"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

More on Debt

One of the things you'll hear a lot if people talk about the National Debt (that is, the cumulative deficit between spending and revenue run by the Federal Government), is that it's no big deal, because other countries have a proportionally higher amount of debt in relation to their Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is a rough measure of total economic outpuut.

This obscures the fact that Americans have vast amounts of consumer and morgage debt compared to other nations. While our Federal Debt stands at around $8 Trillion, we collectively carry more (around $8.5T) in personal debt. This is in contrast to most other nations, where government debt is higher than personal debt.

Read More

Tags: 

A Booming Economy, Bush Style

BLS Numbers, via the Agonist:

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the second quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

That 4.0 inflation excludes energy prices. So not counting increased costs of gasoline, electricity, natural gas and heating oil, wage-earning people (that's all of us non-CEOs) saw our real pay decline by 2.5% in the past year.

But we got rid of that estate tax, so things are bound to pick up soon.

It boggles my mind how blind most people in the corporate/government/media power elite are to the dangers of our current economic situation. We've got income inequality the likes of which we haven't seen since right before the damn depression, personal debt levels (mortgage and credit cards) the likes of which we haven't seen since, well, ever, and an economy that's based on "financial products," cheap oil, and crappily-made shit from China that we sell out of giant concrete boxes.

This is the kind of thing people talk about when they use the term "house of cards." It won't be appocalyptic if (when) it collapses, but it would be a hell of a lot better if this was something we did intentionally rather than just playing Jenga as long as we can.

Read More

Tags: 

War Pigs

Read More

Tags: 

Daily Show on Net Neutrality

Read More

Back Home

Made it back up. It was a good quick visit to SF... next time I hope to have a bit more lesure time to see friends and stuff. This was more or less all business. Sucessful business, so that's nice, but still.

The dive was good for my mind I think, both legs solo. I have all these memories of roads, of biking down Broadway late at night in that deserted stretch in the 20s, of the steep downhill to Denver on I-70 as you break free of the mountains, of various routes I've taken to various schools, and to see women before. There's something about the experience of moving down a given piece of path when you've done it a few times in a few different states of mind. It's a touchstone for a whole lot of different feelings.

I'm having this whole separation experience from New York lately. For the first time I'm living somewhere else, thinking of calling another place "home." The times I've been away from the city in my adult life have generally been transitory. The longest stretch was when I was working on Music For America, at which point "home" was my cubicle, and I had a nice place to sleep and occasionally to party in the Mission. But that was campaigning; it was never a life, which is probably why it didn't work out for me. And after that I came back to the city.

I miss it, but not as much or as immediately as I thought. I miss it a little like like I miss my first girlfriend, who I was most purely in love with (in New York!), who I can still conjure theoretical passions for, but who I've completely accepted won't really be part of my life ever again. Not that I won't ever go back to NYC (clearly I must, and often), but at this point the idea that I might not continue to have a permanent address there has penitrated my being, and it feels... ok.

Read More

Tags: 

Wal-Mart Tries to Be MySpace. Seriously

Advertising Age:

It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to "express their individuality," yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users "hubsters" -- a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.

That's pretty funny.

Read More

Thanks Franz

Read More

Tags: 

Consumerist On Nightline

Shoppers Bite Back

This was out a little while ago, but it bears repeating for a couple of reasons.

  1. Corporations can be just a beureaucratic as government, are fundimentally less accountable and lack even a notional mission of "public service." Remember that when you listen to Republicans talking about how this or that should be privatized.
  2. An increasingly democratic distribution of media power (thanks to the internet, peace be unto It) is the 21st Century's freedom of the Press from a checks and balances perspective. Traditional "press" institutions are clearly failing their role as a Fourth Estate. Better to decentralize and distribute that responsibility now that it's technically feasible to do so on a national or global scale.

Read More

A Note On Hezbollah/Hamas/Israel War

I know I said before was my final word, but I think it's worth noting that about a year ago Iran and Syria signed a mutual-defense pact, so with the Bush Administration and the Israeli leadership doing their best to push this to the both of them, it theoretically doesn't matter who gets dragged in first.

Once this gets going, and I tend to think the odds are that it will, we're looking at an "all in" scenario. The IAF has started hitting Lebaneese Army targets (a distinct group from Hezbollah) after word came that they would resist (rather than assist) a ground invasion by the IDF. Ground invasion is probable.

Maybe I should accelerate that biodiesel plan.

Also, watched at bit of FoxNews w/the Girth this morning. I don't really do cable news, so maybe it's always this bad, but it was kind of shocking. 74% of people still get their news from TV. With this kind of coverage, sufficient support for a bombing campaign can't be too hard to work up.

...Which does without saying would be disasterous. More analysis on that point via billmon.

Read More

Tags: 

Teh Space!

I'm visiting now at the co-working (and housing) space that my man Neil (and other homies too) call "office". Teh Space.

Attention NYC hipsters: this works. You should do it too.

Read More

Tags: 

Pages