1 Boring Old Man

the left coaster
by Mary
01/06/2010

James K Galbraith asks who were the economists that understood the problems in the economy, because so many economists have no clue. And one point what jumped out from this paper was this:

^{In the present crisis, the vapor trails of fraud and corruption are everywhere: from the terms of the original mortgages, to the appraisals of the houses on which they were based, to the ratings of the securities issued against those mortgages, to gross negligence of the regulators, to the notion that the risks could be laid off by credit default swaps, a substitute for insurance that lacked the critical ingredient of a traditional insurance policy, namely loss reserves. None of this was foreseen by mainstream economists, who generally find crime a topic beneath their dignity. In unraveling all this now, it is worth remembering that the resolution of the savings and loan scandal saw over a thousand industry insiders convicted and imprisoned. Plainly, the intersection of economics and criminology remains a vital field for research going forward.}

So, just how many people have been convicted and imprisoned in this cycle of corruption and financial scandal? From what I’ve seen, hardly any.

After I read this article, I got to thinking about the last several months. We’ve been on the road – Thanksgiving in North Carolina, then three weeks in the Middle East, then huddled in front of a fireplace during a [very] cold snap recovering from the Egyptian Epizeutics AKA "walking pneumonia." I’ve been comfortable to join the whiny dialog about what a disappointing year we’ve had with the relics of the Bush Administration littering the landscape like some post-apocalyptic movie set, and our continued disillusionment as our idols strut their feet of clay eg Tiger Woods, Brit Hume.

But when I read this Galbraith article, I felt rejuvenated. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but that didn’t matter. He was talking about history, and ideas, and making a plea for change. He was damning the establishment, but there was a hopeful twist – something better to aim for. In his negativity, there was a spark. What I thought about was how gloomy the dialog has been this year – the trivial antics of the hopelessly ideological Republicans, the mopey disappointment of the utopian Progressives, the in-fighting among the fragmented and traumatized Democrats. Obama looks tired. I feel tired. The year seems lost in a blah-blah of politics soon to be forgotten in the scope of time. It reminds me of Richard Farina’s book title from an old Fuzzy Lewis blues song – Been down so long, it looks like up to me, or Ray Charles’ – If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all. In the history books, my fantasy is that 2009 will be summarized in a single line:

In the year following Obama’s election, America floundered, lost in the inertia of the Bush/Cheney debacle…

2009 was the year of Bernie Madoff, a year when centuries of civilized dialog was given over to the crooks, the liars, and the bottom feeders that have always haunted our society…

Brit Hume stands by his Tiger Woods Christian crusade
Raw Story
By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
January 5th, 2010 — 1:49 pm

Fox News pundit Brit Hume is facing a backlash over his comments this past weekend that golfer Tiger Woods should convert from Buddhism to Christianity because Buddhism can’t "offer the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith."

Since making the comment on Fox News Sunday, Hume has been accused of proselytizing for the Christian faith and denigrating Buddhism’s estimated 350 million followers. But Hume insists that he never meant to insult Buddhism, and stands behind his call for Woods to become a Christian. Perhaps most tellingly, he has not — as some commentators, including the Washington Post‘s Tom Shales, have suggested — apologized for the remark.

"I was really meaning to say in those comments yesterday more about Christianity than I was about anything else," Hume told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly Monday night. "I mentioned the Buddhism only because his mother is a Buddhist and he has apparently said that he is a Buddhist. I’m not sure how seriously he practices that." Hume went on to insist, as he did in the Fox News Sunday segment, that converting to Christianity would solve Woods’ marital and personal problems.

And, in a statement that used the language of true, old-fashioned proselytization, Hume explained his argument that Woods’ conversion would be a boon to Christianity. "What I’m saying is if Tiger Woods were to make a true conversion, we would know it," Hume said. "And — and it would shine because he is so prominent. It would be — it would be a shining light, and I think it would be a — it would be a magnificent thing to witness"…

Time for accountability at the White House
Washington Post
By Sally Quinn
January 5, 2010

Now it turns out that there was a third uninvited guest at the White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, this one a member of the Indian delegation. It was enough of a shock that the would-be stars Tareq and Michaele Salahi had crashed. But a third? The Salahi story may have been delicious, but the implications of the appalling breach of security are immense. The president could have been assassinated. And had that happened, the Office of the White House Social Secretary would have been as culpable as the Secret Service.

One of the first lessons any administration needs to learn is that somebody has to take the hit for whatever goes wrong. If another culprit is not identified, the president gets the blame. One incident after another in the past few months has shown that members of this administration would rather lay low and let Barack Obama be the target. This has got to stop.

Many in Washington wondered why the director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, did not resign over the state dinner security breach. At least Sullivan testified before Congress on the subject. White House social secretary Desirée Rogers came under fire after the Salahi scandal erupted. From the start, Rogers was an unlikely choice for social secretary. She was not of Washington, considered by many too high-powered for the job and more interested in being a public figure [and thus upstaging the first lady] than in doing the gritty, behind-the-scenes work inherent in that position. That Rogers stayed and that the White House refused to allow her to testify before Congress reflected badly on the president…

Everything seems to be like that these days. A bomber didn’t blow up a plane. The story? Obama didn’t say anything about it publicly on Christmas Day from Hawaii. He waited 72 hours. Where’s the story in that? We’re struggling with two wars and remain embroiled in a massive financial quagmire. And we’re talking about the Salahis?

Shirtless Tiger Woods photos may fuel steroid speculations
Prime Writer
by Kevin V
January – 5 – 2010

In the new February 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, a buff, Tiger Woods is seen on the cover, shirtless and with well defined abs. The issue will be available nationwide on January 12, 2010.

The photo reveals Tiger holding dumbbells and the photo shoot was meant to portray the athlete’s strength and determination. Unfortunately, the photos might cause more speculation that the athlete has been using steroids.

The rumors were also fueled by Los Angeles Times Sports Columnist Bill Plaschke suspicions that Tiger might be guilty of doping.  Plaschke first made the allegations approximately two years ago and stated that he felt that Tiger Woods looked like Barry Bonds from the back…

^{Before I left, I was speculating about Tiger Woods’ Madonna Prostitute Complex based on his choice of loose women. I’ve been mildly obsessed with Iran since I got back, but I checked in on Tiger, and saw that the mistress count was in the teens now – all "easy" ladies. I got to thinking what might explain this sex-addiction that seems to predominate in his life and landed on the idea of androgenic steroids. If you put tiger woods steroids into Google®, there’s stuff to read, sure enough. Male hormones turn up the sex drive, sure enough. That’s what they’re for…}

And it’s the "Who knew?" part of this story that makes it interesting. You can’t do all of that in a super-public life under the nose of your wife without some help. We know about some friend accompanying Rachel to Australia. But it takes a lot more than one old friend to bring off such a thing. And the steroids? How did that work? Tiger Woods is beginning to look like a Bernie Madoff kind of character. And now, he’s reported to be off getting treated in Arizona [that would likely be at The Meadows].

Brit Hume’s off message:
Have faith, Tiger Woods, as long is it’s Christianity
Washington Post
By Tom Shales
January 5, 2010

… Brit Hume was certainly full of something on "Fox News Sunday" this week. Hume, a part-time analyst at Fox since stepping down from his daily anchor role, sought to redefine the job of political pundit, apparently, when he stepped boldly up to the task of telling people what religious beliefs they ought to have. He prescribed in particular a remedial, therapeutic dose of Christianity for disgraced golfing champ Tiger Woods, a man whose lubricious private life has been haunting the headlines for weeks.

Noting that Woods has referred to himself as a Buddhist, Hume knocked his fellow "Fox News" panelists for mortified loops when he dissed about half a billion Buddhists on the planet with the remark, "I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith" … "My message to Tiger would be: Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world"…

Hume has a message for Woods; lots of people will have a message for Hume. First off, apologize. You gotta. Just say you are a man who is comfortable with his faith, so comfortable that sometimes he gets a wee bit carried away with it. If Hume wants to do the satellite-age equivalent of going door-to-door and spreading what he considers the gospel, he should do it on his own time, not try to cross-pollinate religion and journalism and use Fox facilities to do it. At the same Republican convention where Hume bemoaned his advancing years, he spoke of knowing when to leave the party and go home. "I’d like to walk away while I’m still doing okay," he said, "and not have people say, ‘He was fading.’ " It’s easy to understand the sentiment, but Hume ought to know that what people are saying right now is a whole lot worse than that he’s fading.

Earlier, though, when it was still the 20th century, Hume discussed, in an interview, his spiritual epiphany and what motivated it. "I came to Christ in a way that was very meaningful to me," he said; it was in the aftermath of his son’s death by suicide in 1998. It would be indefensibly insensitive to mock Hume for his beliefs, especially considering the way he came to them…

• If you are in financial trouble, vote Republican. They’ll lower your taxes.
• If you are in need of forgiveness, go with Christianity.
• If you want broad 3G coverage, go with AT&T Wireless.

Ralph Nader denies that his candidacy in the 2000 Presidential Election threw the election to George W. Bush. I would propose that this denial comes from the same self-righteous trend in his personality that lead him to stay in the race instead of doing the right thing and endorsing Al Gore. In my opinion, Ralph Nader is a person who would rather be right than be effective. To me, he is the paradigm for that kind of conflict – being true to lofty principles at a time when pragmatic solutions are called for. Looking back, whatever was wrong with Al Gore pales in the face of what we ended up with in George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.

But I did it too. I didn’t vote for either one of them – neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush. It is one of the things that I most regret about my life. I was mad at Bill Clinton for lying to us [I still am]. I was mad at Al Gore for standing by him [I still sort of am]. I thought Al Gore was too self righteous. I was disappointed that Clinton/Gore went along with deregulation. Things like that. I had "Liberal Angst." And so on Election Day in 2000, I just didn’t get around to voting. It was a Sin of Omission – but that’s actually an even more painful sin because I never explored the other side enough to know what I was really doing. My Liberal Archetype was offended by the Clinton Administration’s style and lead me astray. Mea Culpa…

The Liberal Archetype:

Jungian Psychology is popular with the art and intellectual set, but rarely discussed in the realm of everyday human behavior. That’s a shame because hat’s wrong with what Jung said interferes with understanding where he was right on the money. Freud and Jung had a fundamentally dichotomous view of the human psyche. Freud saw the shared mythology and symbology among widely disparate peoples as coming from their shared experiences in early life – the paradigm being the Oedipal Complex. Jung agreed with Freud that each of us has a Personal Unconscious, but felt that we all shared a Collective Unconscious – something we were born with. The archetypes inhabiting the Collective Unconscious are the Wise Old Man and the Great Mother.

What does that mean? For Jung, each of us has an aspect of our Psyche that "knows all" [in modern psychoanalysis, we would call this the Archaic Grandiose Self, or our Narcissism, the heir to infantile omnipotence]. But don’t be put off by these terms. It’s that part of our psyche where we’re absolutely sure we are right. In my case, I think of it as my Liberal Archetype. You know about it. You probably have a similar Archetype yourself. Dick Cheney has another kind – a Neoconservative Archetype.

So in 2000, my Liberal Archetype was offended by Bill Clinton and to some extent Al Gore. They didn’t live up to my ideals, and I made the biggest voting mistake of my life. Ralph Nader‘s Liberal Archetype got in his way too, and he made a terrible decision based on it. I’m worried that it’s happening among the Progressives right now and that it will hurt us badly in 2010. We Progressives types spent the better part of eight years watching George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney dismantle America. We lived for 2008 when we might be liberated. Barack Obama burst onto the scene, and we had our man.

Reality Bytes:

But our man ran into a roadblock, and turned out to be much more center-left than we wanted. He had to compromise on the Stimulus, on Health Care. He didn’t dismantle Big Business or Big Finance.  He’s not as anti-War as we’d like. He didn’t crucify Bu$hCo with document releases. Given the circumstances, he’s done a good job, but it wasn’t the good job we wanted. His Wise Old Man isn’t a Liberal Archetype, it’s more a Moderate Archetype. And his opposition has been some of the worst in America’s history. Add the worst Recession and two wars… It has been a hard year. Progressive Angst is at a high level.

The Right Thing

What He Said
Hullabaloo
by digby
01/03/2009

In an fascinating post Devilstower at Dkos remembers the naughts, and makes a very, very, very important observation :

^{Don’t forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented — with a side order of Freedom Fries. They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I’d be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they’ve claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn’t fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.}

^{What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There’s no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember… if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it’s not likely that you’d give them a chance to do it again. Because they will. Given half a chance — less than half — they’ll do it again, only worse. Because that’s the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let’s cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That’s just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn’t go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it’s because we didn’t deregulate enough. If the wars aren’t won, it’s because we haven’t started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it’s because we haven’t done enough to make them afraid.}

^{Forget the naughts, and you’ll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.}

I don’t deny that the corporate Democrats are screwed up too. But they didn’t invent this political world. As I quipped before, they just learned to stop worrying and love the money. This world of graft and corruption and unfettered greed was the conservative movement’s idea of utopia. And they got it.

That 1937 Feeling
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 3, 2010

^{Here’s what’s coming in economic news: The next employment report could show the economy adding jobs for the first time in two years. The next G.D.P. report is likely to show solid growth in late 2009. There will be lots of bullish commentary — and the calls we’re already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder. But if those calls are heeded, we’ll be repeating the great mistake of 1937, when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened — and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths.}

^{This shouldn’t be happening. Both Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Christina Romer, who heads President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, are scholars of the Great Depression. Ms. Romer has warned explicitly against re-enacting the events of 1937. But those who remember the past sometimes repeat it anyway.}

^{… Which brings us to the still grim fundamentals of the economic situation. During the good years of the last decade, such as they were, growth was driven by a housing boom and a consumer spending surge. Neither is coming back. There can’t be a new housing boom while the nation is still strewn with vacant houses and apartments left behind by the previous boom, and consumers — who are $11 trillion poorer than they were before the housing bust — are in no position to return to the buy-now-save-never habits of yore.}

^{What’s left? A boom in business investment would be really helpful right now. But it’s hard to see where such a boom would come from: industry is awash in excess capacity, and commercial rents are plunging in the face of a huge oversupply of office space. Can exports come to the rescue? For a while, a falling U.S. trade deficit helped cushion the economic slump. But the deficit is widening again, in part because China and other surplus countries are refusing to let their currencies adjust.}

^{So the odds are that any good economic news you hear in the near future will be a blip, not an indication that we’re on our way to sustained recovery. But will policy makers misinterpret the news and repeat the mistakes of 1937? Actually, they already are….}

^{The CPI in 2008 and the first 4 months of 2009}

^{The Obama fiscal stimulus plan is expected to have its peak effect on G.D.P. and jobs around the middle of this year, then start fading out. That’s far too early: why withdraw support in the face of continuing mass unemployment? Congress should have enacted a second round of stimulus months ago, when it became clear that the slump was going to be deeper and longer than originally expected. But nothing was done — and the illusory good numbers we’re about to see will probably head off any further possibility of action.}

^{Meanwhile, all the talk at the Fed is about the need for an “exit strategy” from its efforts to support the economy. One of those efforts, purchases of long-term U.S. government debt, has already come to an end. It’s widely expected that another, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, will end in a few months. This amounts to a monetary tightening, even if the Fed doesn’t raise interest rates directly — and there’s a lot of pressure on Mr. Bernanke to do that too.}

^{Will the Fed realize, before it’s too late, that the job of fighting the slump isn’t finished? Will Congress do the same? If they don’t, 2010 will be a year that began in false economic hope and ended in grief.}

After Americans Visit, Uganda Weighs Death for Gays
New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
January 3, 2010

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks. The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family. For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior. One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations. Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity [who previously tried to ban miniskirts] recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights”…

 

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill…

One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations. Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.” The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over…

Just Out from TSA
Talking Points Memo
by Josh Marshall
January 3, 2010

The TSA just released the following statement on updated, permanent security measures, effective tomorrow …

"Today, the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010. The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners."

"Because effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights."

But my central reaction goes back to this post. I think it’s naive to think that we can feel assured that we can develop a 100% sure system to avoid the possibility of some kind of attack. al Qeda is obsessed with finding small holes in any system we create – liquids, mixing chemical on the plane, etc. It is our collective PTSD in action – "preventing the past." I think the place to beat al Qaeda is wherever al Qaeda is – Iraq, Pakistan, Yemin – not in airport screening.