The hills are alive - with the sound of kvetching and retching

Forgive my ‘Yiddish-isms’. That’s what happens when you grow up in or near Miami Beach. Kvetching means complaining. I think you know what retching refers to. But the media echo chamber is so alive with pain and angst over what Obama should do, hasn’t done, the way he done did it that I can’t hear myself think.

Notable examples: all the screaming heads on CNBC, and most notably Rick Santelli. The print media and blogosphere - liberal, centrist and right wingnut - has joined in as well, and then they’ve given far more attention than should be warranted to that bloated, self righteous, self important default leader of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, that I feel like heading for the nearest emergency exit post haste.

Can we all back up and breathe, before we completely loose track of the real issues?

Click to read more ...

Putting the bailout in perspective: Iraq and military spending

The media - both locally and nationally - has been awash in wailing and a great gnashing of teeth over what the bailouts might cost. What they fail to do is put this within any kind of meaningful context. Even so-called liberal commentators are wringing their hands in dismay over the, admittedly, huge numbers we’re dealing with.

What are we really talking about here? All of the bailout money is taxpayer dollars spent how? As the size of the bailout increases, the more they become a numerical abstraction - hard for anybody to get their head wrapped around.

Click to read more ...

Why this bailout is NOT terrible

I’ve been harping on this for a while now, so I hope my regular readers will bear with me. At breakfast out this morning my mother continued the “bad behavior” drumbeat in regard to corporations and their CEOs. According to Winifred, this is the cause of it all. Corporations should be nice, and care about the environment yada yada. You would have been proud of me. I didn’t rise to the bait. She’s 91-going-on-92 years old and it would have been pointless.

Let me say it one more time: corporations are not people. They are bundles of contracts. They have no ethics or morality inherent in them. That’s why they require regulation by a government that has it head pulled out of its own backside. Americans made money ass over bandbox for decades in the middle of the last century - often referred to as the Golden Period of America - in spite of all the horrendous regulations. Gee, if regulations on corporations were all just inherently bad, how could that have happened? Let’s all go ask Phil Gramm - with some tar and a bag of feathers in hand.

So this afternoon, when I read this article from The Motley Fool online investment newsletter, which we’ve subscribed to forever - and got out of the market well in advance of this crisis, thank you very much Fools - I knew I had to post it.

Click to read more ...

A very clever way to understand the credit crisis

This is the work of Jonathan Jarvis, as part of his MFA in Fine Arts thesis, and gives even the thickest of us a great way of understanding the whole financial crisis that we are embroiled in.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

From Mr. Jarvis:

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Baseline: The Financial Crisis for Beginners

Local blogger, AnnOnn, tipped me off to this one today. She’s a good, solid blogger, but needs to quit putting me in the same paragraph as Bill O’Reilly. This also goes for you, Arden. Quit putting me in the same paragraph -or planet - as Ann Coulter. Bwa!

Anyhow, AnnOnn managed to watch Bill Moyers’ Journal last night (where the heck was I? Oh, yeah - sick in bed):

Last night Bill Moyers interviewed Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Simon has a very informative website, The Baseline Scenario, and Moyers referred to Simon’s blog entry “High Noon: Tim Geithner v. the American Oligarchs.”  from AnnOnn Everything

Click to read more ...

The economy: our definition of crazy?

I keep reading editorials, letters to the editor and posts to the blogosphere that we just need to be patient - wait for the inevitable economic turnaround. This presupposes that our current situation is simply a blip - albeit a particularly nasty one - that we can just spend our way out of, as we’ve done in the past. It also presents a simplistic view that, really, the current mess is a result a failure in just one sector or the other - housing or a few Wall Street bad actors. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Click to read more ...

No Lemmings were hurt in this segment

Thanks a lot, Miles. I saw the film of those poor fuzzy wuzzies going off the cliff into the sea and wondered just where in the heck you got that!

But it begs the question: Am I a Lemming, too? Are most of us Lemmings now and then, succumbing to the ‘herd instinct’? Nobody likes to believe that’s even a remote possibility - it brings to mind some disturbing images ( like vermin-ridden rodents mindlessly following the leader to disaster).

The following CNN report by Miles O’Brien shows us that there are, indeed, some psychological nuances to the current economic crisis that we can all take some responsibility for.

Click to read more ...

The Weekly Wrap: Friday, 10 October, 2008

Put your guns down - evidently nobody on the right thinks civility has a place in the political forum, so they’re loading the crowds with mean-spirited and foul-mouthed rowdies. Former McCain strategist, John Weaver thinks they just might shoot themselves in the foot with this course of action:

Click to read more ...