Liberal Media Elite

Actually, this one is for Matthew:

The European commission is preparing itself for a membership bid, depending on the outcome of a snap general election expected in May. An application would be viewed very favourably in Brussels and the negotiations, which normally take many years, would be fast-forwarded to make Iceland the EU’s 29th member in record time, probably in 2011.

Olli Rehn, the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, said: “The EU prefers two countries joining at the same time rather than individually. If Iceland applies shortly and the negotiations are rapid, Croatia and Iceland could join the EU in parallel. On Iceland, I hope I will be busier. It is one of the oldest democracies in the world and its strategic and economic positions would be an asset to the EU.”

Its strategic and economic positions….interesting.

I was gonna write a long screed about the state of the economy, but after a pass through the mainstream press today, particularly the New York Times, I was overwhelmed by the stupidity of the journalistic community.

Before getting to that, here’s the skinny on the economy…remember back in November when the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) told us we’d been in a recession since December of 2007 and all of us were, like, “no shit…it took you 11 months to piece that together?”

Okay…sometime in June the same rocket scientists are gonna tell us we entered a depression in November of 2008. Trust me. It’s coming. There are various mathematical indicators that lead me to this conclusion and I’ll go into them in a later post just for the geeks that care about such things…but the biggest leading indicator is that rich guys are throwing themselves in front of trains or off ledges or whatever. When rich guys (and by rich I mean worth 100’s of millions or billions) start killing themselves specifically because they are now poor, the economic shit has officially hit the fan…which is as good a description of a depression as any other I’ve come across.

On to journalistic idiocy…

Toxic Assets: Okay…can we kill this term? Please? No, really, I’m begging. It’s such a wonderfully misleading mix of drama (Toxic…poisonous…a cloud over a suburb that kills small children and the elderly) and sideways passive voice let ‘em all off the hook crap. It sounds like there’s something inherently wrong with the asset. “See that house over yonder, Clem? Fucker’s toxic.” Let’s call these things what they are: bad loans; bad investments; bad choices. Toxic assets makes it sounds like some unsuspecting friendly neighborhood banker gave someone a loan for a commercial building and it turned out to be riddled with asbestos. It wasn’t. Only thing wrong with the building is that there were too goddamn many buildings and not enough people to put in ‘em. Bad. Fucking. Loan. Which changes the image in one’s head to smugly arrogant 30 something Manhattan investment banker buying up a bunch of loan packages he didn’t really understand, making a few million a year, and then looking kinda confused and as dumb as he actually is when it all crashed down around his ears.

Nationalization: Oh, sweet Jesus. The Paper of Record ran an article today with the headline “Rescue of Banks Hints at Nationalization”. Fuck me. Just fuck me now. No. It does not hint at nationalization. The government taking a 6% ownership stake in Bank of America in exchange for somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 Billion is not nationalization. It’s a bailout of a bunch of fuckups. In exchange for bailing out a bunch of fuckups who put the entire national economy at risk through their poor choices, the government, like any owner, makes a few demands. That’s not nationalization. Nationalization would be the government taking over the bank, all of it, with little or no compensation to the shareholders, and running the damn thing. There is no “hint” of nationalization in this. But…they found some bonehead banking analyst who said…

“We are down a path that this country has not seen since Andrew Jackson shut down the Second National Bank of the United States,” said Gerard Cassidy, a banking analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “We are going to go back to a time when the government controlled the banking system.”

Um…no. We’re going to nothing like that. We’re going to an era where the government is bailing out jackasses like Gerard (hey, Gerry…did you see this recession/depression coming? I just combed through some of your analyst reports and it appears you thought shit was doing just fine…so forgive me if I think I don’t need to pay attention to you ’cause you’re kinda dumb) and taking a radically undervalued ownership stake just so jackasses like Gerard can’t pull all of us down the tubes with them. Ain’t nothing being nationalized up in here. What’s happening is the government is taking on the risks that the financial institutions shouldn’t have taken on in the first place. The nationalization talk is a way of subtly applying political pressure in the form of “don’t start making demands in exchange for your ownership stake” that would result in a giveaway to these institutions with no limits on what they can do with it or how they can operate…no other major shareholder would accept those kind of limitations. The government shouldn’t.

Other Passive Voice Abominations: The one that’s up my ass today is referring to financial institutions that talk about large banks that cannot function as “the sinking economy erodes their capital”. Again…passive voice bullshit. It’s like the economy is sinking on its own…as if some weird form of gravity heretofore unknown to us has grabbed hold of the economy and is pulling down into quicksand. The sinking economy that is eroding their capital is entirely of their own making. Take away the housing and commercial property bubbles, the easy credit, the credit to people who shouldn’t have been given credit, the utter lack of fiscal responsibility, the buying and selling of debt instruments that the buyers and sellers didn’t understand, the huge upswing in risk profiles of these institutions and the greed of executives and shareholders that looked the other way, and you don’t have a fucking sinking economy.

Thank you for letting me vent.

You knew at some point, some Republican airhead would decide they needed to get on Fox News by stoking the outrage over their “disenfranchised votes” due to the alleged (but not proven nor even supported by bad evidence) double counting in the Minnesota Senatorial race.

Not wanting to let some good manufactured outrage go to waste, that’s just what some dimwits are doing in St. Paul. Money quote…

Though the group acknowledged that it had few concrete examples of actual double-counting, its attorney said he believes there “could be hundreds” of double-counted votes. At a late-morning news conference, the group said it would launch a website in hopes of getting other Minnesotans to join them. “My vote was disenfranchised” because of the double-counting, said Scott Walker, a Republican activist from St. Paul. “I am furious about that.”

It is truly heartening to me that the same bullshit tactics that cost Republicans the last two election cycles are still enthusiastically employed by those who have yet to come to grips with the fact that it ain’t 2003 anymore. My liberal brethren…do not get pissed about this stuff. Encourage it. ‘Cause 2010 is just around the corner and the dumber these guys make themselves look the better it will be for us.

The French government seems to be worried that there is a new generation of radical lefties emerging:

The French government fears a wave of extreme left-wing terrorism this year with the possible sabotage of key infrastructure, kidnappings of major business figures or even bomb attacks.

Secret French government reports, seen by the Observer, describe an “elevated threat” from an “international European network … with a strong presence in France” after the radicalisation of “a new generation of activists” in recent years. Senior analysts and experts linked to the government have drawn parallels with the Action Directe group, which carried out 50 or more attacks in the early 1980s. Others cite the example of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Some, however, think that the activities of those groups are exaggerated for political reasons. Reasons voiced in the article by the father of one of the arrested:

“They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs and to demonstrate against the government,” said Gérard Coupat, father of the alleged ringleader of the Tarnac group [village in central France where eight members of a commune had been arrested for sabotaging high-speed TGV railway lines and "associating with wrongdoers with terrorist aims." - Ed.].

“The government is keeping my son in prison because a man of the left with the courage to demonstrate is the last thing they want now, with the economic situation getting worse and worse. Nothing like this has happened in France since the war. It is very serious.”

Author and researcher Christophe Bourseiller told the Observer the threat was being exaggerated. “Yes, there is a certain renewed level of agitation, but there is a huge difference between deliberately slowing down a few trains without injuring anyone and something like the Madrid bomb blasts,” he said. “The Ministry of the Interior has made it look like the Tarnac arrests halted a serious campaign of violence with a huge, huge media operation.”