houses of cards are crumbling

the house of cards known as the financial sector on wall street is crumbling. need i mention countrywide bought out by bank of america, bear stearns bought out in a deal arranged by the government, indymac taken over by the government, fannie mae and freddie mac taken over by the government, lehman brothers going bankrupt, merrill lynch bought out by bank of america, and aig taken over by the government? and that is only what has happened so far; half of that happened in the last month and the rest within prior months. obviously the collapse of the financial sector is accelerating. only two major investment banks are even left existing anymore: morgan stanley and goldman sachs. they may or may not survive this. washington mutual (or wamu for short) is on the brink of collapse and several larger banks are competing to buy it. meanwhile, lehman brothers may actually partially survive its bankruptcy, as the british bank barclays has announced plans to buy the good parts of the now-bankrupt lehman brothers, while letting the bad parts fail. the strange part about this is, every single company that failed has been either cannibalized by a larger company or nationalized by the u.s. government. of course, for regular banks, the government is basically required to nationalize them if they go under, according to federal law, and they get taken over by the regulatory agency known as the fdic, or federal deposit insurance corporation. this is what happened to indymac. investment banks, hedge funds, mortgage companies, and insurance companies do not have this automatic protection, which is why lehman brothers went bankrupt. the treasury secretary and chairman of the federal reserve have been remarkably inconsistent and unpredictable in their handling of this crisis, deciding to bail out some companies but not others in a somewhat random fashion. of course, this has all led to a huge stock market crash, and there is also high unemployment, high inflation, and oddly enough, the dollar is increasing in value while oil is decreasing in value. why is the dollar increasing in value and oil decreasing in value at a time when the u.s. economy is on the brink of collapse? the global economy is greatly intertwined, and collapse of the u.s. economy spreads to other countries, causing their economies to likewise collapse, which means their currencies will, like the dollar, lose value, so the dollar ends up on a more even footing relative to foreign currencies because everyone ends up poor together. and why is crude oil going down in price? well, demand for oil has fallen due to bad economic conditions, people driving their cars less, more people losing their cars when they can’t afford the payments, and more people seeking more fuel-efficient vehicles and alternative modes of transportation such as public transit, bikes, or even walking. now the segway will finally catch on like everyone said it was going to when it was first introduced! if people can afford it, that is... i am guessing bikes will be much more popular. and you know why else the price of crude oil has gone down? hurricane ike destroyed a lot of refining capacity in the gulf coast, so it is harder to convert crude oil into gasoline to sell at the pump since there are less refineries up and running, creating a backlog of unrefined crude that needs to be sold and driving down the price of crude oil. crude oil has actually fallen to $96.19 a barrel, way down from its high earlier this summer in the mid $140s. anyway, the fall in the price of oil is due to supply and demand, basically... there is less demand in the short term, due to the bad economy and hurricane ike. in the long run, the price of oil will eventually go back to skyrocketing. if i had money to invest, i would invest it in oil. something else that has skyrocketed in value recently is gold, which is now ridiculously expensive because people think of it as a safe investment in tough times. i would not invest in gold now, however, because when the economy gets better, gold will get cheaper again, but oil will get more expensive than ever.

this economic collapse has helped to start knocking over the house of cards the mccain-palin campaign is built on. that house of cards started to get knocked over when sarah palin was really popular in the polls, with all the media coverage of her and all the various scandals she has been involved in throughout her short political career, and she really looked like an unprepared amateur in her abc news interview with charlie gibson. the collapse of the sarah palin bubble that had temporarily put john mccain ahead of barack obama in the horse-race numbers has been perhaps the main reason for the house of cards of the mccain-palin campaign to start collapsing. but the bad economic news this week has taken the spotlight off of sarah palin and all the silly news, and put it onto the serious issues affecting our country: exactly what the mccain-palin campaign does not want, since they want the campaign to be about personalities and not issues, as their campaign director has recently publicly said. the obama-biden campaign, on the other had, is squarely focused on issues such as the economy and how to solve our country’s problems, not coming up with silly baseless attacks to distract the public from the real issues. the lack of focus by the mccain-palin team on issues is really hurting them now, as both john mccain and sarah palin are proving to be incompetent and incapable of giving straight answers to simple questions. the mccain-palin team was only ahead in the polls when they were having an almost complete press blackout and relying on surrogates to talk to the media. now that the surrogates such as carly fiorina are becoming public embarrassments to the mccain-palin campaign just like phil gramm in the past, they are now making the surrogates who say stupid things shut up. carly fiorina said neither sarah palin nor john mccain would be qualified to run a fortune 500 company. phil gramm, of course, denounced the united states as “a nation of whiners” in a purely “mental recession”. so i guess when people lose their jobs, it is just in their heads, and they need some psychotherapy to realize they are still employed. and recently douglas holtz-eakin, a top adviser to john mccain, claimed that john mccain invented the blackberry. you know the blackberry? a phone you can do email and stuff with. kind of ironic for the mccain campaign to claim he invented the blackberry, when john mccain has also admitted he has no idea how to use a computer. and now something even MORE ridiculous. lady lynn forester de rothschild, who married into european nobility and became a member of the multimillionaire rothschild banking company, announced her support for john mccain, because she “didn’t like” barack obama and thought he was an “elitist”. oh, and she is a member of the democratic national committee who supported hillary clinton’s presidential bid, and she is technically an american citizen despite being a member of a very wealthy and famous family of european nobility. and in her first day as a john mccain surrogate, she referred to many of her fellow hillary clinton supporters as “rednecks”. how on earth is one of the wealthiest people in the world, a member of the famous rothschild european banking nobility family, who calls fellow hillary clinton supporters “rednecks”, supposed to be taken seriously when she attacks barack obama as an “elitist”? i bet she has 10 houses, an olympic-sized heated swimming pool, a fleet of private jets and helicopters, and eats nothing but expensive gourmet food like caviar and foie gras. for her to call someone elitist is the most ironic thing ever. and lastly, sarah palin is still in the news, and she no longer has the positive coverage she first had; now the media keeps updating us on various ongoing scandals regarding sarah palin. of course we all know sarah palin lies all the time about supposedly opposing the “bridge to nowhere” that she actually supported. but the scandal that is being reported on now is the “troopergate” scandal, where she tried to have her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper because of a messy divorce he had with her sister and sarah palin taking her sister’s side. you see, sarah palin did not manage to get her former brother-in-law fired from being a state trooper, but she did fire the state police commissioner. what is the official reason she gives for the firing? well she has given several reasons and keeps changing her story (clear signs that she is a liar) but her latest excuse really takes the cake because her excuse is even worse than what she is being accused of! her excuse is that the state police commissioner was asking washington for money to help crack down on alaska’s epidemic of sex offenders. alaska has more rape (per capita) than any other state. hey, at least they are #1 in something besides geographic size! sarah palin claims that the state police commissioner was disobeying her orders not to ask for this money to help put more serial rapists behind bars. that is her official excuse for firing the police commissioner! and when she was mayor of wasilla, she instituted a policy of making rape victims pay for having the police use rape kits to determine if they were raped and get the dna of who did it. that’s right, as mayor, she billed rape victims for the rape kits used to test them, and sent them bills in the mail that they had to pay. so first they got raped, then they got tested with rape kits, obviously a very humiliating experience, and then, even worse, they end up getting mailed bills to pay for being raped, by the city of wasilla that sarah palin was mayor of. according to the man who was alaska’s governor at the time, a fellow republican, no other city in alaska charged rape victims money for being raped. this fits in perfectly with the fact that last week, john mccain’s campaign accused barack obama of voting in favor of a law to teach kindergarteners sex ed before they learn how to read. actually, what this law has done is teach kindergarteners the warning signs that an adult may be a dangerous sexual predator, and how to avoid such a person to avoid being raped or inappropriately touched, and how to report sex crimes to the authorities. that is what the language “age-appropriate sex education” in the law refers to. so, that is at least 3 examples of the mccain-palin ticket being in favor of rape, just reported in the last week. are you a rapist? vote mccain-palin. they support rape. democrats would run that as a campaign ad if they were republicans. and as for the issue of the economy that people are now focusing on, john mccain keeps making contradictory statements. he said the fundamentals of the economy are strong, and later the same day said the fundamentals of the economy are at risk. one day he said he strongly opposed a federal bailout of insurance giant aig, then after the government went ahead and did it anyway, the next day he said they did the right thing. he has spent his entire career crusading against government regulation, and spent his 7 years as chairman of the senate commerce committee supporting deregulation and opposing regulation. phil gramm, his former chief economic adviser who called us a “nation of whiners”, was the author of the law that deregulated the banking and finance industries and ultimately led to the economic collapse we are having today. and john mccain voted for that law. so what is john mccain saying now? he is promising aggressive new regulation against the “fat cats” on wall street, saying he will really crack down on them and make them pay for what they’ve done. but he is not giving any specifics about the new regulatory framework he says he wants to put in place. he is not proposing any actual policies to solve the financial crisis, just using rhetoric. and these “fat cats” he rails against in speeches are the same people who would get most of the benefits from the tax cuts for the wealthy he proposes.

more and more, the media is stating as fact that the mccain-palin campaign is telling bald-faced lies, and they are not doing the usual “fair and balanced” bullshit of saying that the obama-biden campaign is equally guilty, because the media has woken up and is finally telling us the truth about everything, so it is time to pay attention to the media and believe what it says, because, quite frankly, the mainstream media has a lot more resources at its disposal to fact-check things than, say, a liberal blogger like me, and they have more credibility than anyone else, and for good reason. that is not to say that the media is unbiased. far from it. the media is a large group of individual human beings, each with their own personal biases, and every media organization collectively has a sort of culture in its newsroom that has its own unique bias. for instance, fox news is staunchly conservative and msnbc is increasingly liberal. there are liberal publications like the nation magazine and conservative publications like the weekly standard. most major newspapers with multiple opinion columnists are not entirely liberal or entirely conservative, but so-called liberal newspapers like the new york times or washington post have a ton more conservative columnists than the number of liberal columnists at conservative newspapers like the wall street journal or washington times. msnbc, the cable news network that has for the most part embraced liberalism, still has many conservatives on, like joe scarborough and pat buchanan, and in the past msnbc has gone through periods when it was a conservative network featuring a show with the ultra-right-wing crazy nutjob michael savage (real name michael weiner) as host. msnbc is only embracing liberalism because they are last place in ratings and will do anything for higher ratings, and they figure no other cable news network caters to liberals so they can corner that market the same way fox news cornered the market of conservatives. meanwhile, cnn pretends to be neutral. ha ha. with lou dobbs on cnn and glenn beck on cnn headline news, i hardly think they are neutral... having conservative hosts like those 2 with no liberal hosts to counter them means cnn is just fox news lite, with conservative bias that is not quite as obvious. as for nbc, abc, and cbs, i am at work at my job whenever those networks have the evening news, so i really have little idea what bias those networks have, although i am certain all of them have some sort of bias. as for the liberal bias of msnbc, it should be noted that msnbc has a center-left bias, not a far-left bias, so when they hosted debates for the democratic presidential candiates, they excluded dennis kucinich because they thought he was too left-wing. as a dennis kucinich supporter, i was appalled by that decision, but then again, msnbc is a joint venture between microsoft and nbc, and nbc is a subsidiary of general electric (ge). the clinton administration pursued an antitrust case against microsoft, and general electric is a military contractor, so the parent companies naturally have a conservative bias, which keeps msnbc from being too liberal.

so of course, i have other sources for information besides the mainstream media: the huffington post, the daily kos, alternet, and the nation magazine, primarily. you may notice that those are all liberal sources. i do also look at 2 conservative sites regularly: the drudge report and politico. those sites only have mild conservative bias, because anything with strong conservative bias is really too much for me to take. the really conservative sites are so full of bullshit and all sorts of stuff that makes me really, really angry at the people who post stuff there, it is pretty much impossible for me to look at those sites much at all, since i hate them so much. on the other hand, i trust the liberal websites very much, because i share the same belief system as the people who post stuff on those sites, and while sometimes they may make mistakes (such as saying that sarah palin’s son trig was actually the son of sarah palin’s daughter bristol), those mistakes are honest mistakes made by people trying to get to the truth, and are certainly not deliberate lies. bristol palin did turn out to be pregnant, but the blogger who claimed bristol was the mother of trig did get some facts wrong, and this was exposed by the fact-checkers in the mainstream media. and once the mainstream media picked up on the story and fact-checked it, i put my faith in the official fact-checked version that the media decided was the truth, because ultimately, there is only one truth, and anything that contradicts it is fiction, plus the media has a lot more fact-checking resources at its disposal than some random blogger nobody ever heard of with an account on daily kos. still, i do not question the motives of my fellow liberals, because i believe in our movement, and i trust them to do the right thing, to be honest and tell the truth, and to fight for what is right. i have not seen anything at all in this election season to make me question my commitment to liberalism, except when the issue of abortion came up, i did think a bit about both sides of that issue and whether i am really correct to be pro-choice. on all the other issues, my mind is firmly made up (well except for offshore drilling and nuclear energy). except for abortion, offshore drilling, and nuclear energy, my mind is firmly made up in support of liberalism and my candidate, barack obama. ok well maybe there are other things i am undecided on, at least in the foreign policy realm: the conflict between russia and georgia, the israeli-palestinian conflict, how to deal with pakistan’s new government and the al qaeda and taliban presence there, whether the new coalition government in zimbabwe is a good thing, and whether venezuelan president hugo chavez is a good guy or a bad guy. anyway, as far as offshore drilling and nuclear energy go, i am leaning towards supporting both of them, as long as the government prioritizes clean, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal and continues to increase fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. and i am somewhat undecided on whether the federal government should bail out all these failing financial firms, although i am leaning towards just bailing out all of them so that investors stop worrying and the money people have in the bank or in investments stays as safe as possible and so the credit market has a future, since our economy is heavily dependent upon borrowing and the credit crunch has been really bad for everyone. as for abortion, i am still pro-choice, and my reasoning for this is somewhat odd: i think that animals like dogs or cats or other mammals and perhaps some non-mammal species are obviously alive like us, have consciousness like us (although without thinking in words), and have real emotions just like us, plus many animals are capable of rudimentary thinking and figuring certain things out pretty well. “unborn children”, which i refer to as human fetuses, are nowhere near this advanced, and i believe they should have less rights, if any, than fully-developed mammals such as a dog, cat, mouse, chimpanzee, squirrel, or panda. since animals have pretty much no rights whatsoever, and are subject to wanton massacre to be turned into food for us to eat (cows, pigs, chickens, turkey, fish, etc.), i think if we ever want to give any rights to the “unborn” of our own species, first we should give equal or greater rights to animals of other species besides our own human species, since adult mammals of other species are much more advanced than human fetuses. since i personally eat meat pretty much every day, and have a personal stake in continuing the mass slaughter of innocent animals that have real feelings and emotions and are capable of rudimentary thought, i do not approve of giving animals significantly more rights than they enjoy today. i do think there should be much harsher penalties for killing or harming an animal that is the property of someone else without their permission, especially beloved pets like dogs or cats. and of course endangered and threatened species should be protected even more than they are today. but cows, pigs, chickens, and those other animals we eat as food ought to continue being made into food, although they deserve better living conditions and quick, painless deaths. i will continue to eat meat, and i will continue to support abortion. in fact, i even support abortion in the third trimester, since a human fetus at that stage is still less advanced than a typical cow or pig, and if it is okay to kill cows and pigs, then why not human fetuses? i am not a religious person who believes humans are special and inherently superior to all other species. i do believe that in many ways we humans have superior abilities and traits to animals of other species, but i think that it developed through evolution, not creationism. anyway, that is one of the reasons i think abortion on demand is justified at any stage in the pregnancy, if the mother wants an abortion. another reason: the human fetus inside the mother cannot survive on its own outside of her, and is basically a parasite that is feeding off her, draining nutrients out of her bloodstream and blasting waste materials back into the bloodstream. it is sort of like a cancer or a tapeworm, except not as bad, because it ends up turning into a human once the mother gives birth, and then it is no longer a parasite inside the mother’s body. and pregnant women, just like any other people, should have the right to have parasites removed from their bodies. of course, if the human fetus is removed from the body and turns out to still be alive and able to survive on its own, then i think that little person definitely has the right to take advantage of universal health care just like any other person, and grow up to be a person just like anyone else, an equal, if they are able to survive being born early, if given the best medical care available. and i definitely support having pregnant women do genetic tests on the human fetuses growing inside them to test for all sorts of horrible ailments, so that they can terminate the pregnancy if the human fetus has some horrible disease like down’s syndrome in its dna. this will give those women a second chance to get pregnant and then give birth to children without any known genetic diseases, so the children who end up being born will live long, happy, healthy, independent lives. giving birth to someone with down’s syndrome is not something noble, it is something immoral, because you are deliberately bringing into existence a human being with a horrible ailment they will suffer from their entire lives, when you could just as easily terminate that pregnancy and instead bring into existence a human being who is perfectly healthy and has nothing wrong with them. that is not to say that i don’t think people with genetic disorders have the right to live; i just think that they suffer too much and that it is inhumane to bring someone into existence cursed with a terrible illness to suffer from their entire lives. and frankly it also costs a lot of money for other people to care for these people born with genetic disorders, especially if they are unable to live independently and become productive adults who can work. of course, i strongly support all kinds of birth control and contraceptives, such as condoms, birth control pills, morning-after pills, and everything else that can be used to prevent unwanted pregnancies and/or the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. i think abortion should just be there as a last resort, kept entirely legal with no restrictions, just in case the birth control pills and condoms fail to do the job, but the first line of defense against unwanted pregnancies should always be things like condoms and birth control pills, and abortion should be considered a last resort, something to only do rarely. but of course there are several cases where abortion should be very highly encouraged instead of considered a last resort: genetic diseases as discussed earlier, rape, incest, and cases where the mother’s health would be endangered by giving birth. and of course, outside those cases, i also support unrestricted access to abortion for everyone who is pregnant, for any reason, at any time during pregnancy. it is just simpler that way; imagine the bureaucratic nightmare of pregnant women trying to prove that they were raped or that it was incest or whatever, just so they can qualify for an abortion, and by the time all the government paperwork is done, it is too late and the baby is already born. it is just best to completely keep the government out of women’s bodies and let them have complete control over that aspect of their lives; that maximizes individual freedom, like libertarians want. generally i think the government should stay out of people’s sex lives and not try to legislate morality, and they should not censor television or radio at all. i even think that all gambling, prostitution, and drugs should be legalized (but heavily regulated and taxed of course, since i am a liberal). if we legalized all that stuff, a lot of stuff that is now considered crime would be legal, and there would be a lot less criminals, and after all, those are all what we call “victimless crimes”, where there is either no victim or the only victim is the perpetrator who is engaging in self-destructive or morally questionable behavior. but if people engage in such behavior, it is none of the government’s concern, because we need to maximize individual liberty, and if someone does something that does not harm anyone else, they should have the right to do it legally. there would be less cases courts would have to consider, less people put in prison, and it would save the government a lot of money. by taxing gambling, prostitution, and drugs, the government could actually make a lot of money off things that currently cost the government a lot of money, keeping all those people in jail, paying all those prosecutors and judges and public defenders to deal with all those victimless crimes. anyway, i guess i do not completely agree with other liberal democrats on everything, and some of my beliefs are libertarian instead, but since libertarians oppose taxation and regulation, i am a liberal democrat, since my economic views are basically in favor of some kind of capitalist-socialist hybrid system like in most of europe. i genuinely hate the wealthy (in general, not as specific individuals) and want to punish them with very high taxes because i think that they have way more money than they could ever spend, and other people deserve that money a lot more than them. i do not think that wealthy people work very hard; after all, nobody ever calls them “working class”. they have all this money that other people desperately need to buy stuff with to stay alive. and while many wealthy people are involved in philanthropy and donate a lot of their money to charity, this is not mandatory, and there are plenty of wealthy people who keep their money and spend it on themselves, getting multiple houses and stuff. people like john mccain, with all his houses. now i suppose hate is too strong of a word for my feelings towards the wealthy, but i do really think that they have exploited everyone else and do not deserve their money or have any inherent right to keep it. i think one of the primary roles that governments play is to protect the wealthy from having their property taken away from them, by having theft be a crime and all that. governments are the defenders of capitalism, the defenders of the wealthy, and without governments, there would be no capitalism or wealthy people. so wealthy people owe a debt of gratitude to governments for protecting them and their wealth, and the least they could do is share some of that wealth with other people. of course sharing is voluntary and what i am talking about is involuntary, but really, i strongly disagree with the anti-tax views of libertarians and conservatives, and do not think the wealthy deserve to keep all the money they have made through exploiting the working class. so ok... we have a “poverty level”, and anyone below it does not really have enough money to survive on their own. why not have a “wealthy level”, and anyone above it has way more money than they could ever possibly need for themselves and their families, and heavily tax any money above that wealthy level and give the money to people under the poverty level so that everyone ends up in between those 2 levels? and maybe we could give the wealthy the option to contribute to worthy well-regulated charities of their choice instead of paying that money as taxes to the government, in order to continue the tradition of philanthropy. i don’t know exactly. what i do know is that the gap between the rich and the poor has risen every year and is at a record high level now in the united states, and is higher than in any other wealthy industrialized nation, and something needs to be done to close that gap. some people do not view that gap as a problem because they believe in unregulated free market capitalism; i strongly disagree with that view. i think the recent government bailouts of large financial institutions demonstrate the many failings of unregulated free market capitalism. that is why even john mccain is abandoning his previous support for unregulated free market capitalism, following the example of the bush administration. i think the bush administration is right to intervene in this economic crisis and help out our financial institutions that are the backbone of our economy. i do not think they are doing everything quite right, and they sure failed with respect to lehman brothers earlier this week, but at least they are doing something, and that is better than lassiez-faire free-market trickle-down bullshit economics. i think in the end, our economy will recover, but a major challenge will remain: the price of oil will continue to rise in the long term, because there is only a limited supply of oil (it is nonrenewable) and there is increasing world demand for it, which will use it up rather quickly, leaving us without viable energy alternatives unless we move quickly to develop those alternatives instead of thinking that offshore oil drilling is the magic key to solving everything. and if we put off doing offshore oil drilling for maybe 20 years, imagine how much money we will be able to make off the oil then, when it will be many times as expensive as it is now. if we drilled it all now, we would just use it up quite fast, and then we would have none left and rely completely on other countries for oil. that is why the republican proposals are so ridiculous. republicans never think about the long term or the greater good of everyone, only about the short term and helping out their cronies and the interest groups that support them. well maybe it is unfair for me to say “never” in that last sentence... how about “almost never”? anyway, i have gone on long enough in this post for now... see ya later :-)