1 Boring Old Man

The Biggest Disappointment of the Obama Presidency
Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson
10/16/2009

President Obama’s brief display of drive-by compassion Thursday in New Orleans was, for me, by far the worst outing of his presidency thus far – and the biggest disappointment. I covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath – the flood in New Orleans that drowned a great city, the storm surge in Mississippi that erased whole communities, the devastation, the agony. For weeks afterwards, I had trouble sleeping. I couldn’t forget the scenes I’d witnessed or the stories I’d heard.

More than a year later, I covered a Senate subcommittee hearing in New Orleans on the lagging reconstruction effort. I watched as a young senator who was thought to be considering a presidential run – that would be Barack Obama – used his Harvard Law skills to eviscerate Bush-era officials for not doing enough to rebuild and revive the Gulf Coast region.

So it was strange and disheartening that Obama would wait nine months to make his first visit to New Orleans as president. It was stunning that he would spend only a few hours on the ground and that he wouldn’t set foot in Mississippi or Alabama at all. But worst of all was the way he seemed to dismiss the idea that his administration could and should be doing much more.

I know that local officials say the Obama administration is more responsive and more effective than the Bush administration, but that’s not saying much. What says more is that New Orleans still doesn’t have an operational full-service hospital. And that an adequate flood barrier is still not in place.

"I wish I could just write a check," Obama said. If that was his message, he should have stayed home. We now know that our government can make hundreds of billions of dollars available to irresponsible Wall Street institutions within a matter of days, if necessary. We can open up the floodgates of credit to too-big-to-fail banks at the stroke of a pen. But when it comes to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, well, these things take time.

I doubt these are the priorities Obama wants to be remembered for.

This is not the place to come for criticism of President Obama. I’m one of his big supporters from the starting gate. But I share Eugene Robinson’s disappointment with yesterday’s pop-in pop-out visit to New Orleans. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are Red States, but they’re States nonetheless. They deserve better.

House Panel Clears Derivatives Bill, Debates Plan for Consumer Agency
By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post
October 16, 2009

The Obama administration won its first major victory Thursday in its effort to overhaul the nation’s financial system as a key House committee passed a bill to regulate exotic financial instruments known as derivatives. Trading in derivatives – contracts used to bet on the movement of stocks, bonds, commodities and other things – magnified last year’s financial crisis by forcing companies to record bigger losses as markets collapsed. But for years policymakers had rejected regulating the derivatives market, worried about stifling financial innovation.

The vote Thursday by the House Financial Services Committee, largely along party lines, endorsed a central plank of the administration’s plan for new regulations aimed at preventing another financial calamity. But the measure still faces a long road. The House Agriculture Committee, which also has oversight of derivatives, will vote on and quite possibly amend the proposal, and the full House and Senate must act, too.

The regulators that would be in charge of policing the derivatives market – the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – hailed the passage of the legislation even as agency officials continued to voice concerns about whether it goes far enough. "Substantive challenges remain," CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement, adding that he intends to work with Congress to design a bill that "covers the entire marketplace without exception" and "to ensure that regulators have appropriate authorities to protect the public"…

If you haven’t yet tried to understand Financial Derivatives, Wikipedia has a surprisingly clear description. But it still has the jargon of Wall Street. So, I’m going to have a slight shot at things, using the jargon of something else – Calculus. I’m aware that the mere mention of the word sends shivers through many who survived the Calculus-Hell that had to be traversed to get the grades to go to college. For others, it was a fascinating thing that was conceptually challenging, but has little direct application in adult life [For me, it was the last time that the universe seemed sensible and orderly].

After a couple of years of Algebra studying equations and graphs of the relationship between variables, you moves to the world of Calculus where you meets derivatives. A derivative is another equation that tells something about the first equation. In the example on the right, the second equation gives the slope [rate of change] of the first equation at a given point in time – something about the first equation.

Well, that’s what a Financial Derivative is too. It’s not a Security [a share of some actual entity like a Company]. It’s not a Commodity [a real thing like Soy Beans]. It’s something about the real things. So people buy and sell contracts based on which way the Dow Jones average goes, or what happens with the weather. For example, Financial Derivatives are used as insurance to hedge investments. I buy a futures contract on Soy Beans for my Soy Bean Processing Plant. But if there’s a Drought, I lose my shirt – so I buy a contract betting on bad weather. Why would someone sell me such a contract? It’s because bad weather is very unlikely and most of the time, there’s no payoff.

Such Casino-like transactions seem benign on first hearing, but they’re malignant because they’re unregulated. A.I.G. sold Derivatives on Mortgage Backed Securities – packaged Real Estate Loans that only had value if the borrowers paid off their loans. When the Housing Bubble burst and people began to default on their loans in record numbers, A.I.G. didn’t have the capital to pay off their derivative contracts [credit default swaps]. You know the rest of the story. The risk had moved up the chain to a megalithic Financial Institution that almost went under because a small unit in London went from a Cash Cow to a deal-breaking liability in a very short time.

Key House Panel Votes to Regulate Derivatives
New York Times
By STEPHEN LABATON
October 15, 2009

Bowing to political pressure from community bankers, the House Financial Services Committee approved an exemption on Thursday for more than 98 percent of the nation’s banks from oversight by a new agency created to protect consumers from abusive or deceptive credit cards, mortgages and other loans, The carve-out in legislation overhauling the regulatory system would prevent the new consumer financial protection agency from conducting annual examinations of the lending practices at more than 8,000 of the nation’s 8,200 banks, leaving only the largest banks and other lenders subject to the agency’s examiners.

Earlier in the day, the committee completed its work on a different contentious provision of the legislation when, on a nearly straight party-line vote of 43 to 26, it approved tougher regulations over the derivatives market. That provision, too, contained exemptions for many businesses…

The measure creating the new agency has already been significantly pared back from the Obama administration’s proposal. While the exemption approved on Thursday would cover a vast sector of the banking industry, those institutions control only about 20 percent of the roughly $14 trillion in assets held by commercial banks. The 150 largest banks, which would face more regulatory scrutiny, hold the remaining four-fifths of the assets…

The legislation’s chapter on derivatives would impose new regulations and capital requirements on dealers, and would force more trades onto exchanges or electronic platforms. But in a major concession to businesses, many trades intended to hedge risks by companies like airlines, manufacturers and energy interests would be exempt from trading through exchanges or clearinghouses…

The regulator, Gary G. Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, vowed to try to strengthen the measure when it is considered by a second House committee next week. "The committee’s bill is a significant step toward lowering risk and promoting transparency," Mr. Gensler said. "Substantive challenges remain." He added that he hoped a final bill “covers the entire marketplace without exception"…

The derivatives legislation was criticized by consumer groups as being too weak and by Wall Street interests as being too onerous…

But ponder it I will. The Bank part is pretty clear. When they say that 98% of the Banks are exempted from the consumer protection regulations being proposed, I don’t hear that as a major loophole. The big money Banks would be regulated and inspected [80% of the money]. That’s where the difficultym has been so the compromise isn’t a deal breaker. And there are a number of iterations where it might get tightened up even more. The megabanks are our problem.

As for Derivatives, I’m not excited by any exceptions there. I’m still skeptical that this concept of "hedging" is a nightmare ready to happen. I’m encouraged that the business listed as exceptions are airlines and manufacturing – these are not speculators. But the inclusion of "energy interests" worries me. Enron was in "energy interests." The bubble that burst last was an energy bubble [the oil bubble]. And remember our spurious $4+ gas prices. I prefer the sound of  "he hoped a final bill ‘covers the entire marketplace without exception.’"

To my mind, this bill is as important or even more important than the Healthcare or the Stimulus Bills. The profundity of this Recession was the result of runaway speculation and risk taking unequalled since the 1920s. While most of us suffered, many of the people "in the know" made fortunes. They’d love to do it again.

^{Andy McKee – Topeka, Kansas}

I was going to let it go, but I couldn’t pass on Rush’s noble romanesque pose on the rock with a tsunami coming ashore in the background captioned, "An outpouring of support, love and resolve to fight. After the storm, waves recede and the rock remains" [I wonder who he/they are resolving to fight with]. He also claims that the NFL and NFL watchers are Liberals. I didn’t know that – that people who watch professional football are Liberals. ‘Cause I know a lot of Liberals, but I don’t know anyone who watches the NFL [Maybe the Liberal NFL watchers live somewhere else – blue states?]. But after this, I think I might start watching them some myself. They seem like some reasonably principled guys.

And the real reason, the real reason — and there are many, many reasons that are valid, but the real reason — that pressure was brought upon me by Sharpton and Jackson and DeMaurice Smith and the commissioner is that the Players Association is using my involvement in the Rams and this whole episode as a bit of leverage in their negotiations, the upcoming negotiations with the league and with the owners on a new collective bargaining agreement. That is what’s really going on, and the Players Association… I don’t know how many players know this, but Mr. Smith has let it be known that if he has to he’ll bring the White House into this. He’ll bring the Congressional Black Caucus into this.

So Obama’s America is quite possibly going to include the National Football League, and pressure from Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus and other places might be brought to bear on the owners. I can’t imagine that that’s anything they want. You know, as all businesses are, they’re regulated to a certain extent by the federal government but this would be a huge expansion of that. And that threat is being bandied about. And I don’t expect anyone to admit it. The owners are not going to admit that. They don’t want to. I’m sure that the reaction to this today will be, "Ah, Limbaugh doesn’t know what he’s talking about." It will be another one of these things, but that is one of the things that I do know is going on behind the scenes. 

Mr. Limbaugh, I’m sorry someone misquoted you about missing James Earl Ray. They were silly to make up things when there’s so much nasty material available in what you have said. As for your daily attacks on and slurs about black Americans, including our President, that kind of thing doesn’t do much for your image. But, to be honest, except among the subset of like-minded equally hateful people, your image never has been much to write home about anyway. Maybe you could answer this child’s question and try to turn things around for yourself…

Former right-wing leader warns of religious right violence: ‘Anyone can be killed’
Raw Story
By Larisa Alexandrovna
October 14th, 2009

Frank Schaeffer is an outspoken critic of the politicized Christian evangelical right. He sees the “End Times” movement as anti-Semitic. He fears that a right-wing terrorist might assassinate the President of the United States.

None of these talking points would be novel on the left, but Schaeffer is hardly a bleeding heart liberal. His father, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, is considered to be the godfather of the modern religious right movement. Schaeffer himself took up the family mission and became a prominent speaker and writer, promoting many of the sentiments that have given rise to the politically active, extremely well organized and zealous movement of today. He left the religious right in the 1980s, and was a Republican until 2000.

In an interview with Raw Story, Schaeffer — who has a new book coming out this month called Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) — discussed his concerns about the radicalization of the Christian right and the increasingly violent rhetoric he foresees turning into actual violence.

"Since President Obama took office I’ve felt like the lonely – maybe crazy – proverbial canary in the coal mine," Schaeffer said. "As a former right wing leader, who many years ago came to my senses and began to try to undo the harm the movement of religious extremism I helped build has done, I’ve been telling the media that we’re facing a dangerous time in our history. A fringe element of the far right Republican Party seems it believes it has a license to incite threatening behavior in the name of God"…

I was impressed with how the Players and the NFL Commissioner handled themselves in objecting to Rush Limbaugh’s ownership of an NFL team. This sampling from yesterday’s Limbaugh web site, on the other hand, isn’t very restrained. His detractors, it seems, aren’t after him for his daily racist comments about President Obama. They just delight in discrediting Conservatism. His list of articles maligning his critics, two black men and a hispanic, are simply getting out the truth, not retaliation. And what’s the big deal anyway, his comparing NFL Players to notorious street gangs wasn’t a racial slur, it was his way of respecting the game of football – some Limbaugh Love. We appreciate those clarifications.

• Michael J. Fox: On the October 23, 2006 edition of his radio show, Limbaugh imitated on the "DittoCam" [the webcam for website subscribers to see him on the air] the physical symptoms of actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease. He said "[Fox] is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act … This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting."
• Phoney Soldiers: During the September 26, 2007 broadcast of Limbaugh’s radio show, he used the term "phony soldiers", referring to a September 21 Associated Press story about individuals falsely claiming to be veterans in order to receive benefits. A caller, saying he was currently serving in the Army and has been in 14 years, said, "They never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media." Limbaugh interrupted, "The phony soldiers." The caller continued, "The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for their country." Several minutes later, after the caller had hung up, Limbaugh read from the AP story describing the story of Jesse Macbeth. Macbeth joined the Army but did not complete basic training, yet claimed in alternative media interviews that he and his unit routinely committed war crimes in Iraq. On June 7, 2007, Macbeth pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and was sentenced to five months in jail and three years probation. Media Matters noted Limbaugh’s use of the term "phony soldiers" in an article on their website. The article suggested that Limbaugh was saying that all soldiers who disagree with the Iraq War were "phony soldiers", and their article received substantial press coverage after it was discussed in speeches by Presidential candidates John Edwards and Chris Dodd. Limbaugh said that, when he had made the comment about "phony soldiers", he had been speaking only of Macbeth and others like him who claim to be soldiers and are not, and that "Media Matters takes things out of context all the time".
• Operation Chaos: In an attempt to undermine the Democratic campaigns, Limbaugh encouraged his listeners to vote for whoever was behind in the vote, an effort dubbed "Operation Chaos". In Ohio, Limbaugh encouraged his listeners to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton. In Ohio, voters changing their registration must attest that they support the principles of the party to which they switch. About 16,000 Ohio Republicans switched parties for the election. The Ohio Attorney General’s office stated that it would be hard to prove any voter’s fraudulent intent. Limbaugh said that there is nothing wrong with Republicans voting in Democratic primaries, as Democrats were able to vote for John McCain in Vermont, New Hampshire, Florida, and other states. "This is getting absurd. If it weren’t for independents and Democrats crossing over, Senator McCain would not be our nominee!" Limbaugh has said that "The dream end of [Operation Chaos] is that this keeps up to the Convention, and that we have a recreation of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fire, and literal riots and all of that, that is the objective here."
• Magic Negro: On March 19, 2007 Limbaugh referred to a Los Angeles Times editorial by David Ehrenstein which claimed that Barack Obama was filling the role of the "magic negro", and that this explained his appeal to voters. Limbaugh then later played a song by Paul Shanklin, "Barack the Magic Negro," sung to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon".
• Club Gitmo: And then there was this tasteful tee shirt playfully supporting water-boarding:
  

I had a comforting thought today, an old man kind of thought. I’ve been feeling the weight of the daily news of late. In the last century [I told you it was an old man thought], I had two categories in my mind – news and editorials. It may have been naive, but I thought of the news as just being what happened. Selective news reporting [or distorting] was something they did – Pravda, or Radio Havana. For years, I used to listen to Radio Havana at 6,000 kHz on my shortwave radio in the evenings. They played the kind of jazz I like [it persists in Cuba long after being replaced here]. When the news came on, I enjoyed its oddness, its lack of relationship to anything else I’d heard during the day. They’d report the scores from the Cuba Angola soccer games or about the preparation for the PanAm Games. There would always be some example of American Imperialism from the day. Farm production was on the rise. The coming rain would be replaced with sunshine soon. I could enjoy it because I knew it was distorted, passed through a rosy ideological filter. The world was pretty simple – things were going great and the bad guys were still off doing bad things. The soft, upbeat voice of the commentator fit with the anachronistic progressive jazz drifting in from offshore. It was a soothing fantasy world masquerading as the truth – propaganda lite.

It actually feels to me like our news has changed – blurring the comfortable boundary between news and editorial. It seems like every factual story includes something about the conflict within the facts. Obama wins Nobel Prize has something added : Republicans Ask Why? or : Limbaugh  Outraged, or Snowe Votes for Health Care: This Time, or Mayor Who Added Jobs Lost Some, Too. I’ll bet that it just feels that way, that If I went to the archives and looked at old newspapers or watched old black and white newscasts, it would be just the same – conflict no matter what the topic. There would be a difference. There wouldn’t be something like Fox News, at least not something as prominent as Fox News. But Fox News is another story. This post is about my comforting thought today, and Fox News sure isn’t it.

I was thinking about watching the Discovery Channel special about Ardi last night, the 4.4 million year old  skeleton found in Ethiopia. She walked upright like we do, but had "grasping feet" for climbing like the Chimps. They called her a "mosaic." It was a fascinating piece of human history seen through a paleontologist’s telescope. There wasn’t any conflict in the story, only curiosity. Even without all the fancy Argon dating and mega-micro scans, the skeleton itself spoke with a clear voice. She wasn’t an Ape, nor was she yet a human. Looking back from our perspective, her place in our development was without question. But if I met Ardi four million years ago, I would have had no idea where she was headed, what would come of her and her kind.

Things seen through a telescope and things seen through a magnifying glass look very different. I can look back at my old blog entries and, though I can recall the anguish I sometimes felt when I wrote them, it’s a telescopic view – already history that’s in its place. But when I read today’s news with its conflict and uncertainty, the bad feeling some things engender look huge through the magnifying glass of the present. Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe threatens to be another Project for the New American Century. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize looks like a liability of expectations. The Teabaggers might take over America just as the Religious Right did in 2000.

My last post was the second time I found myself thinking that Dick Cheney has some version of PTSD – traumatized by the First Gulf War he officiated and by 9/11, the attack he knows he missed. I think I also have a version of PTSD – from the last eight years. I haven’t yet learned to look at the news and the daily conflicts in a balanced way. It has only been nine months since reading the news from Washington for the spin or combing for evidence of yet another secret program was a perfectly appropriate thing to do. I’m still hypervigilant, jumpy when certain key phrases or people come up. I find myself reviewing well known history frequently as if saying it in print will keep it from repeating. And I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of that kind of thing going around. Like Mr. Cheney, I’m trying to prevent the past.