Marriage Is So Gay

For the life of me I can't understand why anyone cares if the government recognizes the union of consenting adults and calls it marriage.  Why anyone feels they need the stamp of approval of the state in order to ratify the love they have in their hearts for another grants the state more authority over matters of devotion and commitment than any government ought to have over its people. If anyone of a particular religious sect doesn't want to recognize some of these marriages between people, then that is surely their right. No one is suggesting that gay marriage be mandated by any religion.  Demanding that their dogma be imposed on anyone not willingly a part of their sect though? Absolutely not. And claiming that the state ought to abide by religious strictures because of a false notion that the state exists because of that sect's dogma? False on its face.

The United States is NOT a Christian nation.  

It is a nation with a lot of Christians in it.

If the state is to allow an adult to declare their commitment to another adult and grant certain rights in property and entitlement benefits with that declaration, then any restriction of that right which refuses to recognize any declaration by any set of consenting adults is discrimination on its face just as surely as interracial marriage bans used to be discriminatory.

If you happen to be offended by that concept, so what? You have no right against being offended.  The rest of the population need not lower itself to your standards because you're such a sensitive soul so easily made queasy by two men kissing?  Grow a pair, huh?

Caveat Emptor in Extremis

This is, of course, a generalization, but until about 1980 or so, big business culture in the United States operated under the presumption that the purpose of the business was to make money by providing a quality product or service.  If that product or service was efficiently provided at a reasonable price together with an appropriate level of quality, sales would grow and profits generated.  Since about 1980 the culture changed so that the purpose of business became simply to generate profit as quickly and grandly as possible, by any means available. Manufacturing the product, or providing the service was just a step along the way, the only factor being to do it cheaply - a fetish of efficiency.  The result was a large sector of the economy dedicated to what basically became a smash and grab business model more suited to invading hordes of locusts picking the entire landscape clean before the exterminator could do a thing about it.  The approach was facilitated by a governing structure featuring inadequate regulations which were inadequately enforced.

The finance industry is the worst offender, having successfully worked to remove nearly every semblance of distinction between low-risk reliable investing, traditionally the place for middle class savers, pension funds and the like; and high-risk investing, formerly the province of the already wealthy and the venture capitalists or the world.  Hard to believe that it seems a good idea to will these characters back into being, but that's pretty much what we've come to:

Mitt's Experience, or Lack of It

Let me be clear that when the Democratic primary season began in 2007, I was a supporter of Bill Richardson, a guy who had served with distinction at every level of American government. The guy is a genuine public servant.  I never cared for Hillary as I saw her as an extreme corporatist like her husband, of whom I also was never much of a fan for the the same reason.  That said, the GOP provided no alternatives that I could live with as the party had destroyed McCain Version 2000.  The most serious legitimate critique of Barack Obama when he was a candidate in 2008 was that he lacked substantial experience in elective office, and what experience he did have was not especially noteworthy.  It was hard to argue against those facts so I wasn't enthusiastic.  But it eventually became clear that he would be the nominee so, reluctantly at first, I supported him, and then enthusiastically, after reading The Audacity of Hope.  In that book, he showed me he had the historical background to understand where we've come from as a nation, how we got to where we are in many areas of public policy, where we had to go, and how to get there.  In the absence of genuine experience, it's sometimes possible to acquire a form of experience from the right sort of learning and this was the best available. Regardless, no candidate is prepared for the Presidency so it's a matter of considering weaknesses that can be overcome, allowing strengths to come forward.

That said, Mitt Romney is the most inexperienced politician to run as a major party presidential nominee since Adlai  Stevenson lost to Ike in 1952 (well I guess except for Ike himself who'd held no elective office at all. Of course, he wasn't exactly a run of the mill politician, having managed and won World War II and all.). Mitt was a one-term Republican governor in the most Democratic state in the nation where that office is very weak. The legislature really runs the show there. Besides that he worked at Bain as a corporate raider and redeveloper at the higher levels of the American business world. That's it. He was raised as a stereotypical son of a rich guy. George Romney came from not much to make something of himself and eventually ran AMC (creator of The Pacer automobile as well as my first car, the AMC Matador Station Wagon, 1973 for me) then became the Republican governor of Michigan (where the trees are the right height) with a stellar reputation as a genuinely compassionate moderate in an era when such politicians were in abundance. George might have had a good shot at the GOP presidential nomination in 1968 had he not been honest about why he changed his initial stance in favor of the US involvement in the Vietnam War ("I was brainwashed by the generals"). Honesty doesn't get you far in American politics.

Mitt has little of his father's experience and has shown no awareness of any other experience outside of that of exactly what he is: a rich guy who grew up as a rich kid. The business experience he claims is his main (sole?) qualification for office is very limited. High end and successful for sure, but limited. He might understand an oil company, but he doesn't know a thing about running a gas station.

So when applying the same standard from Obama '08 to Romney '12 (again, not normal in US politics), the critique is precisely the same, perhaps worse for Romney.  He ain't got the chops.

Econ 201: I Think I'm Starting To Get It

My economic education has proceeded apace these years since the housing market collapsed where I live in Florida in 2005 (well before everywhere else) and then the full economic collapse in 2008. I understood what the banks were doing regarding the mortgage bubble while it was happening, since that's the business I'm in, but it's taken me some time to wrap my head around some of the policy moves made since the collapse. But I had an epiphany the other day which, if I'm correct, may go a long way to explaining why the bailout and the ongoing Quantitative Easing (QE) measures (a fancy way of saying the Fed has printed a LOT of money) have been rigged the way that they were rigged.

The Fed has the task of maintaining control over the US banking system, keeping it solvent and stable, while balancing inflation and employment rates. This I learned long ago but understanding how it works in a time of extreme, almost catastrophic crisis, was new on me, as I guess it's been for pretty much everyone, including the folks in charge of the system, the Bernanke, the Timmy, et al.

Basically what has been done since the crisis began is pretty simple: throw lots and lots of cash at the problems. The problems have been caused almost exclusively by insanely abusive banking practices that utterly confounded the purposes for a banking system. But that's another discussion which has been oft-discussed. Let me just get to my epiphany.

So lots of money has been given to the banks, essentially free of charge -- no short-term interest rates for practical purposes. That means ANYthing the banks did with that money would be profitable as long as it didn't become a loss (like all of those criminally fraudulent mortgages they gave to borrowers). Of course, the banks were and are carrying enormous losses for the foreseeable future because of the mortgage mess. If the totality of the losses were tallied, it's pretty well certain that most if not all of the biggest banks in the country would collapse immediately. But with a massive infusion of cash, a lot of that damage can be masked. As long as that cash stays on hand, it remains an asset rather than as a liability. In other words, if the money isn't loaned out, then it stays in the positive column of the bank balance sheet. Additionally, if all that money were loaned out, another bubble could be triggered as people start buying stuff with it. THAT could (and because of the gigantic sums of fresh cash printed up) probably would also trigger some pretty massive inflation, devaluing the dollar overnight.

Of course, we've heard a lot of noise about hyperinflation because of all the money printing, and we've also heard a lot of noise about how the banks are sitting on the money instead of loaning it out to the public. And often, it's been portrayed as an oops that strings weren't attached to the bailouts and QE requiring that the money be loaned out to the public. But my epiphany is that it wasn't a mistake at all. It was intentional from the start.

Free money to bad banks prevents their collapse and keep them profitable, thereby meeting the first major requirement that the Fed has. Allowing them to hold onto the money contributes to their stability and prevents inflation even though so much more cash is theoretically out there. But it's all fake because it isn't out there at all -- it's completely locked up, hoarded, on banking balance sheets as unreachable as the gold in Fort Knox. So inflation is kept at bay, fulfilling another of the Fed's obligations. Finally, nominal stability in finance has allowed the economy in general to more or less stabilize as well and perhaps slowly start to creep into something that can be described as a recovery even though unemployment, the final obligation of the Fed, remains well over 8%. The argument here is that the monetary policies of the government and the Fed prevented unemployment from being much much worse. While that may be true, had it not been for the irresponsible Fed policies through the 90s and especially the early aughts, together with the longterm and successful efforts of every congress and administration since late Carter to chip away at the regulatory foundation of post-Depression Era finance, the madness that caused the crisis would never have happened.

There's no oops here. The stability of the banks is false but will stay as is unless another outside crisis knocks them over. A European crisis, major war, major oil shock, or some other like big event could do the trick. We are still living in a house of cards and there's no telling if or when an ill wind will rise on the horizon.

W(h)ither the GOP?

For those who tuned in to Progressive Blend Radio expecting to hear me lead the interview of William Rivers Pitt of Truthout.org, things didn't go quite as planned. I had a major problem getting a decent connection to the station either via Skype or regular phone line so the guys in the studio had to come to the rescue, and rescue they did. So go ahead and get the podcast if you didn't tune in live. Pitt gave us some fascinating insights into his world of political journalism as well as a peak inside the inner world of a presidential campaign from his time as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich in 2008. We look forward to having him on again soon, maybe even with me being able to participate.

That said, the other main topic of the interview was the apparent desire of the Republican Party to disconnect itself from the vast majority of women voters in this country. It turns out the uproar a few weeks back over the Komen Foundation's announcement that it was dropping its funding to Planned Parenthood was just a peashooter hit to the bomb that was about to drop. Without getting to the details which are readily available, the GOP, through its currently surging presidential nomination candidate, Rick Santorum, seemed intent on raising the issue of women's contraception to one of major import. Deriving from health insurance issues involving the Catholic Church, to which Santorum is a strict adherent, the GOP objected to any government support of any form of birth control (while at the same time, the GOP in Virginia was pushing a state bill which would require women considering abortions to have an invasive internal ultrasound exam prior to the procedure-an exam which, if not approved by the woman but performed anyway, meets with precision the definition of rape-in this case state ordered rape).

Darrel Issa (R-California), initiated a set of hearings which led to the viral posting of the already well-known picture above, and then refused the request of any women to testify at the hearing. That it was all men discussing women's health was obvious and ridiculous enough. But what I finally realized while listening to the discussion on Progressive Blend was that they weren't just a bunch of men, they were a bunch of men representing assorted aspects of the nation's formal religious sects. They were leaders of institutions of society; institutions whose job it is to tell their followers how to live their lives.

It became clear to me that the greatest difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans, for all their bluster about rugged individualism and the desire to preserve their liberty against government infringement, have no problem at all submitting themselves to other institutions quite easily. Institutions which, in most cases individuals have no philosophical control or influence over once they submit to it. They have made it clear that religious institutions, giant corporate enterprises, and the military, should be able to function without any interference from government (ignore for the moment that the military is part of the government as the folks I'm describing consider the military as separate from any notion in their heads from civilian government).

On the other hand, these grand supporters of liberty reject at every turn any expression of genuine individuality or independent thinking wherever it should happen to pop up, especially if it happens in a person's private life.

So here we have another of the many ironic hypocrisies of today's Grand Old Party. They do not actually appreciate the individual behavior of anyone that actually demonstrates any individuality, and they don't have any interest or respect for any institution that they actually have any control over, unless they happen to control it. In that case they demand that everyone respect it the same way that they do or be tarred as a sinner, one not a member of the other main institution they respect but have no control over: the Church; or as the functional equivalent of a foreign target of the other institutions that they respect but do not control: international corporations or the military.

The conclusion to be drawn here is rather shocking I think. The operating mindset of the functional wing of today's Republican Party is not just in opposition to the Democratic Party. It is, in a very real sense, completely against every principle they claim to champion. They seek to take this country to a place nowhere near any conception it was ever thought to represent, but instead, straight back to precisely what it was that it rebelled against in the first place: a unitary nation, run dynastically by privileged families who hold most of the wealth and most of the power. Today's Republican Party truly is a COUNTER-revolutionary movement by genuine conservatives as the term was understood BEFORE the American revolution. They wish to overturn a LIBERAL revolution in the sense that it liberated the people from the restrictions of institutions over which they had no authority.

As an aside, it is also testament to either the incompetence or the complicity of the Democratic Party that they can't or don't get the message across strongly enough regarding the true nature of the conservative movement. With little effort, the Democrats should be able to put the Republicans so far out of the race for any place in the government that they would be reduced to little more than an entertaining afterthought to the daily management of the country. But instead of the Republicans being just another little reality series with lousy ratings, they are allowed to step ever closer to gaining the trust and viewership to run this country right out of existence and back to the metaphorical teat of an old European Empire. Yet they accuse the Democrats of trying to imitate Europe. Irony becomes farce becomes tragedy.

Gravitar Interviews William Rivers Pitt Live On PBR Tonight

William Rivers Pitt is the editor and columnist for the frontline Progressive news site truthout.org. He just celebrated ten years writing there and tonight I'll be interviewing him on air on Progressive Blend Radio live, together with DJ Downtown and Eddie Herradura. The More Me Show starts at 5PM EST and the interview is at 8 or 8:30. Listen to us live or look for the podcasts which will be posted within a day or two after. You can follow Progressive Blend Radio at the station website or through their site at Facebook. Both places host a Ustream feed and chatrooms when the show is on air. Listen in, join in, tell your friends, enjoy!!

Gravitar Speaks!!! Live on Progressive Blend Radio, Jan 3, 2012, 9PM EST

That's right folks, I'm coming out of hiding to appear on the round table for Progressive Blend Radio's election year special, Stupor Tuesday. I'll be among the luminaries discussing the results of the Iowa caucuses, what they mean, what they don't mean, and where things go from here.

You can join in to but to do so, you need to tune in live starting at 9PM EST to http://pbradio.net. Hope to chat with you or see or read your feedback somewhere.

You can seek me out on Facebook by going here: Gravitar Profundus: The Mighty Liberal.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!!

Why Occupy Wall Street (or any other street)?

Below is a response I wrote to a Facebook friend about an article she wrote yesterday explaining why, despite being a very intense liberal and rabid supporter of President Obama, she feels almost completely disconnected from the Occupy Wall Street and related protests springing up across the country. And so it goes...

Interesting read, Erin. I get where you're coming from but I have to say that I think you are exhibiting the same sort of attitude towards the OWSers that I've seen you decry against folks (like me) who are avowed liberals but have become utterly fed up with Obama and his way of attending to his job.

This is indeed an entry level protest for a lot of those folks and a fair number of them couldn't explain with any clarity what it is precisely they're protesting and there are also a whole bunch (which is typical of any liberal gathering of issues) who only have their own discrete issue in mind regardless of the larger purpose for being there. Nothing unusual about that.

That said, it seems to me that the true larger purpose, if really there is one, is one so mundane that it IS exotic: enforce the goddamn law! Yesterday I linked a blog by Matt Tabbi where he explained for the umpteenth time what happened in the banking/mortgage/investment industry. I also happen to BE in the RE business as a title lawyer in South Florida so I saw this garbage happening pretty much first hand. You can blame people all you want for applying for loans they had no business getting, but you can only blame the mortgage brokers and the lenders themselves for actually GIVING these loans to people. It was out and out fraud from beginning to end with every bait and switch and strongarm scare tactic you can imagine and I don't blame customers for not knowing their nice broker or banker was selling them shit without a care. Anyone can apply for a loan. But only the genuinely qualified should be APPROVED for one. And that authority is fully with the brokers and lenders.

It's the 1% (maybe a slightly higher %age) who preyed upon the rest, who were told they deserved a place in an ownership society. A degree of foolish gullibility can be applied to the masses on this, but the great great direct, knowing, and intentional (important conditions to be met in fraud) blame can be laid at the feet of the lenders, who then did it again in all manner of ways when they sold these loans up the ladder, increasing the risk of loss countless times and which we haven't yet seen the end of by a long shot.

The repealed regulations and government exhortations may have created the incentive to get into the business the way they did, making it technically legal to OFFER a product, but the accounting standards and fraud laws were and are still on the books.

Apply the law as it is. That's all I ask. And then OWS has meaning. Obama makes a lot of noise saying that it's up to Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department Of Justice to decide what to prosecute. He chooses pot dispensaries in California instead of the criminals at the commercial and investment banks. WHY?? THAT is why my support for the administration is as thin as it is. THAT is why our economy is still in the toilet. The nation that made it big by enforcing the rule of law, doesn't do it anymore. Hence there is no confidence in the world of dealmaking even though the dollar remains strong relative to the rest of the moribund world. The money boys will keep their money here but they won't use it because they can't rely on the system and its enforcement mechanisms to keep everyone honest and the economy stable.

Enforce the goddamn law Mr. Chief Executive. That's your JOB. If he won't do it I'd love to find someone who will. But no one seems interested. That means we're done doesn't it?

I look forward to your further thoughts and appreciate your work and intensity. I wish I had more time to do this myself.

peace
GP

The Fix Is Nearly In And You Will Be Left Broke

Earlier today I read this piece in the AOL/Huffington Post and immediately heaved a sigh of resignation. The article summarizes a Fed review panel regarding improper foreclosures and concludes that there haven’t been any. Let me repeat that: the Fed says there have been no improper foreclosures. Anywhere. Under any circumstances. To say that this is mind-boggling to me underestimates the notion of mind-bogglement by orders of magnitude conceivable only through the measurements of cosmology.

According to the report, a foreclosure is justified simply if a borrower has failed to make their payments and has gone into default. Period. No consideration is given whatsoever about who then has the right to foreclose on the property in question despite the fact that rightful possession of property is pretty much fundamental to the existence of the country and most of the developed world.

Among the basic precepts of the founding of the United States was that anyone (well except people of African heritage and most women at first) could own their own property, their own land and use it to their own benefit. The free flow of property was a relatively new thing in the western world and it is among the major reasons that the notion of liberty entered the minds of colonists and early Americans. But with the free flow of property, came a need to keep track of who owned what in order for the entire process of property transfer to remain stable and reliable. Knowing who has a right to a piece of land, to use it, enter upon it, do work on top of or under it, build something on it, live on it, sell something on it, get a loan using it as collateral, and sell it, among many other things, is the hallmark of the United States and the entire system of American individualism. The “American Dream” is to own your own home.

The idea that it doesn’t matter who can take that home away when payments go late completely overturns the whole system. From at least 2002-2008 (and probably before if you follow the stories about MERS), the great majority of the American banking system has routinely failed to maintain records of who owns what when it comes to real estate in this country. They took the low risk, low yield, genuinely conservative notion of compound interest and superheated it into the high risk, high yield notion of securitized investments. And they did so without the permission of the people who were put at greatest risk: the American homeowner.

Without detailing it here, a great number of home loans, especially the ones that weren’t standard 30-year fixed interest rate loans, did not meet proper guidelines for offering such loans. They then got sold off to investment agencies under false pretenses and with false ratings regarding the quality of the loans. And then got split up again with more false ratings. And at nearly every point along the way, nothing ever got filed to state who it was that bought these loans and therefore had a right to collect them, or go after the collateral if they weren’t paid. What that creates in law is a problem of standing. The question is: do you have a right to say I owe you money? If so, prove it to me and I’ll pay you otherwise get lost. Without proper documentation, it’s hard to prove who owes what to whom. And there are rules and deadlines for filing some of this paperwork. For most people who own a home, it is their most important possession so it should be taken equally seriously by the entity that can collect money on or claim to take away that possession. If someone is going to be thrown out in the street, then a court better be damn sure the people doing it have a right to do so. But so far, that isn’t happening, and this Fed report suggests that the banks are working towards getting away with it (which shouldn’t be surprising).

The line that states that negotiations may be underway to settle the matter for $30 billion effectively means that the banks will get an oops (on top of all the other ones they already got), and then they are off the hook for failing to keep track of everything. For creating a Gordian Knot of the entire country's real estate market it is entirely likely that they will actually get paid multiple times for their transgressions for what will amount to a small fee (the $30b). They got reimbursed through TARP. They got paid one hundred cents on the dollar via claims run through AIG (because of TARP). And they will now get possession of the original asset and get to sell it again, often for cash, and otherwise with loans that they give and earn interest on again, or possibly even use to start the whole friggin’ process of fraud all over again!!!

If this happens, if the banking system gets a mulligan for a decade of thievery, then the United States as we have known it has truly ended. The rule of law will be a farce and there will no longer be any reason to rely on anything unless you happen to be a member of the 1% club. The 1%ers are the ones whose total wealth equals most of the rest of the 99% combined. The Roman Republic will be the Roman Empire and the Goths will be sniping at the edges most egregiously.

Sarah Palin: The Dangerous Moron, Shouldn't Reload, She Should Rebrand

Well really, she should just go away and enjoy her recently made millions and spend the rest of her days signing moose pelts for curious tourists dropping by to meet the curiosity from the inconveniently far north. But she's too egomaniacal to do that.

Sarah Palin has a following which is religious in its fervor and willfully ignorant in its understanding of the wider world and how it works. The biggest problem, of a size they cannot comprehend, is that the scale of the nation, economy, and world, and it's amazing complexity are simply beyond the scope of their reasoning. This is not to say that her followers are too dumb to manage their own lives and those of their families and immediate communities, but at a certain point, things get so abstractly beyond their personal experience that they, as they so often say about others, "don't get it." The problem of understanding scale is certainly not limited to Palin's followers, it pretty much hounds most regular people because absent experience with scale and complexity, the world can become a very abstract place very quickly.

Awareness and context are available more now than ever before because of the omnipresence of information through the internet and other explosively expanding media sources, but until porn is displaced as the number one internet activity, the use of that information will remain restricted. We are indeed in the midst of an information revolution which hasn't been seen in human history since the invention of the movable type printing press, but we're real early in the process so it will still be quite a while, a couple generations by my reckoning, before kids brought up in it from the start will be used to using it for purposes beyond acquisition of the next orgasm.

But I digress...

For once, Sarah Palin was made a patsy unfairly by mainstream and definitely by the left punditocracy for the massacre in Arizona a few weeks back and true to form she shot back at her critics with an even more incendiary blast that made her a headline again for another week. Her "blood libel" reference confirmed the religious tone of her communications to her followers. It was a foolish metaphor to use but right in line with her mode of operation. She is a publicity hound, not a leader and this incident demonstrated that reality as starkly as anything else she's done since being brought thoughtlessly onto the national scene following a John McCain hissy fit over not getting his own VP running mate choice, douchebag Joe Lieberman.

If she was a leader, she would have responded to her accusers with a message that upbraided them for their jumping to false conclusions, but recognizing that there was, nevertheless, a point about nasty, non-substance language in political campaigns and its marketing, and that she would be an example to others by refraining from it going forward. She could have rebranded herself into a genuine force of substance in American politics. She then could have been justified in calling out others from all points of the political spectrum for their bad language and actually led us into discussions over the genuine difficult issues of the day and the assorted ways they can be addressed. But she didn't. This, because Sarah Palin is STILL a dangerous moron and has too many people following her for no good reason and her continued presence in our national political scene remains a problem for whatever the future holds.

This is not a 1st Amendment issue. Of course a politician can say whatever s/he wants in furtherance of whatever it is they are trying to further. This is about being a responsible adult in the world. There are appropriate and inappropriate ways to communicate to people. Sarah Palin communicates like a petulant child or an adolescent artist interested only in shocking and getting publicity for its own sake, not for contributing anything useful to the human experience. She doesn't need to reload. She needs to rebrand or retire.