Psychopolitik 2.0

In an American Voices bit on The Onion, in response to Bush lifting the executive ban on offshore oil drilling:

“Is there a ban on printing more money? If so he should lift that too and fix the economy while he’s at it.” -Don O’Connor, painter

Rather than laugh about how obviously stupid that remark would be if someone actually said that, it reminded me of a quote Cunning Realist had up awhile back:

If prices went up, people demanded not a stable purchasing power for the marks they had, but more marks to buy what they needed. More marks were printed, and more, and more.

-Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies

Blargh…

I got a question: After all the evidence to the contrary, why do statist-progressives STILL have this crackpot idea in their heads that the Republican Party is run by libertarians?  Seriously, “billionaire libertarian cranks”?

Uh, yeah, hardcore libertarian billionaires run the GOP.  That’s why their agenda consists of those central libertarian goals of endless war, gay-bashing, and corporate welfare.

A couple snapshots from the active meltdown.  All emphasis mine:

-Another bank failed…

U.S. banking regulators swooped in to seize mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp Inc on Friday after withdrawals by panicked depositors led to the third-largest banking failure in U.S. history.

California-based IndyMac, which specialized in a type of mortgage that often required minimal documents from borrowers, became the fifth U.S. bank to fail this year as a housing bust and credit crunch strain financial institutions.

The fifth?  I know about Bear Stears, but what were the other three?  Much as I’ve been keeping up with this, I don’t recall a mention of those. Hmmm…

IndyMac will reopen fully on Monday as IndyMac Federal Bank under Federal Deposit Insurance Corp supervision, but tensions ran high as customers at a branch at its Los Angeles-area headquarters read a notice in the window saying it was closed.

At another branch down the road, a man who said he had more than $200,000 in an account — twice what is normally FDIC guaranteed — argued with a security guard who was closing up.

The FDIC, which will seek a buyer for IndyMac, estimated the cost of the bank’s failure to its $53 billion insurance fund at between $4 billion and $8 billion.

So some other bank is going to get a ridiculously sweet deal eventually in absorbing them, and the public is going to eat the costs.  In the meantime, the government owns it.  Also, if the man with the account mentioned in the story is any indication, future banking will require the average person to know the terms and regulations by heart before they can believe that their money will be there, because Gawd Forbid you end up saving more than they can be trusted with.  Ponder this for a moment.

-Fannie?  Freddie?  Fucked:

A private equity executive who formerly headed up regional bank North Fork Bancorp Inc said on Friday that some form of nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was “inevitable.”

“The combination of the real problems that these companies have with the perceived problems that they have is deadly,” John Kanas, now a private equity partner at WL Ross & Co, said in a telephone interview.

He described the mortgage entities as “critical,” saying the backing they provide is not just for the mortgage market, but also supports the smooth running of the wider financial markets.

Nationalization, however, is not going to be problem-free, he said. Assuming the government fully backs the companies, that would imply the equity behind them is wiped out, he said.

“That alone is going to cause great dislocation,” he added.

The average person right now is probably thinking “What does he mean ‘nationalize’?  Aren’t they national already?”.  Well, they’re quasi-national in that they’re old-fashioned corporations explicitly chartered via a political act.  They’re nominally controlled as “private” businesses despite the backing of the State.  The result of such an amalgamation — socialized cost and private benefit — could be seen a mile away by us cranks, what with our habits of quoting dead economists & pointing out that capitalism is in fact not synonymous with a free-market.  But you know things are going tits-up when big financial players are willing to acknowledge a contradiction they themselves operate on, and you can find descriptions of privatized gain & socialized loss, in the context of arguing Fannie & Freddie should both be allowed to fall, in the pages of Business Week!

The root of all this mess, ranging from mortgages to credit to even our foreign policy, is that a long time ago the rulers of this country decided that whoever had the most money should make the rules.  Naturally, they tried to build in shields to the consequences of their own actions.  Realizing this is key to any meaningful shift, no matter how painful it may be in the short-term.

To put it less charitably: in the messageboard that is my life, the next person to say the problem is “the market is too free” is going on Ignore.

By now the following should be common knowledge:  I don’t vote for philosphical reasons, and just because something shows up in the ad bar does not mean I support it.  That aside, I’ve noticed something odd in the Google advertizing.  Once in awhile it’ll spit out a presidential campaign ad, but (at least on my end) thus far it has ALWAYS been a McCain ad.  Why, I have no idea.

To the regular visitors: Has anyone seen it bring up any others, whether for Obama, Barr, or anyone else that’s running?

Things you don’t expect to see:

• Richard Simmons tongue-kissing a woman
• Nuns smoking weed in public
• A Harold Meyerson column that doesn’t deserve ridicule

Waitaminute…what?

According to a report by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out products for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct investment in Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007, while it increased just 14 percent in China.

The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn.

But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly cheap?

Vietnam’s edge, it seems, is political. “Communism means more stability,” Laurence Shu, the chief financial officer of Shanghai-based Texhong, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cotton fabrics, told Bradsher. This view, Bradsher reports, is common among Asian executives and some American executives, too, though they have the presence of mind never to say so on the record. After all, Vietnam, like China, outlaws independent unions. Absent free speech and free elections, no radical shifts in the government’s economic policies are likely to be sprung upon unsuspecting American businesses. (emphasis mine)

He goes on from this observation to rhetorically ask why the hell the Vietnam war even happened if businesses were going to decide communism was A-OK anyway.  I’d take this as yet another example of how not only is being pro-market not the same thing as being “pro-business”, but big business is actively ANTI-market.  The possibility of someone other than them having bargaining power anytime soon is anathema, and any haggling must go downward, not back and forth.

It’s only stealing when poor people do it.

The above link goes to a story about an oil well in Nigeria, and how the people that actually live on the land where that oil is at got ganked by the oil companies, receiving virtually nothing for the privilege of using their land but sickness and scraps.  Fucking terrible.

Who speaks for their property rights?

Sucky development in the legal battle between GooTube and Viacom re: the latter’s ridiculous IP-infringement claims: A court order has been issued demanding that Google hand over the information for every single YouTube user, including what videos they watched & their IP address, and every video that has been removed, regardless of reason.  Not only is this amount of information worthless except for the purposes of an IP witchhunt, but as the EFF points out, compliance with such an order just happens to be illegal.

Of course, the claim by Viacom that triggered this entire mess — that people putting up snippets of video they like in a compressed format amounts to claiming they created something they didn’t, and that the effect of doing so is equivalent to the effect of Federal Reserve floods of “liquidity” on the dollar — is 180 Proof nonsense, but reality is for the little people.  Nope, can’t acknowledge that sites like YouTube function as a media buffet of sorts, which depending on the specific content either draws attention to stuff that younger tech-savvy people — who increasingly don’t bother with TV much — might’ve missed the first time, serves as an archive of sorts for examples of the type of content that you just don’t get anymore (many of the ones yanked have been old music videos), or encourages recontextualizing or remixing of video for purpose of serious expression (I’ve seen clips of news footage edited to include obvious contradictions the same show later disseminated) or silly inside-joke type entertainment (Two words: “Juggernaut, BEYOTCH!!”). Even though if anything we ADD value simply by giving a fuck about it, to do that would mean placating us annoying punks with our PC monitor tans and fast fingers and mp3 players and habit of stepping on the old elite’s lawn.

This isn’t going to work.  They can either acknowledge the direction things are going, or commit media suicide.  Either way, this idiot attitude that YouTube users are somehow snatching food from the mouths of these people’s children is following the dinosaurs into extinction.  It’s not a matter of whether the existing rules will change, only whether they want to adapt or simply die.

This is so bang-your-head-against-the-wall Stupid with a capital S that it doesn’t deserve pithyness or particular wit in response:

The price of retail gasoline could fall by half, to around $2 a gallon, within 30 days of passage of a law to limit speculation in energy-futures markets, four energy analysts told Congress on Monday.

Testifying to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management said that the price of oil would quickly drop closer to its marginal cost of around $65 to $75 a barrel, about half the current $135.  Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co., Edward Krapels of Energy Security Analysis and Roger Diwan of PFC Energy Consultants agreed with Masters’ assessment at a hearing on proposed legislation to limit speculation in futures markets.

Krapels said that it wouldn’t even take 30 days to drive prices lower, as fund managers quickly liquidated their positions in futures markets. “Record oil prices are inflated by speculation and not justified by market fundamentals,” according to Gheit. “Based on supply and demand fundamentals, crude-oil prices should not be above $60 per barrel.” (emphasis mine)

Found this amusing, re: Iraq & the political status of its oil.  All emphasis mine:

Bush administration officials told Hunt Oil last summer that they did not object to its efforts to reach an oil deal with the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, even while the State Department was publicly expressing concern that such contracts could undermine a national Iraqi petroleum law, according to documents obtained by a House committee.

Last fall, after the deal was announced, the State Department said that it had tried to dissuade Hunt Oil from signing the contract with Kurdish regional authorities but that the company had proceeded “regardless of our advice.” Although Hunt Oil’s chief executive has been a major fundraiser for President Bush, the president said he knew nothing about the deal.

Yesterday, however, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released documents and e-mails showing that for nearly four months, State and Commerce department officials knew about Hunt Oil’s negotiations and had told company officials that there were no objections. In one note, a Commerce Department official even wished them “a fruitful visit to Kurdistan” and invited them to contact him “in case you need any support.”

That guidance contradicted the administration’s public posture. The Bush administration made an Iraqi national petroleum law, which has still not been adopted, a top priority last year in the hope it would more tightly bind the country’s regions together and open the way for international oil companies to invest in much larger oil fields south of Iraq’s Kurdish region. The State Department said, and continues to assert, that it opposes any contract with a regional Iraqi authority in the absence of a national petroleum law.

The Hunt Oil deal was seen by Kurdish officials as a key victory because the company’s chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, was not only a major backer of Bush but also a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. After the deal was completed, a dozen other foreign firms signed oil contracts with Kurdish authorities.

So the administration lied.  Big Whoop, they always do.

So the CEO of Hunt Oil is a buddy of Bush.  No duh.

What’s the interesting part of this story, you ask?  Simple: the combination of this agreement with Kurdistan and the multiple ones that followed with the public stance of ostensibly keeping Iraq whole show the one area where there was a Plan B.  Since that US-written oil legislation foisted on Iraq has been filing itself under “will be passed when Dr Dre finally releases that damn Detox album”, the oil companies have been preparing themselves in case of a split so they can at least get something.  They clearly have not given up, but strategically they’re light years ahead of the administration.

BTW: right away after clicking that last link, the article starts with this:

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

As someone who knows the real motivations behind much of our foreign policy, all I have to say is this: what took so long this time?