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Kunstler's Election Campaign Blogroll
October 20, 2008
The Curious Case of McCain
For the unsentimental among us, John McCain has demonstrated an interesting paradox in behavior: how someone regarded as a war hero can end up behaving so ignominiously -- by running a presidential campaign based almost wholly on scurrilous attacks and trafficking in lies about his opponent. The latest is the barrage of "robot" phone calls going out to voters that declare Barrack Obama to be a "terrorist." Remember, back in the Vietnam War, John McCain did not choose to be shot down and taken prisoner. It was just something that happened to him. He was able to endure his captivity, and suffered greatly in the process. But he didn't necessarily come out of it a person of good character. People would like to think so, but perhaps it just didn't happen that way.
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Remember to spread the "meme" -- help "re-brand" the Republicans as The Party That Wrecked America
October 8, 2008
Great Debate Number Two
What tedium. Neither of the candidates was able to honestly articulate the terms of what this society faces. Both are more-or-less trying to hose the voters with promises that can't be kept about pensions and medical care. Both are deluding the voters when they repeat the mantra about "energy independence." But on the level of what is revealed about character, these debates tell a different story. John McCain comes across as desperate, feeble, and hooked on scurrilous insinuation. His reference last night to Mr. Obama as "that one," established a new low in campaign manners. Mr. Obama comes across as self-possessed and fair-minded, even if he couldn't bring himself to tell the voters the truth about their diminishing prospects. Given the background situation of the melting financial landscape, Mr. McCain looks all but finished.
October 6, 2008
Our "Hero"
Did John McCain authorize Sarah Palin's thoroughly scurrilous attack on Barack Obama this weekend in which she accused him of "paling around with domestic terrorists" -- ?? If so, it is a further demonstration of the fact that being a war hero, of surviving an enemy prison camp, is no guarantee of future honorable behavior. McCain is running a guttersnipe campaign.
October 3, 2008
The Veep Debate
Sarah Palin is an excellent performer. The trouble is the nature of her performance -- a vindictive know-nothing out of her depth in national politics, tricked out like a sexy librarian in a porn movie to seduce the votes of all those sore beset uptight Midwestern babbits whose car dealerships are going out of business. The spectacle of seeing Ms. Palin presented as a serious national candidate only reflects on the dishonorable behavior of John McCain, who cynically picked her as his running mate.
A reader from Ohio reminds us of a very important point:
"$700 billion could completely rebuild the US passenger system! All the way to complete eletrification and to the same standards the French enjoy with their TGVs."
Its enough money to bring service to every town of 5000 and up.
Sept 26, 2008
A Scene for the History Books
From The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The day began with an agreement that Washington hoped would end the financial crisis that has gripped the nation. It dissolved into a verbal brawl in the Cabinet Room of the White House, urgent warnings from the president and pleas from a Treasury secretary who knelt before the House speaker and appealed for her support.
“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” President Bush declared Thursday as he watched the $700 billion bailout package fall apart before his eyes, according to one person in the room.
Sept 25, 2006
What on earth was John McCain thinking when he "suspended" his campaign -- including a duck-out from the first debate? This was his response, by the way, to Barack Obama's phone call to him suggesting that the two of them put out a joint statement supporting some kind of swift congressional action to prop up the credit markets. I suppose McCain was trying to "look presidential" by rushing back to the geographic center of power. But after twelve hours the gambit has already taken on the odor of a major blunder, since McCain's rush back to Washington was upstaged by President Bush's TV speech last night -- even though Bush came off like a cigar store indian delivering his plea for action.
Meanwhile, events on the financial scene are still out-pacing personalities and parties. At 7:00 am Thursday some deal points seem to be in place involving executive pay and government equiity stakes. But I think this is still a smokescreen for the real central issue, which is transparency -- the clear market valuing of the troubled securities that so many playerz in the system want to off-load on the taxpayers.
Sept 24, 2008
Bailout Games
What an amazing spectacle to watch the Senate hearings on C-Span last night with Treasury Sec'y Hank Paulson, Fed Chief Ben Bernanke, and SEC chairman Chris Cox.
Most conspicuous was Paulson's tortured squirming as he avoided the outstanding question at issue, which is whether holders of securitized debt of dubious value can simply dump them on the US Treasury in exchange for "real money?" Paulson wants the holders of these things (called "assets" but which are really liabilities) to be able to exchange them for whatever price they say they are worth. This bypasses the fundamental process of markets establishing the price of a security (otherwise known as "mark-to-market").
Notice that this is essentially a swindle.
Notice that many of the holders of this paper are the same people (and companies) that created it.
Notice that the company headed until recently by Treasury Sec'y Paulson (former CEO of Goldman Sachs), was not only in the forefront of engineering these debt securities, but that an office within Goldman Sachs was shorting the very securities that they were creating and selling to other banks, pension funds, and municipal investment funds?
The US Senate and Congress are being squeezed very hard to pass desperate enabling legislation that would allow the dumping of all this worthless paper. Their desperation may overcome even the wrath of their constituents, who are catching on to this scam. However, I'm not convinced that anything they pass will, in fact, stabilize the collapse of this house-of-cards. Many additional horrors are waiting in the wings to work their own hoodoo, including the fiasco of credit default swaps (another swindle class of investment paper), and the debacle of credit card default along with automobile re-pos. Meanwhile nothing prevents the continued slide of house prices back to (and probably beyond) parity with incomes -- not to mention the gathering losses of incomes (i.e. jobs) that will wring more solvency out of the American public.
Sept 9, 2008
The Party That Wrecked America
It's official: John McCain and Sarah Palin are up in the latest polls now that the conventions are over. This is a positive development. It will give the Obama-Biden campaign incentive to get serious. It would have been a disaster for Obama-Biden to come out of this past week ahead. It might have prompted them to kick back and be complacent.
McCain-Palin have nowhere to go now but down, and I will tell you exactly how this will happen. They can run away from President Bush, but they can't run away from the Republican Party. The Republicans will be regarded from now on as "the party that wrecked America." Over the weeks ahead, as carnage in the economy and the financial markets ramps up, it will become increasingly clear. It is important that this meme be spread through the internet. I urge all commentators who read this blog to adopt and spread the idea that the Republicans are "the party that wrecked America." It will work because it is the truth. Use it freely. Don't bother attributing it to me. Just spread the word. Get the meme going.
Quote of the day: Mike Morgan on bad debt contagion in the financials:
"This is a virus, with a 100% kill rate. This is a pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen. This is only something that can be fixed after we kill all the players that carry the virus, because the virus only dies when the host is dead. The hosts are the sick financial institutions being run by crooked executives, regulated by incompetent regulators, appointed by blissfully ignorant politicians and at the end of the line is a judicial system that is without power to do anything."
The Political Campaign Mini-Blog
Sept 8
The Party That Wrecked America
It's official now: John McCain and Sarah Palin are up in the latest polls now that the conventions are over. I view this as a positive development. It will give the Obama-Biden campaign incentive to get serious. It would have been a disaster for Obama-Biden to come out of this past week ahead. It might have prompted them to kick back and be complacent.
McCain-Palin have nowhere to go now but down, and I will tell you exactly how this will happen. They can run away from President Bush, but they can't run away from the Republican Party. The Republicans will be regarded from now on as "the party that wrecked America." Over the weeks ahead, as carnage in the economy and the financial markets ramps up, it will become increasingly clear. It is important that this meme be spread through the internet. I urge all commentators who read this blog to adopt and spread the idea that the Republicans are "the party that wrecked America." It will work because it is the truth. Use it freely. Don't bother attributing it to me. Just spread the word. Get the meme going.
Sept 5
The Old War Horse
John McCain, an old hero in a dishonored political party, made his appeal to the nation last night. In contrast to the vicious bombast all around him this week in Minneapolis, it was a pretty low-key, diffuse appeal. Strangest of all was his attempt to dissociate himself from the very party he was pitching his appeal to. The net effect was to lay all the blame for the mismanagement of US affairs on George Bush's doorstep, and hope that the voters don't notice that George W. Bush is not the only person running the US government (or that the Republican Party has been a full partner in the enterprise).
The internal contradictions in McCain's pitch were such that he fell back on the prisoner-of-war narrative as the main reason voters should elect him. It is a powerful narrative of survival, but it was a long time ago in a different campaign called the Vietnam War, and one senses that if he trots it out again, let's say in the upcoming debates, it will start to sound like a sob story.
Both McCain and his stratagists are trying to make the most of a campaign devoid of ideas or an agenda for action by turning it into campaign about feelings and symbols. By a strange paradox, they have succeeded in feminizing their party. The Democrats started doing that in in 1984 with the snivelly Walter Mondale, but they have now gone in the other direction and re-masculinized. My guess is that the voters will notice, including the female voters -- and the times ahead will seem sufficiently scary by November that the old war horse and his old prisoner story, propped up by his Gal Friday veep, will seem inadequate to the new tasks-at-hand compared to the much more credible and straightforward Obama and Biden. That is, unless this nation is so far gone that it actually decides to commit suicide.
One hint of that came in McCain's remarks about former Soviet Georgia (birthplace of Joseph Stalin) -- one of the few parts of his speech where he departed from a fuzz and gauze rhetoric of mere feelings. If there's a case of US imperial over-reach these days, Georgia is exhibit-number-one. It is clearly not in our sphere of influence and provoking Russia over it by meddling there is nothing less than an invitation to commence hostilities. Perhaps that is what war horses do. It seems extremely unwise.
Mostly I'm relieved that the conventions are over. How mortifying to see our countrymen parading around in ridiculous hats, like eight-year-olds, and what is increasingly becoming a Nuremburg-style display of jingo-patriotic symbolism -- fifty-foot high televised flags and such. I shudder to think of what people in other nations think of us when they see us act this way.
Anyway, I think the mainstream media has missed so far the real story-line developing in this election -- the US economy is cratering, and the banking-finance sector is blowing up. Moving into October, the Republican Party will come to be seen as the party that wrecked America. I doubt the old war horse can overcome that.
Sept 4
The Patriot Game - Wednesday
The odious soap opera in Minneapolis gets worse each night, this one like a Sandra Bullock movie produced and directed by the Devil. I tuned in for Rudolf Giuliani's keynote speech, a hyperthyroid exercise in oratorical thuggery, which led directly to the main event, Sarah Palin's acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination.
She quickly proved to be a confident podium performer, but the content and tenor of her remarks conveyed all the petty viciousness and insecurity of the Republican right-wing. As she spoke, the cameras panned around her rapt audience, affording snapshots of the dumbest white people in America, self-congratulatory in their small-town ignorance and brined in a dangerous jingo-patriotism that must make leaders in other nations cringe in amazement at the rhetorical recklessness being served up. Everything about her speech was small-minded, vindictive, smugly sarcastic, and shot through with falsehood (e.g. that the Republicans will "lead America to energy independence"). You wonder how much kool-aid these people have to drink to believe their own bullshit. In fact, watching Ms. Palin's performance, two notions came to mind and lodged there firmly: 1.) That the Republican Party has itself become a vector of terrorism, and 2.) that these are exactly the people I had in mind when I conceived the term "corn-pone Nazis" to describe the worst outcome of an over-stressed society.
In the aftermath, with the whole Palin family bathed in cheering before a giant televised waving flag, the true ethos of this phony spectacle revealed itself: this is the party of losers, and Sarah is their cheerleader. Deep down, Americans feel like losers. Our economy is cratering in an abyss of greed and foolishness. We're exhausting our resources in imperial military adventures. And we're stuck in a car-dependent living arrangement with no future. This bunch doesn't want to face the reality in any of this. They just want to "drill drill drill" so they can keep snowmobiling and rack up more credit card purchases of Chinese-manufactured salad shooters in the WalMart.
Here's an interesting question: if they win the election, will Sarah Palin and her whole family move to Washington when she takes up her duties? What will her husband do there? Who will take care of her "special needs" baby while the mother is learning how to become commander-in-chief of the armed forces and guardian of a nuclear arsenal (plus presiding over the senate)? Will daughter Bristol stay home in Alaska with her teenage husband and their new baby?
Tonight is the climax of this awful spectacle. John McCain gets to explain why the party that wrecked America deserves another term running things in the in the nation's capital.
Sept 3
Pretend-O-Rama in Minneapolis
What a sordid spectacle it was to watch the Republican dignitaries and delegates strain to pretend that John McCain's impulsive Vice-Presidential pick, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, was a great choice, and that the US economy was strong. But as one member of the club explained it, this election is not so much about issues as about feelings. I'll tell you what feeling is expressed overwhelmingly by the Republican script: insecurity. They know they are absolutely full of crap and that a big portion of the electorate is on to them. Hence, all the jingo-patriotism, including their scurrilous motto, "Country First," as if their Democratic opponents were foreign agents. There were moments last night (Tuesday) when the pretending and outright lying got so strenuous, I thought I was at a Pinocchio look-alike contest. These are the people who are locked into defending the mis-investments of the past, in every sense. They will not adapt to the emerging realities of the future, or even entertain the notion that it is necessary. They will also come to be regarded, as this campaign moves into the heart of autumn, and the banks start crashing, as the party that wrecked America. In fact, speaking of feelings, I have a feeling that the Republican party is so morally bankrupt that it might actually explode in factional war after this election, and maybe even blow up altogether. They are the Whigs of our time.
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