So all of this talk about getting the right information from the right sources and who do you trust and who do you question and in the end, what the hell is real?
Well…
Don’t go looking to CNN. They’ll just a have a round-table discussion and let you watch, but forget about them taking ownership of any facts. That’s for journalists, dammit, and we’re entertainers. We have flashy little dials and heartbeat lines that judge the reactions of 30 people IN OHIO that might give you a sense of what THE PEOPLE are really thinking and how they’re responding to the presidential debate points.
Imagine that. 30 people pent up in a wooden-paneled room made to look cozy and American, like a rich colonialist’s living room. Ten republicans, ten democrats and ten independents all sitting on bar stools with pong controls in their hands that wirelessly transmit their oh-so-accurate readings to the colorful lights on your screen. When I heard that I remember wondering how long they keep them there for one stretch at a time. How often are they fed and how often do they get to see news from other places?
How often do they get to see sunlight?
Can you imagine a team of FBI agents consoling families of these victims in a white and green government building somewhere in Dayton while a group of SWAT maniacs tears down the doors to the situation room? They’d find, after a few hours that the lot would be reduced to snarling animals frothing at the mouth, clawing at the walls and each other with their pants around their ankles, howling unholy things at Wolf Blitzer while he paces frantically along his widescreen podium. Two rookies would vomit in the corner and the rest of the team would have to stomp them all like rats in a closet.
Shit. You won’t find that gibberish here.
What you will find is help. If you don’t yet understand your opinion on how to fix the financial situation, here are two brilliantly-written articles from The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/greider3
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/galbraith_black
To the skeptics and others not familiar with The Nation: yes, it tends to be a left-leaning paper, and yes, they support Barack Obama. No, they do NOT support John McCain. That said, they do, in my opinion and as far as I can tell in my research, report factually in their journalism. Their articles tend to be on the short to medium size and usually include plenty of analysis based on experts with clear and well-respected credentials. They often speak to the electorate but offer options that a person in Congress would do well to read.
I don’t know how well their rhetoric reflects that of the American Mass, or the Global one for that matter. It suits me, however, just fine.
If you simply don’t understand this financial mess at all, let alone have an opinion on it, fear not; I will give you more of what you trust:
…Jesus. I’m looking around but not finding any one stop shop to explain the important parts of this situation. So. I’ll do it myself:
I’m not going to explain to you about interest rates and the different kinds of mortgages or anything at all that has to do with bonds, mortgage-back securities or other such things beyond what normal people care about. I mean, I COULD - I did read about it.
Seriously. I went to wikipedia and spent 3 hours reading through wiki’s tangled web of links and trying to finish a sentence without opening another page and well… you don’t want to get into that mess. Initially I just started reading about the terms and then I got into history and recent events and now? Now I have a subscription to like, 10 different financial newsletters, I might’ve purchased a stock portfolio closely resembling George Soros’ and as a result of it all, I can no longer remember some small things like whether it’s Corn Flakes of Special K that I prefer. I’m sure it’ll come back to me, though.
But I’m not going to do that to you here. Instead, here’s what you need to understand about this financial fiasco:
What it means to be “in a financial crisis”:
The current crisis is only a crisis in the sense that some very big corporations that used to have a very high stock value now have stock that is worth very little. If you had money invested IN them, like, if you owned their stock, then you lost a lot of it, maybe all of it. If you had money WITH them (like a banking customer) then you’re insured for 100K by the FDIC and *technically* you don’t have to worry about your money (though you should really consider how much the government would actually pay of 100K to each citizen, right? - THAT’s thinking critically).
How this will affect the general economy and eventually, you:
Yes, Mr. President, it turns out there ARE “linkages” across the entire financial system. When these large banks start going bankrupt and can’t get any loans to pick themselves up, other institutions that are doing ok (Bank of America, for example) will still be more hesitant to loan money. To anyone. That’s what will trigger the actual “crisis”. This thing that’s going on now is just a few rich yoyos losing a lot of money. The actual crisis will be when small business can’t get loans and start closing down, not hiring, not building, not expanding. It will be when even comfortable employees in large corporations are still receiving their salary but can’t get credit to buy that new TV, or refrigerator, or a loan for a new car, or equity in their home to remodel. This will snowball into fewer plumbers, construction workers and electricians with work to do; fewer cars being sold, leading to layoffs in the auto industry and a fall in stock prices there; fewer demand for consumer electronics, causing layoffs and stock decline in that industry as well…
Yes. It’s then that we’ll begin to recognize how much like the Great Depression this fiasco could become. But that’s a few weeks or months away. For now, all we have is, like I say, a lot of rich yoyos losing a lot of money and asking the taxpayers to give it back to them so that they can pay their CEO’s severance packages of a few million dollars.
Why did the stock price all but disappear over a few days?
These companies were running so low on money that they started being forced to report their accounts, what they earned, how much debt they really had, etc. in order to sell off their dead/dying parts. Suddenly the numbers were too low and people didn’t want to pay so much for a share in the company.
Why did these companies have no money?
These companies invested heavily into risky scenarios like bad mortgages (SUB-prime… that’s literally what it means, if you didn’t know that). When those risky people started defaulting and not being able to make their home payments, the banks (as they should’ve known) didn’t have the money to cash out on it. Instead of letting people know there was a problem developing, they kept it to themselves. No sense in letting the stock price go down by telling people that they have no money. Right?
That’s the “greed” of Wall Street that you keep hearing about. It’s the notion that they could get more clients and charge more interest by taking large risks in loaning money to people they should’ve known wouldn’t have been able to pay in the long run. They DID know, and instead of not doing it, they found creative ways to loan the money “for now” and worry about the rest of the deal later.
And that’s the gist of it. Bad loans to people they knew couldn’t pay the whole thing but would pay a lot NOW. Banks that made bad decisions sold these debts to large financial institutions who gambled (with tax-payer-insured guarantees) that the housing market would stay up (nothing does) and when it didn’t, they kept it to themselves.
Until last week. Then all hell broke loose.
Wanna wait and see for what’s going to come out of Washington in terms of a salvation? I didn’t. I’ve written to both of my senators and the congresswoman for my district and told them all what I want to see in any bailout package on which they vote and that if they vote Yes on anything that doesn’t include what I consider to be basic and decent provisions necessary not only to ensure success but also to preserve the dignity of the American people and the office they hold, I will vote them out in the next election cycle. It took all of 3 minutes to find all 3 of their home pages and the “contact me” link therein. It took another 5 minutes to draft a decent and clear letter stating what I wanted. It took another 3 seconds to copy and paste that letter into the email boxes of the other 2 legislators. It’s WORTH it.
Look, I’ve already received my absentee voter ballot. I’ve already read through all of the measures and taken a position on them. The only bubbles that haven’t been filled in yet are those for Ellen Tauscher, my congresswoman who’s up for re-election this term. Come next week, when a vote should be taken, her name WILL have a darkened bubble next to it. And it’ll only take a second.
I’m making this simple for them. Maybe you should too.
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People, people, people…
PEOPLE!
There are some truths that we must recognize and stop talking about so that we can move on to the good stuff. Luckily, you’re all primed to hear about them because they have to do with THE ISSUES - which you love - and that’s what this election in November is going to be about.
Right? Right.
Abortion
It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention at this point that Roe v. Wade will not be repealed without some kind of voodoo on the Supreme Court. It would be a travesty to the American Way of life, but not because it goes against our values, necessarily. Roe v. Wade has become like Fenway, like Thanksgiving, like Drive Thru’s, like Labor Day Sales, like hot dogs and watermelons and like frivolous lawsuits. It’s an American Institution. You can’t get rid of Roe v. Wade. What the hell would we bicker about pointlessly in presidential races?
So, seriously, shut up about abortion. It’s legal, and besides, the President of the United States is just about the least powerful peg on the totem pole when it comes to changing the constitution. Even Franklin, Adams and Hamilton agreed on that. Hell, even Ahnold has more sway with that document than does the Prez. The best chance the chief executive has is to stack the deck, and that’s only if you get lucky like W. and have 2 freaking seats give way to you. In a matter of months. Weird.
National Security
It’s pretty obvious to anyone counting the ciphers at the NSA that National Security has been mostly an efficient way to make my tax dollars go from one magical place to another magical place as inefficiently as possible. We could’ve been more efficient in wasting so much money as what we spend on the TSA: we could’ve put it all in a pile in the middle of the desert and taken a match to it.
Furthermore, the disaster of national security, aside from the poor planning, poor execution and poor response, is really the fact that the mentality of people has now changed to one that more closely resembles frightened hamsters than Americans in pursuit of their life, liberty and/or happiness. Seriously. You can cause panic, fear and a total disruption of commerce simply by putting an empty briefcase at a street corner. Or you can hang a circuit board with wires hanging from it on electrical wires around a city. Or you can leave a note in the seat back pocket of an aircraft saying that there’s a bomb in the airport.
Watch how people react. It’s insane. Frightened rats make more sense in their flee tactics and threat assertions. We suck at that kind of thing.
Health Care
It’s pretty obvious to anyone that has lived abroad or been injured abroad while traveling that American health care is the shite of the civilized world. Embarrassingly complicated, impossibly expensive and totally overrun by insurance companies and staff infections, and god help you if you use Kaiser Permanente. I mean, you may as well just amputate your own head.
Ideas float rampantly in political campaigns, but if you pay attention, no one has ever really got hold of one of these “ideas”; not really. Promises are made like it was an algebra problem, but it always falls short on explaining anything. It’s not impossible, I’m sure. But with 300 million people, nothing’s really easy. Obama’s new plan is no different, though the man can sure tell a good story, eh?
I feel like buying some health care already.
Foreign Policy
It’s pretty obvious to anyone looking out instead of just looking in that the world is a big place, and that America doesn’t fill up anywhere near enough of it to behave the way it does. Being abroad has shown me that if there’s such as thing as “stark contrast” it’s what you see when you put the “typical” American image that the world has come to have next to the image of an American who has traveled. The world seems to think (mostly rightfully so) of bumbling idiots that are as loud as they are rude, unrefined and totally despicable animals of no taste or class. But American’s who travel, who have a chance to look back as they leave borders behind are almost unanimously disgusted by their brethren. They think very much like Europeans, that America is doomed and there’s nothing the world can do about it. Which is too bad, I should say, because the place had so much potential.
Economy
It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying a mortgage or taxes or dividends or just about anything that the economy has tanked. And I don’t mean like, a cycle, where if you just sit tight this thing will get figured out in 5-6 years and we can all go back to day trading while at work, shopping on amazon while driving down the road and checking out the nicer rims on the other Explorers who all pay the same $1.40 for gas.
No, no. This was a bad time for the US to fall flat on its face and drag the civilized world with it and the consequences will be more than just the sum of its parts. We have finally gotten past the Chinese Olympics (which everyone has already forgotten by now) in which China came out of the economic underground flashing the ownership title of all of our debt in its left hand and a fisted up can of whup-ass in the other. And everyone knows China is right handed.
While we distract ourselves and spread what little worth our economy has throughout the middle east in pointless ventures that haven’t had a hope of success in 5 years, China, India and Russia are being smart and silent. Europe can’t protect America because it’s got its own problems. Last week in Edinburgh I saw a comedian from the Isle of Mann poke fun of the housing market and those in it. How much more “rising of the proletariat” can you get? I mean, the Isle of Mann! Who’s ever heard of that place and they’re taking the piss out of the entire rest of the continent for getting swept up in this mess.
By the time this is done, not only will America be paying at least what it is now at the pump, but we won’t even have gallons anymore. Ever heard of the metric system? I suggest everyone take a steep course in Mandarin and look up the word “meter”. We’ll all be seeing it a lot more very soon with the learning curve that is around the corner.
Iraq
It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention at this point that Iraq will not have a pretty ending. Or even a clear one. And won’t somebody stop this shit about it being about supporting the troops? Wars aren’t about supporting the men and women you send to die. War is about something else. What do we do to mitigate a war? Do we provide equipment and healthcare for the fighters? Do we provide proper funding to the cause? Sure. If this were actually a war and not a terribly mis-guided joy ride on the taxpayer’s grandchildren.
How about supporting them by saving their lives and bringing them home, not by saving the egos of their leaders. Do I REALLY have to be the one to say that?
Global Warming
It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention at this point that we will not reverse this carbon problem. We should’ve been doing something about it in 1993. And only now are we even having discussions about it, and they’re not even productive. It’s still a talking point. That’s it, man. We’re fucked. The republican’s refuse to even use the term, “global warming” and the democrats are too incompetent to make the issue visible beyond some powerpoint slides and and green posters. Polar bears are melting (because, you know, they’re made of ice. I bet you Michelle Bachman would buy that) and we have people who think that unrestricting industry is more important than maintaining a sustainable growth. And no action.
You can have the congress set out resolutions upon resolutions about 50% of cars produced in the US must have 20% fewer emissions by the year 2156 or whatever, but that’s not action: it’s theater. You know and I know that nothing will happen except that there will be more hybrid commercials. And don’t even get me started on those damn things.
The End
It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention at this point that the options are limited, like always. John McCain is either a habitual liar or else that he has his memory systematically erased by Karl Rove every night before bed. Unofficially, of course. The corollary to that is that everyone in the mainstream media seems to have no capacity for short term memory. Don’t you people record the shit he says and then contradicts less than 24 hours later? Weren’t you there both times he said diametrically opposing things?
Yes, yes you were. So why don’t you stop him and point out his contradiction on the spot? Why don’t you get him on track when you ask him about his 7 houses and he replies with a POW story that sounds more like Abe Simpson drolling on about an incoherent and unrelated story? And why stop just because he gets visibly angry? Why don’t you just warn him before the interview that if he tries anything funny that we’ll put a stink bomb under his kitchen table, but that we won’t tell him which one it’s under?
What Else
It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention at this point that…
Oh, what the hell? Screw this shit - let’s have the hope. Sure. Have it. Fill your mouth with it like whipped cream or Velveeta from the bottle. Roll around in it like bushels of hay and make all the love you want, or don’t want. John McCain is either an idiot or a lying bastard and we’ve had enough of both for too long. Obama is not perfect, and he’s fucked up big on at least one occasion that I can think of off the top of my head (I’m looking at you, FISA Bill). And Biden… he ain’t perfect either with his big mouth and politician’s smile that I’ve so learned to distrust. But an Obama-Biden ticket… that’s some sweet sugar we’ve been so long without. We’ve been putting up with the bitter taste of Zombies and Frankensteins and recoiling in the sour shower of corruption and lies and outright thievery that we’ve forgotten the taste of real honey.
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So I’m at the gas station the other day, pouring MTBE hydrocarbons into my vehicle. I admit it, I use gasoline just like the rest of you mortals, and I also feel the recent upward swing in gas prices. It sucks.
Remember when gas prices dropped to a dollar and a penny a couple years ago? Gone are those times, eh?
But it’s all relative. Do you know how much gas costs in other countries? How much it has always cost in other countries? In Brazil, gasoline has cost — for as long as I can call myself a person — about R$2.80 a liter.
What the hell is a liter? You might ask. You and about 98% of all other Americans.
A liter is close enough to .25 gallons — in other words, there are 4 liters in a gallon.
The Brazilian Real converts to close enough to 2 Reais per dollar at the time of this writing, which is to say that a liter of gas costs around $1.40.
Multiply that by 4 liters to get a gallon, and we start getting to the very frightening and desperate conclusion that gasoline in Brazil, a country where the minimum wage of $350 per month is held by over 50% of the population costs a whole lot of money. Specifically, this means:
$5 a gallon for gasoline.
This is hella expensive, and Brazil’s condition concerning gas prices is pretty representative of most other places on the planet.
So my question to you people becomes: What the hell are you complaining about? One fewer latte per day ought to cover that. Quit your bitching.
Allow me to put it in perspective, as it was recently brought to my attention by my younger sibling: let’s say that gas prices hop to $2.80…oh wait, we’re already at $3.40…ok, that won’t work.
Speaking of which, remember when gas was about $2.80? Well, yeah. Those days are gone too.
But let’s go with this $3.40 per gallon business. That converts to $.85 a liter.
85 cents.
Those studying physics, chemistry, foreign languages or at least those of you that have already read the above tangent may already know what a liter is - for the rest of you, it’s the volume of a standard Nalgene™ bottle, or the larger Aquafina bottles with which Pepsi chooses to adorn their selected university campuses.
I have yet to hear people complain of the high cost of water, or suggest that we bomb small island nations to lower the high water costs to our own citizens. Maybe that’s because there is no OWEC (Organization of Water Exporting Countries, for anyone who missed the OPEC reference), or perhaps because that’s just silly.
You decide then, since you’re so good at voting in a president who knows what he’s doing. I digress.
What I have seen instead is people dropping a buck-twenty on a liter of water without batting an eye.
Water. $1.20.
–
Am I getting through to you? Is this starting to make sense? Because I’m still confused…
And let’s not forget that there is free tap water available in most places where you can get a liter of the precious liquid for $1.20, and that in the Bay, at least, that tap water is good stuff.
I’m not saying that oil prices are fine and people should just shut up and pump their gas. You’re paying for that oil anyway because the US is among the governments that most subsidizes oil prices. That keeps its oil addicts happy and complacent - ergo, quiet.
Nor am I offering a solution to the problem of inflated water prices (yes I am, actually - drink tap water and quit giving money to Pepsi and Coca-Cola). But if you think that gas is too expensive then consider riding the bus, walking, or biking to wherever it is that you need to go. It’s free, and 2 of the 3 options contain no MTBE.
…and if I hear an SUV owner complain I cannot be held responsible for my actions. Don’t laugh, you bastards. This is serious.
Posted in Politics, Rants | 2 Comments…
Permit me an “aside” for my mind, you know, drifts, and I struggle to keep up.
People are animals of complacence. If one is comfortably seated and you push him, not enough to make him fall off his seat, but just to rock back and forth, he won’t come at you. He may say something, but really what he wants is for everything to be like the way it was.
You know — they sometimes call ‘em the good ol’ days.
If you want that man to stand, to not only say but to DO something, you’re going to have to push him so hard that he falls off the chair and never rocks back because you’re changed his way of life.
This is a metaphor akin to Plato’s cave, but with a rocking chair. Deal with it.
But it’s sort of the condition that America is in today. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying in Darfur for oil and inequity: I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me. Inhuman treatment of children in China is poising the Chinese to be in a position of claiming its credits and dismantling the west like a bankrupt business: I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me. AIDS and cancer are still killing people like they were a decade ago and politicians want to make childhood obesity a priority and call it ‘progress’ to remove soda machines from schools: I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me. The corporations that you and I support, along with the bazillions of people that simply don’t think about how much gas they burn and how responsible they are for worsening of the atmosphere are overheating of the planet and guaranteeing the ensuing results: I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me. The US Government is illegally and unrighteously tapping all lines of communication against the express wishes and mandates of the constitution for no good reason…I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me. An illegitimate President misled the people into supporting a war in Iraq for what today only vague reasons may exist: I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me.
Gas prices go up $0.50. Pandemonium. Radical change is demanded. Faulty the guilty, kill the sinners. It’s judgment time.
That’s the way it works, and goddammit, the leaders can’t be relied on to do anything because they’re animals just like the rest of you. They say that they’re fighting this war in Iraq so that they don’t have to fight it over here…that seems convenient, don’t you think? I’ll bet there would be a lot less support for this war and it’s troops if it were being fought over here…shit, if it was affecting anything here at all.
The truth is that in these times of so much fear, Americans want the borders closed because they like it in here; it’s not quite as real as the rest of the world, where gasoline has always cost $5 a gallon and so people have learned to use it more wisely. It’s nicer than out there, where people have known about the dangers of greenhouse gases all along, and where freedom of press and censorship are openly discussed, not blindly claimed.
–
I’m not about to announce a rally or try to incite movement in your hearts — if you didn’t already feel something before reading this then all you’re doing is shifting the focus of your obsequiousness. I am not a puppet master and my words are not the strings to which you cling — at least, they shouldn’t be. What my words ought to be is the fire that burns your ropes, the blade to cut your strings; the bombs that blast you free.
Think for yourselves. Vote. Speak. Act.
Do.
Or it’s all your fault.
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Wholly uninspired by the affluence of this place, I am forced to explain how blasé it can be.
Despite the amazing amounts of papaya and mangoes and various other fruits and juices with which I am not presently equipped with names, despite the copious amounts of all things good like pão de queijo and coffee that doesn’t taste like ass, despite the 12th floor balcony overlooking one of the world’s largest metropoli — it’s all little more than a Marriott with a nice facade; a bed & breakfast with too much space and little charm. Really. People, in general, have no concept of real luxury. It’s incredible how far a little gold trim goes for some people.
And for what? $450 a night? More? It’s unreasonable, and spectacularly so at that. If it weren’t for fiscally irresponsible clients, I don’t see how a place like this could even exist.
Moreover, there is scum in this place who think this is great, or worse, who think this is normal. These are the same jerks and idiots who don’t notice the favela across the street. These are the same assholes who will return to their respective foreign nations without their laptops or wristwatches and a tell a tall tale of how they were brutally robbed by a street kid. These same fat men in cheap suits with matching mustaches and large expense accounts will describe the beautiful women they watched dancing (if they were cultured enough to go out) and the delicious food that later gave them the runs that can make a educated man learn to pray.
Fuckwads.
There is, of course, a whole other perspective on the favelas that I don’t share, either because I’ve been too far from these shores for too long or because I’m just not that obtuse. Maybe both.
In any case, most people are disgusted by the presence of the favelas in the cities. Some are even in search of a solution, a method to get the people out of there (for better or for worse, and mostly for worse). I find it interesting that few, if any, are in search of a way to stop people from getting into that state of necessity and desperation in the first place. Interesting that for all the compassion people have for the poor, it doesn’t translate if the poor are in favelas.
Maybe that’s not fair, and maybe it is. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Since when have people as a whole had enough forward-thinking vision to solve problems instead of symptoms, right? Even the favela folk are guilty of that.
–
Let’s back up a step. For those not in the know, a favela is an area (usually a few blocks or more) in which haphazard, incomplete, illegal construction has been erected, residences established and a community formed. Often these were people that came down south from the northeast of Brazil for construction jobs and other such political wash basins. Electrical wires are spliced and electricity is stolen from the municipality. Streams are rerouted and water is stolen as well. Some abodes are worse than others, made of wood and cardboard while others have brick and mortar that depict an ongoing construction, sometimes for decades, perhaps.
They build over themselves, because unless they’re on the fringe of the city swallowing other satellites there is no where to go but up. At least two things they all share are clothes hanging out to dry in the hot, muggy air, and extreme poverty, the likes of which I wouldn’t dare describe here beyond being terribly immense and fantastically immeasurable.
This would be, of course, a natural segway point into the obvious discussion of the drug trafficking and the opportunity for organized crime that such an environment harbors and fosters but I just don’t have the strength to go into that mess right now.
In any case, I feel I should note (since no one else has) that the people who live in favelas are just that: people. And it’s amazing what little influence or effect that fact has on perspectives of these places. They are so blind to their anger and hate of the em>favela, so lacking in their compassion for the people that the fact is almost nullified, almost ceases to be a fact.
And maybe sometimes it does, a little.
Fucking people, man.
Posted in Rants, Travels | No Comments…