OneMind

You want both to understand the real roots of the economic crisis being faced by the United States and, increasingly, the rest of the planet? You could do worse than to read Simon Johnson’s piece in the Atlantic, The Quiet Coup. It is a largely emotionless, matter-of-fact comparison between the United States and third world emerging-market economies seen from the perspective of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive and it is nothing short of chilling.

“The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary,” Johnson writes. This is the advice IMF has offered dozens of emerging-market countries and the United States is now behaving as if it were such an economy.

Johnson agrees that, “This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.” In other words, break up the banks and financial institutions, either before selling them off or as a condition of their acquisition.

Offering us an incisive aphorism, Johnson warns, “Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.”

Finally, Johnson turns his searing intellect to the regulatory issue. “To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation.” He points out that those laws are a century old and are simply not adapted to the modern reality in which the present crisis has been brewed.

Tough stuff and a good read. Thanks to my pal George Sidman for the pointage.

Henry Blodget at the Huffington Post raises a great question today. Why is the government bailout program designed so that the folks who loaned money to the ailing financial institutions are having their loans repaid at 100 cents on the dollar? Didn’t these people know they were making a risky investment? Shouldn’t their money be tapped to bail these companies out before us taxpayers — who, after all, didn’t make a single decision to invest a dime in these criminal organizations — take a hit?

Still more politics as usual from the “Change We Can Believe In Gang.”

The more I read and learn about this whole financial mess and the way it’s being handled, the less convinced I am that Obama really considers the ordinary people first in his policy making when it comes to these important high-ticket decisions.

While I remain a big fan and positive supporter of President Barack Obama — and while I still agree with and even cheer the vast majority of his policies — the shameful way he differentiated between Wall Street and Detroit disgusts me and makes me lose heart. Double standards are indefensible in an egalitarian state.

As The Nation’s William Greider said on Bill Moyers’ Journal last week, Obama seems “absolutely committed to the restoration of the Old Order” here. Granting hundreds of billions — nay, trillions — to the financial industry without demanding any change in top management or contract rescission and then turning around and providing a fraction of the same sums to the auto industry only on the condition that UAW workers and small business vendors tear up their contracts and at the same time forcing top-management changes and even dictating product strategy is absurd. The Democratic Party is showing that it is no better than the Republicans in paying off their sponsors and backers on Wall Street.

It seems probable that hundreds of thousands of auto workers will lose their jobs. It seems probably that tens of thousands of small businesses who depend on the auto industry for their livelihoods will go out of business. All this at the behest and with the full support of the Democrats who promised fundamental change in the way politics is done in this country but who in fact are engaged in restoration of the old order.

Please, Mr. President, turn this around. Treat Detroit with fairness. If the Detroit model works for the auto industry, then apply it equally to Wall Street and its crooks and thieves.

Well, my Kindle 2 crashed overnight. The top half of the screen is gone. Well, mostly gone. In any case, it’s not working. It is either black, white or black-and-white bars depending on where it thinks it is, I guess.

Turning it off and back on didn’t fix it (didn’t expect it would but you gotta try). Menus are useless because they display primarily in the upper half of the screen. I spent over 40 minutes on hold at Kindle support before giving up and sending them an email.

This served as a great reminder for me that one problem with living in the Cloud is that you have a single point of failure with some devices and situations. I wonder how long I’ll be without the Kindle.

Interestingly, I can keep reading the book I was reading by using my iPhone Kindle app (not nearly as readable, obviously), but (and this seems to me to be a flaw in the Kindle’s ecosystem) I can’t read it online at amazon.com on my laptop. I’d think that would be a pretty obvious capability to incorporate.

During the years of the late, unlamented Regime of Bush 43, I frequently posted about the lies and garbage he insisted on foisting off on the public. Very often my source for such “clarifications” was the wonderful people who run FactCheck.

Well, here is FactCheck’s commentary on President Obama’s prime time press conference this week with some notes about places where he also fell short of truth or clear and maximum disclosure. Though I think these inaccurate or incomplete statements are far less egregious than almost any attributed to Bush, they are nonetheless a bit troubling. In particular, his allegation that his budget projections are based on economic assumptions that “are perfectly consistent with what Blue Chip forecasters out there are saying” is annoying because it seems clearly factually inaccurate.

Frankly, the other three points FactCheck picked out for criticism are marginal at best. They ding him for saying things that are essentially true but for which there was more that could have been said that would have clarified the point and watered down its impact. I don’t think it’s incumbent on any leader responding to a specific question from the press or the public to provide an in-depth and complete response. He should answer the question truthfully (which it seems to me Obama did here); the onus for eliciting a more complete response lies with the questioner. Otherwise every press conference would have one question asked and the President would take an hour to answer all of its nuanced detail.

Still, I’m glad FactCheck is there and being as vigilant as it was when the Bush Regime was running things into the ground. This can’t do anyting but help us as a people.

According to a report on Constitutional scholar Prof. Jonathan Turley’s Web site, South Africa has barred the Dalai Lama from attending a peace conference in that country because it doesn’t want to piss off China. Are you kidding me?

The country with the worst human rights record of my lifetime — now reformed and an alleged bastion of freedom — is barring the illegally banished leader of the once-independent nation of Tibet because their largest trading partner (and also, BTW, the inheritors of the “Worst Human Rights Nation on the Globe” epithet) might be offended? Money ahead of principle? Again?

I call on President Obama to officially chastise the South African government for this affront to humanity.

Following a link today I ended up on a Forbes.com page discussing the Amazon Kindle and why it should adopt Open Source standards. Something like 10 seconds into the page experience, a voice suddenly began narrating what sounded like a TV news story. But there was no video in sight on the page. Then there was a pause so I figured it was just another annoying audio (bad enough). But then it started again. I scrolled down the page and, sure enough, there was a Forbes TV spot running. I hadn’t asked for it. I hadn’t approved it running. I hadn’t seen the spot at or near the top of the page where I could stop it before it disturbed other people.

This kind of garbage is unacceptable. It is born of the arrogance of Web publishers who just don’t get the true nature of this medium. I own the browser, Mr. Forbes.com, not you. I decide what content looks like, not your typographical geniuses who put important stuff into six-point type in an effort to cram more useless data and ads into a small space. I own the airspace around the Web experience on my computer, too. Instantly bringing up sound — with or without video — without getting my permission first is a great way to lose me as a reader forever.

I work at home, so none of my fellow workers was disrupted by this noise but Forbes.com is presumably read mostly in offices and workplaces. How do those folks feel about having to turn their sound off or down when navigating the Web because inconsiderate publishers like Forbes try to jam aural content down our ears?

It seems there are more fingers than there are useful pointers in Washington these days around the AIG bonus scandal. Some Republicans have been screaming that Sen. Chris Dodd was the one who undermined his own provision that would almost certainly have doomed these outrageously stupid awards before they were ever issued.

But once again, Factcheck.org comes to the rescue with a clear delineation of the truth.

It wasn’t Dodd who eviscerated his provision. It was Treasury Secretary Geithner and therefore President Obama who did so. They claimed they were concerned that if the bailout came with too-stringent restrictions on executive pay and bonuses, banks — particularly smaller ones — would decline the money or return it before it could do any stimulus-ating, if I may coin a word. That’s the kind of mealy-mouthed crap we’ve put up with for eight years from a deaf, dumb and blind GOP administration. And it’s part of the “politics as usual” this President promised to change.

Now, to be fair, Obama has in recent days agreed that the buck stops at his desk and that as President he’s responsible for this situation. But he has not acknowledged the factual basis for the outcome. This isn’t a matter of some low-level underling screwing up and the top guy being magnanimous. This is his freaking Secretary of the Treasury from all appearances screwing up a major decision. And then attempting to explain it away in language so lame it was reminiscent of other recent holders of that post.

Particularly given the fact that almost none of the TARP money has found its way into new lending, it’s time for the Obama Administration to stop worrying what will happen if this bank or that insurance company or the financial “services” company over there does or doesn’t take the bailout money, does or doesn’t survive. They’ve already amply demonstrated that no amount of help is going to either fix the problem or change their attitudes. They deserve to be nationalized.

Over the last few days as the mega-scandal over AIG has exploded and exploded again, I’ve been wondering how those crooks could justify paying $100 million in bonuses to the very executives who drove that mammoth company into the ground. The company explanation, offered by the Federally installed chairman, had two thrusts:

• The bonuses were legally contracted and therefore obligatory.
• AIG needs to retain talent in order to recover from the debacle.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich nails this one over at Huffington Post today. He makes the points better and more succinctly than I could have. In essence, he says:

• Contract, shmontract. The company was bankrupt. Only the Federal government saved it. If they’d gone into Chapter 11, not a dime of those bonuses would have survived. They still shouldn’t.
• Talent? What talent?

You need to read Reich’s piece. The Obama Administration is “outraged” and demanding all sorts of things but they’ve also capitulated on these bonuses, concluding AIG is right; they are legally obligated to pay them. Bull puckey. Find a way not to pay these nimrods a dime.

Now that’s change we can use.

(Read this additional piece on how not to pay these bonuses safely and legally.)

I’m about to cancel my subscription to the print edition of the San Jose Mercury News. Thus will end a tradition I’ve enjoyed for more than 30 years, through good times and bad, through a dozen relocations within Northern California, and through a number of other attempts to move from reading the dead-tree edition to reading a version more environmentally sound and convenient.

The Kindle 2 reading experience with the Mercury News is splendid. I can’t recall now whether the subscription price is $0.99 or $1.99 per month but I’d gladly pay even more for this terrific convenience and eco-friendly option. As far as I can tell after a week’s free trial, I miss nothing of importance in the Merc’s Kindle edition and, equally important, the Merc never misses me. The delivery person responsible for making sure I get my paper every morning is somewhat less than 90% successful. So far, no problems with the Kindle version.

I find it easier to scan, and with no large pile of newsprint to fold, manipulate and keep out of baby’s reach, just a lot more enjoyable reading experience. Yeah, there are no photos (I suspect that will change at some point as well) and the comics aren’t available (my wife reads them and will now have to do so online somewhere). But overall, this is a real win for me and for bits-and-bytes.