"We’re All Journalists Now"? No, Count Me Out of The Self-Pitying Press. Posted by olvlzl.

Tom Keane’s column in today’s Boston Globe Magazine is the mix of truth, fudging, piety and self-serving dishonesty which commonly happens whenever members of the scribbling class wax on about the Freedom of the Press. To mix the Pentagon Papers case, perhaps the greatest example of press responsibility in the history of the First Amendment, with Judith Miller’s covering up for crime within the executive branch for the purpose of preventing the truth being reported (ultimately to promote an unprovoked, illegal and disastrous war) is dishonest and beneath contempt.

This, Tom Keane, is why any thinking person looking at the “press” in the United States today is rethinking the meaning of “freedom of the press” and the context in which it can exist. Judith Miller was not protecting a source, she was covering up for criminals. Those criminals were in the business of breaking the law in order to silence anyone who might be tempted to report the truth in the very paper involved in the Pentagon Papers case and which had carried Joe Wilson’s debunking of the Bush II junta’s case for invading Iraq. The point that she didn’t “report” on Valerie Plame’s undercover work and so those who leaked the information to her were not “sources” is a minor one compared to the fact that a “reporter” who was a party to preventing The People finding out that Bush and Cheney were lying us into a war worse than Vietnam. The publisher of the New York Times took his sweet time in doing something about one of his star reporters acting like a hack for political criminals, she’d been promoting Bush War II in the guise of reporting all along.

The freedom of the press is not like an individual's freedom of speech. It is not a right held by individuals, it isn’t in any way an inherent right due to nature or nature’s God. It’s a right given to corporate entities with potentially more power than the voice of any individual. A right given to an entity more powerful than an individual should be given only for a very practical reason. If The People are to govern themselves they have to have as much of the truth, an understanding as close to reality as it is possible for us to have. The press gets freedom to publish, not for its enrichment or because of some airy-fairy notion of freedom of thought, it gets that freedom only to the extent that it serves its purpose of informing the public. When it neglects or gives up its purpose of informing the public it gives up its right to freedom. Our press has largely given up that purpose and, in a rather frighteningly elegant example of consequences following actions, the very establishment that it serves in opposition to The People is limiting its rights to freely publish. It’s not The People who are the problem, Tom Keane, it’s those whose boots the subservient media lick. NOT that most of the press will care. They aren’t in the business of reporting the facts, they are in the business of selling advertising and boosting circulation by pandering to the lowest in human weakness for sensation and the stimulation afforded by hate and resentment. It’s the fact that the corporate party has the ability to maximize those profits which has led the“free press” to choose who it will serve.

A Free people aren’t the ones who are destroying press freedom, it’s the ones corrupted by commercial media and the thugs they are told to vote for. That might not be a fact of life they taught you in law school but it’s a fact that is absolutely basic to a real understanding of what is necessary for freedom of the press to exist at all. But you won’t find that reality by juggling legal terms and bandying names of famous cases hashed out in courtrooms and law journals. You get it by facing the facts as they exist in real life. That's a reporter's job. Reporters who find the facts and report them, they're the only real journalists. The rest of us are just parasites which die without our hosts.

Does The Cooper-Hewitt Citation Make The Mad Housers Respectable? Posted by olvlzl.

When they retired from the farm, my grandparents lived in “the little house”, about 16 feet square, four rooms and a water closet. There was also an outhouse in a tiny, unattached shed. Though it was a perfectly good place for two people to live and they had lived there with two of their children early in their marriage, it would probably never be allowed today. At least not unless it was on wheels.

The tiny house movement is a good thing, a rational reaction to the absurd mega-mansions that people have been gulled into wanting. Seems that a lot of people are rethinking letting a large house and mortgage eat up their lives. While some of the tiny houses are jewels of traditional and modern architecture, those are out of the income range of many who you really need a tiny house. As the Cooper Hewitt exhibit which featured the Mad Housers pointed out, there are 90% of the world who need to get through a life as well.

The Mad Housers began in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a group which builds tiny shacks for homeless people where they can sleep and get out of the elements. The houses are built by volunteers of donated materials and then turned over to the people they are built for. Their website shows two basic models, with plans. There is the 6x8' house with a sleeping loft and the 4x8' “low rider” for situations in which the housing has to be really inconspicuous. In northern climates they would have to include insulation, even with the tiny, funky home-made wood stoves they provide. While I’m not sure about the stoves, they say they’ve got a good record of safety. Still, I’d like to see one before I decide on it.

The Housers, like any well thought out shoestring group, has to be very careful about where they expend their limited resources and volunteer time. While the placement of the huts is often of marginal legality, there are some situations more marginal than others. I’m impressed at their practicality and realism. Some of their clients use the huts as a way to get out of destitution some of their clients are so down and out that they will probably never climb out.

Lending people money at a ruinous rate of interest, risking their falling into destitution is not only legal, it’s encouraged by banking and lending laws. Providing housing for people living in the rough makes you an outlaw. Sometimes, at least. In their FAQ there is one dealing with the advisability of providing housing for people without houses as if being disparately poor without a place to sleep wasn’t bad enough. Somewhere in the things I read for this post someone asks if people would rather have someone sleeping in their doorway or in one of these huts. Maybe that question is the best answer.

About Hapenings in Rochester, NH. Posted by olvlzl.

I live close enough to Rochester, New Hampshire so that two members of my immediate family were locked down in the schools and a number of friends were directly effected by the hostage crisis at Hillary Clinton’s headquarters. From what is known now, the local and State Police handled the crisis very professionally and I thank them for that. Even if it had happened thousands of miles away, their not attempting to become media personalities during the standoff is very much appreciated. The hyper-hype that the cabloids and broadcast impose on situations like this is more of an incentive to crack-pots and marginal personalities in search of attention than it is useful to the People. As if the media are in the business of providing people with useful information instead of sensational ratings fodder. While nothing can be done about the shameless and irresponsible media spreading every last rumor and air-filling lie, it’s not something that the police and others are required to participate in. The time to give the public the facts is when those are known. Until the crisis is over, the police have work other than to provide CNN with something to fill in between commercials.

Someone I talked to this morning wondered where Anderson Cooper and the other media people were going to spend the night. As luck would have it, I intended to write about Rochester today anyway. This article by Conor Makem from the Rochester Times earlier last month is about the mostly unremarked crisis in homelessness and hunger in one of the more well-off areas of the country.

ROCHESTER It's 3 p.m. and Nancy Lawrence is calming down one of her volunteers over the phone. The residents of the Homeless Center for Strafford County are beginning to show up for the evening. The parking lot is full.

Lawrence, the executive director, is frazzled. The center has never been this full so early in the season. They opened Oct. 1 and were full three days later. Normally they don't have this many residents until after Thanksgiving. There are 10 adults and 10 children, aged 1 to 11 years.

"I turn away two to five families a day," she said. "I've turned away a few people before, but never like this."

She notes that every homeless shelter in the area is full. Lawrence is housing a pregnant woman due within days, she has fewer volunteers than in recent years and she has taken to loaning money out of her pocket to residents. She expects it to get worse.

"Our food pantry is wicked low," she said.

No one really expected the national media that descends on New Hampshire every Presidential election, to cover every hot dog eaten by the candidates to find this story, now, did we. How often do they report on destitution in their own towns?

Rochester and the surrounding towns aren’t in particularly bad economic condition. Since homelessness and hunger are that bad in Rochester and the surrounding towns it’s certainly a lot worse in most places. I don’t know if there is a tie in with the hostage-taking and bomb threat to be made but there could be. The suspect is known in the area, there was at least one rather marginally rational letter printed in a local paper and there have been enough domestic and other incidents with police to have gotten his name in the news. I think he’s probably been in rather disparate need of some kind of psychiatric help for a while now, his neighbors say he’s been unemployed for months. His wife had just filed for divorce last week so it’s quite possible that he or she would soon have ended up homeless. A lot of people have fallen from father up the economic scale than they were. There are a lot of people just barely holding on by their fingernails even in relatively well off places.

The backlash against people who were living on the street and very conspicuously not those in a position to house them was some of the foul gas that fueled the rise of Rudolph Giuliani, objectively the seamiest and most compromised major candidate in the race. Not that the delicate noses of the DC based press can smell the taint. How much do you want to bet that somehow, Hillary Clinton will be made to pay more of a price for the incident in Rochester than Giuliani will have to for his associations with criminals and sleaze. Not that anyone here would take that bet. None of us is going to be surprised when it turns out to be her fault, I’m sure that some hate-talk personality has already floated the soon-to-be reported as having-been-said lie that she planned it as a campaign stunt. Some things are a sure bet.

More about this later.

Some Friday Kitty-Game Fun

Courtesy of Kenosha Kid, you can get addicted to a new game, this one. The idea, as far as I can figure it out, is to stop the cat from leaving the field, and the way to do that is to click on the light green dots to make them into dark green ones. The dark green ones work like a fence, or at least the kitty can't leap onto those.

Have fun, and a good weekend, too.

The Dangers of Asbestos

You may have observed the removal of old asbestos from buildings, presumably from far away, unless you were one of the removers clad in those space suits the workers wear for protection because asbestos is a known health hazard. But you may be unaware that asbestos may exist in new products, too, even in some toys meant for children:

The CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit, two brands of children's play clay, powdered cleanser, roof sealers, duct tapes, window glazing, spackling paste and small appliances were among the products in which asbestos was found by at least two of three labs hired by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

The group, which was created in 2004 by asbestos victims and their families, spent more than $165,000 to have government-certified laboratories examine hundreds of consumer products over 18 months to determine whether asbestos was present.

It is unusual for a group of volunteers, many of whom have asbestos-caused diseases, to fund research that impacts public health.

"We had to. No one else was doing it," said Linda Reinstein, the group's co-founder and executive director. "This is information that consumers and Congress must have because asbestos is lethal and we naively believe that the government is protecting us, when it's not."

The product that is of greatest concerns to some public health experts is the fingerprint kit, which is a huge seller, according to sales personnel interviewed by the Seattle P-I.

The asbestos in the fingerprint kit was found in the powders the kit contains. These are very likely to be inhaled while playing with the kit.

I'm not sure how reliable private laboratory tests are, but it's of clear concern to find that the government is not testing for asbestos.
-----
Via Rants from the Rookery.

Bias in Texas

This story is odd:

The state's director of science curriculum has resigned after being accused of creating the appearance of bias against teaching intelligent design.

Chris Comer, who has been the Texas Education Agency's director of science curriculum for more than nine years, offered her resignation this month.

In documents obtained Wednesday through the Texas Public Information Act, agency officials said they recommended firing Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination. But Comer said she thinks political concerns about the teaching of creationism in schools were behind what she describes as a forced resignation.

Agency officials declined to comment, saying it was a personnel issue.

Comer was put on 30 days paid administrative leave shortly after she forwarded an e-mail in late October announcing a presentation being given by Barbara Forrest, author of "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse," a book that says creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Forrest was also a key witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case concerning the introduction of intelligent design in a Pennsylvania school district. Comer sent the e-mail to several individuals and a few online communities, saying, "FYI."

Agency officials cited the e-mail in a memo recommending her termination. They said forwarding the e-mail not only violated a directive for her not to communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the agency regarding an upcoming science curriculum review, "it directly conflicts with her responsibilities as the Director of Science."

The memo adds, "Ms. Comer's e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral."

Why should the TEA remain neutral in this matter? I guess it should also be neutral about whether the earth is flat or not?

Very Bad

Added even later: The situation appears to have been solved without anyone getting hurt.


ThinkProgress reports that a man who appears to have a bomb strapped to his body is holding Clinton Campaign volunteers as hostage in New Hampshire.

Added later: The news now report that at least two hostages have been released. It is not clear whether any are still being held.

Friday Nature and Critter Blogging

First, some lovely snakes, courtesy of swampcracker. Notice the curiosity of the orange snake. It's thinking of making tools.





The racer snake can see far:





Then a glimpse at life under the surface, by Darryl Pearce. Very mystical and fascinating.





Finally, and naturally, some Pippin-cat by FeraLiberal. NOBODY sees as far as Pippin:

What Annoys Me Today

Mostly because nothing seems to light my writing fire today, I have dawdled over various parts of my daily chores, such as checking my e-mail. The ads I have to go through first tell me what is going on in "Entertainment" and "News of the Day" and I decided to look at what it is that should entertain me.

It's news about the private lives of celebrities. Many of these are about babies being born to some celebrity or another, and all the headlines are of the form where "x" welcomes "baby girl/boy/multiples". Wouldn't it be more entertaining to read that "x" was furious and wanted to cancel the baby order? Or is there a special welcome ritual that I've missed about the arrival of babies?

Yes, I know that what I wrote above is curmudgeonly, and that it's difficult to think of an interesting way to say that the new parents are delighted to finally hold the baby. The annoyance I feel is much more severe when the news are about how someone reacts to horrible events. You know, the kind of thing where someone is asked how they feel about having their whole family killed in a fire or lost in an earthquake. It seems wrong to even ask such question, and the answers have very little news value. Of course the survivor is devastated. To ask her or him to expand on that feeling is voyeurism of the nastiest kind.

Then there is this story about a man who killed his ex-wife and his children. The story is written in an odd way, almost as if family violence is some sort of a virus that just happens:

The couple, who divorced in 2005, had a history of domestic violence, police said.

The family lived in Frederick County for about five years, with Brockdorff moving out in 2005 and Pumphrey leaving this year, neighbors said.

Brockdorff was a self-employed electrician who had coached T-ball, and Pumphrey was a flight attendant, said Mullen, who lives two houses away. The three Brockdorff children were close friends with Mullen's.

The couple's relationship was stormy, and police were often called to their large home to help settle their disputes, Mullen said.

In fall 2005, Pumphrey asked Brockdorff to move out, and he moved to nearby Urbana. But he continued to visit Pumphrey and harass her, Mullen said. Pumphrey got a restraining order and even suspected that her phone had been tapped.

"She was very scared," Mullen said. "She wanted to protect her kids and herself."

Perhaps the ex-wife was also violent, but the story gives no evidence of that. Instead, it is the "couple" who somehow "has a history" of domestic violence. And all this in a story which begins by telling how the ex-husband killed the rest of the family. I can't imagine similar writing applied to other kinds of murders.

Holiday Gift Ideas

These are some ideas which arrived in my mail box. First, you can help to fund Equal Access Fund, which provides funds for women who can't afford an abortion. Second, you can help to fund Women's eNews, a worthy website reporting on news of interest to women around the world and one of the first Internet sites dedicating on them. If you want to send them a check, make it out to The Fund for the City of New York/Women's eNews, and mail it to:


Women's eNews
135 West 29th Street, Suite 1005
New York, NY 10001

I will add more suggestions as I receive them. Happy holidays! (The beginning trumpet call in the war against Christmas, naturally.)
...
And more ideas from Viva La Feminista.

On The Republican Debate

I watched some parts of it but was unable to watch it all. Let's just put it this way: It was a bit of a spectacle, and I'm not at all sure what scope there might be for bipartisanship under the current circumstances.

The interesting question for me is to figure out whom the money boys want as the candidate. It looks like it might not be Rudy, given the timing of this story, but Romney has that Mormon thing working against him. Huckabee is the new darling of the media. They always like a smiling, godly guy who hates women, I guess. - Of course, all this is speculation based on nothing but my own sarcastic self.

What did you think of the debate? And of the wonderful questions posed in it?

Sex Tourism Reversal

Reuters reports about older white women joining Kenya's sex tourism. It's always useful to remember to take stories like that with a grain of salt, because they might be part of the business which makes up faux trends with no real statistical evidence to back them up. But supposing that it indeed is true that older white women travel to Kenya in order to have paid sex with young Kenyan men, what should a feminist say about it?

That would probably depend on the feminist. My first step in analyzing stories like this is to do a gender-reversal. If you do that all the article tells us is the old and nasty story about colonial oppression and prostitution or about the power of wealthier individuals to buy sex from poorer individuals who have few other alternatives. Perhaps the advantage of the actual story is that these other aspects become much clearer when the entitlement aspect of being an older white man has been removed. Older white women are usually not regarded as entitled to sex, after all.

My second step was to think how I would feel about the article if the older women went to, say, Florida, for their sex tourism and if the younger men working in the industry were of the same race and with other alternatives to escorting as a way of making a living. Would the arrangement then be just fine? After all, it is mostly viewed as just fine when it is older white men who do this by paying for mistresses or casual sex. I'm not sure.

My final thoughts had to do with wondering about how all this would be explained by the misogynistic section of evolutionary psychologists. Women aren't supposed to do this kind of stuff, and certainly not older women.

Pat Buchanan's Nightmares

Unlike the rest of us, Buchanan tends to write books about his own private nightmares. They always have the same monsters: white women who don't breed enough and brown people who will come and take over the Murka Pat is so proud of. His newest book is all about the same old racism and sexism:

MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan appeared on the November 26 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes to discuss his new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, And Greed Are Tearing America Apart (Thomas Dunne Books, November 2007), in which he writes that America is "on a path to national suicide" and later asks: "How is America committing suicide?" answering: "Every way a nation can." He proceeds to claim that "[t]he American majority is not reproducing itself. ... Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

What Buchanan is saying that white, non-Hispanic Americans are not breeding enough and that this is the reason why Mexicans will take over the country. If all those abortions had not happened we could have solved the need for cheap labor in agriculture and the hospitality industry by using our own people!

Buchanan's arguments really do seem to come from his private nightmares, except for his assumption that the United States of the past was a happy mixing pot where everybody was boiled until they looked quite nicely European. He fails to apply social science to his fears, too. For instance, more educated people always have fewer children and the average children per family drop pretty fast once an immigrant population becomes mainstreamed in the United States.

But what he never fails to do is to blame white women for not having more children to keep Pat's nightmares at bay. This is especially weird considering the fact that Pat personally has done nothing to help those birth rate numbers he so deplores.

Scientists Talk Back on Abstinence Education

It does not work, by the way, and throwing money at it is just a way of giving pork to some religious groups. A group of scientists has written a letter about the uselessness of abstinence education to Nancy Pelosi, and you can read it here.

The Golden Compass: Anti-Religious Propaganda!

*Warning: The link contains spoilers.*


I was waiting for the Catholic League President Bill Donohue to comment on the movie, based on the first book in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, and Donohue didn't disappoint.

He took the anti-religion bait and swam with it, all the way to the end of the reel:

The author of the book on which the new film The Golden Compass is based has hit back at critics who accuse him of peddling "candy-coated atheism".

Philip Pullman dismissed as "absolute rubbish" accusations by the US-based Catholic League that the film promotes atheism and denigrates Christianity.

"I am a story teller," he said. " If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon."

The Golden Compass - which stars Nicole Kidman - premiers in London on Tuesday.

In Donohue's world anyone who depicts anything negative about religion is peddling atheism. Only perfectly candy-coated descriptions of Christianity are allowed.

The whole thing is really silly, because Pullman's trilogy can also be read as a retelling of the creation tale from the Bible and in that sense it is very religious indeed.

Go and see the movie, just to annoy our Bill.

A Silly Game For You

To balance the sad post below. You can go to this site and find out which presidential candidate is closest to your values. Not sure that any such short list of questions really works, but who knows, you might find something new about yourself.

Bad News From Iraq

The women are not faring well in all the upheaval. I was opposed to the Iraq invasion for many reasons, and especially for the reasons of avoiding unnecessary blood-letting, but the fate of the Iraqi women always weighed heavily on my mind. I believed that the most organized part of the society, that of religious fundamentalists, would take over, and I feared what would happen to the women who are not content with the rules of that type of religion.

The situation does not look good. In the south of Iraq:

In Basra, Iraq, religious extremists are waging a violent campaign against women who do not dress or behave according to their interpretation of Islam and doctors who provide medical services to women.

"They kill women, leave a piece of paper on her or dress her in indecent clothes so as to justify their horrible crimes," said Basra police chief Maj. Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf. Militants murdered 42 women between July and September, the BBC reported Nov. 15.

The same piece mentions violence against male gynecologists, in an attempt to make them stop practicing. The snag in that is that there are not enough women gynecologists. Thus, if the militants have their way, most women in Iraq will get no gynecological care. Sound familiar? This is the sort of thing the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in the north of Iraq the Kurdish women aren't doing that well, either:

Ninety-seven women were burnt to death and 27 others killed in the three Kurdish provinces during the past four months, the human rights minister in the Iraqi Kurdistan region revealed.




"I cannot say that violence against women has lowered," Yusuf Aziz Muhammad told reporters after taking part in a conference held in Arbil on Sunday to discuss means to stop violence against women.
The statements coincide with the international day to eliminate violence against women, November 25.
"Surveys conducted in Arbil (the capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region) showed that there were 60 cases of women burning in Arbil, 21 in Duhuk and 16 in Sulaimaniya. There were also 10 cases of women killing in Arbil, 11 in Duhuk and six in Sulaimaniya," Muhammad said.
The Kurdish official, citing the figures of 2005, noted that there were 59 cases of women killing in the region, which rose to 118 in 2006.
"Cases of women burning themselves in Sulaimaniya during 2006 were 64 and in Duhuk 185," said the minister.
Women proved involved in honor-related crimes are forced to burn themselves and sometimes they are set ablaze by their male relatives.

That article notes one of the reasons for all this violence: contempt towards women and their role in the family and society. You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to reconcile that contempt with the simultaneous push in Basra to make women act according to the most limited roles possible. But misogyny has never been bothered by its own illogicality.

And what of the response from the West to news like these? Some fear that even talking about them foments war against Iran or some other suitable country, despite the obvious futility of war as a weapon for democratizing a country. If anything, things have gotten worse for Iraqi women since the U.S. invasion, and I don't quite see how it would help women in any of the countries where women are not much valued if they or their family members were first killed by U.S. bombs.

Others turn suddenly all relative in their ethical judgments when otherwise they would not do so, and point out that we shouldn't judge what other cultures do. I wonder if they would have the same reaction should we be reading about the burning of children or if the corpses in Basra all belonged to members of a religious minority.

No, it is something about the victims being women that causes the "look elsewhere" syndrome. Because deep down, somewhere, many of us still believe that the women belong to their husbands, fathers, families and their societies, to treat as those parties see fit.

Is This Funny?

Shakes points out that rape is now a laughing matter, and presents this example of the genre of humor where violence is funny (she also provides a transcript of it):





Did you find yourself laughing when the three defenders of the environment killed a man and gang-raped a woman? I'd guess that you did not if either murder or rape has ever touched upon your own life. But what about those who are lucky enough not to have the memory of that pain?

I didn't find the skits funny, but then I'm a prude as you all know. Instead, the choices made me try to figure out what it is exactly that the creators of these jokes wanted to accomplish. Is the idea to make environmental protection look like a manly thing to do? Something tough guys might consider, inbetween rape and pillage? Or are they arguing that spoiling the environment is worse than gang-rape or murder?

Deep Thought For The Day

The reason all those corporate answering services are automated is to make sure that any complaint you have never reaches an actual living ear. That way the firm doesn't have to fix anything.

On The Housing Bubble

Last night the top Google advertisement on one blog was this:

No Money Down Home Loans
$300,000 Loan Amount Minimum Instant Approval - No Credit Check

Interesting that these kinds of ads are still being used, given the state of the housing market. Note also that any ad specifically pointing out that there will be no credit check would get a much larger than average number of responses from those who have bad credit, and people who have bad credit are often going to continue having bad credit. That "no money down" part is also very suspicious. Taken together, the ad promises mortgages for people who really cannot afford mortgages.

There is a sense in which the housing markets in the last few years (pretty much the Bush reign) have acted as if the equivalent of gravity in the physical world no longer works: No, you don't have to save money for a fancy house. No, we will not look into your past credit history. Yes, indeed, you can get something for nothing.

But of course you can't get something for nothing, or certainly not on the scale that the housing bubble suggests. What is it that they used in the place of all those old rules about mortgages? The one new theory or myth seems to have been the idea that the prices of housing will keep on rising and rising and rising.

If that myth is true it makes sense to take a loan which is front-loaded with nothing but interest. You get to deduct the interest against your taxes, you get to live in the house, and if the value of houses rises you gather equity from just that. When finally the day arrives with monthly payments for not just the interest, that day when your monthly payments will double, say, well, your house has appreciated in value and you can either sell it and make some money or you can refinance it based on its new and better value. Neat, is it not?

Except of course in the case when housing prices are falling. In that case you are in deep trouble. And that is the scenario that is now unfolding. What is especially bitter about that scenario is that the very reason WHY the prices of houses have stopped rising is the vast number of bad mortgages, taken by people on the hope that prices would keep on rising. A sort of a suicide, if you like.

So, yes, the outlook is not rosy in the housing markets. But the meaning of all this is even more grave and the debacle might hit all of us, whether we ever gambled with houses or not. The reason has to do with the role the wealth in the form of houses has taken in the United States. One article quoted an expert who stated that Americans have used their houses as ATM machines, as sources of money for things quite unrelated to housing. That may be a little too rude, but it is indeed true that the wealth in the form of housing has been fueling the U.S. economy for the last eight years.

People spend more when they have more wealth, and when the value of their houses increased they felt that they had more wealth to spend. Now that the value of their houses is not increasing and may well be decreasing, they will spend less. Less spending by consumers means fewer orders for firms. That means more unemployment, and the vicious cycle starts turning: Unemployed people will not consume that much, unemployed people will lose their houses....

So what happened to allow this all? The government didn't disallow it, for one thing. Then the financial markets invented a new tool: that of mincing up all the poor mortgages and then tossing them into the general mortgage salad for the purposes of reselling. That way nobody could tell exactly how many bad mortgages they had just acquired! In short, the general investments in the housing markets were not protected from the bad investments. And, as I mentioned, the government didn't declare this new tool illegal.

The latter reminds me a lot of the 1929 stock market crash. The new tool then in play was leveraging. It worked beautifully when the market was going up and it crashed every bit as spectacularly when the market was going down.

I hope that we have all learned enough since 1929 to contain the current housing market crisis before it gets worse.

Trent Lott Leaves Abruptly

The Republican Senator from Mississippi and the Senate's Number 2 Republican, has just announced his resignation from the Senate, effective before the end of the year. He has given the reason as "other opportunities."

Very odd...

What The Fashionable Klansman Will Be Wearing Next Spring Posted by olvlzl

If you missed the go-round between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee on illegal immigrants earlier this month, you missed some fun. Huckabee, while the governor of Arkansas floated a proposal to give some kind of tuition break to the children of illegal immigrants in his state. Panicking that he might have spent mightily and lose to Huck Thin in Iowa Romney attacked him on this issue only to have Huckabee say, "I guess Mitt Romney would rather keep people out of college so they can keep working on his lawn," . Seems Mitt had hired a lawn care company that depended on cheap, illegal immigrant laborers for twelve years. Fred Thompson got in a few kicks in on Huckabee too. You’d imagine that the effort must have winded the laziest candidate in the race. There is also talk about Huckabee turning over state owned space in Little Rock for use by the Mexican consulate.

Illegal immigration is the code phrase for a well prepared strategy the Republicans are relying on in next year’s election, anti-Latino bigotry. Conservatives, unable to run on their actual platform, which would disadvantage the large majority of middle-class and working class people for the advantage of the oligarches, have always reverted to bigotry, their most trusted tool. Bigotry has won them election after election. CNN’s Lou Dobbs and others, well, really the entire cabloid-hate talk media, have been laying the ground, whipping up anti-Latino mania to the point where it is actually going to have a real impact on the election. Republicans are practicing with it against each other before using it against Democrats in the general election. On Russert’s program this morning Mary Matalin was fantasizing that anti-Latino bigotry would drive black voters into the arms of the Republicans, a fantasy so wacky that has the smell of being Oked by some consultant or other before that hack mouthed it.

The other reliable tool of Republicans, Biblical fundamentalism, is also being kept handy. Huckabee’s success in the Iowa polls is primary based on the pseudo-christian vote. The “Values Voters” and other pseudo-religious Republican fronts SHOULD have a problem with the anti-alien plank which is certain to be a part of the Republican platform. That is they would if liberals had the wit to have read the Bible. For example, in her brilliant review of The God Delusion, Marilynne Robinson made this potentially useful point in response to the false assertion that The Law as laid down in Leviticus - one of the favorite books with cherry pickers on both sides of the God Wars - was meant to only apply to Jews.

... the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people," language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33—34 says "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself." In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins's own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.)

My bold

What would the “Values Voters” answer be if it was repeatedly and relentlessly pointed out that this “law” was as much part of the bible as the ones allegedly opposed to gay people? Would it have an impact? Would it shame them? I don’t know but anything is worth trying at this late date. Perhaps it won’t work politically next year, since the groundwork of anti-Latino bigotry has been so well laid by hate-talk media. But Democratic strategists should always be on the look out for what the corporate media is preparing for use by Republican candidates and they should attack early and continually, pointing out that it is morally repugnant. It is only by a wall of resistance that hate campaigns can be fought. When you have the entire commercial media against you, you have to use every weapon available. If Lou Dobbs had been condemned for his promotion of bigotry over the past several years one of the potentially most potent tools of division and conquest by the party of the privileged it might not work as well as it probably will.

Ok, maybe the picture of Matalin was over the top. But ain't it the truth?

Sick As A Dog

Will post tomorrow.

olvlzl

P.S. No, I'm not eating grass.

Saturday Bad Poetry Hour

Jobless

I keep my ironed business face
in the old yellow travel case
under the stairs.

I lost the key.

My mirror stares
back at me
dressed in morning nudity.

----

In Memory

The woman has been killed.
Her eyes do not see.
Her body has been tilled.
It feeds a rattle tree.

And merrily we dance
around the rattle tree.
And when we get a chance
we tell her she is free.

----

This one is not about Hillary Clinton, by the way.

Hilary

I met her in the swimming pool.
I cannot stand the crowd.
But Hilary was different
and seemed to say so, loud.

Her skin was silvery and cool,
her swimming like a dream.
Her crawling style was ancient
but made the waters stream.

Her eyes were deep and green as sea.
I never saw them blink.
Yes, Hilary was different
but how, I could not think.

Until at last it came to me
and I saw what I had missed.
These facts made it evident
that Hilary was a fish.

These Are Some of My Least Favorite Things

1. A list of stuff from TPM Muckraker about the way information has been withheld or removed during the Bush Administration. The list doesn't really cover the cases where information was altered.

2. The "administrative mistake" which stopped cheap contraception from being available to college students also stopped it being available at 400 community health centers serving the poor. It's bad enough about the students, but to do this to poor women is really evil.

3. The fraud and waste in the funding of the Iraq occupation. Reading just a few articles on where the money has actually gone reveals a group of American contractors bathing in money, asking for more money and throwing the excess money away, without having very much to show for any of the output the money was supposed to have bought.

This is a real scandal and deserves much more attention, especially from the conservatives who used to be the party of the fiscally conservative government. Note that very few of those jobs were allocated through any sort of competitive bidding to begin with. It almost sounds like Government Gone Wild.

Democrats: The New Party of the Rich

This is a new conservative meme, making its way around the right blogosphere. It is based on a Heritage Foundation (rrrright-wing) study, which the Washington Times summarized as follows:

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.

"If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions," Mr. Franc said.

A key measure of each district's wealth was the number of single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year and married couples filing jointly who earn more than $200,000 annually, he said.

But in a broader measurement, the study also showed that of the 167 House districts where the median annual income was higher than the national median of $48,201, a slight majority, 84 districts, were represented by Democrats. Median means that half of all income earners make more than that level and half make less.

Mr. Franc's study also showed that contrary to the Democrats' tendency to define Republicans as the party of the rich, "the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts."

It sounds very convincing, does it not? There's only one problem: The study doesn't actually say that it is the rich who vote Democratic and the poor or the middle-class who vote Republican.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what is wrong with the Times arguments is to imagine a slightly different study, one relating the percentage of blacks in a state to whether the state, on average, tends to vote Democratic or Republican. I would not be at all surprised to find in such a study that the states with the highest black populations also tend to elect Republicans to the Congress. Now, does this mean that the Republican Party is the new party of the minorities? Of course not.

And the same argument applies here: The rich are more likely to vote Republican, and especially so in states with lower average incomes. In states with higher average incomes the tendency of the rich to vote Republican is less pronounced.

Friday Cats

These are hj's Aino and Iippa, Korat cats all sated and sleepy.

Oops! Sorry, We Didn't Mean It. Could You Come Back, Please?

I wrote about the Circuit City policy earlier this year, the policy of letting more experienced workers go, just to save money on the wages. That policy was based on the workers doing nothing wrong at all, just being "too expensive."

Well, Circuit City has learned that there is a reason why more experienced workers get paid more, and they are now asking them to come back. Please. Pretty please:

In March, Circuit City let go more than 3,000 workers and replaced them with lower-paid staff, a move criticized by analysts who said the loss of the more-experienced employees hurt sales of items such as extended warranties.

Circuit City's "execution remains a significant concern," Sanford Bernstein analyst said in a research note on Wednesday.

Cimino said Circuit City's changes include the creation of a supervisor position for stores and the elimination of shelf- stocking duties for sales associates to give them more time with customers.

The moves have "improved the associate morale in the stores," Cimino said. "We're getting feedback from our customers that they are having a better experience in the stores."

Compare this with what Circuit City did last March:

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers. The laid-off workers, about 8 percent of the company's total work force, would get a severance package and a chance to reapply for their former jobs, at lower pay, after a 10-week delay, the company said.

No wonder that morale went down after that move and that reversing it would be a morale improvement.

Why is it so hard to understand that a sales associate who actually knows the product is an asset to the firm?

Happy Thanksgiving 3!

I want to give thanks to visual arts. They are one of the deep mysteries for me because what they give is not easily explained using just intellect or aesthetics or in fact any arguments at all. Some works of art are like a fist into the stomach, unyielding in their demand to look, to see, to understand something which always just escapes understanding. Others are like the scent of vanilla or cinnamon or like the scent of Solomon's Seal: the more you try to inhale the scent the less you smell it, but when you give up and stop trying there it is - suddenly - and gone as quickly, leaving behind only something which matters but why?

Trying to analyze art is for me a fascinating and fun game but it never gets to the reasons for that basic reaction, a physical one, which forces me to pay attention to something. It's not that the analyses don't matter, they do. But they cannot unravel the mystery completely and totally, and they can never make the explanation for that initial stunned moment something that one can just file away as an intellectual fact.

I have many favorites among the visual artists, but today I'd like to mention Leonora Carrington. She is not well known but her work gives me that inexplicable initial thump. Or perhaps something subtler in her case. Anyway, this is one example of her paintings: Adelita Flees





She is a surrealist as you can see, but what kind of a surrealist? What is surreal in her world view? What is the painting really saying? It speaks to a nonverbal part of me, sadly. Also happily, of course.
----
Link to the Guardian article by Darryl Pearce.

Happy Thanksgiving 2!

I wanted to put up this short story about sexual desire but it's not on the computer and I can't find the notebook in the mess that is supposed to be my libraries. Instead, you are going to get another short story about root canal work. Well, it's a short story but the events described in it actually happened to me. I know it is very unsuitable for today. But then it is unsuitable for every day.

A Dental Appointment

Sara is late. She is running for the train. The driver sees her running and takes off exactly one second before she reaches the still open door. Sara swears silently. She can still make it, she hopes. The coin exchange machine is malfunctioning again. She starts turning her pockets and bag over in search for coins. The next train should come within ten minutes. Her appointment for a root canal isn't for another forty-five minutes. Not that she is looking forward to it.

Once she has the coins she sits down on the bench and looks at the pigeons perching on the roof of the deserted station building or flying through the empty shell of its second floor. The station house is a ruin, of some long-gone civilization, and the pigeons are the new power that has taken it over. Lucky birds, they have no teeth.

A woman and a man cross the tracks and join Sara and another woman already there at the train stop. The new arrivals look Middle Eastern, probably a mother and a son. He looks affluent, Americanized, in his forties. She doesn't look Americanized. Her scarf is on crooked and she wears no bra. She has missing teeth in the front.

Sara practises deep breathing. Her stomach rebels against the prospect of a dental visit. The couple seem to know the other woman on the bench. The mother doesn't speak any English. She wants to compare how dark her hair is to the other woman's grey curls.

The train arrives. Sara finds a single seat in the back and continues deep breathing and relaxation. She has a fobia about drills. The trio from the stop seat themselves across from her. The man has brilliantly white teeth. Breathe gently, breathe deeply.

He talks with the American woman over his mother's head. "Do you know how many children my mother has had? Sixteen! And do you know how many survived? Eight!"

The train takes off from the station and slowly rolls through the suburban landscape. Backyards and trees go by. Birds without teeth. One neat fence has graffiti which Sara can't read. She can never read any graffiti, and it is all in the same handwriting. She imagines a jet-setting graffiti artist, flying from one country to another, scrawling graffiti everywhere. Most likely someone with perfect teeth.

The train stops and takes off again. The houses look more expensive now, and less of them is visible from the tracks. There are proper woods now, green. Sara tries to relax in the green.

"Don't you think that women belong in the home?" asks the Middle Eastern man of his neighbor. Sara can't hear her answer. A group of schoolgirls enter the train, laughing and chattering. Sara hopes that their voices would drown out the man but they move on.

Now the landscape is citified. Poor backyards with clotheslines and derelict cars, more graffiti. Then highrises. Soon the train would go underground. Then she'd be nearly there. Breathe in, breathe out.

"My mother never liked girls", says the man. "Why do you think she doesn't care for girls?" There are no free seats, no standing room anywhere. Sara starts to sing quietly to keep his voice out. Her stomach has clutched into a tight fist. It won't relax. It won't let go.

The train dives into darkness. The color inside changes to greyish cold. Everybody suddenly looks tired and old and in need of dusting.

Sara counts the remaining stops. Three. She is afraid that she'll need to find a restroom soon. The train slows in preparation for a stop. Large advertisements flash by. Do you need to lose weight? A woman in bikinis lying in the sun. Two happy people buying insurance. No graffiti. Nothing about root canals or the dislike of little girls. They take off again.

Sara has forgotten to sing, so she can't avoid hearing the man. "What is wrong with selling your daughters if you don't want them?" She has to get up. She has to leave right now. On the next station. It means having to run three more blocks. She gets off. She runs three more blocks. She is late for her dental appointment.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This song is wonderful.

A Taser Video

By Digby, who also provides the background for it. Warning: Possibly upsetting to watch.

Spotting Patterns

Texas and Taliban. The post by a male undergraduate urging women - those hussies - to get back into flowing and elegant (and constricting) dresses to better reflect their innate passivity and modesty has something in common with the fervent kind of Talibanism of the Muslim extremes. Consider this quote from the student's sermon:

The androgynous masculinization of the modern woman, through the donning of pants, suits, uncovered shoulders and unveiled hair, has in a sense led to the slow whorification of ladyhood. In discarding feminine dress, women seem to have symbolically discarded femininity and modesty (the virtues of women) in favor of sexual virility, promiscuity and immodesty (the vices of men).

The bolds are mine. I think Osama bin Laden would nod his head while reading those words. Isn't it weird?

Other patterns crop up in some of my recent posts, too. For instance, the idea that women are often seen as at least partially responsible for their own sexual victimization, even when there are no real grounds for that. I think this has a lot to do with our unstated assumptions about what is normal and who determines what normal behavior might be.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia III

Remember the 200 lashes and six months in prison a gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia was given for talking to the media about the case? Her initial punishment was 90 lashes for being in contact with a man not her relative, but the extra lashes and those six months were added because her lawyer talked to the media. The lawyer had his license revoked for that same act.

What all this means is that the gang-raped woman is now totally without legal representation. The human rights organizations are outraged:

The case has sparked outrage among human rights groups.

"Barring the lawyer from representing the victim in court is almost equivalent to the rape crime itself," said Fawzeyah al-Oyouni, founding member of the newly formed Saudi Association for the Defense of Women's Rights.

"This is not just about the girl, it's about every woman in Saudi Arabia," she said. "We're fearing for our lives and the lives of our sisters and our daughters and every Saudi woman out there. We're afraid of going out in the streets."

Human Rights Watch said it has called on Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah "to immediely void the verdict and drop all charges against the rape victim and to order the court to end its harassment of her lawyer."

Even John Edwards is outraged. From an e-mail:

Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Today, Senator John Edwards released the following statement;

"Today's news that a Saudi Arabian court has chosen to punish the victim of a gang rape is an appalling breach of the most fundamental human rights. I am outraged that President Bush has refused to condemn the sentence. We need a president who will reengage with the world and restore our moral authority - only then will we be able to lead other nations in protecting the basic rights and human dignity of every person on this planet."

How about it, President Bush? You could tell your pals to go a little easier on their womenfolk.

Show Us Yer Boobs!

The New York Times tells us about what some football fans use for kicks when their team isn't playing very well:

At halftime of the Jets' home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday, several hundred men lined one of Giants Stadium's two pedestrian ramps at Gate D. Three deep in some areas, they whistled and jumped up and down. Then they began an obscenity-laced chant, demanding that the few women in the gathering expose their breasts.

When one woman appeared to be on the verge of obliging, the hooting and hollering intensified. But then she walked away, and plastic beer bottles and spit went flying. Boos swept through the crowd of unsatisfied men.

In karate this would be called a gauntlet (though of course that gauntlet involved physical attacks by everyone you pass). The women must run a gauntlet. Not only that, but they are unpaid entertainment for the men, not professional strippers or employees of the stadium. Imagine the feelings of any woman who comes across this scene unexpectedly. She's treated as...what? I have no kind description of what the asshole men are doing there.

And what happens when a woman actually responds by flashing her breasts at this horde of salivating imbeciles? This:

Denisse Rivera, a 23-year-old from the Bronx, was on a first date Sunday. When she arrived at the crowd at Gate D, several men pointed at her, signaling men at all levels to chant in her direction. After a brief moment of hesitation, she flashed them. Then she took a bow.

"I don't care," Rivera said when told that video clips of previous incidents, taken on cellphones, ended up online. "I love my body and I like what I have, so let everybody share it."

Two security guards soon approached Rivera. The guards warned her about indecent exposure laws, she said, and let her go.

There you go. It's the woman who is breaking the law, apparently not all those menacing men hooting, hollering and throwing things.

And no, the security can't cope with this at all, though they do have time to warn the women involved. What are they supposed to do, one man asks? Arrest everyone who starts humming?

Much easier not to bother, of course. And in any case, everybody likes a little of Girls Gone Wild, even if the girls aren't actually volunteering for it.

Give Thanks VI

And I promise that this will be the last one of the series. So let us give thanks for feminine virtues, as described by one male undergraduate:

What's not sexy is feminism (not to be confused with femininity), which is directly responsible for the disappearance of our beloved dresses and the adoption of pants by the "new woman." Like all fashions, pants are symbolic of something - in this case masculinity - through their allowance of physical activity. Dresses, the antithesis of pants, symbolize femininity through grace and elegance. Men find elegance in women to be attractive, and dresses are a physical manifestation of femininity. The wearing of pants by women represents the masculinization of the fairer sex, which is not at all attractive.

In advocating the wearing of dresses, I must distinguish between the flowing elegant dresses of tradition and the more degenerate and immodest dresses of our present culture. The miniskirt, a dress of sorts that doesn't extend below the knees, is both lacking in modesty and elegance. Elegance is essential to femininity, and the lack thereof implies a sort of masculinization. Modesty is essential to feminine virtue, and the lack thereof implies a state of whorification. Immodest, inelegant dresses constitute a degeneration and androgynization of true dresses.

There ya go. And yes, indeed, it is Thanksgiving 2007, not Thanksgiving 1937.

Also give thanks to whoever taught this boy to use dualistic thinking: Either women are modest, in a long dress or they are whores. Too bad that he never developed this idea any further:

Like all fashions, pants are symbolic of something - in this case masculinity - through their allowance of physical activity.

Therefore, it follows that being paralyzed in a bed would be the greatest epitome of femininity? If allowance of physical activity is only for men, that is.

I'm still hoping that Mr. Ryan Haecker is a joke. I'm willing to give thanks to the great spaghetti monster or to the Pope (in his dress) or to almost anyone if that should prove to be true. Though if this is a joke it is not well-told.

May the last words go to Mr. Haecker:

If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility. These defining aspects of womanhood are immutable.

Give thanks, my feminist friend, that you don't have to marry him.
----
Via Pam's House Blend.

Give Thanks V

Aren't you happy that this man does not yet speak for the majority of Americans, and with any luck never will?

Only strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities can forestall these terrible scenarios. This would not require a "declaration of war," an antiquated concept that has not been employed since World War II and rarely before. We would send no troops, conquer no land. Rather, we would act in pre-emptive self-defense.

At stake are supreme issues of national safety. The president alone, as Alexander Hamilton said, is positioned to operate with "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch." Of course, Congress can block presidential action, but in this case, most members will be satisfied to stand clear and let the president do what must be done.

Give thanks that we still live in the world before the nuking of Iran.

Give Thanks IV

Give thanks for the messengers of bad news who are attacked for merely being the messengers. Give thanks for the majority of the world which hears the bad news and is willing to act on them:

The world's scientists have done their job. Now it's time for world leaders, starting with President Bush, to do theirs. That is the urgent message at the core of the latest — and the most powerful — report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists who collectively constitute the world's most authoritative voice on global warming.

Released in Spain over the weekend, the report leaves no doubt that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (and, to a lesser extent, deforestation) have been responsible for the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures.

If these emissions are not brought under control, the report predicts, the consequences could be disastrous: further melting at the poles, sea levels rising high enough to submerge island nations, the elimination of one-quarter or more of the world's species, widespread famine in places like Africa, more violent hurricanes.

And it warns that time is running out. To avoid the worst of these disasters, it says, the world must stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases by 2015, begin to reduce them shortly thereafter and largely free itself of carbon-emitting technologies by midcentury.

Then give thanks to whoever decided to have the two-term limit on American presidencies.

Give Thanks III

Give thanks if you are on the waiting list for a private jet but manage to re-equip a commercial one in time for your Thanksgiving vacation. Give thanks for your new Patek Philippe that cost you $900,000. Give thanks for the economic situation which, astonishingly, is very good for the super-rich:

The quest for things exorbitantly exotic has reached a fever pitch of late. For one thing, more people than ever can afford to join in the pursuit. "This is the richest year ever in human history," said Steve Forbes, chief executive of Forbes, whose recent Forbes 400 list consisted entirely of billionaires for the second year since its inception. The past year has seen the number of billionaires grow 19%, to nearly 1,000, according to the company. In the past 10 years, the number of financial millionaires has more than doubled.

Half the new members on the Forbes 400 list come from hedge funds and private equity, and they form a fiscal fraternity that is not only wealthier but also younger, more diverse and more numerous than ever. While managing and making billions, the economy's latest whiz kids are shaking up the financial world and, quite often, the planet's spending habits along with it. "Never before have so many Americans gotten so wealthy so quickly. And never before have the wealthy spent so much on lifestyle and consumer goods," says Robert Frank, author of Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. "So what do you do to stand out? The challenge for today's rich is to set themselves apart from the merely affluent. You want things no one else can afford or experience. The challenge is to always stay ahead." And while the recent stock-market turbulence may stall the tide, it is unlikely to stem it. "You can't get rich off financial markets and not be exposed if they fall," Frank says. "The next year or two, we might have a slight decline in numbers of millionaires as well as a decline in the amount of their wealth. But long term, I'm bullish on wealth. The rich are going to get richer, and more important, they are going to get more numerous."

Give Thanks II

Give thanks if you are not in Iraq and if you don't have a loved one over there. Give thanks if you do have a loved one over there and she or he is well. Give thanks if your loved one came back all broken but alive, yes, still alive! Give thanks that our government is saving money by taking away some of the signing bonuses of those wounded in action, perhaps because they can't complete the period of time they signed up for:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

Give thanks.
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Link via Carpetbagger Report.

Give Thanks I

Bob Herbert tells us how the housing market bubble burst all over one disabled woman in her sixties:

Like vultures, the mortgage lenders began circling the single-family house with the tiny front lawn on Merrill Avenue.

They knew that the woman who owned the house was old and sick and that her two aging daughters were struggling with illness and poverty as well. That was all to the good as far as the lenders were concerned. The predator's mission is to home in on the vulnerable.

"The people that wanted to put through the loan called me about a hundred times," said Rosa Dailey, who is 65 and going blind and needs an oxygen tank at times to help her breathe. "I kept telling them no, because I didn't think we could afford it. But they kept saying how it was to our advantage. So I finally said: 'All right, let's see what we can do.' "

...

That was the beginning of a tragic spiral, with one unaffordable loan following another. As Ms. Dailey put it: "I feel like they led me down a dark alley."

Ms. Dailey told me her story in the freezing living room of the house on Merrill Avenue, which no longer has a working furnace and is growing shabbier by the day. It's all she has left. Her mother and her older sister are dead now. Her only income is about $1,300 a month from Social Security — less than the monthly note on the house, which is in foreclosure proceedings.

One aspect of the so-called mortgage crisis that hasn't been adequately explored is the extent to which predatory lenders have committed fraud against vulnerable homeowners. They have pushed overpriced loans and outlandish fees on hapless victims who didn't understand — and could not possibly have met — the terms of the contracts they signed.

I guess we could all say thanks for not being Ms. Dailey, at least yet. Many people probably did take badly thought-out loans because of greed or gullibility. But the case of Ms. Dailey is unlikely to be a unique one. It's still not uncommon for ordinary people to view bankers or lenders as professionals, as people in a trusted role, as people who will tell you, with a heavy and serious tone of voice, if you really can't afford that mortgage you set your heart on. This is how mortgage lenders have been regarded for quite a long time. And my guess is that Ms. Dailey believed the lenders. If they said that she could afford the loan and that it would make her payments smaller, well, they must be right, given that they know all those technical terms and wear three-piece suits and so on.

It's almost as if your physician suddenly turned on you and started feeding you drugs you don't really need or urging you to have unnecessary operations. Such physicians do exist but they are rare, because the legal framework and training is geared towards making physicians behave in a different manner, that of a trusted professional. When did this change about bankers and mortgage lenders?

Ms. Dailey is going to have corn flakes and canned vegetables for Thanksgiving, while sitting in her cold house.

May Colvin

I was reading an old flea market book of poetry the other night and came upon this old ballad

MAY COLVIN

False Sir John a-wooing came
To a maid of beauty fair;
May Colvin was this lady's name,
Her father's only heir.

He woo'd her but, he woo'd her ben,
He woo'd her in the ha';
Until he got the lady's consent
To mount and ride awa'.

"Go fetch me some of your father's gold,
And some of your mother's fee,
And I'll carry you into the north land,
And there I'll marry thee."

She's gane to her father's coffers
Where all his money lay,
And she's taken the red, and she's left the white,
And so lightly she's tripp'd away.

She's gane to her father's stable
Where all the steeds did stand,
And she's taken the best, and she's left the warst
That was in her father's land.

She's mounted on a milk-white steed,
And he on a dapple-grey,
And on they rade to a lonesome part,
A rock beside the sea.

"Loup off the steed," says false Sir John,
"Your bridal bed you see;
Seven ladies I have drown'd here,
And the eighth one you shall be.

"Cast off, cast off your silks so fine
And lay them on a stone,
For they are too fine and costly
To rot in the salt sea foam.

"Cast off, cast off your silken stays,
For and your broider'd shoon,
For they are too fine and costly
To rot in the salt sea foam.

"Cast off, cast off your Holland smock
That's border'd with the lawn,
For it is too fine and costly
To rot in the salt sea foam."

"O turn about, thou false Sir John,
And look to the leaf o' the tree;
For it never became a gentleman
A naked woman to see."

He turn'd himself straight round about
To look to the leaf o' the tree;
She's twined her arms about his waist
And thrown him into the sea.

"O hold a grip o' me, May Colvin,
For fear that I should drown;
I'll take you home to your father's gates
And safe I'll set you down."

"No help, no help, thou false Sir John,
No help, no pity thee!
For you lie not in a caulder bed
Than you thought to lay me."

She mounted on her milk-white steed,
And led the dapple-grey,
And she rode till she reach'd her father's gates,
At the breakin' o' the day.

Up then spake the pretty parrot,
"May Colvin, where have you been?
What has become o' false Sir John
That went with you yestreen?" –

"O hold your tongue, my pretty parrot!
Nor tell no tales o' me;
Your cage shall be made o' the beaten gold
And the spokes o' ivorie."

Up then spake her father dear,
In the bed-chamber where he lay:
"What ails the pretty parrot,
That prattles so long ere day?" –

"There came a cat to my cage, master,
I thought 't would have worried me,
And I was calling to May Colvin
To take the cat from me."

It's quite an old ballad and reminds me of the Bluebeard fairy tale. But this heroine is resourceful and clever and carries out her own rescue. Interesting.

A daylily has been named after May Colvin, too.

The Little Drummer Boys

These are the hawks, always eager to have a little bit more war. The problem with their eagerness is that going to war in, say, Pakistan (the newest possible target) while also staying in Iraq requires some sort of cloning of the military and the Bush administration is dead-set against cloning. Or it requires hiring mercenaries and we know how well that works.

In short, the U.S. does indeed have the largest stock of WMDs and nuclear bombs and the like, and the largest military budget of any country on earth (in fact, several times larger than the next largest such budget), but the U.S. does not have millions and millions of spare soldiers. Any attempt to extend some sort of warfare to several countries would fail unless it was carried out by distance bombing only. I wish the little drummer boys would make it clear that they are talking about turning countries into glass-covered parking lots, because that's what the only realistic strategy to winning such wars would entail.

Who Does The Laundry?

An interesting interview with two American women who write on mothers and work.

Today's Post on Economics (Less Filling And Tastes Great)

One of the effects of globalization or international competition in general is well known: Certain domestic industries suffer because they are no longer competitive and workers in them will be laid off. What should those workers do next?

The traditional economics answer is retraining. You go back to school, get new skills in something your country still can compete in, you then get a new career and all will be fine.

The shorthand of this pretty much states that there will be those immediate losses of jobs and earnings but in the longer-run everything will be just dandy. A comment at Eschaton threads the other day points out that this shorthand story is a fairy tale. Here is the comment by jen:

Yup. And the rest of us who make well under that amount are suffering what I like to call "regressive wages." Meaning, your career gets tied up with a big red bow and shipped overseas, leaving you to deal with unemployment or underemployment for a year or two or three. Then you spend your savings to go back to school and start over in a new career. Upon starting over you can't make any better than a shitty entry level salary despite two decades of work experience. Meanwhile the nest egg is gone and you're up to your eyeballs in debt again, because even though your wages have taken a nose dive, the cost of living has continued to increase.

You're forty-something now and have no idea where your child's college money is going to come from, let alone retirement savings. And then, as if you haven't been kicked in the balls hard enough, you find out your new career is likely to experience an "explosion" in offshoring by the end of 2008.

The point jen makes is an important one: Changing careers is not a costless operation but an incredibly costly one, and the post doesn't quantify the costs of mental suffering at all.

In general economic arguments tend to downplay the costs to people from moving or from changing careers or from other adjustments the market deems necessary. Moving, for instance, is seen as an easy way to adjust to your firm juggling its operations, and it may well be better than being laid off. But moving means losing all the support structures your family may have developed, pulling the children out of the schools in which they have made their friends and possibly also causing your spouse to lose a job he or she likes and needs. Moving is expensive.

And so is job retraining caused by globalization. These costs should be kept in mind when discussing the advantages of global markets.

A Bitch-Hunt

Maureen Dowd is ready for one:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.

Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter, after he began exploring a presidential bid. When he winked at her, took her elbow and tried to say hello on the Senate floor, she did not melt, as many women do. She brushed him off, a move meant to remind him that he was an upstart who should not get in the way of her turn in the Oval Office.

He was so shook up, he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.

She has continued to flick the whip in debates. She usually ignores Obama and John Edwards backstage, preferring to chat with the so-called second-tier candidates. And she often looks so unapproachable while they're setting up on stage that Obama seems hesitant to be the first to say hi.

And what have we learned from these beginning paragraphs of yet another entry in the "id" diaries of one Maureen Dowd? That a woman in power is a dominatrix? How very feminist. Or that Hillary Clinton, specifically, is a dominatrix? What is the evidence Dowd provides on this? That she is cold towards Barack Obama. This, my friends, is how a woman becomes a dominatrix.

What else might we learn from these few paragraphs? Might there possibly be an innuendo here about race, too? I'm not sure about that. But Maureen Dowd sure hates Hillary Clinton and thinks that it's important for her readers to know that, including the reasons for her hatred which appear something to do with sado-masochistic sex and Dowd's insistence of interpreting a powerful woman in politics in such terms. Dowd also wants to tell us that she knows the inner motivations of Hillary Clinton ("a move meant to remind him that he was an upstart").

It's pretty sickening. Politics is not really who gets to tie whom to the bedposts with those velvety ties, Maureen. It's about which people get bombed in the future, about the Constitution, about unemployment, health care, education and all those other incredibly non-sexy matters.

Sigh. I'm preaching to an empty room while all the fashionable pundits sharpen their pencils to scribble down intimate details about the Clinton's marriage and about Hillary being a dominatrix in a leather harness and about the Democratic men all being bottoms. If you are not convinced by Dowd's series of "I Hate Hillary" columns, Andrew Sullivan has joined in the bitch-hunt, too:

Here's a more paranoid explanation: at some point in this campaign, if you believe the Washington rumor mill, there may well be some Clinton bimbo eruption stories, i.e. Bill's post-presidential extracurricular activities will come under discussion again. This Novak flap therefore may be a dummy-run for the various responses if such alleged doodoo eventually hits the campaign fan. The story would be relevant again not so much because of Bill but because of Hillary. She is now the candidate and would be forced to respond to such allegations if they became in any way legit.

"She is now the candidate and would be forced to respond to such allegations if they became in any way legit." Oh my. Hillary Clinton is both a dominatrix whipping the Democratic girly-men into submission AND the person responsible for any possible future affairs Bill Clinton might have. Either way, she is defined by sexuality, not by the politics she proposes. And that is what makes these unsavory messes my business, a feminist business.

So stop it, already. Criticize her policies or her expertise or other relevant matters.

Sunday Night Truth or Dare Posted by olvlzl.

Maybe it's the queasy stomach, maybe it's the insomnia or the SAD or writer's block but I'm feeling reckless tonight, so I'll tell you one of my deepest, darkest, most scandalous secrets.

I learned to read and speak Esperanto a couple of years back. And even worse than that, I think it's a fine idea and I don't care if it makes me disreputable. After a few months of studying Teach Yourself Esperanto I could speak it better than I can French, which I studied all through high school and college. And the books I've read are pretty good, especially the poetry.

There. Isn't that scandalous? Now it's your turn.

What Do You Know? Reading Something New About Thanksgiving. Posted by olvlzl.

I almost passed by Eve LaPlante's article about Thanksgiving, which looked like it would be a rehash of nonsense about the Pilgrim Fathers and associated New England Yankee propaganda but that would have been a mistake. Oh, it is all about the Pilgrim-Puritan tradition of "public days". However, at the heart is interesting information about one of LaPlante's ancestors, Judge Samuel Sewall, of witch hunt infamy. In addition to leaving a full description of an early 18th century thanksgiving menu (yech!), LaPlante gives details about how he came to see the error of his witch persecution and became a better person for it.

In January 1697, for example, the Massachusetts government called a public day so the community could repent and beg God's forgiveness for the disaster of the Salem witch hunt, in which a Colonial court had executed 20 innocent women and men. One of my ancestors, Judge Samuel Sewall, was one of nine judges who had presided over the 1692 witchcraft trials. On Jan. 14, 1697, during the fast-day service at Boston's Third Church, now Old South, 44-year-old Judge Sewall stood up from his bench and bowed his head as his minister read aloud Sewall's public statement of acceptance of "the blame and shame" for the witch hunt. Sewall donned a coarse penitential hair shirt on that fast day and wore it, according to family lore, for the rest of his life, as a constant, painful reminder of his sin.

During the long period of repentance that followed, Judge Sewall tried to improve not only himself but also his society. He became an unlikely spokesman for the advancement of civil rights and individual liberties. In the summer of 1697, not long after the fast day, he published an essay, "Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica," that portrayed America - and Native Americans - as virtuous and godly. In 1700, when one in five families in Boston owned African or Native American slaves, Sewall composed and published the first abolitionist statement in America, "The Selling of Joseph," which argued that slavery was immoral. His 1725 essay, "Talitha Cumi," or "Damsel, Arise," stated the "right of women" and women's fundamental equality to men.

Having had the traditional myths of ye olde Pilgrim fathers force fed in my youth- largely created by ye olde Yankee historians and used as "nativist" propaganda- I'd never gone into the aftermath of the anti-witch mania and so didn't know about the repentance. Holding a grudge against the Puritans, I'd assumed that anti-slavery efforts began with John Woolman, the Quaker saint. And I'm ashamed to say that I knew little about feminism before Anthony. It's good to be upended once in a while, forced to question basic assumptions and customs of thinking. Apparently Sewall found that to be true.

I have a hard time imagining Scalia or Roberts or Alito repenting their corrupt actions in public or reforming themselves into something other than henchmen of the powerful establishment. Thomas, as his recent book proves, is never going to be any better than the pathetic, self-motivated, limpet to the powerful that he has always been. Ronald Reagan liked to make fun of the Puritan tradition for all the wrong reasons. He saw the discouragement of self indulgence as their major failure. The refusal to self-indulgence is one of the primary sins of our establishment today, usually expressed in some pop-psychological terms of inhibition and hang-ups. Fun is good but it isn't the greatest good. The real sins of the Puritans weren't the ones cited most often today, they were injustice, inequality, sexism and bigotry, hypocrisy and vainglory. The sins of the Puritans are exactly the virtues of today's conservatives.