Obama After Six Months

Somehow folks seem to forget, especially those nuts shouting down Democratic representatives at health care reform town meetings, that this entire mess--deficits, banking collapse, unemployment, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession--are the aftermath of the Bush administration. Not that greed is partisan. The greed that withdrew funding from the manufacturing segment of the economy was both Democratic and Republican. When a 5% profit margin isn't enough, and most investment bankers want a higher return on their money, we know we are screwed. So, yes we are screwed.

Rolling Stone has an interesting piece on just how Obama has worked out during the first six months of his presidency. The three commentators are Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, David Gergen, former aide to both Republican and Democratic presidents, and Michael Moore, the rebel filmmaker. It's an interesting read, so take a moment to check it out.

Tuning Out En Masse

As I posted yesterday, I've had to give myself a rest from the outside world this week as some personal issues as well as work took top priorities. That's when I realized that despite all of the personal angst, I was actually feeling better not paying too much attention to daily events. Yes, I knew there had been a shooting at the Holocaust Museum, and I understood what was at stake in the elections in Iran (actually posted on it last weekend before my "news fast" began), and I did see two episodes of Stephen Colbert in Iraq, which made me laugh and warmed my heart, but that was about it.

Here is my suggestion: let's stop watching television news altogether. I don't care what station. Our cable company just took MSNBC off basic cable service, so we lost it unless we use the cable box; digital won't allow the signal in unaided even with a brand new television. Lately Rachel and Keith have begun to sound as shrill as Glenn and Bill, so frankly, I stopped watching them. And some of their segments belonged on The Daily Show and not on a legitimate news show. I've never liked CNN, have only tuned to Fox News when I wanted to get angry, and am not around for The News Hour on PBS.

If we stopped watching, en masse, then perhaps as a country we would allow this extraordinarily gifted president to try to undo the damage done by greed and cleverness, exacerbated by deregulation and cronyism. Maybe he would stop trying to be so centrist and really put his head together with the best and the brightest and solve the real emergencies facing us: carbon emissions, health care, an unsustainable economy, and wars in countries we don't understand.

Maybe we would stop throwing names at each other and begin to listen a bit more.

We can't just label as "racist," "communist," or now "reverse racist" anyone with whom we disagree. And we can't forget that folks like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann are working for "entertainment-news" organizations that crave ratings, because higher ratings mean more advertising revenues.

Public interest isn't in their vocabulary.

So here is my suggestion: turn off the radio and television, and walk around your local community. Have a cup of coffee and begin a conversation with a neighbor. See what we can agree on, and maybe we can end the shrillness, isolate the extremes, and save the planet before it goes the way of Mars.

Take a look at both Paul Krugman and Frank Rich's columns.

Improvisation

One wouldn't expect this, but economists have a habit of speaking confidently when they are really just improvising, thinking through a theory or ideological theory, even worse, and then having the balls to convince a government to let them try it out.

Reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, especially now, especially living in a post-Bush world with the consequences of a Bush presidency, we should be a bit skeptical about the decisions being made here, at the G 20 Summit that just closed in London, and inside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. We have to get smarter about economics and money.

Economists like Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1976, was the expert helping the infamous, brutal war criminal General Pinochet "transform" Chile into a radical free market state. President Salvador Allende was assassinated during a military coup that was in large part orchestrated by Nixon-Kissinger to assure that the natural resources of the country would not fall back into the hands of the people who owned them. Then in came Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" to destroy the safety net, the middle class, the trade union movement, and spread poverty while dividing up those rich natural resources among multinational corporations.

And Jeffrey Sachs, the guru of Bono now and a big name in international aid, was once the economist who helped Bolivia achieve the same rape of its people, although a bit less brutally than Chile, and who was responsible for leading post-Apartheid South Africa away from a socialized state with redistribution of wealth as a means of reparations to those Africans who had suffered so under colonialism, and into a give away that assured that South Africans, the dark skinned ones, would remain poor and in shantytowns. Unemployment rates are higher there now than ever before.

In America we look to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as somehow benevolent institutions because up to now we have always controlled them, but that isn't how they are seen by developing nations. So these agreements that came out of the G 20 Summit in London should be viewed skeptically. We are watching a bailout that is destroying the middle and working classes in our own country, destroying the safety net and trade unions, while pouring money into the banks and investment houses. And we see some of the same economists in the background. Once again Larry Summers is right there. Read about him and then wonder if he should have the ear of the President. Now it's been disclosed just how much money he made spekaing with the same companies he is trying to rescue. Why is Paul Krugman so critical of Obama's decisions? Krugman is another Nobel winner for economics.

Essentially no one knows what they are doing! It's all improvisation.

Dressed in Black

With markets rallying over Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's resurrection as the savior of Wall Street and American banking, we mere mortals should be shivering. The Dow rose nearly 500 points, the S & P 500 increased by 7.8% yesterday. Everyone in a suit and tie was praising the formerly reviled Geithner.

But what is good for Wall Street and banks, the sale of toxic assets, is not necessarily good for you and me, even though our 401 k retirement investments might have regained some of their value yesterday. Read Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times. Remember, he won a Nobel Prize for economics.

This assumption that the American financial system is just fine, thank you, with some excesses, yes, is what allowed someone like Bernie Madoff to flourish and dewealth almost 5,000 "investors." Returns were evaluated solely in dollars, ignoring unspoken beliefs that due to his position, Madoff had access to corrupting insider information, which must have driven these "investors" when Bernie was making profits for them and the market was tanking elsewhere.

Now Lucinda Franks, formerly of the New York Times, has written quite a piece for TheDailyBeast.com, claiming that even the "legitimate brokerage" floors of Madoff's world were phony.

Madoff insisted that everything on that floor must be black. An employee with a silver picture frame was told to replace it. A strange obsession for a man who was allegedly very busy finding foolproof ways to invest in volatile and changing markets. The 17th floor was supposedly the place where the phony business was run. However, according to a former employee: the proprietary and market-making arms on the 18th and 19th floors of Madoff Securities, were designed to lure investors in, especially highly placed figures in society, and to fool the SEC into thinking that he had a large and impressive galaxy of businesses.

Employees throughout the Madoff floors were overpaid and underworked, which leads one to believe that his sons and wife, and niece, are all about to be indicted for their role in the ponzi scheme.

What allowed Madoff to reign, what allowed Joe Cassano to bring down AIG with his sale of $600 trillion in credit default swaps, what allowed banks to structure mortgage rates and commissions to profit from exploitation and fraud, well these aren't signs that the American financial markets are essentially healthy. Tim Geithner is no hero to me, and he shouldn't be for you either. Until we have a full investigation, full accountability, then the banking debacle will remain, like American use of torture in the "war on terror," an unexamined chapter of our history that will inevitably repeat itself.

Radical Change or Nothing

Some of my dearest friends chipped in and bought me a Kindle for my sixtieth birthday. It's on back order so I have some time to get accustomed to this new electronic device in my life. I'm a reader: I subscribe to The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and I get the New York Times delivered on Saturday and Sunday. My daughter's subscriptions to The Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair were sent to me this fall since she was studying abroad. Unlike my husband, I do not read every article in every magazine. I skim, I cherry pick, I only read what keeps my attention.

I read several books at a time. I have a well-worn library card, because I have a forty minute each way commute to work and am addicted to books-on-tape, now books-on-cd. I refuse to buy them, because they are far too expensive. Instead I pressure my local library to improve the quality of their purchases, so that I have more choices. This week I am listening to Toni Morrison read her new book A Mercy. Not an easy task since it is breathtakingly sorrowful and so poetic that sometimes I don't quite understand what is happening, and have to wait patiently, until Morrison is ready to fill in the gaps.

With a Kindle, I will have to download books, for a price, from Amazon.com, abandoning my allegiance to my local independent book store and the library, except for my books-on-cd, although I understand I can download those and listen in the car from my Kindle.

Having spent a lifetime touching books--my grandfather, the same one who taught me about opera, gave me a book every time he saw me, using the Kindle will be a radical change for me. I once spent a dismal plane ride, circling Philadelphia for hours because we couldn't land at LaGuardia, seated next to an artist who designed the interior of the bookstore I never opened. Way before anyone else did it, I thought about having a book store and cafe. But like my idea to have a singles bar in a laundromat, I never got around to it.

I won't be touching books anymore, but will have the opportunity, according to my friends, to underline and write notes, and store multiple books on my Kindle, so that I can access them later. I do deface books regularly, which is the reason why I buy many of them instead of relying solely on the public library.

Eating Christmas dinner with friends last night, we talked about what needs to happen in order to change the course of this downward tailspin: retail sales down 5-8% (much of it the result of falling gas prices); Bergdorf Goodman, the most luxurious department store in New York, having an on-line sale advertized on nytimes.com, sharing its spot with the film "Doubt,", Neiman Marcus, and "Revolutionary Road"; daily reports that this charity, every college and university, or that social justice organization begging for funding because of the hedge fund collapse, Bernie Madoff, or the dive in the world stock markets; labor unions panting from the accusations lodged against them after they worked so hard to elect Barack Obama, mostly because unlike most of us, they have fixed-benefit pensions still. The list could go on forever, I suppose.

What we concurred on was this: despairing times call for radical change. It's the only time radical change is feasible. So dump Caroline Kennedy as the choice for New York's new Senator and absolutely forget about Jeb Bush as Florida's Senator in 2010. Haven't we learned that dynasties are a waste of time. Read Paul Krugman about the need to have radical change, but squeaky clean radical change. Read Frank Rich in his suggestion that the brightest might not be what we need right now.

This is our opportunity to think outside the box. To be radical. To move the stream.