March 30, 2009
Trillions for Wall Street, Zero for Detroit
Merriam-Webster defines lickspittle as "a fawning subordinate; toady." I like words and, though dictionaries sometimes get infrequently used words wrong, in this case Merriam-Webster captures the essence of it. Barack Obama confuses the wave of righteous anger that brought him to the White House with a different kind of political support: the kind that can be bought. And he thinks if he's fawning enough to Wall Street, if he's a lickspittle, he'll get the money he needs to keep his political career in high gear. Well, he should think twice. Whatever Americans may say to pollsters about not wanting to bail out the automakers — meaning to them automaker executives — there's a lot of support out there for the industry and a lot of people will get angry all over again if Mr. Obama flushes it down the tubes.
The Balkan Chameleon
I first laid eyes on Richard Holbrooke (he won't remember) on Monday evening, September 21, 1992. Some ridiculously wealthy Manhattan socialite had thrown a party for Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, then the new cause du jour, and some boutique human rights group — a bogus one, I realized in retrospect, now defunct, though its chieftain has since moved to greener pastures and is still active — had decided that I might be useful and had flown me up for the soirée. As it was, nobody was interested in me, I had a drink or two, ate some peanuts, and went back to DC. But it was amazing to watch Holbrooke in action, brown-nosing furiously, trying to pronounce Izzy's name, clambering up on the human rights soapbox. Later in December of that year Holbrooke and I crossed paths again, in Sarajevo, though neither of us was aware of the other's presence.
March 29, 2009
Do Not Buy This Chair
I sit in front of the computer screen a lot. So my work chair is very important to me. I'd gone through about three quite expensive chairs before discovering my last chair, a Leap, from Steelcase. The Leaps first came on the market in 1999 — I think I bought mine around 2000. A very comfortable chair, built like a tank. But over the years it began to break down. First the seat height adjustment lever snapped off (ergo no more seat height adjustment). Then one of the arms refused to adjust for height (I crammed desk debris into the socket until the arm held up at approximately the right position). Then the other arm developed a series of deep, uneven cracks along its length, creating a very rough, scratchy surface. After a few years of coping with all this it seemed like it was time to get a new chair. And, as some good work chairs are being made right here in the U.S., I figured I could help the economy recover. Being already a happy Leap customer, after a little bit of looking around at other options, reading reviews and so on, naturally enough I ordered another Leap. Version 2. Made in Michigan. When it arrived last week, Oh Boy!, was I excited.
March 23, 2009
The Old Switcheroo
It's hard to argue with the stock market. On the other hand, one expects bank stocks to do well when they're being subsidized by an opaque system that may well plunk down (or is plunking down) more than a trillion dollars, maybe several trillion. And the explanations for the scam get complicated — at least to me — when they start plugging numbers into expected values. But here's what I think: house prices are too high. It's not reasonable, for example, that a young hospital resident and his social worker wife should be able to afford a no money down mortgage on a million dollar home. They may think they can, but they can't. And those would be the quality mortgages. How many mortgages were written for super double-wide trailers owned by televangelists, or McMansions for cubicle tech workers? Way too many. All those house prices have got to fall to normal, truly affordable levels. So a lot of the toxic paper out there is absurdly overpriced. We're not talking about 'restoring stability to markets' but in fact about ordinary people paying for enormous losses by big banks.
March 21, 2009
Money Changers
It's so tiresome watching Barack Obama prostitute himself to Wall Street. And at this point in the game the Democrats in Congress must stop him, because it's clear he won't stop himself. No more con jobs. Indeed, what Mr. Obama is about to do seems to me an impeachable offense.
Matt Taibbi has a long, colorful write-up in Rolling Stone on the AIG rip-off. But there are things I still wonder about: if AIG accounts for about half a trillion dollars worth of toxic derivatives, what about the rest? Last year publications like the New York Times put the outstanding dollar value of derivatives worldwide into the hundreds of trillions. And I can't imagine that AIG had some kind of secret formula. Perhaps they were at the center of the whole thing but once they started printing money I'm sure their rivals, many in boutique hedge funds, started doing the same. Put another way, I have difficulty imagining that all the other remaining derivatives out there somehow could be very much less toxic than those traded by AIG.
And on a related front Paul Krugman weighs in on little Timmy's plan to dump more money on Wall Street. If anything, Krugman is too kind.
March 20, 2009
American Idol
NBC says that Barack Obama is the first sitting President to appear on the Tonight Show. Which raises a question: why did all those other Presidents — the show began in 1954, so that makes ten Presidents before Mr. Obama — decline to be guests? Surely some of them must have been asked. The reason is, to be honest, that it's undignified and it degrades the office. What's next? Hollywood Squares? I rather doubt Jay Leno can be of any help politically and if this sort of behavior continues I wonder how long it will take before people develop the habit of cracking unflattering jokes about the former junior Senator from Illinois?
March 19, 2009
Tossing Timmy and Larry Under the Bus
It's time. No good can come from having Wall Street humanoids dispensing public coin to other Wall Street humanoids. Mr. Obama is still talking the talk — he was in fine fettle yesterday evening in Costa Mesa, California — but he ain't walking the walk. Treasury is completely adrift; there's no end to these bail-outs in sight; no long term plan worth mentioning; nor any international financial diplomacy that impresses allies or interested bystanders. What Mr. Obama desperately needs is a financial team that excludes those responsible for the mess in the first place. He's gamely trying to double-talk his way out of that reality (why he picks corrupt allies remains a puzzle) but I don't see many true believers
March 16, 2009
Good Beer
The first time I bought a six-pack of Schloss Eggenberg Pils, I bought it for the novelty of its pull-ring bottle cap — something I've never seen on any other beer. And I've kept on buying it because it's pretty good. Light, tasty, not overly hopped. From Austria. Perhaps not in the top ten beers of all time but definitely on the "A-list." And their website is actually very cool; I hadn't realized that this is a beer with such a lot of history. If you like beer and happen to see Schloss Eggenberg in your favorite store, do yourself a favor and give it a try.
March 15, 2009
Bonus This!
In principle I'm opposed to capital punishment but I'm willing to make an exception for Wall Street swindlers. Instead of throwing a constant stream of billions of dollars at them and hoping that their worshipfulnesses will start the economy up again it would be better to mete out some extremely harsh punishments, to better concentrate their minds. Long sentences — life sentences — at supermax prisons would be a start. My personal preference would be to string several dozen of them up along the National Mall. Or at the very least I'd like to hear more from the Obama finance geniuses than "we're unable to legally prevent hundreds of millions in bonuses from being paid to AIG managers."
March 13, 2009
My Exploding Dishwasher
From the sublime to the mundane. Back on February 11th I was reading in the living room when I heard a fairly loud explosion in the kitchen. I went through a quick mental check of possible sounds, decided that neither the cats nor the dog could have produced the tumult, so I went to investigate. The dishwasher, which had been running, was emitting a lot of heavy, black smoke — by the smell, from an electrical fire. Long story short, I learned after several calls to Bosch that the dishwasher was subject to a recall (coincidentally, I got the recall notice a couple days later). The machine was out of warranty and, besides, I figure that dishwashers will clog up, stop working, or even flood. No big deal. If it'd just broken down I wouldn't have cared. But dishwashers aren't supposed to explode and catch fire. Kitchen fires can be plenty serious. So I complained. It took a while but yesterday I got a check from Bosch for the full cost of a replacement. Thanks, Bosch!! And I chose Bosch again for the replacement because they have stainless steel tubs, do a great job cleaning dishes, and I'm very persnickety about germs. Moral of the story: when you have a legitimate complaint with a large company, take the complaint to the top.
March 10, 2009
What Arab-Israeli Peace Process?
Part I: The Settler Question
By Chuck Spinney
Marmaris, Turkey — On March 2, 2009, the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now issued a report saying that the Israeli housing ministry plans to build 73,000 housing units in the West Bank. Peace Now said 15,000 of these units had already been approved, with another 58,000 awaiting approval. On March 7, 2009, the Guardian reported that a confidential report issued by the EU said Israel continues to annex property in East Jerusalem. It said Israeli housing authorities had submitted plans for 5,500 new housing units (3,000 of which have already been approved) since the Annapolis "peace" conference in November 2007. Readers may recall that the Annapolis conference was supposed to resuscitate George W. Bush's moribund so-called Road Map to Peace. Assuming these housing plans are implemented, and only 2.5 Israelis on average inhabit each new unit, the entire program could add as many as 196,000 Israelis to the 490,000 Israelis already living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Yet as recently as September 30, 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said Israel should withdraw from almost all of the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem in order to achieve peace. Of course, Olmert's profession of normative behavior would be deemed gratuitous nonsense in an international court of law, because all these settlements are clearly illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. So what gives?
March 6, 2009
Hello, DOW 4,000
How many banks (like Morgan Stanley) that the government is propping up are trying to profit by driving Ford (that the government is also propping up) into the ground? Am I unreasonable to think that subsidizing both while one cannibalizes the other doesn't make any sense? Anyhow, this morning Paul Krugman complains, again, about the Obama administration's foot-dragging on really fixing the banks. Krugman marvels at administration officials' resistance to nationalization, but their "free-market" ideology shouldn't be such a surprise to him: surely he knows how people from the University of Chicago think about economics. And this is the heart of the problem. Barack Obama always was too cozy with hard-core Chicago "free-market" ideologues and now he's finding it impossible to break away from their influence. It wouldn't be unfair to describe this as a cult phenomenon.
March 5, 2009
More on Cloture
As promised, finally, here is my op-ed in this morning's Los Angeles Times. I started working on this with the paper in late January but it got slightly side-tracked due to unrelated events. In any case, the accidental timing works perfectly, as this appears on the heels of several similar essays, in particular two in the New York Times of a couple days ago. Timing, as they say, is everything.
