mushinnoshin

The Onion FTW on the bailout:

“Congress really let the American people down, or really stood up for them. Honest to god, I got no fuckin’ clue anymore.”

Somehow I got this song stuck in my head this morning, so I had to find it and give it a listen.

Politico reports on a ‘recoupment’ provision sought by the Blue Dogs

The Blue Dogs, a group of conservative House Democrats, want Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to include a “recoupment” provision in the Wall Street bailout package.

In a letter that will be sent to Pelosi and Boehner, the Blue Dogs, led in this case by Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), are calling for a future tax to be imposed on financial services companies if taxpayers lose money on the bailout package.
[...]
Tanner and other Blue Dogs see this provision as an “insurance policy” for taxpayers, and it would amount to a 2 percent “fee” on taxable income of financial services firms.
[...]
“A recoupment clause, as we envision it, is essentially an insurance policy for the taxpayer. Three to five years after enactment of TARP, the Secretary of the Treasury shall report on the program’s net gain or loss to the taxpayer. If the plan results in the taxpayer showing a loss, then the amount of that loss would be recouped by a small fee imposed by the Internal Revenue Service on the financial services industry until the taxpayer recoups the loss. If the taxpayer comes out even or makes a profit, there would be no recoupment necessary.”

Sounds like an excellent idea to me. Now, in a philosophically pure vacuum I might prefer a higher tax on the specific institutions who received aid and none on those that did not, but I realize that in the real world that would hamper the possibility of getting it done, and really, a 2% tax even on the uninvolved companies is hardly draconian given that they will have benefited indirectly at least by the act of, you know, not letting the entire economy collapse.

The Blue Dogs are really good to have around on an issue like this, and I might even say they’re the ideal people to look to here for leadership — representatives of the conservative taxpayer who nonetheless recognize that doing nothing isn’t an option, and aren’t inflexibly bound by a rigid dogma that retards their ideas.

If only they weren’t so often god-awful on issues of war and human rights.

I saw Trouble the Water tonight — excellent, deeply moving film. I think the tag line sums it up nicely –

It’s not about a hurricane… it’s about America

I mean just damn, what more can be said? Katrina showed us our worst and our best all at once, and they’ve captured it masterfully in this documentary centered around two survivors who camcorded their own documentary as the disaster hit.

On other subjects, I finally watched the debate when I got home from the flick. What’s striking me is all the pundits in the after talking about McCain “winning on points” and such, and I gotta say I just don’t see it. Sure, he dominated the agenda, and spent the whole night throwing punches — but if the punches don’t land, what have you got?

Which ties to a greater metaphor I think for the campaign as a whole. The chattering classes want a boxing match, and their adrenaline starts to pump whenever they see McCain throw a punch, and time after time they throw up their hands and groan in exasperation when Obama declines to punch back, afraid that he’s losing, never seeing the fight for what it is.

Look — I know we’d all love to see that jab to the chin that takes McCain to the mat, but the problem is, Obama can’t afford to pummel McCain. First for the minor reason that as a black man, he treads a fine line when showing aggression. Like it or not, right or wrong, there are a whole lot of subconscious fears about “the angry black man” that he can’t afford to engage. But even more importantly — to be the sort of leader he wants to be, to bring the country together in the way that we need, to make sure that come January 2009 he doesn’t have half the country bitterly engaged against him — he has to win this thing by being the bigger man, not the meaner one.

After the debates, just like during the Palin bounce, the pundits criticize him for failing to give them a boxing match. But Obama’s not a boxer — he’s a martial artist. Don’t waste energy on punches that won’t work. Block when you have to, but prefer tai sabake. Use your opponents movements against themselves, sometimes a mere inch worth of shifting is all it takes to send your opponent careening.

After 90 minutes of bluster, anger, and flailing strikes that never seem to land, McCain was exhausted, flustered, his knuckles bruised from striking the wall. And that’s why the polls tell us Obama won the match, no matter how many “points” Pat Buchanan thinks McCain won.

Sensei teaches us that the ideal fight is won with one single strike. I trust Obama to hit McCain with a solid, pinpoint blow to the solar plexus on November 4th.

Last night brought nearly three hours of Henry Rollins doing his uproariously funny spoken-word gig last night. I’d seen the Rollins Band play many moons ago (Lollapalooza ’91, back when the ass-kicking What Am I Doing Here was on my shortlist of favorites), but never had the chance to see him do his spoken word live.

He really is a master storyteller. He has this way of nesting stories-within-stories, three, four, five levels deep, to the point where it almost comes off as rambling — until he starts winding them back, closing each one out in proper reverse order, like nested methods in a piece of program code returning in succession.

With his energy, his intelligence, his curiosity about the world and his willingness to actually put his feet to the pavement — well I’m not going to call him a hero of mine, because I don’t do hero worship. I’ll just say he inspires me to want to be better — to be stronger, more active, more determined, more willing to get my ass off the couch and actually work for the sort of world I want.

Surprisingly he didn’t get too overtly political, at least not as much as he has in some previous material. He took some potshots at McCain for trying to chicken out of the debate, and had a few barbs for Palin, and even did a not-half-bad Bush impersonation in a few places, but it was almost always one-liners and zingers, the real meat being his stories from the road. Of course that road took him into Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Laos, among other places, so the political baggage he brought with him as an American was always certainly an inextricable part of the story.

I can’t begin to relate it all to you, but I do want to share one thing, partly because it really struck me and partly because it was near the end of the show and thus remains freshest on my mind — :)

He was telling us about visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and told us about a conversation with the native who was showing him around. The native told him that his mother had been killed by the regime — she was a teacher, and was executed for being “an intellectual”. And Henry ties it back to how it seems to be the case that nearly every despotic regime makes a priority of taking out the intellectuals.

Something to think about whenever you hear the right wing thugs call someone an “elitist”.

March 2007:

WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Senator Barack Obama today sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson urging them to immediately convene a homeownership preservation summit with key stakeholders to fight foreclosures driven by growth in the subprime mortgage market.

The text of the letter is below:

Dear Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson,

There is grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures. Because regulators are partly responsible for creating the environment that is leading to rising rates of home foreclosure in the subprime mortgage market, I urge you immediately to convene a homeownership preservation summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge.

The rest: Obama Urges Bernanke, Paulson to Fight Foreclosures, Hold Homeownership Summit

I’ve been hearing a lot of pundits describe the economic meltdown using phrases like “Judgement Day for conservative economics” and such (granted, I don’t watch Fox). Which is fun to say, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair. First of all statements like this are far too broad, “conservative economics” encompases a lot of things, not all of which are directly related to this situation. So I think we need to narrow the focus to the conservative position on deregulation. From there, I suggest this crisis tells us a bit about what conservatives get wrong — as well as what they get right.

What conservatives get right: The belief that deregulation encourages economic growth activity.

What conservatives get wrong: The belief that all growth is good. When growth happens too fast and without any control — in economics it’s a bubble. In medicine they call it cancer.

What conservatives get right: The belief that the market is self-correcting. Huge companies going bankrupt is the market correcting itself.

What conservatives get wrong: The belief that these “corrections” have no negative effects on external parties who are thrust into the position of having a vested interest — eg, all the other people swimming around in the same economic pool in which the misbehaving companies are pissing.

What conservatives get right: The belief that individuals should have the liberty to do business as they please, so long as they don’t initiate force or fraud.

What conservatives get wrong: The belief that corporations are private entities that should have all the same rights as human beings. Corporations are a creation of legal fiat, operating under special privileges granted by government. The public is well within its rights to insist on conditions for granting said privileges.

Bottom line seems to be — we don’t have a free market. We therefore cannot make policy prescriptions based on theories of how things might work if we did. So long as our economy is dominated by quasi-public, quasi-private corporations and manipulated by a quasi-public, quasi-private Federal Reserve, we need public oversight of these institutions, and we need leaders who respect the people’s rights and interests in this regard.

McCain’s Economic Plan

Soooo…. yeah, sorry I missed the party at the saucer tonight. There was at least one person I’m sorta curious about meeting, but there was also one person I really didn’t want to run into, which I guess might have have washed out in the balance.. but then at least three or four of the people I always want to see couldn’t make it… so at the end of the day my agoraphobic tendencies won and I committed myself to a night of playing piano alone in the dark.

What? Don’t groan, don’t worry about it. It is what it is, I am who I am.

Of course I can only play so much piano, and I filled out most of the night with a Netflix contribution, watching the movie Primary Colors. And there were certainly some thoughts and lessons to be drawn that paralleled both the good and the bad of our current attempt to elect President Obama. Along those lines I had a number of bright comments that piled into my head as I watched, but at the end I was only left with the bits about how Stanton was “flawed but essentially decent”, and — well, I can’t find the exact quotes at the moment, but there was great bit about how the protagonist saw Stanton as a liar who agreed with him, even though he lied to get elected.

It’s hard to argue with that.

On a side note, if Hillary Clinton was half as good an actress as Emma Thompson, the world just might look very differently now. Though, hell, I’m almost convinced that if Hillary hadn’t let her ego and ambition pass on the chance to run in 2004, the world still might look very differently now.

Oh and I meant to add — Travolta’s performance as Bill Clinton (err… Stanton wink wink) — well I won’t go so far as to call it extraordinary or Oscar worthy or anything like that, but it was good enough I think to serve as something of an apology for most of the rest of his career :)

If you’re like 99.5% of the country, you probably haven’t kept up with the circus sideshow that is the Libertarian Party campaign this year. But it actually has been entertaining in a “can’t not watch the trainwreck” sort of way.

To recap it for the rest of you — well most of you know about Ron Paul and his merry band of libertarian-republicans by now. Of course selling out to anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-immigrant social conservatives seriously pissed off the left half of the libertarian spectrum, but since the libertarian party tilts to the right anyway, most of them got sucked up in the drama of moneybombs and rEVOLutions and set their left-libertarian and anarcho-purist constituencies out to rot. We’re going to take over the Republican Party! We could even win the White House! Yeah, how did that work out for ya?

Well, surprise surprise the party of big government mercantilists, war pigs, and civil paternalists had no use for a small government capitalist anti-interventionist libertarian — even if he was otherwise sufficiently backwards socially. Who would have guessed? Of course there were saner heads who knew the primary run was a windmill tilt, but they fully expected Paul would grab his twenty mil and come back the LP. Again surprise surprise, he didn’t — just like he repeatedly said he wouldn’t, over and over again the entire time he was running.

But the LP conservatives already had what they wanted — a weakened left flank and a hyped up right flank that desperately wanted to believe they could just replace the driver with any semi-famous Republican and keep going. The party was ripe to nominate a polished turd of a conservative Dixiecrat, and after seven or so contentious ballots, that’s what they did.

And long story short, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Poor fund raising, campaign mismanagement, a depressed base, and a general loss of pretty much any respectability the LP might have once had. And it all came to a head last week, when Barr got his feelings hurt when Ron Paul didn’t give him an exclusive endorsement, and decided it was somehow better to piss on Paul and his supporters than to play nice and smile for an hour.

Which has all led to this moment, as LP founder David Nolan has now declared The Barr Campaign is Over.

Of course I gave up on the LP a long time ago as my views shifted leftward, but still it’s a little sad watching your old friends eat themselves.

PS: For any of you who do consider yourself libertarian and don’t know what else to do at this point, you can vote for the Boston Tea Party ticket of Charles Jay and Thomas Knapp. I don’t know much about Jay but I’ve got mad respect for Knapp, and that’s possibly how I’d vote if I wasn’t on board with Obama.