Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

No wonder they kept it secret

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Wait for the line about bonuses...

Col. Klink defense

So-called Maestro Alan Greenspan, still pining for Ayn Rand's seductively simplistic rationalization of infantile selfish fantasy, reasserts all the things he "knows" that the Great Recession has disproven. As the Great Depression which birthed him had disproven before.

Only an honest man could abjure the convictions of a lifetime, based on new (to him) experience. Instead, Greenspan quote-mines his inscrutable mumbles for something, anything exculpatory:

He pointed out that the Fed had warned about subprime lending and low-down-payment mortgages in 1999, and again in 2001.

There's no time - or authority - left for Greenspan to redeem himself. He had a run of luck, and then the maelstrom... He can't fix it, so he can't let himself regret letting it blow up.

Citigroup's executives, fat and happy and well-paid to ignore the truth, essay instead the Sgt. Schultz defense.

“No one, including myself, ever conceived we would see real estate prices plunge 30 to 40 percent, with homeowners walking away from homes en masse for the first time ever,” Thomas Maheras, the former co-head of Citi’s investment bank who oversaw its mortgage activities, said.

Lots of people knew there were problems. If educational TV is running "Flip That House" marathons, warning! People with no special training were wondering where all the buyers for million dollar houses would come from. Maheras was raking in too much money to notice.

Brooksley Born gets the last word:

“The Fed utterly failed to prevent the financial crisis,” she said. “The Fed and other banking regulators failed to prevent the housing bubble, they failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, they failed to prevent our biggest banks and holding companies from engaging in activities that would bring them to the verge of collapse without massive taxpayer bailouts.”

Back on the road in a jiff

Think AAA will come quickly?

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Free market hooey

Why does CNN continue to thrust the discredited and unpopular idiocies of Ron Paul in front of us on a weekly basis? Do they have some contractual obligation to provide a certain percentage of bullshit content that they can't meet otherwise?

The laissez-faire market ideology that Ron Paul and his acolytes endorse has two things going for it: It's simple, and it's coherent. The major problem: It doesn't describe a world that ever existed anywhere, and it couldn't exist. The organization of business works every day to defeat free market conditions because the profit motive is to win, not merely to compete. Enterprises get too big to satisfy the condition of atomicity required by the models that the free marketeers love so much.

CNN should start ignoring Ron Paul in the same way the voters did. The man's a loon. He wants to get rid of the Fed. He thinks the Community Reinvestment Act caused the credit crisis, even though that's bullshit. It's o.k. with Paul if we have a depression, just so long as the government doesn't make any rules that put the common good ahead of opportunities to make a bundle and get out before the collapse.

If we have to have loons on the news, better to have a broader mix of loons instead of the same old loons every week. I hear Bill Ayers is available, but I guess he doesn't have enough money to buy this kind of ego-stroking publicity. Instead, next month we'll see Donald Trump and T. Boone Pickens and who knows how many other right-wing gasbags.

Some liberal media.

Laws, appropriations, who cares!

Picking up a theme seen around the liberal blogs, where does the Fed's authority to bail out all these financial institutions come from, obligating taxpayers to many billions in new debt that we already can't afford? When did Congress approve the takeover of Freddie and Fannie? When did Congress extend rescue authority to insurance companies? Or did it come from the Authorization to Use Military Force, the way every other power the government wants was allegedly ceded by the Legislative branch?

The roots of our democracy and our liberty are in law. Without law, we are already sliding into arbitrariness and government by personality.

I'm not arguing against strong measures in the financial markets, including some bailouts. I'm saying that there's a lawful way to do it, and of course the Bushists are not pursuing the messy, difficult business of actually framing a law that allows them to do these things legally. They just don't care.

The largest irony is yet to come. There will come a time again some distant day in the future when Republicans are well-regarded again. At that time, after the worthless assets have been paid off to their foolish investors, the GOPers will suddenly realize that it's creeping socialism for the government to actually hold the valuable assets, and they will stamp their feet and wail that those assets should be privatized in a fire sale to their cronies.

And they'll all get rich yet again.

Update: The Bushists didn't even brief Congress on the AIG bailout. Congress, we don' need no stinking Congress.

Republicans, meanwhile, are already setting up their complaints to cash out in the future.

"Wall St. got drunk"

Duhbya said this to disclaim responsibility. Boy, now, that's a new tack for him.

Wall St., among others, did get drunk, but they did because the Fed and other financial regulators failed to take the punch bowl away. They failed in their jobs at frightening and increasing cost to us taxpayers because of their laissez-faire Bushist ideology.

The White House thoroughly endorsed and supported the looting.

Planning to prevent a plan

The Bushist Treasury Department wants to prevent additional regulation of the financial markets. This is known as the failure to learn from experience. No surprise there.

[T]hat authority would be limited, doing virtually nothing to regulate the many new financial products whose unwise use has been a culprit in the current financial crisis.

In other words, bailouts are fine, but nothing preventive.

In a draft of a speech to be delivered Monday, [Henry Paulson] declares: “I do not believe it is fair or accurate to blame our regulatory structure for the current turmoil.”

After all, the regulators all took early retirement. How could they have caused the credit meltdown?

Democrats reacted with some praise. “It’s a recognition, maybe a reluctant one, that you have to enhance regulation,” said Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services committee.

Do I hear the sound of faint damning?

Consolidating regulation into fewer agencies, while in the abstract a good idea, accomplishes this for Republicans: Fewer regulators to subvert. Putting more power in the quasi-independent Fed also reduces the leverage future, truly Democratic Congresses might have on regulation.

Update: Paul Krugman agrees.

Socialize ALL the risk

Hey, the Fed had to intervene in a market run amok to keep the whole financial system from ruin, so the right lesson is to make it easier for the Fed to bail out other disastrous investments. But, noooo, we can't regulate the market; that would glove the invisible hand, and Ayn Rand says ... some obvious bullshit.

Two choices: Either the Bushists are total morons or they think we're total morons.

Yesterday's news

The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom, headlines "In Surprise Move, Fed Cuts Key Rate". The Washington Post concurs with "Fed Makes Surprise Move to Calm Markets", though that headline will probably be gone soon. The LA Times has a similar headline on its front page, "Fed delivers unexpected rate cut to calm markets".

Who was surprised? Certainly not the financial markets. This rate cut clearly leaked yesterday in the middle of the afternoon.

I wonder how transparent the leak was. Did everyone get it or just the important players? Silly even to ask the question, I know.