And Another Thing . . .

The Nobel Prize is a nod more to world sensibilities who are happy to see the United States again take leadership in the reduction of nuclear weapons, solving the troubles in the MidEast and reinforcing the power of diplomacy over naked force. The Nobel committee cares very little about domestic US politics or the troubles in the US media industry.
The rancid reaction here in America is more of a statement about the growth of the opinion media and the death of the news media.

Yes, it did come as a big surprise that President Barack Obama today was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Last I looked this award was still one of the highest awards a human can receive. While it is unique that a Nobel Prize is awarded to someone so young and so early in his career, Obama's message of international diplomacy must have struck a chord with the award jurists. The group must have been attracted to his message of international disarmament and negotiation across many fronts.
And, you would think that the award would be greeted with cheers among most of the citizens of his home country. Guess again.
Following the announcement of the award today, I made the mistake of reading stories posted by the mostly the mainstream media and actually spent a few minutes watching cable news. Actually I found most of the comments pretty harsh.
Most surprising, I found a hastily written article by the normally doughty Associated Press, mostly summarizing a list of anti-Obama comments they gathered. Frankly, because the piece echoed so many of the conservatives erroneous talking points, I thought the article was manufactured opinion rather than news.
Most of the cable news analysts, save about one, were happy to dump all over it. Fox News spent most of the morning covering a slow-speed car chase in Dallas. (Actually the phrase "cable news network" is a misnomer, they are all more like "cable opinion networks." Producing opinion is cheap, producing news takes time and money.)
News outlets went out of their way to drag down the usual conservative analysts who lambasted Obama for his actions in Iraq, his deliberations over Afghanistan and his negotiations with Iran. While they were trying to make the case he wasn't deserving the award, the right-wingers didn't sound very peace like. One prominent commentator said the Obama only won the prize because he was black.
One of my favorite commentators dismissed the Norwegian prize jury as a bunch of left-wing liberals. I guess that panel has to recruit more guys from Alabama or Texas named Bubba.
There is a chance that many Americans were a bit torqued because some analysts hinted that the award could be a world smack down of George Bush. But I am still betting that the Nobel Prize jurists work at a bit higher plain than cable news networks.

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee, with one exception, voted along party lines to recommend Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. It had been expected that one or two other Republican senators would have voted with the Democrats.
Combined with votes on the national health care proposal, that Republicans in Congress are voting in a block to please their party and fund-raising base -- cranky, old white men, red-necks from the South and talk radio hosts.
Word out of Washington is that Republican congressment and senators are working with the President and Democrats on drafting proposals, but just don't want to get caught out in the open voting for them. They are putting themselves into the weird position of working on legislation, then voting against it.

Before they were morphed and twisted out of shape by cable news networks, the words 'liberal' and 'progressive' were not overlapping concepts. Traditionally progressives were the reformers who wanted to improve conditions for working people through the established political process. These folks had there golden era during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century lead by a corps of social advocates and muckrakers who took on the horrible conditions of anyone who wasn't rich or a capitalist.
Progressive were at odds from the radicals, anarchists and syndicalists who just wanted to literally blow the whole thing up.
Traditional liberals are those who try to get government out of everyone's lives. They want to say and do what they want without governement interference. The folks would be the ones in opposition to the big state type of government.
John Podesta, who headed the transition for Barack Obama and is renovating the concept of progessivism, wrote a book last year call "The Power of Progress" which outlines the differences.
Using these definitions, Podesta describes the Obama Administration as progressive. So far he doesn't appear to be a Liberal.
Take that Rush Limbaugh!

The economy is still nuts, and here is another example. Late last week, much to everyone's, surprise, some of the nation's biggest banks reported profits of all things. And how was this surprise good news greeted on Wall Street today? Financial stocks are getting hammered. The Dow is down 253 points at this writing.
Apparently, either bank executives have the credility of Fox News anchors or the stock market behaves like a four-year-old after heading a handful of Easter candy. I vote for both.
The news of the uptick in bank earnings ran so counter to the conventional wisdom that all weekend journalists and analysts have been bad mouthing the banks' reports. And one thing you can't do in this crazed time is to run counter to conventional wisdom.
In truth, some financial analysts are reporting that bank profits are coming their securities trading desks, a small isolated sector of their banking business and that those numbers might be legit. That sector is show small signs of life. It also appears that many bankers are trying to run as quickly as they can from federal financial assistance, even if they may need it further down the road. They had their fill of populist outrage in Congress. Would they jigger their financial reports to avoid a government bailout? This could get interesting.

The Market Went Up Today! Why!

 

Today, for no obvious reason, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went up 216 points, or about 2.79%. For months now major financial journalists have been following the stock market as one of their leading indicators of the country's economic health. Yeah, right. Using the stock market as economic metric is  on par as using a 13-year-old girl at a Hannah Montana as the leading indicator of the nation's mental health. When you think about it, they act pretty much the same.

Dumb as I want to be, journalists edition: There is a big news flap today coming out of the G-20 meetings in London. Michelle Obama is being criticized for touching Queen Elizabeth when the two met. Apparently the team of journalists shadowing the Obamas don't know much about economics, the banking crisis or international relations, so the erstwhile political reporters are reverting to what they do best: gotcha journalism.
Remember when George W. Bush supposedly set back Ango-American affairs back 200 years by winking at the queen a couple of years ago.

One of biggest downsides of an economy in recession is dramatic growth in the numbers of door-to-door salesmen pedaling weird scams. I have to get a sign.

Tomorrow is the last day of work at the Post-Intelligencer. Much has been written about the demise of daily newspapers, but studies show that readership of serious news has actually increased. Unfortunately, about a decade ago publishers decided to price their high-cost journalism on par with Mandy's Chia Pet Blog.

It must be nice in a time of crisis to have a ready ideological answer you can pull off the shelf. It saves wear and tear on your brain from reading and thinking things through. An economic calamity? Just dial up Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Or better yet listen to Ron Paul.
Trouble is that almost all of the ready answers to the current economic crisis were cooked up in relative financial calm, and right now, truth be told, most professional economists are mystified as to what is going on. Sure they have their pet theories and ideas on how to fix the situation, but most will admit that they haven't seen this kind of thing before.
Previously during downturns, economists and bankers have used layers of tools to correct the financial world. For the last 20-30 years the Monetarists at the Federal Reserve Bank have controlled the flow of money using the federal funds rate. Too much growth, raise interest rates and tighten bank rates, too little drop rates and loosen controls on bank reserves. It always seems to work after a bit.
Guess what? Last year government bankers became alarmed when dropping the federal reserve rates stopped working. Rates are now darn near zero and you can't get much lower than zero. And you can drop the cash reserve requirements of banks any lower without risking the safety of the banking system if one should fail.
Flailing economists are now at the next level: They are dusting off the theories of the dread John Maynard Keynes, the anti-Christ to ideologues of all stripes. In a very short sentence: Keynes believes in aggressive government spending to stimulate the economy. Trouble is that if you start Congress down this path, you can't stop them. Keynsian economics which stared in the 30s and during the war in the 40's, darn near killed the economy in the 70s and 80s.
It starting to look like these are times when it's time to read and analyze and appreciated the wonder of the chaos.

Many Americans are probably asking themselves: "Hey, didn't we just vote George Bush and the Republicans out of office? Why are we now seeing Republican Congressional leaders we hadn't heard from in years all over the television and in the newspapers dictating to Barack Obama how to shape the economic stimulus package like they have real power."
Well, of course, the GOP is in vogue right now because, after their drooling over Obama during the inauguration, TV news and newspapers need to create an opposition to manufacture some tension to gin up ratings and readership. Times are tough in the media business.
But in truth, due to the rules of the Senate, the few remaining Republican Senators have much to say about what the body eventually passes. It's your basic civics.
Also deep down, Republican congressmen know that the vast American electorate is much more moderate than the Democrats think they are. The fact remains that the Democratic majority is still much more liberal the general population.
There is also a related question: Is the American public smart and sophisticated enough to swallow a fair and balanced economic stimulus plan without throwing a collective tantrum over a badly-timed purchase of some bankers corporate jet?

A large slice of the current economic mess can be traced to the financial disaster caused by different kinds of dangerous investment practices on Wall Street. The worst of these is the securitization of various debt obligations including home mortgages.
In a nutshell, driven by the need to make double digit returns, financial propeller-heads purchased shaky debt caused by various bad business decisions, mixed them with a small portion of good debt, then bundled and particalized them throughout the financial system in securities.
The ratings agencies, who had conflicts of interest all over the place, gave these securities top ratings, then banks and investment houses all over the world bought these things, even if they didn’t know what they were. Yep, that sounds dumb.
Just as dumb is what also drove this mess was the really bad decisions made by millions of people. Folks loaded up their credit cards to the max far beyond what they could ever pay at usurious interest rates. They purchased home they couldn’t afford with mortgages that in the end they could never afford. Some of more rational people said were betting that the skyrocketing house prices would just go higher. But I am betting most people just used the extra cash to buy more consumer goods and didn’t think about how two years later they would be underwater.
On top of that, despite the slow decline in general wages, people bought more and more stuff, usually on credit. What were these people thinking?
As looks now, the only way for the U.S. to dig its way out of the mess is to work the problem from both ends – working the banks and getting the mortgage system working again by helping homeowners. It has to be done somehow, but I just can’t get passed bailing out knuckleheads either on Wall Street or in Wal-Mart.

Despite the mystique of the news business, most of the work of daily newspapers is the simple business of meat-and-potatoes journalism - going to meetings, monitoring government, writing stories about people in our community and, on a good day, exposing something that has gone amiss. And all of this needs to be written in a clear, understandable style. On a day-to-day basis it's a fairly simple product.
Readers crave information. We are up to our eyes in uniformed opinion and analysis.
Nationally over the past 50-60 years daily newspaper owners have made fairly hefty profits and have, on the side, been able to fund newsrooms full of professional journalists who are adept at reporting, editing, weighing information and writing quickly and clearly. The downside is that newspaper owners, until the last couple of years, haven't seen the need to adapt their business model to problems that starting emerging as long as 20 years ago. They have let the simple small well display advertisement slip away with out a fight.
It's the business model that has failed, not the journalism model. I don't see how scattered, part-time bloggers on politically loaded websites are going to fill the same information need as newspaper reporters.
As our Seattle daily newspapers devolve, it will be sad to see the loss of simple reporters who work their beats, attend meetings and work the phones.
Democracy will still be healthy. It just will be dumber.