Friday, March 20, 2009

Excuse Me While I Stay Confused

My friend, Ron, said to me yesterday, “I read Mr. XX, and then Mr. XXX, and then Mr. XXXX, and then I read the NYT and then I read the WSJ: who am I supposed to believe? Who can I trust?”You’re asking ME?

Bill Maher asks, “Why can’t we just admit that we just don’t f@#*king know?”

Barbara and I watched a talented lawyer explain, on television, about the legality or potential illegality of AIG bonus contracts, then turned and looked at me, and asked, “Can you explain that to me?”

To which I said, “Huh?”

It is very apparent that we are all consumed by AIG and the economy, right now. (Some people are so consumed that they are sending death threats to AIG executives: ouch). Ron (see the guy above) said yesterday that he thinks we are all looking for the “next big bubble” to make everything OK, again. I think most of us are looking for a nice, simple, single answer to both a simple explanation and solution to a very complex mess.

Here is what Paul Krugman had to say this morning:
March 20, 2009, 9:05 am
AIG
Preliminary thoughts on the tax bill:
1. It’s not the way you should make policy — it’s clumsy, and it will punish some innocent parties while letting the most guilty off scot-free
2. But — there wasn’t much alternative at this point. And for that I blame the Obama people.
I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but its part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.
This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

Then there is this, from James Galbraith, who is NOT a populist economist:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Economy--No-Return-to-by-the-web-090319-85.html
I think we should listen more closely to him and less to many others???
Or try this one:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-I-G--A-National-Embarr-by-James-Raider-090318-537.html
I keep searching for a better word than embarrassment, but I cannot find one. Obscene, maybe?

Or maybe this observation:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090319_the_geithner_problem/
This article raises the question, “What did he know and when did he know it?” Last night, on CNN, Geithner said he knew about some “things”, a few days before the bonuses became public knowledge. These “things” sound very much like the “strings” the Governor of Texas says are attached to the unemployment funds for his state in the stimulus bill. He says these strings prevent him from accepting them, but he can’t seem to say what the ‘string things” are, exactly.
Meanwhile, Governor Palin (AK…remember her?) is declining funds as well. But in her case, she is threatening to decline those ‘earmarked” only for education: she says those “strings” in the legislation that require Alaska to “grow its’ government”. I would suppose that not educating the populace is one good way to guarantee that Alaska will not grow. And Governor Sanford (SC) has asked to use the education portion of that states’ share of the stimulus to pay down debt, thereby neglecting education and laying off 7000 teachers. I think he and Gov. Palin are just stringing us along. Or perhaps they knew “things” before Geithner did? (I just heard three political pundits call for Geithner’s head and two more explain the actions of Palin and Sanford as preparatory actions for elections in 2012. I fail to see the connections, but I’m confused.
Eric Cantor (OH) has been very resolute about being the voice of “no” about almost everything having to do with TARP, TALP and AIG, but when actually pressed on MSNBC about how he would vote about the bonus legislation, would not say. Later, in order to stay center stage but ideologically impure, he went Republican-Lite and voted for the anti-bonus actions. This is something like Senator Chris Dodd saying he did not put language into the AIG-related legislation right before he said he did. This is also something like John Kerry saying he was for something before he was against it, or Mrs. Clinton being against Barack Obama for President before she was for it as soon as she was named to be the SOS.

Are you confused yet? Are you feeling just a little like an Orwellian pig? Did you bring your lipstick? Are you tempted to fly? Or at least fly off the handle? Well, add this to your plate of imponderables:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031802283.html?wpisrc=newsletter
The headline here is: “Fed to pump $1.2 trillion Into Markets”. This is, of course, another mind-boggling amount of money, coming right after a grandfatherly Bernanke told 60 Minutes that “we will not let the banks fail”. The next day the market rallied (Barbara said it was the Bernanke factor; I think it was because it was Monday and stocks [Geithnerian things] were cheap). Steven Pearlstein (WaPo) on MSNBC is just now telling me that it is obvious that “the depression is much worse than they thought” (they being the government?) and that we should be braced for much higher deficits. And the other “thing” I liked about the morning stories was this:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090319_a_government_of_men_not_laws/, wherein David Sirota sounds somewhat like Galbraith.

But this should make you uneasy as well:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/19/cnbc-rich-wall-street/. I really like this one. We are still some of us, anyway) hanging onto the notion that only the rich and greedy can manage money. But given the give-aways and short-sightedness that allowed us to give away billions of TARP funds (and now TALP…rhymes with SCALP) funds without accountability, I don’t think letting the government manage our money is such a hot idea, either. Would you give your money to Barney Frank? My father would call all of this rationalization of the rich being in charge “bass-ackwards thinking”. For once, I agree with him.

This next story is both confusing and transparent:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/19/financial-roundtable-lobbyists/. Having failed to engineer profits from attempting the defeat the stimulus bill, the lobby folks are trying to carve money out of the budget for special interests. We have no shame. Or integrity. Or logic.
All of which brings me to the congressional antics and how they all contribute to my confusion…and yours.

Over the last decade, the lasting effects of the great “uniter” have only added to our great “division” and bifurcation. The chasm between right and left, conservative and liberal, has just been growing. Beginning most recently (and openly) with the complete and total rejection of any Republican votes for the stimulus bill, and moving on from there, the most important issue being kept alive in Congress right now is NOT the welfare of the country, but whether or not you are a Democrat or a Republican and how loudly you can proclaim your allegiance.
Last week, the Republicans stated flatly, that their goal was to “bring down Democratic numbers”. Ideological purity has completely superseded the national economic welfare as the rule of the day.
Except when such ideological purity runs counter to your personal agenda (Google Maxine Waters and the President “keeping his facts straight”), your wallet or your political ambitions. Take, for example, the small group of “blue dog” democrats, deciding this week to establish a “secret” society, having joined forces to form a small sub-group in the Congress that would work closer with Republicans to thwart the economic policies of their own President and party. I wonder if they have a secret handshake? Do they understand the nature of “splinter groups”? Do they understand that splinters can get infected? This dedication to obstructive obstinacy seems endemic to, and symptomatic of, our nationally confused awareness of misplaced priorities.

(Former staffers of the Bush administration, perhaps 70% of them, have either abandoned ideological purity to write profitable tell-all books or have been unable to find jobs because of their prior devotion to that former Rovian moral ”high ground”. I can’t help but wonder if they are re-thinking their allegiances)

And then we have Sen. John McCain and other Republicans are opposing the appointment of Chris Hill to represent the U.S. in Afghanistan. General Petraeus thinks this is a good choice. Despite continued Republican calls to listen to the “generals on the ground”, because Hill is not “their boy” and not a staunch Republican, this group is opposing the appointment. This is silly and counter-productive, to say nothing of being hypocritical and not of much help in advancing the cause of peace in the region. But is all stubbornly ideologically pure. And no one in Congress seemed to care about the AIG and bank bonuses until the public got wind of it. Then, suddenly each side said it was the fault of the other (or of Bush and Paulson, or of Obama and Geithner), making a national economic crisis a political football. Then the House passed a bill (with sudden Republican participation) to eliminate, prevent or tax the bonuses. I will give them this: they finally displayed real transparency: were able to see right through their phony concern. Now that bill is off to the Senate, and I am hearing that the bill is potentially illegal, to the point of being unconstitutional. This means it may be scrapped, altogether. What a waste of time. I have called the recent behavior of Congress to be theater; Mr. Raider (in the earlier article) calls it “circus grandstanding”. In either case it has all been duplicitous or perhaps much ado about much of nothing. Except for the damn crisis.

Let’s confuse the issue, a little more:

The Congress is thinking about giving the corpse of Chryslers several more billions of dollars. Why?

Gordon E. Liddy, the AIG boss guy, is working for one dollar a year (really?) and is volunteering to sit before congress and be grilled, saying that the bonuses are distasteful but obligatory. He also says Bernanke and the Federal Reserve approved the bonus package long ago. (Geithner’s staff says the same thing).

Venerable General Electric Corp. is in trouble, having just lowered their annual dividend to pennies, to raise cash. They have also disclosed that their biggest portfolio item is the GE Capital group. And that that group has invested heavily in questionable real estate. Why? (And most of what they manufacture, they do so off-shore…except for the missile guidance systems for the DOD)

Crown Books is advancing $7M to George W Bush for a book of memoirs we don’t need or want to read. Why? (Maybe the folks in Calgary know “things” we don’t.)

J.P. Morgan and other banks, along with General Motors, is either declining further bail out monies or returning them, citing too many “strings”. After the last cash infusion, they are suddenly profitable (it makes you wonder whence came the crisis?), with Citibank claiming profits in the billions (and remodeling their executive offices).

And Michael Steele is, well…Michael Steele. Explain that one. He has even Rush stumped.

Oh, yes: Mr. Cheney, is that an assassination squad in your pocket or are you just happy to kill people?

I know full well that I have co-mingled TARP, TALP, stimulus funds, education, unemployment, economic advisors, political expediency and poor domestic policy, but I am confused. In the time it has taken to write this, I have found five or six more articles that I could have cited or quoted or referenced. But they have all been muddled and contradictory of each other. I had to turn off MSNBC. I was just getting more confused. If you think you can say all of this better, please do. I no longer know whether I should change my hopes or change my mind. I do know that a few more words of wisdom from the wise and I may lose my mind. I need a nap.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Stagecoach Driver, Economist, Bouncer

Once upon a time there was a stagecoach called “The United States of America”. The reins to the coach and the horse team were given over to a short, smirky, ex-town drunk from Texas, sometime around the year 2000. His name was Uncurious George, and he came from the town of Born Again Cistern. He and the guy riding shotgun, Dickless Dick, were supposed to get the coach through the next eight years without incident, no loss of life, no financial loss and no loss of dignity. And they were also not supposed to lose any luggage and to tell the truth about their pilgrim’s progress. They were supposed to deliver thee coach intact, in reasonably good shape and without harm to the passengers.

They were also supposed to take the coach and head west, from New York, for Los Angeles. They had about 280 million passengers in the coach, and a whole bunch of political ambulance chasers strapped up-top, who were along for the ride and slated to telegraph stories back their media folks as the coach travelled. Most of them were pretty main stream types, but there was one who was really Foxy, with bad eyesight and just a couple who wrote only with their left hands. Uncurious George would not speak to them “direkly” (in fact he could barely read or write), so he used spokespeople, who came and went through the revolving door at the rear of the stagecoach. The last one was an intellectually bleached blonde, Dana Peroxide, who served synthetic pablum laced with melamine from China for breakfast. Dickless Dick , given the slightest provocation, hid in an un-dick-closed location.

Before they could even leave NY, George and Dick got into a nasty bar fight down on Wall Street and took out two tall skyscrapers: when the cops arrived, George and Dickless denied even being there. They made lots of toxic dust, kept the NYFD busy and got their coach rates raised because they managed to ground all the airplanes.

The next several years were just more of the same. The next big event was a big bar fight in Iraq and then the two of them barely escaping with their goat skins in Afghanistan, spending like drunken sailors, ignoring the coach riders, feeding the pressers up-top bull shit, and signing checks from the surplus they got with the coach, as well as signing statements absolving themselves of any responsibilities for any calamity caused by their bad handling of the coach. They paid no attention to the passengers needs, stopped only at Chinese-owned Wal-Marts, performed no routine maintenance on the coach, the horses or the roads or bridges and told everyone that everything was OK because they had decided it was. They lost more luggage than anyone realized, and the closest they came to maintaining dignity, was the indignance they aroused in foreign countries from their lawless arrogance. They parked the stagecoach at prisons around the world, tortured the prisoners there and tortured the coach passengers with liable, lies and deceit.

After nearly eight years, with the wheels coming off the wagon, running on broken spokes and with broken down horses, the coach passengers were fed up: they had paid full fare for years and only gotten as far as Chicago. The pressers up-top were starting to discover they had a left ear as well as a right one, the check was NOT in the mail, and some guy back in the Wall St. rubble, named Paulson, had just joined the apocalyptic movement and announced that the end was perilously near, right around the corner, and everything really sucked…and he needed $700B, no questions asked. By the time the coach finally came to rest at the stop in Chicago, the passengers were looking for tar, feathers, rail and rope (they already had a jackass). They all got off the coach and stayed overnight in empty, foreclosed houses. And everyone was hoping that there might be a change in the works.

Just about everyone had decided that George would no longer be allowed to drive. In fact, some had even posited that he might be drinking again. Over the next several weeks and months, a search went underway for a new driver.

No one knows just exactly when the call came, but the rumor is that Mel Brooks called, and alerted everyone to the fact that there was dark-skinned renegade guy, staying at the bunkhouse in Chicago. He was known to be a straight-shooter and could handle a team. No one had ever had a minority driver before, but he looked so much better than George and Dickless (and nobody in the conservative camp had a Blackberry), that in almost no time (and several million dollars later) Kid Barack was given the reins and the roadmap (or what was left of it: about all that was left of the Constitution map was a few tatters. It turns out, Dickless had been using a secret paper shredder and never had any intentions of getting to Los Angeles. But that partially explained why they had always managed to find a place to stop for dinner where Dickless could get broiled Halliburton.

Eventually, some time around the middle of January, with The Kid at the reins, and a new guy riding shotgun (Big Bad Joe Bidenhammer, a former Amtrac conductor), the stagecoach left Chicago. Champagne flowed, Jesse Jackson tears flowed, everybody back in Washington balled everyone else and no one was able to tell, at least right at first, if that bright orange glow was the sun setting in the west or that it was just the radiance of Kid Barack. They had a new team of horses, new grease in the wheels and the smell of delusionary Obamanism was everywhere.

But the festivities and glee did not last long. To begin with, the old team of horses had only numbered four, and now Kid Barack had to handle eight. And three of the eight were Republicans, they pulled slowly and to the right and farted and Rushed around. Then, some of the people The Kid wanted to bring along to help, either couldn’t come along because they owed too much money to people back at Club Fed in Washington or had been sleeping around with too many stagecoach suppliers. Then the guy who was supposed to replace The Kid in the bunkhouse turned out to be a crypt keeper, and all of this meant that The Kid had to learn how to handle eight horses, keep the passengers happy (who all wanted to be in LA “yesterday”), handle his Blackberry, go find a birth certificate and get the pressers up-top top stop looking for scandals and start paying attention. That was all right after he found out that the checking account was over-drawn, the coachline’s credit limit was almost tapped out and Uncurious and Dickless had left some diplomatic, financial and foreign relations stink bombs in the back of the coach. (Did I mention that the coach had no brakes, either?)As quickly as everyone had become elated, many became deflated, just like the DOW Jones daily averages, and there was even talk of “let’s shoot the sheriff”. Mel Brooks urged patience: Blazing Saddles do not blaze forever. But the folks on the right started screaming socialistic treason and whining and the folks on the left started screaming for Kid Baracks’ head because he failed to turn water into wine. Eye of Newt was being hailed as the next millenium’s curative, to be possibly coiffed with some Alaskan mousse, and the right rang their Jindal bells but no one came to dinner except a Steele band from Jamaica, Queens. The progressives argued that there was no progress, the far out lefties, who are never satisfied how left anything gets, remained dissatisfied.

That is more or less where we are right now: the idio-ides of March. Just like we want everything else in America, instantaneously and right now and lots of it, with the help of the opportunistic pressers and the practitioners of naivite’, who have wanted to have their cake and eat it too (It doesn’t work that way),we are busily being anxious, schizophrenic children. Sooner or later, the horses will come under control and Kid Barack will learn how to better finesse them. (One or two from SC may need to be shot; they shoot horses’ asses, don’t they?), Rahm the man Emanuel, the team manager will fill out the ball team back at the office, stagecoach sales will pick up eventually and the passengers will realize they are a lot closer, perhaps, to Denver than they thought. They will learn to drink tap water and skip the Evian and the new holy trinity may well be Krugman, Reich and Galbraith. It will take awhile to know if Geithner can play ball if he ever comes out of his ivory clubhouse, and Kid Barack will learn to be a better economist. We will be able to take all of this to the bank…if we have one left.

I am very tired of the American desire for instant gratification, but I am equally tired of empty, childish, right-handed, obstructionist rhetoric. No matter how you mix up the letters from “tax cuts”, it does not spell nirvana. I am also tired of the new Obama team coming late to the party. This “after the horse is out of the barn, let’s close the AIG barn door” is ludicrous. He is the President, for crying out loud. Dickless is gone and Uncurious thumbed a ride to Dallas, where he can do us little harm. We can say anything bad about either of them we like. We paid for that with the full-fare rate we have been paying for the last decade. And maybe, once Kid Barack gets the horses under control, he will stop authorizing the use of the words “clarity” and “transparency”, since they ultimately mean nothing. That alone would make the stagecoach ride less bumpy and more comfortable. And if he will just lock Princess Pelosi up n the tower…

We could use a few good dogfights. It’s time to stop being nice. It’s time to kick some ass instead of kissing it. Obama may realize that he has the reins, but I wonder if he is also knows he is the bouncer at the entry door to this nightclub called “Reality”?