Trumporama

The Contradiction Shows The Cognitive Dissonance

I don't think the Trump Presidency is going to make it to June. Basically, the problem lies in the fact that having won the election on a dodgy kind of technicality, he's trying to push ahead as if he has a mandate when in reality he is one of the last popular incoming Presidents in the history of modern polling. He's hardly in a position to push for any mandate to do radical stuff. If anything he should be treading very delicately so that he can at least get the lay of the land and get used to a presidential routine. He's in the metaphorical big leagues now, so if we extend the baseball metaphor, it's time he put his game face on and started fielding the routine plays, play each ball on its merits and try to make good contact with the bat. Instead he's gotten to first base on a dropped third strike and proceeded to get picked off. It's not looking like he actually belongs.

Despite being the Republican POTUS, his notions of policy direction bears little relationship to the stated Republican values and objective, and as such a growing number of Republicans are deserting the cause of the President.

Overnight, the commentary is looking forward to an impeachment.

Unlike in the various dictatorships Trump admires, the complex skein of constitutional legal and political checks on tyranny in the United States are holding—just barely at times, but they are holding. And the more reckless Trump’s behavior, the stronger become the checks.

Only with his lunatic effort to selectively ban refugees (but not from terrorist-sending countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt where Trump has business interests) has Trump discovered that the American system has courts. It has courts. Imagine that.

The more unhinged he becomes, the less will conservative judges be the toadies to ordinary Republican policies that they too often have been. Anybody want to wager that the Supreme Court will be Trump’s whore?

In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting his view of Putin. They have ridiculed his screwball claim of massive voter fraud.


They are running for cover on how to kill ObamaCare without killing patients or Republican re-election hopes. This is actually complicated, and nuance is not Trump’s strong suit. Rep Tom McClintock of California spoke for many when he warned:

“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, said Rep. Tom McClintock. (R-Calif.)

“That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, mocking Trump’s own nutty tweeting habits, sent out a tweet calling a trade war with Mexico “mucho sad.”

Trump’s own senior staff has had to pull him back from his ludicrous crusade against Mexico and Mexicans, where Trump forces the Mexican president to cancel an official visit one day, and spends an hour on the phone kissing up the next day.

Trump proposed to reinstate torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the Senate’s third ranking Republican said Wednesday that the ban on torture was settled law and the Republicans in Congress would oppose any reinstatement. Trump’s own defense secretary holds the same view. After blustering out his new torture policy, Trump meekly agreed to defer to his defense advisers.

That looks ominous. Trump's presidency in roughly a working week has careened from reckless to loose, swinging wrecking ball as it has failed to fill positions, sacked ambassadors, and enacted directives that have blown up around the world.

Here's a more detailed track of what that list of messes looks like, but more simply, there's this alarming chart:

I do want to point out this bit:

(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies. 

Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.” 

Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.

Finally, somebody is talking about this in the Anglophone Sphere. 

Anyway, the Frankenstein Monster that is the Department of Homeland Security is  finally getting up and around creating the havoc its critics predicted years ago when it was conceived in the wake of 9/11:

Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision. 

That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

Yeah. So logically, the DHS can ignore courts and exercise its prerogatives, and the ramification of that is the Trump administration really is about the Putin-isation of American politics, concentrating power in the executive office.

You can expect that impeachment call to come in before June is through, but it might not be in time before Donald Trump uses the DHS to cut out the Courts, Congress, and the Senate, and then silences the media and academia.  This is looking a lot uglier than people imagined. 

"Oh The Stupidity"

Yeah. Just thought I'd put that there.

Being Where?

Maybe We Need To Talk About The Donald (Some More)

One of the more interesting narratives developing is the notion that Donald Trump isn't all there. It's hard to pick up all the strands of this story because a lot of people are now discussing it in earnest, but the best strand might be Martin Amis' take in Harper's.

Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition “by.” But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s “reluctant” micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every single decision will hugely benefit from his omnicompetence. “By” is tentative, and even the epithet “books” is open to question, because Trump always calls his books his “bestsellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The Art of the Deal (1987) and Crippled America (2015). I suppose a careful study of the intervening bestsellers — among them Surviving at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007) — might have softened the blow. As it is, I can report that in the past thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline.

It's a delightful skewering of a pompous ass. A tremendous read, really, written by a man who knows how to demolish any character worth calling a character, and by Amis' estimation there's really not that much character to demolish.

Harper’s readers will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His written, or dictated, sentences, while grammatically stolid enough, attempt something cannier: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “What I say is what I say” seem relatively rich. At first, you marvel at the people who think it worth saying — that what they say is what they say. But at least an attitude is being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally, this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she is? 

Fascinating. And maybe there’s some legible sedimentary interest in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or maybe not. As well as being “for real,” Trump has “no problem telling it like it is.” To put it slightly differently, “I don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89 he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say exactly what I believe.” “The fact is I give people what they need and deserve to hear . . . and that is The Truth.” See if you can find anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling”:

In Washington, D.C., I’m converting the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four reasons. Number one — we’re really good. Number two — we had a really great plan. Number three — we had a great financial statement. Number four — we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from the beginning. 

That’s the way the country should be run. 

Before we turn to the naked manifestations of advanced paranoia, we had better tick off the ascertainable planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making tree-huggers feel good.” On immigration: he tries to soften the edges, but the nativist battle cry is intact and entire (“Construction of the wall needs to start as soon as possible. And Mexico has to pay for it”). On health care: he would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort it all out. On governmental style: he would restore “a sense of dignity to the White House,” bringing back the old “pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there — big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump quotes that famously controversial line about the necessity of “well regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word paragraph, “Period.”

And there in that bit Amis nails down the cognitive degeneration, very apparent in the texts separated by time. If Donald Trump wasn't all too polished as an intellect way back when, he's since degenerated considerably. He is having trouble slinging sentences together in speeches. Amis, as a professional at reading into text, certainly as any capable novelist is, can parse out the degeneration of cognitive function. 

It's an important idea because we tend towards seeing people in continuity and not as changeable personae. We assume that the people we know and meet maintain a consistent personality and persona over the vast time of a lifetime. I assume my friends are consistent with who they were five years ago, ten years ago, maybe even twenty or thirty. We assume that this consistency applies to people all around me. This is why it so hard for relatives to spot the onset of degenerative cognitive diseases like Alzheimers. 

Now, it turns out somebody in Salon floated the observation that the Donald might not be all there, back in April.

We have become so accustomed to these sorts of ramblings that we don’t really register them as anything more than standard nonsensical Trump-speak—a pattern of speech we have seen crop up across the GOP in recent years, most notably in Palin’s gibberish. But I urge you to re-read the exchange above and register the range of nonsense—the lack of basic grammar, the odd syntax, the abrupt shift in topic, the disconnect from reality, the paranoia, and the seeming inability to even grasp the question. 

As we scratch our heads and wonder how someone who says and does such things can still be a frontrunner, I want to throw out a concern. What if Trump isn’t “crazy” but is actually not well instead? To put it differently: what if his campaign isn’t a sign of a savvy politician channeling Tea Party political rhetoric and reality TV sound bites? What if it’s an example of someone who doesn’t have full command of his faculties? 

We’ve watched both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton come under fire for potentially being unfit medically to run, but have we wondered enough about Trump? There is far more media coverage about Clinton’s health at 68 than Trump’s at 69. 

There could be a good reason why. At times it can be very hard to distinguish between extreme right-wing politics and symptoms of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association tells us that if two of the following core mental functions seem impaired then it is time to seek medical help: Memory, communication and language, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgment, visual perception. Alzheimer’s carries other symptoms besides memory loss including difficulty remembering newly learned information, disorientation, mood and behavior changes; deepening confusion about events, time and place; unfounded suspicions about family, friends and professional caregivers; more serious memory loss and behavior changes. 

Scholars of the recent trends in GOP politics point to some of the very same tendencies happening across the extreme right-wing faction of the party. (See thisand this for example.) 

Much to the chagrin of the reasonable conservatives who wonder what has happened to their party, it is now often difficult to distinguish Republican rhetoric from the ravings of someone suffering from diminished mental capacity.

She has a point. In Donald Trump, we might be having the closest candidate to Chauncey Gardner.

UPDATE:
Wait, there's more! Moments after I put out the post, this one came in:

Trump’s shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind’s ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered. 

But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a “bimbo” and later saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills.” If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.

He's rather unwell. He needs care. Not the president's chair.

'House of Cards' Season 3 - Netflix

What's The Point of Getting Netflix?

Rhetorical. It's to binge watch the amazing 'House of Cards'. Netflix has finally arrived in Australia and you can get a hold of it through Fetch TV, which is just swell because it's like having 2 suppliers on the one box. I guess that's what it is.

So yay Netflix and yay Fetch TV. Spoiler alert! I might spill something.

What's Good About It

Now in its third season, Frank Underwood is the President, and we get to see just what kind of policy maven he actually is. The cut and thrust being a caretaker President makes for good viewing. As with the previous seasons the acting is superb an the directing remains stylistically consistent from episode to episode. The tension mounts ever so slowly, and there's quite a lot of intrigue unfolding before our eyes which makes for much brain-teasing fun.

Francis now has a nemesis in the Russian President Viktor Petrov, a character that is a flimsily-loosely based on Vladimir Putin but is much taller. He also has a domestic rival in Heather Dunbar who is running against him in the 2016 election, and she too presents well. Frank is doing this without Doug who is in a long B-plot of his own through the season. So Frank is doing a lot of stuff, even as his own trusty marriage to Claire begins to fray.

The dramatic tension is always high and the intrigues keep you wondering so they've stuck to the method of the earlier seasons, and it works very well.

What's Bad About It

There are limits to what Frank can do given his method in his rise to power. This gives rise to a lot of wheeling and dealing scenes that are subtle and expository, but it's too much like 'The West Wing' without a plan. Frank wings it a lot, and every time he does, you sort of wince. You hope Barack Obama doesn't just wing it like this. You know George W Bush must have winged it much like this - and his record speaks for itself.

The policies Frank pursues are also bad. They're not picaresque bad, they're just flat out disagreeably awful. I'll go into it a bit later but basically it's not much fun rooting for a bad guy to win if his plan is something that you think is not exactly great. After all it would be hard to root for a film about say, the Nazis in power because you'd inevitably have to discuss the Final Solution and that's just the worst of a government full of bad policies.

It's one thing to root for the bad guy to get to the top through dastardly tricks he winningly shares with the audience. It's another when he then goes off and becomes a President that's worse than Nixon. It was hard rooting for or sympathising with Nixon in Oliver Stone's 'Nixon' film. It's hard to feel much for Frank when he bangs on with crappy policy.

What's Interesting About It

The show seems to be straining at the seams. It wants to tell us so much more and go into politics itself much more but it can't without looking like other shows and films. Frank Underwood then does something drastic and crazy but in most part it comes across as hokey. What we seem to be finding out about Frank in Season 3 is that for all his ambition and gusto and conniving and scheming, the Presidency itself is his endpoint of the Peter Principle. He is good enough to rise to the office but having achieved it, he is not up to it.

In this we can sort of see echoes of 'Richard III' by Shakespeare where they got the device of the bad guy main character addressing the audience. Richard III himself came to power under cloudy circumstances and didn't really reign for long, and was brought down by a rebellion; from which you can draw a certain conclusion that he couldn't have been terribly good at the King-ing business. Frank Underwood does whole lot less of it in this season because... well, he looks awfully busy; too busy even to talk to us.

The end of Season 3 leaves you with a cliff hanger of sorts but having sat through this season, I thought the road ahead isn't terribly long for this show. The UK Version had 3 seasons and finished with Francis Urquhart getting assassinated and turned into some kind of martyr for politics. In the case of Urquhart, the character starts as a conniving conservative and ends up as a kind of full blown fascist so you don't mourn for him so much as feel relieved the whole damn show is over. Frank Underwood starts off as a Southern Democrat so you wonder just how far to the right he can go, and what exactly that means.

The Third Pole

As dumb and stifling as the two party system is and the kind of politics it engenders, from time to time it throws up people who want to start a third pole. Some of these are well-meaning like the Australian Democrats of old or Malcolm Fraser who was trying to put something together in his dying days. But other instances they seem to be Trojan Horses for the Far Right and lunar Right. Like Ross Perot or the Golden Dawn in Greece. The point is, most instances of the third Pole seem to be far right insurrections, posing as centrists sitting between the two parties.

Frank's positioning of his policies are deeply, deeply suspect. He wants to get rid of welfare, raid the coffers for emergency relief and just employ people or pay employers to employ people. it's fanciful as the economics is crackpot. Frank wants 100% employment and there is no discussion of what that would mean. He is also against minimum wages because that would limit the number of people getting jobs. It's like the corporatist heaven where people can be fired at will, and be totally fungible. Naturally people resist the inanity of this vision, but somehow Frank Underwood is totally convinced this is the best policy direction.

The subsequent gyrations involved in craving for this crappy third-pole-fascist policy takes up a lot of screen time and he keeps telling us this is the legacy wants to leave behind. Dismantling the welfare state and replacing it with guaranteed 100% employment: The ultimate small-government fetishists' dream. When you consider such policies essentially drive labour out of its own negotiating table and sends them to the below-poverty-line wages of Walmart, you wonder how this could even be considered by the show runners.

In The Absence Of Marxism

Over the years - thanks to Facebook and such - I've come to realise just how distant Marxist theory is from American political thinking. What's even more interesting is how the US Democrats try to pose as the party of the broader Left without any actual theoretical framework except an old kind of small 'l' liberalism. As such, the US Democrats have rarely taken a policy framework that could alleviate the issues of the working poor which has existed since Reagan came to power.

Watching 'House of Cards' unfold in the US has been far more enlightening as to just how little framing goes into the thinking over policy. It's free, but it's un-moored so it is oblivious of its drift to the right. If nothing else, Marxist theory would give some of these policy makers a kind of sextant to know just how far off the middle they are drifting. But the ingrained fear of a Godless communism has made any consideration of Karl Marx, all but nought. In its place is an absurd kind of identity politics that allegedly starts with the individual, with a bloated sense self-importance typical of identity politics. If this is black rappers from Compton or the LGBTQ population in San Francisco, that's one thing. But white southerners bearing the Confederate flag trying to assert identity politics only serves to show how stupid identity politics is when pursued to the reductio ad absurdum.

Frank Underwood's position is that if everybody had jobs, they would have the freedom to exercise their identity politics to the full. In other words, he himself might not be a racist, but he supports the ideological framework that gives rise to racism in the absence of Marxist analysis. And he's supposed to be from the US Democrats. Honestly, that is so stupid, but he seems totally unaware of where that would all go. The problem right there is that when I watch the show, I'm smarter than the allegedly smart main character; and that makes it pretty boring.  The rest of it becomes a sort of choreographed sequence of political tactics, but his centrepiece policy really is fucked.

He really is like Shakespeare's 'Richard III' - truly deserving of a terrible end.

Cheering For Psychopaths

Frank Underwood is of course a psychopath so the picaresque essentially works on cheering on the psycho, in the same way we did that for 'Dexter', except he's not killing one or two people, he's killing swathes of people from the seat of power as President. Viktor, the re-imagined Putin is equally a psycho who only understands power through the prism of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' but with a further discount on scruples. Frank's wife Claire remains a psychopath as well. Heather Dunbar says all the right things but she has hints of psychopathy as well. After three seasons I'm a little fatigued with the constant cognitive dissonance of cheering or spending time observing these head cases. What used to be edgy is now grating. What used to be intriguing is now blatantly obnoxious.

Maybe this is the point the show is trying to make; that it takes a genuine psycho to rise to the top and get things done, and this is what is really rewarded in democracy. Plato thought so, so it's not a new idea, but you'd think there was something a bit more to go on than psychopathy. At this stage I'm longing and waiting for the moment Frank is assassinated, but I guess Season 4 is going to be about how he wins re-election and goes onto a second term.

It is however interesting in how it exposes the frailties of American political thought. They're a lot more interested in politics than policy.

"You're Entitled To Nothing."

If you thought TonyAbbott and WTE Joe Hockey saying this kind of stuff was going to lead to a more egalitarian society, you were wrong. Tony and WTE Joe proceeded to devise the least fair budget in the short history of Australia. Which gives rise to the notion that people who bang on about entitlements are those who are most motivated to hold on to their own entitlements while stamping out the entitlements of others. This is the basic nature of politics in a zero-sum game, and this rhetoric is true of both sides of politics. When Leftists talk about ending entitlements, they're talking about Private school funding and special tax rates for the rich and franking credits on dividends and so on, without giving up on any of the Left's favourite programs.

Rightists are of course, worse. Nobody seems to think about what Machiavelli wrote in his 'Discourses' but it's worth noting that the baseline clause of good government is stability, the second clause is building the benefits to maximum number of people in its constituency. Taking away benefits and replacing it with nothing isn't good government.

Of course it goes without any surprise that Frank Underwood kicks off his national address with "In this life you are entitled to nothing." It's true in a libertarian sense but a society run on libertarian sense is no society at all. Small Government is a myth concocted by people who think governments are run like corporations. Worse still, the psychopathic end of this crowd think that if you could cut government services altogether and privatise everything, government would be reduced to nothing. The purest of Libertarians would like government stop and simply disappear; the US Republicans seem to want to cut it so there's nothing but the military and the police and a perpetual war on drugs and terror. The Australian Coalition Government wants to cut the government in such a way that all tax dollars collected go to service their class only.
Frank Underwood wants to dismantle welfare and make everybody work for less than poverty wages.

While one isn't entitled to anything in particular, you'd think one's government would be doing better than sending us back to the 18th century. In the real world, this means we really should be sacking this Coalition government in Australia on grounds of lack of competence.

The View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2014

The Politicians We Get Are From Those On Offer

Who would run? Why would you run? Who would back you? These are the kinds of questions that might cross the aspiring politician. I'm not one of them, so I can watch people run and fail with a certain amount of objective distance but ultimately that's hurting me. It hurts me because I'm letting somebody with not the right tools to do the job, and on this blog you'd know for a fact that I'm pretty harsh with politicians. The higher the office, the harder I kick.

Democracy is a funny thing. In America, the most watched kid in high school is not the smartest kid, not the best looking kid, but the most popular kid. Being smart and good looking but not popular (heh, Irony alert!) I always found this American fixation on popularity particularly strange - but it stands to reason.If you're not popular, you can't win election, and only by winning elections can you access power, popularity as a character trait then is the highway to power. So all these people running for office, at least in America would be all these kids who once upon a time were the most popular kids in their year and there's no reason for them to have been the smartest. And so even there America at least gets the politicians it deserves. It explains a lot.

In Australia it is a bit murkier as to what makes a person a good candidate in the eyes of the two great parties or for that matter the lesser parties. The process of preselection in various seats is opaque, and every documented account of how people are chosen is filled with intangible processes and thoughts that defy explanation. My local member - one Craig Laundy of the Liberal Party who looks like a gerbil - must have made some deal with some entity in the party to be the candidate. And so far, he's just okay. Not terrible, not good, not anything in particular - a perfectly fungible replacement level MP. That Jaymes Diaz guy who went from gaffe to gaffe came from the sort of party room machinations that gave us Pauline Hanson a a Liberal or Eddie Obeid as a State ALP candidate. The point being if you asked (and expected) the parties to pick smart people to run, you still get candidates like Diaz, Hanson, Obeid, Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper, and so on.

Given politics i a kind of necessary evil, it is a good thing we're forced to think about it seriously in Australia. In countries where they don't have compulsory voting, the track record for democracy in many places is even worse. As Winston Churchill said, it's the least worst option.

In that light, I want to just bring your attention to this article.

“What you say – always – is that you want to make a difference. You believe your experience qualifies you to serve. These circumlocutions are the etiquette of democracy, the ritual salute … [people] want to hear you say that you are in it for them.”

And how many times have you heard the pledge. To make a difference. To build the economy. To fight for education. And do you ever really believe it? Or do you suspect politicians are in it for themselves, far more than they are for you?

“It’s worth considering,” Ignatieff goes on, “that such dissembling may have its uses. The pretence may begin as a piece of hypocrisy and end up becoming a politician’s second nature. From pretending to serve, you may surprise yourself by actually doing so.” But the biggest challenge is to pull off the confidence trick. "You have to invent yourself for public consumption."

And therein lies the asymmetry. Politicians do not get rewarded for candour or honesty; their first step is to commence from the hypocritical position to tell the audience what it wants to hear. If the audience is dumb and ignorant, these things are going to be a lot worse than you expect. This is exactly how democracy ends up offering the seeming, willing, willful idiots we get on election day. We can talk reform all we like, but unless the electorate smartens up a lot more, we're always going to get the kind of politicians we want to throw off the top of a cliff.

but then, that would be why they're cutting education. They ant to make it a lot harder for the populace to smarten up.

The Looting Says A Lot

I know it's a war zone but the utter lack of respect shown by the East Ukrainian rebels around the MH17 crash site is pretty staggering. It sort of shows the crassness of the people on the ground near the crash site.

I keep getting told by Tomas how awful the Russians were when they occupied Lithuania. The stories are colourful (in a really bad way) and grim. I have discounted the awfulness because they were testimonials from the wronged, because they had reasons to paint them as badly as they could, and Russia under Stalin probably had very few luxuries of thought for people to behave better in occupied territories. Yet, when I see these reports of looting, I can't help but think of those stories and consider the likelihood that these Russians in East Ukraine are not so far away removed from the brutes who occupied East Europe. They are as socially backward as you can imagine. What they're doing out there looting is like something out of history books that tell you about early medieval peasants and serfs under the Tsars. It's disgraceful in this day and age. I'm sorry but it's culturally repugnant and there's no valid excuse for them to be this way.

I really hope we don't end up sending any troops into East Ukraine to fight these people. It really would be a waste of perfectly good ammo.

 

Try Getting Your Head Around This One

$295 billion Bail Out For Citigroup

Not a day goes by without some drastic news. The stock market keeps going down and occasionally perking up in some kind of mad hallucinatory rush that everything might be okay, only to find out it isn't, and plunges further. It's a dog-eat-other-dog-as-sushi kind of world.

The US government is now bailing out Citigroup to the tune of $500b.

The US government has unveiled a bold plan to rescue troubled Citigroup, including taking a stake in the firm as well as guaranteeing $US306 billion ($500 billion) in risky assets.

The banking giant will also get a $US20 billion cash infusion from the Treasury Department, adding to the $US25 billion the bank received last month under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

In return for the cash and guarantees, the government will get $US27 billion ($43 billion) of preferred shares paying an 8% dividend. That is higher than the 5% the government charges dozens of other lenders under its $US700 billion financial industry rescue package.

The action, announced jointly by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, is aimed at shoring up a huge financial institution whose collapse would wreak havoc on the already crippled financial system and the US economy.

The sweeping plan is geared to stemming a crisis of confidence in the company, whose stock has been hammered in the past week on worries about its financial health.

"With these transactions, the US government is taking the actions necessary to strengthen the financial system and protect US taxpayers and the US economy,'' the three agencies said in a statement issued today.

The decision came after Citigroup's tumbling share price sparked concern that nervous depositors might pull their money and destabilise the company, which has $US2 trillion of assets and operations in more than 100 countries.

"It really was a must-do thing,'' said Nader Naeimi, a strategist at AMP Capital Investors. "If they'd let Citigroup go, that would've been disastrous.''

Citigroup agreed to absorb the first $US29 billion of losses on the $US306 billion portfolio, plus 10% of additional losses, for a maximum total exposure of $US56.7 billion.

The Treasury Department could end up absorbing $US5 billion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp $US10 billion, and the Federal Reserve the rest.

Talk about a house of cards! After all the bickering over 700billion, they're simply throwing 500billion at this problem. Now, here's something else to ponder in all this mess:

Naomi Klein Cries Foul

Naomi Klein's one of those thinkers that seem to come out of the far left. I liked her stance when she was doing 'No Brands' as a movement, but as that movement blossomed into a global network of activists that seemed to picket the World Bank and IMF meetings, I kind of lost interest.That's just me, and not her message's fault or her fault. I'm just a little JP Sartre in those moments as I've discovered.


Here she is, saying the way Washington is handling the actual bail out is borderline criminal.

In a moment of high panic in late September, the US Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed--a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."

Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending--for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc.--is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.

I definitely agree with all that. If you found all that interesting, then here's more.

Naomi Klein: Well, there's a few elements now that are being described as illegal that we're finding out. First of all, the equity deals that were negotiated with the largest banks and also some smaller banks, representing $250 billion worth of the bailout money, this is the deal to inject capital into the banks in exchange for equity. The idea was to address the so-called credit crunch to get banks lending again. The legislation that enabled this was quite explicit that it had to encourage lending. Barney Frank, who was one of the architects of that legislation, has said that it violates the act if the money is not going to that purpose and is instead going to bonuses, is instead going to dividends, going to salaries, going to mergers. He said that violates the acts, i.e. it's illegal. But what we know is that it's going precisely to those purposes. It is going to bonuses. It is going to shareholders. And it is not going to lending. The banks have been quite explicit about this. Citibank has talked about using the money to buy other banks.

Then there's other aspects of this that are borderline illegal. We found out that in the midst of the crisis, the Bush Treasury Department pushed through a tax windfall for the banks, a piece of legislation that allows the banks to save a huge amount of money when they merge with each other. And the estimate is that this represents a loss of $140 billion worth of tax revenue for the US government. Many tax attorneys who were interviewed by the Washington Post said that they felt that the way in which the Treasury Department went about this by unilaterally changing the tax code was illegal, that this had to include Congress. Congress only found out about it after the fact.

There's another piece of this puzzle that is also borderline illegal, which is that in addition to the $700 billion that we are discussing, the $700 billion bailout, there's another $2 trillion that's been handed out by the Federal Reserve in emergency loans to financial institutions, to banks, that actually we don't really know who they're handing the money out to, because, apparently, it's a secret. They could be handing it out to a range of other corporations -- I think they are -- but they're saying that they won't disclose who has received these taxpayer loans, because it could cause a run on the banks, it could cause the market to lose confidence in the institutions that have taken these loans. Once again, that represents an additional $2 trillion.

If that doesn't make your blood boil, I don't know what will. These people are losing your net worth to the four winds as they pocket tax dollars as bonuses and service fees. It's insane. Add on top of it the $295.2billion to bail out Citigroup, and the money used to bail out AIG twice, you get the feeling this is all just one big con... but of course, nobody's talking about it too loud.

A Cool Link You Should Bookmark

This one came in the email today. It's a pretty cool blog. I found this link through their blog.

The G-20 came to Washington for the weekend and sucked all the air out of the city before announcing that they were really serious about patching all the leaks in the foundering ship of globalism. Well, they have to at least pretend that they are doing something. Meanwhile, the former bit player known as reality has taken center stage in the ship's main lounge. It is putting on an act even gnarlier than the Kit Kat Klub show in Cabaret.

This reality show is sending some clear signals to the denizens of the real and really crowded world. The main signal is that the trade and financing rackets of recent decades are over. The extravaganza of economic hypergrowth based on cheap resources is over. The promiscuous swapping around of risk and rewards is over. There is no global institutional framework for managing the impairment left in the wake of this binge. It will be up to the individual nations now to figure out their national lives and livings.

Alas, the financial impairment is still on-going world-wide and has quite a ways to run before it's finished working its hoodoo on the so-called advanced economies. The lame duck US economic posse so far has done everything possible except the two things that really matter: allow the fraudulent securities at the heart of the problem to be exposed to the light of day to determine their actual value; and allow those companies who trafficked in them to suffer the full consequences by going out-of-business. For the moment, they're content to shovel cash into the truck-bed of every enterprise in America that shows up at the Treasury loading dock. This can only have the effect of eventually destroying the value of that cash.

Aiyah. The rest of it's pretty intense too, and his message echoes Peter Schiff who I pointed to a several days ago. While he indicates the US economy and its citizens is about to head for a totally different kind fo economic landscape as a result of this crisis, one gets the feeling that nobody can quite imagine how destrictive and transformative this change is going to be. The unravelling of decades-long assumptions and baselines is going to adversely affect everybody across the globe. It's sobering and depressing, not that I was drunk on credit or happy to be in hock before.

Obama Wins

Just How Bad Were The Bush Years?

If you'd told me back in 2000 after Al Gore had his Presidency stolen away, that the 2008 Democratic Candidate who would displace the Republicans from the White House was going to be a black man, I probably would have laughed. Most people would have. Well, Obama won.

In a historic victory over Republican candidate Senator John McCain, the President-elect told a sea of supporters in a Chicago park.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where any things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive ... who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer," he said.

Senator Obama told the crowd that his victory belongs "to you", and the voters who turned out did so because they believed this time "must be different and their voices could be that difference".

He said America was not a collection of individuals, but "we are and always will be the United States of America".

He said it was "a long time coming" but "because of what we did on this day" during this election, "change has come to America".

Listing the challenges ahead, including two wars and a financial crisis, Senator Obama said that he was hopeful for America.

"There will be set backs and false starts," he said.

"I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face ... "

Senator Obama congratulated Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin for all they had achieved and looked forward to working with them.

He said Senator McCain had "endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine".

So much for the Bradley effect. People really did want change. That vibe was in the air from the moment he got past Hillary to win the nomination. Here's the thing: I ended up rooting for the guy, not because of him, or because of the other guy, but because of history. And when you think about it the first Black POTUS coming to power in our lifetime is historic and worthy of telling your grand-children one day that we were there to see it.

Of course if you're one of those people rootin' for the other side, you're probably thinking, "Fuck, how did that happen?"

It happened like this: George W Bush's Presidency was so-o-o-o bad, that America was willing to vote in a relative newcomer, a relatively inexperienced executive, and a black man to boot, rather than return the GOP to power. That is to say, America said that a young black man with relatively less experience than his white counterpart, had to be a better choice than the guy who was going to follow in GWBs footsteps - And that simply blows me away. GWB was so bad, that...

...Ahh, fuggedaboutit.
The point is, change has come at last. It's been a long time coming.

Media Bias?

Complaints By The Media, Of The Media, For The Media

There's always this complaint that there's this thing called 'media bias' and that this bias is always to the left. Fox News often claims it is more balanced because they invite commentators from both sides of the Left-Right divide even the though the host is a frothing-at-the-mouth fascist. It's all self-serving rhetoric that passes for commentary from Fox News, but that's its alleged justification for spreading its noxious disinformation as news. If any media is biased, it's Fox News.

For years, our national carrier the ABC has been under pressure from the Liberal and National parties for its alleged media bias. Successive boards and chiefs have been appointed with a view to changing this alleged mysterious bias, and most of these boards and chiefs fail to accomplish anything of value mostly because the bias is a figment of the Right's imagination. The ABC is not a hotbed of Communists, Trotskists and Marxists. It's a hotbed of frustrated filmmakers.

Part of what escapes the understanding of the conservative thinkers is that the very notion of critical thought made giant strides out of Karl Marx and Engels in the 19th century as they dissected the nature of Absolute Monarchies as Czarist Russia and ancien regime kingdoms such as the Kaiser-led Germany and the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even in the 20th Century it was the Marxism-inflected Semiotic School that made the greatest in-roads into dissecting the expanding area of mass media. Conservatives in most parts are flag-waving monarchists in any country.

The upshot of all this is that just about every media production course is inflected (or infected, if you like) by a Marxist analysis method in discussing images, sound, meaning and so on. This has led to a situation where most people working in the media who are literate are somewhat left-leaning in their outlook because their critical framework is founded in Marxist thinking. Is this good? I don't know. I'm pretty sure I suffer from it as much as the next person who studied media and communication in my generation. It's a bit of a drag, because I don't necessarily want to be led by my brain to the Left - indeed, it's hard work staying in the middle because the Left always comes armed with words, while the Right always come armed with... arms, it seems.

It is in the very absence of the viable, contemporary 'conservative' frame work by which to analyse texts, events, people that leaves the conservative voice left out of these discourses - and let's face it, even the notion of a discourse comes out of heavily Marxist French contemporary philosophy. What chance has the Right really got if it has lost the ability to argue from Hobbs and Hume, while the boffins of the Left keep coming up with new-fangled ways to deconstruct (there's another beautiful Marxist-inflected term) phenomena. Simply put, the Right side of politics is lacking in any kind of vocabulary that can viably and ably present a critique. Marshall McLuhan's work is nice, but it can't withstand the volume of words invested in the French-Philosophy-derived critical discourses.

You sort of have to go back to Immanuel Kant to start a critique without Marx, but for the two facts:
1) Kant's critique of Pure Reason is a heck of difficult book to digest for the average Right wing hack.
2) It's not necessarily going to lead to the sort of conclusions the contemporary right is going to like, any more than the contemporary French philosophy.
In other words, Kant, can't cut it. Not alone, anyway.

In that light, I want to link to this article by Gerard Henderson in the Herald today.

I've lost count of the number of ABC journalists, based in or visiting the United States, who are covering the presidential election. But the number does not really matter since they all seem to be saying much the same thing.

With a few exceptions, Australian commentators are following their American counterparts - they are barracking for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party ticket. It is difficult to recall any other election in a democratic society where the media has been so obviously supporting one side in a two-sided contest.

It is not so much a case of conscious bias as the prevalence of fashion. The US President, George Bush, the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Administration in Washington DC are very unpopular, especially among journalists and commentators.

John McCain has been afflicted by the fact that he is the Republican candidate during the time of an international financial crisis and when the US is involved in an unpopular military commitment in Iraq. More importantly, Senator Obama is a young and charismatic son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, who is promising change, renewal and all that.

Gerard Henderson thinks what his side is up against is 'fashion'. That it is fashionable to adopt Barack Obama as the candidate of choice when there is a man who appeals much more to Gerard in John McCain, and that is why the media is lauding him. I have to say this is a woefully inadequate analysis of the media for the reasons I mentioned above, but we'll go along with it for the moment.

The overwhelming majority of opinion polls suggest a comfortable win for the Obama/Joe Biden ticket. Even so, some pollsters give the Democrats a relatively modest lead of about 5 per cent with a large number of undecided voters. What's missing in much of the reporting is an examination of why the Democratic ticket is not further ahead and what an Obama administration would mean for the US and the rest of the world.

It seems that Obama's inability, so far at least, to win a huge vote turns on the fact that he is the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) candidate to run for president in decades.

This is reflected in his voting record in the US Senate and his past associations with individuals and organisations on the radical left. The list includes the Chicago clergyman the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the self-confessed one-time urban terrorist William Ayers of Weather Underground infamy, and former Palestine Liberation Organisation spokesman Rashid Khalidi.

He sounds like a man who hates conceding defeat but must because the reality is against him; and so he is laying a curse on the reality by blaming media bias. It's understandable. Back in 1996-2000, I found it really hard to stomach the great lurch to the right that saw John Howard get entrenched and George W. Bush come to power, and the 7 years that followed were just painful. And I'm only casually a leftie - a chardonnay socialist who can't stand much chardonnay - I try to stay dead bang in the middle as advocated by the song 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and even then the rise of the right in the last decade had me reaching for my vomit bag. So I imagine Gerard Henderson to be understandably reaching for his vomit bag as the Socialist cause makes a big comeback. It happens to all of us Gerard - dude, your horse is not a bad horse, but it's just getting beaten by a better one. Get over it.

However, if the Right actually had a contemporary philosophical foundation for mounting proper critiques, their jobs at convincing the public against the perceived bias might not be so difficult. That is to say, if the Right were actually a little more intellectually competent and rigorous, instead of stooping to the lows of Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair and Miranda Devine, it might be able to better shape tomorrow without reverting to paternalistic fascist arguments that rightfully (pun intended) garner it such scorn and ridicule.
Go back to Hobbs and Hume, and bring it up to date. Siding with the religious nuts is not going to win the middle where I sit.

On The Eve Of The US Elections

Just Before Obama Makes History
All my life, it seemed impossible that a black man (and by extension any coloured person) would or could become POTUS. We'd seen Morgan Freeman play a very dignified POTUS in 'Deep Impact', but it just seemed like one of those fanciful Hollywood notions - a bit like Geena Davis playing one or the amazing career portrayed by Martin Sheen in the 'West Wing' series where a pretty wonderful Democratic parallel universe unfolded. All of this was a stark reminder at just how awful a choice had been made in having George W Bush as POTUS.

It's interesting how fast, how far-reaching his candidacy has been in readdressing the countless wrongs that have been done. There is a chance that this is the beginning of something great, like a renewal of the American dream, the great promise that was once there in the Constitution. It just might be a black man who leads America out of its current mess and leads it to a place where it can lead the world with true authority. We'll see. The expectations have never been this high.

This is going to be good.

Saying Bye To Bush
I nearly wrote 'elected' George W. Bush, but in fact I have to say he had the election jury-rigged to steal it from the man who would have made a much better POTUS than himself. The tragedy is somehow Amrica allowed itself a POTUS so committed to abstract notions that he was willing to appoint incompetents based on their beliefs about Abortion and 'Roe versus Wade'. After 8 years of the country being run into the ground, both fiscally and financially as well as international prestige and reputation-wise, it seems appropriate to celebrate the coming end of his sad Presidency.

This is a Presidency that saw (just to name only the MAJOR disasters):
9/11.
The War in Afghanistan
The War in Iraq
The military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay
The Sub-prime loans crisis
The Complete meltdown of the financial markets that led to the bail out - with his treasury secretary begging his own party on bended knee in Congress

I'm sure there are going to be any number of right wing commentators who are going to try and salvage the legacy of this Bush Administration, but the facts are, he ruined America. It is fitting tat just as the last days of GW Bush are about to come to pass, Oliver Stone is coming out with his movie 'W'. I hope he puts the boot in hard.

Watch Out For The Grassy Knoll
Speaking of Oliver Stone, he of 'JFK', of all the things that haunt us all is the 'Military-Industrial Complex'. I always recommend people read this book 'Voltaire's Bastards' which explains just why there is such a conglomeration of interests. It essentially comes down to the fact that the US Government never completely wound down its war-footing after WWII, and as such there were a plethora of firms that kept wanting government contracts to make arms.

That is to say, there's a whole bunch of companies that only make weapons, and weapons for the US government at that - and they form a dirty big part of the US economy.

Years ago, Japanese aviation engineers from Mitsubishi went across to the USA to find out just what resources could be used to build the FSX fighter jet based on the F-16. To their amazement, they found that these companies made parts that were never tested in volume, and were never placed in general domestic civilian use. This surprised the Mitsubishi engineers because even though Mitsubishi make weapons for the Japanese Self Defense Services, they also make vast consumer products from pencils to automobiles.

And yet, here were whole cities in Arizona and Colorado that specialised in making things that were just for weapons, never to see light as commercial parts. The funny thing is, these communities always want small governments, less taxation, but more government spending on arms because that's the only way their economies function. An elaborate kind of corporate welfare for a whole sector of the economy. This is who the Military-Industry Complex are, and this is why they keep harping on about the right to bear arms and the threat of socialism. They're the people who Oliver Stone thinks detested JFK so much because he was going to deny them a war, that they organised the assassination.

Guess who they're voting for, and why there might be gunmen on some grassy knoll waiting for the Barack Obama motorcade.
It's not about race, it's about their collective hip pockets.

Presidential Debate - McCain v Obama

Actually Seeing These Candidates

I've only seen Barack Obama in small clips, so the recent round three was my first opportunity to actually watch him in action as well as a straight comparison with his opposite number John McCain. To be honest I think Obama's native intelligence has been understated by the press - it was abundantly clear that he's a much, much smarter cookie than I'd been led to believe - while the press has overstated the policy agenda of John McCain's campaign. McCain looked like a insubstantial retard next to Obama.

Throughout the debate it seemed pretty obvious that McCain's mantra was still the Republican chestnut of smaller government and tax cuts and rebate to the rich sort of stuff at best, which is disappointing because it shows he has very little awareness that that line of reasoning led to the current financial crisis. If anything was obvious as daylight was the fact that if one voted for a McCain presidency, it really was going to be more of the same, in spite of his insistence that he's not George W. Bush.

Obama has been criticised for some time now as having very little policy specifics, just blankly offering change without a concrete policy platform. This characterisation was simply wrong. The man is full of concrete plans that he can't say enough about without the moderator cutting him off in mid-flight. If the debate was anything to go by, Obama seems to have more of a plan than McCain.

McCain spent his equivalent time essentially attacking Obama for being liberal, or for having friends who used to be radicals or having voted for a Pro-Choice bill while being a Illinois state politician. I have to say this was a boring tactic by McCain. Frankly, I'm not interested in 'Roe versus Wade' as a issue at all or whether a judge would overturn it or not. While McCain railed against the ideological framework for picking judges, he sure was happy to roll in the ideological claptrap of abortion as an issue.

It's a non-issue. The only reason it can be made into something that resembles an issue is because there are enough stupid people who insist that it should be an issue. Bottom line, I don't really care if some trailer-park trash teenage girl gets impregnated by some trailer-trash boy, and is wondering if she should have the right to terminate the pregnancy or not. It's just not a pressing issue on my horizon. I'm sorry if it sounds callous, but it's just not an issue.
The pressing issues for the USA is going to be how it gets through the current economic mess caused by the lack of oversight that was sanctioned by the current Bush administration; the two wars being left as the legacy of this same Bush administration, and how to actually take a step towards a greener energy-economy which hs been resisted by the Bush administration.

It is clear that John McCain is coming too late in history. The part of history where the very arguments that McCain was trying to mount held any weight, was consigned to the dustbin 12months ago when the credit crunch came in to dismantle the extensive debt structures America and the rest of the first world had built up. This is no time to be insisting on small government and more tax cuts for the rich. In that sense the debate illustrated just how out of touch, out-moded and out of luck McCain was as a candidate. It's simply not going to matter what he says. The time for his kind of politics has passed.

The Idiots In Middle America
It's sad but true that one of the most anti-intellectual things going around is Hollywood tailoring its product so idiots in Middle America can 'get it'.

There's something about the Presidential debate that is operating on the same level. As I noted before, the metaphorical 800lb gorilla in the room is the financial crisis which is going to turn into the looming recession. Yet, the debate's format itself wants to tackle such moronic issues appointment of judges who might overturn 'Roe versus Wade' or the effect of negative campaigning or whether the oil import proportions can be cut, or whether the education voucher model in Washington DC could be mounted Federally. I don't think too many people would have been wiser about just how much the candidates are actually trying to have a plan that deals with the metaphorical 'gorilla in the room'.

I saw the dissection on Fox afterwards and the pundits were happy to talk about negative campaigns and the abortion issue, with the woman from Fortune Magazine trying to characterise Obama as a 'liberal' and therefore something bad. They went to a bunch of scruffy looking swinging voters who then said a bunch of incredibly idiotic things like "I'm voting for a President, not a debater." Dude, stay at home if you're not interested in the debate! Don't waste our time with how inadequate your mind is in digesting what just took place.

Another nork sumgly said "I think what Obama' saying is right, but I still won't vote for him."
That's not a swinging voter, Fox television! That's a racist prick who has no rational argument but simply can't abide a black man.
I don't know why I get irritated by this, because it's Fox. But it is so stupid. You sort of wonder if people really are going to take pointers from that moronic cast of imbeciles.

They say a country elects a government it deserves - and perhaps 8 years of George W. Bush cements all the negative connotations of that expression. Nothing depressed me more than just how dumbed down the actual coverage was, in the light of the actual debate.

The Obama-Hate

Which End Is The Rough End Of A Pineapple?

I'm not a socialist in any real sense. I'm actually a free market capitalist. An ideal economic outcome for me is that over a million people click on those links to the right on this page and go purchase my recordings, thank-you-very-much. (and I might add, you really must!)
I'm really not all that Bolshy in the sense that I don't really care what the rich own - the means of production or even a Ferrari for show. I do care about what they do to people who aren't rich, but I'm really not into more taxation or dirty big strikes to bring down industry.

So back in my Uni days when people used to shout socialist slogans, or God-forbid Trotskist theory, I'd shrug and say, "that world doesn't include the possibility that I own a Fender Stratocaster."
The answer I got was " no, we believe it should be a world where everybody has a Fender Stratocaster."
Well, not everybody wants one. Some people want Gibsons. :)

There are US articles are popping up now about the rallies held by the McCain-Palin camp which are pandering to a lot of anger. CNN had this article.

"When you have an Obama, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there going to run this country, we have got to have our head examined. It's time that you two are representing us, and we are mad. So, go get them," one man told Sen. John McCain at a town hall meeting in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

It's almost a cry for help, with the GOP party faithful amazed McCain could possibly be losing.

"And we're all wondering why that Obama is where he's at, how he got here. I mean, everybody in this room is stunned that we're in this position," another man said at a rally.

"I'm mad. I'm really mad. And what's going to surprise you, it's not the economy. It's the socialists taking over our country," another man said.

That's pretty scary. The point of my preamble about my non-Bolshy-ness is this: There's hardly a single candidate in my lifetime that has run for POTUS that I could classify as anywhere near socialist. The only exception I would make is Hillary Clinton's role as First Lady in the first Clinton administration where she tried to introduce universal healthcare - much like our own Medicare - and failed. That's it. The rest of the bastards from Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dole, Dukakis, Mondale, Bush I and Bush II, Reagan, Carter, and Ford did not have anything resembling what might be called a 'social conscience' necesary to be labled a socialist.

Neither has Barrak Obama said anything that makes me think that he is anything like those people I've encountered who are real socialists. He is passionate about politics, but there's nothing that makes me think he's a committed socialist. He has nothing in common with the people I used to see peddling the socialist rags on the corner of George and Park streets in the city. Nothing wrong with that, but he just ain't no socialist.

The other thing is this: if it should so happen that the United States went full-on-Socialist for 4 years, they might actually be surprised at how some things improve in that country - namely their abysmal healthcare. Instead there are fat white idiots angry at the possibility that Obama is riding into the Whitehouse with ex-terrorist friends and a socialist agenda. Give me a break.

What's truly pathetic is that the poor whites want to vote Republican because the candidate in their corner is coloured, in spite of the fact that the Republicans have diligently created the conditions of their enduring poverty in the last 8 years. They trust McCain more because he's white? That's it? What do you do with such people who want to cut off their dicks to spite their balls? And McCain and Palin are pitching their sad little 'anti-socialist' rhetoric at these people as if America really was under some threat from the brigade of nuts who sing 'Internationale'.

I'm not saying Obama is the best candidate out there, or that his candidacy is significantly better than that of McCain. It's just that the election is being fought on nothing to do with real issues and a whole lot of paranoia about socialist ghosts that are simply not there.
It's pathetic.

UPDATE:
Here's something from Saturday Night Live. Watch out for Bill Murray's profound question. :)

Financial Crisis As Strategy

Pleiades Mailbag

Here's something from the ever-trusty Pleiades mailbag.

...every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the titans of Wall Street—most especially until 1929, the House of JP Morgan—have deliberately triggered bank panics behind the scenes in order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used the panics to control Washington policy including the exact definition of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to consolidate their control over industry such as US Steel, Caterpillar, Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such financial warfare to increase their power.

Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century.

That process of using panics to centralize their private power created an extremely powerful, concentration of financial and economic power in a few private hands, the same hands which created the influential US foreign policy think-tank, the New York Council on Foreign Relations in 1919 to guide the ascent of the American Century, as Time founder Henry Luce called it in a pivotal 1941 essay.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that people like Henry Paulson, who by the way was one of the most aggressive practitioners of the ABS revolution on Wall Street before becoming Treasury Secretary, are operating on motives beyond their over-proportional sense of greed. Paulson’s own background is interesting in that context. Back in the early 1970’s Paulson started his career working for a rather notorious man named John Erlichman, Nixon’s ruthless adviser who created the Plumbers’ Unit during the Watergate era to silence opponents of the President, and was left by Nixon to ‘twist in the wind’ for it in prison.

Paulson seems to have learned from his White House mentor. As co-chairman of Goldman Sachs according to a New York Times account, in 1998 he forced out his co-chairman, Jon Corzine ‘in what amounted to a coup’ according to the Times.

Paulson, and his friends at Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had a strategy it is becoming clear, as did the Godfather of Asset Backed Securitization and deregulated banking, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as I have detailed in my earlier series here, Financial Tsunami, Parts I-V.

Knowing that at a certain juncture the pyramid of trillions of dollars of dubious sub-prime and other high risk home mortgage-based securities would come falling down, they apparently determined to spread the so-called ‘toxic waste’ ABS securities as globally as possible, in order to seduce the big global banks of the world, most especially of the EU, into their honey trap.

So yes, the rest goes on to argue that the current panic is part of a greater design in a strategy designed to help American Financial power grow. It might be true; but it also might be that this whole thing is just another house of cards coming down.

Too Much At A Loss
Here's another link sent in from pleiades about how there weren't enough digits on a clock in NYC.

NEW YORK - In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the growing figure.

As a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been switched to a figure - the "1" in US$10 trillion ($16.5 trillion). It's marking the US federal government's current debt at about US$10.2 trillion.

The Durst Organization says it plans to update the sign next year by adding two digits. That will make it capable of tracking debt up to a quadrillion dollars.

That's a lot of dough.

No More Political Discussions At iCompositions

recently, there was a thaw in the iComp stance on politics, wherein they let a free debate on politics take place on 2 threads in the forum; both of which wen upward of 30+ pages of comments. Unfortunately some of the participants were less than ethical and started to drag the debate down into the gutter. As a result the site has gone back to its original 'no political discussions' dogma.

It's quite unfortunate in that the discussions in good parts were interesting. It's sad that the forum canot be a true forum as long as there are hecklers and wowsers and idiots taking it hostage every few comments.

It's never a good day when freedom of speech is thwarted, but if there are idiots who cannot discern that freedom of speech is not freedom to vilify, then it is eminently understandable. Sometimes it is time to abandon principles and do what's right.

News That's Fit To Punt

Bail Out Happens

In the end the House voted on the bailout.

The bipartisan legislation reversed the House rejection earlier this week that sent global stock markets plunging. The measure authorizes the government to buy troubled assets from financial institutions reeling from record home foreclosures. The bill contains $US149 billion in tax breaks and affirms regulators' power to suspend asset-valuing rules that companies blame for fueling the crisis.

``These steps represent decisive action to ease the credit crunch that is now threatening our economy,'' Bush said at the White House.

The House approved the measure 263-171, four days after rejecting an earlier version. The bill's defeat on Sept. 29 caused a 778-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, prompting dozens of lawmakers to switch their vote on the legislation, the government's largest intervention in the markets since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

``The issue is stopping the panic,'' said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. ``The plan's not perfect, but it's certainly better than doing nothing. Now Treasury has to be very aggressive about purchasing a wide range of assets very quickly.''

There are many discussions as to whether it is a bail out or a rescue package or good money after bad, but the bottom line is that without shoring up the US banks, the global role of the US economy is going to be greatly hampered.

Perhaps The American Century Is Coming To An End
Here's a great article in the SMH. I'm surprised there are still great reads in the Herald some times.

In Washington, George Bush and his top economic officer had spent hours in the White House persuading and cajoling the congressional leaders of both American political parties to endorse his rescue plan. With the burning smell of some of the biggest financial institutions in the world still fresh in their nostrils as their ruins smouldered in New York, Bush grew increasingly frustrated.

"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down," he said of the US economy, marshalling the inimitable eloquence of the President who has given rise to a minor industry of books and wall calendars featuring the manglings known as Bushisms. All efforts failed.

"In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury Secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr, literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to blow it up by withdrawing her party's support for the package," The New York Times reported.

Pelosi leads the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Bush and Paulson are Republicans. Pelosi jibed: "I didn't know you were Catholic." And then, on the business at hand: "It's not me blowing this up; it's the Republicans." It was Bush's own party blocking the plan. Paulson reportedly sighed, "I know, I know."

It was on the same day, September 25, that China launched the Shenzhou 7 space mission, sending aloft three astronauts or, as the Chinese call them, taikonauts. Two days later, Colonel Zhai floated out of his module and "walked" in space for 20 minutes.

Zhai radioed back to his President and the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Jintao: "The space-walk mission has been accomplished smoothly. Please set your mind at ease, Chairman Hu and the people of China. In the vastness of space, I felt proud of our motherland."

Hours after the Chinese module returned to Earth safely, the US House of Representatives rejected the Bush Administration's rescue plan to allow the Treasury to buy distressed debt so that US credit markets could start to function again. US stocks fell by 7 per cent and more than $US1 trillion in value was destroyed as investors despaired. It was one of the biggest one-day falls on Wall Street.

There's more in this thought provoking article.
The 'Coelacanth 2' album's working theme has been about The American Century, so I take great interest in discussions on this point.I have hard predictions of an end to the US hegemony and the end of the American Empire, but I am always wary of such claims. Unless the barbarians at the gate end up parading down Pennsylvania Ave with a noose around the captured POTUS's head, I don't think it's a likely 'scenario'. This is just a temporary dip in its power, mostly thanks to the ineptness of its current leadership.

That's not to say these damages by the current incumbent idiots cannot be undone.

A Note About Oil

Because the Financial Review does not have a free-to-public online edition available, I cannot reproduce the text here. Clever people, those Fin Review folks. Anyway, in it was an article last week about the crude oil market which drew my attention. OPEC has been tightening quotas in order to drive up oil prices because naturally, per unit sales helps their economies more and they know the world is hooked on to it. Iran in particularly loves it when the oil price goes up and the price rise puts a hurt on the US consumer.

What is not widely reported is that Saudi Arabia often over-produces its quota and then sells off the excess production to oil companies in order to lower the crude price.
The reason given for this was that if the world consumer moves away from their SUV to a hybrid car, them they are not coming back to the SUV market - in other words, Saudi Arabia does not want you to be weaned off its chief export. It made me laugh.
After my accident, I think I want to wean myself off cars entirely.

Damien Hirst's Big Haul

He's like some chubby rock star, really. Yet his works are worth millions.

What could be dumber than Hirst's dot paintings, painted by assistants with stencils? Or ashtrays of all sizes filled with used butts? Such pieces were sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds in last week's auction. The piece-de-resistance was his Golden Calf - a dead bull with gilded hooves and horns in a gold-rimmed tank of formaldehyde. Nothing could serve as a more pointed "up yours" to wealthy, eager buyers. It was a descendent of the effigy erected by the Israelites while Moses was conversing with his Maker on top of the mountain.

Hirst may be saying that money, or perhaps the stockmarket, is the false god of our times. Just as easily, he might be talking about himself. "Here I am," he says. "Come and worship!"

This sort of grandiose cynicism is greeted with admiration in art circles - "Ho, ho, Damien is really giving it to those rich capitalist bastards." In this scenario, Hirst becomes ever more subversive as his personal wealth increases. By this standard he must be the most subversive artist that has lived, since he is now said to be worth more than $US1 billion and employs almost 200 people in a chain of specialised art-making workshops.

Money exerts a narcotic influence on seemingly rational minds and Hirst has made the accumulation of capital his central artistic concern. In this, he has perfectly captured the temper of our times, in which cultural achievement is measured by the mass media in dollar terms. So it is hardly surprising to read in a wire service article reprinted in many papers around the world (including this one) that last year "Hirst sold a platinum skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds for £50 million, which is thought to be the world's most expensive piece of contemporary art".

In fact, as reported in The Art Newspaper and other sources, the skull was actually "sold" to a group that included Hirst, his dealer and his business manager. His record-breaking achievement must be tempered by the knowledge that Hirst was both creator and purchaser.

The auction represents an even greater triumph of publicity over probity, because we have no way of knowing who was buying all those works via the telephone. Even if the artist was not personally involved, there were enough dealers and high-end collectors who simply could not afford to see the auction fail and the value of their own investments plummet. The idea that this event represented a "gamble" on Hirst's part was sheer spin. This was one auction that never stood a chance of failure.

It's a bit mind-boggling where Contemporary Art has got to right now. The diamond encrusted skull is a little bit too 'Elton John' in its aesthetic, but what the heck. It's still a Diamond encrusted skull! Literally, it is what it is in a way that defies critical dissection.
This following bit caught my attention:

One gets the measure of Greer's shallow nihilism when she writes: "What is touching about Hughes's despair is that he thinks that artists still make things." Call me naive and sentimental but I believe that's almost the definition of an artist: someone who makes things. Those who employ hundreds of people to make saleable commodities are perhaps better known as "manufacturers".

Few people embrace poverty but for most artists the pleasure of making things exceeds the pleasure of making money. If it were the other way around, everyone would tailor his or her work to the most obvious commercial imperatives. Yet some artists, driven by their own wilfulness or creative compulsions, will persist with works nobody wants to buy for most of their careers

I think the art work is actually an artefact of the artistic moment. The legacy of the inspiration. The physical evidence of the Edisonian notion - the artwork itself represents the 99% of perspiration part, but signifies the 1% of genuine inspiration. This has been my personal theory for about 10 years but every time I bring it up with artists they treat me like I've gone insane or have no insight whatsoever into why they do what they do. Don't listen to me guys, but I am somebody who has translated 2 books on Contemporary Art, so I do think I have a clue.

Nonetheless, when you think about it, when you buy the finished album by say, your favorite band, you're really buying something that represents the culmination of the labor which points to the inspiration - what's this song about? - and not the artistic moment itself. It's certainly true of my songs, good and bad, that the final recorded version is merely the reflection of the moment I went "ah ha! There's a cool idea!"

All the pricing issue is a matter of how much people value the labor or materials. Sometimes a work of art is worth less than its materials - much like the copper statue that was stolen and smelted for export to China. Damien Hirst is doing alright.

Side Orders On The Second Bail Out Plan

Pleiades Mailbag

Here are some interesting links from our man in the info-sourcing business.

This one talks about the pork barreling to get the Bill through; in other words, little riders to help the House members go home to their electorates with something to show.

Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion financial-markets rescue that passed tonight by a vote of 74-25. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.

It's one of dozens of tax breaks benefiting Hollywood producers, stock-car racetrack owners and Virgin Islands rum- makers included in the broader legislation in an effort to win support from House Republicans, whose defection contributed to a rejection of an earlier version of the legislation two days ago on a 228-205 vote.

``This is how Washington works,'' said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington research group. ``A big pot of pork is their recipe for final passage.''

Representatives for Wyden, a Democrat, and Smith, a Republican, didn't immediately return calls. Jerry Dishion, president of Rose City Archery, was in meetings and unavailable to comment, a receptionist at the company said.

Most of the provisions are part of a package of provisions known as ``extenders'' because they are renewed for only a few years at a time.

That's pretty handy if you're a recipient but you sort of wonder how any of this actually helps America beyond the bill. Anyway, that's how it's done in Washington. Horse-trading for all.

This one covers an energy tax break as part of this process.

The U.S. Senate approved tax cuts valued at more than $100 billion, including a host of alternative energy credits and dozens of breaks for businesses and individuals, as part of its $700 billion bank rescue bill.

The legislation, which the House likely will act on tomorrow, passed the Senate on a 74-25 vote. It would give the Treasury Department authority to buy troubled assets, chiefly mortgage- backed securities that are burdening financial institutions.

The Senate added the tax provisions to woo Republican votes in the House, where an earlier version of the bailout plan failed by 12 votes on Monday. The tax package would spare 24 million American households from a scheduled alternative minimum tax increase this year, renew credits for business research, and extend $17 billion in energy incentives.

House adoption of the provisions would end a 10-month stalemate in Congress over how to deal with the budget impact of the tax breaks. It would also bolster the balance sheets of companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Harley-Davidson Inc. that rely on the research credit, as well as those producing energy from wind and solar sources.

It would be ``virtually impossible'' to expand solar energy without the credit, Madison Grose, a managing director at Starwood Capital Group LLC, said yesterday in an interview before the vote. ``The cost to the rate base for these types of projects is substantially higher without the investment tax credit being part of the capitalization of the projects.''

So much for that one. It's hard to see if one is meant to feel good about it at all when the whole economy might go down the gurgler but there you go.