Velvet Verbosity

This is one political post I will make no apologies for.  In all of our distraction with the very good cause of Haiti, somehow this law got passed by the Supreme Court right under our noses, with so few mentions in the press as to be suspiciously negligible, and…well, just watch Keith Olbermann explain exactly what this means for us.  This is the most important thing I’ve shared with you, my readers, since the start of this blog.  Please pass it on.

For more background, start here.

Olbermann is right.  The passing of this law has just monumentally, and possibly irrevocably, changed politics in this country.  It’s not like there wasn’t already collusion between big corporate money and politics, but until two days ago, such things were at least still seen as unlawful and corrupt. Today, thanks to this new law, corporations can now legally pour as much money as they want into a candidate.

Think about that.

And it’s not just Liberals like Olbermann that are stunned and dismayed.  Conservatives too.  The Senior Editor of Veterans Today has called for the arrest of the 5 Supreme Court Justices that passed this law.

This is not the kind of news that you swallow, feel a little angry about, and then simply move on to the next distracting thing.  This is a historical moment, and left unchecked, will radically alter the political trajectory of this country.  This is the kind of news that requires action.

So, as Keith Olbermann asks, “What are you going to do about it?”

The news just keeps getting weirder and weirder.  Every time I think it can’t get any more outrageous, I turn on the news, or go to a news website, and there it is.  I blink, thinking it must be an illusion, that I read wrong or heard wrong, but nope.  I then surf the net or the channels looking for signs of outrage to find little to none.  It is so mind boggling and crazy making that I’m just going to assume that I somehow passed into a parallel universe that looks just like the relatively normal one I used to be in, but here, everything is crazy.  This explanation keeps me from losing my mind.

So, did you hear that Larry Flint and his buddies are going to hit the govuhmint up for a sweet $5 billion? His reasoning?

“People are too depressed to be sexually active.  This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

Yes, you’re right Larry, because Hustler and internet porn is bringing people closer together everywhere.  In fact, wives all over the globe are incredibly thankful for the super hot techniques that their men are picking up from this type of porn.  Yeah, women totally love pretending to be porn stars while their sexual needs go unmet.  Pshhhhh.  Shut up Larry.

It wasn’t enough when Wall Street executives went on luxury business retreats with their bailout money.  No, the financial news just had to go and get weirder.  Either The Onion has bought up all the major news networks and is pulling the all time best nation-wide prank on all of us right now, or we have managed to hit an all time low as a nation.  Holy crap.

Update: Shout out to I,Rodius.   When I posted this story, I had a moment of hesitation as I looked at the picture of Mr. Flint’s face and realized what a bloated ego he is and how he’s probably sitting back watching the publicity fly, laughing all the way to the bank.  I hesitated because I don’t like to be part of such games.  I decided to post this anyway for a few reasons.  1) I wanted to post Bill Moyer’s piece, and these two stories intersected beautifully and this way I 2) myself could ride the shirt tails of LF’s publicity.  I see this post as part of an antidote, like when the last fairy came in to influence the curse on Sleeping Beauty.   Yeah, so this is me, waving my magic wand back at ya.  And 3) because I’ve observed my whole life the silence of women when it comes to issues of pornorgraphy/anti-pornography.  I never understood it very well, it was this huge enigma to me.  I could see it written all over their faces, in their body posture, and in their mouths that they wanted to speak how they really felt, but didn’t dare lest they be accused of being insecure, feminazi-ish, or a prude.  There was never a day, or a specific reason I made the decision, I just knew I was always going to say what these women were afraid to because of people who make posters like this:

Because they are the same kind of people that make posters like this one:

Sweet.

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,

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.