Velvet Verbosity

I’ve decided to move my political rantings over to a newly established, still wet behind the ears, site “Velvet Verbosity Votes“.  I’m still putting the back end together, but with just over 30 days left in the elections, don’t count on the site ever getting too pretty.  It seemed like a better idea to keep my writing site separated from my politics, though deep down I believe you can’t separate your politics from anything you do in your life.   More motivating is that I want to test out the blogging platform Square Space.  If it’s good, I may move Velvet Verbosity to it when my hosting contract is up this winter.

In the meantime, I’ve got a cold that makes me want to squeeze someone’s head in a vice because, you know, misery loves company.

With love,

I just heard that Paul Newman died of cancer yesterday.  I’m not much of a Hollywood fan, but Paul Newman had infiltrated my psyche in other ways.   All those foods.  Seriously, I almost felt like I knew him.  After all, he smiled at me in the grocery store, rode around town with me in my car, and hung out in my kitchen on numerous occasions.

RIP Paul Newman, spaghetti has never been the same since I met you.

Ok, I need to know. Are there any Dexter fans in the house?

With love,

In case you haven’t noticed, I like to take action. Helps me to sleep better at night. Sometimes pushing through to hope gets heavy, so I wanted to share with you two things that are a little more fun or inspiring.

1. The “Show Our Beauty: A Challenge to Women’s Magazines” campaign over at thepoint.com. The campaign asks a major women’s magazine to release an issue sans airbrushing or photoshopping either on the cover or in any of the features. Whew!  Just thinking about that must be making the glamour girls sweat in their Dolce and Gabbana.  No need!  If they agree, you agree to buy two copies of the magazine if and when the untouched photo issue hits the stands. No action is required unless the objective is reached, so it’s a win-win proposition. We’d give women (and especially young girls) a break from the onslaught of “perfect” imagery, and whatever magazine picks up and delivers on the challenge will see some major sales as a reward. Consumer action at its best. It will take you minutes and if no magazine accepts the challenge, you’ve lost nothing. If a magazine does accept and deliver, you’ve seen how joining forces can move mountains - big, airbrushed, glitter topped mountains. Join the campaign here and, of course, spread the word.

2. A Flash of Genius, the movie, based on a true story, about Dr. Robert Kearns, the man who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and had it stolen by Ford (bad Ford). He fought back, and eventually triumphed. I love me a story where one man/woman takes on the Goliath. Anyone want to see it with me? We can make a date to see it on the same night, and have a blog discussion next day. Here’s the trailer.

With love,

I’ll bite my tongue on the shenanigans of the current administration, or how we citizens helped it to happen.  But I can’t resist one teensy weensy link to an op-ed piece by one of my favorites, Barbara Ehrenreich.  Though it touches on current events, it’s just an interesting piece on positive vs. negative vs. realistic thinking.  I also won’t mention how endless yearning may very well be at the root of current events.  Hehe.  I just mentioned it.

I know, I know, you came here to read so you can write.  “Get on with it VV!”  

My pick of the week is LCeel’s piece on yearning, because it broke my heart a little in that good way, what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called “The Genuine Heart of Sadness”.  Thank you LCeel.

The little shopping cart holds all there is of him in the world; all that will be left behind when he is gone. He has his places, his secret places he goes … to find warmth, when needed … to find food, when hungry … to find shelter when the world threatens him. But mostly he goes to the park. And he sits on a bench where he can see the children play. And he remembers. A time when he mattered. A lost and former life. And old blue eyes get teary. And it’s hard to breathe through the yearning in his chest.

• Sweet, utterly sweet yearning words at gsp-shadow.
  
• A reminder from Patsy that every bit, every person, counts.
• Oh we writers, don’t we know this aching yearning that Night Blogger speaks of?
• Another two-for-one, watch JM Twist and Yearn.
• Angelgal is itching to be a challenger.  In the meantime, the story continues…
• And now we know the secret of why the sleep deprived ninja is sleepless.
• Happy Hippy yearns for those three words.
• Susan on the yearning of artists.
• Delicious yearning from another Angel.

Another week, another word.  This evening I had McShirty pull a book off the shelf and choose me a word.  His first point landed on American, but with all my political rantings this week I thought you all might think I staged the whole thing.  So I had him do it again.  Second choice from The Age of Shakespeare:

Moral 

from the sentence, “who at the close recognized that ‘this thing of darkness’ is, even in n intimate sense, ‘his’ - the connection between ‘nature’ and the civil, moral state is expressly considered”.

With love,

The 100 words post will be up this evening. Just a heads up!

There’s no question that something has to be done about the free-fall on Wall Street, but there seems to be a lot of questioning about who should foot the bill, and where accountability and responsibility lies. There are those who feel that the general public is responsible for borrowing far beyond their means to add way more cush to their lives than necessary. Without doubt, Americans have been guilty of this. However, to ignore what was really happening on Wall Street is in its own way irresponsible. Egregiously irresponsible. And to label it “conspiracy theory” is absurd.

Consider this, “Goldman [Sachs], in particular, has been remarkable for the high bonuses it pays to its employees. Goldman’s CEO and two co- presidents were each paid more than $67 million last year.” (See full article here.)

Rather than jump to the conclusion that calling these facts out is nothing more than over-blown, doom-sayer, conspiracy theorizing, let’s for a moment consider another view. People tend to bristle and be dismissive of anything that even remotely smacks of conspiracy theory because it suggests that someone, somewhere, has evil intent, and we have a problem with the theory of evil. Here’s another way to look at it.

When a corporation is discovered dumping toxic waste into a quaint neighborhood’s waters, there are those who believe that string-pullers at that corporation had evil intent, i.e. they were deliberately and knowingly poisoning innocent citizens. There are few cases of true evil where harm is delivered for harm’s sake. It is much more likely that a corporation that is dumping toxic waste is simply doing what corporations are made to do. Make money for their shareholders. Dumping toxins is just a way to cut costs, not an evil way to poison people.

When you can take this same view of Wall Street it is much easier to understand, easier to swallow, and easier to remove the fear that gets in the way of seeing things as they are. No one on Wall Street, no one in the government, set out to screw the American people for the sake of screwing the American people. They were just trying to make a buck, and the more bucks they made, the more they wanted to make. They were just trying to line their own pockets.

When any one person is making multiple millions of dollars, you can bet their decision making is based on how they can make more right now and not on how they can sustain financial stability over the long term. These same people are going to take a loss, but not near the loss that the average taxpayer will take. Even if their income is cut by half or three-quarters, they will still make more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.

I am all for the American dream. I am all for individuals being able to build a reasonable fortune. I’m all for innovation and progress. I’m all for people being paid more if they take more risks, have more education, or work harder. But I ask you, is anyone worth that much more than someone else? Is a CEO of Goldman Sachs worth millions of dollars more than a college professor or a plumber?

When any one person can make millions of dollars by making irresponsible, mis-guided decisions, can we sit back and only point fingers at the family who borrowed too much? That family was not well-versed in economics, but the people on Wall Street were educated in economics, and it was their daily job. Excusing Wall Street’s behavior by thinking they didn’t know is also off mark. Plenty of people knew what was coming. Written almost exactly a year ago by Kuttner:

The federal reserve is still struggling to contain what is already the most severe credit contraction since the Great Depression. Yet in all of the press coverage, commentators have scarcely acknowledged that this old-fashioned panic is a child of deregulation. During the past decade, the financial economy has repeated the excesses of the 1920s — too much borrowing to underwrite too many speculative bets with other people’s money, too far beyond the reach of regulators, setting up the entire economy for a crash.

If Kuttner saw it coming, if Roubini saw it coming, if economic students saw it coming, then you can bet Paulson, Bernanke, and everyone else involved saw it coming too. To now bail out these people at the taxpayer’s expense is nothing short of robbery. And that is evil.

Yes, more politics today. Try as I might, I can’t get my head to wrap around this language of the new legislation that will bail out Wall Street:

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.

Reminder, or reality check, however you want to view it, this legislation when boiled down to its simplest form, is socializing risky debt and loss. So Wall Street wanted privatized profit, and when the shit hit the fan, they want to socialize their losses, meanwhile there is zero help to individual mortgage holders. Here’s Robert Kuttner’s view:

The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street’s dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson — a provision that evokes the Bush administration’s suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security. […]

The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.

Urgency was the same message that was used on the American people to get us to agree to go to war on Iraq. Under the heavy cloud of urgency, we allowed some of our rights to be stripped away. We can’t let the urgency of the economic crisis cloud our judgment today. There are alternatives, not the least of which has to be at minimum, accountability.

Source: Dirty Secret of the Bailout: Thirty-two Words that None Dare Utter (Jason Linkins)

For those that are interested, here is a reading list to start with.

• Chris Martenson on What the Bail Out Really Means, includes details of new legislation.
• John McCain, Economic Radical?
• Wikipedia, The Great Depression. Compare current situation with events leading to the Great Depression for yourself.
• No help for the little guy, yet no caps on Wall Street compensation.
• Why Obama has my vote.
• And why you couldn’t pay me to vote for McCain

And where are these people now?

I’m not a political writer. I simply don’t have enough background in history, politics, or economics to provide regular commentary. I am, however, a U.S. citizen, and as such, I feel a responsibility to talk about what is happening right in front of our faces. I feel silly writing “fluff” while our economic system is in collapse, our government is breaking the constitution, and greed run amok is leading rampant hypocrisy and downright criminal behavior.

I feel a responsibility to take a stand, state my position, and perhaps inspire dialogue and debate. No matter your position in life, or your interests, if you are silent and inactive in these matters you are allowing our government to essentially rob us, and then turn around and ask us to pay ourselves back.

In Steven G. Brant’s words:

Think about this. Our government has just decided — without asking any of us, including our Congressional representatives — that $85 billion more of our money should be used to cover the actions of (and pardon the unsophisticated language here) stupid, greedy, criminal people. Stupid, because they didn’t have a clue that what they were doing would have such negative consequences. Greedy, because all they could see were short term dollar signs in front of their eyes. Criminal, because they just robbed you and me of $85 billion dollars by holding a “we’re too big to fail” gun to the head of the US government.

As citizens, we can no longer make the mistake of believing Bush’s rhetoric. As a nation, we believed him when he told us that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the 9-11 attacks, and we did not stop to question his actions in Iraq. We’re still there, and there is still not one shred of convincing evidence that Bin Laden was responsible, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. We elected the man to a second term and stood by silently as our rights were taken away, as the constitution was breached, because we were led to believe that we were being taken care of.

We should be alarmed. We should be coordinating, gathering, debating, planning, and taking action. What is so alarming about the current economic crisis is that had we, as citizens, not been asleep at the wheel, we would have seen this coming. If we want a democracy, and we do, we have to be ACTIVE in understanding what the issues are, active in understanding the economy, foreign policy, government systems, laws, etc. While we are busy defending our “rights” to privacy (i.e. internet anonymity) we allowed the government to pass legislation that would increase things like racial profiling and allow other breaches of our privacy like illegal phone tapping. While we are busy defending the first amendment to protect our rights to access violent video games, ‘gangsta’ rap, pornography, etc, we have collectively stood by while journalists were arrested for trying to report on the news, while whistle-blowers lost their jobs and were swept under the rug. Instead of being engaged citizens, we were getting our “entertainment” on, and the only things that ever really got our attention was when that entertainment lifestyle suddenly came under threat.

We are a nation with our priorities out of whack. We have been remiss in our pursuit of individual success to the detriment of the very foundation of what made all of our luxuries possible in the first place. We have abused the bill of rights to pursue our own selfish wants. We have turned away from our responsibilities in hopes that someone else would take care of things. A government “for the people and by the people” requires citizen action, and not just at the voting booth. We owe it to our country to know what the hell is really going on so that we can make the right decisions, mobilize when necessary, and take action swiftly.

It is already too late to stop the likely $700 billion bail-out of Wall Street. The question is, why aren’t we raising our collective voice to ask some obvious questions. Where is this money coming from? How will it be repaid? What is the real plan here? Where was this money when we needed it for schools, health-care, scientific research, or higher education? When will the so-called “trickle-down” actually manifest so that every single family in America that is working full time can earn a livable wage? Why did the government support policies that created a wildly unstable and skewed distribution of wealth, and why should the taxpayers bail out the few at the top without assurances that something will be done to balance out the distribution? 

There are more. Many more. And we need to be asking them, out loud. To each other, to big business, and to our elected officials. We need to increase the volume until we are heard AND answered. We need to grow up, put down the entertainment, and investigate our government’s policies deeply. We need to be citizens of America.