Author: Brian

RepublicanWare^®

            All Hat. No Cattle.

Wall Street Journal:

“The federal government, acknowledging the need to take a more comprehensive approach to the financial crisis, is working on a sweeping series of programs that would represent perhaps the biggest intervention in financial markets since the 1930s.

Sweeping. Good choice of words.

McCain rolls a health care proposal peeled from packages in his wallet, ingenious handling, er, regulatory unhandling, that’s toppled our houses, snapped our investment houses and now risks our entire house.

Mike Sunnucks at the Phoenix Business Journal:

The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act broke down barriers between banks, securities firms, mortgage lenders and insurance companies. That deregulation repealed Great Depression-era bank regulations with the approval of former president Bill Clinton.

The Gramm bill encouraged lending during the strong housing market but has put banks, investment houses and insurance companies in peril since the housing bust which started two years ago. The measure allowed those lending money to sell off those loan portfolios to other companies, thus disconnecting the lending risk.

Obese Don’t Need Fat
What’s unsaid is that D.C. took America to a halt. States, cities, counties and towns were hamstrung, disabled, displaced by symbolic scissors and loud reassurance. Well before selling our banks and lenders, we gave away protections and constraints. McCain and Gramm [et al] rolled back strong rules, history’s forts, strong built state and local culture keeping predators stopped.

You must try. Repeat after me. Keeping Predators Stopped.

It’s not the game of nature loosed by Bush or McCain or the Republican free market. It’s game shot dead.

Deregulation we want we won’t see until we regulate our government.

Deregulation is a very wide wide word that has hit America between the eyes. Yes, let’s damn Clinton for it too, and be alert to Rubin if Obama is tied tightly.

Deregulating Social Security is million’s of finance sector commissions so large it could spurt stocks higher than Wall Street Viagra.

Deregulating Health Care, a credit card for every heart attack, nudes state and local rules enough to get an old man out of bed.

Precisely.

pssst. It is not well known that a Victoria’s Secret catalog was responsible for a key aspect of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

No man or woman once impressed me with a Rolex or a Cadillac nor appeased me with a little white dog. Better status is on my mind. I think of putting greens beside the patio and I am sad, not for their happiness, but for yours.

Where did it begin, false pride? With you I’m sorry to say. Choose any Century. Fools and gold are always much too much for any civilization.

A PoleRouter had always the status of a high-quality luxurious watch. In the late 1950’s a steel PoleRouter cost as much as a Rolex Explorer. An 18k PoleRouter with a gold bracelet had nearly the price of a car.

We have worked so hard. Navigators, engineers, day upon day. So proud and good. Of course a gilt wrist proves it. But only for you.

The greater pride is living here well. Wear that. Impress me.

Bush has not one achievement.

Paul Krugman looks over his trillion dollar bailout plan and says, “No deal”.

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

No quid pro quo. Sums up an era, don’t you think? Privatized profits. Socialized losses. “But we ain’t no Communists!” say our rouge cou.

Slate. Strong words in two pages display the McCain Health Care proposal as a hidden gift to his corporate friends.

If enacted, this proposal would cause a shift along the lines seen in the credit-card industry.

What makes no sense is to neuter state regulations while putting nothing in their place.

Letting South Dakota regulate America’s credit-card industry hasn’t worked out so well. Letting Arizona do the same for health insurance would be worse.

Hidden gift? We know what that is.

A deep undercurrent of Robert Paterson’s Prince Edward Island blog, looking beneath the surface, has been how difficult it is for a conventional organization to adopt a 2.0 world. As if to say, the ‘intermodal multinodal cybernetic society’ has a very long way to go.

The entrenched habits of control, centralization and top down could not be shifted. No amount of appeals, about the power of a 2.0 world, more speed, better information, better conection inside and outside the enterprise, landed with the change.

I think we all underestimated the height and the steepness of the slope of the “landscape” that had to be crossed to go into the next “valley” of the 2.0 world.

Systems remain stable for a long time – so long as the key environment to support them exists. For real change to occur, you have to get out of the “valley”, over the mountain and into the next valley. So the dinosaurs ruled for millions of years, while the more adaptive mammals lurked in the shadows waiting the moment when the environment would change and set them free.

So until last week, it was still possible for organizations to chug along with a 1.0 perspective. For its key environmental factor, cheap and easy credit and access to capital was still in place.

Well dear readers – this is no longer the case. The asteroid has hit the worlds financial markets and the dinosaurs will die. Large cumbersome beings that need a lot of capital and credit and who cannot adapt quickly will die.

Credit and assets based on cheap credit are simply evaporating. So is the “photosynthesis” process of capital and credit creation. Investment banking and conventional banking is in the process of losing its own capital base. Even the credit of the US itself will be tested to the limit in the ensuing months.

What we are experiencing is not a normal correction but the equivalent of an asteroid strike.

Robert warns, “It will get worse” and offers thoughtful advice along the way: 2.0 world will emerge from the ashes of the Financial Capital World.

Network from matrix
And matrix from node,
To coin a modern ode.

The world’s largest fertilizer companies face two lawsuits in Minnesota and Chicago for price-fixing and conspiracy. more…

* Mosaic of Plymouth, Minnesota, USA,
* Agrium of Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
* Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc., Canada,
* JSC Uralkali of Moscow, Russia;
* RUE PA Belaruskali, of Soligorsk, Belarus,
* RUE PA Belarusian Potash Co. of Minsk, Belarus,
* JSC Silvinit of Solikamsk, Russia, and
* JSC International Potash Co. of Moscow, Russia.

In several countries, obscure laws shield makers of potash and phosphate — two key ingredients in fertilizer — from certain antitrust rules.

In the US, for example, phosphate makers are among a handful of industries empowered by the 1918 Webb-Pomerene Act to talk with competitors about pricing and other issues.

The allegations come as the fertilizer companies have profited from the global grain-price boom of the past two years.

Price rocketed sky high
The price of phosphate has climbed to about $1,100 a ton, up from $430 last year.

The only rule left standing was ‘anything goes’. – Bob Schieffer, CBS Face The Nation

Some think privileged. True. Two per cent and two percent of that. Some see a casino. True. A thief is first to know the odds. Most see humanity lost in avarice. Of course. This is why we govern. What folly said leave us to our nature?

We fix it at home, America. Soonest, of all times, now, bring sustenance and prosperity home. Bring honor. The true hill is never Washington.

We’ve let this Las Vegas version of what used to be ordinary banks in our ordinary hometowns go berserk.

BILL MOYERS: So who do you trust anymore? I mean, you write in your book that the most worrisome thing is the extent of official understatement and misstatement, the preference for minimizing how many problems there are and how interconnected they are.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, just to give you an example of how many there are, Alan Greenspan has finally decided to admit, you know, this may be one of those once-a-century biggies. Well, what makes it fascinating is that I sometimes use the description “seven sharks.” There are seven sharks in the tank with the economy.

And the first is financialization because we’re so dependent on this industry that’s sort of half lost its marbles. The second is that you have this huge buildup of debt, absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world. The third is you’ve now got home prices collapsing. The fourth is you’ve got global commodity inflation building up.

The fifth is you’ve got flawed and deceptive government economics statistics. The sixth is that you’ve got what they call peak oil where the world is, to some extent, running out of oil. So it’s not just commodity inflation, it’s a shortage of oil. And then the last thing is the collapsing dollar. Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one. And when Greenspan says it’s a once a century, I think it’s another variation but on a par with the Thirties.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think when you hear John McCain and Secretary Paulson say that the fundamentals, however, are solid?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, John McCain once said he didn’t know anything about economics. And half the time what he says, you know, proves that on a day-by-day basis.

---

BILL MOYERS: So we at least finally have an election about something, don’t we? I mean, with the Fed and the economy at the heart of the debate now?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The people who have the connections with the lobbies and the big donors have absolutely no problem with all these bailouts and rescues. But they don’t dare admit it because who’s rescuing the laid off worker? Nobody’s rescuing them. The fact that the Democrats don’t want to talk about what they’re going to do if they get the chance, that’s dishonesty. But the Republican Party is thoroughly dishonest in the same way.

THE POLITIC OF HOPE

NOT HEEDED?
NOT NEEDED?

THE GAMES AND THE GEMS,
THE GIZMOS AND THE GADGETS,
THE GARMENT AND THE GLAMOR,
STILL FLOOD OUR GARDEN.
ALL IS WELL.

THEN WHY?

Why is the public forum quite convinced?
The quorum forms, is seldom minced,
The crush of cash and goods exchanges.
The manual’s writ, to wit, law rearranges
the how, the what, the when of cost.
This must be spent or all is lost!

We ask:
Epic yesterday, is it flawed,
resting on our shoulders?
Each and all of us is awed!

The Task:
Both formers and molders,
both material and number,
both conduit and by-way,
both vitality and slumber,
both you and I, we and they,

ALL MUST CHOOSE.
ALL MUST MUSE.
ALL MUST USE.
GRAPH THE CHART,
STOCK THE PART,
DREAM THE ART,
PULL THE CART,
PAY THE PRICE,
CARVE THE ICE,
SHOO THE MICE,
ATTRACT THE NICE.
IT’S UP TO YOU AND ME
IN THIS DEMOCRACY.

Where do we go?
And who will say so?
Is this what we’re waiting for
To open future’s door?

TRY:
WHAT PLENTY HAVE WE PLANNED?
WHAT RISK AHEAD IS MANNED?
WHAT SURE AVENUE, WHAT LAND?
WHAT MAINTAINED, WHAT SCANNED
TO BE USED,
NOT ABUSED?

Projections list what is not sure.
Archives inventory what is no more.
Accounts know what just went by;
Tax measures that decree, no lie!
O’ order, do not bend.
Our use-abuse will surely mend.
We try always, watchful, wary.
We know the time. We do not tarry.
We as people strive in honor.
Oh there’s slight, or greed, or con, or…
These are only sides of nature,
Things that color, shade the slate, or
Absolve in partnership with fate and maker.
We praise the giver not the taker!
In all this social beast
a person needs bread and yeast
to rise and fill,
surmise and frill,
balance a price
get a slice.
This is enough to say.
See this balmy day?
Instead,
no dread.
Aren’t we fed?
Aren’t we ahead?
Isn’t it said
It all works out in time?
Don’t tease me. All is fine.
You have yours. I have mine.
What more? Don’t threat of less.
We’re strong enough to face this mess.
What’s that you say?
Another shortage play?
An increase to pay?
Listen. I have too much to do today.
Go away.

OH, CITIZEN, IT IS NOT BUT DUTY WON.
NOT STRUGGLE BUT JOB WELL DONE
TO STRIVE THE DEPTH, TO SEE, TO KNOW;
TO PROVE ADEPT, TO PLAN, TO SHOW;
PROVIDE THE NEED,
SHUN THE GREED,
ASSURE WE’RE FREED.
HERE, I PLEAD
EACH HOLD A KEY,
A PART TO GUARANTEE
OUR GREAT LIBERTY.
NEVER LET IT BE SAID
WE ARE SUCCUMBED BY DREAD.
SPEAK, “DON’T TREAD!”
SHRIEK, “I’M LED
BY LIBERTY’S FORUM,
OUR PEOPLE’S QUORUM!
REASON IS OUR DAY!
JUSTICE IS OUR WAY,
WHISTLES ON THE EAGLE’S WING.
THIS IS WHAT WE DREAM AND SING!”

Then of all we’ve seen or ever knew
It rests on what we say and do,
Regardless the state of style,
The yard of cloth, the mile of smile,
Principal without remorse.
Vision is our course.

Face the trouble!
Burst the bubble!
Dissolve our pain.
Achieve our gain.

EACH CAN REACH,
SO REACH TO EACH,
THE BEST RESTITUTION
FOR ANY INSTITUTION.

NETWORK FROM MATRIX,
MATRIX FROM NODE,
TO COIN A MODERN ODE.
NURTURE YOUR CLAN.

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR, IF YOU CAN.

Unable to hide under Bush:

“At this point I should note that for the first time, both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defense have doctorates in Russian studies,” Mr. Gates said. “A fat lot of good that’s done us.”

US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, speaking at Oxford.

Try and fathom the rationale for this list of CEO Compen$ation, only 25 with the wealth we’ve waited since Reagan to trickle.

If you don’t feel pissed on, you are in a coma!

Now, Bush dares, they need One Trillion Dollar$ from Ma and Pa Kettle to cover the incredibly irresponsible actions of Wall Street.

The American Dollar may soon be confetti.

Dumby up, America. Make tomorrow American.

I’ve often wondered what it was like to live through the (first) Wall Street Crash. Now I have some idea. What’s strange is the way, at each stage in the crisis, there’s a feeling that perhaps it has bottomed out. And then it gets worse again. Today we’ve seen the unthinkable happen — the US Treasury is running out of cash, and the markets are beginning to contemplate the possibility (still deemed extremely remote, but still…) of the US government defaulting on its loans. And it’s coming closer to home.

The end of American capitalism as we knew it?

Seafarers Provide.

Day 512 for Astronauts.

Create environment.
Sustain a crew.
Dangerous,
Isolated.
Brave.

Wind SE 8 knots, Course SSW, Speed 2 knots, Position 18° 38′ S by 105° 13′ W

My favorite cloud is a single white puff ball floating low in the sky drifting west on any tradewind.

You don’t need to go here, a NYTimes book review. I clicked because the title drew me.

The Best Mind of His Generation

The moods that Mr. Wallace distilled so vividly on the page — the gradations of sadness and madness embedded in the obsessive, recursive, exhausting prose style that characterized both his journalism and his fiction — crystallized an unhappy collective consciousness. And it came through most vividly in his voice. Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware (and nearly impossible to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words) — it was something you instantly recognized even hearing it for the first time. It was — is — the voice in your own head.

smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

Me, at any rate.

A federal judge on Saturday ordered that Dick Cheney cannot destroy records. HA!

It’s you, America.
Now what?

America has entered a 50/50 era, a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College.

Manichaeism (in Modern Persian ???? ???? ?yin e M?ni; Chinese: ???) was one of the major dualistic religions, originating in Sassanid Persia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaean

Two kinds of people in this world.

Happy now?

ABC News Exclusive Dirty Detail

“An internal government document obtained by ABC News appears to contradict Sarah Palin’s most recent explanation for why she fired her public safety chief Walt Monegan, the move which prompted the now-contested state probe into ‘Troopergate’.”

ABC News Photo Illustration

Troopergate: Public Safety Commissioner Monegan traveling to Washington for $10 million for Alaska Rape Prevention – more rape than any State in the Union.

Troopergate: Her governor’s staff OK’d his flight.

Troopergate: In Sarah Palin’s legal filing, she fired Monegan because he had a “rogue mentality” and was bucking her administration’s directives.

Witnesses who refuse to testify can be found in contempt under Alaska law. But the full Legislature must be in session, which won’t happen until January. McCain sent a team of operatives to Alaska to “carefully coordinate” any information that’s released.

Troopergate: Walt Monegan refuses to go along with her personal vendetta.

America!
Stay outta her kitchen!

The document on top in her three-ring binder is a flyer from the John Birch Society.

Do the math.
Who needs math?

Which Party makes us money?

1. FRoosevelt: 267.2% increase.
2. Clinton: 118.1% increase.
3. Coolidge: 110.4% increase
4. Eisenhower: 68.7% increase
5. Bush (Sr.): 44.1% increase.
6. Reagan: 26.4% increase.
7. Johnson: 22.4% increase.
8. TRoosevelt: 18.1% increase.
9. Wilson: 15.1% increase.
10. Truman: 11.4% increase.
11. Nixon: 9.7% increase.
12. Carter: 0.2% increase.
13. GWBush: 0.5% decrease
before market crisis!
14. Taft: 1.5% decrease.
15. Hoover: 83.5% decrease.

Kennedy, up 12.5% in two years and ten months.

The debt ceiling will be over $11 trillion by the time Bush leaves office.

Republicans cost us money!

Which party, Democrat or Republican, puts more money in our pockets? [NYTimes]

Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

Say it nicely:

“There is a large historical gap in economic performance between the two parties.”

Vote cruel.

a modest proposal
for a new flag design

Don’t be alarmed. Paine is our pain. We can do that.

The Bush administration asked Congress for unchecked power to buy $700 billion in bad mortgage investments from U.S. financial companies in what would be an unprecedented government intrusion into the markets. [Bloomberg]

All our money.

Across the nation, homeless organizations are seeing the largest numbers in a generation, as people without jobs and homes seek shelter in cars or temporary encampments like those outside of Reno and in the cities of Portland, Fresno, Seattle, Chattanooga and Columbus.

Not one dollar.

The British papers sound an alarm – rising repossessions, soaring energy and food prices and job losses. Depression?

You wanna tune into genius? A little bit is good for the spleen according to latest research. Then tune into a Bay Area writer that grinds more words than sand under your shoe, tells it as he sees it, and scorns anybody not into tolerance and breadth. Now, that’s hate we can use.

Follow this fellow. For the sake of recognizing what honesty can do.

White women, no way!
Once pro-Obama, but now swoon for McPalin? Who the hell are you?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Every white woman I know is positively horrified. Wait, that’s not exactly true. It’s more accurate to say that every thoughtful or liberal or intuitive or open-minded white woman I know worth her vagina monologue and her self-determination and and two centuries of nonstop striving for equal rights and sexual freedom and exhaustive patriarchal unshackling is right now openly horrified, appalled at what the addition of shrill PTA hockey-mom Sarah Palin seems to have done for the soggy, comatose McCain campaign — that is, make it not merely remotely interesting and melodramatic, but aggressively hostile to, well, to all intelligent women everywhere.

Sisters. This is what he says, “You’ve got to be kidding me. They say: This is what we get? This could be our historic role model? Two hundred years (OK, more like 2000) of struggle, only to have this nasty caricature of femininity try to hijack and mock and undermine it all?”

“And thus did the harrowing wail go out…”
Have you had your harrowing wail lately?

McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five
The story of “the Keating Five” – a scandal rivaling Teapot Dome and Watergate

By Tom Fitzpatrick
published: Phoenix New Times, November 29, 1989

You’re John McCain, a fallen hero who wanted to become president so desperately that you sold yourself to Charlie Keating, the wealthy con man who bears such an incredible resemblance to The Joker. Obviously, Keating thought you could make it to the White House, too.

He poured $112,000 into your political campaigns. He became your friend. He threw fund raisers in your honor. He even made a sweet shopping-center investment deal for your wife, Cindy. Your father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was cut in on the deal, too.

Nothing was too good for you. Why not? Keating saw you as a prime investment that would pay off in the future.

So he flew you and your family around the country in his private jets. Time after time, he put you up for serene, private vacations at his vast, palatial spa in the Bahamas. All of this was so grand. You were protected from what Thomas Hardy refers to as “the madding crowd.” It was almost as though you were already staying at a presidential retreat.

More: The Phoenix Gazette, September 12, 1993 [pdf]