City Pages: Gay community apologizes to Amy Koch for ruining her marriage
So utterly pitch-perfect, I have to post it twice.
"Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating"
If I wasn’t knee-deep in back issues of The New Yorker, I’d consider resubscribing to Rolling Stone just so I could get my fix of Matt Taibbi:
Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as “standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself.”
Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Your average chimpanzee couldn’t fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
Oh, progressive periodicals. Maybe I need to turn to The New American to balance things out?
Occupy the Internet, local edition
I am somewhat disappointed that we are going to be out of town for the Occupy Fergus Falls (FFDJ) gathering that is going on this Saturday, as I feel very strongly that what every sleepy rural town needs is absurdist political theater and public rallies to shake things up. And it’s only going down a block from our house, so that’s even better. But I’ve done what I could in my limited capacity and made use of the F.A.T. Occupy the Internet service to decorate our city’s two most popular online forums for public “discourse,” the Fergus Falls Daily Journal and the Fergus Forum.
Make signs, not war.
Kunstler: The Jive Economy
They are our future, these yeast people and mudskippers, because the intelligent minority of this nation lacks the one thing that animates intelligence in the service of reality, and that is the courage to tell the truth. I suppose this is what galls so many former Obama boosters: that the “hope” vested in him would be enacted in truth-telling, which would lead to “change” in the choices we make about doing things. What we ended up with seems to be something like a false champion with a good line of talk.
He’s more right than I almost feel comfortable admitting.
Picture of the day
There was something else going on tonight too, right?
Seriously, though. Masterful speaking performances on all fronts today.
Full disclosure: I’m guessing on the second speech, since I only read the transcript. But considering that the last State of the Union was delivered by a baboon’s ass, it shouldn’t be hard to top.
Words unminced
Kunstler on McCain’s campaign tactics:
He’s run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics.
Ouch.
May the best man win.
Just stop talking
I hate listening to politicians speak just about more than anything else. Hedged statements, buzzwords, half-truths, self-important promotion, and bravado are the norm, regardless of party affiliation.
But even worse is the stuff uttered by Sarah Palin over the last several days. I now understand why McCain kept a virtual gag order on her for a couple of weeks after her unveiling. She is clearly out of her game, struggling to keep up:
What she says is crazy, but the way she says it is even crazier. Pure syntactic nonsense. Haven’t we endured enough of this?
Couldn’t call it unexpected
Spotted in the newspaper this morning, and worthy of attention.
- White House asserts executive privilege in EPA dispute
- US asks to rewrite detainee evidence
- Deal Reached in Congress to Rewrite Rules on Wiretapping
Like Dylan said, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Who are the hangers-on who still think this joke of an administration is worthy of anything but contempt?
And great job, Democrats, of working on that new agenda. I hear there’s some oil off of the coast just waiting to be had.
The summer of our discontent
As the price of gasoline in the U.S. pulls itself up to $4/gallon, and the realities of our poor housing, transport, and investment choices set in, I’m glad to see that we as a nation are slowly coming around. Mass transit ridership is up, the Hummer and its ilk are dying a much-welcomed death, and even the shill of the auto industry has made predictions about a decline in travel.
If one was, say, a presidential candidate, now might be a good time to make note of the unreality of our previous way of life, note the positives that higher gas prices can bring, and propose setting a floor on gas prices.
On second thought, one might be wise to keep this plan hush-hush until after one has obtained the office. Selling this plan while campaigning presupposes an electorate with enough brains to realize the benefits.
But what the government can’t, or won’t, accomplish, the market will, for better or for worse. I think the ratchet effect is in full swing. $3/gallon gas, we hardly knew you: $4 is here to stay. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t have realized this earlier, skimmed a bit off the top, and done a better job of preparing ourselves for a different way of life.
Mediocrity on parade
If this report is an honest appraisal of Washngton’s state of thought on the nation’s gasoline “crisis,” then we’re truly fucked. I have not heard anything more depressing than these stuffed shirts trying to devise increasingly absurd ways to keep our fantasy of a happy motoring country afloat.
Practiced outrage at this issue is a safe bet politically, no doubt. But whether it’s the administration looking to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), presidential candidates calling for a gas tax holiday, or a windfall tax on oil company profits, it’s apparent that no one has stopped to think that the underlying premise — that we must keep our national fleet moving at any cost — is wrong.
The “one million” barrels of additional production that ANWR would bring to the table is, relatively speaking, a drop in the bucket. The U.S. imports 10 million barrels of oil a day, and produces another 5 million or so domestically. In a report authored three years ago, the Energy Department said that opening ANWR to drilling “might reduce world oil prices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel” (see “Results”). This corresponds to a pennies on the gallon decrease, which is hardly the kind of relief touted by the administration. The report goes on to say that the impact of the influx of ANWR oil could easily by negated by an equal decrease in OPEC exports, so as to keep the amount of available oil static.
I’m also disappointed by Clinton’s echoing of McCain’s call for a gas tax holiday, for it shows that her intentions with respect to the environment are not as pure as I had hoped. Obama’s characterization of the candidates’ tax holiday as an idea “designed to get them through an election” is spot-on.
(Update: The Freakonomics blog issues a challenge to find an economist who thinks the tax holiday is a good idea. I await the results with bated breath. The unsurprising results are in.)
McCain’s plan would do nothing to replace the lost revenue to the Federal Highway Trust Fund, causing it to miss out on about $10 billion in revenue. Clinton, on the other hand, proposes to replace this lost revenue with a windfall profits tax, which, having been repealed in 1988, has not seen the light of day since. While this tax would put Republicans in the hot seat — does one pander to one’s NASCAR base (votes), or does one kowtow to the oil industry (money) — I doubt such a measure would pass.
Though their ways may differ, Republicans and Democrats alike offer nothing new. And in such a tightly contested Democratic primary, I think it’s safe to assume that any ideas offered up will not stray far from what is considered safe politics.
Surely nothing will be heard on efforts to improve our national passenger rail system, better urban mass transit, and curbing sprawl. Instead, the desperate clinging to the status quo of “more houses/more roads/more cars”, as shown by recent talk of bailout of the adjustable-rate mortgage market, ensures that this election season, though notable for the makeup of the ballot, will remain mired in tired ways of thinking which only serve to hasten our country’s decline into a muddling pool of shit.
