Month: November 2007

Whatever Became of Common Sense?

Earlier this week, the head of the Red Cross had to step down after having a “relationship” with a subordinate. No, I’m pretty sure he would not be resigning over a friendship.

Common sense would have said “Sex with the employees is a bad idea.”

Also earlier this week, the same law enforcement officials who sold the people of California a ballot initiative requiring satellite tracking of “sex offenders” determined that — now that voters have made it law — the entire idea is unworkable and really expensive.

Common sense would have said “It would be easy to keep track of these people if they were still in prison.”

And the final item for your consideration, a story that makes me feel ill, a 2 year old girl was beaten to death for not saying “please” and “yes, sir.” Mom wanted to call an ambulance at one point, but was prevented by her “Mr. Manners” boyfriend. Then they put her body in a trash bag and dumped it at sea. How discourteous. But here’s the part that gets me (emphasis mine):

In her statement to Galveston authorities, Trenor said the girl was beaten with leather belts, had her head held underwater in a bathtub and then was thrown across a room, her head slamming into a tile floor.

[snip]

“There was never an intention to beat Riley to death,” he said.

Now let me get this straight. You beat her, held her head underwater in the tub, and threw her across the room such that her head slammed into a tile floor, but you never meant to kill her? What exactly did Mr. Manners think would happen?

Common sense would have said “A two-year-old can learn to say please and thank you, but beating her to death is counterproductive.”

In closing: Blogthings internet quizzes; the Tunnels of Chinatown; Girl Scout sashes make headscarves as American as Halal Apple Pie; Billie Piper will be back on Dr. Who (yay!); a court has ordered the Bush Administration to turn over “documents related to immunizing telecommunications companies from lawsuits” by tomorrow; today the arctic, tomorrow the moon; and finally, “How does Bruce Schneier protect his laptop data? With his fists!” One bit of advice near the bottom (that I’ve been advocating for a long time), “minimize the amount of data on your laptop.” Common sense may be alive somewhere after all.

Now I’m Mad

There’s a lot of talk today about how “Worsening Credit Crisis Leading to Meltdown of Financial System and Severe US Recession” (it’s long and written by economists, but please at least read the first paragraph) and “New Wave of Mortgage Failures Could Create a Nightmare Economic Scenario” and just to top it all off, banks have billions of dollars of undisclosed risk — they may not even know for certain how bad it is because much of it was kept off-balance-sheet. Huh. I thought we had tighter accounting rules in the post-Enron world.

Now, I have not been as angry at the banks and the Fed as many writers have been. I know enough about economics and modern banking to know that there will be no way out of this mess that does not involve banks. Who do you think is going to provide the money to refinance all those crappy mortgages so people can keep their homes? It’s not the government; they can’t afford it. It’s not Fannie and Freddie; they don’t give loans. It’s banks and other mortgage providers.

But now? Now I am mad. Robert Shiller wrote this piece for the New York Times. You can find a no-registration version here and here and links to other people’s thinking on it here. I’m only going to directly quote a few paragraphs. After telling us that indeed, a 30% decline in housing values has precedent and could happen, he posits that “This crisis should be an occasion for some inspired thinking about fundamental changes in our real estate institutions. The actions that have already been taken are not impressive.” Then he lists the measures taken in the early 1930s, without which “the Great Depression would have been much worse than it was, and we would be in a more vulnerable situation today”:

In 1932, the National Association of Real Estate Boards proposed and Congress created the Federal Home Loan Bank System, modeled after the Federal Reserve System…. This was an ambitious plan: these banks were to be a special lender of last resort for real estate, discounting mortgages so that troubled banks and loan associations could keep issuing mortgages.

Also that year, the real estate appraisal industry pulled itself together to become a truly professional organization, founding the Appraisal Institute, which established national standards.

In 1933… Congress modified bankruptcy law to allow insolvent wage earners to file to protect themselves from eviction from their homes. This was a democratization of bankruptcy law: the new statute led the way to the current situation, in which individuals and businesses both have access to important bankruptcy arrangements.

Later in 1933, after Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, Congress created the Home Owners Loan Corporation to sponsor loans for those having trouble making payments, replacing short-term mortgages — then typically five years with a final balloon payment that was often hard for homeowners to afford — with much more sensible 15-year ones that were fixed-rate and self-amortizing. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration; it insured mortgages and insisted they be 20-year fixed-rate and self-amortizing.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a radically new invention intended to prevent runs on banks from depleting resources for home mortgages, among other calamities, was also created in 1934. And in 1938, Congress created Fannie Mae, which eventually led to the huge securitization of mortgages.

Now, leaving aside for the moment that a 20 year mortgage was an innovation 70 years ago, and now 30 years is standard, leaving aside how anemic the governmental response is to a crisis that the rest of the world is worried about. Let me tell you the part I am truly angry about:

Congress is already on track to eliminate the provision — Section 1322 of Chapter 13 of the bankruptcy law — that prohibits courts from adjusting terms of first mortgages.

This makes me mad because part of the problem is that the bankruptcy reform bill passed back in 2005 is what pushed so many families into Chapter 13 bankruptcies in the first place.

Oh, and because “Minorities hit hardest by housing crisis” and disproportionately have sub-prime loans, remember that the problems facing middle America are only worse for people of color in America. Remember all the hoopla about encouraging minority home ownership a few years ago? As recently as October of 2006 President Bush himself was encouraging minorities along with everyone else to go out and buy a house.

Administration policies fed the housing bubble, which in turn fed the mortgage mess we are currently trying to dig out of. Their proposals have been nothing more than media hype, and Congress has done little better. When you can look back at Herbert Hoover and say he did a better job with a similar problem, that’s really pathetic.

In closing: Brilliant at Breakfast points out Barney Frank on jobs and wage stagnation in our “service economy”; the Archcrone borrows the drum I’ve been beating to point out that universal health coverage is not the same thing as universal health care; if you haven’t been to my professional site, you have probably missed Teller’s House of Mystery and Imagination; it turns out kids will eat healthy food if you serve it to them; one Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer asks “If not now, when?“And finally, a must read article on social mobility. A mixed bag of researchers from “the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation and the Urban Institute” found that it just doesn’t exist anymore! Don’t zone out before this paragraph (emphasis mine):

[Julia B.] Isaacs [of the Brookings Institution] said she was surprised at finding that the personal income of American men—including white men—has been almost perfectly flat for the past three decades. One of Isaacs’ studies indicates, in fact, that most of the financial gains white families have made in that time can be attributed to the entry of white women into the labor force. This is much less true for African-Americans; in 1968, when the sample group was first surveyed, black women were far more likely to already have income-producing jobs.

So, when you hear so-called “family values” sorts talking about how “all today’s problems are because mom is out working instead of taking care of the kids at home”? They are not only saying “all today’s problems are because mom can actually leave a bad and/or abusive marriage,” they are in fact saying “all today’s problems are because American families have too much money.” Somehow, that does not jive with my experience. How about yours?

David Sirota Is Right On (and other ramblings)

Granted, I’ve read Mr. Sirota’s work before, but this week he’s on fire.

First, we have this item from Truthdig called “Was Ross Perot Right?” That was actually a question Wolf Blitzer asked of Hillary Clinton last week. Her response was to make fun of Mr. Perot and make some lame comments about only remembering a bunch of charts.

Can you just imagine the uproar if, say, Dan Quayle had answered that way? Every comedian in the country would have had fresh material. Mr. Sirota reminds us: “A Democrat laughing at Perot on national television is a big mistake. Simply put, it risks alienating the roughly 20 million people who cast their votes for the Texas businessman.”

The fact of the matter is that when Mr. Perot’s biggest points are examined — that there will be an almost audible “sucking sound” as jobs flow out of America, and that depressed Mexican wages could make illegal immigration to the United States worse — he was right and Sirota has the data to prove it. Yet “[Clinton] she and other congressional Democrats are currently pushing a Peru Free Trade Agreement at the behest of their corporate campaign contributors—an agreement expanding the unpopular NAFTA model.”

The fact is that Mrs. Clinton is less “progressive” than a slot machine.

Oh, but Mr. Sirota did not stop there. He went on — albeit in another article at another website — to tell us “the dishonest argument over illegal immigration trying to divert our ire away from the corporate profiteers, outsourcers, wage cutters and foreclosers that buy influence — and protection — in Washington.”

Now make no mistake, we need some kind of immigration reform in this country simply because there needs to be a clear, simple, attainable path to legal residency and/or citizenship in this country (and no excuse for breaking the law). However, all the immigration proposals recently offered center on things like expensive eco-disaster community-rending useless fences and permanent underclass guest–worker programs and beefing up unenforced regulations on worker documentation. Why is that? Mr. Sirota tells us (emphasis mine):

The answer is exploitation. Employers looking to maximize profits want an economically desperate, politically disenfranchised population that will accept ever worse pay and working conditions. Illegal immigrants perfectly fit the bill.

Politicians know exploitation fuels illegal immigration. But they refuse to confront it because doing so would mean challenging their financiers.

Instead we get lawmakers chest-thumping about immigration enforcement while avoiding a discussion about strengthening wage and workplace safety enforcement — proposals that address the real problem.

Equally deplorable, these same lawmakers keep supporting trade policies that make things worse.

There is no such thing as “jobs Americans won’t do.” But there is such a thing as employers who won’t follow the law. Employers who without penalty don’t follow the law put companies that do follow the law at a competitive disadvantage. There’s your real sucking sound.

In closing: a Black Friday comic; someone else scratching her head about how “inappropriate” old episodes of Sesame Street are; clean, clear water and how it shapes politics and diplomacy (a trend which is likely to only get worse); beating the dead horse called FISA and the Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb (short version? What part of the DoJ can get a warrant up to 3 days after starting a wiretap don’t they get?); ’tis the charitable season, don’t forget one of my favorite charities, Child’s Play; CNN on losing holiday pounds (I take issue with their saying “It would take 27 minutes of walking to burn the 97 calories in an 8-ounce serving of cola,” because most people are in fact drinking it 12, 24, or 32 ounces at a time, but “Take small bites and eat slowly. And, don’t get stuck in guilt if you’ve eaten too much,” is good advice); and as for this study from the Heritage Foundation covered by the “right-wing” Reverend Moon owned Washington Times suggesting “Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts.” I’d just like to point out that the study findings that “of the 167 House districts where the median annual income was higher than the national median of $48,201, a slight majority, 84 districts, were represented by Democrats” and “the likelihood of electing a Democrat to the House is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in that district” are likely to be caused by Democratic policies that favor higher wages — remember, “rich” people can live wherever they like. It’s just too easy to turn this study around and make the Republicans the party of depressed wages.

CreepShorties

Half a Million Dollars in Debt, and Some People Want to Worry About Pens and Notepads: CNN tells us about a young family I wish were more unusual. Both young adults graduated medical school. Their first child is due any day now. They work “brutal hours for salaries that, on an hourly basis, work out to a little more than they could earn stocking the shelves at Costco.” And they have $500,000 in student loan debt — so far. But as I say, the people who want to “reform” health care are much more concerned with the pens and notepads that drug companies give to doctors.

Extra, Extra! Read All About it! Book store reinvents the book! Actually, the Amazon Kindle looks pretty cool.

That Makes Elmo Want to Sing the Cow Song. I grew up watching Sesame Street. And these people just don’t get it. Early Sesame Street — which by the way, packs a whole lot more actual education than the newer, sanitized, dumbed down for younger kids version on PBS today — is not about escaping into some happy place where numbers and letters dance. It’s about meeting kids where they are, admitting that sometimes things are not all rosy. It taught us that the world did not end at the next cross-street, that some people are just grouchy, and that milk comes from cows. Oh, and since milk is pasteurized, what the heck does it matter that “[c]ows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time”?

Thankful for the Planet. Here’s 84 ways ordinary people can help the planet. Some of them even save you money.

The Social Security Debate that Wouldn’t Die. Heeeeeeeere’s Krugman. He would like to take a few minutes to refute just about every sentence about Social Security beginning with the phrase “Everybody knows that….”

Maybe They Should Call It USA ToDuh. USA Today tells us that many sex offenders are homeless, making it more difficult to track them. That’s the direct result of Megan’s Laws making it difficult for sex offenders who have served their prison terms to find housing (and avoid mob justice). Seriously, if these people are so dangerous we have to track them for the rest of their lives, put them in prison for the rest of their lives. In another story, USA Today tells us that hate crime was up 8% in 2006. Well, that couldn’t’ have anything to do with the various hatemongers telling us to fear people who are not like us: people who are Muslim; people who are gay; people who are Hispanic (and therefore implied illegal immigrants).

When There Are No Invaders, There Are No Insurgents Either. The British have left Basra, and violence is down. Imagine that.

This is a Bad Idea. Colorado wants to pass an amendment to the state Constitution giving legal rights to fertilized human eggs. It’s a bad idea. Unless, of course, you think that women are nothing more than a cardboard box. Oh, and never mind that it’s not even a pregnancy until implantation.

Political Discourse.  If you happen to live in Nevada, I have some links regarding our upcoming caucuses over here.

Too True. “And you never find what you need in there.”

Speaking of Now-Inappropriate TV I Watched as a Child. A link to an interview with Moe Howard of The Three Stooges.

And Last But Not Least. The BlogHers Act landing page for initiatives to improve maternal health worldwide is live and active.

“Is the Children Learning?”

In Texas, maybe it’s better if they don’t learn too much from the textbooks. The math texts included 109,263 errors, 79% of which came from books published Houghton Mifflin Co..

Students may wish some of the errors had not been uncovered – particularly the inclusion in some books of the answers to math quizzes at the end of each chapter. The answers were supposed to appear only in teacher editions of the books.

In other cases, Spanish versions of the books had incorrect translations. And some computations were just wrong.

Six publishers submitted drafts of their textbooks to the TEA hoping to get in line for selection of the next generation of math books that will be used in Texas public schools.

These are, of course, rough drafts — very rough — but if the errors are not gone by Spring (the season, not the Texas community), publishers will have to cough up $5000 per error. However, since the book contracts are expected to be worth $116.8 million, that may be a small price to pay.

In closing:  what a real central bank looks like;  I wish Jill didn’t have a point about how defining life as beginning as conception is a death sentence for a woman with an ectopic pregnancy; Flying Spaghetti Monster under academic scrutiny; a record nobody wants to set; sad but true, some boys use pregnancy as a tool to keep girlfriends in line; who doesn’t love exploding casinos? (ok, imploding); and a conspiracy that may link Republican sexual improprieties, gay sex, a disappearance and possible murder, a tell all book, and may ultimately lead to the White House.  Could it be we may finally find out the truth about Gannon-Guckert‘s White House access?

The Best Movie You’ll Play This Year

“What? Don’t be silly, you can’t play a movie,” you may say.

The next generation of video games is here, now. And yes, it’s like playing a movie, with you playing the major characters.

Last Tuesday, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out. It was widely expected to be one of the hot titles of the season, and I bought it opening day. G4’s X-Play gives it 5 stars out of 5.

I finished the game — well, the single player portion of the game — last night, and can say X-Play is understating when they say it “follows a US Marine and a British SAS soldier through a series of increasingly complex and escalating events in the Eastern Hemisphere.” I found it to be a totally immersive experience, better than many action movies. The game is rated M for good reason; definitely not for the kids!

If you play this game, you will find yourself on a variety of missions wherein you attempt to get off a sinking ship, rescue fellow soldiers, try to capture a foreign leader, attempt to escape a nuclear blast, skulk around the ruins of Chernobyl, snipe, blast, shoot, blow things up, watch people die, and find yourself in a chase scene that puts Mission Impossible’s Chunnel scene to shame. Oh yeah, and you get to save the world too — just in the line of duty.  The ending was very unexpected;  it came quickly but was satisfying (and there’s a bonus mission after the credits, so don’t quit just yet).

So tonight, I will be getting into the multi-player part of the game, taking a little time off from Battlefield 2, which by the way is probably the game Mr. Bush was playing with the troops. It’s the only game we can think of around here that allows players to “shoot the bad guys” in the Middle East and “simulate riding in a car or boat.” I just don’t know that I’d call a 2 year old game “cutting edge virtual reality games”.

In closing: Samsung pulls out of Japanese consumer electronics market; Mr. Armitage admits it was “foolish” to out Valerie Plame; the myth of the ticking bomb; are homeowners “too big to fail”?; thanks to Mr. Krugman for pointing us to this report on health care expenditures; Expert Ezra actually takes some time to “partially” defend employer-based health insurance; and too cute for Cute Overload, it’s the Weirdest Mothers in the Animal Kingdom. Well worth reading is this piece from Pandagon about those who think the family can be “strengthened” by making it harder to get divorced. Agreed that divorce is not a good thing, and not fun for anybody involved, but that’s not the answer. You don’t solve this problem by making it harder any more than you “cure” tuberculosis with cough medicine; it may stop the coughing but you’re still dying and contagious. If you want stronger families and fewer divorces, make it harder to get married, and provide more opportunities for counseling people before a marriage hits the rocks.

Here in My Car

Don’t ask when peak oil is;  it has come and gone.

There’s a lot of reasons oil is as high as it is.  These reasons include high demand from nations with large, newly industrialized populations, a weak dollar, and 7 countries (including a few oil producing countries) that are no longer supporting the dollar.

It doesn’t matter any more.  If you don’t want to take my word for it, listen to the International Energy Agency.

We Americans live in a society where we depend on cars to get everywhere.  Many of us live in neighborhoods that don’t even have sidewalks — we couldn’t safely walk to our destinations if we wanted to. Many of us live miles from our jobs.  Many of us live miles from grocery stores and other essential businesses. Many of us live in places where there is not a safe, effective, or cost/time efficient public transportation system.

Believe it or not, Daimler wants to help us out — oh, and make money on the deal too.  They will be selling “Smart Cars” that get 40 MPG (if you have trouble reading that, just click the “Print” button and the text will appear in a pop-up window, you don’t really have to print it).  They are also hedging their bets in a partnership with Ford to make automotive fuel cells.

But the thing that should make you mad about “going green” and fuel-efficient vehicles and alternative fuels is this:  the auto industry could already get to a fleet average of 35 MPG within 5 years, using existing technology. And they could make more of money doing it.  You know who says so? Click and Clack, those guys who do the funny little show about cars on your local NPR station every weekend. Of course they’ve got a big study by Citigroup and the Investor Network on Climate Risk behind them.  Yeah, they carry a little more weight than some funny mechanics from the East Coast.

In closing health care round-up:  Expert Ezra with Ten Reasons American Health Care is So Bad; those are nice eyes you’ve got there, sure would be a shame if something happened to them, of course it will cost you $22,000 to keep that from happening, heck no your insurance company won’t cover that; L.A. Times reports that a big insurer actually paid employees bonuses running as high as $20,000 (hm, that’s an interesting number…) to get rid of policy holders who actually needed health care; The Archcrone on true universal healthcare, which like Expert Ezra, I prefer to call Medicare For All; and a very long but very sobering article with references and charts and everything on The Erosion of Hoping Your Boss Will Pay for Health Insurance.

In closing economy round-up: oh, so that’s how they figure we have “no inflation”;  Brad DeLong goes into more detail about How China Can Destroy Us Economically; the economy is great except for consumer confidence; and if we have “full employment” how come tax receipts don’t reflect that?

And finally just a few little things:   I love this picture; I also love this word substitution exercise; Green Gifts; and please be aware that I have a new professional site at BridgetMagnus.com.  Most of my housing and local interest items will go over there now, with cross-posting and pointer posts as appropriate. It’s been too long since I’ve said this, but thanks for reading what I have to say.

Disconnect

How the economy is doing these days largely depends what data you want to look at. I’ve been saying that for quite a while now. More to the point, others share my opinion. Here’s Reality Based Educator. Here’s Tyler Cohen. Here’s the BondDad. They all boil down to “How can you say there’s no inflation when commodities are so high and food/fuel prices go up every time I turn around?” and “How can the GDP be so spectacular when the dollar is worth less than a loonie?” and “If everything is so wonderful, how come we have a ‘credit crunch’ and foreclosure crisis?”

And that’s just up until yesterday. Today we can add little data points like 47 million Americans without health insurance, including 3.4 million children who had coverage at the beginning of the Bush Administration. And we can add up to 12,000 pink slips at Chrysler. And in the same quarter that we had almost 4% GDP growth? We had 30% growth in foreclosures, almost double levels from last year. CNN tells us “More than 635,000 foreclosure filings were reported nationwide – one for every 196 households. The filings include everything from default notices to auction sale notices to actual bank repossessions.” Think about that. You live in a neighborhood of a couple hundred houses? Odds are really good you have a neighbor in foreclosure. Apparently the economy is great unless you are a human being.

Even Wall Street is having a rough time, since “Now that 307, or 61% of S&P 500 companies, have reported, the headline numbers are far from encouraging. Earnings have contracted 5.3% from a year ago, S&P says, the worst performance since the fourth quarter of 2001.” Oh but wait, if you don’t count a couple bad sectors, “Eight of the 10 sectors posted 8% or greater earnings growth; five were in the double digits.” And his analysts think next year could have profit growth — not revenue growth, actual profit growth — of anything between 6.5% and 15%. The low number is still more than 50% greater than the “good” GDP number announced yesterday, the highest one is almost 4 times higher. Oh no, the CEO might have to make do with a smaller yacht. Keeping in mind we still have a trade deficit, where the heck is the money to fuel these profits coming from?

In closing: don’t get me started again about vouchers; the New Company Towns; perhaps mining laws should be revisited more often than once every 135 years, “A House bill, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act, would permanently bar the sale of federal lands to miners and would require them for the first time to pay royalties of up to 8 percent of gross income from mining, which would go to a fund to clean up abandoned mines. It would also establish new permitting and environmental rules”; and yes I know I put it in today’s Daily Three, but Schneier is right on again about how “unusual” is not the same thing as “criminal”.