A Blog Named Sue

The Mel Cooley Index for Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, "Heck, by that standard Mitch Albom should be president."

A well known drag

I'm sitting here wracking my brains trying to figure out when Rudy Giuliani became such a slack bastard. Don't get me wrong - I've considered the man and his policies despicable since his time as mayor of New York City and the intervening years have not mellowed my opinion. Still, there at least seemed to be some fire in his belly, some vigor and drive. Granted, it was drive fueled by naked ambition and raw narcissism but it was drive nonetheless.

This lingering reputation as a hustler and street figher seems to be the main reason why pundits think his decision to abandon his run for governor of New York must be because he's set his sights higher. I'm not convinced. Even before Bernard Kerik's conviction, the rumor here in New York was that Rudy had lost interest in running for governor because he didn't want to deal with the state's wildly dysfunctional legistlature and rapidly deteriorating budget crisis.  (That link is to an article in the New York Post, by the way, an outlet that under normal circumstances Giuliani couldrely on for a thorough tongue bath.) Rudy's no fool; he can see what dealing with California's unfolding disaster has done to Arnold Schwarzenegger's political future. But New York City was in pretty tough shape when Giuliani was first elected mayor, and he didn't seem to be cowed by that challenge.

It's possible that years of highly-paid political consulting work and accountability-free media appearances have softened the old boy up - or maybe be was never the pit bull the media makes him out to be. If he were to run for governor of New York he'd most likely be running against Andrew Cuomo, whose brand-name in New York is at least as strong as Giuliani's - and he also enjoys a pugilist's reputation. Giuliani might very well beat Cuomo but it would be a bloodbath. Kirsten Gillibrand is a much softer target. Charles Schumer, and old-school power-broker if there ever was one, is said to be educating her in the ways of the Senate and grooming her as a protege, but she hasn't yet made much of a name for herself in Washington. She's someone he could conceivably beat with name recognition alone.

Maybe Giuliani's always been about hitting the soft target. New York City's crime rate - Giulani's signature issue - was already dropping at the end of David Dinkins' term as mayor, but by that point Dinkins was remarkably unpopular and had a reputation as an ineffectual leader. In other words, he was an easy target for a tough talking media darling.

If he does decide to take on Gillibrand, even that election won't be the cakewalk for Giuliani, despite Fox New's inevitable attempts to tell you otherwise. It's worth remembering that Rudy came in a distant fourth in the 2008 New York presidential primary - pretty unimpressive for the hometown hero! Also, New York City voters recently awarded a third term to Michael Bloomberg even though he trampled the city's popular term limits law. Giuliani's suggestion that his term be extended in the wake of 9/11 was greeted with a resounding, "Um ... no, thanks." He's simply not a popular guy. On the other hand, if does decide to run for Senate, at least I'll have an excuse to revive this graphic:

 

The Mel Cooley Index for Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Today, Mel Cooley is hoping that all of these people were also opposed to holding the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, too - since it was such a juicy target for terrorists.

What is it good for (part II)

So, a Chinese news agency is saying that a French news outlet told them that the RAND Corporation is lobbying the Pentagon to start another war in order to bring the US out of the current, severe economic downturn. Obviously, the provenance of this story is dubious and it should be treated the same credibility as all those rumors going around saying that I've been cast as the next Doctor Who. 

Still, I'm linking to the debunking above because the author makes some interesting points, especially regarding the idea that war is the ideal economic stimulus. (Really, by that reasoning, with two bloody misadventures going on right now we should be living in a new Gilded Age.) The author quotes an economist who tells him that war, in fact, always causes a recession, as the long conflict becomes a drag on the economy. Slipping on my "I'm-not-an-economist-but-I-play-one-in-my-rich-fantasy-life" hat, I'm not sure I agree with that. The current recession was not caused by our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was caused by the entire financial market losing its collective mind at the same time. Iraq and Afghanistan are simply not large enough conflicts to engulf the entire culture or require enough spending to turn the economy around. (They do, however, tie up enough resources to hamper efforts to end the recession.) The same could be said for the recession following the first invasion of Iraq. There were mild recessions after World War II and the Korean War as industrial production was scaled back in the aftermath of the crisis. 

So, taking the conservative mantra that "the New Deal failed and World War II ended the Depression" at face value, and comparing it to the negligible economic "benefits" gained from our recent and current overseas conflicts, we can see that we don't just need a war to turn things around, we need a really, really big war, a global conflict. I sure as hell hope that no one at any think tank in Washington is lobbying for that, but I don't put anything past these people anymore. 

Still, in light of all this, I think it's worth restating the point that I made here, that a war, in broad terms, is basically a massive government spending program of the type that deficit hawks generally decry. As the administration prepares a jobs bill, there is going to be all manner of huffing and puffing from the deficit hawks about not saddling our children with a huge national debt - pretty much the same blather they blathered during the debate over the stimulus package. Sure, we won't saddle our children with a huge national debt - we'll just saddle them with the smoking ruins of a once proud nation instead. This is a real crisis - don't let any knuckleheaded tea bagger tell you otherwise. We're the most grotesquely wealthy nation in the world and we're having a hunger crisis, for God's sake. By the most narrow measure of unemployment, there are nearly 20,000,000 people out of work. 

The best part about approaching a new jobs bill and stimulus package as war spending? There's no actual war! No one has to die. With a massive number of infrastructure projects and a new energy grid to build as well, there doesn't have to be a post-war "recession" for a long time to come, either.

If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name

Well, if we've learned nothing else from l'affaire Dobbs it's that CNN is, at least, still capable of embarrassment, unlike certain other cable news networks. John Stewart pretty much single-handedly killed Crossfire and Robert Novak was (eventually) shown the door for his role in burning Valerie Plame's cover and cursing at James Carville on the air. What does this say about CNN? I have no idea. Novak wound up on Fox, Glenn Beck is another CNN veteran who has found his audience on Fox, and I'll wager that Dobbs ends up there as well. CNN is kind of like Fox's farm system now - they watch for the CNN talent who are clearly too batshit to participate in rational discourse, snatch them up and give them multimillion dollar contracts.

And let's not kid ourselves - Dobbs would be a perfect fit for Fox. All the local papers here in New York have described Dobbs as a "hardliner" on illegal immigration, and speculated as to whether or not that had something to do with his departure from the most trusted name in news. But let's be clear: saying that illegal immigrants are going to cause an epidemic of leprosy in the United States is not a hardline position, it is a batshit position. And whether or not pressure from media watchdog groups, Hispanic advocacy groups, and left-leaning bloggers played any part in Dobbs departure, it's probably in Dobbs best interest to claim that it did: playing the martyr card seems to be working for Carrie Prejean, and Dobbs is at least somewhat more credible than Prejean. Personally, I have things that I'd rather brag about than getting Lou Dobbs fired.

For every job, so many men, so many men no one needs

Still caught up in the hustle (with virtually no flow to speak of), but on the other hand, at least I'm working.

In the media, unemployment is like the deficit - a vague, poorly defined number that pundits kick about because it's a number, and therefore useful as a benchmark or indicator of something equally vague and poorly defined. Of course, to economists and hopefully to policy-makers unemployment isn't poorly defined at all. But when was the last time you heard anyone on the teevee break down exactly what the number meant and how the BLS arrived at it?

Allow me to put a human face or two on the statistic: in the United States, a nation of 304,059,724 people, an unemployment rate of 10.2% means there are approximately 31,000,000 people looking for work. That's about half the population of the United Kingdom and roughly equal to the population of Iraq. The broadest measure of unemployment, U6, is 17.6%, which translates to nearly 54,000,000 people looking for work.

Those are brutal numbers. Keep them in mind over the next few weeks as pundits kick the unemployment number around in order to score political points.

(Stats via the Crack Den)

EDIT/UPDATE: Culture of Truth has corrected my math; I was calculating my numbers out of the total US population rather than the working adult population. Stupid. That's what I get for ciphering while I'm at work. The proper number of unemployed comes out to around 15,700,000 - still a staggering number, nearly twice the population of New York City.  Using the U6 measurement there are nearly 28,000,000 out of work. Still a horrendous number, and it sounds a lot worse than "ten percent."

Blips

Too busy, once again, with personal/business/rich fantasy life to blog "for real," but in the meantime, here are a few items that I'd like to share:

Um, Jackson? Some us knew a long time ago that the Iranian protestors weren't necessarily pro-America. See, we actually read their party platform.

Also, this ad for a local pawn shop, which features Uncle Sam with a wad of cash in one hand and a fist full of other people's bling in the other, is really kind of awesome:

A futile gesture on a Thursday morning

This is probably pointless, but I'm going to try anyway: before everyone from Glenn Beck to Jim Cramer to your office wingnut (every office has one, and you all know who I'm talking about even though I've never met you) freaks the fuck out over this:

Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration slammed Wall Street by ordering pay cuts of an average of 50 percent and caps on benefits for top executives at companies owing the government billions of dollars from taxpayer-funded bailouts.

... please remember this: we're talking about a move that affects a grand total of 25 people. That's not some number I pulled out of the ethers for hyperbole's sake. It affects a grand total of 25 people. 25 people who damn near managed sink the planet's economy. You don't get a raise for that unless you work for the villain in a James Bond movie. And this is not government over-reach, either: after the bailout, the government pretty much owns these companies, and their bonuses are pretty much being paid with our tax dollars.

Now, if you do decide to freak the fuck out over this, you can't ever again think it's OK for someone who buys a company to come in and fire half the workers and cut the remaining workers' salaries. Never again. You're a socialist now, fighting exploitative management on behalf of labor. Welcome to the glorious struggle, comrade.

Like I said, a futile gesture. But that's what the Internet is for.

SAY HI TO MOM - FROM JAIL

Ah-heh. Ah-heh-heh.

[chuckle]

[snort]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

What is it good for?

My older daughter is studying the Great Depression in her history class. She's in fourth grade, so obviously she and her class are only getting a cursory treatment of the period.  Her study materials (as you can see here) generally state that Roosevelt's New Deal programs helped alleviate the Depression, although "some say" the Depression didn't really end until the United States entered World War II and industrial production ramped up to meet the country's military needs.

I'm not an economist so I have nothing to add to that debate; it's been going on for years and it's a conservative mantra that the New Deal failed and it was World War II that ended the Great Depression. I'm reminded of Paul Krugman's assertions that the Roosevelt's stimulus wasn't big enough to end the Depression, although he adds that the package wasn't nearly as big as Roosevelt wanted because he ran into fierce political opposition. Krugman makes this point because he believes that we need a much bigger stimulus package than we currently have, although he doubts that will be possible due to the opposition President Obama encountered to the first stimulus package. Krugman concisely summarizes his positions in the video interview posted here.

Getting back to the conservative belief that the New Deal failed and that World War II ended the Depression: They insist on this point because they believe that government spending is ineffective at providing economic stimulus. But, to paint World War II in the broadest possible way with the crudest possible brush, what was it besides a massive government spending program*? They make it sound like the war was some beneficent angel that appeared in our hour of need to render unto us a boon. But someone had to pay for all those tanks, planes, jeeps and liberty ships, and it wasn't the private sector. That was all government money. The people building them might not have been government employees but they might as well have been.

I've written before about the conservative movement's belief that any government spending is considered wasteful unless it's spending on the military. I don't think this will change any time soon. But it might be helpful to appeal to relatively sane majority of the population by framing any future stimulus package and even health care reform as "war" spending. The United States was in grave mortal peril during World War II. I believe it is in grave mortal peril again, though not because of any outside enemy but rather due to our crumbling infrastructure, outdated energy policies, shortsighted economic policies and a litany of other hazards. We face not the imminent threat of military conquest but instead the chronic threat of slow rot. I think it's worth spending a few bucks to turn that around.

(*Of course, I believe World War II was much more than a government spending program. Anyone who knows me or is familiar with this site knows how I feel about war and how it wastes lives and blasts dreams. If you're not, feel free to poke around the site and see for yourself.)