And now for something not very different...

and don't say I didn't tell you so.

Where's the beef?

Here's a letter to the editor of the SB News-Press that I submitted yesterday. I'll update this post when/if it's published.

UPDATE: The letter was published on Friday, October 23, 2009.

We’re being told that improvement in the “real economy” (that’s us, folks) won’t begin until Americans start spending again. But we can’t spend more unless we have more, and that means we need more jobs and better pay. But those increases are dependent upon improvement in the “real economy.” Do you get it? We’re caught in an economic loop, a “jobless recovery,” where only the money-changers’ pockets benefit—just like the one we suffered through during the Bush years.

There’s this difference, however. Whereas over the last decade Americans were able (and induced) to borrow against their homes and credit cards to spur spending, now we can’t. We’re already maxed out (or more), while our home values are declining, our mortgage payments increasing and our credit limits shrinking.

What about all those billions (or is it trillions?) that were poured into the banks and their insurers during the last year? Well, it turns out they haven’t “trickled down” after all, unless you’re one of their CEO’s or shareholders. But job growth? Nada. And an increase in real wages and salaries of workers? No way. Indeed, we’re still losing jobs at a monstrous rate, and wages are still in decline. Only the stock market is rising—and that’s merely an increase from a panic-driven bottom. In short, all that’s happened over the last year can be captured in a single word: Nothing.

To quote Bette Davis, “Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy night.”

Where's the emergency?

Better yet--where's the outrage?

Brevity rocks

I get a kick out of slogans--I'm no literary or intellectual snob--especially those that appear on bumperstickers carrying terse, pithy messages. I'm not talking about "My kid's an honor student..." stickers, and certainly not "God bless America." But "The more people I meet, the more I love my dog" is, to me, priceless. And my latest discovery: "All who wander are not lost."

One man, one vote?

Is this really a good idea in view of these folks, our fellow citizens and sign-makers?

MacMuseum?

Say it isn't so. What's the next site: The Sistine Chapel?

You think I'm kidding?

Why do they hate us?

Here's one reason.

He said it best...

I don't agree with Tom Friedman about many things (especially his favorable view of economic "globalism"), but I must admit he's a hell of a writer, with whom I agree on this point: Our national discourse has become ruinous of serious and effective democratic reflection. After a finely-pointed comparison to a similar condition in Israel some years ago, he concludes:

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

What bullshit!

Multiple signs of recovery? My ass. Job losses continue unabated, as do the hours of work and amount of pay. Income disparities are growing, not shrinking; gas prices are headed upward again, inflation is on the way and the value of the dollar is tanking.

Obama was sold a bill of goods by his Wall Street advisors that counseled unmonitored "trickle down" economics. The worst is still to come, brothers. This "recovery" is a chimera, a fake boom fueled by the government's infusion of funds into banks and big corporations, who are reporting big profits rather than trickling the money down into the hands of the people.

You heard it here first. Actually, not first. Seven-hundredth. We're in for years of ugly recession, and in the short term for another deadly bounce off the bottom.

Great fun!

Here's a link on a site that offers strings of quotes from an oldtime radio program named "Pat Novak for Hire." It starred Jack Webb (pre-"Dragnet") and was set in San Francisco, where Webb played a hard-boiled private investigator. The dialog, much of it captured in these quotes, was Raymond Chandler cubed, at least cubed. Give some of the episodes a click and read as many of the quotes as you can before falling out of your chair in glee.

Karzai ballots

Hmm. What was your first clue the election was rigged?

We've got China right where we want them

Building a chocolate theme park.

And now for something really important...

Check out Cecil's answer to an age-old question.

Fifty things that are being killed by the Internet

Here's one list. Can you think of others?

Arranging deckchairs...?

I know that the Titanic metaphor is a much-used one, but I'm getting that sensation with Obama's administration. Fiddling while Rome burns? Closing the barn door after the cows have split? Whatever, you pick. His ramping up in Afghanistan, his equivocation about military tribunals, his billions to banks and AIG, his backing down on healthcare, his constant failure of meaningful leadership--among many things, lead me to despair of hope for a significant change in America's course. Could it be that Obama's out for a plaque somewhere. Is he--like Bill Clinton--so needy, so yearning for universal adoration that principle plays no part in his decision-making? Is he, after all, just another politician?

What do you think?

Do you agree or disagree that "America's mainstream has a 'mean streak'"?

Robots that lie to each other

This article explains why we need religion, even if there's no god.

I coulda told ya

Two weeks ago I was camping along the migration route of Sockeye salmon--one evening on the Olympic Peninsula side, one evening on the Vancouver Island side--and there was talk of a "thinner" run of fish. "Thinner" was the word the lady on the Canadian side used, as I recall. Turns out she wasn't exaggerating, not at all.

How awfully sad.

Barack, I hardly know ye

Here's another one of my letters to the editor of the SB NewsPress. I'll update with info if it's published in the hardcopy paper.

Update: The letter appeared in the NewsPress on August 5, 2009.

To the editor:

A liberal’s assessment of Obama’s brief tenure.

His Sotomayor nomination rocks. However…

The economy. I grant that he’s not had nearly enough time to reverse the disastrous impact of decades of America’s profligate, credit-addicted consumption, but he’s hearkening to the same persons and institutions to effect “change” that created and fed on those now-entrenched cultural/economic memes. While he seeks to improve our financial straits—to constrain our unregulated markets, to cure our loss of decent-paying jobs and widening earnings disparities—there’s little prospect of stemming America’s decline so long as he employs the tools crafted by the same folks who wrecked—and profited from the wreckage of—our nation’s economy.

Our “security.” His rhetoric occasionally feels satisfying, but his actions—the buildup in Afghanistan/Pakistan, the still-growing Pentagon budget, the continuing secrecy—are doggedly similar to those of his predecessors. He also promotes America’s global-policing role, thereby energizing the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned about five decades ago. Indeed, but for his recent (and politically safe) elimination of some Pentagon-derided F-22’s, Obama’s foreign/military policy appears as pugnacious as Reagan’s.

Surely he’s too well schooled to be ignorant of an acutely salient lesson of history: empires invariably decline due to consumptive over-indulgence and militaristic over-reach. Therefore, his failure to activate true “change” must be the result of something in his character that is ultimately ruinous of meaningful achievement: fear.

After suffering through eight years of an executive who acted through ignorant arrogance, must we now endure one who suffers from informed cowardice?

Well, whadda you know!

The feds are finally getting back to some serious antitrust enforcement. It's actually quite a modest start. By way of background (not related in the NYT story), the loosening of antitrust enforcement began many years before Bush II, with the slow turning away by the US Supreme Court from truly aggressive rulings favoring competition between businesses as the means to create a healthy climate for the marketplace. The "Chicago school" (based on Milton Friedman's concept of unrestrained capitalism) took over, the most salient disciple of which was Professor (now federal appellate judge) Richard Posner and influenced the course of judicial as well as administrative decision-making, creating the doctrine that consumers benefit more from economies and efficiencies of scale than from competition among equals. There began a long history of approvals of huge mergers that created "too big to fail" entities: not just banks but conglomerates that spanned many business arenas.





Well, maybe we've learned that "bigness is badness," to repeat an adage that used to dominate antitrust thinking. I hope so, because it has gotten so that entry into some low-investment businesses is becoming prohibitively costly, almost impossible. With high rentals of huge malls, massive chains of retailers and suppliers, how, really, could a small entrepreneur begin, for example, a sandwich shop or a burger joint? What about a carpeting outlet or a clothing stor?





As I said, a modest start, but a start toward once reducing the power of the monied and vested interests in America.