All We Need To Know

Am I the only person who feels that media coverage of the latest Wall Street turmoil and the efforts to pass the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" has been lacking? I can't escape the feeling that we're being told over and over again that it's important that this thing pass, and the airwaves are full of dire warning of the consequences, but the entire scenario is no less opaque than it was when President Bush warned us that the Sky was falling and Henry Paulson submitted a plan that explicitly rejected any sort of Congressional or Judicial oversight of the Treasury Department's relief efforts. At the same time, this whole thing is often described as Wall Street foisting off $700,000,000,000.00 of their mistakes onto the taxpayers (who we are made to feel are just us ordinary joes, even though Wall Street executives and large corporations pay taxes, too) and walking away clean. The Anglican Church has weighed in on the plan, complaining that it would only take "$5 billion to save six million children's lives." and that "World leaders could find 140 times that amount for the banking system in a week." The Archbishop of York clearly doesn't understand that the EES money isn't meant as a giveaway, in the way true charity is supposed to be, but as an investment that could be reasonably expected to return at least some of the money. But since very few other people seem to either, I suppose it's only to be expected.

A lot was made of the fact that the Dow had its single largest one day POINT drop in history. But that's because there were more points to drop. In percentage terms, more of an absolute measure, the drop was the 17th largest. Still a big deal - but not the biggest catastrophe in the world. But the coverage seemed tailor-made to get people running scared.

In the end, I want the facts, just the facts, and a decent amount of the facts - and then I want to be able to make a semi-informed decision on whether or not this really is a good idea, or as urgent as we're being told that it is. Of course, it's really not possible to go from Zero to Educated in this way in a short span of time. And that's the problem. A whole raft of factors and interests have banded together, through both chance and design to render the whole system so opaque that the only thing that anyone seems able to say now is "trust us." And that's hardly been a plan with good outcomes in the past. So, as John McGuiness so correctly points out, "people need something to demonstrate that we’re not being played for suckers."

But I don't think that we'll ever see that, because I suspect that we ARE being played for suckers. And while the financial press seems to be telling us that we're not being duped, they aren't doing so in such a way that allows one to independently reach that conclusion. Although I suppose that its more accurate to say that the game has been rigged so that if Wall Street loses, everyone loses (while also allowing Wall Street to win while millions of us lose). But it's also true that Wall Street isn't a single entity, any more than "Main Street" is, and to a degree, this mess is something that we would have seen coming, if we hadn't been so busy trying to line our own pockets with what we decided was free money. In the end, our financial system is choking on the very mechanism that it designed to keep up a continuous transfer of wealth up the food chain. Yes, It's going to be painful to press the reset button, but forestalling that isn't going to help the hoi polloi any - and the pain will just be that much greater when it actually does require pressing.

Approval

What does it mean for a candidate to "Approve this message?" MSNBC's FirstRead blog points out that the McCain Campaign released a web spot with the boilerplate candidate approval message - even though it was literally impossible for him to have seen it prior to airing, as he was still on stage at the debate from which comments in the spot are taken...

Oh, That's Just GREAT...

Now, the pirates have tanks... But I suppose the most important question is who's the rocket scientist that decided to send a shipment of hard-core military hardware into some of the most pirate-infested waters on the planet undefended? You'd think someone would have piped up with "Crave pardon, milord, but this isn't the smartest way to go about this."

The Nature of the Beast

“We make a terrible mistake believing we have to find something wrong with the people we won’t vote for.”
“You can’t tell someone else that ground on which they make their voting decision is irrational. We can’t tell anybody they don’t know what they’re doing because they vote for candidate X instead of Y.”
President William Jefferson Clinton

Both of the statements above were quoted in the "Trailhead" blog on Slate. In this particular posting, Christopher Beam makes a very interesting point after the second of these - "That’s actually a good description of what campaigning is." I suspect that this actually applies to both of the lines from President Clinton's recent statements that I've quoted above. Both of these statements were made after Senator Hillary Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination for president had failed, and it's quite interesting to note, when the campaign was still going on, how vocally Clintonistas (one of their more flattering nicknames) found something after something to be very wrong with Senator Obama and claimed that it was irrational to the point of lunacy to vote for him. And of course, the Obamamaniacs returned the favor, round for round, without any high-profile chiding over it.

And, for those of you who may have been living under a stone somewhere, the general election campaign is shaping up in much the same way, with the partisans on both sides digging their trenches deeper and deeper and seeking to drive their Hate Train of choice straight through the other side's living rooms. It's been like this for as long as I can remember - dating back to the Carter administration.

Of course, this goes far beyond politics. You can understand each and every choice we make about or between people to be a vote of sorts, and people constantly seem to feel the need to find fault with the people they don't "vote for."

Which Witch?

There is a video, circulating on YouTube, of now Alaska governor and vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin, receiving an anti-witchcraft blessing from a Kenyan priest. Why is this news? Why has it shown up in the newspaper, and online? Who cares? Now, if Governor Palin herself were going around, claiming to ward people against witchcraft in the name of God, that might be newsworthy. But she was attending a church service, and, basically received a blessing from someone of another culture. And that culture happens to be one of those that still harbors a widespread belief in witchcraft. (Although, given the fact that there are people in the United States who sincerely believe that Harry Potter is an enemy of God, and that Dungeons and Dragons is a gateway to Satan worship, pointing out that a belief in witches in the Third World might be the pot calling the kettle black.)

When you think of all of the functions that politicians attend in a given year, let alone across their careers, it's a pretty safe bet that some strange (to the average American) things happen on a fairly regular basis. I understand that the McCain campaign has been keeping Governor Palin away from the press, and so reporters are scrounging for tidbits to feed to the public, but it seems that this particular non-event is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.