Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) announced his retirement from Congress today -- he won't be running again next year -- at age 71. This is a huge bummer legislatively, but hopefully he'll turn up on news commentary a lot more, especially as he promising not to become a lobbyist. Consistently the smartest and wittiest guy in the House, Frank was no different today:
[Barney Frank] on the House under Republican rule: “It consists half of people who think like Michele Bachmann and half of people who are afraid of losing a primary to people who think like Michele Bachmann and that leaves very little room to work things out.”
Goodbye to Ken Russell, legendary British film director known for his combination or erudition and over-the-top visuals. Classics include: Women in Love (Oscar for star Glenda Jackson), Altered States, Tommy, The Lair of the White Worm, The Devils. Who can ever forget Tina Turner as the Acid Queen?
Goodbye to pre-IPO Facebook, between April and June 2012. The stock options will never mean the same thing again, the innocence lost, time for quarterly analyst calls and big annual reports. Guaranteed to have more investors than anyone imagines.
I'm not sure how this slipped under the radar, but on Tuesday, the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound cleared its final hurdle -- the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) approved a Construction and Operations Plan (COP) submitted by Cape Wind Associates back in October of 2010.
What is all means:
The project consists of 130, 3.6 megawatt wind turbine generators covering approximately 25 square miles in federal waters offshore Massachusetts with the maximum capacity to produce about 468 megawatts. The average expected production from the wind facility could provide about 75 percent of the electricity demand for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. At average expected production, Cape Wind could produce enough energy to power more than 200,000 homes in Massachusetts.
This Rolling Stone article by the incomparable Matt Taibbi, Looting Main Street, tells of how big banks like JP Morgan are acting like Tony Soprano in driving places like Jefferson Country, Alabama (the case Taibbi chronicles) to massive debt on top of debt, well beyond the actual cost of any infrastructure improvements needed:
...In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.
And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
It's an amazing article, which also shows you what happened to Greece -- now causing massive bankruptcy/bailout pain for the EU, threatening the Euro itself:
Now if the euro was a company, the Greek division would be closed or sold off. The product line had not lived up to expectations. It was important therefore to protect the core business. Other weaker divisions might have to go too. Now some economists like Paul Krugman, who is an admirer of Europe, opined recently that the problem was that Greece had joined the Euro before it was ready. We are now living out the consequences of a fudge ten years ago.
Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date. ... But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks. ... At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.
At what point do we start using the f-word to describe what these huge "masters of the universe" banks have done? As in, F is for Fraud?
There's a contrast going on between our man in Europe:
And what he's up against with the North Koreans -- what he's able to get from the international community to condemn them is a first test of his worldwide clout.:
Obama slides into the Tiergarten in Berlin like a wind from the West, a breath of clear air, an athlete at the peak of his game, nothing but net.
His speech masterfully wove the post-WWII history of the Berlin airlift, recalling the great feat of America rescuing their so very recent enemy from brutal Soviet blockage, and weaving it in with the challenges we face today for a compelling call to action -- a call for all to renounce apathy and take up leadership again, as only together, reunited, can we make the world we want to live in; the world we want our children to live in.
The 200,000 people who attended, in large part a young German audience, got an event they'll always remember. Without hectoring or scolding, he called up all better angels. He struck a righteous balance between love of America, in essence reintroducing America to Europe by way of his own personal story, and citizenship of the world. The latter, fodder for those within our own American ranks who would seek to destroy us by recidivism, xenophobia and ignorance, is in the grand tradition of both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Not surprisingly, the two best orators to have help that office since Obama was born.
I can't see how this hurts Obama except with the hardened rightwing partisans and the smear merchants. It's been a long time since I've felt this rising feeling about America, deep inside, a true pride in the ideals of this country as embodied by flesh & blood. Obama's message to Berlin today was not to count us out. Not if he had made it there:
To quote an email I sent to a friend earlier today, I'm not sure the MSM wants to acknowledge Obama's awesome coup in Berlin -- they seem to be downplaying. But for any intelligent American the choice of McCain now becomes even costlier, as we've seen in pictures for ourselves all the personal equity Obama has now built with these key Middle East and European leaders. Only a fool would squander that for McCain, who might not even last four full years in office.
So aside from the semiotics of Obama's adventure, aside from the leaders-equity, aside from the sheer guts to take such a risk where one real faux pas overseas could capsize his poll standings, what I like best about the whole trip is that he's very, very seriously preparing to hit the ground running when he takes office. He understands in a way McCain (and Bush) doesn't the magnitude of the job. That's why he has a transition team already gearing up, win or lose.
It's not cynical semiotics, especially as his whole trip is a gamble that it won't turn voters against him for perceived "arrogance". It's that he's actually a responsible adult who knows what it takes to lead.
America, take heed. Protect this one.
I've said before that, no matter his attributes, by the time November 4th rolls around, voting for John McCain (should he still be on the ballot) will feel like voting assisted suicide for America.
I didn't realize that feeling would actually congeal so soon.
Having grown up in the late 20th Century, I've felt that American Exceptionalism myself, and the feeling that it was going to last forever. But now I hear that the 21st Century is all about BRIC -- Brazil, Russia, India, China. Steve Clemons has this:
A widespread view among elite Germans and the non-elite normal types I spoke to is that America is in fast decline -- sort of like Britain after World War II. I think that the impressions foreigners have of this decline is "overshooting reality" as there are many substantive realities about America's ability to deploy force and purpose in the world that remain formidable.
But conversation in some serious circles is turning to what Europe can do to help America stabilize in some position of "lesser global stature." There is also a sense that the nation that is filling much of America's previous geopolitical space is China and that Europe feels tension in its strong alliance with U.S. power in decline and its strategic distance from China clearly ascending.
Just fifteen years before I was born, America had gone over and saved Europe. Now in 2007 we have Europe pitying us?
While this site is nakedly partisan, one of the core reasons, if not the core reason itself, is that the Republican Party has potentially "ruined" America. At home it has undermined the notion of "the common good" and replaced it with "what good for the greedy is good for America"; militarily, for all our death-bringing technology it has laid bare our weaknesses to the world; and overseas it has proven to the world that the most atavistic, exploitative, unevolved American capitalist-imperialists actually do still exist, that they can get control of our most powerful political levers, and that they will kill or allow hundreds of thousands of innocents die to get their way.
Given that last one, why would Europe want to help America, except maybe to make sure we stay in our diminished corner from now on?
It's articles like Clemons' that makes me think the only person who can possibly reverse America's decline, among the current generation of senior U.S. political leadership, is Al Gore.
No one currently running for President comes prepacked with a comparable amount of international respect. No one currently running has shown remotely the amount of vision and translated it into real world action. No one currently running for President showed the level of courage over the decision to go into Iraq that Al Gore did back when the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove war machine was setting the country up like so many country fair rubes.
America in decline. We got the 20th Century, maybe China gets the 21st. It didn't have to be that way.
Ultimately the fault is not only in our leaders. We've gotten morally soft, and I don't mean in the way religious conservatives might espouse. We need to recommit to a Franklin Delano Roosevelt type morality, where we know we're all in it together, we act rationally to help rebuild our nation as a whole, not just those with big capital gains income, we have to change our ways.
Al Gore says that the American political will is a renewable resource. He may just have to drum it up himself, and so far he doesn't look interested.
In any case, the Democratic electoral dominance last November wasn't an end, it was only the very start. The Augean Stables of our government and media still need a good, strong flushing. Before it's too late.
