Sunday, May 10, 2009
I thought a lot about it, and I realized that I'm not ready for the commitment to a weekly blog. I feel strongly about many issues, if asked I could probably give a decent answer, but things that inspire me to write do not occur often enough for a post every 7 days. If something changes, then there will be a post, and hopefully one day I'll be a consistent blogger but until then, if you want to talk politics, music, life, philosophy, food, whatever, I'll be here. Thanks-Ben
Monday, April 20, 2009
Something to ponder while high today
Happy 4/20 everybody, go and do something stupid. Enjoy yourselves, but don't get caught! You wouldn't want your rights stripped away from you as you get driven down to the station because you were acting suspicious or ordered one taco too many across from a cop who's being eyeing you because you smelled too dank.
Just have good clean fun under the influence today. Maybe next year we can celebrate with decriminalized weed. Maybe in two years we can celebrate with legalized weed. Maybe in three years an eighteen year old can walk into a liquor store, buy a cube of silver bullets and a prerolled blunt. Maybe in four years cats will grow on trees. Just keep in mind this may be one of the last years of a greater police presence on 4/20.
But this post isn't going to about marijuana. No, this post is about freedom and our apparent lack of it. The Democracy Index, a global ranking system that rates how well a country does in the act of democracy based on these five areas: "electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture." The US ranks 18th, just above the Czech Republic, a former Soviet satellite and below Japan where totalitarianism reigned until 1945.
Why are we so low on this list of freedom? We still fall into a top spot very well, yet we're losing to places that historically had always been beneath the US on terms of liberty.
We're lower on this list:
1. Because Americans expect help from the federal government and when Big Brother steps too close, citizens retreat to the state government, demanding congressman and governors stand up for them.
2. Because the War on Drugs has been a colossal failure resulting in upheaval in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru to name a few.
3. Because despite having the freedom to buy a semi automatic at Walmart, we keep killing each other to get on TV.
4. Because the government finds secret internment easier than the highly blocked up American justice system.
5. Because we are built on traditional, "moral" values that do not always stack up to what is freedom for anyone gay, female, non-white, non-Christian, non-able bodied, or poor.
6. Because the drinking age is too high.
7. Because we give environment-damaging companies the go-ahead to destroy wildlife, evict local tenants, and waste away valuable resources.
8. Because we allow corporations to become, "too big to fail."
There are more reasons, but I don't want to ruin your day. So get high, watch a movie, throw a frisbee, jam out, get some munchies, and feel good on this most holy of stoner holy-days. Tomorrow we gotta start fixing our country
Just have good clean fun under the influence today. Maybe next year we can celebrate with decriminalized weed. Maybe in two years we can celebrate with legalized weed. Maybe in three years an eighteen year old can walk into a liquor store, buy a cube of silver bullets and a prerolled blunt. Maybe in four years cats will grow on trees. Just keep in mind this may be one of the last years of a greater police presence on 4/20.
But this post isn't going to about marijuana. No, this post is about freedom and our apparent lack of it. The Democracy Index, a global ranking system that rates how well a country does in the act of democracy based on these five areas: "electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture." The US ranks 18th, just above the Czech Republic, a former Soviet satellite and below Japan where totalitarianism reigned until 1945.
Why are we so low on this list of freedom? We still fall into a top spot very well, yet we're losing to places that historically had always been beneath the US on terms of liberty.
We're lower on this list:
1. Because Americans expect help from the federal government and when Big Brother steps too close, citizens retreat to the state government, demanding congressman and governors stand up for them.
2. Because the War on Drugs has been a colossal failure resulting in upheaval in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru to name a few.
3. Because despite having the freedom to buy a semi automatic at Walmart, we keep killing each other to get on TV.
4. Because the government finds secret internment easier than the highly blocked up American justice system.
5. Because we are built on traditional, "moral" values that do not always stack up to what is freedom for anyone gay, female, non-white, non-Christian, non-able bodied, or poor.
6. Because the drinking age is too high.
7. Because we give environment-damaging companies the go-ahead to destroy wildlife, evict local tenants, and waste away valuable resources.
8. Because we allow corporations to become, "too big to fail."
There are more reasons, but I don't want to ruin your day. So get high, watch a movie, throw a frisbee, jam out, get some munchies, and feel good on this most holy of stoner holy-days. Tomorrow we gotta start fixing our country
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Let's All Go Teabagging!!!
John Oliver, the Daily Show correspondent said it best, "Everyone needs to chill the fuck out!"
Today is April 15th, tax day, everyones favorite right after the National Hangover Days (January 1st, July 5th, and the day after your birthday). Interestingly, this year features a 21st century variation on the 18th century Boston Tea Party with conservative activists around the country demonstrating their disapproval with the Obama tax code changes, namely a tax increase for the 5% of top US citizens (yet those people aren't teabagging). TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already by the way. The demonstrators are picketing and dumping teabags in the parks they are in all around the country (it's illegal to dump in the water, what do you think this is? 1773?) and speaking out against the new taxes from the Obama administration. Originally started by a Ron Paul-inspired "paleoconservative" libertarian campaign who rented a blimp with his face on it to throw tea out the windows, it was effectively hijacked by Fox News anchors who are pretending they came up with the idea, angering the paleos and making an expression of free speech laughable with their ignorant corruption
What's so unbelievable about this whole thing is just 1 day after the Homeland Security report warned of, "right wing extremists" the people getting on the news while speaking out against Obama are rather extreme, one even calling for, "book burnings" and "if you have children in high school or college, pull them out!" First of all, don't put crazy people on TV unless they can vocalize their thoughts into an active criticism of US policy. If you have a bunch of nutty people spewing xenophobic and Conspiracy theorists freaking out over how, "they" are all against "us," you're movement is going to half be written off as actual far right secessionists/revolutionists or covered extensively supported by an entire TV network representing an entire section of a mainstream political party.
Rachel Maddow pointed out that while these protests occur every year by civil disobedients and extreme political groups, this is the first year that one of the main parties (Republican obviously) have played a major role in the events. Even Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, basically refered to secession as an option on the table should, "things continue on this path." It is going to take a few weeks to see how far the right wants to go with these demonstrations. By protesting new taxes despite 95% of Americans being eligible for a cut and demanding the repeal of the "death tax" or income tax, these people will hope for starting a rebound in the popularity of conservative politics by the 2010 elections.
What pisses me off is that literally no one on TV was protesting the wars, the two wars that cost 1 BILLION DOLLARS PER DAY just to run and that at a minimum will not end until 2011. The reason the deficit Obama is running is $3 trillion over the next few years is because unlike his predecessor, he isn't hiding the price of war from us. War is the biggest detterent of all! We are in a horrific debt not just because of poor Wall Street management, but because Iraq and Afghanistan are so fucking expensive. If you don't like taxes, fine, I don't either. But if you still support the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the extent both Obama and Bush do, one of which we won and the second of which is an expanding quagmire, then you're bringing down the future generations just as much as any tax/bailout. Suck on that teabag.
Today is April 15th, tax day, everyones favorite right after the National Hangover Days (January 1st, July 5th, and the day after your birthday). Interestingly, this year features a 21st century variation on the 18th century Boston Tea Party with conservative activists around the country demonstrating their disapproval with the Obama tax code changes, namely a tax increase for the 5% of top US citizens (yet those people aren't teabagging). TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already by the way. The demonstrators are picketing and dumping teabags in the parks they are in all around the country (it's illegal to dump in the water, what do you think this is? 1773?) and speaking out against the new taxes from the Obama administration. Originally started by a Ron Paul-inspired "paleoconservative" libertarian campaign who rented a blimp with his face on it to throw tea out the windows, it was effectively hijacked by Fox News anchors who are pretending they came up with the idea, angering the paleos and making an expression of free speech laughable with their ignorant corruption
What's so unbelievable about this whole thing is just 1 day after the Homeland Security report warned of, "right wing extremists" the people getting on the news while speaking out against Obama are rather extreme, one even calling for, "book burnings" and "if you have children in high school or college, pull them out!" First of all, don't put crazy people on TV unless they can vocalize their thoughts into an active criticism of US policy. If you have a bunch of nutty people spewing xenophobic and Conspiracy theorists freaking out over how, "they" are all against "us," you're movement is going to half be written off as actual far right secessionists/revolutionists or covered extensively supported by an entire TV network representing an entire section of a mainstream political party.
Rachel Maddow pointed out that while these protests occur every year by civil disobedients and extreme political groups, this is the first year that one of the main parties (Republican obviously) have played a major role in the events. Even Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, basically refered to secession as an option on the table should, "things continue on this path." It is going to take a few weeks to see how far the right wants to go with these demonstrations. By protesting new taxes despite 95% of Americans being eligible for a cut and demanding the repeal of the "death tax" or income tax, these people will hope for starting a rebound in the popularity of conservative politics by the 2010 elections.
What pisses me off is that literally no one on TV was protesting the wars, the two wars that cost 1 BILLION DOLLARS PER DAY just to run and that at a minimum will not end until 2011. The reason the deficit Obama is running is $3 trillion over the next few years is because unlike his predecessor, he isn't hiding the price of war from us. War is the biggest detterent of all! We are in a horrific debt not just because of poor Wall Street management, but because Iraq and Afghanistan are so fucking expensive. If you don't like taxes, fine, I don't either. But if you still support the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the extent both Obama and Bush do, one of which we won and the second of which is an expanding quagmire, then you're bringing down the future generations just as much as any tax/bailout. Suck on that teabag.
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Banking Crisis is Over?! Since when?
In response to Douglas A. McIntyre's article :
"More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over" from Time Magazine
McIntyre argues that, " the great banking crisis of 2008 is over" which is in part true. He references the fact that Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup are all recovering from the huge losses in 2008 and expect to do better throughout 2009. All good news to be sure. Financial insurance giants such as these are involved with such a tangled web of securities, equities, mortgages, hedge funds, CDOs, CDSs, and a whole host of ridiculously complex transactions that there is really no way of telling how frozen business would be should they have continued down the path they were on. AIG is only worth $50 billion dollars if it was sold tomorrow, but insures over $300 billion worth of other companies and governments.
The problem lies with the part of McIntyre's article where he notes that the trillion dollars the government has promised to use and threw nearly blindly at the banks is utterly useless now. Henry Paulson admitted that when they started the TARP program last year they, "gave away money so fast NO ONE kept track of it!!!" The American taxpayer is out billions upon billions of dollars, and is now crippled with debt for easily 3-4 generations.
Not only that, but just because the banks are turning around does not mean everything is going to be fine. We have an 8.5% unemployment rate that does not even count those not seeking working and trying to get back to school or have not registered as "unemployed." It does not address the fact that banks are still not lending again leaving new businesses in the dirt and homeowners ("struggling" is putting it lightly) to pay for homes, cars, food, school, and the whole mess of things any normal person has to deal with on a day to day basis!
How in the hell did these banks rebound so quickly? The TARP money could definitely be noted as helpful, but the Obama plans have barely gotten rolling yet. Treasury basically asked the banks and insurance companies for reports on how deeply they had gotten themselves in the earth, and over just a few months a bunch of institutions rebounded! McIntyre writes, "[there is] almost no one with an in-depth knowledge of the credit market tapestry who does not believe that there are hundreds of billions of Confederate dollars being held in the vaults of the major banks." You know what that means? It means that while these finance industries begged Congress for our money, they could just as easily had a plan B, C, and D to fix themselves if government stuck up their noses and sniffed, "screw you!"
Another thing. The key words above are, "almost no one." Treasury guys aren't stupid, but they aren't as corruptingly smart as the guys who figured out how to drag the world into this mess in the first place. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, (see The Obama Deception<--I do not agree with a majority of the views in that film) but the people who were at the very top of the banking food chain really fucked the rest of us with one hell of a good plan. The sheer volume of money that is getting poured like butter over the steaming crab legs of this injustice to Americans is enough to make one cringe, but what do we do now that investigations are showing us that some of these major institutions may have had their own safety nets? It's not a golden parachute, it's a goddam platinum mattress.
The government refuses to bail out the smaller, local banks that millions of Americans have their money in because they "don't affect enough people". They won't bail out automobile companies that actually make tangible products and employ 1/5 of the US workforce because of the companies own incompetence and refusal to change. Yet we hurled billions upon billions at insurance and banking giants who did not divulge any in depth reports on why they got the way they were (their own incompetence, see Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone) did not give any explanations to their problems and just said, "Oh, you wouldn't understand, don't worry about it, we got it, it's cool. Can I have $500 billion please?"
We need more intelligent minds at Treasury working for the American people (not saying they aren't smart/patriots) and less of them going into shadow industries that ruin and lay waste to the world around them. We should not support massive bailouts if the causes of a half-year recession are not addressed (lack of oversight, government communication, hypercapitalism, etc.) and we should not blindly allow our elected officials to be connived into funding the insatiable pigs that are major finance companies. Not everyone is a bad guy, again see Taibbi's article for who is/isn't, but frankly it's a shame to let ourselves be suckered into this calamity
Greed and stupidity got Wall Street and unfortunately all of us into this catastrophe of catastrophes, but the more we find out about how much the insider guys knew about what was going to happen and cashed out while begging for our help, the sooner we can get our money back.
"More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over" from Time Magazine
McIntyre argues that, " the great banking crisis of 2008 is over" which is in part true. He references the fact that Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup are all recovering from the huge losses in 2008 and expect to do better throughout 2009. All good news to be sure. Financial insurance giants such as these are involved with such a tangled web of securities, equities, mortgages, hedge funds, CDOs, CDSs, and a whole host of ridiculously complex transactions that there is really no way of telling how frozen business would be should they have continued down the path they were on. AIG is only worth $50 billion dollars if it was sold tomorrow, but insures over $300 billion worth of other companies and governments.
The problem lies with the part of McIntyre's article where he notes that the trillion dollars the government has promised to use and threw nearly blindly at the banks is utterly useless now. Henry Paulson admitted that when they started the TARP program last year they, "gave away money so fast NO ONE kept track of it!!!" The American taxpayer is out billions upon billions of dollars, and is now crippled with debt for easily 3-4 generations.
Not only that, but just because the banks are turning around does not mean everything is going to be fine. We have an 8.5% unemployment rate that does not even count those not seeking working and trying to get back to school or have not registered as "unemployed." It does not address the fact that banks are still not lending again leaving new businesses in the dirt and homeowners ("struggling" is putting it lightly) to pay for homes, cars, food, school, and the whole mess of things any normal person has to deal with on a day to day basis!
How in the hell did these banks rebound so quickly? The TARP money could definitely be noted as helpful, but the Obama plans have barely gotten rolling yet. Treasury basically asked the banks and insurance companies for reports on how deeply they had gotten themselves in the earth, and over just a few months a bunch of institutions rebounded! McIntyre writes, "[there is] almost no one with an in-depth knowledge of the credit market tapestry who does not believe that there are hundreds of billions of Confederate dollars being held in the vaults of the major banks." You know what that means? It means that while these finance industries begged Congress for our money, they could just as easily had a plan B, C, and D to fix themselves if government stuck up their noses and sniffed, "screw you!"
Another thing. The key words above are, "almost no one." Treasury guys aren't stupid, but they aren't as corruptingly smart as the guys who figured out how to drag the world into this mess in the first place. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, (see The Obama Deception<--I do not agree with a majority of the views in that film) but the people who were at the very top of the banking food chain really fucked the rest of us with one hell of a good plan. The sheer volume of money that is getting poured like butter over the steaming crab legs of this injustice to Americans is enough to make one cringe, but what do we do now that investigations are showing us that some of these major institutions may have had their own safety nets? It's not a golden parachute, it's a goddam platinum mattress.
The government refuses to bail out the smaller, local banks that millions of Americans have their money in because they "don't affect enough people". They won't bail out automobile companies that actually make tangible products and employ 1/5 of the US workforce because of the companies own incompetence and refusal to change. Yet we hurled billions upon billions at insurance and banking giants who did not divulge any in depth reports on why they got the way they were (their own incompetence, see Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone) did not give any explanations to their problems and just said, "Oh, you wouldn't understand, don't worry about it, we got it, it's cool. Can I have $500 billion please?"
We need more intelligent minds at Treasury working for the American people (not saying they aren't smart/patriots) and less of them going into shadow industries that ruin and lay waste to the world around them. We should not support massive bailouts if the causes of a half-year recession are not addressed (lack of oversight, government communication, hypercapitalism, etc.) and we should not blindly allow our elected officials to be connived into funding the insatiable pigs that are major finance companies. Not everyone is a bad guy, again see Taibbi's article for who is/isn't, but frankly it's a shame to let ourselves be suckered into this calamity
Greed and stupidity got Wall Street and unfortunately all of us into this catastrophe of catastrophes, but the more we find out about how much the insider guys knew about what was going to happen and cashed out while begging for our help, the sooner we can get our money back.
Weekly Blog-ins
Hello All,
After some time away, I have decided that I will be updating thebenblog with new pieces every week or so. There have been quite a few things that I would love to share my opinion on, and I am taking the advice of a friend who noted how Facebook Notes are just not as wide a media as a more continuous and genuine digital column.
With that, I promise to put up a new post at least once a week. I am not sure if I will have a specific day of the week for doing so, or a set range of topics, but I can assure you each post will be thoughtful and hopefully not too partisan of a point of view.
Thanks for your continued support!
Ben
After some time away, I have decided that I will be updating thebenblog with new pieces every week or so. There have been quite a few things that I would love to share my opinion on, and I am taking the advice of a friend who noted how Facebook Notes are just not as wide a media as a more continuous and genuine digital column.
With that, I promise to put up a new post at least once a week. I am not sure if I will have a specific day of the week for doing so, or a set range of topics, but I can assure you each post will be thoughtful and hopefully not too partisan of a point of view.
Thanks for your continued support!
Ben
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