October 2008 archive

Increasingly Desperate: The McCain Campaign

Will Commit Increasingly Stupid Acts

Believing It Will Lead To Victory

Failure Awaits Them  

Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds

 

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

Published: October 4, 2008  

The turmoil on Wall Street and the weakening economy are changing the contours of the presidential campaign map, giving new force to Senator Barack Obama’s ambitious strategy to make incursions into Republican territory, while leading Senator John McCain to scale back his efforts to capture Democratic states.

Mr. Obama has what both sides describe as serious efforts under way in at least nine states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including some that neither side thought would be on the table this close to Election Day.

Europe calls for global summit on bank crisis

 

Toby Helm in Paris

The Observer, Sunday October 5 2008

Gordon Brown and other European Union leaders called last night for a global economic summit to ‘rebuild the world’s financial system’ as they held emergency talks on how to prevent a repeat of the current international credit crisis.

At a hastily convened meeting in Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the heads of the EU’s four biggest economies – Germany, France, the UK and Italy – were united on the need to call all leading economic nations together to create ‘a new financial world just as Bretton Woods did 60 years ago’.

USA

No rescue in sight for what ails economy

 Even if the financial bailout works, the economy faces troubles too pervasive and entrenched to be solved any time soon, analysts say.

By Peter G. Gosselin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — While Americans have spent the last month transfixed by the spectacle of one financial giant after another crashing to the ground, the rest of the U.S. economy has been sinking in the muck.

By now, the process is so far advanced that, even after passage of the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial rescue plan Friday, the nation’s economic options span the unappealing gamut from bad to worse.”The wheels seem to be coming off the economy right now,” said Brian P. Sack, vice president of the respected forecasting firm of Macroeconomic Advisers. “It’s hard to see how we avoid a recession, and it could prove a tough one to climb out of.”

My oldest son and his fiancee came down for a visit, so we took them on a winery-crawl through what’s called the “Yadkin Valley Wine Region”, an area in the heart of North Carolina with a lot of up-and-coming wineries. We must have drove over 200 miles on various back roads finding our way to various wineries. On hundreds of lawns, we saw McCain/Palin lawn signs. Hundreds. Nowhere on any of these back roads did we see  a single bit of Obama signage. Not a single Obama sign or bumper sticker to be seen. I made some crack about “southern crackers”, but my son said “No, we were driving from Philly to Harrisburg the other week and we took the scenic route, and that’s all we saw up there too.”

And this  got me to wondering. We think North vs South; old vs young; white vs black; progressive vs traditional. Maybe it all boils to to something as simple as: urban vs rural. Maybe this  is a battle of rural values vs urban values, a battle of the utter and inflexible resistance to change vs an environment where change is embraced because it is the rule, rather than the exception. Maybe it’s as simple as: rural people want things to stay exactly the way they were for their parents and grandparents, while urban people  have seen so much change that they crave it compulsively.

Just a brief, caffeine-fueled Sunday morning reverie.

Original article, titled Slumps and struggle and subheaded The writings of Leon Trotsky shed light on the complicated relationship between booms, slumps and class struggle, writes John Rees, by John Rees via Socialist Worker (UK):

George Bush’s apocalyptic televised address in the US last week will have signalled the seriousness of this economic crisis – even to those not already aware of it.

The numbers that are thrown around are so mind-boggling that they are mind-numbing. The total amount of Credit Default Swap (CDS) obligations outstanding, according to the Bank of International Settlement, was 57 trillion US$ in December 2007 (pdf).

That is roughly Four Times the size of the US GDP.

These are the things that Warren Buffet called a “time bomb”.

What are they? Well, suppose that we are watching a little old lady crossing a street, and want to take out a life insurance policy that pays if she gets clobbered by traffic. Unless she is close family, or she is a business partner, we can’t do that … we have no insurable interest.

But if we were watching a company, and wanted to buy a contract that pays off if the company can’t pay on its bonds, we could. We’d buy a CDS.

Here are a few more pictures…..

Water show outside of the Bellagio. Oh. Even though I wasn’t all that jacked up about Vegas if anybody wants to take me away for the weekend at the Bellagio, I will not turn you down.

Observant folks will note the giant “Donny and Marie” sign in the background. In a separate show the actual “Osmond Brothers” are playing.

I posted a diary yesterday on the bailout for billionaires, which I adamantly oppose for reasons laid out in that diary.  I was thoroughly pissed when I wrote it and some of my rhetoric became a bit heated (as my rhetoric sometimes will), and my meaning was misconstrued by some who read the piece.  This is an effort to clarify.