The Global Economy:

Was it really just twenty years ago that American workers were ready to march in the streets because the economy was turning global?

Look at where things have come since then. Vovlo, the super safe care from Sweden, was bought by Ford who is now selling it to China. (See The New York Times story.)

The first Volvo I drove was owned by my good friend Bob, who bought it new in 1970 and put 450,000 miles on the thing. He ended up selling it to a Volvo dealer for about five hundred more than he paid for it. Now, apparently, you can't give them away, at least not in the U. S.

A Story I Don't Even Want to Read:

The New York Times is reporting that Bernnie Madoff's Ponzi scheme cost his investers $21.2 billion. (That's with a "B," folks!) As far as I know, I'm not one of the suckers this crook robbed, but what gets me is that there was that much money floating around, being gambled for the sole purpose of growing larger, when there are so many things that need to be fixed. Madoff's greed and arrogance was matched only by the sum of those who rode along with him.

Public Option Except …:

Senate majority leader Harry Reid has a brilliant idea: put the public option back in the health care bill but let individual states refuse it. This way those southern whites who rule their southern right wing states can continue to deny health care to … you know, (stagy whisper) people they don't like.

President Obama wants you to stay home if you're sick, but your boss won't pay you if you do. He might even fire you! Quick, what do you do? A.) Go to work and sneeze on your boss; B.) stay home and update your résumé; C.) thank your lucky stars because you work for a company that provides sick leave; D.) kick the dog because you foolishly used up your sick leave this summer going to major league baseball games and lying about it.

In California Judge Vaughn R. Walker asked the following question in a gay rights trial about same sex marriage: "The last marriage that I perfomred involved a groom who was 95 and the bride was 83. I did not demand that they prove that they intended to engage in procreative activity. Now, was I missing something?" (See The New York Times story.)

The judge was responding to the argument that marriage should be reserved for those people who wish and are biologically capable of reproducing. My daughter tells me she sees nothing wrong with two men marrying, but she's completely disgusted by the thought of a couple of geezers looking into honey moon accommodations.

Once this gets to the Supreme Court, we can expect Justice Antonin Scalia to inform us about the founding father's intentions: Let's see, George Washington: no kids, slept around a lot; Tom Jefferson: no kids by his wife, but one or more with his slaves. Yeah, we can look to those guys for what to do.

Book Review:

Raymond Carver's brand of story telling is alive and well in Wells Tower's book of stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Sure, you can quibble about minimalism and metaphor, but I was reminded of no one so much as Carver in reading Tower's stories.

The characters are everyday sorts of folks who find themselves in everyday sorts of problems, even when they run away from home and join the circus ("On the Show") or they join a band of marauding Vikings to sack a monastery ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned"). These are folks who are rundown and weary with their lot in life and desperately seeking answers in all the wrong places because these places are the only ones they know to seek answers in.

Maybe my favorite among the nine stories contained in the book is "Retreat," a story about two brothers, one of whom, Matthew, is doomed like Sisyphus to fail after every success. He is our story teller in this piece, and at the end, he manages to make a magnificent shot on a hunting trip with his brother of an moose. The animal will provide him with enough meat for a year. He and his brother and one other character work all afternoon to muscle the animal back to their hunting cabin, where they begin to butcher it, but while Matthew is cooking the three of them some steaks carved from the animal, the other two realize the meat has been spoiled, probably due to it being diseased.

All of that work for nothing, and how does Matthew respond to that. Like a good many other people I've known. But you'll have to read the story to find out.

This review focuses on plot and character, but the real magic in story telling comes from the voice of the narrator. The opening story, "The Brown Coast," beings with

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discmfort in his underpants. He'd come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

Now who wouldn't want to read on after that opening?

While Washington Fiddles, Health Ins. Co.s Gouge Public:

Health insurance premiums are being pushed up at a record pace as the insurance companies strive to make as much money as possible before congress acts to reform the industry. (See The New York Times story.) Small businesses and individuals are being especially hurt by the companies' headlong rush to make as much money off the misery and fears of others in the next quarter as possible.

Never fear, greed is alive and well in the U. S.


On Pigs and People:

Pigs have a lot in common with people. They eat the same food, they get the same diseases, they live close by. And we eat lots of them. The meat is cheap and easy to produce. You can bring a pig to market in six months, and you can raise him in a barn where he never sees the light of day or comes in contact with most of nature. And they're ugly, smelly, and noisy, so most people don't care.

So what does this all add up to? A breeding ground for one of humanities most common fellow travelers—the flu. (See The Washington Post story.)

Book Review:

Placing a CD of a poet reading his work in the back of a book of poems isn't a brand new idea, but it's still one worth noting. Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera, from The University of Arizona Press (2008), contains such a CD, and it adds much to the pleasure of reading the book.

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without bounderies

—Juan Felipe Herrera

One of the challenges to reading any book of poems is trying to determine how the poems should sound. Regardless of what any poet in the past might have said about poetry being the news of the day, poetry does not read like a newspaper column. Voice is paramount.

Of course, not all poets read their work well. Anyone who has heard the recordings of T. S. Eliot reading The Waste Land should recognize this. (I frankly prefer Garrison Keilor's reading myself.) But Herrera, while he may be no Eliot, knows how to read his own work and does a fine job of it. And after listening to the CD, I found the book even more accessible than it already was.

Herrera is the son of migrant workers and was born in California in 1948. He's been publish poetry for nearly forty years in both Spanish and English. As one reviewer notes, a remarkable and important voice in American poetry. (Google for other links to the man and his work.)

Special thanks to The University of Arizona Press for including the CD.

The Public Option:

Why are white voters in red states so opposed to the public option in health care reform? Because they're convinced that the federal government simply takes their tax money and hands it out like candy to people who are … not like them.

Check out what's happening in the "seven-month-old program to help homeowners with little or no equity [to] refinance their mortgages" (Renae Merle, "Refinancing lifeline fails to reach most 'underwater' homeowners" in today's Washington Post). Some 97 percent of such people fail to receive any assistance. Another government program gone astray. Don't fail to notice here that the vast majority of these folks have mortgages on homes that are worth far less than they are worth.

This Day in History:

Forty-seven years ago, President Kennedy initiated his famed air and sea blockade of Fidel Castro's Cuba. The United States had failed, by that point, to assassinate the communist leader of the island, had failed to effectively back a CIA led military coup to over throw him and reestablish a regime more favorable to mob led casinos, prostitution, gambling, and illicit drug sales.

In the meantime, Castro was pandering to his people by establish free education and universal health care. And wrecking his economy by providing the free world with an excuse to buy its sugar elsewhere.

Kennedy's actions begat negotiations with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev for a quid pro quo reduction of nuclear missals. They would pull theirs out of Cuba and the U. S. would take its out of Turkey. Meanwhile Kennedy could look heroic to conservative forces in the U. S. who had been preaching Democratic party leniency on socialists. (Remember the McCarthy witch hunts?)

Oil Price Creeps Higher:

Speculators and a sinking dollar are pushing the price of crude higher as it sold just pennies short of $80 per barrel today.

Overseas, especially in Asia and India, the economy appears to be on a gradual upswing, causing oil speculators to bid up the price in anticipation of a recovery. Meanwhile the dollar continues to fall in value, which would help with American exports if America produced anything to export.

Currently, the one sector of the American economy that is improving is the financial information group, and they don't loan money to people or small businesses, even though they did benefit heavily from the massive bailout. Thus J. P. Morgan is doing quite well, thank you, but no new jobs are being created.

Pluto's Not a Planet so How Many Planets Are There?

Back in 1995, as Bill Clinton was gearing up to run for his second campaign and Bill Gates was about to release his new operating system, the first "exoplanet" was discovered. An exoplanet is a planet that exists outside our solar system. Since then, more than 400 such planets have been discovered in our galaxy, Bill Clinton has gone on to become the Secretary of State's husband, and Bill Gates and company are about to release a new operating system. (See The Washington Post story about "exoplanets." You can Google the two Bills, if you really want to.)

Late Breaking News: Dopers head for 14 states for load of medical stash!

Massive traffic jams were reported in 36 of the fifty U. S. states as millions of sick people raced to the borders of the 14 states where medicinal use of marijuana is legal, now that the fed has stated it will not persecute dopers who do weed so as not to feel badly.

A massive exodus is reportedly taking place out of red states in the south and midwest, being led by an old hippie looking fellow driving a 1962 Pontiac covered in a gray primer coat and bearing the insignia of "The Zigzag Man."

The downer is that the price of a mellow high is likely to follow the rules of supply and demand; that is, a dime bag ain't what it used to be.

In other news: President Obama has announced that he'll be closely watching this latest turn of events. If all works well, he'll consider legalizing marijuana in Iran if they don't chill out over this nuclear business.

An Apology: The New York Times has stated that it will layoff 100 people in its newsroom. I'd like to express my apologies here as one of the bloggers who undoubtedly is responsible for this action.

Book Review:

One of the things I enjoy most about reading fiction is the snap shots it can provide into other people's lives and cultures different from my own. I've recently finished reading Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a first collection of short stories all set in Pakistan. The opening story, "Nawabdin Electrician," was a selection for Best American Short Stories 2008, and the book itself was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. Little wonder, then, that I should both choose to read it and enjoy it.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the stories are connected through characters and specific settings, a sure positive for critics who nominate books for prizes, think Faulkner, Hemingway, Garcia-Marquez. But for me a serious part of the value of such a book is Mueenuddin's providing me with insightful snap shots into a culture and a place that I know little about.

The stories won't provide much background on current military action in Pakistan or the regions occupied by Al-Qaeda. Instead we are provided with a glimpse into the lives of the wealthy and those who wait on them, a sort of upstairs/downstairs vision of people in their daily lives, especially those of women. Domestic life and the struggle to survive and discover meaning to existence are central themes in the stories. Another is the constant state of negotiation. Note the following passage from the story, "About a Burning Girl":

When I returned punctually at five from the office, my wife called me into the living room, where she sat with an old lady, one of her projects, someone from whom she wanted something. Judging from the guest's enormous Land Cruiser parked in the veranda, she must be the wife of a big fish. This is the phrase; also a big gun. Imagine my wife as being the poor man's Lady Macbeth and you will have the entire picture.

Mueenuddin's characters are always making deals, and often the deals they make end up not serving them well. Readers will also note the fatalism throughout the strata of the culture he portrays. In all likelihood, it is this fatalism that most American readers will have the most difficulty with. Certainly it will not be the prose, which is as well crafted as that of anyone else writing in English today.

A Line in the Sand:

Frank Rich wants President Obama to draw a line in the sand. He's irate that Goldman Sachs is making billions hand over fist (reported third quarter earnings of $3.19 billion/anticipated bonuses paid to themselves this year: $23 billion) after having played a significant part in bringing the country to the edge of bankruptcy while benefiting hugely from a taxpayer bailout and simultaneously doing nothing, zip, zilch, nada to create any jobs.

Who can blame Frank? But the problem with lines in sand is that they are so easily obliterated.

Rich has to reach all the way back in history to Teddy Roosevelt to find an example of a president who stood up to the Robber Barons. Teddy was aided and abetted by the huge stick of the electorate who were willing to keep him in office. (NOTE: When Teddy wanted to run for a third term, his second actually, since he came to office the first time after a death in the White House, he had to form a third party, and he lost the election.)

Teddy's cousin, Franklin D., did draw some lines, but he too had a huge electoral mandate, and he ran in to political problems that caused the lines to be blurred.

No president since has successfully drawn a line in the sand for domestic issues. Eisenhower did send in troops to Arkansas, it's true, but there was little money interest in prolonging segregation. Most of the moneyed interest at the time saw this as a move to improve the educational and training background of a significant portion of the work force.

JFK's lines were all drawn against communist countries. Johnson refreshed Eisenhower's line domestically, and paid for it by having to forsake the opportunity to run for reelection. Nixon's lines led to impeachment proceedings and his resignation. Ford, as we know, was nothing more than a place holder, while Jimmy Carter's presidency had no known domestic agenda beyond proving that a supremely nice guy could be elected. Once.

And then there were the Reagan/Bush administrations whose lines were all drawn against labor. And we've seen the results of that. Stagnant wages for thirty years while the top earners reap massive profits by gambling away the GNP.

Clinton did draw a line in the sand. It was that health care thing—and the pen—and then nothing, as the winds of change blew the line in the sand into oblivion.

75% of Republican Senators Support Stripping Individuals of Their Right To Sue Coworkers Who Gang Rape Them and the Companies That Protect Those Perpetrators

This bit of news has been making its way around the internet, but I'm not afraid to kick a horrifying piece of information when it's down. 30 of 40 Republican Senators voted against an amendment (which passed 68-30) that would prohibit the U.S. Government from contracting with any organization that requires employees to surrender their right to sue in the case that they are raped. The amendment is in large part spurred by a gang rape committed by KBR/Halliburton employees against another KBR/Halliburton employee in 2005 in Iraq. Read about the amendment as reported in the MinnPost, or view The Daily Show's coverage below.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape-Nuts
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Have You Heard Bob Dylan Sing Christmas Carols?

National Public Radio has posted a pole on its website where you can vote for the 50 most important musical voices. You might even be able to listen to Dylan's rendition of your favorite Christmas Carol while you're there. It's something else you can say you've done in your life.

One Step Closer to Making the Health Care System Worse?

The Senate Finance Committee voted to approve the senate bill to "overhaul the health care system" today (See The New York Times' story). In the meantime, the insurance companies of America have vowed to jack the cost of insurance through the roof.

The rich and the powerful continue to be rich and powerful off the misery of others.

China Leads in Global Trade:

How much do you pay for a pair of jeans? Chinese manufacturers sell packets of a dozen jeans to retailers for $2.85 a pair. In China, when the manufacturer needs to sell at a lower price to compete, he just cuts labor costs. They also benefit from "low-interest loans from state-run banks" (See The New York Times' story.)

Harvard Defeats Yale:

This just in: Following in the wake of a Supreme Court review of Florida's call in the 2000 American presidential election, the five-man board constituting the Nobel Peace Prize selection group has confirmed that an articulate Harvard grad is superior to a Yale mumbler.

Check out SNL's send up of Obama's reaction to receiving the Peace Prize

And the Good News Is:

Sales are expected to be flat for the Christmas season, which means bargain hunters can look for a bonanza in sale items, not only after the holiday, but also in the days just before. (See The New York Times' story.)

On the other hand, the slow employment recover will undoubtedly drag on. (See The New York Times' story.) When retailers can't sell their junk, then the manufacturers cut back. In this case, one is left to suppose that the Chinese economy will begin to suffer.

You heard about the 263,000 job losses last month, but the numbers are grimmer. More than 571,000 workers dropped out of the job market altogether. (See The Washington Post story.)



Chicago Is My Kind of Town:

Frank Sinatra crooned, but then the chairman of the board was known to have connections with certain unsavory types who, reportedly, helped manufacture his career. If you were on the Olympic board, would you want The Games played in the city of Al Capone? The 1968 Riots? The Infamous Mayor Daley (#1)? The Black Sox Scandal?

O, city of broad shoulders and meat packer of the world …
Symbol of democracy extended to cemeteries, of lovable losers …

Ah, t' heck with it. … Let's all go down to Rio and par-tay!

I have a dream:

That I can be super rich without even trying. (See Gail Collins' Op-Ed.) "So, how's that been working out for you, Jim?" To date, I'm still dreaming. Maybe I should start watching Dancing with the Stars and taking notes.