Motley Moose – Archive

A few months ago I would not have been aware of the late economist, Hyman Minsky (1919-1996.) His theory, known as the “Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH)” was not a matter of public discussion as we watched our economy go directly into the toilet and the recession grow and get more dismal.

Had I known about Minsky, however, I would have seen this coming in the 1980s when the Reaganites began to dismantle government regulation of banks and the investment markets. FIH says hat stability is inherently unstable.  

Byron Dorgan (Dem. – North Dakota) was on C-Span this morning to discuss the elements of the Senate’s upcoming Credit Card Bill.  I’m not sure what he thinks he can accomplish, but at the very least, he is making us aware that the CC companies are big players in the screwing of the American Economy.

It’s hard for a guy in his sixties who often poohpoohs the kinds of movies that show up for the masses as latent garbage to admit it, but I sat in a theater surrounded by teenagers watching STAR TREK this weekend. My wife wasn’t interested and had work to do at school, so I went alone, which I rarely do.

And I got a kick out of it.

Driving home, I started thinking about the story that was originally developed by Gene Roddenberry when I was in my early twenties and going to Northwestern (where our theatre history studies started with the development of drama in Greek Mythology)  and it has gone through many television and film iterations, each adding or filling out more story parts.

So, two hundred years from now when some theatre history student is perusing mythic drama that draws from the now religious repetition of the relationships of Spock and Kirk, Romulans and Klingons, Earth and the planets where no man has gone before, will that student remember that this was not lost reality which has become part of our culture by belief through repetition?

And will there be atheists who are challenged by the masses because they don’t believe that Spock actually ever existed?

Under The LobsterScope

… which connected Al Qaida with Iraq.

In a McClatchy article:

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

We know now that connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida did not exist.

McClatchy continues:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

And more information is coming out from other sources.

According to the NY Times there was no investigation into the past use of torture techniques:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Perhaps, if this had been looked into, we would have known that waterboarding leads to false confessions.

Under The LobsterScope

Over 10 years ago, Scott Simon and the public tv folk did a documentary on “voluntary simplicity”, living on only what is necessary, avoiding excess consumption, reducing stress and actually becoming “anti-materialistic.” They ran it again on the Documentary Channel this afternoon and it really caught my attention.

Here, in our economic pothole, with a government trying to restore the high debt spending system supported by banks, investment houses, auto manufacturers and most of the world’s producers of necessary and unnecessary products, we are all trying to get by from day to day with jobs disappearing and income tightening up.

Living a more simplified life in West Virginia is where Elly and I started heading before the blowout of the markets. It is somewhat less expensive here and the community has just about everything we need to survive as long as we can keep ma job. Elly’s teaching position is fairly secure (mine, however, never was and is about to end — leaving me back at freelancing in the web market… and fortunately I found my first local client on my initial entry into the market. One more account and I will be better off than I was teaching and have more control of my own time.)

The Farmer’s Market has started again for the season, giving us access to fresh, mostly organic produce tied to the season. We participate in the Town recycling pickup every Tuesday morning (although I don’t know where the plastic goes… hopefully not to landfills where they just add to the mess, but into new products or insulation or fabrics[?]… I saw an ad for men’s suits made of a recycled plastic fabric!) We garden in our back yard, eat what we grow and have very good grocery stores with new organic food departments springing up all over.

Intellectual stimulation comes through Community Theatre (now I’m involved with Full Circle and really enjoying it) and the free Friday night film society.

And we could still simplify our lives some more. The next year will be an interesting experiment.

Under The LobsterScope

Dr. Kutner’s Suicide… America’s Gain

Watching HOUSE (still my number 1 show) last night, I was astounded, along with millions of others, when Dr. Kutner, played by actor Kal Penn, was found dead on his apartment floor, an apparent suicide victim. This was an electric episode (with the night’s medical plot featuring a dying husband and wife… with the husband played very well by…get this… Meatloaf!) and drove me to the HOUSE web site immediately after to find a Memorial Page already set up to the memory of Dr. Kutner.

Why… why did they kill off one of the most popular (and funny) characters on the show? Money? Backstage conflict?

The reason is striking: Kal Penn is going to work at the White House!

After I finished teaching today I had to make a stop at Martin’s Food Store over near Interstate 81 in Hagerstown, MD. This is a brand new facility, which is one of the reasons I’ve started going there. It’s clean, well maintained, has great employees who seem to have been trained very well… and it actually makes grocery shopping fun.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a very BIG store… I get a lot of exercise just wandering the aisles. It has a nice organic food department, its fresh fruits and veggies are top notch and it has a wonderful meat department, too.

Today I tried their “Easy Shop” program – which strongly emphasizes the trust between store and customer. When I check in by running my Martin’s Bonus Card in front of a scanner. Then I am issued a handheld device that I use to read the labels on products as I shop and I take a bunch of bags to put in my cart  –   I bag things as I buy them. The handheld device keeps track of what I bought, shows me how much I save with my Martin’s Bonus Card and gives me the option to put things back if I find better deals on other items.

So with little argument and a 300-plus majority, Congress yesterday voted to tax bonuses given by companies (read “A.I.G.”) funded under TARP at 90%, thus recovering the multi-million dollar awards to anyone in these companies earning over half a million bucks in regular income. The fact that this was targeted at TARP recipients in general was an attempt to generalize the law… and not make it, as it clearly is, a focused punishment of a particular company.

Essentially, this is what is referred to as a Writ or Bill of Attainder, and which is specifically banned in the Constitution.

A bill of Attainder is legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial. Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 specifically states: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed.”

Robert Reich posted the best commentary on the AIG scandal… and this REALLY is a scandal!… and I agree with him 100%. Here it is in total:

The real scandal of AIG isn’t just that American taxpayers have so far committed $170 billion to the giant insurer because it is thought to be too big to fail — the most money ever funneled to a single company by a government since the dawn of capitalism — nor even that AIG’s notoriously failing executives, at the very unit responsible for the catastrophic credit-default swaps at the very center of the debacle — are planning to give themselves $100 million in bonuses. It’s that even at this late date, even in a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently, Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money.

Norm Coleman has had several vote quests struck down by the Minnesota Second District Court, and Al Franken told a conference of Democratic Senators today that he can see a “light at the end of the tunnel.” I hope that means Al will be awarded certification on his seat by the Minnesota Court very soon. The Democrats need his vote to fight off the filibuster strength of the Republicans in the Senate.

In order to get a real sense of what’s happening, I spent time reading .pdf files at the Minnesota Second District Court web site this afternoon, and, going back a couple of weeks, it’s clear that Norm Coleman is  following every failed approach with a newer one… what he is doing is stalling and, I expect, it is stalling at the instruction of the Republican National Committee.