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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, February 20, 2009

When No Means "Gimme" 

...if you were to cast a casual eye toward the votes of Senators and Representatives on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, you would note that Representative Greg Walden (OR-2, R) voted against the bill because it contained far more spending and far less tax cuts than he and his Republican cohorts wanted. Of course, you would be able to save yourself the Googling time if you were sufficiently aware to recall that not one single House Repubican voted for the stimulus package, but never mind that...

In either scenario, however, you just might find yourself nonplussed, perplexed, or even a bit gobsmacked to find such worthies as Congressman Walden and others diving into the stimulus fund distribution process like scrappy but under-talented small forwards trying to come out of the fight for a rebound under the basket, arms held high and elbows swinging. But there he is, insisting that he is going to do his part to grab "an unfair share" of stimulus money for land management activites that he voted against...

So here we have the perfect example of the muddled, almost schizophrenic game plan that the Republican party has mapped out for its return to majority power. On the one hand, you have the new face of the Republican party, House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, announcing the establishment of a "stimulus watch" program that serves no other purpose that ferreting out every little dime of expenditure that they can trumpet as 'waste, fraud, and abuse'. On that famous other hand, you have any number of Republicans who had not one single good word to say about any sort of spending instead of a constant and on-going diet of tax-cuts stepping into the fray, as Walden is doing, to help put their odd little stamp on the spending, for no other reason than to address a deep, nagging fear that it just might do some good and expose absolutist nay-sayers as being fully on the wrong side of history and the facts. They understand, even though only in a primitive, puerile, way, that any tactic other than the classic move of playing both ends against the middle is the path down which long-term minority status lies...

People like Walden can't help themselves because they have no other choice. The kind of spending that he and others are trying to now muscle into the process to have some say in would not have even happened if Walden and his party had been in the majority, and a good part of the reason that there is such a wild frenzy of competition going on right now (no, literally, at this very moment) to distribute the money that will be coming to the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management is the little-discussed fact that the failure of Republican Congressional majorities over more than a decade and the last eight years of a Republican presidency put these agencies in the position where they had so much unfufilled need to be addressed in the first place. While it would have been nice, in a larger context, if Eric Cantor and Greg Walden and all those other Congressional Republicans would have cared enough to have a 'recover watch' program to spy on the unaccounted-for billions of dollars that were shipped on pallets to Iraq (especially since I know a lot of people who would have been more than happy to spend that money for the betterment of our natural resources with far more accountability), it's amusing to see that they finally have some interest in how ARRA stimulus money is going to be spent...

...even though, in Greg Walden's perfect world, there would only have been tax cuts for businesses without customers and employees who are either unemployed or afraid of being so and aren't going to spend a single dollar that they don't have to...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:41 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Why Some Bankers Need To Be Shot Into The Sun 

...the AP provides a stunning story today about the absolute blood-sucking perfidy of the financial community when it comes to serving the needs of Americans on the edge...

This paragraph says it all:
For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there's a new twist to their financial pain: Even when they're collecting unemployment benefits, they're paying the bank just to get the money — or even to call customer service to complain about it.

Just think about this for a moment: people who have lost well-paying jobs because of an economy that is making loud whistling noises as it plummets by your window are being forced to pay part of their unemployment compensation to the banks that have convinced 30 states that a debit card system is the way to go, and they have to do so for no other reason than the fact that those banks have convinced those states to have a debit card system. This is such an outrageous and profoundly stupid practice that an already overly-boggled mind struggles to decide who should be run over in the parking lot first...

Once upon a time, states mailed checks to those eligible for unemployment compensation. In fact, during more recent days at the cusp of the 21st Century, many governmental entities figured out how to engage in electronic direct deposit of salaries and various other sorts of compensation into personal accounts. In all of these situations, it has never been necessary to create a framework that required a bank to engage in any sort of work requiring capture of some portion of those transactions as part of some profit stream. Now, however, at the very time that many of these financial institutions are struggling in a crisis or their own making, they are being afforded an opportunity to skim profits off the top of spreading national misery and desperation by assessing usurious charges against unemployment benefits while at the same time receiving taxpayers' money - in many cases just recently paid by these recently unemployed workers - to apparently do nothing more than fluff up their portfolios to the benefit of investors and bonus-baby employees while refusing to actually diving back into the arena of actually lending money to companies that might have been able to stay in business and keep some of those taxpayers employed...

Every dollar of unemployment compensation is vital to those who find themselves in need of this particular aspect of the social safety net that wise people created back in the day before rich wingnut Republicans became a feature on the landscape. The whole idea of unemployment compensation should logically exist outside of some sort of framework based on any particular profit motive, but that clearly isn't happening in three fifths of these United States and the taxpayer-subsidized banks that are managing this system are milking it for every possible penny. This situation is the perfect example of why it's time to duct-tape a few bank executives to some powerful NASA rocket and aim it toward the sun...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:44 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 16, 2009

It's A Big Ocean Out There 

...clearly it's time to start thinking about buying lottery tickets, because the news of the last couple weeks suggests that million to one odds just don't seem as daunting as they once did. Whether it's satellites smashing into each other several hundred miles above the earth or nuclear missile subs of two nations not currently at war (as far as we know) bumping into each other in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, long odds seem to be losing a bit of their spiky hopelessness...

There's a lot of volume of water to hide a submarine in, even if one confines oneself to the northern Atlantic, so the idea that two submarines would be at exactly the same depth at exactly the same time at exactly the same place is - as the retired admiral says in the story - extraordinary. At least it appears that both the British and French have got that whole "run silent, run deep" thing down to an art; either that or they both need to do some work on their passive detection capabilities. Whichever is the case, they certainly couldn't hear each other at close range...

It's a truly remarkable story, especially since it carries the suggestion that the French may not even known that they ran into another submarine (or for reasons of their own didn't want to admit the fact). I can hardly wait for the American attack submarine tapes to show up on YouTube....
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:46 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Fiddling While The Housing Market Burns - Bankers' Edition 

...courtesy of BusinessWeek, we don't so much learn but instead have confirmed for us the fact that the carnage of the subprime mortgage fiasco stems not only from some feral desire by the financial community to shove happy new homebuyers out the door with mortgages they would struggle paying, but also from a kind of venal shortsighted greed and intransigence that virtually guaranteed nobody would escape unscathed...
One reason foreclosures are so rampant is that banks and their advocates in Washington have delayed, diluted, and obstructed attempts to address the problem. Industry lobbyists are still at it today, working overtime to whittle down legislation backed by President Obama that would give bankruptcy courts the authority to shrink mortgage debt.

Nero would, I presume, understand...

This article tells a grim story filled with its own fair share of villains, precious few heroes, and millions of people who were victims of their own dreams, carelessness, or the silky words of fast-talking financial grifters. There's plenty of blame to be parceled out, but the financial industry and its Washington henchmen deserves top billing in the credits for taking what was already a bad situation and making it worse by refusing to address the problem under any terms that weren't as favorable as possible to the banks, regardless of the long-term consequences to the housing industry or the larger economy...

I hate to start ranting like some crazed socialist, but even a quick run-through on this article starts to make the idea of nationalizing banks - if only in self-defense - sound disturbingly like a reasonable idea. It's another one of those greedy 'cut nose/spite face' stories that reveals the greasy underbelly of capitalism run amok. Oddly, it even has some eerie parallels to the Peanut Corp. of America saga - although the scale and potential exposure to criminal indictment is obviously starkly different - even down to the fact that these two tales of myopic cupidity in the face of the the greater good have played out over the same time span...

The take-away points from the mortgage crisis story as told by BusinessWeek is a grim one: any attempt to save the dire situation we are in will only be done on the terms of the financial industry, if they have any say in the matter, and even though they were invested in a gamble just as much as those home buyers to whom they offered loans, they will insist on being made as close to whole as possible (with salaries and bonuses intact, thank you very much) even if our children's children need to spend their lives paying for it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:04 PM 0 comments

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