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The mortgage meltdown is so huge that Bush & Co. want to give Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson
$7,000,000,000 to bail out the Wall Street bankers whose greed and ineptitude caused this
problem.
Furthermore, the original Bush proposal said:
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable
and committed to agency discretion,
and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
There are no checks and balances here, so Paulson in effect would become the
dictator of the
dollar.
Nothing in the original Bush proposal would prevent Paulson from adding diamond studding to the
"golden parachutes"
of the bankers, and the taxpayers would get the bill.
However, there must be any number of honest bankers out there who didn't participate in the sub-prime loan fiasco, people who, when someone who worked as a burger-flipper or a Wal-Mart clerk came in to get a mortgage on a $500,000 house, just said NO! These bankers were doubtlessly derided by their fellows for being stodgy old farts, too set in their ways to take advantage of the derivatives, bundled mortgage packages, and other new financial instruments created by the Wall Street "Masters of the Universe." The NEW bankers were raking in billions with their schemes, whereas the OLD bankers were dully asking for down payments, collateral, and following traditional banking practices, to make just routine business profits, and not making loans to people who were financially risky.
Just saying no is not the way for a bank to make money, of course. A bank has to say yes to make money, but has to know when to say yes. Stodgy old fart bankers know this. All they need is the resources to make these yes loans, but now the financial system is paralyzed, so even good loans are not being made. That is the reason tor the seven hundred billion dollar bailout--the need to get the system working again. The problem is that you don't protect the chicken house by giving the front door key to the foxes.
So, to keep the financial systems moving by infusing it with the liquidity to make new loans possible, you don't throw money at exactly the same people who caused the problem in the first place, rather, you need to put your money in places where there are responsible adults. You have to find those few stodgy old fart bankers on each state's Main Street and distribute the bailout money to them, not to Wall Street.
Remember, stodgy old fart bankers know the difference between safe and stupid. That's more than can be said for Bush & Co.
THE STRONG-LEADER SYNDROME
Russia's invasion of Georgia is being used by right-wing pundents to promote their strong-leader philosophy: namely, that only John McCain can stand up to Vladimir Putin. They consider the use of diplomacy to be "weak." What they prefer is the Teddy Roosevelt-style gunboat diplomacy of the nineteenth century.
What the Neo-cons are not thinking about are the consequences of military action. They are oblivious to Russian history and the fact that Russia had been invaded by Napoleon and had been invaded by Hitler; the Russians see an encirclement -- America has been arming and training the military of Georgia (plus supports NATO membership for Georgia) on one side and Uncle Sam has been proposing the placement of American missiles in Poland on another side.
Westerners may think that the Russians are just being paranoid, but the Russians think of themselves as a people with a long memory, and to them, being hemmed in on all sides by "the world's only super-power" may look like a prelude to invasion.
What the "strong-leader" advocates lack is a perspective of what happens when Russia feels itself threatened, and they certainly see the Americans a potential enemy.
Let us look back to the last time the Americans started encircling the Russians. During the Kennedy administration missiles were placed in Turkey and pointed at Russia. The Russians used a tit-for-tat response by placing their weapons ninety miles from Florida. Thus, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Many of both the Pentagon advisors and the cabinet officers wanted a "strong-leader" response to the Russians. Attack the Russians in Cuba, they said. Kennedy was almost alone in advocating a diplomatic solution. What Kennedy and his advisors did not know at the time was that the Russians had atomic weapons pointed at the American military base at Guantanamo Bay. If the Americans started an attack on Cuba, the Russians, in a matter of minutes, would have destroyed the Guantanamo Bay facility.
Think about that: an American military base completely wiped out by atomic weapons. What would have been America's response?
Years earlier, William Randolf Hearst, blasting "Remember the Maine" headlines in his newspapers, whipped up a war against Spain over the (probably accidental) destruction of one US Navy ship in Havana harbor, so imagine what would happen if a whole America base were destroyed. The Americans would have launched their ICBMs against Russia itself in retaliation. The Russians, seeing all of those atomic bombs heading in their direction, would have shot their own weapons at America's cities and military bases. The results would have been tens of millions of Americans and tens of millions of Russians killed.
This did not happen because Kennedy was wise enough to let himself appear to NOT be a "strong leader." He reached a compromise with Kruschieve whereby the American missiles were withdrawn from Turkey and the Russian missiles were withdrawn from Cuba. It was a compromise whereby both sides backed down from the "strong-leader" positions.
However, what if the President back then had been a John McCain type, someone prone to McCain's notorious temper tantrums? You would have been dead! Furthermore, hundreds of millions of people worldwide would have been casualties of a full-scale atomic war. The danger is that there is a high correlation between "strong" leaders and "stupid" leaders.
[[ Aside: That is why World War I was such a long and bloody business--none of the leaders were willing to work towards a compromise, so the trench-war killing just went on and on. ]]
As was the case in the 1960s, America is again encircling Russia, and as we saw in Georgia, it can be expected that the Russians will push back. When the American missiles start arriving in Poland, you can expect another crisis because the Russians will say "this is too close." Will we have a leader who is smart enough to find a way to assuage Russia's paranoia? Or, will we have a "strong" (a. k. a. stupid) leader who will plunge us into another war? We know that McCain is campaigning as a "strong leader," and his handlers are touting his military experience -- (they are not mentioning that the experience is mostly as a pilot who got shot down and captured by a bunch of Vietnamese peasants.) President-in-waiting Palin has already said that she would go to war with Russia over Georgia, so a vote for the Republicans is a vote for war. They prefer to be strong, rather than smart.
However, would Barak Obama be any better? On the question of being a "strong leader," it remains to be seen if Obama has the guts to not say, "me too."
It takes a grain of truth to propagate a lie.
As an example, let us use a story that is currently developing in the blog world. Here is the grain of truth: Time Magazine reports that, as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin asked her town librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, how to go about banning books with "objectional" language, but the librarian would not cooperate. {{Also see: Anchorage Daily News / Sept. 4. 2008 }}
In a discussion of the above subject at the blog section of Librarian.net, ( http://www.librarian.net/stax/2366/sarah-palin-vp-nominee/) someone named "Andrew" posted a list of books that Sarah Palin wanted to ban. The list included works by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Salinger, Twain, Solzhenitzen, Rowling, plus Chaucer and Shakespear and many others. The two items, the Time article and the Palin list of banned books, are being picked up by other sites, and the story is moving outward like a chain letter. Site B referrs to the Librarian.net (let us call it site "A".) Site C refers back to both A and B; site D mentions A, B, and C; site E references B, C, and D, but does not mention A; site R mentions only D and Q; etc. etc. In a short amount of time there will be hundreds of inter-connected sites with this "information" posted. Once the original site fades into the background, all of activist sites will refer to each other in a case of "circular logic." Also, people who have a habit of forwarding e-mail comments will be saying, "pass this on: Palin banned books, and here are the sources ..." and they will list sites D, Q, and Z, etc.
Later, if you Google "Palin" and "banned books," you will end up with a huge list of sites, so people will say, "if there are this many Google hits, then it must be true."
However, remember site A, the Librarian.net blog where this "Palin list" got started? It will end up as just a small tree in a huge forest of Google hits, so many people will not notice it. If you go back to it, you will find that the members of that discussion group have already discredited "Andrew's" list. They posted the original sources of the list, which is apparently an academic listing of books that various people, for various reasons, at various locations, and over a long period of time, have tried to ban. Furthermore, someone pointed out that some of the books on the list had not even been published when Palin was mayor of Wasilla. So, while it is true that Palin asked about banning books, and she did unsuccessfully try to get the librarian fired -- (An aside--as soon as she got power, Palin tried to get a lot of people fired; the librarian was just one of many, but that is a completely different issue) -- there is no evidence that Palin actually banned any books in Wasilla. Nevertheless, because of the way that the Internet works, many people will think that she was a book-banner, and they will see as the evidence for this the references from sites D, Q and Z, etc.
This true-grain-to-lie phenonomon is not something new. It has been exploited by propagandists for decades. Long before the Internet, Paul Goebbels was using it in Nazi Germany. More recently, T. Boone Pickins' Swift Boaters persuaded a significant number of voters that a soldier who actually came under enemy fire in Viet Nam was less patriotic and less worthy of being President than a Texas National Guardsman who stayed home and drank beer. Currently, a large number of Americans think that the Democrat's candidate for president is a secret Muslim. Obama, Kerry, and the Jews of Germany were all victims of insideous propaganda campaigns, and surprisingly, Sarah Palin may be joining them.
Rebember, you heard it here (on the Internet) at newsNH:
The Internet is the world's greatest source of misinformation!
The second greatest source of misinformation is Fwd: Fwd: e-mail.
Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: e-mail is also the greatest source of really, really bad puns, but don't get me started on that subject!
Republicans like to say that they are a party of tradition. Unfortunately, they have a tradition of really bad vice presidents. There was Richard Nixon who blamed all his woes on his dog "Checkers," and later had to resign in disgrace. There was Spiro Agnew who resigned in a deal to avoid prison. There was Dan Quail, "Mr. Potato Head," one of the dimmest bulbs in Washington. There is Dick Cheney, a man who is doing his best to turn America into Fascist Germany with all the preemptive wars, secret prisons, and torture that marked the Hitler era.
Now we have Sarah Palin, chosen by John McCain only because she is a woman who appeals to the religious extremists in the Republican party. If this is the most qualified woman in the Republican Party to potentially be president, then they are ready to join the Wig Party in the dustbin of history.
Now you know why Bush supports Wolfowitz and Gonzales.
February 3, 2005Send Bush a beer!When George Bush was young, he was a drunk. His frat boy interests were beer, babes, and baseball. This lead to a few car crashes, arguments with his father, a DWI arrest, and probasbly going AWOL from the military. All of this was of no consequence. It was merely the irresponsibility of an idle rich boy. No one was much harmed by George Bush the drunk.Then George Bush got religion, and he gave up alcohol. Now he is much older, but he has become a drunk again. This time he is drunk on power. He is the leader of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. This, coupled with his religious fanaticism, has made Bush a dangerous man. He is on a crusade to convert the world to his values. When he says that "freedom is on the march," what he really means is that his army is on the march. They invade, they kill, they torture, they destroy cities, all at George Bush's command. Remember last year when that reporter asked Bush about his mistakes, and Bush was nonplused because he couldn't think of one? That's because Bush thinks he is on a mission from God and everything he does is the will of God--certainly God's can't make mistakes, right? Power drunk religious fanatic George Bush is a world menace. Things were much better when Bush was merely a frat boy drunk. We need to return to those days. We need to switch Bush's drunkenness back to beer. Do your part to save the world, join the Beers to Bush campaign. Send George a beer!
Of course, there is the danger is that Bush will become double-drunk, drunk on both power and beer. |
Finally by 2008, the Democrats may have figured out that nominating "Rockafella Republican" guys like Gore and Kerry is a certain road to defeat. Also, by 2008, the Bush economic policies of huge deficits and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on the Iraq quagmire will have pushed the country to the edge of depression, or even over that edge. The last time the country enjoyed prosperity was during the Clinton administration. However, no sane person will suggest resurrecting Bill Clinton, so, the next best thing will be ...
There you have it: the great catfight:
In is not often that the smart guys and gals at Google do something dumb, but their plan to place university libraries on the Internet is more a matter of publicity than it is of practicality. It strikes me that the Google Library was a project launched by the PR people, not the code writers, at Google.
For works that are copyrighted, they will post abstracts and brief excerpts. This is allowed under the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law. This, of course, is proper. To do more would be to steal from the authors and publishers of those works.
For works which have entered into the public domain, the plan is to
post graphic images of each page in the book. This is similar to what
many people do when creating Adobe PDF files. There are two flaws
in this design. Such graphic files would be huge in comparison with
text saved as plain ASCII such as those used by
If I were researching Minnesota Widgets and I had a Project Gutenberg text entitled, say, "Midwest Manufacturing - 1800 to 1900," then I could simply load the text into a word processor and search for "Minnesota" + "Widgets," and I would quickly sift out the relevant material, if indeed Widgets were made there at that time. With the same book at Google, however, I would have to hope that it had a very good index page, and if it did not, then I would have to look through the entire book. I might have to read through dozens of Google books to find what I was looking for, a very s-l-o-w process.
It doesn't have to be this way. We publish electronic books in Adobe PDF format, however, our books are not much larger in size than plain ASCII files of the same material, and furthermore, you can search within our books using Adobe's FIND command. This is true because, unlike most users, we do not make our pages into graphic images. (The find command doesn't work with graphic pages.) We build our book files to make them compact so that they can be downloaded quickly, even with a slow dial-up connection. We want to make our material available to people who don't necessarily have the fastest and best of equipment. Our goal is to reach the widest audience possible. If you have an Internet connection, then you will be able to both read and search inside our books. If a tiny company like Serendipity Systems can do this, why can't the Internet giant Google do it?
UPDATE
State of the news
Consider this ...
The only state-wide source of news in New Hampshire is a rabidly conservative relict of the Hearst yellow journalism days when newspapers were willing to start shooting wars just to boost circulation. As a result, outsiders often view New Hampshire citizens as sanctimoneously narrow-minded boobies who hold the most regressive of opinions. New Hampshire deserves better representation from the press.
Consider this ...
Merger mania has turned once-independent voices into homogenized parrots for media moguls like Rupert Murdock and Sumner Redstone or for corporate public relations departments. The Boston Globe is now owned by people in New York. The Los Angeles Times is owned by people in Chicago. The hometown, independent newspaper is becoming an endangered species. What will the effect of this consolidation be? Will MS/NBC criticize Bill Gates as a latter-day robber baron? Will Disney/ABC report on malfeasance by Mickey Mouse? Don't count on it! For example, recently CBS Radio reported that a San Francisco publisher offered to "horse-trade" favorable coverage for the mayor for support for a media deal. Horse-trade? Is CBS afraid of the word bribe? Or is CBS afraid of the Hearst Corporation. Or is it that they are all foxes in the chicken coop together? An independent news source should not be afraid to call a spade a spade and a bribe a bribe.
Consider this ...
It appears to me that the quality of newspapers has been going down. For example, twenty years ago The Lewiston Sun was an excellent small-city newspaper, featuring world, national, and local news. Now, its world coverage is dismal and its national reportage is anemic at best. Almost all newspapers have reduced hard news coverage in favor of "features" and infomercial types of stories. Alas, information myopia pervades the news business.
Consider this ...
Condensation and exclusion is not just confined to print publications. The National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio opposes the creation of low-power community-based FM radio stations. Two categories of radio stations were envisioned. Stations of 10 watts or less would reach an radius of a mile or two, while those with 100 watts or less would reach about a three and a half mile radius. Such stations would serve small areas and specialized groups such as inner-city minority communities. In the past, radio stations such as Free Radio Berkeley were run as "Pirate radio," and often espoused liberal points of view. The Federal Communications Commission has been very aggressive about shutting down "pirate" stations. The proposal to allow the "pirates" to become legitimate has brought fierce opposition from owners of both commercial and "public" radio stations. Do the airwaves belong to the people, or do they belong to whomever has a few million dollars to set up a high-powered radio?
Consider this ...
The cost of newsprint, presses, and all the accouterments associated with the traditional newspaper will continue to rise, making "on-paper" publications increasingly expensive to produce. Expensive editorial coverage will have to be further reduced in favor of revenue-producing advertisements. However, kids who used the Internet since kindergarten will, as adults, not read "adpapers." They'll get their news from on-line sources. If on-line news is merely a mirror of the reduced print/broadcast news (almost all present on-line newspapers are just abridged versions of their on-paper parents,) then our young readers might just say, "Why bother?"
As a result ...
Control of the news is falling into fewer and fewer hands, and those hands are presenting narrower and narrower points of view. Citizens of New Hampshire and of the country as a whole are becoming daily less well-informed as a result of all of this media consolidation. Do we want all our news to come from Time/Warner/AOL/Microsoft/Dow Jones/et al., Incorporated? Diversity of opinion is something that is required to keep democracy healthy, but how can this be accomplished in the face of merger mania?
Here at newsNH ...
We propose to build that diversity from the ground up. A. J. Liebling once said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Okay, we're handing out printing presses. These are modern printing presses, the kind that put down type with the click of a mouse, not hot lead. We won't need to cut down forests for paper, or buy ink by the barrel. We won't need warehouses, or delivery trucks, or corner newsstands to make this Internet newspaper available, and you'll be able to get it anywhere on the planet. If you are in Los Angeles, or Paris, or Tokyo and you want to know what is happening in Pittsburg, or Hinsdale, or Rye, just click on newsNH to find out. Plus, NewsNH will have a great variety of opinions and news sources because it will be composed of numerous independendent weekly town newspapers, each serving its own community and serving the state as a whole.
How this works ...
On the left you will find a list of the New Hampshire towns with newsNH-associated Internet newspapers. Just click on the town you want to read about and the current issue of that newspaper will appear, either here in this frame, or in a separate window. Each newspaper has editorial independence from newsNH and is under the control of its own publisher/editor. We at newsNH do not influence the content of the town newspapers, but we do offer technical and formatting assistance to the editors so that we don't have a confusing jumble of different styles. Furthermore, we can't edit the contents because the data files are actually located on the editor's local Internet server, not on newsNH's computers. This preserves the independence of each town newspaper.
Privacy issues ...
Unlike most Internet sites, newsNH is not monitoring the reader's computer activity. We are not capturing the reader's browser history; we are not checking to identify the reader; we are not sending cookies to the reader's computer. The only marker we use is a counter which merely records the number of visits to this site. This is a bit disadvantageous to us. We can't tell our advertisers that Reader Joe Smith came to us from www.hotgirls.com after buying herbal remedy books at www.amazon.com. If a reader sends us e-mail, or fills in an on-line form, that information will only be used to answer the reader's question or process his or her request. This information will not be made available to others. True, this is not the way that Internet businesses are normally run, but we're trying to do something different here. We're bringing back intregrity.
Join newsNH ...
To start an Internet newspaper in your town, return to the top of this page and click on the "Editors wanted" box.
John Galuszka
Editor in chief
www.newsNH.com
Start date: Oct. 17, 2001 -- Last revised: 9/15/08