Dem vulnerabilities during the August recess

As annoying as it may be, Ross Douthat touches on the significance of semantics and messaging:

But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.

And, inevitably, the tendency toward political corruption. The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.

The first paragraph may be simplistic, but the second paragraph is spot on. The corruption of the party-in-power is the characteristic that makes the GOP and Democrats most alike. The sad, sick irony is that they are more than willing to throw stones from their own glass houses once they are in the minority.

Will Allen and Joel Salatin: remember these names, these men.

If you can place Alice Waters – with the institutions and cities (of the East Bay)  that she’s come to be associated with … then you can add Joel Salatin (southern Virginia) and Will Allen (Milwaukee) to that list.
Oh, and there’s some First named Michelle Obama is doing her darnedest to elevate food issues – food systems, food justice and food deserts – into the everyday vernacular, too.

Beyond our borders, you could consider the upstart Brit, Jamie Oliver, (dyslexic according to wikipedia) who has hustled from popular chef to cooking show personality – where he got his moniker of the Naked Chef, as he prefers to cook and introduce cooking to people by stressing that food is best when practically naked – into staunch foodist. Consider that food populist, or politically-active and determined proponent of good food.

Good food doesn’t mean tasty. Fast food has hijacked our taste buds into chemical opiates (hat tip, Supersized Spurlock)

So, who are Joel Salatin and Will Allen? They are permeating the corporate media and popular consciousness – just in these first five days of July:
•    Salatin’s Polyface Farms was the rural Virginia location of a Sunday night story on ABC News [oddly, dated June 16 on the website] about Chipotle (yes, McDonalds-owned Chipotle) raising all of its pork and chicken and eggs (and “most” of its beef, according to the Chipotle founder/executive) in “happy” environs.
Salatin is a self-professed ‘grass farmer.’ I first read about wily Salatin and his Polyface Farms in Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. Thanks to Pollen recounting experiences from Salatin’s Polyface Farms, I’ve added holons and raken to my vocabulary.
•    Allen, meanwhile, first came onto my radar by being picked as a 2008 MacArthur genius awardee. But, he’s placing Milwaukee squarely on the map. Few people outside the real estate or retail sectors can tell you that “every sqare foot brings in $30.” On the 1st of July, he had this coverage in the ever-slimming NYTimes.

In this new frontier … there’s plenty of new language to learn: aquaponics, castings, vermicompost. There’s even a new type of black gold … that’s more basic than coffee, and smells much better than oil.

What I love about all of this is more than getting my hands dirty. Sure, weeding, gardening and watering take me back to my toddler days toiling on grass and dirt in Denver. But, the resurgence of small-scale farming is how it is returning humans into the natural order of things. By that, we are readjusting to being a small part of many ecosystems that we depend upon.

Furthermore, the responsibility of produce demands that we be producers. Consumption has its place, but we need more life in our relationship to the foodstuffs that sustains us.
That said, have you heard that Food Inc is coming to a theater near you?

P.S. I just ordered my first subscription to the Small Farmers Journal. Base in Sisters Oregon. [h/t, CJ]

Ties that bind: Obama-ClintonWH, Obama-Harvard

Change implicitly requires risk — the risk of not sticking to the status quo. While the man alone embodies plenty of differences from his 43 predecessors, it looks like much of his nominees, appointees and supporting cast are 20th Century Clintonites or Ivy-Leaugue and Harvard-types:

As Mike Allen highlights Al Kamen’s analysis:

WHO’S WHO — WashPost’s Al Kamen: “Fully 42 percent of Team Obama’s picks for Senate-confirmed positions so far worked in the Clinton administration. And if they appear to come from elite, private schools, well, they do. In fact, about one-fourth of those named so far either attended or taught at Harvard, to name just one esteemed institution. On another front, men are outnumbering women by more than 2 to 1 in the top jobs.”

More alarming is the entrenched owning class interests of the financiers and financial titans that run the Treasury Dept, Fed Banks and White House by association. In a troubling and telling article on “Obama’s Collusive Capitalism“:

The Obama policy of collusive capitalism is most evident in the financial bailout. He has placed his economic program in the hands of a man — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — who can best be called, as analyst Susanne Trimbath puts it, a “lap dog of Wall Street.” A protégé of former Treasury Secretary and Citicorp board member Robert Rubin, Geithner played a pivotal role in the original Bush bailout of the Wall Street elite…. The Geithner plan, Stiglitz noted this week in a New York Times op-ed, represents “the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves: clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets.” The winners in the plan are the top guns of the financial industry, who would welcome further government-sponsored financial consolidation. For them, this would be vastly preferable to the more democratic alternative of selling the remaining assets of the failed large firms to dispersed, healthy, usually smaller, regional institutions. Perhaps one has to start with the very obvious fact that the president — despite occasional attacks on the greed of Wall Street — did not run against the financial markets but, rather, with their strong support. As early as the 2008 Democratic primaries, noted New York Times Wall Street maven Andrew Ross Sorkin, Obama had “nailed [down] the hedge fund vote.”

What more will it take for us to realize that we don’t share many/any political or social or economic interests with these fat wallets running the Obama administration.

On Larry Summers ‘08 income

Best diss from Felix Salmon and one more reasons (as if we needed more) to see how the owning class pervades the executives of Team America — err, TeamObama:

But Summers’s speeches are interesting too, especially the foreign ones: $67,500 from Tata Conultancy Services; $90,000 from the Asociation de Bancos de Mexico; $103,500 from the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Baja California; $112,500 from Centro de Liderazgo y Gestion in Colombia; the same amount from IESE Business School in Spain; $135,000 from the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina; and a whopping $225,000 from Leaders and Company, the publishers of This Day newspaper in Nigeria.

Is Larry Summers the only person in history to reply to an email from Nigeria saying “we have hundreds of thousands of dollars we would like to give you; you need to do very little to receive it” — and actually get the money?

What’s more intriguing, and less funny, is how small the lines of influence are, as a $147K seat on a board of Dr Doom’s economic forecasting firm is a nice penny:

Of particular interest to me is the amount that Nouriel Roubini was paying Summers to sit on the advisory board of Roubini Global Economics, where I used to work: $147,500 a year. Somehow I doubt that fellow board member Marc Uzan was pulling down a similar amount.

If you don’t know Dr Doom, read this NYT profile of him here. And here’s his firm’s site.

ObamaDOJ + RIAAfolks = old web 1.0

Boring … and for proof that the Obama administration isn’t that down with the cutting edge of internet life and hacking despite the impressions given by his Crackberry addction:

Nearly two dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library groups urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to quit filling his administration with insiders plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America. The demands came a week after the Justice Department, fresh with two RIAA attorneys in its No. 2 and No. 3 positions, announced the administration’s support of $150,000 in damages for each music track purloined on a peer-to-peer file sharing program.

What govt spending looks like

Robert Kuttner on the multi-year plans of the stimulus package:

the stimulus as a down-payment on an expansion of government services such as affordable housing and early childhood education that have been chronically under-funded, as well as long term investments in green energy and smart infrastructure.

…. If you look at the details of the Obama recovery plan, however, it includes a lot of outlays that don’t look like one-shots: laying more than 3,000 miles of electric transmission lines; installing 40 million “smart” utility meters to help reduce energy use; weatherizing 2 million homes and most federal buildings. Among the other infrastructure investments are improving security at 90 major ports and modernizing the nation’s water system. These needs and others like them don’t end after two years.

Obama said Saturday in his first radio and video address, “This is not just a short-term program to boost employment. It’s one that will invest in our most important priorities — like energy and education, health care and a new infrastructure — that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.”

H.E.E.I.P — the economic acronym

For all the talk of essential economic remedies, there is hope in the acronym of HEEIP:

Health
Education
Employment
Infrastructure
Poverty programs

Or as this Wall Street Journal article detailed it last week:

The Obama stimulus plan is directed toward health, energy, education, infrastructure and support for the poor.

disgusting nepotism

This pisses me off:

There is a rich bipartisan history of dynasty in American politics that dates all the way back to the Founding Fathers; Obama-Biden actually represents the first winning ticket since 1976 without a son or a grandson of a U.S. senator on it.

In 2008, the storied Udall clan, sometimes referred to as the Western Kennedys, saw two members elected to the Senate— Mark from Colorado and Tom from New Mexico. In 2010, they could be joined in the Senate by Florida’s Jeb Bush, the son and brother of presidents and the grandson of a senator.

All told, it’s entirely possible that the Senate will be comprised of nearly a dozen congressional offspring by the end of Obama’s first term as president.

What’s the point of me bragging about being able to outplay the Clintons and the entrenched interests of

I suppose a problem when dealing in systemic issues — such as a two-party political system embroiled in corruption like a stage-four cancer — is that one individual has little shot at changing the dynamics they enter into. So much for That One, our shining light.

If he doesn’t strike decisively against the entrenched then he’ll be as ineffective as Jimmy Carter or as sell-out as Bill “telecomact-welfarereform-threestrikes” Clinton.

Keating to McCain: Till Death do Us Part

I doubt that it was meant as a marriage vow towards an unsavory marital partner. Nonetheless, it is a curious way for a banker named Charles Keating to refer to a political candidate of John McCain.

I came across this blog due to a Times (UK) article about the $50,000 in contributions bundled out of the law firm Keating founded. The Times linked to an Oct 9 Washington Times article no less, that includes a jpeg of McCain’s letter of apology on official US House letterhead that Charles keating had the gall to write on top of and send (back!) to Congressman McCain. He even starts it off with “Don’t be silly.”

An odd way of opening — is it meant to be light-hearted? collegial? or chastising?

The opening is followed by “you can call me anything. Say anything. do anything. i’m yours.”

Is that suggestive? or an absolute commitment?

***

I did a few quick inflation calculations (thanks to Inflation Calculator) of how much $166,000 of early 1980s money is worth in today’s dollar amounts. $166K from 1986 equates to $310K in 2007 (a convervative figure, as the ‘82 figure would equal $350K )

… which would have made the unname bundler out of the Keating law firm not only a Pioneer in the 2004 Bush campaign but a Super Ranger. Or the elite of the small dollar campaign contribution corralling that has arisen in the post-McCain-Feingold era.

What is the bailout:: Keynes is in, Friedman is out.

This instructive point from Wake Forest professor David Coates:

But doesn’t the bailout represent a fundamental change in government policy?

Yes, it does. It marks the end of an era, but not the end of capitalism. As David Brooks said in The New York Times recently, the real casualty here is the Gingrich Revolution. Given what has happened these last four weeks, it’s unlikely that any time soon a future President will build into his State of the Union Address proposals to partially privatize Social Security, as President Bush did on at least two occasions in the last eight years. For the minute, it rather looks as though Milton Friedman is out of fashion, and that John Maynard Keynes is on the way back in. We don’t face socialism; but we do face a slightly more managed capitalism. But the rest of the industrial world flourishes under such a system. Arguably we will too, if the management is up to the task.