A beautiful comment on NYT

You will appreciate this comment below from someone on NYT (riffing off of one of loveliest Psalms in the Bible - "My Shepherd is the Lord, nothing indeed shall I want... "

http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/obamamercial-divided-we-watch/index.html?hp#comment-164057

"McCain’s experience is
defeat after defeat,
being captured,
crashing planes,
panickly picking Palin etc.

The Lord is Obama’s Shepherd,
He will not lack votes,
He makes him composed and not panicky;
The Lord leads him as like a Pastor tending great multitudes; The Roaring Crowds waving by;
Obama’s table hath the Lord furnished;
In the full glare of Palin and McCain;
As Abel’s Sacrifice was accepted by God in the full glare of ‘Cain!
Obama’s Vote boxes overflow with votes;
White house and Oval Office therein shall surely await Obama;
And he will dwell and reign there-from four years and four more;
To the pleasure of all Americans and all Men of Goodwill the World over"

Own 1/millionth of a chance to party in Chicago :) !!!

Today I succumbed one last time to Obama's plea for cash to outwit the OTHER One, the Maverick! The carrot (pshaw! I don't need no carrot!):

"As a bonus, any donation you make today means you could be selected for a trip to join Barack in Chicago on Election Night. We'll fly you and a guest in, put you up in a hotel, and make sure you have some of the best seats for our huge public event with tens of thousands of supporters"

Don't disturb me, I'm busy checking out the flight schedules...

Response to NYT on Taxes and Regulation

I wrote this originally in response to a letter from an NYT reader to their OpEd editorial by Egan on "Party of Yesterday". But NYT came back with an autoreply on their standard conditions for publication - less that 150 words (this was more like 570), and while I made a half-baked effort to edit it it meant cutting out 2/3rd of the meat and potatoes, so I found a next-best home for it as a comment on NYT's economix blog, and which I'm transplanting down here.

One of the Letters to the Editor on Egan’s “Party of yesterday” is typical of Americans attitude towards taxes, as well as regulation and anything government-done.
The writer (Cliff Johns, KY) claims “Demand for our products and services, not government programs, allowed us to create these jobs.”

I have been raised and lived all my adolescent/young adult life in India, during a period where there was a rampant black market i.e. tax-free parallel economy. Paucity of public revenues forced all then existing infrastructure to go to pot, and new ones were built on black-market cement to faulty codes bringing with it post-construction mishaps. Adulteration of everything from foods to cement along the lines of the chinese baby-food scandal, was rampant. Even an honest entrepreneur in the India of those times would have to pay “black-market” protection money to everyone up and down the line that would guarantee his company’s existence, and allow his product, compromised as it might be, to reach the hands of his consumers. Not because Indians lacked the intelligence or creativity or even honesty of Cliff Johns and the like, but because the infrastructure and the environment (labor, electricity, roads, you name it) conspired to weaken their products and their attempt to reach them to the market, and there but for the grace of God goes you Cliff Johns!

On the other hand during my lifetime here in the US I’ve seen upstart companies like Fedex, Microsoft, Walmart, incorporate, set themselves up in business, grow and themselves become the infrastructure upon which newer American ingenuity can foster and become commercially productive. Were it not for roads, rail, electricity, law enforcement, and each one’s personal integrity, this could not be. The UPS that delivers my e-bay purchase within 2 days of the click of the mouse would not reach me were it not for all these invisible layers of infrastructure, laws, regulations, public supervision, that we take for granted.

Americans, the Republicans (really or mostly), take for granted such foundations of a civil society, and at their peril. They falsely and childishly attribute all their (real or stock market) success entirely to their own smarts. We are already seeing the unravelling of civil society in the Wall Street and corporate dishonesty that has produced the bailout crisis. The illness has spread so far so deep. And I am not talking of lack of demand and economic woes, but the inability to differentiate between the private good and the good of those to whom you have a fiduciary duty whether your customer, your shareholder, your employee; I am talking of the inability to differentiate between the private good and the civic good whether it is to contribute your share of the infrastructure, environment, the parks, the very emergency funds from which the bail-outers are so wantonly dipping their hands into. This myopia was so rampant in India, but so rare in the America that I was first privileged to see. The argument that it is the “rich” that are helping create the wealth that is trickling down fails to see that it is the many hands of the middle-class that have helped build and maintain the infrastuctures that the rich have built their empires on.

It is not “giving money away” as Cliff Johns the letter-writer says - it’s just paying the piper, and when you forget to pay the piper don’t be surprised to find the music will stop.

What is $700 billion going to mop up?

When you have a $ 45 trillion spill?

Here's some facts to remember/read on Three Times is Enemy Action by Devilstower
over at Dailykos Sun Sep 21, 2008 at 06:03:41 AM PDT

"Here's business correspondent Bob Moon and host Kai Ryssdal on American Public Media's Marketplace from back in the spring.

BOB MOON: OK, I'm about to unload some numbers on you here, so I'll speak slowly so you can follow this.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion.

The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion.

The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion.

OK, you ready?

The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion.

KAI RYSSDAL: That's a lot of money, Bob."

FYI - 'Credit default swaps' are just hot-air trades - i.e. as in trades in the hot-air that steams off of hot-potato (no-doc mortgage-backed securities) trades, exactly that!

What Marrying into Money Can Buy You

Difference between Bush 41 and Bush 43?

Just 2.
$2 Trillion, that is!
Iraq War (ref Joseph Stiglitz) - $ 1.5 Trillion
Crony bail-out so far* - $ 0.5 Trillion
Of course that's not counting the as-yet-to-be-decided bail-out to purchase the toxic securities on investment banks' books!

* Crony bail-out broken down as follows:
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (US Treasury) - $ 200 billion
Loans to banks - $ 183 billion
Loan to AIG - $ 85 billion
Loans to investment banks - $ 60 billion
Financing to JP Morgan to buy Bear Stearns - $ 29 billion
Total deal - $ 557 billion
(* Ref Washington Post, Sept 19, 2008, "The Insiders - In Crucible of Crisis, Paulson, Bernanke, Geitner Forge a Committee of Three")

And the tab for Bush 44, another Republican administration?
At the going rate probably another Trillion dollars!

Unforgettable campaign 2008 quotes

Maureen Dowd - NYT 9/18/2008: about an Alaskan protester's handpainted sign "McPain + Palin = McPain"

Obama in Nevada on 9/17/2008 on McCain fighting the old-boy network (as reported on NPR and paraphrased): "The old boy network? In the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting!"