That Little Old Calvinist, Me

I have noticed a certain hardcore compassionlessness has crept into my writing recently.

Partly I'm angry because the Randians whose job it is to rail against any form of public kindness have been strangely silent on the Wall Street Bailout. The same people who complained about the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Katrina can't seem to come up with a cogent argument regarding the wholesale bailout of Wall Street millionaires.

Mostly I'm angry because the Robber Barons who profited by the billions (Lehman Bros (2006) and Lehman Bros. (2008), Goldman Sachs (2006) and Goldman Sachs (2005)) bringing the nation into this crisis are now lobbying to profit by the billions through the bailout. (Note: those four reports total $43 billion in bonuses for just two companies for just two years each. Add in all of the hedge funds, investment banks, and commercial banks for the entire length of the Bush Presidency and we would get damn close to the magic $700 billion mark.)

A Price Must Be Paid. The people who are destroying the world's economy must not be allowed to profit by it.

A Price Must Be Paid - Three

To participate in the Wall Street Bailout, all senior management must have first returned all bonuses, including exercised or outstanding stock options, received during the previous twelve months. As long as the Government owns the assets purchased in the Bailout, no senior management may receive any stock options, bonuses, or severance payments.

If management is not willing to relinquish their bonuses, stock options, and golden parachutes then they are not in need of a government bailout.

A Price Must Be Paid - Two

If this abysmal Wall Street Bailout has to be enacted it must be paid for with a hefty surcharge on the dividends and capital gains of everyone earning in excess of $200,000. We are bailing out the rich - the rich should fucking well pay for it.

A Price Must Be Paid

The Wall Street Journal has the text of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. It is egregious.

Section 4 allows for only vague and infrequent reports to Congress.

Within three months of the first exercise of the authority granted in section 2(a), and semiannually thereafter, the Secretary shall report to the Committees on the Budget, Financial Services, and Ways and Means of the House of Representatives and the Committees on the Budget, Finance, and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate with respect to the authorities exercised under this Act and the considerations required by section 3.

Improvement to Section 4
The Treasury Secretary must submit written reports under penalty of perjury to both houses of Congress on a monthly basis. The reports must be fully public with no information redacted. The reports must list all transactions under this plan, the book value of the debt being acquired, the current market value, and the price the Government paid for the debt.

All sales of assets under this Act must be similarly reported (book value, current value, price paid to the Government). If the price paid to the Government is less than the current value or the price the Government paid to purchase the asset the Treasury Sec. must explain to Congress in detail the reason for this discrepancy.

Section 8 grants absolute autonomous power to the Treasury Sec.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Improvement to Section 8
All existing laws apply to the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act. Congress has the absolute right to review the actions and decisions of the Secretary and to appoint such reviewing authorities Congress deems necessary.

(Stiff criminal penalties for defrauding the Government under this program must be stated in the law. Such defrauding to include misrepresenting the book or current value of the debt. Both the corporation and its responsible officers are legally responsible for the information provided by the corporation it must be provided under penalty of perjury.)

Additional Section
The accounting books for any corporation participating in this program are to be open in their entity to examination by the Treasury Department or the United States Congress for as long as the Federal Government holds the debt acquired.
*****
There is more I would like but the above are the minimum changes to make the Paulson Bank Bailout Act acceptable. My wish list improvements are:

• Every corporation participating in this program is restricted to the compensation it pays to all employees, individual consultants, and board members. For five years from first participation no individual may receive total compensation (salary, bonuses, stock options) in excess of twelve times the median household salary for the preceding years. In 2007 the median household salary was $50,233 meaning the highest compensation allowed for 2008 would be $602,796.
• The government is to receive equity in the corporation equal to some percentage (say 20%) of the difference between the book value and the price paid for the assets purchased by the Government. This equity to be used to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
  

McCain's Proposal: Make the Nation's Health Care Like the Banking System

I've known for some time that John McCain wanted to use banking deregulation as the pattern for reforming (by reform he means utterly destroy) health care. It was sort of his secret. He believed it, he'd share that belief with the right ultra-conservative crowd, but I didn't think him stupid enough to chat it up to the broader public. I was wrong.

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation. ~ John McCain in Contingencies Magazine Sept/Oct 2008

In one sentence McCain puts himself foursquare behind the policies that have caused the banking industry to dissolve and he has promised to do the very same thing to health insurance. What an astonishing toofer. And it is out there in print, available in many of the finer HMO waiting rooms.

Contingencies Magazine website

I Guess We're All Communists Now

What a week! The government nationalized the mortgage industry when it took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government nationalized the insurance industry with the forced acquisition of AIG. Now the government is building a garbage bank where all the lesser banks can sell their worthless bad paper - meaning, of course, that bankers now have absolutely no incentive to use due diligence while writing loans to their wasteful billionaire buddies.

Add in domestic spying and internal passports and we will have created a Communist government of a type Ronald Reagan used to denounce.

The United States government is Communist with a Chinese tint. The rich and connected know the government is always ready to help them if they stumble. It will pick them up and refill their pockets with gold. The poor and what is left of the middle class know they are on their own. Success is impossible. Should they fail, as they surely must, all they will receive is a lecture on Republican Self Reliance.

Call Them 'Bushvilles'

In a echo of the Depression era "Hoovervilles" the AP is reporting on modern tent cities populated by the thousands of Americans made homeless by the economic crisis.

For those people whose high school history instructions was derelict (Sarah Palin), "Hooverville" was the collective name for the homeless encampments that sprang up around American cities during the 1930's. They were named for President Herbert Hoover. Under that Republican president, as now, what assistance that was available went to the wealthy cronies of the politically powerful.

Palin-McCain Times Three

E-Mail:
Way back when e-mail was new and I was an adviser to an elected official I gave her some advice:

Never write anything in an e-mail you wouldn't want to see posted on the first floor bulletin board.

Palin used an insecure, public e-mail account and it got hacked. Of course it did. Grow up. That's why governments maintain highly secure accounts. Palin was stupid to use a Yahoo account.

Questions and Answers:
Sarah Palin actually tried to answer a question at a McCain townhall meeting. As her answer faded into a testy babble McCain had to come to her rescue.

Palin delivers speeches reasonably well but she is lost in a question-answer format. Like Bush, she has a problem understanding the subject-verb sentence structure concept. Unlike Bush she doesn't have a native, childlike wit to fall back on when she has to ad-lib.

Who Gets Top Billing:
Sarah today put herself at the top of the ticket. She's been upstaging Old Man John for some time, she is stealing top billing for herself now too. If they win I expect Sarah will lock John in the Lincoln Bedroom and just take over.

Two Snapshots of the Coming Depression

Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it means everything.

• Fine Dining is Kaput. I drove by Anthony's Fish Grotto here in San Diego at lunch time today. It's a mid-range eatery - somewhat pricey (dinner for two will cost about $60 without wine), but well below the most expensive hashhouses in town. They normally have about 25 cars in their parking lot for lunch. Today there were four.
  
• Empty Grocery Shelves. Later I went to Vons grocery store to buy some fresh vegetables. There were gapping holes in the fresh food aisles. There was no broccoli, no green beans, a slim selection of fresh meats, and the fruit look past its prime. The canned and packaged food aisles were full. It was as if anything with a long shelf life was still abundant while those things that have to be delivered fresh daily was in short supply. As if several suppliers stopped delivering.
  

Maybe I just caught a couple of anomalies. I hope so. Or, maybe I spotted the leading edge of the total collapse of the nation's economy. I hope I'm just being paranoid.

McCain: Deregulation Hawk

One could argue, quite accurately, that John McCain is responsible for the Nation's economic crisis. McCain has worked his entire career to deregulate the financial industry - with disastrous results.

• In the 1980's McCain was a key figure in deregulating the savings and loan industry. McCain parlayed it into highly profitable graft for himself. That led to wholesale theft and the collaspe of many S&Ls. McCain got caught in the the ensuing scandal but successfully used his POW line to wiggle free.
• McCain's economic guru, Phil Gramm, slipped the "Enron Loophole" into legislation in the year 2000. This deregulatory loophole was used by that infamous company to game the electricity markets so egregiously that it led to Enron's own collapse. Since then, McCain has blocked every effort to close the loophole which is now being used by energy traders to game gasoline prices.
• The current banking crisis traces back to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Again Phil Gramm get direct blame for deregulating banks. Again, John McCain followed Gramm like an servile puppy in the effort. The effect is an economic crisis the world has not seen in 75 years.
  
• McCain has said he will make Phil Gramm Treasury Secretary.
• McCain's son, Andrew, ran an Arizona bank into bankruptcy earlier this year under curious, at least, circumstances.
  
• Not content with fucking the nation's economy, McCain is campaigning on a platform of deregulating health care.

It is true that, as of today, John McCain is urging reregulating the financial markets. Of course that would mean undoing his life's work. But, John McCain wouldn't lie, would he? He wouldn't say one thing now to get elected and do another thing after he gets in office, would he?

Black Monday

The stock market is poised to fall off a cliff today. It will be an old fashioned Panic, a blood letting. But everything is okay because John McCain has declared the economy is fundamentally strong and he wouldn't lie, would he?

Palin Is a Chorine

He used to like to take me out and show me off. Ugly guys like to do that.

I've been wondering what Sarah Palin is. Not who she is, I know that, but what role she fills.

John McCain hardly goes anywhere anymore without Palin on his arm. She's more important than mere arm candy. She's more like a brunette chorine. Like a magician's assistant, her job is to wear a tight skirt, flash some leg, smile a lot, and distract the audience from the slight-of-hand going on. And I have to say she is doing a good job. Nobody is paying attention to anything McCain says anymore.

Another celebrity chorine, Roxie Hart.

Hunker Down

Tens of thousands of people are suffering in Houston because they listened to official advise to "Hunker Down."

Of course now those same officials who instructed Houstonians to stay in place because evacuating an American city is too difficult a tack for government to manage are now blaming the victims of the hurricane for not leaving.

Yet another example of government hypocrisy written in innocent blood.

Murdering Straight Talk

John McCain has murdered the concept of Straight Talk. His lies are bold and frequent. He has learned the teachings of a master that if he always lies and repeats the lies endlessly in the face of contradiction people will believe the lies. When caught lying he attacks - it is "disrespectful" to show he has lied.

This is not a ruthless Nazi reference, it is a pathological liar reference. As a liar, John McCain has exceeded the reach of George Bush and is equaling the skill of Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. As Goebbels knew, skillful pathological liars can gain ultimate power.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

And one for Sarah Palin. "Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character."

A Time to Focus

Judging from what I'm seeing I don't think they need it, but here is some advice for the Obama campaign.

• Forget Sarah Palin. She is a meaningless celebrity. The newsmedia is going to spend way too much space on her, she doesn't deserve a breath from the campaign except to denounce her whenever some vile noise emits from her mouth. The opponent is John McCain.
• Ignore the published polls. According to the published polls (Rasmussen, Gallup, etc.) some 90+ percent of the public is solidly behind one candidate or the other. That's hogwash. The truth is 40% of the electorate, mas or menos, is persuadable. The published polls are advertising for the polling companies so they want to appear definitive when accurate polling would show it still a general mishmash.
• Never apologize. Double down on any attack that draws blood. For example: "That lipstick wearing pig I'm talking about is John McCain."
• Fight for the right to vote. Republicans are currently working to prevent Democrats from voting in battleground states like Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. Many states will be won or lost depending on whether or not Republicans succeed in stealing the right to vote from the American people.
  

The Agony of de Feet

On a completely personal note, I am in pain (poor dear). Or at least my feet hurt. The right foot came first with Achilles tendonitis. Not wanting to be ignored, my left foot developed a really nasty case of plantar fasciitis. The result is that walking is a test of creative foot placement to minimizing the sharp, stabbing pain while I wait for my podiatry appointment.

Making Enemies Wherever We Go

Be sure you are right - then go ahead. ~ Davy Crockett

Everyone knows that the Taliban leadership and what's left of Bin Laden are hiding out in the lawless region of Pakistan. The problem with the recent attack by the United States into sovereign Pakistan was it was a monumental cockup. The attack may, or may not, have killed anyone important but it certainly killed a score of innocents.

Obviously timed to coincide with the Republican Convention, the September 3 attack probably failed since there was no bragging about it from the podium the following day. Instead the United States followed the attack by announcing we will be selling nuclear technology to Pakistan's enemy, India.

Clumsy, ham-handed, politically motivated, ill-considered, deadly, and a failure. It was Republican diplomacy at its best.

The Real Original Maverick

They used to say in vaudeville that you never want to follow an animal act. John McCain fell into that trap. Never a compelling speaker he was positively soporific last night following Palin's snarling attack dog performance.
But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about Maverick, the REAL Maverick.

The real Maverick was a gambler, an inveterate poker player, and something of a con man. He was lazy and, above all else, a coward. As his Pappy always said, "He who fights and runs away lives to run away another day."

The real Maverick was Bret Maverick as played by James Garner in the 1950's television program. The entire series can be seen weekdays and 6 pm on the Encore Western cable channel.

As my old pappy used to say, 'work is fine for killin' time, but it's a shaky way to make a living.' ~ Bret Maverick

Pit Bull

The reviews are in and Sarah Palin is the new Spiro Agnew.

An attack dog skilled at reading other people's writings (Who will be her William Safire?), she has set her career path. It will be a ugly path never mitigated with pleasant prose. And it will likely end with her serving time in prison. Hopefully, I will not need to spend any additional time thinking about her.

Full creds to Jonathan Singer who saw this potential before anyone else.

Focus Grouping the Republican Convention

As I said earlier, the focus groups for conventions are both party's political junkies.

The reaction to Tuesday was, well, nothing. Virtually nobody, even right-wing blogs like Redstate had anything to say about the speeches. Up until now the Republican Convention is a non-event.

Everyone is waiting for Sarah Palin tonight. It is not that people have low expectations for her, they don't know what to expect. Unlike Dan Quayle, she has to do more than just be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. This is her roll-out for 99.95% of the American people. She has one chance, just this one single chance to impress.

What to expect. The cheering will be so loud early she won't be allowed to finish sentences without being interrupted. Expect her to spend an inordinate amount of time just smiling at the cameras. The cheering often will come at inappropriate moments as the crowd will be trying to protect her from looking lost or hesitant. The words themselves will be completely meaningless. Republicans at the end will be calling it the greatest oration since Cicero. Frankly, they will be thrilled if she doesn't get obvious flop sweat.

People will be watching in the same way they gawk at traffic accidents, hoping to see blood on the streets. Me? I've got the Discovery Channel.