Quote of the Day

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.
   - William Congreve

Quote of the Day

Best trust the happy moments. The days that make us happy make us wise.
   - John Masefield (1878-1967)

Obama's First Fumble

Given the almost flawless campaign Barack Obama ran to go from being a relatively unknown freshman Senator to the next President of the United States, we believe he deserves quite a bit of latitude to demonstrate the wisdom of his decisions. He's pledged to lead by reaching across the aisle and bringing competing factions together as he builds solutions to our country's problems. And unlike The Decider, who talked about being a uniter and then went about proving that he meant not a whit of what he said, we fully expect Obama to bend over backward being President of the entire country, including those with whom he doesn't generally agree.

His decision to invite evangelical minister Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaguration, however, is clearly a mistake that no amount of time will convince us otherwise. While it is true that Warren is the type of evangelical who is putting emphasis on the destructive effects of global warming and efforts to aid the less fortunate, he's also an unrepentant bigot. Just as the segregationists of the last century sought to deny fundamental human rights to a group of persons simply on the basis of who they were, Warren and those of his ilk seek to do the same to another group of American citizens today: homosexuals. A gay basher who smiles from a mega-church pulpit with all the smug self-satisfaction of Jerry Falwell is still nothing more than a gay basher.

Of course, Warren hides behind religion to justify his bigotry. Is there any hateful, destructive position that religion hasn't been trotted out to defend at some point in time? In fact, Warren is so convinced about his moral superiority that he said in a recent interview that even if it were to be proven with absolute certainty that homosexuality is completely a biological condition, he'd still maintain his position that its natural consequential behavior is wrong and sinful.

As much as we're tempted to rant about the psychological control problems of adults who insist on telling other adults what they may and may not willingly do, especially when it's done with a moralistic appeal to some higher authority, this is really about Obama. It's one thing to want to include and work with those who doesn't share your own values; it can be an effective way to disarm them and even perhaps modify their stridency. It's quite another, however, to have a person who proudly advocates against what is quickly becoming this generation's human rights issue deliver the invocation for your first official act as President.

Thankfully, this is a symbolic mistake rather than a substantive one. Rick Warren's presence on January 20th isn't going to destroy the environment or further extend corporate welfare benefits to well-connected CEOs. But symbols are extremely important, too, especially when you've pledged to end the politics of hate and division that's been the right-wing's manna the past eight years. We hope as Barack Obama grows in his new job, he gains a greater appreciation of this and decides he'll no longer give bigots such a prominent platform and recognition no matter how inclusive he's committed to being.

Quote of the Day

The truth is that you can spend your life any way you want, but you can spend it only once.
   - John C. Maxwell

The End of Wall Street

Here's a great article about the insanity that passes for sensible and valuable 'work' in our nation's financial center. It's also further evidence of why the various rescue packages Bush and his compliant Congress should never have been considered, much less passed. Those whose unchecked and insatiable greed created the mess should have suffered the consequences, and those who would have wound up as collateral damage - say, a career teacher now retired on a fixed income whose pension fund would have gone bust - should have been the ones receiving the assistance. But, of course, it hasn't been the teacher who's been collecting obscene amounts of compensation for gross incompetence and negligence and funneling some of that back to Bush administration cronies and various weasels in Congress.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

We are reminded of an old saying on The Street: "Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered." One hopes the experiment of letting greed run amok unchecked and unfettered by governmental oversite and regulation, begun in the ascendancy of Reaganism and sold during the past generation as the solution to all our country's problems and concerns, is finally over. After all, just how catastrophically does the lab have to blow up before someone concludes the underlying theory is ultimately destructive? Unfortunately for most Americans, the worst is yet to come.

Quote of the Day

People should know what you stand for. They should also know what you won't stand for.
   - Anonymous

Quote of the Day

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
   - Kurt Vonnegut

Wall Street's Favorite Whore

By now, it's clear that the $1 trillion and counting bailout of the legalized gambling industry known as Wall Street hasn't done much, if anything, other than ensure large and undeserved bonuses and other such perks will continue to flow to those who created the largest financial meltdown in United States history.

We've wondered for some time why George Bush doesn't just simply back up a fleet of Brink's trucks to the Treasury and skip the pretense that what's he's up to will help the average American. It's always been about ripping off the American Taxpayer for the benefit of his friends and cronies, and his final climatic act has been no exception, executed on such a grand scale even he is undoubtedly amazed that he's gotten away with it.

But Dubya hasn't done all this on his own. He's had plenty of help from Democrats in Congress, and during his latest caper, one in particular: Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. Schumer has long known, both as Wall Street's personal servant and as the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, that all those contributions from the people who pay themselves millions upon millions each year for separating people from their money are really investments expecting a healthy rate of return. Chuck Schumer is not one to disappoint.

This profile of Schumer from the NYT offers a clear perspective of how he's carried the water for Wall Street, how he's been rewarded for doing so, and how it's come to be that the wealthy who took wildly excessive risks are having their losses covered by people like American auto workers, for whom no money is available.

As the financial crisis jolted the nation in September, Senator Charles E. Schumer was consumed. He traded telephone calls with bankers, then became one of the first officials to promote a Wall Street bailout. He spent hours in closed-door briefings and a weekend helping Congressional leaders nail down details of the $700 billion rescue package.

The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.

“We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals,” one executive said, summarizing Mr. Schumer’s remarks. “We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust.”

The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.

Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer could have delivered legislation that addressed the core problems of the financial crisis in such a way that protected the American Taxpayer and the United States Treasury while ensuring those who gambled their way into this mess paid for their mistakes. Instead, it's been the exact opposite. While more and more people lose their homes and their jobs, well-connected but clearly incompetent financial industry executives continue to receive obscene compensation free of regulation and control.

Thanks, Chuck. The Republicans couldn't have done it without you.

Quote of the Day

There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.
   - Anonymous

King Midas In Reverse

Everything George W. Bush has touched in his life has turned out to be a disaster for those around him. It should come as no surprise that the first official history of the American reconstruction of Iraq is but another narrative of the all-encompassing incompetence that almost singularly defines the Bush administration.

The NYT reports

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

Mercifully, the Bush disaster series concludes in five painfully long weeks.

Quote of the Day

It's hard to tell our bad luck from our good luck sometimes; hard to tell for many years to come.
   - Merle Shain (1935-1989)