Grapes of Wrath

Sometimes one needs to link back to history to understand some of today's phenomena. History books, often skewed and distorted, are far from being the only reference for people seeking answers to complex issues. One might fare better by taking a fresh look at the body of literary works whose authors may have purposely crafted to circumvent the political correctness and the pressures of their times.

Here's a leaf from Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"-- a novel that defies the dust of time and goes straight to the heart of yesterday/today's miseries of the common man:

If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. (…)

The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered and drew figures in the dust, and yes, they knew, God knows. (…) The owner men went on leading to their point: "You know the land is getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it." The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land. Well, it's too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. "A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that." "Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.”

“But—you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, they breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so."

The squatting men raised their eyes to understand. "Can't we just hang on? Maybe the next year will be a good year. God knows how much cotton next year. And with all the wars—God knows what price cotton will bring. Don't they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling. Next year, maybe."

They looked up questioningly. "We can't depend on it. The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size."

No further comment is needed to explain the relevance of such a sober look at the ills and the inadequacies of our system and the awkwardness of those attempting to enforce it.

US Corporate Media: Swallowing the Bitter Pill They Helped Create

It was not until the deafening sound of the bursting housing bubble could no longer be hushed that the US corporate media began shyly reporting on the sub-prime mortgage disaster. The MSM’s failure to do its job of informing the public and uncovering some of the riskiest behaviors of reckless lenders and credit peddlers in history was akin to its unashamed complacency in the face of the Bush Administration’s outrageous constitutional contraventions and its violations of international law.

Now that the ad-spend is plummeting and the share prices of the big media corporations are collapsing, the MSM has only itself to blame. The expected windfall from the US presidential elections and the Olympic Games, two big boon events which took place the same year, just did not materialize.

In a November 28, 2008 article published by Globe and Mail, Richard Siklos wrote that some parts of the industry - particularly local U.S. media - have seen their sales fall off a cliff and their long-term viability as business models called into question. He quotes Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., one of the world's largest media conglomerates, as saying that automotive advertising, which has represented as much as 40 per cent of the advertising at his local Fox TV stations, is down by 40 per cent this year, with some big advertisers such as imperiled General Motors cutting their spending by more than half.

The slowdown in ad revenue described by R. Siklos is hitting newspapers as well. Online advertising is also likely to plummet to meager levels in 2009.

All this is due to the housing disaster and the financial collapse that came with it. Although the crisis turned out to be one of epic proportions, none of the MSM saw it coming, and it’s not a far-fetched scenario that some corporate media organizations may have simply turned a blind eye, perhaps in the hope that it would go away on its own if nobody brought it up. With the exception of the blog community, no serious attempt was made before 2008 to warn consumers of the looming cataclysm and the hardships that may ensue.

This was no small blunder. It dwarfs the US intelligence failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union or to prevent the 9/11 attacks and to anticipate the huge domestic and international backlash from the misguided invasion of Iraq. It dwarfs all of those failures because the housing swindle was happening right before everybody’s eyes and the red flags raised by many bloggers have been ignored for too long.

The current crisis may bring about a historic shift in the media industry. The MSM is losing ground very rapidly, they may never fully recover from the current slump, as they are being hit from all sides: plummeting ad revenues, image problems, proliferation of alternative info and entertainment sources, and the negative impact of the economic downturn.

R. Siklos says the bigger question is the degree to which the media wipeout will imperil businesses whose future was already in doubt when the downturn hit. Recent weeks have seen some print publications, including U.S. News & World Report and the Christian Science Monitor, drastically cut back their publishing schedules, and several magazines fold.

It looks like this unprecedented downturn in US history is finally taking with it the arrogant US corporate media, as it has already deleted from our collective memory eight years of our existence, eight years during which a highly incompetent president wiped out the achievements of the entire Western civilization.

Five Reasons to Admire Hank Paulson

Bedeviled by many in the US for his handling of the financial crisis, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson whose demeanor makes him look like an elk surrounded by a horde of famished hyenas, proved to be foxier than any old-hand politician in Washington.

His appearances before Congress, scanty and far between as they may be, have become a real circus, with all the usual buffooning, laughs, shouts and hubbubs. Yet Hank Paulson should be credited for a steadfastness seldom seen within the beltway. There are at least five reasons for which Hank Paulson deserves our admiration:

1. From the start, he devised a strategy and he stood by it. He seems to have deliberately boxed Congress in an untenable position by giving himself a maneuvering margin ranging from stunt to dare. He began with a shocking, outrageous stunt, by asking for 700 Billion dollars and unbridled powers to disburse the money as he sees fit. It was a “shock and awe” strategy that worked well with an unpopular Congress about to face an irate constituency back home. Paulson didn’t get a blank check from Congress, but he nonetheless ended up with a check cut to the “Bearer.”

2. While Paulson’s visibly dithering testimonies never exceeded the limits of the speech hindrance from which he suffers, he seems to have used that same impediment to his advantage. Oddly enough, Paulson’s stuttering tic was all too befitting, given the momentousness of the crisis he was in charge of tackling.

3. Paulson further unmasked the legislators' ignorance of the extent of a financial crisis that was brewing under their watch for a number of years. Many of our elected officials still admit today they have no clue where the money went or where it’s going—another credit to Paulson’s rightly planned policy to not divulge the names of the money recipients to fend off the risks of any bank runs. Paulson is mindful of a-la-Chuck-Schumer leaks that can come out of the Capitol with no regrad to the consequences.

4. Paulson dropped the TARP provisions of the rescue package without bothering to ask for Congress’s approval—a dare that came to light after half of the money was already handed out. Again, Paulson’s from-stunt-to-dare strategy worked to his advantage and re-enforced his undeclared conviction that Congress is irrelevant when it comes to tackling a matter as earth-shattering as the current financial crisis.

5. Even under pressure, Paulson never wavered from his early position that the auto industry should not expect to be bailed out like Wall Street. Paulson knows the “Bridge” money Detroit is begging for is a bridge to nowhere. This position is based on the fact that what could work for Wall Street may not work for the Big Three. The thrust behind Paulson’s rescue plan has more to do with voodoo economics than with throwing money at the problem. He and the Fed Chief Ben Bernanke have implied it repeatedly in their interventions before Congress. Their main aim was to pronounce the allocation of big money for the rescue effort, but with the hope that they won’t need to use all of it. Paulson and Bernanke’s hopes were pegged on restoring consumers’ confidence and healing investors’ psychological ills by appearing to be busy doing something about the crisis. Like most savvy economists, they are both aware that there just isn’t enough money in the government coffers to cure all the ongoing tribulations of the financial sector.

Paulson might have fared much better by asking Congress to hold prayer sessions, instead of the endless hearings that seem to have no bearing on the current financial and economic turbulence, both at home and abroad.

blogocrat: The Mourning of a Blog

blogocrat: So Long HP!

The Mourning of a Blog

An insightful blog went off the blogosphere after it led many of its visitors to safety in the middle of the US housing storm. After three years of a heated debate over the health of the housing market in the US, or the lack thereof, HousingPanic is no longer active. The blog master, Keith, pulled the plug on HousingPanic on November 5, 2008, a day after the election of Barack Obama to the White House. Keith opened a new blog he titled: "Soot and Ashes: Reinventing America After the Crash.".

In his farewell note, Keith wrote:

"Three years.

Ten million views.

6,000 posts.

Trillions lost.

A world economy in shambles.

And housing prices almost back to where we started.

HousingPANIC ends."

It was quite a ride indeed. HousingPanic was among the first blogs that sounded the housing alarm in 2005. Much of what was written by the blog master and posted by the contributors and the visitors became a reality: The housing bubble, the financial turmoil, the stock market crash, the demise of the GOP, the election of Obama...

I personnally enjoyed posting on that blog under a different name-- one of the reasons I stopped posting in my own blog for a few months! There are hundreds of blogs dealing with the US housing market, like Dr Housing Bubble, Patrick.net, etc, but the thing about HousingPanic is that it was down to earth. It said it all in a way that left no one out.

So long HP! and good luck to you Keith with your new blog.