Whiskey Fire

Modern History

by flory

The revised histories are being penned. The recently departed Obama economic team are lined up to explain to the peasantry what horrid shape the country would have been in without their genius to save the day.

The detachment from reality is fascinating, in a trainwreck kind of way:

As for the banks, Summers said their revival and payback of TARP money make it hard to argue that “the economy would somehow be in better shape today if the government had nationalized the banking system."

Larry, dear, we all understand that as far as the Village is concerned, the condition of the economy begins and ends with the size of the bonus pool on Wall Street. But those of us in the real world have other metrics. Things like jobs. Families able to keep their homes. And maybe some accountability from the people that got us into the mess?

The thing is, you guys did exactly nothing to ensure that the same global clusterfuck won't happen all over again. And again. And again. The banks are all still too big to fail. And they still get to police themselves. The rating agencies are still corporeal conflicts of interest yet they remain linchpins of the bond markets. Foreclosures have become an industry. And the same people are still running things.

Nationalizing the banks might've accomplished one thing: you could've fired the bastards that fucked everything up in the first place. That would have gone a long way towards convincing those of us out here on Main Street that there was an actual sheriff in town and the rules really had changed.

Apparently you can't be brought to understand how significant that might have been.

New Priorities

by flory

So this whole budget deficit thingey has got so scary that President Carebear is even willing to go out on a limb and cut defense spending!!!

Calm down....nobody is really serious here. What they really mean is they're ready to fuck over the troops. That's pretty clear right up front:

To make ends meet, Mr. Gates also announced that he would seek to recoup billions of dollars by increasing fees paid by retired veterans under 65 for Defense Department health insurance...

Cutting up to 47,000 troops from the Army and Marine Corps forces

The above are in the first five paragraphs of the story. You have read down to paragraph 17 to find out that they recognize there might be some graft and waste in the budget. Note the weasel wording -- they've identified $54 billion -- they're not necessarily going to do anything about it:

Separately, the Defense Department bureaucracy had identified about $54 billion more, from things like reducing contractor hiring, freezing personnel rolls, reducing the number of generals and admirals and closing or consolidating headquarters

Here's a suggestion: Fire Xie and Halliburton and let those 47,000 troops you're planning to leave hanging do the work the US military handled for 225 years, until Donald Rumsfeld decided the true priority for defense spending was enriching his friends. 

Too clever by half

by flory

It looks like, just maybe, the teabagging Republicans may've shot themselves in the foot with their oh-so-clever tax deal with Obama. I suspect everybody who reads this blog has heard by now that there's a stealth assault on Social Security prominently featured in the deal. What's just now being discovered is the dog that didn't bark in the night -- what wasn't included in the deal. Turns out that's a not-at-all-surprising assault on state finances and government employee unions:

Congressional Republicans appear to be quietly but methodically executing a plan that would a) avoid a federal bailout of spendthrift states and b) cripple public employee unions by pushing cash-strapped states such as California and Illinois to declare bankruptcy. This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011.

This all has to do with a federal program --called BABS, set to expire on 12/31 -- that subsidizes the interest cost of state borrowings. Republicans wouldn't let Obama include it in the deal:

my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.”

What this means is that for the big states with the big projected budget deficits, those deficits just got measurably bigger. (There was an article in the Oakland Tribune on monday wondering why in the hell Jerry Brown wanted the damn job again.) The Republican assumption is that the only way to balance those budgets will be to take on the civil service unions -- in the hope that the crisis will get so bad the governors will kill the unions as dead as their hero Rayguns did to PATCO.

What they don't seem to have taken into account -- being Republicans and unable to think more than one step ahead of themselves -- is what this will do to the municipal bond markets. Kill them, basically. And that won't make Wall Street particularly happy. I suspect that having been apprised of this little oversight, Chuck Shumer, Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein just became opponents of this deal.

And Wall Street in opposition, with any luck, may be enough to kill it.

Everything new

by flory    

I'm a bit more optimistic than Atrios that the banksters won't steamroll the entire judicial system by foreclosing on homes to which they don't have clear legal title. Even a wingnut heavy judiciary is going to be pretty protective of due process requirements.

But having to go back and clean up the documentation tracking legal ownership on the mortgage notes is really the minor issue here, as Nocera points out in the linked article. The real danger lies in the pooling agreements the banks signed onto when they sold off and securitzed the underlying mortgages:

they are saying that Bank of America was servicing loans in these bonds that the bank knew violated the underwriting standards that the investors had been led to believe the bank was conforming to. What’s more, they said, the bank had never come clean about all the bad loans, as it was required to do. Therefore, say the investors, the bank has a contractual obligation to buy back the bad loans.

In other words, the banks lied through their teeth, assuring the investors that these were properly underwritten loans, when they knew exactly what kind of toxic shit they were selling. Chances are good the banks are going to lose these lawsuits. Not only are they pretty obviously wrong from a legal standpoint, but they're not fighting against Joe and Jane Homeowner. They're fighting the New York Fed and the biggest bond funds in the country.

Unfortunately, winning can also mean losing:

If the foreclosure lawyers start winning a lot of cases, if judges halt foreclosures on a widespread basis, if investors start to extract billions upon billions of dollars from the banks — and if banks become seriously weakened as a result — we’ll be right back where we were two years ago. The banks will need to be saved for the good of the economy. The taxpayers will have to come to the rescue. That’s an appalling prospect too.

 TARP II anyone?

The question is, will the tone-deaf Obama administration try to pass another trillion dollar bank bailout without some pretty heavy regulatory trade-offs? A majority of the country already thinks TARP I was an Obama bailout, rather than Chimpy's.  Passing a TARP II without really sticking it to the banksters would be political suicide. Especially since all of this would likely be playing out right about the 2012 campaign season.

Anyway you look at it, the worst of the bankster-created economic problems may very well be ahead of us. I wish I had more faith that Helicopter Ben, Little Timmy Geithner and the rest of the Obama economic team will be willing to put the interests of the taxpayers, and the future of the country, ahead of the interests of their bankster buddies.

Crystal blue persuasion

by flory

I'm sure this is all about deadbeats wanting to walk away from their mortgage. Isn't that the wingnut party line?

Maybe the bank will foreclose?

Left behind

by flory

So Chile, a middling country of 8 million people, manages to successfully rescue 33 miners trapped underground for two months. The entire country got behind an effort to make sure the shortcomings of a mining company didn't destroy 30 families.

Meanwhile, Switzerland, another country of roughly 8 million people, just managed to complete construction on the longest tunnel on the planet. A majority of its citizens voted themselves $1,300 in taxes in an effort to keep trucks off the road that are destroying the Alps.

As construction projects go, it was a pretty big deal:

TV stations across Europe showed the event live. The embraces and cheers by the hard-hatted workers brought to mind the successful rescue of 33 trapped miners earlier this week in Chile.

When was the last time you remember this country, of 400 million people, completing an engineering feat that had the rest of the world cheering?

UPDATE: Even the easy shit is apparently beyond our capabilities these days.

 

Understanding your world

by flory

So there's another christianist pastor having a temper tantrum over the Burlington Coat Factory Community Center. Dog bites man, right?  Well this guy is getting serious:

A bigoted pastor who has assailed gays and Muslims is launching the "9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero" a mere two blocks from the World Trade Center

Of course, it takes time to build your appropriately over-the-top christianist place of worship (see for example here) so Pastor Bill needs a temporary home - fast. Gotta catch that zeitgeist thingy.

Might as well rent the ballroom at the local hotel:

Pastor Bill Keller of Florida said today he will begin preaching Sunday at the Marriott at 85 West Street

Our Pastor Bill isn't a single issue teabaggin' bigot -- he's got a history of spreadin' the hate:

in 2008, he targeted presidential contender Mitt Romney for being Mormon with a campaign called "voting for Satan"

Mormons = Satan?

You think maybe somebody should tell Pastor Bill where the Marriotts go to church on Sunday?

They knows what they knows

by flory

All you ever needed to know about how wingnuts think can be summed up in this poll. 43 wingnut bloggers were asked to rank the 25 worst figures in American history. There's probably a couple dissertations worth of insight into wingnut understanding of American history that can be teased out, but consider just this: Michael Moore -- whose contribution to American history has been a few documentary films -- ties for 19th place. Lee Harvey Oswald and Leon Czolgosz -- who assassinated American presidents -- don't even make the list.

Update: Apparently Michael Moore registers with more than just no-name wingnut bloggers:

Michael Moore--he just oozes evil

(Update to the update: The point is -- Michael Moore also seems to hit the radar of wingnuts who really should know better -- like UCLA law professors)

Sidebar

by flory

Remember how your mother always told you to be careful what you wished for? Someone needs to remind the Iowa GOP:

...it wants to reintroduce the "original 13th Amendment" first offered  by senator Phillip Reed of Maryland in 1810. The amendment states that "if any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honor” from a "foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen" and "shall be incapable of holding any office of trust."

The intent is to strip Obama of his citizenship because of his Nobel Prize. (I'm confused though -- I thought it was gospel in the loonier corridors of the right that he wasn't a citizen in the first place. The Iowa GOP inhabits a crazier corner than the birthers? That's some competitive instinct.)

Of course, there will be a some collateral damage. You'll have to do something about Ronnie Reagan and his English knighthood, not to mention Dwight D. Eisenhower and those military honors from no less than 32 foreign powers, including the commie pinko rooskies.

Wingnuts. Gotta love their ability to look in the rearview mirror and see tomorrow.

Microscopically chromed lining

by flory

By sacred tradition, everytime Breitbart or Drudge has instigated one of wingnuttia's patented flying monkey flashmobs, the story arc has followed a well trod path:

Early morning, Day 1: Completely made up "scandal" is posted to Drudge or Breitbart.

Late morning, Day 1: Faux News reports on "breaking news" of the scandal.

Evening, Day 1: CNN et al inform us that "there are reports" of the breaking scandal.

Morning, Day 2: Reports of the reports allow entire media universe to obsess over scandal.

Afternoon, Day 2: Democratic administration (because these attacks, curiously, never happen to Republican administrations) issues explanation/apology/retraction regarding scandal.

Following 2 weeks: Media and administration dance the dance. 24/7 back and forth on scandal until the entire spiral arm of the milky way galaxy is sick of the subject.

Week 4: Enterprising reporter (Clinton administration) or blogger (Obama administration) discovers that scandal is complete bullshit. CNN et al have long since moved on to the latest runaway white woman story and nobody pays attention. Scandal is fixed in the public mind as gospel truth.

Something curious happened on the way to the Shirley Sherrod tarantella. The enterprising blogger (or somebody, I'm not really sure who broke the story of the edited video) moved the timeline way the hell forward. What normally isn't discovered until people have long since moved on -- the video was complete edited bullshit -- was discovered the next day.  People were still paying attention. The administration was still paying attention. The administration overreacted, was called on their overreaction and had to do something about it. Yes, Breitbart got what he wanted, a Democratic administration looking about as inept as humanly possible, but he also got called on his bullshit and has been making excuses ever since.

Those "real americans" we're always hearing about have been told that Breitbart made the whole fucking thing up. And they're still paying attention. I don't think this has ever happened before. Equally important, the administration was forced to face the fact that they got played, and played badly, and played publicly. And it all happened when people were still paying attention. Do you think even this slow learner white house is inept enough that they'll let the flying monkeys get away with this again? I'm cautiously optimistic that they won't.

The wingnut noise machine may've finally jumped the shark. Or a girl can dream anyway......