Friday, September 26, 2008
McCain on the Ropes (3:51 pm)
Capitol Hill’s progress toward an agreement on the Wall Street bailout came to an alarming halt after John McCain decided to inject his insane “maverickism” into the crisis. This is the same sort of uninformed (read: senile) and desperate PR stunt that brought you Sarah Palin – and which the campaign now must employ to keep her out of the spotlight.
Here’s a bit from John B. Judis on The Plank, the New Republic blog:
… it is simply unpatriotic—it’s an insult to flag, country, and all the things that McCain claims to hold dear—for McCain to hold this financial crisis hostage to his political ambitions. McCain doesn’t know a thing about finance and is no position to help work out an agreement.
For the reasons Judis points out, Congressional leaders wanted nothing to do with the out-of-touch senator and were, surprisingly enough, close to reaching a deal on the bailout – before McCain decided to try and weasel his way out of the debate and went to Washington.
Of course, McCain now plans on showing up in Oxford, like a schoolboy aware that he’s being called out and can’t avoid a fight. But not until after he soured a near-deal, making sure that things got ugly enough to justify his original panic on Wednesday and to give him a much-needed excuse for either A) avoiding the Mississippi debate entirely, which turned out to look too much like a suicidal move, or B) justifying how confused and bug-eyed he’ll probably appear in tonight’s debate against Obama, whose cool, professorial demeanor is looking more and more desirable (dare I say, presidential?) contrasted with a skittish GOP.
The whole ordeal was an embarrassment for McCain. But what’s really troubling is that his extreme panic was unnecessary and politically stupid. It’s not as if the Obama camp had offered an elixir for the bailout crisis and McCain was under pressure to up the ante or come up with an answer of his own. Mostly, both camps had kept mum on detailed bailout strategies. That’s because neither side is in a position to offer an... read more
posted by Louis Mattei | start the discussion
What’s Old (and Vile) Is New (2:22 pm)
Chris Hayes writes on the resurgence of the (Andrew) Mellon Caucus, noting how some wingers are quoting (with approval!!!) the following statement from the old plutocrat:
Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate … It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life.
Utterly charming in 1929, and it’s only grown more so today. But it sent me back to John Holbo’s phenomenal review of David Frum’s book Dead Right, in which he delves deep into the heart of darkness lying within the right’s economic philosophy. Holbo quotes a passage in which Frum explains that “The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top.”
Mmm-hmm. As Holbo notes:
The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundation is hereby laid for a desirable social order.
Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in... read more
posted by Brian Cook | 1 comment
RUN FOR IT, MARTY! (1:31 pm)
As if the deranged antics of McCain’s campaign this week weren’t enough to cause you to question what dimension we’re in, his campaign, or someone who supports it, is running an ad on the Wall Street Journal site proclaiming that McCain won the debate. Yeah, the one that’s in 7 hours.
posted by Jarrett | start the discussion
Thursday, September 25, 2008
“The Biggest ‘The Dog Ate My Homework’ In History” (1:43 pm)
Josh Marshall has a truly amusing post up about the “seriously whacked” crap McCain pulled out yesterday. Here’s but a sampling:
I have a busy schedule, with lots of work obligations and meetings. I also end up doing a decent number of panel discussions and speeches, though I try hard to keep those to a minimum. And like everyone, sometimes I get tired or overwhelmed and I wish I could get out of this or that responsibility.
Occasionally in these moments, in a perverse kind of private entertainment, I’ve found myself imagining what would happen if I pawned off on someone just the ballsiest, most inane excuse for flaking on some commitment. And not something that people might buy — nothing entertaining about that — but just something completely off the wall and nonsensical. What would people’s reaction be? Speechless, laughter, tearing me limb from limb? Would they ever speak to me again?…
Isn’t this pretty much what John McCain tried to pull today? But actually really did it? And on a national stage? He wants to cancel the debate? And maybe also Palin’s debate. Are you kidding? Why not cancel the election too? And because he has to go back to DC to solve the financial crisis? Really? The topic he knows nothing about and after he’s shown up less in the senate in the last two years than anyone but Tim Johnson, the guy who had the stroke? Which of my employees is going to call from home tomorrow and say they can’t come to work because of the financial crisis?
posted by Jarrett | start the discussion
Palin/Couric Reaction (1:33 pm)
In These Times reader KK reacted this way to the Sarah Palin/Katie Couric video posted below:
I’m reminded of what George Washington said: If your head is of wax, do not walk in the sun.
posted by Jarrett | 2 comments
Be Afraid… (1:32 pm)
be very, very afraid. Scott McLemee thinks—not without reason—-this woman (or someone much like her) will one day be president:
Watch CBS Videos Online
posted by Brian Cook | 1 comment
Chicago’s Greenest Citizen (1:23 pm)
Recently, the Chicago Tribune endeavored on a city-wide search to identify its “greenest” citizen, and in Ken Dunn, founder of Chicago’s Resource Center and resident of Hyde Park, they’ve found their winner:
Dunn, 65, of Hyde Park, is so green that he beat out 11 other finalists, identified with the help of local sustainability groups, to be named the greenest person in Chicago by the Tribune.
“Much of our country had a very frugal attitude in the late ’40s, when I was first aware of household practices, and I’ve been trying to stay true to that,” Dunn says.
“And I think that’s important for everybody when they think of a sustainable lifestyle: Think of it as a return to the more community-oriented, richer life of prior ages.”
Dunn produces only 3,800 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, as compared with the 44,000 pounds produced by the average American. He was one of two dozen contestants we found with the aid of organizations including the Center for Neighborhood Technology, the Chicago Recycling Coalition and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Contestants were judged on the basis of personal, not workplace, greenhouse gas emissions…
Dunn is already living at roughly the level of carbon emissions that scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the average human must achieve by 2100 if we are to avoid dangerous effects of global warming.
So what does Dunn’s daily life look like? According to the article he rides his bike everywhere he goes, air-dries his laundry, eats food grown in his backyard, and heats his home with a wood-burning stove. He also eats food that he finds discarded by local restaurants and grocery stores.
Read the article to learn more about Ken Dunn and the runners-up.
What’s your carbon footprint?
posted by Jarrett | start the discussion
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Deregulation’s Godfather (3:29 pm)
For anyone looking for a bit of historical context for the financial meltdown beyond the Bush administration and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Robert Parry’s new column over at Consortium News does the trick nicely:
As the United States begins to assess how the nation got into its trillion-dollar bailout mess, a true understanding must go back three decades or so when Reagan deployed his well-honed communications skills and the Republican Right mastered the dark arts of propaganda to get the American people to shed the annoying strictures of rationality.
At its core this crisis really doesn’t have that much to do with George W. Bush’s reign — its legislative/deregulatory origin is older, deeper and more depressing than that. The real culprits - free market ideologues - set the stage for this ever-enlarging mess decades ago:
Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in 1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical worker. (That CEO-salary figure is now more than 250 times that of an average worker.)
The era’s financial imbalances had other effects…
The super-wealthy finance industry kicked back money to both Republicans and Democrats – as well as to friendly think tanks – to ensure that “free-market” ideology flourished and regulatory “barriers” were removed in the name of progress.
posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion
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