There Is No Plan

illegal shmillegal

Conveniently put aside most probably by a pact between Obama and McCain, the I-word was not uttered once during the election campaign. I mean pigs wearing lipstick got about ten thousand times the airtime. John McCain walked away from the sensible immigration reform he championed for fear of losing the base that he’d been so studiously courting. And Obama, as a Democrat saw it as a net vote loser, especially in states like New Mexico and Colorado which were a firewall for his electoral strategy.

And yet it was only a few months ago, that the news was full of stories about marches in Los Angeles, and border fences being built, and extremely irate sheriffs in Mariposa County, Arizona. There was talk of vigilantes and ‘minutemen’, posses to round up the illegals, and nightmarish tales of containers turned coffins. The news cycle is a funny thing. Immigration was just dropped like a hot tamale. Read the rest of this entry »

getting kinda hot in here

Houston, and everywhere else in the nation, we have a problem.

In the latest “Direction of Country” Gallup tracking poll, 87% of respondents said we were on the wrong track.

In another recent Gallup poll about the level of environmental concern, 61% said we should be doing more on global warming, and 68% continue to think we should act even if other countries, like China, do less.

Driving less would be one way to improve matters. And yet the recent news from the US Department of Transportation estimates that Americans will drive nearly 80 billion fewer miles in 2008 than we did in 2007 is greeted as a sign the country is on the wrong track, not the right track. Read the rest of this entry »

america the proud

The Auto Industry defines America. There is hardly a major part of recent American history that isn’t profoundly influenced by cars, socially, economically, and politically. As the nation debates the future of its manufacturing heart and soul, it’s worth looking back a few decades in the shape of a list of manufacturers and their slogans or ‘taglines’. It wasn’t always the “Big Three”.

The list speaks for itself about the how much the nation’s vibrant multi-faceted, innovative car industry has been laid low in the past few decades.

The name of each manufacturer (and there are many) is followed by their slogan. Full of pathos, a vigorous, often naive optimism,  and an odd polite dignity, they tell of a time when American manufacturing ruled the world. Some of the lines are truly priceless. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

Tragedy on Black Friday morning.

The 34-year-old employee, who was not identified, was knocked down by a crowd that broke down the doors of the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y., and surged into the store. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 6 a.m.

Who’s responsible for this?

During the election campaign, Palin and McCain were chastised for not stopping people in their crowds from crying racial epithets and worse at Obama. That’s nothing compared to Black Friday. At least nobody got hurt.

But it’s just fine for Walmart, Target, and all the other Crap pushers to prime the crap junkie mob with massive come-ons to buy more cheap stuff. The ads go out, the mob get up at 2 a.m, arrive at the locked doors at the same time, the group mentality gathers pace, adrenaline is running high, there’s a push from the back of the crowd, the mob surges. The doors give way. Everyone rushes in and some poor employee in the wrong place gets trampled to death. Read the rest of this entry »

it ain't easy to kick the habit

You gotta love economists. In way more complicated language than is necessary, they tell us the party’s over for our free spending ways. It’s time to save. We leveraged ourselves up to the eyeballs for a flat screen TV. It’s time to save. We bet the housing market would go up forever and we were wrong. It’s time to save. We’re all broke. We’re worried about our jobs, we’re upside-down on our houses, our retirement plans are in tatters. Winter’s coming and the recession’s on. The economists tell us it’s time to save.

Of course, that makes fabulous sense economically, but it doesn’t add up spiritually. Did the consumer boom of the last twenty-five years truly change us? I think so. I think it’s in our blood. I think it’s the reason we’re more obese than ever and only as green as is fashionable. Can we go back to our parents’ thrifty ways, when polyester was where it was at, and Wham! a really big deal. I think not. Read the rest of this entry »

you're getting sleepy...

The Dow Jones Industrials are widely regarded as a pretty poor indicator of where the overall equity markets stand, let alone the real economy. As one hedge fund manager suggested, “equity markets are a zit next to the bond markets.” And let’s not even mention the vast trillions in the derivative markets which have damaged the global economy so profoundly.

And yet at the end of every radio newscast, on every Yahoo home page, on the ticker on every cable network, thereis the DJI, it’s not so shiny brand dancing around at the whim of some very silly people playing monopoly with other people’s money. It’s going up, it’s going down, it’s barely moved. Blah, blah, blah.

The truth is we’re worshipping a zit. Read the rest of this entry »

eahhh. i've seen better.

So what exactly is Obama thinking with his cabinet picks?

Everyone from Joe Lieberman to Pat Buchanan is delighted with Obama’s top job choices. Joe says they’re “perfect”, which suggests Obama is doing something very, very wrong. Pundits are torn. Is Obama a closet centrist who sold us a bill of goods with all that ‘change’ stuff? Or is he a progressive who’s going to browbeat all his experienced Clintonians into doing his bidding.

My guess is the answer is neither. Obama said today that the ‘change’ is going to come from his desk and filter downwards, but that’s easier said than done. If Obama truly is a progressive (and he really needs to be to define this historical economic moment), a more likely outcome is that the cabinet could quickly descend into ideological squabbling as the President talks up real change, and the cabinet talk up real caution. Obama is known as a consensus builder. If the cabinet is moderate, the consensus will be moderate, and real ‘change’, well that will have to wait.

It would certainly help the President’s ‘change scenario’ that at least one of his major cabinet picks was someone, well, new. But there isn’t really one guy in the top team that offers a totally new perspective on anything at all. So far moderation and predictability has been the order of the day, except in the case of HRC for State, which strikes me more as either fear or plain stupidity.

Time will tell, of course. But there’s one word that definitely wouldn’t be used to describe the new cabinet.

And that’s transformative.

has china really changed that much?

Sometimes it takes an aging rock band to make a great point. Take Guns n’ Roses new album, its first for seventeen years. The band’s insightful leader created a fabulous oxymoron, bringing together the words “Chinese” and “Democracy” for it’s title. Now that’s comedy.

The Chinese authorities did what they always do in these situations and censored everything about the album they could get away with at the same time as lashing out at the band for its insulting stance on the People’s Republic. How dare some old rock stars attack China’s non-democracy?

But does the vast plastic toy police state protesteth just a little too much? The irony seems completely lost on most of the world’s leaders, who are busy toadying to the Chinese to keep them buying the mountain of freshly issued Western debt. The British have backtracked on their decades-long fudge about Chinese control of Tibet to appease Beijing, and America, which has been pushing democracy like Avon pushes makeup is simply too scared to issue any kind of statement about censorship or human rights abuses in China. We allowed them into the World Trade Organization even though they brazenly broke its rules before and after they joined. Slowly but surely, we seem to be handing China superpower status on a plate. Another word for it is appeasement. And just like back in Munich in 1938, it strikes me as a very bad idea. Read the rest of this entry »