Not as sick as the economy...

But the polls are lookin' good!
I gotta say, checking out fivethirtyeight first thing in the morning has done wonders for my mood.

So on this gorgeous New England, autumn Friday, I am comfortably writing my first entry in bed. With a snazzy laptop and despite an awful cold, I couldn't neglect the blog any longer.

Reading the New Yorker's excellently concise if unbalanced (for the sake of brevity) endorsement of Barack Obama for prez, I was reminded once again that he spoke last March about stuff. Searching for a speech Obama gave in New York in March 2008 results in articles from papers in New York reporting on the famous (which I believe is a good thing) race speech he gave in Philly. Search deeper, and there is the speech given a few weeks later on the economy. I watched it this morning, and am now conflicted both with a 'na na na na na na' third grader's response and the disappointment one feels when faced with prescience like this. Here's an excerpt via the campaign website:

[T]he American economy does not stand still, and neither should the rules that govern it. The evolution of industries often warrants regulatory reform - to foster competition, lower prices, or replace outdated oversight structures. Old institutions cannot adequately oversee new practices. Old rules may not fit the roads where our economy is leading. There were good arguments for changing the rules of the road in the 1990s. Our economy was undergoing a fundamental shift, carried along by the swift currents of technological change and globalization. For the sake of our common prosperity, we needed to adapt to keep markets competitive and fair.

Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one - aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.

Deregulation of the telecommunications sector, for example, fostered competition but also contributed to massive over-investment. Partial deregulation of the electricity sector enabled market manipulation. Companies like Enron and WorldCom took advantage of the new regulatory environment to push the envelope, pump up earnings, disguise losses and otherwise engage in accounting fraud to make their profits look better - a practice that led investors to question the balance sheet of all companies, and severely damaged public trust in capital markets. This was not the invisible hand at work. Instead, it was the hand of industry lobbyists tilting the playing field in Washington, an accounting industry that had developed powerful conflicts of interest, and a financial sector that fueled over-investment.

A decade later, we have deregulated the financial services sector, and we face another crisis. A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business has changed. But by the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.

Since then, we have overseen 21st century innovation - including the aggressive introduction of new and complex financial instruments like hedge funds and non-bank financial companies - with outdated 20th century regulatory tools. New conflicts of interest recalled the worst excesses of the past - like the outrageous news that we learned just yesterday of KPMG allowing a lender to report profits instead of losses, so that both parties could make a quick buck. Not surprisingly, the regulatory environment failed to keep pace. When subprime mortgage lending took a reckless and unsustainable turn, a patchwork of regulators were unable or unwilling to protect the American people.

The policies of the Bush Administration threw the economy further out of balance. Tax cuts without end for the wealthiest Americans. A trillion dollar war in Iraq that didn't need to be fought, paid for with deficit spending and borrowing from foreign creditors like China. A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting - coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement - allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long term consequences. The American economy was bound to suffer a painful correction, and policymakers found themselves with fewer resources to deal with the consequences.

That's just five minutes of the half-hour speech. Oh, and if you haven't yet, why not go on and watch his speech on education.

So it would appear, as the polls are favoring the Obama-Biden ticket, and the press, anxious to make a living, follow that lead, there is room for hope. That's not to say that my generation isn't sick with worry about all these old white guys talking about taking your money out of the stock market. My generation, er, peer group, doesn't have any money in the stock market, but we want to some day, and also would like to believe that we can someday move out of our parents' house. To someday, thanking the American Dream, put our parents into assisted living. But perhaps the economy, despite the crises, is salvageable. Perhaps the Bush era can be buried along with tax breaks for the wealthy, interventionist overspending overseas, lackluster incentives for renewable and hybrid energy, while regulation rises from an early grave and the socialism we know and love can reinvigorate our schools and repave our roads. And we won't have to wear barrels held up with suspenders for long. (*big inhale*)

Comics curmudgeon has a fantastically witty cartoon guide to our great New Depression on wonkette.
A Children's Treasury of Poverty Iconography

Also thanks to my new fav site, the so-called classy conservative, Christopher Buckley, son of William F, and author of "Thank You for Smoking," has written that he'll be voting Obama. Not on his family periodical, the National Review's backpage, due to the reaction of readers (12,000 of them, he asserts) to Kathleen Parker's icky, but still timely denouncement of Palin, he writes at a fresh new blog, "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama". Which is funny, because he seems assured that his readers, or at least those that share his party affiliation, are scary, and should not be upset, like a great vile mob of "gut" reactionaries. As wonkette writes, "mid-20th Century conservative intellectualism... is 100% dead forever now." Huzzah!

*****

Remember Bush's urge to push weight against the Paulson plan, foreshadowing "financial panic" and a "distressing scenario," because fear-mongering never fails?! Well thank goodness a plan passed, because I guess the $700 bil already worked! Nothing to see here! Please move along! Bush today urged Main St Americans like me and you to resist fear, because all this bad stuff that's happening on Wall St is because of uncertainty and fear. And that's no place for sissy behavior. How irrational! Not only is there nothing to worry about anymore, because the government has the tools to fix the problem (I love it when his analogies reference things I understand like tools and shopping rather than illuminating what's actually going on down there in the Executive Bunker of Silence and Secrecy), but everything will go back to normal "swiftly."

And that crafty still-president reminds me that the wool has been over my eyes for some weeks. Remember all those other countries deserving the world's immediate attention? Yeah, me too.

Worldly Roll-Call:
Zimbabwe: Despite power-sharing agreement, leaders' dialogue leaves a lot to be desired.
Iraq: McClatchy covers daily violence.
Thailand is a regular shitstorm.
India: The nucear deal with America is featured in an interesting analysis at BBC, highlighting the spread of this odd idea- that nuclear energy is totally clean. I have to say, McCain's idea to build, like, another nuclear reactor for every state, brought the question to mind: does NASA get enough funding to send nuclear waste to the moon? Where are we going to select 4 more Yucca Mountins? The Times piece brings up something rather predictable: subsidies, tax credits, and pork.

Desperately trying to bring this behemoth of a thing full-circle, I present you with Laura Rozen's look into how lobbyists tie the most interesting people together! Well, one lobbyist in particular.

Enjoy your long weekend everyone.