The Remains Of The Day?

Someone take The Geezer back to the home. The poor ol' guy has gone out where the buses don't run. The Geezer can't even run a campaign, let alone a country. If this is (fair & balanced patriotism, so be it.

[x Boulder (CO) Fishwrap
McPloy
By John Sherffius



[John Sherffius began drawing editorial cartoons for the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper at UCLA. After two years of working as a freelance artist, after graduation, he was hired by the Ventura County Star in Southern California as a graphic artist and gradually worked his way into editorial cartooning for the paper. In 1998, he was hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as the newspaper's editorial cartoonist, a job he held until 2003 when he quit the paper over editorial differences. Sherffius bridled at editorial insistence that he tone down cartoons attacking Republicans. Sherffius then went to work for the Boulder Daily Camera where his cartoons appear regularly and are syndicated nationally by the Copley News Service. Sherffius won the 2008 Herblock Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius/Boulder Daily Camera

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A Dirt Farmer & A Dust Bowl Historian Both Speak The Truth

The Hopester has been chastised of late for being "too cool" while "the sky is falling." Now, The Hopester has been joined by a self-described "dirt farmer" from Montana in asking, "What the Hell is going on (and what's the hurry)?" Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) makes more sense in a single sound-bite than The Geezer and his Hockey Mom have made from Day One of their ill-conceived campaign. In today's column, Eags, who has written about The Great Depression (The Worst Hard Time), gazes upon our current malaise and recalls how Wall Street brought down Main Street in 1929-1933. The Geezer is Hoobert Heever (Peace, Harry Von Zell) reborn in 2008! The Geezer true-believers should be very, very afraid. If this is (fair & balanced) historicism, so be it.

P.S.: Pray to the Lord (of your choice) that Eags is wrong and that Senator Jon Tester won't become another Phil Gramm if Tester's elected to another term in the Senate.

[NY Fishwrap]
Crash
By Timothy Egan

The big guy with the crew cut and a hand that lost three fingers to a meat grinder looked out at the most powerful men in global capitalism Tuesday, and asked a pointed question:

“I’m a dirt farmer,” said Senator Jon Tester, the Montana Democrat who still lives on his family homestead. “Why do we have one week to determine that $700 billion has to be appropriated or this country’s financial system goes down the pipes?”

Good question, one that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have yet to adequately answer. If they seemed flummoxed, perhaps it’s because they still can’t explain what will be accomplished by nearly nationalizing the banking system and giving the treasury secretary more power than a king.

Another question — since we now own a big part of the world’s largest insurance company, A.I.G., does that mean I can save a load of money on my car insurance? — might be easier to answer.

This bailout, in present form, is toast. Now, with John McCain offering to suspend his campaign and delay Friday’s debate, it looks like the drainage of years past is pulling him down. He wants to back out of facing Barack Obama at the height of the campaign. Why not change the topic, from foreign affairs to the economy?

Some have already tried to protect the true villains of the crash of 2008. Witness Neil Cavuto of Fox News, he of the sycophantic questions to Enron executives and other thieves just before they were exposed, blaming the mortgage crisis on banks lending to “minorities and risky folks,” as he said last week.

There is certainly a food chain of greed, from the lowliest house-flipper in the Southern California exurbs to the Hamptons hedge fund manager. We all put reason in a box and buried it for a time. But before $700 billion is committed to a secretary whose decisions “may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency,” as the original draft of the bailout states, it’s worth remembering where the biggest heist took place, and how Wall Street dragged down the rest of the country once before. You could hear the echoes of history in Tester’s question, riding the fierce urgency of now at a time when the Great Depression and all its gloomy atmospherics are in the air again.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, losing 40 percent of its value over a brutal autumn, barely 2 percent of Americans owned stocks. People asked, sensibly: how could this affect me? Who cared about those swells on Wall Street when cars were rolling off factory lines and the big open expanse of middle America was flush with wheat and corn?

Today, with more than 90 percent of all homeowners paying their mortgages on time and on budget, the parallel question arises: how could this minority of bad loans drag down Western capitalism? It may be news to Joe Biden — with three gaffes this week, he’s approaching a record, even for him – but Franklin Roosevelt was not yet president during the crash. Herbert Hoover was, and there we have the reason why so many people cringed when John McCain said last week that the fundamentals of the economy were sound.

In his first days in office, Hoover said, “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” Oops. And just before he was swept to the dunce corner of history, Hoover said, “No one has yet starved.” At the time, people in rural America were eating brined tumbleweed and road-kill rabbits; the unemployment rate was 25 percent.

But the larger lesson is how Wall Street brought down Main Street. Banks were largely unregulated then, free to gamble people’s savings on stock market long-shots. When the market collapsed, the uninsured deposits went with it. By the end of 1932, one fourth of all banks were shuttered, and 9 million people lost their savings.

In this century, thanks to the deregulatory demons released by former McCain adviser Phil Gramm and embraced by just enough lobbyist-greased Democrats, Wall Street was greenlighted again to act like a casino. Banks in the heartland passed on their mortgages to Wall Street, where they were sliced and diced in hundreds of largely incomprehensible ways. And while few people understand how those investment giants made money, this much is clear: it was a killing. In 2006 alone, Wall Street firms paid out $62 billion in bonuses.

With all the urgency of that famous National Lampoon magazine cover that showed a cute pooch with a gun to its head, and the line “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog,” President Bush says the biggest bailout in American history must be passed now or the world will crumble. He said a similar thing in the run-up to war.

Just once, it might be worthwhile to listen to a dirt farmer like Jon Tester, who wonders why the same breathless attention is not given to the concerns of average Americans. Ah, but he’s only been in the Senate two years. Give him another term and he may start quoting Phil Gramm with approval.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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A Very Good Question

The late Johnny Carson got his show-biz start with an afternoon game show, "Who Do You Trust?" Carson and his side-kick-to-be, Ed McMahon, stayed with the ABC game show from 1956-1962 when they left to take over the "Tonight" show on NBC. The rest, as the pundits say, is history. Now, we have a real-life version of the game show and the contestants are The Geezer and The Hopester. Neither contestant has avoided an unfortunate selection in choosing campaign staffers and advisors. The Hopester initially named Jim Johnson (former CEO of — gasp — Fannie Mae) to head the team vetting VP possibilities. Johnson went under the Hopester bus very quickly. The Geezer has launched a number of attack ads against supposed Hopester campaign advisors, but none of the charges resonated. On the other hand, The Geezer has thrown two advisors under his bus: Phil (ET) Gramm and Carly (Ran HP Into The Ground) Fiorina, The example of The Geezer's choice for VP is sobering; the prospect of a Geezer Secretary of the Treasury has Alexander Hamilton rolling over at this very minute. "Who do you trust?" is the question of the day. If this is (fair & balanced) interrogation, so be it.

[x Salon]
Who Do You Trust To Pick The Next Treasury Secretary?
By Andrew Leonard

As we digest the news that John McCain, who has missed more votes in Congress over the last two years than any other Senator, is suspending his campaign and wants to duck Friday's debate, in order to offer his help crafting a bailout plan, now is as good a time as any to mull over what could be one of the first significant early tests for the next President. Who would Obama or McCain pick for the job of Treasury Secretary?

If the current crisis tells us anything, it is that the job of Treasury Secretary is of preeminent importance — especially if Congress grants Paulson anything like the discretionary fiscal power he is asking for. Whether you think Paulson is just another Wall Street fat cat grabbing goodies for his pals, or is actually motivated by a concern over the state of the economy, I think we should all be breathing a sigh of relief that neither of his predecessors, John Snow or Paul O'Neill, were in charge of grappling the current crisis. A recent New York Times story exploring possible choices for the job noted that O'Neill and Snow were two of "the least regarded Treasury secretaries of recent decades." The Times was being polite.

My interest is not in handicapping who will get the job — the Times story does a good job of that, as does economist Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser earlier today. What interests me is that both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have speculated that Tim Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a veteran of the Clinton Administration Treasury Department, is high on the list of likely Democratic prospects. Both papers observe that Geithner has been on the front lines of dealing with the current crisis.

But neither paper notes what to me is his greatest qualification — his early warning about the potential for exactly the kind of crisis we are currently enduring. On Sept. 15, 2006, Timothy Geithner gave a speech on hedge fund and derivatives regulation.

As I wrote at the time:

Geithner acknowledges that the explosion, over the past 10 years, of hedge fund trading in exotic financial instruments may well have contributed to the general resilience that the U.S. (and global) financial system has demonstrated in response to external shocks since the Asian financial crisis of the late '90s. And yet he surmises at the same time that the very flexibility of the current system may actually make it more vulnerable to a really, really big shock.

Financial panics start when traders and bankers who call in loans or sell off their holdings at the first sign of trouble set off a cascading effect in which everybody else follows their example and the system implodes under the strain. Paradoxically, Geithner appeared to be saying, the more flexible the system, the more quickly such a cascade could happen, and the harder it could be to stop.

The same factors that may have reduced the probability of future systemic events, however, may amplify the damage caused by and complicate the management of very severe financial shocks. The changes that have reduced the vulnerability of the system to smaller shocks may have increased the severity of the large ones.

That's a subtle argument, and we're not going to know whether it holds water until the flood is already 5 feet high and rising.

Imagine, a man with the foresight to worry about how unregulated credit derivatives could increase the chances of systemic failure. Imagine having a President who might pick such a person as Treasury Secretary.

Or, conversely, imagine the surprises a John McCain could deliver. Maybe he'd pick a Robert Zoellick (a Goldman alum who is currently president of the World Bank) or a John Thain, (who just sold Merrill Lynch to the Bank of America.) Wall Street would likely not be upset at either choice. Or maybe he'd pick someone completely out of left field. As McCain demonstrates for us on daily basis, there's really no telling what surprises are up his sleeve.

[Andrew Leonard is a freelance writer based in Berkeley, CA. He is a contributing writer for Wired Magazine. His work has also appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Nation, British Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, Asia Inc., the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and numerous other publications. He has been technology editor for the online magazine Web Review, Packet culture columnist for HotWired, and was the writer of the ill-fated Secret Files of Bill Gates for America Online. His first book, Bots: Origin of New Species, was published in 2007. Leonard attended the University of North Dakota.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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The Krait As Golidlocks: Who's Too Hot, Who's Too Cool, & Who's Too Stupid?

Jumpin' Joe is the Stealth Candidate right now. The Krait sinks her fangs into The Mighty Q (too stupid), The Geezerer (too hot), and The Hopester (too cool). Bottom line: The Hopester is too smart to fall for this Chicken Little act that The Maverick Geezer has pulled out of his sack o'tricks. The Dubster wants a photo-op to demonstrate that the POTUS is on top of the crisis. The Hopester sees this ploy for the nonsense that it is. If that's too cool for The Krait, tough! What the Hell did The Dubster do for all of the Enron employees in 2002 who lost their life savings? Even worse, The Dubster's own brother should be in the slammer for the scam he pulled in the Silverado Savings & Loan collapse in 1988 during the S&L crisis that was brought on — in part — by the Keating 5. (U. S. Senators who exerted undue influence on S&L regulators prior to the collapse of the S&L industry.) The sole member of the Keating 5 still in office and hot to trot for the photo-op with The Dubster? The Geezer hisself! Why would The Hopester want to sit at a table with a gang of thieves? The Krait doesn't get it. The "crisis" meeting at the White House is THEATER! The Hopester isn't too cool. He's too smart to drink The Dubster's Kool-Aid. If this is a (fair & balanced) rejection of nonsense, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Bring on the Rubber Chicken
By Gail Collins

How do you think the besieged financial community felt when the White House announced that George W. Bush was going to address the nation on television Wednesday night?

Hopeful? Terrified?

“We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis,” the president said, reading his lines flatly and stolidly, like an announcer delivering a long public-service message about new parking regulations for the holiday season. The whole event had a kind of unreality to it, since Bush has arrived at that unhappy point in American public life when a famous person begins to look like a celebrity impersonator.

There is, in a way, a kind of talent required to tell the nation that it’s teetering on the brink of disaster in a way that makes the viewers’ attention wander. Bush’s explanation about how the rescue bill would unclog the lines of credit made the whole thing sound less important than a Liquid-Plumr commercial.

But help is on the way! John McCain and Barack Obama are going to join Bush at the White House to work over the details of a rescue bill with Congressional leaders. As Obama put it: “The risk of doing nothing is economic catastrophe.”

Or, as Sarah Palin told Katie Couric on CBS News last night: “Not necessarily this, as it’s been proposed, has to pass or we’re gonna find ourselves in another Great Depression. But there has to be action taken, bipartisan effort — Congress not pointing fingers at this point at ... one another, but finding the solution to this, taking action and being serious about the reforms on Wall Street that are needed.”

So say we all.

(Palin was unable to answer questions about McCain’s record and relief for homeowners with troubled mortgages. But she did reveal forthrightly that she considers her running mate a “maverick.”)

About that rescue bill. Passing it is going to be a test of true bipartisanship, which involves both sides deciding that they will share the blame for doing something messy and unpleasant. But first, Congress has to hold hearings until every single member of the House and Senate has had a chance to yell at Henry Paulson. This can be a surprisingly useful exercise. It is much easier to work up sympathy for the rescue plan once you’ve heard Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky call it “un-American.”

Meanwhile, McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign, taking his ads off the air and going back to Washington to do something leaderlike and bipartisan. This was yet another new McCain, very different from last week’s versions, that blamed Obama for the financial meltdown while tossing out rescue plans like a desperate dart player 10 minutes before the bar closes.

“Following Sept. 11, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now,” he said.

In deference to the current emergency, we will refrain from pointing out that when our national leaders came together following Sept. 11, the results were, all and all, worse than if they had stayed home.

Last week, while McCain was desperately reinventing his position every day, Obama was withholding, declining to take a position until the administration plan had jelled. But in the end, it turned out that their ideas were both vaguely similar and similarly vague. On Wednesday, Obama called McCain to propose issuing a joint statement. Then McCain one-upped him by announcing that he wanted to postpone Friday’s debate until the economy was rescued. His minions raced off to the news shows to say that the American people were “tired of debates and talking.”

Since Obama, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the University of Mississippi, which is hosting the debate, all say it will go on, it isn’t clear what will happen if McCain fails to show up. An empty chair? A last-minute invitation to Ralph Nader and Bob Barr to drop on by? Once in New York, when Rudy Giuliani boycotted a mayoral debate, one of his opponents spent the night twirling around a rubber chicken and the citizenry enjoyed it quite a lot. This isn’t the kind of thing you could imagine Obama doing, but I’d keep my eye on Barr.

Obama, meanwhile, had not even promised to show up for the rescue bill vote until McCain made his grand gesture. When reporters asked him on Tuesday whether he was planning to go to Washington, he was noncommittal: “If we get consensus and everybody is popping Champagne, then I’ll probably go back to campaign with folks who are having a tough time in Ohio and Michigan.”

This seemed like an overly casual way to avert economic catastrophe. Since the people of Ohio and Michigan have been visited by a presidential candidate virtually every hour for the last six months, it would seem that they could get by on their own for a day or two.

This election is turning into a Goldilocks story. One candidate’s too hot, and one’s too cool.

[Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of The Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Prior to The New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Palinism?

The Mighty Quinnette is exceptional. Exceptionally stupid. However, Roger the Dodger has captured THE difference between The Hopester and The Geezer. Of course, there are things like intelligent v. stupid, cerebral v. visceral, and young v. old. However, the bottom line between the two men is that The Hopester is a universalist and The Geezer is an exceptionalist. Ironically, The Mighty Q would not even understand this distinction at all. The Geezer appeals to rage and anger. The Hopester appeals to, well..., hope. If this is the (fair & balanced) choice of our time, so be it.


[x NY Fiswrap]
Palin’s American Exception
By Roger Cohen

Sarah Palin loves the word “exceptional.” At a rally in Nevada the other day, the Republican vice-presidential candidate said: “We are an exceptional nation.” Then she declared: “America is an exceptional country.” In case anyone missed that, she added: “You are all exceptional Americans.”

I have to hand it to Palin, she may be onto something in her batty way: the election is very much about American exceptionalism.

This is the idea, around since the founding fathers, and elaborated on by Alexis de Toqueville, that the United States is a nation unlike any other with a special mission to build the “city upon a hill” that will serve as liberty’s beacon for mankind.

But exceptionalism has taken an ugly twist of late. It’s become the angry refuge of the America that wants to deny the real state of the world.

From an inspirational notion, however flawed in execution, that has buttressed the global spread of liberty, American exceptionalism has morphed into the fortress of those who see themselves threatened by “one-worlders” (read Barack Obama) and who believe it’s more important to know how to dress moose than find Mumbai.

That’s Palinism, a philosophy delivered without a passport and with a view (on a clear day) of Russia.

Behind Palinism lies anger. It’s been growing as America’s relative decline has become more manifest in falling incomes, imploding markets, massive debt and rising new centers of wealth and power from Shanghai to Dubai.

The damn-the-world, God-chose-us rage of that America has sharpened as U.S. exceptionalism has become harder to square with the 21st-century world’s interconnectedness. How exceptional can you be when every major problem you face, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to gas prices, requires joint action?

Very exceptional, insists Palin, and so does John McCain by choosing her. (He has said: “I do believe in American exceptionalism. We are the only nation I know that really is deeply concerned about adhering to the principle that all of us are created equal.”)

America is distinct. Its habits and attitudes with respect to religion, patriotism, voting and the death penalty, for example, differ from much of the rest of the developed world. It is more ideological than other countries, believing still in its manifest destiny. At its noblest, it inspires still.

But, let’s face it, from Baghdad to Bear Stearns the last eight years have been a lesson in the price of exceptionalism run amok.

To persist with a philosophy grounded in America’s separateness, rather than its connectedness, would be devastating at a time when the country faces two wars, a financial collapse unseen since 1929, commodity inflation, a huge transfer of resources to the Middle East, and the imperative to develop new sources of energy.

Enough is enough.

The basic shift from the cold war to the new world is from MAD (mutual assured destruction) to MAC (mutual assured connectedness). Technology trumps politics. Still, Bush and Cheney have demonstrated that politics still matter.

Which brings us to the first debate — still scheduled for Friday — between Obama and McCain on foreign policy. It will pit the former’s universalism against the latter’s exceptionalism.

I’m going to try to make this simple. On the Democratic side you have a guy whose campaign has been based on the Internet, who believes America may have something to learn from other countries (like universal health care) and who’s unafraid in 2008 to say he’s a “proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.”

On the Republican side, you have a guy who, in 2008, is just discovering the Net and Google and whose No. 2 is a woman who got a passport last year and believes she understands Russia because Alaska is closer to Siberia than Alabama.

If I were Obama, I’d put it this way: “Senator McCain, the world you claim to understand is the world of yesterday. A new century demands new thinking. Our country cannot be made fundamentally secure by a man who thought our economy was fundamentally sound.”

American exceptionalism, taken to extremes, leaves you without the allies you need (Iraq), without the influence you want (Iran) and without any notion of risk (Wall Street). The only exceptionalism that resonates, as Obama put it to me last year, is one “based on our Constitution, our principles, our values and our ideals.”

In a superb recent piece on the declining global influence of the Supreme Court, my colleague Adam Liptak quoted an article by Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern: “Like it or not, Americans really are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from all other peoples.”

Palinism has its intellectual roots. But it’s dangerous for a country in need of realism not rage. I’m sure Henry Kissinger tried to instill Realpolitik in the governor of Alaska this week, but the angry exceptionalism that is Palinism is not in the reason game.

[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming Foreign Editor in 2001. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. He is the author of three books: Soldiers and Slaves; Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo; and (with Claudio Gatti) In the Eye of the Storm. Born in London, Cohen received an M.A. degree in History and French from Oxford University in 1977.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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