The Joy of Partisan Bickering

    Partisanship is rarely a good thing.  It divides the people unnecessarily.  It pushes us apart when we would do well to be together, puts us on opposite sides of a political fence when it would do us all good to tear that fence down and work together.  It divides our government, making it less dependable, making it possible for each side to say that the other is doing the wrong thing while saying only they have the correct plan.  It’s bullshit, and it’s stupid bullshit, but it’s our stupid bullshit, and it makes us less than what we could be.

    I’m not saying we would be better off walking in lockstep, everyone of one mind.  I’m not saying that there is no right way to disagree politically with one another, or that political disagreement is wrong.  All these concepts would entail a “pie in the sky” mentality that has no place in the real world.  What I am saying is that the level of partisanship, the rancour of it, far outstrips the simple needs of the American people, and it is making us weaker as a people. What I am saying is that the capacity to self-govern is being thrown out of whack by it.  Let’s look at an example.

    

    It would be nice if the state of New York could find a way around it’s budget impasse.  It can’t, and the governor it seems is being forced to make the decision to withhold payments to local government agencies, which will make things a great deal tougher for our schools and our social services, and municipal government.  Why is this happening? Because as the governor has worked into the night to get some kind of deal done, both sides of the state senate have been dithering, making a mess of things when it is entirely possible that the state could well be bankrupt within the next few weeks, if they do nothing.

     The New York state senate is planning to meet tomorrow to try and hammer out a deal and get it to the governor, but there is no guarantee that they will find a way to get a deal done.  From what I have read, they are trying to fix this years budget holes with next years money…when next year is looking to be worse than this year is from a financial perspective. But it seems, that there is political jockeying going on here.  The republicans, trying to regain the majority in the state senate against a few democrats who are in difficult political situations, I.E. dems running in more conservative districts, are unwilling to make any politically unpopular decisions, like cutting school funding, so while they try to make a deal, they do so hampered by electoral politics and partisanship, and fiddle while Rome burns.

    We really need better.  They will probably come up with some kind of a deal soon. Whether that deal is enough to forestall any kind of serious budgetary crisis is yet to be seen.   They will try to get something out though, just to avoid being seen as sitting on their hands, despite the fact that the budget being in this condition, and things having gone this far, proves they have very much dithered away much time that could have been used to fix that which is broken.

    This ostensibly leaves the decision to try and fix our financial problems with one man, our governor.  We were put in this position by political partisans on both sides of the political fence who were busier looking after themselves and spending our money like it was going out of style, than actually making the right decisions. 

    We New Yorkers have for a while now been pointing the finger of blame solely at our governor.  Maybe the problem isn’t quite there, or maybe not to the extent that we thought it was?  Maybe we should just get rid of all the bums in the state senate and assembly, and maybe the governor too, and be done with it.  Gov. Paterson does come out of this looking much the better though.  Shame it takes this to make it clear he is in fact better than we thought he was.

___________________________________________________________

   That’s about it from here.  Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via wikiquote:  Live within your means, never be in debt, and by husbanding your money you can always lay it out well. But when you get in debt you become a slave. Therefore I say to you never involve yourself in debt, and become no man’s surety. If your friend is in distress, aid him if you have the means to spare. If he fails to be able to return it, it is only so much lost.   Andrew Jackson

It’s dynamite to spend future earnings. I have had a taste of it myself, and it’s mighty bitter. A debt is a debt, whether it’s margins or mortgages; and debts are all the same, no matter how you try to camouflage ‘em. You never get much out of ‘em except trouble. On the farm or in Wall Street, if you use the other fellow’s money, it costs you a lot more than it’s worth.   Sue Sanders

Late Night Idle Talk

     I am hanging out, relaxing after a night of eating too much turkey and mashed potatoes and cake and pie and all sorts of goodies that are truly not at all healthy, and loving it.  Right now, a scant few hours after the carnage, I’m sitting in a fairly well darkened room, lit only with the light of computer screens and Christmas lights, the sounds of a computer game being played by my wife occasionally going “DING” in the background, with “Good king wenceslas” being sung by the Hereford Cathedral choir playing from my old computer speakers.  I can faintly smell the downstairs neighbors smoking, and can just make out the aroma of the leftover turkey that I brought back from my mothers house, after the annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage 2 miles north to mom and dad’s place for some festive noms.

     The thing I take from this day is a feeling of peace and happiness that I often get from these family get-togethers.  We are a close knit bunch, and have been since I can remember.  Times change, people change, but family is always family, being with them is being in a safe haven in a turbulent world, in a place to forget that the world is a weight on everyone’s shoulders, even if only for a few hours. 

   Joy to the World.  Life is good.

______________________________________________________________

    

     Life is good, and yet, there be turbulence on the horizon.  Apparently Dubai, a tiny oil rich nation on the Arabian peninsula, which has more recently come to depend on real estate, construction and it’s financial sector as well as oil, is flat broke. I mean stone flat broke.  The nations main investment company is seeking to delay payment on $59,000,000,000 in debt.  The fear is that Dubai may have to default, and it has a great many people rattled. 

     The yen, the dollar, and markets around the world have reacted negatively to this.  For a while today (it’s past 3pm  in Tokyo as of this writing at 1:16am in New York) the dollar fell to a 14 year low before recovering somewhat.  The Hang seng is down 3½%,  the Nikkei is down 3¼%, as are the DAX and the FTSE futures. 

    A light trading day is usually what you expect to see on a half day like there is going to be today.  Even if there is a light day though, the market is probably going to tank.  The DJIA futures market, which i started looking at about an hour and a half ago, has lost about 70 points in that time. Not bad, but the market when I started looking at it, was already down over 180 points.  It is right now down about 2.5%.  Both S&P and  Nasdaq futures are down over 3%.  

     Market correction or global recovery losing traction? It took the fall of 2 financial giants, and the near sinking of AIG fed by bad mortgages and speculation to cause a disaster last year.  What will the near collapse of a wealthy nation due to billions in debt, (when there are nations{ahem} with trillions in debt) which in turn is causing people to run from riskier assets and causing jitters over worldwide credit do? 

    Just call my name, cause I’ll hear you scream….

______________________________________________________________

     MASTER.  MASTER.

    The music and the mood have changed quite a bit.  Gone is the mellow christmasy music, the METAL is flowing and it feels good.  Lots of metallica and Ozzy/Sabbath.  But that is only fitting i guess, reading the financial news when it’s bad gets the juices flowing a bit.  But I’m done with that for now, and I’m thinking I’ll just finish listening to “After Forever” and then toss on some more relaxed fair.  Tis almost 2 am. Calmness, Herr Rhino, no need to mosh right now.

     Ahhhhhh, a bit of Heitor Villa-Lobos.  Kinda thing that makes me grab the guitar and look at it and ask “what am I doing wrong, why can’t I play like that?”

______________________________________________________________

That’s it from here.  Later!

Today’s Nuggets, via Wikiquote: You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there… just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep ‘em showing up at those jobs.  George Carlin

Thanksgiving is not an anachronism whose time is past. It is much more than a holiday to celebrate a meal shared between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. It is a time to reflect and be thankful for what we have–not for what we cherish, desire or envy.   Ted Nugent

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.  John D. Rockefeller

The Right Moves

       

      Has the Obama administration made the right moves to fix the financial crisis?  The answer to that is not clear cut, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Yes it has is the answer, if by yes you mean that it has made the best moves possible to shore up the system as best as possible, so as to make sure that our financial house does not collapse. No it hasn’t is the answer if you think that there need to be fundamental changes to the way the system is run.  And curiously, both answers are right.

     Without the bailout of the auto industry, the economy would be in much worse financial straits.  Past experience shows that once manufacturing sector jobs are lost, they stay lost.  Ask someone who used to work in the steel mills in Pittsburgh.  Without the auto bailout, GM and Chrysler would have collapsed and taken, between themselves and the ancillary closings of companies that had contracts for and worked with these two, an additional 3,000,000 or so jobs throughout this country. 

    Where would unemployment be if you added those jobs to the already swelled unemployment rolls? How much more deep would we be in the hole now?

     The stimulus has held or saved over 1,000,000 jobs, according to current data.  That is 4 million jobs that have been saved, directly or indirectly due to government intervention.  If you blame the President for the ills of this nation, be magnanimous and give him credit for not allowing the nation to completely fall apart, and keep things from falling completely out of control.

    So much for government as evil ogre trying to steal your freedom.

     Unemployment is very bad, but it has stabilized.  Don’t think so? Do you remember last January? Last February? When Jobs were being shed at a rate of nearly three quarter of a million jobs a month? Now I wouldn’t call us even remotely out of the woods just yet, but I think it is fair to say that this White House’s policies have had some effect.  Jobless claims in February had been on a high and steady upward trend for over six months, and since then, that number has slowly, but surely fallen month by month, from a high of over 650,000 per month in February to just over 500,000 a month last month, and that number looks to be lower than that when the numbers are reported on Wednesday, with the consensus range for that number being around or just under 500,000.  Before the great recession hit that number was generally around 300 to 350 thousand per month. 

     Not out of the woods just yet, like I said, but things are leveling out, and if this, the lagging indicator that it has been of the health of the economy, is leveling out, then that is a very good sign indeed. 

    Now, has the President been 100% on point economically? No, not even close.   

    If you make an analogy that this economic crisis is a house on fire, and we know who set the damned fire, then why haven’t the arsonists been arrested?  Why did AIG and Citigroup get the sweet deals they got, and why have we been left holding the bag?  I understand that these deals were signed off on under the previous administration, but is the current administration helpless? Does Goldman Sachs, and their ilk,  have their tentacles so completely wrapped around the fed and the government that we can no longer do anything to stop them from robbing us blind?

    I disagree with the calls for Treasury Secretary Geithner to resign, but there needs to be much stricter control of the business of investment, a much greater reigning in of both the fed and the wall street trillionaires who steered the ship of state into an iceberg. 

    And someone needs to go to prison for raping the economy.  Several someones.

     Capitalism works,  but unrestrained capitalism can be tyrannical, as we are seeing and have seen in this current crisis.  No one forces anyone to make bad investments or take risks, but wall street created an atmosphere where in order to make the most profit, more and more exotic instruments became the norm, and it ceased to be investing in companies and markets and became gambling.  Gambling is not investing and the entire market in recent years has become one giant casino, run by the gamblers, thanks to deregulation. 

    America was not created “of the gamblers, for the gamblers, by the gamblers”  The President needs to successfully challenge the powers on wall street and bring them to heel, make the government truly independent of them, and continue the work on the issue of unemployment before we can say that this administration’s economic policies are truly 100% on the right track.

    Then and only then, will America truly begin to feel like it’s on the right track.  Some, but not all, of the right moves are being made, in time that will show, I think. I hope the rest will be made soon, we can only watch and wait. 

   Recovery though, is inevitable, it’s just a few years away.  Be patient.

_______________________________________________________________

That’s it for me.  Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via wikiquote:  I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.  Alan Greenspan

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.   John Maynard Keynes.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.  Ben Bernanke

Sheila talking tarp

      

I just see all the problems it’s created now, the horrible public outcry. It’s had a terrible, terrible impact on public attitudes toward the financial systems, toward the regulatory community. Sheila Bair, on MacNeil Lehrer on Friday

     Public attitudes were never really that great when it came to the financial system, Mrs. Bair. At least not in regards to who the banks and the regulators were looking out for, namely themselves first.  Now that is normally not a bad thing, gotta, as the saying goes, look out for number one, right? It worked for years, but the underlying issue here, the lack of trust you site in the statement you made on Macneil Lehrer was brought about by the issues that created the banking crisis in the first place.

    While she says taking tarp money and putting into failing banks to prop them up was a mistake,  the report from bloomberg  says that Henry Paulson was forced to:
    

drop the strategy and use the $700 billion fund to inject capital into banks when the plan prompted lenders to hoard cash and failed to halt a slide in the stock market.

    But as I remember it, that wasn’t the case at all.  He gave the initial plan up without so much as a struggle.   Read this, perhaps it will refresh your memory a bit.  Which leads me to a third quote and a simple point.

Given the urgency at the time, no one should be held accountable “for not thinking all this through,” Bair said.

      Yes there was urgency, there still is.  But no one to be held accountable, sheila? Henry Paulson gets congress, and the American people, to bite on a $700,000,000,000 bailout of Wall street, turns around, and after only a few weeks, abandons the initial plan in favor of just giving money away to the big banks, without any strings attached, costs us Hundreds of billions of dollars.  We then pay more money on top of this to other firms, like AIG and Citigroup, then on top of that, we need to spend a gazillion dollars just to try to get the economy started again. BTW, that trying to get the eceonomy started again? We call that the stimulus bill, which ended up unfortunately being both too small and largely ineffective, despite its size.

   And no one should be held accountable, sheila? Really? Henry Paulson needs to answer some tough questions in front of a judge , for  justice to be served properly before I and a great many other Americans are satisfied that there was no wrongdoing, and that you are right.  A lack of accountability s at the heart of what went wrong here in the first place, Mrs. Bair.  Adding more of it would only make it worse. 

     Henry was an idiot who reacted the wrong way when it hit the fan, Sheila, despite his best intentions. The way tarp was used hurt everything, from the over one hundred banks that have failed this year, that could have used that extra money for themselves, to the current presidents attempts at fixing this ailing economy. Don’t defend the indefensible, don’t you be an idiot too.  

      Watch another viddy.  Elizabeth Warren explains things quite clearly here.

    

   ______________________________________________________________________________

    That was fun, wasn’t it?  More later on!

Today’s nuggets. via wikiquote:  Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.   Thomas Paine

In fact, without any exaggeration, the current mechanism of money creation through credit is certainly the “cancer” that’s irretrievably eroding market economies of private property.  Maurice Allias, 1999

What is it with people?

           There I was, just surfing teh intarwebs, armed only with my wits, my extremely non trusty keyboard (QWERTY sucks), and an old cold cup of coffee that wasn’t helping anyone, and all of a sudden, WHAM, it hit me.  I have been playing around on this @$%@^$# computer all day and I haven’t written  hardly anything… well, i did toss a blurb out in the rhino nuggets, but it wasn’t much.  Plus, Khlaid Sheikh Mohammed is dead meat on a stick no matter where he goes, doesn’t much matter where they hold the trial.  He must be held accountable, and he must be held accountable by “We The People” not the military, not just kept locked up in a cell forever.  Put him in a court and let him defend himself just like anyone else who went around killing people like a complete antisocial f****** nutcase.  Aaaaaaaand We do have the death penalty here, ya know…

      Onto other things.

   _______________________________________________________________

    

  I’ve been reading some comments on youtube that were attached to this particular viddy (after watching some keyboard cat goodness, of course), and I have to tell you, the Presidents opponents are both angry, and extraordinarily unintelligent, at least the ones whose fiction I read there.  A few tidbits for you to peruse:

Obama: At his SKIT SPEECH in “Asia”……”HEY ASIANS!……..if I can keep up the LYING BY OMMISION?……then we have a whole generation of kids in America !!! who ~mm~mmm~mmm!…..I will be turning over to you – and you can make them become Chinese SLAVE LABORERS – as their only career choice! ……..that is because I am here to destroy the FREEDOM OF AMERICA!….with some more loans and Liberal World AGENDA of COMMIES and CRACKPOTS and CULTS – I so admire! LET’s get er DONE!”(cheers follow)

Obama = another smooth talking, Muslim.

I didn’t know Kenya was a pacific region.

Here is a outline of Obama’s trip:

Blame America
apologize for America
America will not monitorize the debt (although we are already doing that)
America will give Billions for Global warming (or is it temperature change now??)
Fat ass michelle will once again barely fit on air force one do to her huge butt and hips.
America makes too much CO2 (it would be a lot less if Obama would just shut his trap.)

     Do you see ANY intelligent discussion above? Anything that could be construed as an honest political discourse? Me neither.

    A) Barack Obama is a Christian and was born in the city of Honolulu, on the Island of Hawaii, this has been proven, and the birth certificate is out there.  Pay f****** attention, dumbass.

   B) If we are going to lay blame for America becoming owned by Asia, that blame goes a long way back. Japan and China have been buying our debt in massive quantities for years.  China has been adding exponentially more American debt since the early 2000’s.  Japan since the 90’s.  And Great Britain and Germany have been major players for years.  Don’t hear complaints about them.  Or Luxembourg, or Caribbean banking centers, or any of the other 25+ listed nations that buy our debt.   And with all the debt they have been buying, the bulk of our debt stays here.  The last numbers I have seen have the foreign ownership of said debt at 27.9% of total.

    Meaning that 72.1% of it stays here in America, it doesn’t leave these shores. So much for the thought of our children being sold in slave labor to china by way of other nations owning us.  Better way to put it is WE ARE BROKE AND WE HAVE BEEN FOR AGES.  This sucks, tis true, but blaming The President, and China, and foreign interests is bullshit from the get go.  There’s enough blame to go around for everyone. 

    And there is no liberal world agenda. 

    C)  America will give billions for Global Warming, and we won’t monetize (not monitorize) the debt? Umm…WTF is that about? Monetization was necessary due to the amount of pressure the financial system was under due to the banking system collapse in 2008.  And we have been monetizing some portion of the debt for a while now.   Or what else do you call what’s happening with Freddie mac and Fannie mae? And who the f*** are we giving billions to for global warming?  Ya need to explain a wee bit more there, laddie. 

    D)  Since when does Michelle have a fat ass?  My guess is that guys wife weighs 400 pounds and has more cellulite than the entire city of Louisville Kentucky.

    Everyone is entitled to an opinion.  But some opinions have a more firm basis in fact than others.  I’m not perfect in this, I have been wrong on a great many occasions, but not here.  Misinformation and plain nonsense of the type written by these …crazed xenophobes doesn’t make those opinions valid, it lessens the value of what is written by these writers.  In the end, opinion without fact is useless to the world.

    _______________________________________________________________

     To end with something completely off topic … SCREW YOU ARRINGTON! Play him off, keyboard cat!

    

   Later!

Today’s nuggets, by Plato, Via wikiquote:   When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong … And so the rhetorician’s business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

Truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Last edit – 12:59am  11/14/09