Thursday, 11 October 2007
Out of town
I'm away from home for three days, so hope to have a lot to comment on when I get back. Bye for now.
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
Yankees Lose
I’m not sad to see the Yankees gazillion-dollar baseball team head for the showers though most of my neighbors are, another example of the irrationality that surrounds spectator sports. What those pampered millionaires have to do with the community spirit that makes you want to root for the home team is beyond me. But people think that because they play their home games in the Bronx, that makes them family, sort of like my feelings of kinship with people whose post office box numbers are similar to mine.
I actually enjoy the game of baseball because I once played it (badly), know the rules and can get caught up in the unfolding contest along with all the sub-narratives. But the last time I went to see a game at Yankee Stadium, owner Steinbrenner made us all stand up for the national anthem at the seventh-inning stretch, ‘to support our troops fighting for freedom in Iraq.’ I don’t see it quite that way, but freedom of opinion wasn’t one of the values on display that night on the diamond or up in the stands either.
There is always baseball down in Inwood Hill Park out my back door, and some of them are organized teams with uniforms and girlfriends sitting behind the chicken wire, plenty of illicit beer drinking and platoons of little kids running around one of the greenest corners of Manhattan adjacent to a nature preserve. If I knew any of the guys, I’d probably be moved to go see their moments of glory and disappointment. But the Yankees? Who dey?
I actually enjoy the game of baseball because I once played it (badly), know the rules and can get caught up in the unfolding contest along with all the sub-narratives. But the last time I went to see a game at Yankee Stadium, owner Steinbrenner made us all stand up for the national anthem at the seventh-inning stretch, ‘to support our troops fighting for freedom in Iraq.’ I don’t see it quite that way, but freedom of opinion wasn’t one of the values on display that night on the diamond or up in the stands either.
There is always baseball down in Inwood Hill Park out my back door, and some of them are organized teams with uniforms and girlfriends sitting behind the chicken wire, plenty of illicit beer drinking and platoons of little kids running around one of the greenest corners of Manhattan adjacent to a nature preserve. If I knew any of the guys, I’d probably be moved to go see their moments of glory and disappointment. But the Yankees? Who dey?
Monday, 8 October 2007
If patient weakens, increase dosage
The business pages continue to fascinate these days. Credit is back in style scarcely a month after the ‘perfect storm’ August meltdown that reestablished the law of gravity in the housing finance market. It’s amazing that the financial world can adjust to these disturbing developments with such aplomb and find a spin that suits their interests, like the way Bush regularly discovers ‘progress’ in Iraq.
The money shovelers cried for relief from the Fed a few weeks ago when a flood of bad loan packages jerryrigged out of stacks of bad mortgages threatened to unleash panic selling. And the Fed obliged in September with a big rate cut to bail out the financiers.
But lo and behold, things now are worse than ever for the average Joe. After dipping into their inflated housing values with equity loans, Friday’s figures show that consumers now are turning back to their credit cards of all things—just the kind of hara-kiri move the financial counselors tell you to avoid.
If I read these stories right, people who used to get home equity cash at 8 or 9% are instead using credit card debt for which they’ll pay 18 or 20% or more, not to mention late fees and penalties, thus improving their chances of slipping down the hidey-hole of insolvency.
So two months after the recent crunch, the average household budget is more leveraged than ever, and the full ripple effects of the home-building collapse haven’t yet kicked in. I can’t make sense of the statistics, but there’s something disturbing about the way our entire economic edifice is built upon this mountain of greater and greater debt, especially given its very recent totters.
Or as George Bush would say, Well, that failed. Let's try it again!
The money shovelers cried for relief from the Fed a few weeks ago when a flood of bad loan packages jerryrigged out of stacks of bad mortgages threatened to unleash panic selling. And the Fed obliged in September with a big rate cut to bail out the financiers.
But lo and behold, things now are worse than ever for the average Joe. After dipping into their inflated housing values with equity loans, Friday’s figures show that consumers now are turning back to their credit cards of all things—just the kind of hara-kiri move the financial counselors tell you to avoid.
If I read these stories right, people who used to get home equity cash at 8 or 9% are instead using credit card debt for which they’ll pay 18 or 20% or more, not to mention late fees and penalties, thus improving their chances of slipping down the hidey-hole of insolvency.
So two months after the recent crunch, the average household budget is more leveraged than ever, and the full ripple effects of the home-building collapse haven’t yet kicked in. I can’t make sense of the statistics, but there’s something disturbing about the way our entire economic edifice is built upon this mountain of greater and greater debt, especially given its very recent totters.
Or as George Bush would say, Well, that failed. Let's try it again!
Sunday, 7 October 2007
God Paints
Just as we’re getting yet another confirmation that the United States of America tortures defenseless prisoners comes the news that the entire family of one Augusto Pinochet has been rounded up and indicted for corruption.
This juxtaposition of events is too aesthetically satisfying to be entirely coincidental. Sometimes God paints with a marvelous palette.
Pinochet’s fans among the rich and privileged in Chile never really minded that he and his goons had women raped by trained dogs or threw their half-alive torture victims out of helicopters. But when it was revealed that he was also stealing THEIR money, that was too much. Now it turns out his wife, children, other relatives and top retainers were all in on it as well—not that that should surprise anyone.
During the Pinochet years any thought of accountability for the secret police terror apparatus seemed so unlikely as to be surreal given its origins in the Chilean army. The courts were corrupted and intimidated, and public opinion divided, not that it mattered much for the first decade or so.
Of course, the information was there all along, just as it is here, but the propaganda machine cranked out disinformation just clever enough to allow the regime’s supporters to pretend it wasn’t happening and the apolitical to ignore it.
But all the justifications, policy twists, spinmeistering, cover-ups, clandestine operations, secret dungeons, hiding of remains, the whole structure typical of authoritarian regimes including, yes, anti-terrorism campaigns—none of it was enough to stave off judgment day for these low-lifes. They seem invincible at first, but the moral rot at the center cannot be halted. It spreads and oozes outward bit by bit until the stench is overpowering, like the smell of cadavers dumped in a cellar.
Twenty years later the parade of former thugs and goons including their notorious chief, lower-ranking assassins and torturers, their superiors, the superiors of their superiors and at long last Pinochet himself faced the black robes, many of them going off to jail. They never believed it could happen to them. But they were wrong.
The faux shock from the Democrats at the latest revelations about torture U.S.A.-style is part of a familiar minuet as well, as if anyone not on life support could doubt what has been going on since the ‘War of Terror’ was announced. Pat Leahy and Senator Rockefeller can be shocked! shocked! to hear of secret memoranda if they like. But if this president hasn’t been trumpeting from the White House roof that he’ll ignore any laws dealing with treatment of prisoners since Day One, then I need to relearn English.
I may not live long enough to see it, but I have no doubt that if the biped race survives, the morally depraved perpetrators and enablers of the Bush regime will also face the music for their multiple crimes.
Patience.
This juxtaposition of events is too aesthetically satisfying to be entirely coincidental. Sometimes God paints with a marvelous palette.
Pinochet’s fans among the rich and privileged in Chile never really minded that he and his goons had women raped by trained dogs or threw their half-alive torture victims out of helicopters. But when it was revealed that he was also stealing THEIR money, that was too much. Now it turns out his wife, children, other relatives and top retainers were all in on it as well—not that that should surprise anyone.
During the Pinochet years any thought of accountability for the secret police terror apparatus seemed so unlikely as to be surreal given its origins in the Chilean army. The courts were corrupted and intimidated, and public opinion divided, not that it mattered much for the first decade or so.
Of course, the information was there all along, just as it is here, but the propaganda machine cranked out disinformation just clever enough to allow the regime’s supporters to pretend it wasn’t happening and the apolitical to ignore it.
But all the justifications, policy twists, spinmeistering, cover-ups, clandestine operations, secret dungeons, hiding of remains, the whole structure typical of authoritarian regimes including, yes, anti-terrorism campaigns—none of it was enough to stave off judgment day for these low-lifes. They seem invincible at first, but the moral rot at the center cannot be halted. It spreads and oozes outward bit by bit until the stench is overpowering, like the smell of cadavers dumped in a cellar.
Twenty years later the parade of former thugs and goons including their notorious chief, lower-ranking assassins and torturers, their superiors, the superiors of their superiors and at long last Pinochet himself faced the black robes, many of them going off to jail. They never believed it could happen to them. But they were wrong.
The faux shock from the Democrats at the latest revelations about torture U.S.A.-style is part of a familiar minuet as well, as if anyone not on life support could doubt what has been going on since the ‘War of Terror’ was announced. Pat Leahy and Senator Rockefeller can be shocked! shocked! to hear of secret memoranda if they like. But if this president hasn’t been trumpeting from the White House roof that he’ll ignore any laws dealing with treatment of prisoners since Day One, then I need to relearn English.
I may not live long enough to see it, but I have no doubt that if the biped race survives, the morally depraved perpetrators and enablers of the Bush regime will also face the music for their multiple crimes.
Patience.
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Explain to me high finance
It’s a little early for Christmas, but Wall Street is hymning ‘Joy to the World’ just a month after the sudden meltdown that the smart guys said no one could possibly have seen coming while losing tons of our hard-earned money. Bells are ringing, cash is flowing, the Fed is doing what it’s told, and all’s right with the world.
Except.
‘The housing bubble has burst, prices are going to collapse, and sales are going to fall through the floor.’ That’s a housing economist quoted by AP Tuesday as the Dow average was floating back above the 14,000 mark.
Now, explain to me how stocks can be climbing toward Everest while one of the most important industries in our consumer-dependent economy is tanking. Every single statistic coming out these days dealing with mortgages, housing prices, new home sales, existing home sales and the like repeats the same litany: buyers have disappeared, and those few who could buy and want to can’t get financing.
The goofball securitization process by which worthless mortgages got pretty bows tied onto them and resold as arcane investment vehicles blew a massive, gaping hole into the whole system. But now it’s all fixed—except that it isn’t. Nonetheless, all the geniuses are swooping back into stocks.
These are the same geniuses who didn’t see the August double hurricane coming and lost a bundle. But now they’ve got it right. Right?
Except.
‘The housing bubble has burst, prices are going to collapse, and sales are going to fall through the floor.’ That’s a housing economist quoted by AP Tuesday as the Dow average was floating back above the 14,000 mark.
Now, explain to me how stocks can be climbing toward Everest while one of the most important industries in our consumer-dependent economy is tanking. Every single statistic coming out these days dealing with mortgages, housing prices, new home sales, existing home sales and the like repeats the same litany: buyers have disappeared, and those few who could buy and want to can’t get financing.
The goofball securitization process by which worthless mortgages got pretty bows tied onto them and resold as arcane investment vehicles blew a massive, gaping hole into the whole system. But now it’s all fixed—except that it isn’t. Nonetheless, all the geniuses are swooping back into stocks.
These are the same geniuses who didn’t see the August double hurricane coming and lost a bundle. But now they’ve got it right. Right?
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Faludi/McCandless
Susan Faludi has a new book coming out, and I want to read it just from the anecdote she told the Times in an interview last week. Faludi won a Pulitzer for her book on the backlash against the women’s movement and followed it with ‘Stiffed,’ about how our society pulls the rug out from under men, too.
After the 9/11 attacks a reporter called Faludi to get a response and at one point said to her gleefully, Well, this pushes feminism off the map, doesn’t it? She was so dumbfounded that she dropped her current project and started researching this new book.
Faludi is definitely onto something.
It’s an ongoing mystery to me how anyone can take seriously the transparent tough-guy posturing by the chicken hawks that has led our sorry world into its present disaster. But there must be a strong appeal in it and one that doesn’t have to be based on anything real (such as military service, for example). The remark Faludi cites suggests that it’s not this or that policy people are responding to, it’s the whole hip-hop posture, the revenge mode, the need to show ‘them’ that we’re not lying down and taking it like any wuss.
You heard the same sentiments after 9/11 in a more buttoned-down version from the commentators like Armitrage and Kissinger, too, as if the entire foreign policy establishment decided to appear at the UN covered in bling. At least now we know what has been happening to us all these years—testosterone poisoning. Is there an antidote?
***
Into the Wild
The strange story of Christopher McCandless that appeared in the New Yorker years ago always stuck in my mind, so I was very curious about the film made out of the Jon Krakauer book. It’s long and taxing—and a marvel. I was mostly paying attention to the way the young protagonist, rejecting society and his own family, took chance after chance on the road and kept pulling them off, sometimes brilliantly. Then about halfway through I realized that as a piece of visual art the film was doing the same thing.
Throughout his picaresque journey McCandless stirred affection and love in people, then left them and pushed himself on to more and more extreme situations. The film offers some partial explanation but wisely pulls back and leaves him and his choices in the realm of human mystery.
The only missing piece, to my mind, was any attempt to examine his sense of masculinity. I say this as someone who also wondered what it meant to be a man at about the same age and exposed myself to dangers as a test. Was there something in his make-up that told him he didn’t measure up? Was that part of the foolhardy tempting of the wilderness that ended his life?
After the 9/11 attacks a reporter called Faludi to get a response and at one point said to her gleefully, Well, this pushes feminism off the map, doesn’t it? She was so dumbfounded that she dropped her current project and started researching this new book.
Faludi is definitely onto something.
It’s an ongoing mystery to me how anyone can take seriously the transparent tough-guy posturing by the chicken hawks that has led our sorry world into its present disaster. But there must be a strong appeal in it and one that doesn’t have to be based on anything real (such as military service, for example). The remark Faludi cites suggests that it’s not this or that policy people are responding to, it’s the whole hip-hop posture, the revenge mode, the need to show ‘them’ that we’re not lying down and taking it like any wuss.
You heard the same sentiments after 9/11 in a more buttoned-down version from the commentators like Armitrage and Kissinger, too, as if the entire foreign policy establishment decided to appear at the UN covered in bling. At least now we know what has been happening to us all these years—testosterone poisoning. Is there an antidote?
***
Into the Wild
The strange story of Christopher McCandless that appeared in the New Yorker years ago always stuck in my mind, so I was very curious about the film made out of the Jon Krakauer book. It’s long and taxing—and a marvel. I was mostly paying attention to the way the young protagonist, rejecting society and his own family, took chance after chance on the road and kept pulling them off, sometimes brilliantly. Then about halfway through I realized that as a piece of visual art the film was doing the same thing.
Throughout his picaresque journey McCandless stirred affection and love in people, then left them and pushed himself on to more and more extreme situations. The film offers some partial explanation but wisely pulls back and leaves him and his choices in the realm of human mystery.
The only missing piece, to my mind, was any attempt to examine his sense of masculinity. I say this as someone who also wondered what it meant to be a man at about the same age and exposed myself to dangers as a test. Was there something in his make-up that told him he didn’t measure up? Was that part of the foolhardy tempting of the wilderness that ended his life?
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
And did that dream frighten you, Mr Bolton?
Can these guys hear themselves? Do they see themselves on TV afterward and cringe? Apparently not. The exaggerated way the powermonger boys strut their macho stuff would embarrass a Panamanian boxing champion.
For example, former US Enforcer to the United Nations John Bolton recently called for whacking Iran because Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ‘pushing out’.
We wouldn’t want one of our rival males to successfully ‘push out’, now would we?
Back in the Reagan days we used to go to Capitol Hill to cover Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger sounding regular alarms about the Soviet intentions in Afghanistan. Weinberger actually once spent a whole morning testifying to a committee there about the ‘Soviet thrusting movements’ in the Persian Gulf. We were in the back howling, but apparently no one else even got the joke.
Bolton said Ahmadinejad is ‘not receiving adequate push-back’ from the West. Does that sound like a plea for marriage counseling to anyone?
Larry Craig, don’t leave us!
For example, former US Enforcer to the United Nations John Bolton recently called for whacking Iran because Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ‘pushing out’.
We wouldn’t want one of our rival males to successfully ‘push out’, now would we?
Back in the Reagan days we used to go to Capitol Hill to cover Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger sounding regular alarms about the Soviet intentions in Afghanistan. Weinberger actually once spent a whole morning testifying to a committee there about the ‘Soviet thrusting movements’ in the Persian Gulf. We were in the back howling, but apparently no one else even got the joke.
Bolton said Ahmadinejad is ‘not receiving adequate push-back’ from the West. Does that sound like a plea for marriage counseling to anyone?
Larry Craig, don’t leave us!
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