Folks-
I've resisted blogging about Sarah Palin in this election cycle, largely on the belief that you vote for the President, and not the Vice-President (which I think is a bad idea to begin with.) However, it has become plain that McCaint's choice of Palin was an absolute disaster. I obviously did suspect this from the beginning. The day her choice was announced, one of my co-workers asked me what I thought of her as a pick, and my response was: "I think McCain just lost himself the election." When he asked me why, I said: "He can't use the experience argument anymore. It's impossible to argue that she has more experience than Obama." We've watched them try to make that argument, but really what McCaint did was put a woman whose experience comes out to being a sports journalist, mayor of a town of about 6,000 people, and governor of a state of only about 650,000 people (about a third the population of my county) for less than 2 years up against a man who has a law degree from Harvard, was the editor of the Harvard Law Review, was a University Constitutional Law Professor, was a State Senator in a state with a population of over 12 million, and a Federal Senator for that same state, and then claim she has more relevent experience than he does. It would be comical if our future didn't depend on the outcome.
For most of the campaign we've been told how Palin is "one of us," and backs the same things we do, such as energy independence, ethics, America, and all things patriotic. It seems every single day something comes out to prove that sentiment wrong in every way.
As for her interest in energy independence, on October 21st the AP posted an article written by Martha Mendoza detailing how as Governor of Alaska, Palin backed shipping Alaskan Liquified Natural Gas to Japan, instead of using it in the U.S.
As for her ethics, she very obviously tried to get her former brother-in-law fired, and fired the man who refused to do it. Contrary to the reports from the McCaint Campaign, she was indeed found to be in violation of Alaskan Ethics rules, but the body making the report had no power to do anything about it. Then a few days ago it came out that she spent $150,000 of the McCaint campaign money for clothes in direct contradiction of what McCaint himself said 15 years ago. The campaign is gamely saying that the plan was to donate them to charity after the election. Does that suddenly make it ethical? I don't remember McCaint saying anything to that effect back then!
It's clear that she has no idea what the job of Vice President entails. Every time someone brings up the subject she either rebuffs the question, or gets the answer very wrong. The job of the Vice President has nothing to do with legislation. The Vice President has two tasks defined by the Constitution: 1. Cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate (not write or debate legislation), and 2. Take over the job of the President any time he or she is unable to perform the job. This usually is interpreted to mean when the President dies, but it also comes up if the President is in surgery, or is otherwise incapable of performing his or her job. That's it.
Now, after telling us all along that she is one of us, and taking Obama to task over his connections to William Ayers, she makes a really boneheaded statement: She is incapable of calling those who bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors, nurses, staff, and patients of those clinics, Terrorists. That's right, the guy who didn't kill anyone in his bombings in the '60's is a terorist, but those who target and kill abortion supporters to suppress other abortion supporters through terror, well, she can't call them terrorists. I'm not exagerating this folks. She can't refer to extreme-right-wing terrorists as what they are. "My killers aren't terrorists," she seems to be saying, "because they are on my side."
This may seem difficult to believe, but it's true. I'm not going to make you take this on faith. You can click the link above or check out the embedded YouTube video below and see her refuse to call abortion clinic bombers terrorists yourself.
This is what she is, in her clearest sense. She is an elitist, not a bi-partisan. She believes that her needs come first, her ideas come first, her beliefs come first, and if she needs a terror squad to put down ideas she doesn't like, she will. This is not the kind of "change" we need in this country, and never did.
It is clear to me that she and McCaint would destroy all of those things that I think makes America great. Tolerance of differing ideas. The idea that anyone can make it in America. This isn't what we are all about.
If you agree with me on these points, please pass this on to your friends.
-Edly
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Barack Obama's Same Path Ad
Folks-
I'm not certain if I have mentioned that I am a supporter of Barack Obama. In case that isn't obvious, I am.
I do not believe that he is perfect. I'm not sure we share the same sense of urgency about the environment and alternative power, but I am very certain that McCain't and I are on different plains of existence about these subjects. Mr. Obama believes that something should be done, while McCain't thinks we don't have to change at all, except maybe by making it easier to pollute.
When it comes to the economy, Mr. Obama and I seem to be in greater agreement. I would like to see more details in his plan, like what he intends to do about the mortgage mess. Where McCain't is concerned, I would like to see him stay the heck away from the mortgage mess, since he obviously has no idea just what the heck he should be doing. Throwing money at rich people will only make them richer, not improve the economy. "Trickle-down economics," what used to be called "Reaganomics," has been an utter failure. That's what is responsible for our economic woes right now.
I'm not sure if Mr. Obama would agree with me about what to do to increase investment by rich people in America. Personally, I would tax those making 7 figures or more at a much higher rate, perhaps as high as 70%. No joke. That's still not the highest rate we have ever had. In the '60's the highest rate was 90%, and the net effect was that people who made the most money did what they could to stay under that tax rate. Think about that for a second. Imagine these CEOs suddenly trying desperately to avoid making tens-of-millions of dollars. Where do you think the money would go? Back in the '60's it went back into the business. Imagine just how solid American businesses would be if suddenly each one of these major companies had another $50-100 Million available per year, just from executives not taking such large salaries. Is it possible that this one change would fix our economy? Probably not, but it wouldn't hurt.
I'm certain that Mr. Obama agrees with me that education is the best buffer against a bad economy. McCain't clearly disagrees with us. Just this year, McCain't voted against a bill that would give Iraq War Veterans full tuition at any college or university in the U.S. because he thought it would lead to fewer soldiers re-enlisting. He didn't account for the fact that it could lead to more people enlisting in the first place. Right now, that's the problem our military is facing.
In any case, Mr. Obama has released a new short video on his economic plan. I'm including the link to that video here. Please take the time to watch it, and then read the comparison of his economic plan to that of McCain't's at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/sidebyside.php.
-Edly
I'm not certain if I have mentioned that I am a supporter of Barack Obama. In case that isn't obvious, I am.
I do not believe that he is perfect. I'm not sure we share the same sense of urgency about the environment and alternative power, but I am very certain that McCain't and I are on different plains of existence about these subjects. Mr. Obama believes that something should be done, while McCain't thinks we don't have to change at all, except maybe by making it easier to pollute.
When it comes to the economy, Mr. Obama and I seem to be in greater agreement. I would like to see more details in his plan, like what he intends to do about the mortgage mess. Where McCain't is concerned, I would like to see him stay the heck away from the mortgage mess, since he obviously has no idea just what the heck he should be doing. Throwing money at rich people will only make them richer, not improve the economy. "Trickle-down economics," what used to be called "Reaganomics," has been an utter failure. That's what is responsible for our economic woes right now.
I'm not sure if Mr. Obama would agree with me about what to do to increase investment by rich people in America. Personally, I would tax those making 7 figures or more at a much higher rate, perhaps as high as 70%. No joke. That's still not the highest rate we have ever had. In the '60's the highest rate was 90%, and the net effect was that people who made the most money did what they could to stay under that tax rate. Think about that for a second. Imagine these CEOs suddenly trying desperately to avoid making tens-of-millions of dollars. Where do you think the money would go? Back in the '60's it went back into the business. Imagine just how solid American businesses would be if suddenly each one of these major companies had another $50-100 Million available per year, just from executives not taking such large salaries. Is it possible that this one change would fix our economy? Probably not, but it wouldn't hurt.
I'm certain that Mr. Obama agrees with me that education is the best buffer against a bad economy. McCain't clearly disagrees with us. Just this year, McCain't voted against a bill that would give Iraq War Veterans full tuition at any college or university in the U.S. because he thought it would lead to fewer soldiers re-enlisting. He didn't account for the fact that it could lead to more people enlisting in the first place. Right now, that's the problem our military is facing.
In any case, Mr. Obama has released a new short video on his economic plan. I'm including the link to that video here. Please take the time to watch it, and then read the comparison of his economic plan to that of McCain't's at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/sidebyside.php.
-Edly
Sunday, September 21, 2008
The Current Financial Situation, and Some Solutions
By Ed Smallwood
Yesterday I was watching CNN. Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd was being interviewed, I can’t remember who it was that was asking the questions. What stuck out in the interview was what he said about a closed-door briefing the Senate got from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He wouldn’t comment on the exact content, after all it wouldn’t be terribly useful to keep the information in a closed-door briefing if it was all going to become public immediately afterward. What Senator Dodd said was that after Mr. Bernanke was done talking, there was stunned silence for 10-15 seconds in the room.
That’s significant. It’s also very frightening, either way you look at it.
I have known for some time that things were going very wrong with the economy. I remember an interview last March with Paul Krugman in Fortune magazine where he said that he thought we would hit 6-7 Trillion Dollars in capital losses in the housing industry this year, a 25% reduction in equity throughout the United States. That is what we are just beginning to see right now. Congress is talking about an 800 Billion Dollar bailout. You can see that what Congress is talking about is roughly an order of magnitude too small to cover what Paul Krugman was talking about. In short, 88% of the losses aren’t being addressed by Congress.
Now, we also have to take into account that the International Monetary Fund is estimating our GDP at roughly 13 Trillion Dollars. The losses we are talking about are more than half of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire United States. Nobody alive has ever faced a financial disaster of this magnitude.
Is that what Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the Senators in that closed-door briefing? Numbers so large that it stunned veteran Senators into silence? I think that’s exactly what happened.
Here’s the real problem: The simple answer to this problem was to avoid deregulating the banking industry in the first place. Don’t let this debacle happen. Unfortunately several years ago the “Regulation is Bad for the Economy” branch of the Republican party got it’s way, with Senator John McCain cheering it on. The easy and simple answers to this problem are all gone now. There is no choice but to see our economy slide downward. It’s simply too late to prevent that.
So, what do we do now?
We’re going to have to bail out Wall Street. We don’t have a choice about this. That’s what Congress is doing to some extent now. The problem with how they are doing it is that they are diluting the shares that investors have by taking majority stakes of the companies they are bailing out and putting it under Government control. They are allowing the investors a chance to keep some of the value, but not most of it. This is unlikely to work in the long term. People’s retirement savings are going to suffer, even though it isn’t as much as they could. In short, the government is bailing out the executives of the companies more than the investors.
The landscape for homeowners is even bleaker. Nothing whatsoever has been done to address their concerns. Foreclosures are happening at an even greater pace than before. More properties are going “upside down” in value than they were before, and the Santa Clara County Association of REALTORS is estimating that this will be the case until at least 2010. Some estimates I have been reading put it at 2012 or later.
Now, with it harder than ever to declare bankruptcy (thank you Republicans,) and savings evaporating, the backbone of the American Economy, the Consumer, has almost no money to buy anything. We can see this through the fact that spending is decreasing while savings are simultaneously decreasing. Until something is done to address the concerns of the average person on the street, the economy can do nothing but spiral downward at an ever increasing rate.
This is where we stand now.
What are we going to have to do?
We are going to have to make peace with the fact that our economy is going to crash first of all. We can’t prevent it. Next, we have to do what we can to prevent it from crashing so bad that it can’t recover. This is a real possibility. There is nothing magical about the economy of the United States. Other countries in a similar state that did nothing saw their economies die outright. Most of them are third-world countries now, or failed states. That’s the danger.
We have to bring back the regulations that prevented this problem from happening decades ago. This is an absolute must. Doing any less than this means that nobody will trust banks enough to loan them money to make loans. That’s how the system works. Without that key part the system collapses and doesn’t recover.
We have to protect the money of the average person as much as possible right now. We can’t expect someone to pay back a bad mortgage at an ever increasing rate for the rest of their lives, tying up their spending power in servicing bad debt just because some company got greedy. If these homeowners decide to allow the banks to foreclose, they will find it harder to buy another home later. The inventory of foreclosed homes will increase, because there will be fewer qualified buyers (you can’t have a foreclosure in at least the last 2 years to qualify for a home loan). This is dangerous in several ways. First, unoccupied homes bring down property values. Second, they are fire dangers. Houses are fuel. If you have enough of them you can end up with a wildfire in the middle of a city. Oakland can tell you why this is bad.
This means we have to do at least one of two things, probably both: we will have to forgive at least part of the bad debt to keep people in their homes, or we will have to allow people with foreclosures on their record to get credit anyway. The former is preferable, and while the FHA is doing this to a small extent, the program needs to be massively expanded. The latter solution will probably have to be put into effect as well. Why should we do this? Why not let the people who took out these loans just hang? If we allow our spite to get ahead of our pity (or self interest), making sure these people pay back their loans, our economy suffers from having too little money left over to buy the things that we sell. All of us suffer if we make any one segment of the population suffer too much.
In addition, we really need to start working on our infrastructure, and I don’t mean just roads, bridges, ports, electricity grid, and communications grid. I mean the workforce as well. For most of my life we have seen a growing battle against the workforce. McCain’t has been talking a big game over how strong our workforce is, but the reality is he has actively been working on weakening it.
The big secret that allows the American economy to be so strong has been our educational system. Public education was invented here. We have expanded it ever sense the Brotherhood of Friends (often referred to as “The Quakers”) introduced the concept. All of my life the Republican Party has been trying to weaken it. Vouchers. Increasing tuition in Universities. Destruction of vocational schools. Even “No Child Left Behind” which is decreasing Federal funding to elementary schools. Recently when Democrats tried to bring back full tuition for all Iraq War Veterans, McCain’t voted against it. He said it would reduce the incentive for our Servicepeople to reenlist. This attitude is going to prevent our economy from recovering.
We need a top of the line communications grid to allow educated people to build products using electricity that will be shipped to the consumer through working ports and over working roads and bridges. If any one of those things isn’t working, our economy dies and stays that way.
Why wouldn’t our economy recover? Really, why would it? People with money are under no obligation to invest it in our country. If our economy is wrecked, they would be dumb to put good money after bad. They’ll invest it elsewhere, in economies that are booming. China is a good example. With no money being invested in our country, no educated people to design new products or services, a 20th century communications grid expected to help them design them, no energy to build them, and deteriorating ports, roads, and bridges to ship them our economy will stay sunk.
What we really need to get us through this crisis is a leader that believes in our future, not one that is trying to bring us back to a failed past, namely the “Roaring ‘20s.” Let’s all make sure we work toward our country’s future.
Links:
Fortune Magazine interview with Paul Krugman: March 17th, 2008 by Jia Lynn Yang http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/14/news/economy/krugman_subprime.fortune/index.htm
Yesterday I was watching CNN. Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd was being interviewed, I can’t remember who it was that was asking the questions. What stuck out in the interview was what he said about a closed-door briefing the Senate got from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He wouldn’t comment on the exact content, after all it wouldn’t be terribly useful to keep the information in a closed-door briefing if it was all going to become public immediately afterward. What Senator Dodd said was that after Mr. Bernanke was done talking, there was stunned silence for 10-15 seconds in the room.
That’s significant. It’s also very frightening, either way you look at it.
I have known for some time that things were going very wrong with the economy. I remember an interview last March with Paul Krugman in Fortune magazine where he said that he thought we would hit 6-7 Trillion Dollars in capital losses in the housing industry this year, a 25% reduction in equity throughout the United States. That is what we are just beginning to see right now. Congress is talking about an 800 Billion Dollar bailout. You can see that what Congress is talking about is roughly an order of magnitude too small to cover what Paul Krugman was talking about. In short, 88% of the losses aren’t being addressed by Congress.
Now, we also have to take into account that the International Monetary Fund is estimating our GDP at roughly 13 Trillion Dollars. The losses we are talking about are more than half of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire United States. Nobody alive has ever faced a financial disaster of this magnitude.
Is that what Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the Senators in that closed-door briefing? Numbers so large that it stunned veteran Senators into silence? I think that’s exactly what happened.
Here’s the real problem: The simple answer to this problem was to avoid deregulating the banking industry in the first place. Don’t let this debacle happen. Unfortunately several years ago the “Regulation is Bad for the Economy” branch of the Republican party got it’s way, with Senator John McCain cheering it on. The easy and simple answers to this problem are all gone now. There is no choice but to see our economy slide downward. It’s simply too late to prevent that.
So, what do we do now?
We’re going to have to bail out Wall Street. We don’t have a choice about this. That’s what Congress is doing to some extent now. The problem with how they are doing it is that they are diluting the shares that investors have by taking majority stakes of the companies they are bailing out and putting it under Government control. They are allowing the investors a chance to keep some of the value, but not most of it. This is unlikely to work in the long term. People’s retirement savings are going to suffer, even though it isn’t as much as they could. In short, the government is bailing out the executives of the companies more than the investors.
The landscape for homeowners is even bleaker. Nothing whatsoever has been done to address their concerns. Foreclosures are happening at an even greater pace than before. More properties are going “upside down” in value than they were before, and the Santa Clara County Association of REALTORS is estimating that this will be the case until at least 2010. Some estimates I have been reading put it at 2012 or later.
Now, with it harder than ever to declare bankruptcy (thank you Republicans,) and savings evaporating, the backbone of the American Economy, the Consumer, has almost no money to buy anything. We can see this through the fact that spending is decreasing while savings are simultaneously decreasing. Until something is done to address the concerns of the average person on the street, the economy can do nothing but spiral downward at an ever increasing rate.
This is where we stand now.
What are we going to have to do?
We are going to have to make peace with the fact that our economy is going to crash first of all. We can’t prevent it. Next, we have to do what we can to prevent it from crashing so bad that it can’t recover. This is a real possibility. There is nothing magical about the economy of the United States. Other countries in a similar state that did nothing saw their economies die outright. Most of them are third-world countries now, or failed states. That’s the danger.
We have to bring back the regulations that prevented this problem from happening decades ago. This is an absolute must. Doing any less than this means that nobody will trust banks enough to loan them money to make loans. That’s how the system works. Without that key part the system collapses and doesn’t recover.
We have to protect the money of the average person as much as possible right now. We can’t expect someone to pay back a bad mortgage at an ever increasing rate for the rest of their lives, tying up their spending power in servicing bad debt just because some company got greedy. If these homeowners decide to allow the banks to foreclose, they will find it harder to buy another home later. The inventory of foreclosed homes will increase, because there will be fewer qualified buyers (you can’t have a foreclosure in at least the last 2 years to qualify for a home loan). This is dangerous in several ways. First, unoccupied homes bring down property values. Second, they are fire dangers. Houses are fuel. If you have enough of them you can end up with a wildfire in the middle of a city. Oakland can tell you why this is bad.
This means we have to do at least one of two things, probably both: we will have to forgive at least part of the bad debt to keep people in their homes, or we will have to allow people with foreclosures on their record to get credit anyway. The former is preferable, and while the FHA is doing this to a small extent, the program needs to be massively expanded. The latter solution will probably have to be put into effect as well. Why should we do this? Why not let the people who took out these loans just hang? If we allow our spite to get ahead of our pity (or self interest), making sure these people pay back their loans, our economy suffers from having too little money left over to buy the things that we sell. All of us suffer if we make any one segment of the population suffer too much.
In addition, we really need to start working on our infrastructure, and I don’t mean just roads, bridges, ports, electricity grid, and communications grid. I mean the workforce as well. For most of my life we have seen a growing battle against the workforce. McCain’t has been talking a big game over how strong our workforce is, but the reality is he has actively been working on weakening it.
The big secret that allows the American economy to be so strong has been our educational system. Public education was invented here. We have expanded it ever sense the Brotherhood of Friends (often referred to as “The Quakers”) introduced the concept. All of my life the Republican Party has been trying to weaken it. Vouchers. Increasing tuition in Universities. Destruction of vocational schools. Even “No Child Left Behind” which is decreasing Federal funding to elementary schools. Recently when Democrats tried to bring back full tuition for all Iraq War Veterans, McCain’t voted against it. He said it would reduce the incentive for our Servicepeople to reenlist. This attitude is going to prevent our economy from recovering.
We need a top of the line communications grid to allow educated people to build products using electricity that will be shipped to the consumer through working ports and over working roads and bridges. If any one of those things isn’t working, our economy dies and stays that way.
Why wouldn’t our economy recover? Really, why would it? People with money are under no obligation to invest it in our country. If our economy is wrecked, they would be dumb to put good money after bad. They’ll invest it elsewhere, in economies that are booming. China is a good example. With no money being invested in our country, no educated people to design new products or services, a 20th century communications grid expected to help them design them, no energy to build them, and deteriorating ports, roads, and bridges to ship them our economy will stay sunk.
What we really need to get us through this crisis is a leader that believes in our future, not one that is trying to bring us back to a failed past, namely the “Roaring ‘20s.” Let’s all make sure we work toward our country’s future.
Links:
Fortune Magazine interview with Paul Krugman: March 17th, 2008 by Jia Lynn Yang http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/14/news/economy/krugman_subprime.fortune/index.htm
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