There was a lot of play in various news sources last week about Prop 8 – The Musical. So, from the Sacramento Community College Players to you (via YouTube)…
For those of you who weren’t paying attention, California barely passed a proposition to amend their state constitution to ban gay marriage. There was a lot of money from conservative religious groups from outside the state poured into advertising to scare the voting public.
The markets are in a free fall. Friday the Dow swung 1000 points. (18% down for the week) At the end of the day, it rallied to only be 150 down. Hoping positive thoughts for the G7 Financial Ministers meeting this weekend.
They think they’re going to get seven pre-eminent economists to agree on a future course of action and all act on it. I think there’s a very small chance of that so more Down on Monday.
I was also humored that there was no talk of the “G8” since we’re talking about actual economics and Russia’s economy is a rounding error compared to the other seven. They are only ever included for political reasons.
This is the most important point in the last eight years for this country to have a Leader, easily more important than 9/11. So much of the market is reacting emotionally, and without any leadership there have been dozens of voices for the fearful and angry to listen to, only magnifying their negative emotions.
And, oh, by the way, we’re four weeks away from a presidential election.
The juxtaposition of two videos I saw today is eerily representative of the current state of American affairs.
The national hero, Buzz Aldrin, speaking on the future of space travel. It all sounds great, unless you listen to more that five contiguous words and try to make a coherent concept out of them.
Obviously Xeni Jardin had a great opportunity to interview such an important man, and couldn’t let the footage go to waste. The inanity is somewhat like a bus wreck. A bus full of parakeets juggling crystal goblets. Shiny.
The other interview was Bill Moyers talking to Andrew J. Bacevich (includes transcript). I actually only heard the audio to this one, though the video snips I did watch made it that much more revealing.
This almost hour of discussion is one that every American should be required to listen to and ruminate on. But we’re much more likely to watch the first one and yell “Go, Buzz!” (Hey, despite the incoherence, I did.)
Such is America’s attention span, and such will be its downfall.
I think I may have to go back and listen to Bacevich again. He did such a good job of relating his points, and the discussion was thick with content.
[Edit: a few days later SciAm had a cogent interview with Buzz. Seems like Xeni just had the bad luck of catching him when he had brain overload – apparently he’s been on a publicity tour of late for several things.]
The Declaration of Independence is one of the most profound documents in human history. Today is the anniversary of it’s adoption by the American states.
Despite it’s prominence in our history, it has no hold in our law.
Everyone knows the the main phrase from the Declaration
All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And yet we, as a country, claim rights for our citizenry that we deny to others. We make excuses for how we allow ourselves to treat humans being we hold in our custody.
The only right an American should have over any other human on American soil is to stay on American soil.
Whether it’s extreme rendition, or lack of habeus corpus rights of foreign nationals we detain, our freedom has become one of the King citizens, by the King citizens, and for the King citizens.
Not unlike the King whose shackles we sought to throw off, we have long forgotten that we used to believe of all men. We used to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.
If we want all men to be equal, we should treat them all equally.
Edit: If you missed the news this week, and I did, it was revealed that our “coercive management techniques” chart used at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably elsewhere) came verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Communist Chinese torture techniques used to illicit mostly false confessions. Are we outraged yet?
If you haven’t noticed, our government hasn’t been regulating things in this country for about eight years. It cuts across almost every agency in the bureaucracy. Mostly they just unfunded the regulators or told them to stop doing their jobs. See recent headlines on airplanes being grounded because they hadn’t been inspected in timely fashion for an example.
You need only listen to the news any given day to be reminded. We haven’t been keeping our government accountable. Neither has our corporate media. So, we can blame only ourselves. Or only our media, if we are cowards. (Yes, I consider ignoring our own failing an act of cowardice. Blaming others is the height of it.)
It was interesting to hear of another regulatory failing on Marketplace on Monday night. This one not of Executive Branch malfeasance, but one of political will-bending in the Legislature in December of 2000.
I’m sure everyone remembers Enron. They went south in a very large way about a year later. But before that they got this legislation passed. Basically, deregulating (and effectively hiding) the trading of about 30% of the energy market.
Recently, we’ve had out-of-control rises in the price of crude oil. All the analysts say we’ve got plenty of supply. So, whatever could be the cause of the price rises?
Well the Legislature has finally fixed their part in this non-regulation snafu. Soon it is of course passing back into the Executive’s hands. What will happen there, only time will tell.
Michael Greenburger, previous Head of Trading and Markets for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission says “many observers believe that because those markets are not being policed, malpractices are being committed and traders are able to boost the price virtually at their will… From my own experience as a commodity regulator, I believe that if the Bush Administration were serious about its regulation, we could begin seeing prices drop within a month.”
If things don’t start moving in a positive direction, let’s make sure we tell our elected employees we aren’t happy about it.
“Enclosed is an important message from the IRS on the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. Do Not Throw Away!”
That’s a quote from the back of the envelope from the United States Treasury. A paraphrase of the inside text: we consider you below the poverty line, you have zero adjusted income last year, and still had to pay $180 tax, so we’re throwing you a bone. We deposited $300 in your account 6 days ago. Please spend it all in one place, we think it will stimulate the economy. Not as much as all those rich people who we gave tax breaks will stimulate the economy …
$300 in a $13,794,000,000,000 GDP: I would do the math, but my calculator has an overflow error when I try to figure the percentage.