Copyright © 2006 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2006 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings. Email: |
Remember when Fed Chief Alan Greenspan suggested people should refinance with adjustable rate mortgages? Oh, what a guy: it wasn't enough that the monetary policy of the day was to make loans easier to acquire and pump up real estate values by bringing the interest rates down, he had to put extra hooks on the fish line. How much of the public's sense of prosperity and willingness to consume — propping up the economy — came from him? (Hopefully a couple regular visitors here will chime in with their astute comments on this.) Well, as we all know, the rates are going back up. And as a result, anyone who bought into Greenspan's recommendations and bought into an ARM, experiencing a fantasy prosperity, and voted with their wallets in 2004 has another cause for buyer's remorse beyond Iraq: their roof may or may not be at risk, but it's costing more than they expected. Greenspan, of course, was wearing the mantle of the cautious observer, what with his pronouncements of "irrational exuberance" and all that. Surely he could be believed! Well, we can't blame Greenspan for all the pincers American consumers are feeling. When it comes to the rising price of gasoline and how it's impacted America, to some extent you can blame the pusher-man (Bush and the GOP), but you also have to blame the gullibility of the American public. Yes, they were lied to, but it's not as if America didn't have an opportunity to be skeptical. There's a logical fallacy (I can't remember what it's called), but the classic example, as odd as it seems, is that just because the sun has always risen in the East before is no reason to believe that it will always do so. In regulated industries like the financial markets, the SEC requires the disclaimer that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. But America seems to have been sold on the past: not just the free money of lower interest rates and escalating real estate values, but low gas prices. The free-flowing oil which the "liberation" of Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq — "Operation Enduring Freon" or whatever the hell Rove christened it from one day to the next — has just not materialized. And so gas prices have not come down. Pile that on with the interest rate increases, the thousands dead in Iraq, the observations of the constant hemorrhaging of our money for an end we don't understand... Well, it's no wonder Bush's approval ratings are as low as they are. The wonder is that they aren't lower: are there still so many fools that cannot wake up and understand the reality which so many others see? The pundits who supported Bush took such comfort in talking about "Bush Derangement Syndrome," they even felt so glib they adopted the idea as if it was so well accepted they could refer to it in a TLA (three letter acronym) as "BDS": as if it were as easily an accepted shorthand as WMDs. Well, if you've been reading Kevin Phillips' "The American Theocracy" you probably have a sense that Bush's underwater- canyon-like approval ratings are emblematic of the chickens coming home to roost. Phillips demonstrates how America's support for Bush is the result of a number of pillars (oil, fundamentalist faith, and foreign debt); I'm not far enough into the book to comment on them all, but at least in the case of the first, Phillips lists the leading oil states and how they went for Bush; the coal states; and so on with the automotive states. In this territory at least, Bush had a constituency — what with the sprawl residents who moved out to the highway centric burbs and planned to drive to work in their tank-like SUVs — which now seems fragile unless the GOP can establish permanent bases in Iraq and get us our God-blessed oil. Remember those corny sci-fi movies where an alien planet
visited Earth and treated us as if we were its energy colony?
Well, can I just say "To quote the line from Pogo..."? Can I
leave it at that, and leave the rest to you?
What will it take to fire up the
Democrats? A new poll from the
New York Times/CBS has Bush's approval ratings down to 31%.
And when you add in historical perspective — such as comparing Bush's ratings
to those of Nixon's, one fact should become apparent: if, as
a politician, you don't come out in the clearest of terms that
there's a lot wrong with this country and how we've gotten here,
you are taking a minority position. You need to disassociate from
this President in the clearest possible terms, and go on record,
hard, about Bush's incompetence and irresponsibility. And
not just Bush (although he's obviously part of the mix):
Republicans have the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme
Court. They cannot hide and blame it on the Democrats. But
the Democrats, to be effective, are going to have to start
blaming, and loud. Talk up port security; talk up deficits; talk
up tax cuts. Connect the dots for the American people.
Griswold under threat? Many people know what "Roe v. Wade" means, but don't understand how the case of Griswold v. Connecticut was an important stepping stone to Roe v. Wade. And when those who are concerned about abortion rights focus on Roe v. Wade, they may not be aware of efforts to undermine the foundation of Roe v. Wade. Griswold allowed people to get birth control and contraceptives — and there is a movement underway to overturn not just Roe v. Wade but contraception freedom. According to this article by Russel Shorto, the greyness is the opportunity, and the greyness is based on how the pill works. If the pill prevents conception, that's one thing; but if it also prevents a fertilized egg (that is, post-conception) from adhering to the uterus, some would consider it an abortion. And this rationale, already being used to argue against "morning after" pills, could easily be extended to your standard birth control pill. Importantly, as Shorto notes, the President has not been clear about strong a line he draws between abortion and contraception:
As Shorto also points out, some conservatives object to contraception in general because it changes the nature of the sex act: they believe that freer sex devalues the woman's role and slouches the relationship more towards physical abandonment and a disregard for other elements which contribute to a successful relationship. That might be true, but I'd dispute: even in my twenties my energy was limited, and there always came a time when you'd have to talk to one another. And besides, if the issue is temptation, you can't legislate temptation. If you wanted to, how would you treat money, and society's measures of success? Would Donald Trump become illegal? Is that next? Of course, if contraception is threatened, the agreed-upon DMZ of making abortion rare is no longer agreed upon. Contraception is an important tool to limit unwanted pregnancies. If these people want to shift the argument to the restriction of freedoms regarding even birth control, well, it's time to mobilize. Here's another bit from Shorto's article: Democrats, meanwhile, have had their difficulty with the abortion issue, and their new hopes are pinned to a strategy that focuses on contraception as a way to reduce unintended pregnancy. Last month, Senators Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton — an anti-abortion Democrat and an abortion rights Democrat — introduced legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. In part, the idea is to force Republicans to support contraception or be branded as reactionaries. The conservative counter was that giving even more government backing to emergency contraception and other escape hatches from unwanted pregnancy will lead to a new wave of sexual promiscuity. An editorial in the conservative magazine Human Events characterized the effect of such legislation as "enabling more low-income women to have consequence-free sex." Shorto doesn't have a bibliography where we can find the
editorial from Human Events, so we'll do some "benefit of the
doubt" giving, and allow that maybe Shorto's taken something out
of context. BUT. Isn't there something a bit disquieting
about the formulation that a problem is that it's enabled more
low income women to have consequences-free sex?
Another cultural note, this time it's Pynchon. Tomorrow, May 8, is Thomas Pynchon's birthday. I can't think of many other writers who have given me so much joy, even as his hilarious moments have occurred in novels documenting the corruption of the world and our loss of self. I also love the intricacy of the details in his work, whether it's in decoding the anagrams of his characters' names or charting the way a motif is riffed and varied as a book progresses. One of my favorites (and I'm not sure if my fondness isn't due to self-discovery here), is the opening of Gravity's Rainbow. It's a nightmare for the character Pirate Prentice, and it entails the evacuations in London in response to the German blitz, and whether the old and the winos are really being evacuated, as opposed to being taken to some place where society at large will never have to think about them gain. The line "You really didn't think anyone was going to rescue you, did you?" sticks in my memory. Anyway, the word which occurs here and there for the left behind is the "preterite," and Pirate Prentice's name is an anagram for "Preterite Panic." There are lots of other little details I could share, such the
as the Learned English Dog in Mason & Dixon who earns the
line "The L.E.D. blinks..." But dwelling on these would distract
from the larger themes, about the struggles and the forces we
have to confront in society. I wonder if he'll ever deal with
Bush in literary form, or if he thinks he already has?
Cultural literacy. The New York Times
Magazine has an article titled 13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Quick
show of hands: how many people recognize the literary allusion?
Consistent job disappointments. In the post below, an anonymous commenter asked me to support my statement that job growth consistently disappoints Wall Street expectations. I replied in the comment box with links going back to December, but haloscan rejected the post because of all of its links (a method of protecting against comment spam). So I need to create a separate post here, I guess. Let's look at the last twelve months, going back to May, 2005:
So: how many months were the statistics below the estimates and how many were under?
Obviously when February's figures were revised they went into
the "under" column, but I haven't tracked all the others, so it's
kind of unfair to isolate it. And yes, I'll take a seven to five
bet. You can make a lot of money on a bet like that. And I admit
that the word "consistently" was too strong.
No sure bets, but here's a pretty good one. When Wall Street has a consensus figure for how many new jobs will be reported in the latest Department of Labor statistics, bet that the Labor figure will disappoint. April jobs were up 138,000, but that undershot Wall Street's expectations, by about 30%. It's time to put the cards on the table: the reason the jobs figure consistently disappoints Wall Street is because, face it, Wall Street is liberally biased. Yeah, I know, "Wall Street." Suits, hefty salaries and bonuses, corporate America, and all that, but it's time America woke up and realized what's in its midst. If they only knew to look at the economy through the eyes of the Bush "we're going to move the goal lines again" perspective, Wall Street would know better. But Wall Street, we know, is in bed with Atrios and The Nation. We all know to expect better now. Oh, and by the way, the Labor Department revised the January
and February figures down.
Satan's Laundromat is active again.
Welcome back, Mike, and keep up the good work!
Brooklyn's warehouse fire is no issue of national significance (an article here), and may not be worth your reading. But it takes a great deal of effort on my part to not comment, loving these old structures the way I do. If you've been coming here any length of time, you know how often I've featured a photo of the warehouses in Sunset Park's Industry City, and they are active. And maybe you've seen my shots of Red Hook, with the buildings that are waiting to be demolished and replaced by the box stores. In all seriousness, let's get the wrecking ball in and mow them down, we'll have our memories in photos, along with our dodo bird photos. There is something special about these areas, they are wonders to behold, and photos can't really capture their size, nor the way they envelop you as you walk through the little streets in these complexes. I sometimes think that photobloggers like me go through these areas as if they're in search of a grail that doesn't exist: a belief that one day, maybe today, they can actually make a photograph that delivers that 360 experience. In all honesty, I wish there were some public trust, an effort at preserving this kind of thing: there is a tenement museum on the Lower East Side; there are national forests. Are complexes like these so easily sloughed off? Over on flickr, by the way you can get a sense of what these now burned out warehouses in Greenpoint were like. Go through these... I never got to visit the warehouses in Greenpoint. Obviously
I've become more aware of what I've missed, and regret their
passing. And as for the forces of growth, if this fire really was
arson, I hope they hunt the perpetrators down, convict them, and
punish them to the extent the law allows. This is not just an
issue of financial gain from accelerating the demolition of an
area: you cannot divert hundreds of firemen from their
call without risking protection against other blazes and
endangering their lives. There are many arguments in favor of
demolishing structures which have outlived their accepted
usefulness, but none of them call for endangering other
neighborhoods or the lives of the bravest.
Moussaoui is spared the death penalty.
Here's a link, if you need one. I haven't found
much information yet on the dynamics, so it's not clear yet what
happened, and I'm not one to idly speculate. We'll need Nancy
Grace, I guess. But in my book, even though I'm against
capital punishment, the death penalty was too good for this guy.
I think he wanted to be a martyr, and I'd prefer to deny him that
role. He sounds like he regrets not having been more involved in
9/11; why let him play that role retroactively? (And yes, I know
there's an implicit contradiction between being against the death
penalty and thinking it's too good for someone. Cue Walt
Whitman.)
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