Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

Wall Street responds to the criticism

Apparently this e-mail went around Wall Street a while ago, but I've only discovered it now. Here is a longer version.

 

We are traders, it’s our job to make money. Whether it is a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it was profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 12,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I have never heard of anyone going to Gamblers anonymous because they won too much in Vegas. Well now that the market crapped out, the government and the average Joes are looking for a scapegoat to blame. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well here we are.

Go ahead and take us down, cause you are only going to hurt yourselves. What is going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the street anymore? Guess what, we are going to take yours. We get up at 5am and go out after work till 10pm. We are used to not getting up to piss when we have a position. We don’t take and hour lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates we are going to devour them.

For years teachers and unionize labor has had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We are going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are sooooo underpaid for building the youth of America. Say good bye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for 5k extra a summer, thank you very much. So now that we are going to be making 85k a year without upside, Joe main street is going to have his revenge right? Wrong.

Guess what, we are going to stop buying the new 65k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35% tip at our business dinners anymore, no more free rides on our backs. We are going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars in with a garden hose on our drive ways. Our money was your money, cause we spent it. Difference is you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and Democratic National Committee might get there way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but its really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom. We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than them, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama is making Joe Main street our food supply will they?

 

Class war goes both ways? Doh!

Why the landslide?

 

Gallup warns

Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters in Gallup weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP's largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup's history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress.

New York Times frets

In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.

Michael Barone explains

But, say the Obama Democrats, shouldn't ordinary people -- in particular, shouldn't the blue-collar working class -- be grateful to a government that tries to "spread the wealth" in difficult economic times?

They used to be, the argument would go. In post-World War II America, voters regularly moved toward the Democrats in recession years.

There's a difference, however, that has escaped Obama Democrats but perhaps not ordinary voters.

In recessions caused by oscillations in the business cycle from the 1940s to 1970s, voters were confident that the private-sector economy could support the burden of countercyclical spending on things like unemployment insurance and public works projects.

But it's been a long time since we've had a major business cycle recession. The recession from which we've technically emerged, but which seems to most voters to be lingering on, is something different, the result of a financial crisis.

The very able economists in the incoming Obama administration seem to have ignored the difference between these two kinds of recessions.

Explorations in Oligarchic Progressivism, 1

Inspired by Van Jones' speech at Netroots Nation 2010, the commenters at Fire Dog Lake have some choice words for the direction of the first two years of the Obama administration:

• Like i have said before the Corporations are driving the progressive movement…which means they control the pace of progress.
• Netroots Nation: Fiddling while Rome burns, (or is sold to the highest bidder).
• Remember the selling of the Iraq war & the role the media played in influencing Americans…well the same play is being run to favor the sham of financial reform.
• The ONLY tactics and strategy that were really well executed where those tactics and strategy lining us up like f’king chumps to sell us chumps out to AHIP, Pharma, Goldman, AIG, the Military Industrial Complex.
• Democrats tend to push destructive policies. They don’t pursue with quite the same zeal the placement of specific individual malefactors in government, they take a big-picture approach. They push things like NAFTA, eviscerating Glass-Steagall, subsidizing private-only health insurance, codifying Too Big Too Fail, etc. They don’t necessarily need the individual malefactors, because they rig the overall machine to malfunction.
• They voted for horrible stimulus, HCR, let Bush get away with his war crimes. All those things could have been pursued, but no, we get watered down corporate approved programs.
• Let’s get over it; we thought we elected a “hopey changey” reformer, and instead we got the worst kind of corporatist shill.

Right-Wing flees the monster it created

They cheered as Bush created the creepy-sounding Department of Homeland Security, but they never expected it to fall in the hands of Democrats!  How did that happen? Now the DHS is predictably eyeballing right-wing extremists, who are totally surprised and panicking, burning up the airwaves and filing lawsuits. Partisanship means never having to say sorry. How could these schmoids ever be expected to understand blowback overseas when they can't identify it under their noses?

9 out of 10 software packages support Israel

In its PR campaign to explain its attack on Gaza, Israel's supporters have invented a new tactic in their well-developed “Hasbara” spin activities. Dozens of sock puppet Twitter accounts have been created solely to spam the same repeated talking points into the #gaza tag. Here we see one factoid containing an obvious misspelling get mindlessly copied throughout their network of troll bots.

Nader goes soft on Obama

America exploded with a paroxysm of outrage as wounded Obama followers savaged Nader for expressing hope that he doesn't play Uncle Tom for the corporate interests.  Watch as Fox news feigns offense:

Nader was too kind in suggesting that he's anything but an establishment shill.  Once again, Nader displays critical thinking during a time of mass hysteria.

Peter Kirsanow's Six Fights

Kirsanow says

In many cases, the congressional math may preclude Republicans from little more than voicing principled opposition. But that's not nothing. It's imperative.

Watch for genuine opportunities to work together for the betterment of the country. But on every other occasion fight. Fight every attempt to entrench a new entitlement. Fight every attempt to redistribute wealth. Fight every attempt to radicalize the courts. Fight every attempt to weaken our defenses. Fight every attempt to restrict political speech. Fight every attempt to revise history. Fight for what's best about America.

“Weakening our defenses” is a dandy idea, because our military spending is roughly equal to the rest of the world.  But the other six are right on.

The Constitution is not a Suicide Pact

That's why they told us that the irregular nature of the Al Qaeda threat forced us to circumvent Article I Section 8, requiring Congress to issue declarations of war, and allow the President unlimited power to prosecute the war against terror.

However, the founding fathers were indeed confronted by irregular warfare, and established a response in the Constitution. Chuck Baldwin explains

President Bush should have supported Ron Paul's bill, H.R. 3076, the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001. This is the constitutional way to deal with rogue terrorist organizations. This is the way President Thomas Jefferson responded to the Barbary pirates.

According to Congressman Paul, “A letter of marque and reprisal is a constitutional tool specifically designed to give the President the authority to respond with appropriate force to those non-state actors who wage aggression against the United States while limiting his authority to only those responsible for the atrocities of that day. Such a limited authorization is consistent with the doctrine of just war and the practical aim of keeping Americans safe while minimizing the costs in blood and treasure of waging such an operation.”

William Buckley's son blasts Movement

Christopher Buckley writes

I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance....to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

The Elasticity of Legislation

As Iceland goes bankrupt, the IHT explains that

Tension with Britain has flared anew during the current crisis. It centers on hundreds of thousands of accounts that Britons hold in online branches of the Icelandic banks; now they fear they will lose their money, and the British government wants Iceland to pay up. The government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain has used powers granted under anti-terrorism laws to freeze British assets of Landsbanki until the standoff is resolved.

Bankruptcy gets redefined as terrorism when it pleases the Prime Minister, and yet many will still insist that government should be granted extra power during extraordinary crises. Really, why bother?