We think Herman Cain or Rick Perry should try out some speeches and sound bites from the 2008 campaign. Word for word. The media didn’t pay attention then. Indeed, no matter what gibberish the candidate said, the media heaped heretofore unknown levels of praise upon him. Let’s see if the media repeat that pattern today.
….this is interesting, if true.
Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland city council have made “preserving disorder” the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k,” etc. And how did the Oakland city council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”
That’s “collaborate” in the Nazi-occupied-France sense: The city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They’re not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the regional president, David Lannon, took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today — rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support,” they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spraypainting walls.
As the Oakland Tribune reported: “A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.” There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one. The experience was surreal, the man said. “They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.” No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy…
At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: The government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class, and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class.
It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot…that’s all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along…
Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window-smashing starts.
Okay, we get all that. But as an electoral strategy this course seems to head straight in the direction of unprecedented landslide defeat. (And a generational discrediting of the movement’s media accomplices to boot — sweet!) So what part of the clever plan are we missing?
We don’t get what’s going on with the administration’s strategy of embracing OWS. Reasons: (a) there are twice as many conservatives than there are liberals in the United States, 40-20% or more; (b) moreover, according to Democrat observers, Independents are much closer to the R party than the D party, further increasing the dominance of conservatism in the electorate; and (c) here’s Joe Klein of all people talking about OWS, which “includes a generous measure of weirdos, ideologues and free-range troublemakers. A recent, unscientific New York magazine poll of 100 demonstrators found that 34% believed the U.S. government is no better than al-Qaeda.” (These findings are consistent with Doug Schoen’s.)
So we’re a center-right country, moving more right, and even committed liberals like Joe Klein can see that OWS are losers and worse. So what’s the administration’s strategy here? There may be some allies of the administration who envision that OWS protests may lead to increasing levels of violence one way or the other and that this will inure to the benefit of the D’s as the proletariat rises up. But the country described in the paragraph above is neither Venezuela nor Cuba. In a bid to restore order, it’s hard to see a majority choosing left-wing authoritarianism. A greater probability is the opposite outcome. Again, what’s the strategy here?
Once there was this: what do you call a liberal with a teenage daughter? Now there’s this: what do you call a liberal after a month of OWS next door?
CBC:
“We cannot accept the explosion of the euro, which would mean the explosion of Europe,” Sarkozy told a news conference before the G20 leaders went into a working dinner Thursday evening. “If the euro exploded, Europe would explode. And in fact it’s the guarantee of peace on the continent where there were terrible wars — fiercer than anywhere else in the world — not in the 15th century but in the 20th century.”
Guarantee of peace? Huh? The euro is about a decade old. Maybe he meant the Common Market, which dates back to the 50′s, though Britain and others didn’t join until decades later.
In any event, the strange hyperbole is interesting. We seem to see nonsensical talk all the time among politicians these days. What’s French for “Pass This Bill Now”? HT: BC
Oops, it’s not that darn cat. It’s those darn fat cats and VDH asks who they are:
Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply…
was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs a suspect billionaire? Should I be mad or grateful that he made billions by permanently replacing my old scissors, paste, and bottle of Liquid Paper of the 1970s?
Did Johnny Depp really have to earn $50 million last year alone — or Leonardo DiCaprio $77 million? Couldn’t they have settled for $2 million in salary in 2010, and thereby passed on a little bit of the savings to their ticket-buying fans? What kind of system would allow Oprah Winfrey or the late Michael Jackson each to accumulate nearly $1 billion? Is left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore — reportedly worth $50 million — a one-percenter? Why does such an enemy of capitalism need so much capitalist largesse?
Do this administration and its supporters really wish to separate millions of diverse Americans by a moral divide of the “few at the top”? Are liberals like Sens. John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein — among the richest in the U.S. Senate — in that elite group?
How about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, together worth over $100 billion? They are certainly philanthropists. But their charities are predicated on two assumptions: They both apparently trust the private sector more than government to administer their vast estates, and neither sees much of a problem in avoiding billions in inheritance taxes that would one day be due to a now-broke federal treasury.
Is George Soros a “corporate-jet owner”? He nearly broke the Bank of England by shorting the British pound and was convicted in France of insider training. Rather than comply with new federal financial-disclosure regulations, he told some of his outside investors just to keep their money. Is Obama’s former director of the budget, Peter Orszag, a “fat-cat banker”? He left the administration to enter the “revolving door” of Wall Street, where he is now a rich banker for Citigroup.
There’s more than a little desperation in this pathetic approach to governance. The Hill: “The numbers say that voters don’t think he deserves reelection, he has no meaningful accomplishments, and the nation is headed off in the wrong direction under his watch. He is simply not viable by any measure.” Foolishness begets foolishness.
Representatives from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are collecting signs and ephemera from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. for potential exhibitions about the movement. And they have plenty to choose from. New images of the already iconic Occupy signs come across the wires every day.
William Cohan in Bloomberg:
In the end, Jon Corzine was little more than an unsupervised rogue trader. His disproportionately reckless $6.3 billion bet on the credit quality of a few European nations bankrupted MF Global Holdings Ltd. over the course of three dramatic days after the short-term credit markets quickly lost confidence in him and his firm. His gamble will cost MF’s shareholders and creditors billions of dollars and, virtually overnight, put the careers of MF’s almost 3,000 employees in jeopardy…
In granting Corzine a three-year extension of his employment agreement in 2011, the board’s compensation committee noted that his “performance has been exemplary since joining the firm just over one year ago,” according to the proxy statement. The board also noted that Corzine “accomplished key near-term building blocks, including significant improvements in the reputation of the firm as demonstrated by its ability to hire quality professionals, the company’s success in securing primary dealer status, its growing client balances and its improved posture with regulators.”
A $6.3 billion bet? MF only had $7.3 billion in total customer assets. And it apparently co-mingled customer accounts with corporate funds. It’s as though 2008 never happened.
Glenn Reynolds in the NY Post:
Since 1999, student loan debt has increased by 511%, while disposable income has increased by only 73%. That’s because when the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. College is no exception. Tuition has been increasing much faster than disposable income, and families — believing that a college education is a can’t-lose investment, much as they used to think houses were — have been making up the difference with debt…
“college” isn’t an undifferentiated product. Companies can’t hire enough mechanical engineers, but there’s no bidding war for majors in Fine Arts or Women’s Studies, degrees that cost just as much, but deliver a lot less in terms of employment. In an economically rational market, it would be harder to borrow money to finance fields of study that were unlikely to produce enough income to pay back the loans. But since the federal government subsidizes everything — and makes student loans un-dischargeable in bankruptcy — there’s no incentive for lenders to care, and even less incentive for colleges and universities to care. They get their money up front, after all — just like the people who wrote the subprime loans…
we should return to the days when student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy, starting five years after graduation. This will allow graduates who are unable to pay to get out from under what is otherwise a potential lifetime of debt-slavery…Put the institutions who issued the degrees on the hook for the money they received. Making them eat the entire loan balance would probably bankrupt a lot of colleges (though that should tell us something about the problem right there), but sticking them with even a small fraction — say, 10% or 15% — would be enough to inspire a much greater degree of concern
And there’s this from the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni: “College tuitions have risen more than 440% over the last 25 years — and for what? The students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right.” 511% and 440% are pretty outrageous, particularly when some of the best learning resources are available for free.
Eugene Robinson seemed awfully sure of himself in the WaPo:
The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate…For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.
The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.
“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention…
Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future…
The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise
There’s only one little problem with all this. Here’s the actual data from Best’s archives, without the ten-year “smoothing” and other features created to produce the graph above. As you can see, it shows cooling over the last decade:
However, Mr. Muller was already on the record: “Richard Muller, leader of the initiative, said that the global temperature standstill of the past decade was not present in their data.” Oops!
James Delingpole of the Telegraph is in high dudgeon: “I had my doubts about Muller’s findings from the start. I thought it was at best disingenuous of him to pose as a ‘sceptic’ when there is little evidence of him ever having been one….I really didn’t want my first blog post in a week to be yet another one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?”
Of course, much of this is becoming irrelevant, since the US and the West can’t afford the expensive fantasies like cap-and-trade and so forth. But it’s nice for candidates for cutting government spending to stand up and draw attention to themselves as Muller has done.
Several decades ago, back when Ugly George roamed Manhattan, there was a homeless fellow whom we’d often see in the vicinity of Broadway and 57th Street. He had a shopping cart with a drum in it. He’d play the drum occasionally and ask for handouts. For some reason, he wore what appeared to be shoe polish on his head outlining the part of the scalp normally covered by hair. We hadn’t thought of him in a long time, but he seems to now have successors galore.
The Washington Post ran a long piece on Social Security, describing its problems in some detail. It could have trimmed the piece from its nearly 2400 words by using an appropriate shortcut:
Social Security, until now a huge lender to the government, will begin demanding repayment to its trust fund to cover the shortfall. If fully repaid, the trust fund can fully finance benefits until 2036…The $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors
So much for the “trust fund.” We suppose this article appears now to propagandize among seniors to join the administration and OWS and demand tax increases. We’ll know soon enough if that’s the case.
They’re burning the midnight oil over at Polipundit. Utahprez described a company that seems even worse than the firms of Wall Street. Among other things, the company
– Is a monopoly, yet somehow manages to lose trillions of dollars every year
– Refuses to manage to a budget, most recently not even presenting one for over 2 years
– Carries a large segment of employees who are paid to do nothing productive…
– Has massive unfunded pension liabilities on the books
– Borrows profligately and has record amounts of debt
– Often acts contrary to the best interests of its shareholders and its board of directors
– Uses the shareholder’s money for projects with which they disagree…
– Provides salaries, benefits and job security that are far beyond those of their own shareholders
– Follows dubious accounting rules that do not meet American GAAP…
– Can set its own rules, and ignore them if they so choose
– Can force us to buy their products and services…
– Can confiscate private property for its own use or turn it over to others that it favors…
– Has a CEO that makes roughly 10 times that of the average employee…
– if you include the cost of the other bennies -– fully paid health care, private security for the CEO and his family, company cars and private jets -– it is more like 100 times…
– the CEO is guaranteed that salary for the rest of his life
Bonus fun: the CEO of the company “warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.” Can’t happen soon enough.
Howard Stern sent his representatives to interview OWS. They capture the seriousness of the moment (warning: part 2 of the interview is pretty gross). Although, as in the 1960′s, the organizers are professional troublemakers, the kids at these demonstrations around the country are nincompoops and worse. It’s pathetic to think that we have elected officials who say: “The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side.” What an embarrassment.
Almost as embarrassing are the mainstream media who pretend these fools have anything of value to add to our current political debates. Perhaps some Howard Stern fans can punk the media as they did in the cases of OJ Simpson on ABC (“Ah see OJay”), or Colin Ferguson on WABC (“de man, he shootin’ everybody, he say bababooey, bababooey”), or Princess Diana on CNN or MSNBC (“it was so horrible, bababooey, bababooey”). It’s a sorry state of affairs when Mr. Stern’s reporting on OWS captures more of what’s going on than do the legacy media.
Mark Halperin in TIME Magazine:
Democrats on Capitol Hill privately display nearly as much disdain for the Administration as their GOP counterparts, complaining about both its incompetence and its ideology.
That’s swell, but it seems only partially correct. Though some Democratic politicians have squawked, the thought leaders of the Democratic Party don’t seem to have a problem with the ideology of the administration, which seems rather like that of Britain’s Labour Party in the late 1970′s.
The next president is likely going to have to do some things that are highly polarizing and disruptive in the short-term. This is necessary and, as it happens, desirable, since an entire set of beliefs in the academic-government-media complex has to be taken on and defeated in order to do the things necessary to restore economic (and probably societal) vitality. John Stossel’s checklist is a decent beginning, but it doesn’t mention things like gutting the EPA and starting anew. Imagine the howls!
GOP insiders urge moderation and caution by a large margin. That won’t cut the mustard, given the enormity of the task at hand. We’re in arguably the longest political season in modern US history — the Lincoln-Douglas debates took place two years before the general election, but news traveled a lot slower back then. This is about much more than winning an election; it is about winning an argument about the identity of the country. Candor and clarity are everything. Anything else is wasting the opportunity of a lifetime.
The Atlantic:
Of all these parts of Obama’s executive order, the loan forgiveness aspect will have the least impact. By moving the timeline from 25 to 20 years, it could be significant in the long run — but it won’t be felt for decades. Remember, 82% of the current student loan debt outstanding was accrued in just the past decade. So it will be at least another 10 years before any of those borrowers have hit the 20-year mark…The monthly impact of the president’s new effort for most Americans paying off college debt will be between $4 and $8
More sleight-of-hand for the innumerate and the gullible. BTW, if this is not a photoshop, this girl needs more than just financial help. (Glenn Reynolds has a simple plan to deal with the debt problem.)
Brent Arends wrote about real estate in China at Marketwatch:
Prices in the major cities have skyrocketed. And newly middle-class investors have piled in. They’ve never seen a housing bust. They assumed it will go on forever. Ten years ago, homes in Shanghai sold for about six times an average family’s income. Today that’s 13 times. Shenzhen has gone from five times to 14 times. These are off-the-charts absurd ratios. This is a bona fide mania…
46 of 70 major cities saw prices stall or decline in September, reports the National Statistical Bureau. As recently as January the number was just 10…You can see a proxy for the Chinese housing bust in the performance on Wall Street of E-House (China) Holdings, a real estate broker with a U.S. listing. The stock has collapsed in a year from $17 to less than $7, and the company recently reported it swung to a second-quarter loss thanks to “tough market conditions.”
The credit bubble is imploding…Total lending has come to about $7.8 trillion. To put this in context, that is twice the entire net government debts of the European so-called “PIIGS” — the troubled countries of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain — put together…
Chinese banking operates in a “twilight zone” of phony accounting and shadow money and it’s all coming apart. “Almost half of all credit creation in China is off balance sheet,” wrote the team at Schroders. They think this situation could unravel “over the next three to six months,” producing a huge crisis with international implications. Most Chinese banks, they predict, will end up as “zombie banks.”
Electricity usage and air traffic have flattened. So there is a significant slowdown in the real economy. China has done huge bank bailouts in the past. Looks like another one is around the corner. However, this does not help with China’s planned conversion to a more consumerist society.
John Podhoretz is getting the vapors over the GOP field. Something similar seems to be going on over at Powerline. For some perspective, let’s flash back to January 2010 and the remarks of a retiring Democratic congressman from Arkansas:
Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home. “I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me’.”
That didn’t work out so well, as you recall, with the 2010 D-to-R pickup far greater than the 54 seats in 1994, and Independents flipping by 33 points. Berry was prescient — one of the seats that flipped had been his.
The election is a year away. Republicans may blow it of course, but they’re not doing so now in our view. Indeed, there is a rather lively discussion taking place, with competing tax plans and so forth. Leading candidates have already said that (a) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and (b) global warming either doesn’t exist or isn’t very important — and the world hasn’t ended. Some observers are even having a little fun with the idea of a Cain/Romney ticket. Relax. There’s plenty of time to panic next year.
