Hooray for the red, white and blue!
Hey, consolidation of the nation’s wealth into a whole three banks — that can’t be bad for consumers, can it? I can feel my $700 billion dollars growing already, it’s the most awesomely effective bailout ever! I must be sure to forward my thanks to President Pinochet Bush!
And if you wrote to your representatives to stop this bill, why not go ahead and write to them again? If Bush says it’s an emergency, it cannot possibly be an emergency, and if the world economy is doomed to go into the shredder, this $700 billion give-away is not going to prevent it from doing so, and the middle class will end up screwed either way.
And Michael Moore agrees with me, so there. Nyah.
Pinochet approves of the bailout
Teacher, pupil, kid at the back of the room napping.
In an airport in Tulsa yesterday with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine — I had already finished my copy of Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. Little did I know that last year’s bestseller would prove more informative than the morning’s newspapers. The thesis of the book is that certain economic policies can only be imposed in the wake of a shocking event, such as a flood or a coup or a bombing, and that, if these events do not occur on their own, they must be created by the people who wish to impose said policies.
The following I found on pp 105-106:
"The situation was so unstable that Pinochet was forced to do exactly what Allende had done: he nationalized many of these companies.
…
"It’s clear that Chile was never the laboratory of ‘pure’ free markets that its cheerleaders had claimed. Instead, it was a country where a small elite leapt from wealthy to super-rich in extremely short order — a highly profitable formula bankrolled by debt and heavily subsidized (then bailed out) with public funds. When the hype and salesmanship behind the miracle are stripped away, Chile under Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market but a corporatist one…a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage an all-out war on the third power sector — the workers — thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.
"That war — what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class — is the real story of Chile’s economic ‘miracle.’ By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent…if that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment [Friedman’s term for his theory] was never really about jolting the the economy into health. Perhaps it was meant to do exactly what it did — hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence."
Royal Alcott 1928-2008
My father Royal died a few weeks ago — that’s why I was away from the computer for a few days.
The story of my family life is, as my brother Eric says, "complicated," too much so to get into here for the time being, but while I was at my father’s house in Eureka Springs, AK the other day I snagged a couple of killer pictures of him that capture him in his prime. The first one was taken in 1947, which would make it probably his senior-year portrait. The second is him at the high-water mark of his Mad Men-era advertising career, late 50s perhaps, early 60s at the latest. He worked for Leo Burnett in Chicago, then for Art Linkletter’s production company in LA, then Foote, Cone and Belding in Chicago later on (I think that’s the order — accurate communication was never a priority in my family). I’ve never watched Mad Men, but now I feel like I should just to get to know what his life was like. The final picture is one I took of him in 1991. I’ve got plenty of things to say about him at some point, but for now let me salute a handsome devil who knew how to rock a three-piece suit.
Paul Newman
I never met Paul Newman, although I am pleased to have appeared in a movie with him.
My wife, however, did meet him, the story of which I would like to relate to you now.
Programming note
I will be out of town through Saturday, sans computer and thus sans blog. I trust nothing particularly interesting is going to happen between then and now.
Fairies and Fantasy: The Wizard of Oz part 1
The Wizard of Oz is the kind of movie that has been so totally absorbed by our culture, seen so many times by everyone from such a young age, that it’s easy to forget that it is, in the end, a movie, created by a team of artisans like any other movie, its basic ingredients — script, cast, costuming, scoring, editing, etc — no more magical or superior than the ingredients of tens of thousands of other movies. And yet, The Wizard of Oz endures like few other movies do, still holds audiences breathless in its narrative grip, despite the changing fashions of filmmaking, despite its stylized overacting, despite its gonzo, surreal production design. Even other tellings of The Wizard of Oz fail to enchant the way this movie does; why is this so?
These are the people running our government, folks.
From the infamous, America-hating commie rag Forbes.com —
"In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
‘It’s not based on any particular data point,’ a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. ‘We just wanted to choose a really large number.’"
Mission accomplished! That, keep in mind, is a Treasury spokeswoman. That’s not a leak, that’s not someone talking out of school, that’s an actual message to the press from a Treasury spokeswoman, speaking in full knowledge that she was talking to a national publication. If that’s their actual message they want people to know, then who knows what’s really going on with these people?
So forgive me if I don’t buy the administration’s line on the necessity of this bailout.
Glad to see I’m not alone.
I’m not going to pretend to be an economic wizard, I have a hard time adding up change from my pocket, but, like the majority of Americans, I’m not sure we need any kind of bailout at all. In fact, the mere fact that this bailout is being rammed down our throats with record speed, making the Iraq war debate seem like a good-natured exchange of ideas in comparison, with an emphasis on FEAR FEAR FEAR TERROR TERROR TERROR and YOU CANNOT QUESTION US, THE COUNTRY IS AT STAKE!!!! and THE WORLD WILL END IF WE DON’T DO THIS GAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!1! makes me assume that the opposite is the case, that this is purely Bush’s corporate overlords demanding he turn over the Treasury to them before he leaves office.
And it looks like they’re getting their way. We’re not talking about whether we need this or not, we’re now haggling over the details. Even though an overwhelming majority of citizens don’t want this in any form. Hmm, using fear and aggression to countermand democracy and the will of the people, where have I seen that before?
PS. Guess how many people, apart from John McCain I suppose, think the fundamentals of the American economy are strong? Go ahead, guess.
More like this, please.
There you go. I’ve never heard of this lady before, but I like her.
And, this.