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Saturday, June 25, 2005A few days old, but here's Dr. Weevil psychoanalyzing those who fear Falwell more than Osama.He'd also like you to send money to pay his car insurance. The TurkeyBlog's tip jar works too, by the way. Alas, this enthusiastic push for donations is paired with little in the way of exciting content. Skimming the blogs, it doesn't look like anybody found in today much more than a lazy Saturday. For your trouble, a bad joke: How do you tell a Congressman from a book? The book has a spine. Weak, I know. But, as I said, a really lazy Saturday. Should mention the novelty of Iraqi terrorists now going after a policeman's actual home. Must make all the real Muslims proud when they read about that one, eh? 
posted by gbarto at 10:51 PM Friday, June 24, 2005Hurrah for the Religion of Peace, now saving souls in Thailand!Actually, the headline reads: Buddhist couple beheaded
posted by gbarto at 6:49 PM Good point from Cicero: Red, white, or pink roses. Collies or Great Danes.He's talking about the first drug tailored to a specific race, and how those who prefer justice to medicine feel about it.
posted by gbarto at 6:40 PM Al Gore used to rail about the people versus the powerful. I wish I'd realized how right he was! The New York Times favors Kelo. Big surprise. As Kelo-Ammendment points out, they got New York state to boot a family business so they could get the land for their new headquarters cheap. Bastards. The Times says the block was blighted. They know so because Jayson Blair filed a report from the scene. * * * Now, thanks to the libs on the Supreme Court, the whole country can know the joy of living in Timseland. When they're bulldozing your house - that's a drug den because you were growing medical marijuana - to build a strip mall, take a moment to remember that Clarence Thomas and Sandy O'Connor were on your side. And send your thank you notes to Breyer and Ginsburg and Stevens for their defense of the state against those pesky citizens.
posted by gbarto at 5:57 PM Thursday, June 23, 2005Re: Kelo(via Insty) Used to be you found a nice piece of property in a nice place at a nice price, you bought it. After all, you could live on it and enjoy the view, or you could sell it for a tidy profit. Now, you find a nice piece of property in a nice place at a nice price, you look for something a little less nice. Not so ghetto-ey that it will be condemned, of course. But ugly enough that nobody with better connections might decide to take it away. A day ago, I could think of no greater idiocy than the Flag Burning Amendment. Thanks to the Supreme Court for expanding my imagination.
posted by gbarto at 8:25 PM Wednesday, June 22, 2005In response to a story about animal rights groups being targeted under terrorism law, Marcus writes:If this is their top "domestic terrorism" issue we should close the whole bloody Dept. of Homeland Security and fire half the FBI.Don't know much about the particular story, but I like the sentiment anyway. Must be hell to be from the amalgamated agency whose component parts took granny's nail clippers at the same time they were renewing the dramatically deceased Mohammed Atta's papers. I keep expecting us to go on a red alert one of these days. Not that the danger will be newly significant, but the orange and yellow markers that are the most visible implements in our Homeland Security program must be about dry.
posted by gbarto at 11:21 PM  Have you taken the MIT blogger survey yet?
posted by gbarto at 10:30 PM Why isn't this man a presidential adviser? Announcing an exit date would be dumber than using a taffy puller to epilate your scrotum.Would that the average Democratic Senator had half as much insight.
posted by gbarto at 3:39 PM House Approves Amendment on Flag DesecrationSenate Battle Is KeyA tearful Dick Durbin told reporters that, his eyes newly awakened to the cause of liberty, he would be wholeheartedly supporting the measure. [Just kidding.] Knowing that any attempt at thoughtful comment will turn into an angry rant about the undermining of political speech, we'll limit ourselves to noting that only a jackass would support this measure. (And even some jackasses know better!)
posted by gbarto at 3:29 PM Monday, June 20, 2005In the post below, I offered a rather disturbing picture of where we stand economically. Comes the question: What do we do about it and how do we work past it?While the cause of degeneration is different, I find something Schumpeterian in my suggestion that democratic capitalism will be its own undoing. But note that the problem is not market forces, but their stifling. What to do? Nothing. How do we work past current conditions? Let the market handle it. I wrote below about nurses' unions, among other things. Right now, there is a shortage of nurses. But there are shortages for workers in a lot of categories. Some of these spots are being filled by volunteers: When the public sector gets too expensive, you get the Rotary Club to pick up the highway for free, get parent volunteers at school and give high school seniors points toward their civic merit grade for helping out at the hospital. In a few years, we'll still have a nurses' shortage. We'll also have unemployed nurses. Why? Entitlement mentalities about health care - both on the part of unionized health care workers and patients from certain sectors have screwed up the market. As a result, there are rising numbers of uninsured. In the worst case, these folks go without care or go bankrupt. More likely, the hospital collects a small percentage and writes off the rest. Right now, we're in a curious spiral: uninsured are treated, costs for the insured go up, insurance gets too expensive, more lose insurance, repeat. We're in the process of killing our current health care financing system. What replaces it? National health care? Why not? It's worked great for Canada and England. I hear our doctors are really enthusiastic about moving to single payer. Right? Our health care system is highly artificial: employer financed health care was created as a way to lift union pay in the face of wage controls. It was the first move that made unions a subset of the rich - they didn't have to worry about illness the way the rest of us did. When wage controls came off, tax deductions for employer health care costs popped up as a way to keep the big business-union racket going with the big players avoiding what the rest of the citizenry had to deal with. But then they kept expanding the entitlement to maintain support for it. It's now collapsing under its own weight because it's artificial, designed not for pure economic motives but in response to market unrealities created by regulatory regimes. The problem is since the people who need care and the people paying the bills are different, everything got skewed. Now it's skewed enough that a lot of clinics in poorer areas are mostly doing fee for service and indigent medicine. When our old system collapses, the one fortunate thing is that a serviceable, albeit inadequate, system will be waiting to take its place. Health care provides just one place for looking at what I believe is ultimately going to happen: From Social Security to union jobs to public education, we're going to find out that the world is capitalist, no matter what you try to regulate it to be, and that the artificial systems, like any other business with a lousy business model, are going to collapse. We've done this a few times before. The depression was the roughest. But the 1990 recession provides a more hopeful model: Schumpeterian creative destruction freed resources - i.e. smart people in useless jobs - for more productive uses. The really useful thing, though, about the 1990 recession is it didn't hit the entire economy at once. I think that Enron, MCI, the internet boom and bust, etc, are the rocky start to a smoother era, one in which we experience a rolling collapse, and a rolling rebuilding. It will feel less secure than what we're used to because the notion of anything being too big to fail will be gone. But in reality, it will be more secure because the very sense of insecurity will force us to move from investing wasted energy on preserving that which is already lost to thinking more about what comes next. The good news in my predictions, if you run with folks like Marcus, is that those hardest hit in the long run will be those who preferred sending a few more folks to the unemployment line to facing the realities of the market place. The good news for us all is that in the emerging environment, those who thrive will not be the ones who wring the most out of those at the bottom but those who see what the future holds and cash in in the process of getting us there.
posted by gbarto at 11:29 PM Marcus is on a tear today. One might expect him to storm the barricades of capitalism, were they not everywhere. Still, he raises a couple useful points. The point of greatest interest is what exactly it means to be a limousine liberal. The short answer, I believe, can best be expressed by an opposition: The difference between an exploitative "capitalist" and a limousine "liberal" is that the limousine liberal feels bad about what he would not change whereas the exploitative capitalist doesn't. One notes, for example, that the doors to the Kennedy compound are not traditionally thrown open to the homeless on cold, winter nights. And Teddy has not acquired a reputation for adjusting tips upwards to assure the doorman, waiters and others he encounters are brought up to what he considers a living wage. One notes, as well, that the Kennedy estates have traditionally been admired for the way they kept the money in the family, not the way they carefully gave back to the proles a share of what old Joe had sponged off of those masses by means of widespread addiction to drink. I do not pick on the Kennedys because they are singularly open to criticism. I pick on them because it is fun. Still, there are many others like them, liberals compassionate to excess when asked to hold forth yet careful not to let an extra dime slip into the hands of either the exploited Italian worker who stitched their leather shoes nor the exploited salesman who fitted them for it. The question we face, though, is what to do about it. Do we lift up our voices in praise for the exploitative capitalist who is honest about it? Do we condemn the whole lot? The problem you run into is that the wealthy classes have their purpose too. They funded Columbus' voyage, funded the East India Company, funded many of the corporations of yesterday and today that have, by means of losing billions on bad ideas, stumbled on a few good ideas that have done us well. The rich, provided they combine the right measure of cleverness and gullibility, provide us with someone prepared to lose enough money in the search for the next winner that a highly organized and specialized society can push forward. Don't believe me? Look how well a country does once it nationalizes industry and the rich take flight. The big problem we face today is a lack of the properly hyper-rich, those looking for the next big thing rather than merely seeking to maintain their capital by means of squeezing ever more out of their workers while minimizing risk. As the middle class has become the new rich, the rich have become increasingly middle class in their habits. As in, why invest in a brand new idea that may or may not work when you can start a factory for a product with an existing market, locate it in a poorer region and simultaneously impoverish overpaid workers at the old factory, which is undersold, and the new one where the workers will put up with whatever it takes to keep their job. The real killer in globalism is not that good jobs are being shipped overseas. It's that instead of using the freed capital to develop the next big thing, the folks at the top are hoarding it for the next recession, lawsuit, etc. A particularly insidious problem in this mess is a subset of the rich that Marcus ostensibly speaks for: The unions. GM spent as much on health care last year as it spent on steel. Think about that, folks. The uninsured pizza delivery boy in the hatchback who can barely make car payments and definitely can't afford a medical emergency? A quarter of his income is going to make sure that 50 year old auto workers in Detroit can keep their boat and cabin in Northern Michigan while somebody else picks up the bill if he has heart problems. If the pizza guy gets sick, he loses his job, loses his car and goes bankrupt when his credit runs out. If the union guy gets sick - and enough of his buddies do too - the pizza delivery guy's car payment goes up the next time he needs a new car - with no improvement in the car. Here in California, we've got teachers' unions and nurses' unions alleging that Schwarzenegger is the Boston strangler's first cousin because he thinks tenure and benefits need to be limited. We hear radio ads about how awful it is that the governor wants to balance the budget on the backs of teachers and nurses - oops, of kids and the sick. But on who else's back might you balance it. The superrich in California are wealthy in stock options they can't cash out and homes that (right now) can only be sold at a loss. The folks with free income are the public sector workers whose pay goes up like clockwork come what may. If anybody else's business is in the red, no bonuses or raises is the least of the problem. Reduced hours and reduced wages - for you or your replacement if you won't take the cut - are the real story. And this, folks, is not about jobs shipped to India. It's about a system that decided unions and a few other categories were entitled, no matter what, and that balanced the budgets on the backs of the rest of us. All that's happening now is that the unions got greedy enough that they couldn't be sustained. Twenty-five years ago, it was an embarrassment to drive a foreign car (save for BMW and a few other high end marks). It meant that not only were you poor, but you didn't give a damn about your country. That stigma's gone. Detroit had ten years to take advantage of it by showing that once America got moving, it couldn't be stopped. In that time, Detroit didn't do jack. Twenty-five years ago, using American steel in America was obvious. How could you pay to ship it from another continent when there was a yard next door? The Pennsylvania and Ohio plants had ten years to take advantage of this. In that time, they didn't do jack. To this day, the only efficient steel producers in the US are, by and large, the minimills. Twenty-five years ago, American textile workers enjoyed protections that kept the clothing prices high and foreign workers out. They had a decade or two to streamline and show that American quality and ingenuity beat out shoddy but cheap foreign products any day of the week. They sat on their hands. Unions aren't the idle rich, but they act like it. Given a form of capital - borrowed time in which to catch up - they turn their attention almost invariably to maximizing profits today as opposed to preparing for tomorrow. As sure as the railroads fought the emerging airlines rather than using logistical expertise to become the freighters of tomorrow, unions have fought the emerging labor markets rather that using their lead in proximity to market and superior skills to maintain an edge. Bottom line: Marcus' diagnosis of what happens today isn't always that far off. But it misses the point that our biggest problem is not exploitation by the wealthy but the creation of new classes that feel entitled to the trappings of wealth, including an investor class that is less interested in being a part of the next Microsoft than getting 2% above market while the companies they invest in lay off another ten or fifteen hundred workers to keep dividends even. This is not a problem of excessive wealth, but of wealth wedded to a poverty mentality. George W. isn't always the sharpest crayon in the box, but he hit the nail on the head when he said we need to make the pie higher. The solution in the long run, isn't to create barriers that allow unions or others to join the investor class in exploiting the rest of us. It's to keep pushing for the open flow of information to follow the flow of goods. We brought down the Soviets with blue jeans and rock and roll. We'll bring down the slave-labor "capitalism" of China the same way. That Microsoft is protecting prying Chinese eyes from words like freedom and democracy tells us we're already making inroads. By the way, I realize Marcus looks a little at the unions as exploiters bit. But I don't think he quite gets to the real point, namely that this is no longer between rich and poor, unions and management or any other such old line dichotomy. Rather, this is a battle between those who have managed to entrench their privileges in social and governmental systems vs. those who are left to pay for it. Globalisation is not really, in this vein, about business colluding with ideologues in a race to the bottom against the poor. The globalisation/fair trade game is really about two entitlement interests attempting to strangle each other in order to grab the remainder of a shrinking, unsustainable pool of money whose origin is systemic, rather than the result of real labor. The problem we truly face is that something has to give. The difference between "capitalist" exploiters and limousine "liberals," to return to an earlier theme, is that the capitalists don't care that it's us, while the liberals would prefer to pretend it isn't while screaming about capitalists to salve their consciences till they get the tinted window rolled up.
posted by gbarto at 9:49 PM Sunday, June 19, 2005Cicero has a long and interesting post on Durbin touching on my earlier comments. He makes particular sense when worrying that there may be more than a few not so bad guys locked up among the Al-Qaeda types. Given that we've created a special facility for a special type of prisoner, it would be worthwhile to make sure, not only for justice but also reputation and to maximize bang for the buck, that the folks we're holding fit the bill.However, Guantanamo is not the Gulag, not Oswiec, not Treblinka. And however much one tries to explain it away, Durbin made the comparison: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings."He was not talking about the way they prepared their coffee or changed their bedsheets. He was inviting every enthusiastic opponent of the administration to envision Guantanamo guards with miniature moustaches and spiked helmets. Were Durbin serious, he would have qualified his statements carefully, going out of his way to explain his sadness that this stuff popped up in an unusually sensitive program. He would have noted that Koran abuses were perpetrated upon Korans purchased with our tax dollars and handed out in gloved hands so the inmates could read the prophet who inspired them to kill us from a book not made unclean. Would have taken pains to explain that it was awful because the comparatively few outrages reflected poorly on a nation that could do better. Marcus says Durbin's comparison was a stretch. Were it the stretching of, say, a rubber chicken, the head would have popped clean off and been found three counties over. Durbin is a Senator in a leadership position who knows the value of rhetoric. He just hasn't gotten used to the idea that the rubes find out about the red meat thrown to fellow party hacks. He should have known better. He deserves the same fate as Trent Lott - life on the backbenches until retirement as punishment for a failure to understand that leaders have to engage the brain before opening the mouth.
posted by gbarto at 10:45 PM Paul Klee's paintings find permanent home BERN, Switzerland -- When Paul Klee applied for Swiss nationality after fleeing Nazi Germany, his request was refused because it was feared that if his art should "take root in Switzerland, it would insult real art and cause good taste to deteriorate."The authorities are always so great at identifying the masters of their own time. One wonders, fifty years from now, what kind of correlation there will be between NEA grants and reputation/average auction price for artists from the 1980s and '90s. Bet it's not high.
posted by gbarto at 10:14 PM Iraq hostage returns to Australia An Australian man freed last week after being held hostage by insurgents in Iraq has returned to his home country.Betcha this'll be the AOL headline tomorrow a.m. Not.
posted by gbarto at 10:05 PM |
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