the SNOB

Palintology

2009-07-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

There are a few themes on which Americans broadly agree, one of which is our general loathing for quitters. While Americans as a rule hate to fail, in social terms it is often treated with a measure of nuance, as a step on the ladder of upward mobility, while the Europeans and Japanese seem to see it more as just desserts for an excessive level of personal ambition. It helps to fail well--c.f. Kerry compared to Gore--but losing, once anyway, does not automatically relegate a player to the afterlife of a coach or commentator.

Because of that, quitting is an especially ignoble thing. It is like being told that the enemy will only aim for your legs, and still cowering in your foxhole when the charge is sounded. One can give the good fight all he's got, and still lose to a stronger foe, but to quit is an entirely personal choice. To compare Palin to Nixon in 1960, Reagan in 1976, or Gore in 2000 is to elide this crucial difference. The more appropriate comparisons at this point are Perot in 1992, or Romney in 2006, or even McCain's suspension-of-campaigning stunt last September.

There is a mitigating factor though, and a curious one it is. If 2008 was the first election to take place in the age of Perez Hilton, Sarah Palin was the first national politician to be treated like LiLo, or perhaps more appropriately, Carrie Prejean. In the 80s, one had to subscribe to the sort of newsletters that advertised in the back of Soldier of Fortune in order to read the sort of wild-eyed rumor and accusations which were daily staples of a plethora of A-list blogs this past cycle. While one might object that this knife cut both ways, let's just call a spade a fucking shovel and call that out for the bullshit that it is.

Sarah Palin endured what surely ranks as some of the most vicious personal slander seen in a presidential election since the days of Jackson and Adams calling each others' wives bastards and bigamists. This unceasing background chatter formed an inner monologue which more than once leaked its way onto mainstream news budgets, where it was presented without the degree of condemnation and refutation accorded to similar emanations from the fever swamps of the Right.

It is not difficult to imagine Palin, after a year of having her family dragged through the mud, doing what many of her soi-disant feminist critics have suggested she do all along--quit playing this man's game and focus on taking care of her children. It is likewise not terribly difficult to imagine a male politician caring sufficiently more about gratification of his own ego to look past its effects on his wife and kids. Palin has proved that many of the feminist critiques of how our society treats ambitious, "uppity" women remain valid, so long as the woman in question can be painted as sufficiently low-status relative to her enlightened critics.

What remains is that Palin almost instantly won the hearts of a segment of the population whose travails and concerns are of diminishing interest to the elites of either party. Where Kerry and Obama and even Bush play-acted and dressed up as hunters, construction workers, or other "salt of the earth" ordinary folk, Sarah didn't need to send an aide to procure a blaze-orange jacket or hardhat.

If the nation has progressed so far that it can no longer accept as a leader a woman who recently worked a fishing boat for pocket money and whose husband spends summers in the oil fields, then perhaps we have lost something essential in the process. At a time when many of our most vaunted professions lie in various degrees of ruin and disrepute, it is hard to imagine Sarah Palin losing that which made her such a novel element to begin with. Her rise, unlikely to begin with, may have a chapter more improbable still to be written.

Honduras WTF?

2009-06-30T10:48:00.001-07:00

I thought Obama's initial equivocation on the Iranian elections and their discontents was at least plausibly grounded in a sort of skeptical realpolitik. We Americans have a pathological tendency to think of the world as divided into "Americans" and "People Who Remind Us of Our Neighbors From Whereverstan Who Are Just Like Us, Really," and this is often reflected by a foreign policy that is one part naivete and one part we-are-so-rich-and-powerful-that-you-have-no-choice-but-to-overlook-our-stupidity. So while I tend to think that a more robust response to the mullahs might have worked out well, I sympathize with those who felt differently.

But I am completely baffled by his reponse to the Honduras crisis, which shares virtually none of the elements that make Iran such a minefield. We have a would-be president-for-life defying the very term limits erected to prevent such a thing, being removed by a military acting in obedience to the country's legislature and supreme court, both of which are at least as democratically legitimate as the Presidency. Not only does Obama not equivocate, he sides with the President who is making a mockery of the rule of law.

Between Iran, Iraq, the financial crisis, and the global warming tax and health care spending bills, I suspect Obama's position on Honduras is 1% Barack and 99% unnamed administration official. Our southern compadres are also justly-famed for military coups, so perhaps he is taking a default position with little regard for the confounding factors on the ground. So heads, he is supporting a Chavez acolyte out of hard-left solidarity, tails he's a blundering ignoramus. Which explanation would you prefer?

Burned by Bernie

2009-06-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

With Bernard Madoff's sentencing we are again being treated to the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments of victims who lost everything to his scam. While Madoff richly deserves to die in prison, I wish the intrepid media would dare to dig a little deeper into what some of these people were thinking. I think it would be instructive--not to generate sympathy for an evil thief--but to remind people that it does not require a genius-level intellect to make sound financial choices.

To be fair, among the 8,000 estimated victims one will find elderly widows and the occasional guileless charity case, but the vast majority of Madoff's investors were sentient adults. "Diversify" is not exactly difficult investment advice, especially to the multi-millionaires who comprised the vast majority of his personal clients. While none of them deserved to lose everything, most were voluntary if unwitting accomplices to their ruin.

Why would a person with several millions of dollars, nearing or past the end of their earning years, not choose to sock away a sizable chunk of that in savings bonds, Treasuries, or other such maximum-safety assets? Greed, enabled by hubris, provides the answer. Greed causes a person to put everything they have in a bucket that pays 10-15% interest rather than splitting it into another bucket that pays 3% or so but truly has no risk. Hubris, to think that you had discovered the fountain of financial youth, allowed people to transform their greed into wisdom. Average schlubs had to invest in the markets where you could lose 30% at any time, but you "knew people" and so could safely rack up better returns year after year.

This is all true even if we elide a point that is only slightly more subtle and yet far more profound--that economic theory and history alike effectively disprove the existence of riskless assets that pay greater returns than T-bills. This is only a marginally more complex restatement of the old "if it sounds too good to be true" rule, but it was enough to convince many investors that Madoff was up to something fishy. Particularly in the cases of larger investors (such as my alma mater, which counts more than one billionaire among its alumni and lost $20 million), the willingness to overlook this seems almost pathological. Far from being "sold," more than a few of these institutional players paid fees to middlemen for the right to be robbed blind. Their share of any monies recovered deserves to be infinitesimal.

It is popular in some quarters to regard the financial markets as little more than a casino without the cocktail waitresses, so stories of shirt-losing play easily into the narrative. While it is true that outcomes will be unequal, they are almost never irrational. While I will refrain from ascribing deliberate intent, presenting the tale of Madoff's victims as blameless militates for the notion that true financial security can come only from the government, which reserves for the crown the right to operate the very type of scheme for which Bernard Madoff will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Localtarianism vs. Economic Vitality

2009-06-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

What begins sensibly (eat less red meat and more leafy vegetables) invariably proceeds to dogma (vegetarianism) and completes the circle as farce (raw veganism). Likewise, what began as a way to get higher-quality seasonal produce (urban farmer's markets) have served as a gateway drug to a much broader buying-local-is-better religion rapidly gaining popularity for its perceived benefits for both the global environment and the local economy.

But is it really? Folk economics tells us that it's better to buy something in our town than to buy it from the next town, state, or country over. This feels right because when a Walgreens opens up 5 miles away and our little neighborhood pharmacist decides it's time to retire, we feel a certain loss of community and personal service. While there are countervailing benefits (such as 24-hour stores and reduced prescription drug costs), the negative effects can be concentrated in certain areas. If you happen to be the sort of person who believes main street business districts are essentially important, then you may finally arrive at the conclusion that anyone who chooses to buy something from Home Depot rather than the local Ace Hardware is a cretin.

But this sort of thinking scales up very badly. The money which leaves a community when a better drugstore opens up the next town over can return when one of your superior local businesses draws customers from that town. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the benefits of distant trade came over a thousand years ago when the Roman Empire went into terminal decline:

In the Dark Ages that followed, cities shrank, markets atrophied, merchants disappeared, literacy declined and--crudely speaking--once Goth, Hun and Vandal plundering had run its course, everybody had to go back to being self-sufficient again...The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund): you ground your own corn, sheared your own sheep, cured your own leather, and cut your own wood.

This, mind you, is in a time when modern industrial scale and technology were not even dreamed of. A small Roman city, if cut off from the world, would probably contain within its borders the means of producing some sizable proportion of the food, clothing, and shelter needed to survive. The mobile phone in my pocket, by comparison, is the product of knowledge, labor, and raw materials drawn from every corner of the globe.

And it's not just fancy electronics, either. The 100-Mile Suit project was a fascinating exercise in which a bunch of artist/crafter/Williamsburg hipster types decided to make a men's suit entirely out of materials and labor sourced within 100 miles of Philadelphia. The end result is fascinating as a commentary on the modern global supply chain, but I wouldn't want to wear the end result. In the end, farmer's markets succeed primarily because the tomatoes taste better than the ones in the Piggly Wiggly, at least during those months of the year when such things grow in New Engand.

Apres Nous, le Deluge

2009-06-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

I suspect many will say that the Times's engagement of Goldman to shop the Globe is just a stalking horse--far worse ideas have been hatched*--but many will also be thinking wishfully.

No one at present seriously believes the Times will go out of business, but the real ball in this game is whether the Sulzberger family stays in control. Their preferred share structure guaranteed them control of the Board, but the Board is fading along with the Times's cash. Instead, the key question is whether they can raise enough cash to keep the ball rolling until things improve. To do so they will have no choice but to submit their good intentions to the judgment of bankers with less interest in the social standing of the Sulzberger family.

If they fail, a cash crisis in the next 12-18 months is not merely conceivable, but very possible.

I am sure that the Sulzberger family does not relish the thought of being the Globe's executioner, or the ones who sold the horse to the glue factory. But let's look at history here--when Neville Chamberlain traded Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Churchill called him a coward, but not many years later he traded it all to a bastard nearly as bad not to save the whole British Empire, but to secure the English Isles. Besides, if the Globe were to fade into little more than a glorified version of the Metro, which paper would their loyal readers switch their allegiance to?

* Imprimis, the Times's rejection of Jack Welch & co.'s circa-$500m bid to buy the paper in 2006, which, had they done it, would now be

How 'Bout That Boston Globe?

2009-06-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

Last week my head of marketing told me that her husband was passing through the Detroit airport as GM announced its filing for bankruptcy, and he told her it was reminiscent of 9/11 and the Challenger disaster: people glued to televisions, quiet sobbing, general feelings of shock and disbelief, etc. But how? To those of us less emotionally-invested in this long-flailing behemoth, its death came as about as much of a surprise as, say, the arrival of Thanksgiving in late November.

The same can be said with increasing intensity about the newspaper business, a fact which seems to have eluded roughly 277 of the Guild members who voted against the cost-cutting concessions proposed by the Times company. We live in what are fortean times across much of the board (save for government, which toddles on like an obese vacationer at an Orlando buffet), and few corners of business are more apocalyptic than newspapers. They will not soon improve.

Those who sit at their desks off of Morrissey Boulevard and cannot imagine the Times company making the decision to close or otherwise divest themselves of the Globe should consider LSD, or other imagination-enhancing substances. Should they decide to sell it off, in this market the top bids will likely come from search-engine optimization firms and spam-blog advertising companies eager to leach off the traffic of a century of content.

My advice, to those who still wish to make a career in this business, is to go get a job with a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you ask him what the fundamental purpose of the News corporation is, I would bet a Benjamin that he'd say "to make money." That is the sort of general you want to follow into battle.

Ceci n'est pas une plan

2009-05-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

President Obama says,

We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we've made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we've seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

...

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don't reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can't get control of the deficit.

So in other words, Medicare is broken and will bankrupt us, therefore we must expand Medicare-type programs to cover a lot more people. This reminds me of the old joke about the basketball player who asks his coach, "Why is the basketball round?" The coach answers, "You have actually asked two questions. The first is, 'Why?' The great philosophers of the world have been unable to answer this question, so I can't help you. The second question you've asked is, 'Is the basketball round?' The answer to this is 'Yes.'"

I am going to go out on a limb here and venture a prediction that serious healthcare reform will not happen before the 2010 elections. There is simply no politically-acceptable way to pay for it, and after trillions of dollars shoveled into "stimulus" and bailouts, the public's appetite for deficit spending is going to bottom out.

Liar Liar Pants On Fire

2009-05-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

Fast food restaurants know that government regulations relating to obesity will probably hurt them all, but given sufficient time to think, Taco Bell and Subway would eventually conclude that a ban on hamburgers was in the national interest. Likewise it should come as no surprise that Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, likes the idea of Cap-and-Trade:

"I think the science, as a CEO I’m not an environmentalist – just purely as a CEO that has to make a payroll – things like that," Immelt continued. "The science is compelling, so it’s a question of when and not if there’s going to be something done on carbon. Give us some certainty and let’s go."

What is compelling to Immelt is that the number one effect of CO2 regulation will be to force the shutdown of billions of dollars of coal and oil-fired power plants and the construction of billions of dollars of new facilities. Large industrial power consumers will also likely be forced to undertake new "green" investments to remain viable. Whatever the Democrats' anti-wealth agenda takes away from Immelt & co. personally will be paid back a dozen times over when the force of law creates large new markets for GE's products.

Picking up the thread from my previous post, there is a great misconception that Big Business is somehow uniquely aligned with the GOP. If the Republican Party is at all the party of business, it is the party of small businesses, on whose shoulders the weight of government bears hardest.

This is a prime example of what economist Arnold Kling calls "progressive corporatism," which is a taut way of saying that big business quickly finds accomodation with big government. The way I think of it, they are like two teenagers who fight over which one gets the car on Friday night, while both agreeing that paying for gas is the least their parents could do.

Government Motors At Last

2009-05-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

The GM endgame now comes clearly into focus: The sick man of Michigan will declare bankruptcy, the government will buy it, and Big Business and Big Government, whose relationship could formerly be regarded as a series of flirtations that occasionally turned adulterous, have finally filed for divorce from the American citizenry and announced their intention to marry. More disturbing unions have been seen, though not since Catherine the Great paid a visit to the royal stables.

And what will we get for all this? We know little about the future, but that GM will shed American jobs for years to come is a near-certainty. They have already committed to close a number of plants, and Obama's plans to force Americans into smaller cars will deprive American automakers of their primary profit center. We are getting well to the point where it would be cheaper to simply write every GM employee a check for a hundred thousand, tax-free and call it quits.

My sole point of cheer in all this is that just as our president's once-tender sensibilities about military tribunals and offshore detention of suspected terrorists emerged his first 100 days greatly toughened, so the rather sticky business of running GM may prove similarly clarifying. For no American company so thoroughly embodies the vision of European-style social democracy as GM, and for that it is coming now to its logical end.

The Specter of Defeat

2009-04-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

To read some of the coverage of Arlen Specter's political re-affiliation, you would think that he is the most significant leader the country has seen since at least the time of FDR, if not Lincoln or Jefferson. While one would not be surprised to find that Wobblin' Arlen often imagines himself carved from granite and wearing a toga, it is less clear why the rest of us should share this opinion.

Specter has for many years been the Republican party's least rigid opponent and the Democrats' least reliable friend. Tempting as it is to view his betrayal as a pivotal event in the nation's politics, we are living in precisely the same world today as we would have been, had Pat Toomey not promised to administer a Ned Lamont-esque primary defeat. The difference is illuminating. Joe Lieberman, whose Democratic alignment is entirely sincere, took his beating in the primary as a good party man, before whipping Lamont in the general election.

The Republicans will almost certainly gain Senate seats in 2010, with the cry "don't let them have 60 seats" likely to play strongly in many seats now considered safe. Roland Burris, Chuck Schumer, and Chris Dodd are all to some degree embroiled in scandal, and power is rarely conducive to discipline in office. The world has changed drastically in the past 6 months, and the 18 ahead are unlikely to be any less momentous.

As to the future of the Republican party, the Democrats and liberal media voices have pronounced the last rites over its body more times than Madonna has discovered religion. We cover elections as horseraces and imagine that either man could at any time change places with the other, but it is almost never so. Election results are the produt of the interaction between great cycles in public taste, which are driven by demographic and economic forces that reciprocate over the course of decades, with the epicycles of events.

It is a great conceit to project the future based on a few observations of the present. The Democrats lost three times with increasing severity from 2000 to 2002 and 2004, and yet these changed neither their governing philosophy nor their future electoral prospects. All parties reek of defeat and desperation when their cycle wanes. I see nothing different in the present moment. The "fierce urgency of now" is a constant, as "now" is the sole moment in time with which we are in direct communion. It is only with the leisurely remove of history that we can more clearly discern that who today appears to ride astride the events of his time, is almost always the horse.

2009-04-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

Big Government and the FEMA Coffins

While I find the Libertarian Temptation more compelling as time passes, I remain of the opinion that in the world as it exists today, there are certain Important Jobs for which government is by far the best qualified batch of rotten bastards to do. The threat of Plague afoot in the realm concentrates the mind to grapple with such bitter and uncomfortable eventualities.

Among them is the story of the FEMA coffins (Google it for yourself), which has been making the rounds of the fever swamps for at least a year or two. In brief, an investigative citizen-journalist claims to have uncovered a secret storage site where the state has stockpiled millions of cheap plasto-coffins. From there it devolves directly into the usual Mad Libs routine of conspiracy theory, and if you read enough discussion boards you'll find out that the government knows but can't stop it, is the cause of it, that it started with the Republicans or the Democrats, Al Qaeda, the Pope, is a manufactured virus or a natural mutation, that it will wipe out 90% of the population, or one city will get nuked, and so on. They're not worth tangling with because it's always turtles all the way down.

A lot of people start by saying, "the government really doesn't have a stockpile of a million coffins," and go on to explain that it's an ordinary commercial distribution center (roughly 2.5 million people died in the US last year and needed to be buried somehow), or that the video is entirely fake or heavily exaggerated.

Me? I hope that the government really does have a stockpile of corpse-handling accessories in some geographically-convenient location(s). Let's face it, sometimes Shit Just Happens. The list of unlikely-but-possible scenarios that cause a really large number of our fellow citizens (and undocumented workers eligible for government-provided cheap-ass body disposal) to unexpectedly leave this mortal coil is neither short nor reassuring. What I can say with conviction is that if the Mexico City Pig Sniffles should cause half of my neighbors to croak, and me and the other half are forced to plant them in holes in the local dog park to prevent a zombie apocalypse, you can pretty much write me off as anything other than a rifle-toting revolutionary.

I really hope the CDC can prevent the pandemic, or at least limit us to a small number cinematically-heartbreaking scenes where attractive young couples are separated into groups of Grim Survivors and Noble Martyrs. But should that fail, the goddam National Guard had better show up with hazmat suits, rifles, and trucks to cart away the dead.

It is against this gruesome backdrop that I live out my greatest disgust with Big Government's sense of priorities. At this moment we're confronting what is arguably the most ominous threat to our collective health in a decade (if not a generation), with virtually none of Health and Human Services' senior offices filled. Our first real alert to the situation in Mexico came from Canada. Institutions rarely become more effective or intelligent with increasing size, and the bureaucratic imperatives that drive government make this tendency even more injurious than in private enterprise.

2009-04-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

Spengler is Full of Shit

OK, so Susan Boyle is not particularly extraordinary. While we fall over ourselves to celebrate her, Spangler reminds us that sixty million Chinese kids are practicing violin, piano, and soon, taking-the-world-over. We're all going soft. Nuts!

If China had an equivalent TV show to American Idol, and the aged wife of a poor Suzhou rice farmer managed to make it to the TV auditions belting out respectable takes on classic songs, I suspect the Chinese people would embrace her as warmly as we've all embraced the unlikely Scots songbird.

2009-03-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Bum's Rush

The Constitution as a rule maintains a majestic and annoying distance from policy issues, which is why the exceptions deserve our special attention. Among them stands Article I's prohibition of Bills of Attainder, which among other things deprives the current Congress of the pleasure of sentencing Rush Limbaugh to the scold's bridle and a bland diet for the crime of being a fat, cigar smoking, conservative bastard.

The Democrats' focus on Rush betrays not an excess of confidence, but fear and insecurity. They have alleged that he is both a huge obstacle (literally) to progress, and a bloviating piper to the Jesus freaks, tobacco farmers, airborne wolf-hunters, gun show promoters, ex-homosexuals, know-nothings, Illinois nazis, and the rest of the trailer trash who voted for Sarah Palin.

The first is demonstrably untrue. If a President's power can be measured by the size of his... wallet, Barack Obama proves that black men really are bigger. Congressional Republicans' objections to the spending plans advanced by the President were given a public hearing in the same sense that a condemned man is allowed a few words after finishing his chicken-fried steak and blueberry pie. And if it was inappropriate for Rush to object to the nomination of a Treasury secretary who couldn't find an accountant to properly complete a Form 1040, then one struggles to imagine what could possibly constitute permissible dissent.

And if all Rush Limbaugh really represents is Red, Dead America, then what of it? Surely your teeming hordes of non-denominational twentysomething collegiate postpartisan postdoc seeing-someone-but-not-exclusively, spiritual-but-not-religious, straight-but-not-narrow, likes-children-but-doesn't-want-any social smokers can whip out their iPhones and Twitter their Facebook friends to remind what a BUNCH OF HOSERS all of Rush's fans are on their way home from the Whole Foods on River Street in their ZipCar. Using a hands-free device, of course.

Now there's another element to all this, and that's the would-be Martin Luthers like David Frum who want to recast contemporary Conservatism by making it look less like Rush Limbaugh and more like David Frum. And when I say "look," I mean exactly that. It is impossible for Newsweek or any other media organization to do a story about any right-wing personality without making him look like Darth Vader. Leaving aside that Rush will likely hang a framed copy of the cover up on his trophy wall, it is telling that you can usually guess the partisan affiliation of a cover subject by where they set up the camera and lights.

But the most laughtastic part of it all for me is the packaging of this as "A Conservative's Case Against Limbaugh." If you want to find liberal critiques of liberals, centrifuges and distillation apparatus will likely prove necessary to concentrate such rare and ephemeral essences into a measurable quantity. But if you wish to find conservative critiques of conservatives in the media, you do not need a magnifying glass; a rake will do just fine.

In any case, the positioning of David Frum as the articulator of a conservative critique of Rush is dubious, to use the mildest possible language. While Frum's accomplishments are non-trivial, suggesting that anyone is more in touch with the pulse of American conservatism than Rush is laughable. This is a man who spends 15 hours a week taking calls from listeners, whose election returns are measured daily by Arbitron, and who has done it nearly every working day since some time before I was old enough to drive.

2009-03-13T06:59:00.000-07:00

No Line On the ~~Forehead~~Horizon

Ok, so Bono is not the first rock star to head towards AARP age, but still. I remember when I mentioned to my father that I was going to see U2 at the Fleet Center back in 2001, and he said, "kids are still listening to those guys?"

The commercial success thus far of their new album strikes me as more an indictment of the current musical scene than anything else. From the alternately scorching and soaring tracks of their early to middle years, they long ago settled into a comfortable and unthreatening senescence. Likewise, it will be interesting to see if their music survives beyond their singular stylization of it. There's an old joke that covers of Bob Dylan are so popular because anybody can sing his songs better than he can, but Bono in his earlier days was without a doubt one of the great vocal talents of the last century.

2009-03-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

For Your Inconvenience

Deval Patrick's transportation secretary thinks you have it too easy, and isn't afraid to say so.

"It should not be inexpensive to park at convenient facilities in the middle of Logan Airport," Aloisi said. "We need people to understand that there are better ways to get to Logan."

In question is a proposed $2 "carbon tax" to be added to all Logan parking, including short-term. Just as a year ago everyone was sneaking "fuel surcharges" to the tab, I expect that "carbon offsets" will add 10% or so to every fee charged by a governmental body. "Concrete tax" would be a better term as that's what the money will most likely be spent on, though the beauty of it is that since consumer behavior modification is the point, you can justify the tax as a "green initiative" even if it's spent buying the mayor a new SUV.

But what really galls is the "we need people to understand there are better ways to get to Logan." Because, as you know, people just love inconvenience. That's right, why sit in your own car, leave when you feel like it, not worry at all about how to get home when your flight arrives at 2am after your connection in O'Hare got canceled, when you have buses that run every hour, subways that stop at midnight, and taxis that you sometimes have to wait an hour for. The nerve!

I have flown out of Logan hundreds of times and have parked there fewer than ten, not because I give a shit about the planet, but because taking a cab was cheaper and/or I didn't have to worry about how many drinks I had at Cheers in O'Hare. Truth be told, drinking accounts for most of my personal enthusiasm for mass transit. I would rather spend my money on booze than cab fare, and stopping at two drinks is like going home with somebody and sleeping with all your clothes on. In any case, those people who choose to brave the Expressway, pay the soon-to-be-$7 tunnel toll, and navigate the spaghetti circus of ramps to pick up their loved ones, are doing so because it is the best option for them.

2009-02-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

What Coldplay Would Sound Like

...if they didn't suck: One Day Like This

Elbow is opening for Coldplay on their US tour later this year, so the Brit band may start to build an audience here, but I think the bill should be reversed. I liked Coldplay for about 3 months in 1999 when FNX was the only station playing "Yellow," but then I realized that (a) Chris Martin sings through his nose; and (b) when posed with the choice between rocking and sucking, Coldplay invariably chooses the latter. Practically all of their big hits have a bridge where I'm just waiting for the clash of a good, distortion-laced guitar solo, and instead, the tempo slows and a piano starts to tinkle. Musical blueballs. Elbow doesn't do that.

2009-02-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

Bolshevik Musings

Walking home from work late last night I passed the Bank of America building on Federal Street. The cavernous entryway gleamed with polished brass and marble; a painting of a clipper ship in full sail hung above the security desk around which a half dozen cleaners shuffled. The thought went through my head: I want to see it burn to the ground.

With any luck, my business has a shot at modest profitability this year. We added a new person to headcount last month, and I have two more possibilities if the numbers stay where they are. The large banks are cutting jobs everywhere they can. GM promises more layoffs as they belly up for another helping at the taxpayer buffet. It will be decades, if ever, before any of these companies employs more people than they did this time a year ago. This year, my little company will create more jobs than both of them combined. Most of this, BTW, comes courtesy of my taking compensation in equity rather than salary, as I continue to be the lowest-paid worker in the company.

On top of this, I now see that the government wants to offer a lifeline to people who took out loans they cannot afford. Five years ago, I passed up a nice condo on the Fort Point channel because a $300k mortgage felt like too big a commitment on my then-105k salary. Since then I've continued to live in smaller rental apartments in less-delightful corners of the city, and gotten no tax write-offs from mortgage interest.

What I am told is that companies like Citibank, and people who thought it would never snow in March, must be backstopped, bailed out, infused, modified, or otherwise stimulated, lest the downdraft of their fall from grace pull me down with them. After all, business cannot survive without banks, even though my business has been financed entirely out of savings. Likewise, we can't have people getting foreclosed on left and right, even though this would mean the house might get purchased by a former renter who planned more carefully.

"Gimme the money, or the girl gets it!"

I don't want to see any more bankers or auto executives hauled down to grovel in front of Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, or even Orrin Hatch. I don't want executive pay caps, Gulfstreams put up on eBay, or an embargo on trips to Vegas. I want to see Jamie Dimon's bondholders force him to sell the Federal Street building and move regional HQ to Woburn. I want to see Rick Wagoner sent to retirement as GM is broken into smaller pieces so that the healthy ones can survive on their own.

Likewise, the structured-finance wizards who cooked up these convoluted securities tell us they're too complicated to undo. So long as the prospect exists of selling this problem to some sucker (and the US taxpayer will do nicely), they will insist that is the only viable option. What man hath securitized, man can unsecuritize, and though I do not doubt the process of unwinding will be considerably less enjoyable than what preceded it, I have almost infinite faith in the creativity and brilliance of the legions of Ivy League whizkids still employed by the financial sector. As Johnson said, "the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.

In fact, I can imagine nothing worse than what is being done right now, except what is likely to follow it if it does not succeed.

2009-01-31T11:35:00.000-08:00

Journamilism, cont'd.

All I ask is to see this kid locked in a room with Jules Crittenden for five minutes. I'd excerpt the post and mock it, but that would really just be completely pointless. I mean, how do you respond to this, other than spraying your tasty beverage all over the screen and hitting the ROFLCOPTER key?

"Any idiot can sign up at wordpress or livejournal or whatever. You need a resume and a job interview to be a journalist."

2009-01-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

The Yesterday Show

Jon Stewart is the closest thing the Left has come up with as an answer to Rush Limbaugh. They are both entertainers first, ideologues close behind. The next two years will be very interesting to see what happens with regards to their respective ratings.

Unlike Limbaugh, Stewart never struck me as someone terribly concerned about ideas as such. Like Bill O'Reilly, he was content to meet his opponents on an uneven field, and feed them piece by piece to an audience as interested in ideological diversity as Vladimir Putin. This is not to say Limbaugh's show is on the same level as Firing Line, but then, who besides Tim Russert has come close to that in the past decade?

Limbaugh is a polemicist, but there is an honesty to it that is lacking in Stewart. With Rush, it's just the big man and a microphone, live on the air; Stewart often tapes (and edits) interviews and has a team of writers to rival Jay Leno's. As a liberal, you know Rush is going to throw punches, but at least no one is going to sneak up behind and break a bottle over your head.

Still, Rush has never been what he was in 1992, 1993, 1994. I was in high school at the time, and remember restaurants advertising "Rush Rooms" where his show was played during the lunch hour. The GOP was in total exile, and the media were treating the charismatic young Democratic president to the full Lewinsky. Rush was the opposition, and while he was too shrewd a showman to be above flinging the occasional piece of dung, it was usually to punctuate a point he'd already made in more thoughtful terms.

I'm sure Stewart will not run fatally short of acolytes braying for fan service, but my suspicion is that much of the audience for his smarmy left-wing irony was a lot less driven by ideology than general disapproval of power in general. As the storm clouds gather on what will probably not be a comfortable couple of years, making fun of Republicans (who are almost completely out of power for the next 2-N years) is going to be devoid of the frisson of rebellion from which its most vital energy is drawn. Chanting "Yankees Suck" isn't nearly as much fun when they actually do.

2009-01-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

Journamilism

"Young lady, in this house we respect the laws of thermodynamics!"

Not to make light of what may quickly turn out to be a tragedy--one suspects there will be at least some casualties from the US Air flight that just went into the Hudson, but reading this story, this rather notable howler leapt off the screen at me:

Temperatures at the time of the crash in the city were just about 20 degrees, with the water temperature likely much colder.

Last I checked, water still freezes around 32 degrees. Of course, I'd much rather walk around in 0-degree air than take a shower in 50-degree water; that's our old friend specific heat at work.

Nitpicking? Sure, but it's stuff like this that makes people like me think that J-schools ought to require a lot fewer classes on ethics and more on science and math.

Edit:
Bravo to the flight crew of US1549! The latest reports are saying no casualties, with pictures showing the airplane upright with passengers standing on the wings--I swear it looked like some had their carry-on bags. Drudge has slugged it "Miracle on the Hudson" but a lot more than luck was at work.

Ask a few pilots what really scares them, and total power loss on takeoff over an urban area is going to be near the top of the list. The clock is ticking fast and you have to make a decision where to go down and ride it through. An off-field landing is a big deal in a little plane like mine, but a picture-perfect ditching of an airliner in the Hudson next to the Intrepid Air-Space Museum is going to go up there with the story of United 232 and Capt. Al Haynes.

2009-01-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

What a Town!

NetFlix watch-instantly local favorites for Boston:

Spellbound
Tootsie
Cabaret
Gay Sex in the 70s
Philadelphia

Discuss.

2008-12-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

Big Government is Unsustainable

For those who haven't been watching, both New York and California are facing staggering budget deficits of $15 and $40 billion respectively. Indeed, it is quite possible both estimates will turn out to be too low. It is essential that Massachusetts ponder these train wrecks while our own fiscal problems remain somewhat tractable.

The underlying cause in both states is a reliance on low-hanging fruit; California collects an overwhelming majority of its taxes from the upper quintile of earners, especially capital gains, while New York has long skimmed the cream off the financial services industry. Since roughly 79% of people are in favor of high taxes for the top 20% of earners, this was a politically perfect solution.

The problem arises however that the incomes of the wealthy are not just higher than those of the middle-class, they are also far more volatile. It is not unusual that in a bad year a business owner or investor will have negative income, and may in fact make 80% of their money in one out of five years. State government budgets, however, tend to move up rapidly and down very slowly if at all; the proposed NY budget for 2009 still includes an overall spending increase of 1%. To the extent that both New York and California took a good year as a sign to increase spending proportionally, this sort of crisis was largely inevitable.

Both states boast prime coastal cities, with enormous human, financial, and educational capital stocks. They would have the means to operate at above-average levels of spending even with tax systems similar to low-tax states. But none of this is permanently true. Buffalo was once home to the largest number of millionaires of any US city. Freight trains used to run deep into downtown Manhattan servicing vast factories and workshops where one now finds meat-market clubs and lofts serving the hedge fund kiddie market.

Just as one still finds millionaires in Buffalo and factories in Manhattan, no doubt the city will continue to have high-earning Wall Street types to peel C-notes off at will. But it could be decades before it has as many as it did in 2006, if those jobs are recreated in NYC and not NC or AZ. Raising taxes now--especially on the upper reaches--will only accelerate the unwinding. Eventually you have to raise taxes on the middle-earners, which New York's swelling basket of new taxes on iTunes, soda, event tickets, clothing, and beer does, by slightly less obvious means.

I've written here before about how the MBTA's budget deficits will eventually eat us alive; indeed, the New York MTA is now looking at simultaneous fare increases and service reductions. Our system remains tenable only because the rest of the budget is still able to make up the shortfall. But the demands on education and healthcare remain large and growing, and it is not clear we're headd anywhere different in the long term.

It used to be that state governments could run surpluses or borrow money so as to operate at a consistent level regardless of the macroeconomic situation. This provided a useful stabilizing force to the economy, and guaranteed the delivery of essential services when people needed them most. While government officials lean into their criticism of bankers and financial engineers for their greedy short-term views, they ought to spare some time to ponder their own.

2008-12-16T21:09:00.000-08:00

Fridgerupt

adj.

1. The realization that you are hungry, it's too late to call for take-out, and your refrigerator contains nothing but two jars of mustard, a container of mayonnaise, and a 2-liter bottle of diet root beer: I had to hit the Mickey D's on the way home because I'm totally fridgerupt.

Surprisingly, Google returns no results for this seemingly-obvious portmanteau, so I am staking my claim.

2008-11-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

Chuckrolled

When the bartender brings the third round of tequila shots to the table and it's barely 6PM on a Tuesday, you know things are going to get a lot uglier. That's how I felt when the Feds arrested chrome-domed and Fu-Manchu'd Chuck Turner, city-councilor-for-life for Roxbury, agitator nonpareil, and darling of the Fabian set, for taking a $1000 bribe to grease a liquor license in the same sting that saw Diane Wilkerson stuffing money in her bra in the Fill-a-Buster diner next to the State House.

So when Chuck said "see you on the steps of City Hall at 2:30 today," I decided it might be a good day for a late lunch and walked over for some free theater. Would he name names? Confess and beg forgiveness? Resign and vow to clear his name?

Of course not.

Aside from the de rigeur "I am innocent of all the charges against me" statement, the whole 30 minutes was pure huffenpuff, Charles the Bald jousting valiantly with the many windmills lined up against him. And of course, Council President Maureen Feeney (his emphasis), who according to Chuck is the one who needs to explain herself. After all, all he's done is get caught on tape pocketing some cake, for which the presumption of innocence ought to apply. Well, she got Chuckrolled, at least for this round. Street power beats back-office power, at least in the beginning.

The crowd was really two crowds--one part his constituents, the people who have actually lived and made their home in his district lo these past decades, and the rest, which looked like the the crowd in the Beacon Hill Whole Foods on a Sunday afternoon, from the mohawked butch girls to the revolutionary in the nice North Face jacket and the older couple in tailored clothing who could afford to hang around City Hall Plaza at 3 in the afternoon.

I don't begrudge Chuck's people, who voted for him in precisely the same way that Southie voted for Jimmy Kelly and the North End voted for Sal LaMattina and every other tribe of this city voted for its own guy at one time or another. The point of electing one of your own isn't to eliminate corruption, it's to make sure you'll have someone to pay off when you need a liquor license. But the "progressives" are another thing entirely. When Turner said his only goal was "the liberation of my people," he wasn't talking about the Amex anarchists and faculty club jock-sniffers who drew in close for their thrilling whiff of radical chic.

For these folks, I can see only two rationalizations: either he is really innocent and being set up by his enemies, or what he's done is a misdemeanor committed by every other city councilor, and he is being singled out by his enemies. The first will suffice only until he is convicted, at which point the denial will have to be augmented. The second is hardly a defense of Turner. By all means, let's shake out every carpet in City Hall. As far as I am concerned, the only difference between a building filled with elected officials and a prison are the bars on the windows.

In any case, we are living in an age when the self-proclaimed defenders of the public trust have told us that the standard for conflict of interest extends to the mere "appearance of impropriety," let alone enough evidence for a US attorney to file an indictment for the act. Turner is right that is not enough to convict him in a court of law. It is however more than sufficient for administrative and nonjudicial disciplinary action.

2008-11-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

Has Business Gotten Too Big?

According to the New York Times,

...Citigroup is widely viewed, both in Washington and on Wall Street, as too big to
be allowed to fail.

The past six months have brought to our doors a succession of private companies which, we have been told, are too important to be allowed to fail. Perhaps it is true of Citi as a practical matter, but it is deeply offensive to darn near every economic and political bone in my body.

As recently as ten years ago, a block of downtown Boston might contain six or more different banks. Then all at once it seemed like the arena now known as TD Banknorth Garden changed names every few weeks. Shawmut Bank, Fleet Bank, BayBank, the Bank of Boston, and US Trust all disappeared within what seemed like a few years. At least the Patriots still play at Gillette Stadium, at least until an Excel spreadsheet at P&G's headquarters in Cinncinnati says it should be renamed Febreze Field.

It is possible that what we have is the financial equivalent of a 1000-year storm, and if we had a few dozen medium-sized regional banks instead of a half-dozen megabanks, we'd simply have a lot more failing banks in need of help. But it's also possible that with a lot more banks, we'd have more diversification and variation in business practices. Of course, plenty would have made many of the same bad decisions, but none of them singly would present as "too big to fail."