Mar
06

The Devil You Know

The Devil You know

I haven’t been completely disappointed by the GOP primary circus these past several months.

In the fall, things seemed so promising. We had the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry still in the race–with Sarah Palin not yet totally out of it. But Ms. Palin proved no more than a chimera (go figure), and the other three, along with Mister 999–Herman Cain–each disappeared after one hot minute under the kleig lights of honest-to-goodness fact-checking and reasonably clear-eyed analysis that sometimes infects media coverage in a major political campaign.

So we’ve been left for months with just Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney trying to muster a challenge to Barack Obama from the disparate yearnings of, as Hendrick Hertzberg recently put it in the New Yorker,

[the] excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists

who make up the Republican “base” today.

Read more…

Jan
03

Facebook Valuation Boggles the Mind

From the What’s It Worth? Department - big news in the world of finance today:  the great minds at Goldman Sachs have conjured up a way for wealthy investors to get a piece of the Facebook action without actually having to take the company public.

Plunking down $450 million of its own money for a share of Facebook common stock which values the Internet equivalent of a high school lunchroom at $50 billion, Goldman won the right to create a “special purpose vehicle” whereby a select list of its own wealthiest clients can pony up an additional $1.5 billion to fund Facebook’s operations and, presumably, reward its founders and directors for being brilliant, savvy players in the post-Crash era.

Hey, well, bully for them all around.  Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em, as the old saying used to go.

Just for kicks, though, I thought I’d poke around and see what $50 billion looks like in today’s world. While it won’t buy what it used to back in the day (ie: the entire gross debt of the United States was about $50 billion in 1940; it is over $1.3 trillion today ), you can still take down some pretty rad gear for that kinda dough. Read more…

Nov
21

Infographic of the Day: Who Owns YOUR Mortgage?

Dan Edstrom gets paid to audit securitization transactions for a company called DTC-Systems, so he might have thought it fun to spend over a year reverse engineering the mortgage on the Edstrom family home into the handy flow chart depicted above.

For those of us with a less erudite sense of how to get our jollies, or who might be among the millions of Americans facing foreclosure and — in some cases — the well-heeled mendacity of the nation’s bankers, this chart is graphic evidence of just how byzantine our financial reality has become.

If it took Dan Edstrom over a year to do this for his own mortgage, how long do you suppose it will take Barney Frank and Eric Holder to sort things out for the nation as a whole?

Nov
10

Infographic of the Day: Effects of Healthcare Reform

Click chart for High-Res image.

There’s a pretty smart lady out there named Lisa Cummings, who is a global benefits consultant advising Fortune 500 companies on best practices regarding plan design and legal compliance. An ERISA attorney by training, Ms. Cummings has a lot of experience analyzing health and retirement plans in the US and around the world and she’s written a detailed critique of what some are derisively calling Obamacare, the so-called Healthcare Reform legislation enacted by the most recent congress, some provisions of which are set to begin taking effect next year.

As you can see by the chart Ms. Cummings used to illustrate her analysis, the question of whether the legislation is good or bad — and on which groups it promises to confer both burdens and benefits — is rather complex.

Some in the newly empowered Republican delegation pining to flex its muscle in the next session of congress have vowed to repeal the legislation.  Many who have a credible understanding of how things work in Washington, DC believe that is an unlikely prospect.  I am inclined to anticipate that we should be prepared for a perfect storm in which poorly prepared, misguided legislators will make total hash of a badly flawed piece of legislation and leave all the interested parties — excepting Big Insurance, of course — far worse off than they are today and than they would be if the law were to be allowed to take effect as written.

Ironically, I think that puts me on the side of those who’d like to scrap the whole thing and start over.

Nov
05

What do YOU Think About Education?

RSA is doing some amazing work getting people to think and re-think about some of the great questions of our time and some of the things we have come to take for granted about our world and our lives.

Take eleven minutes and watch this piece about Education, then hit their website to dive in for more.

Be the change.

Feb
14

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

The true origins of celebrating the notion of romantic love on February 14 are not well documented, though the exchange of elaborate, handmade gifts between paramours was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, and began to really take off in the United States once Esther Howland (herself now considered something of a saint by the American Greeting Card Association) began selling mass-produced Valentine’s cards in the 1840s.

An estimated one billion Valentine’s cards are sent each year, with a surprisingly negligible effect on the degree of love or open-heartedness in the world. Read more…

Dec
28

Another One Bites The Dust

Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, head of the Pakistan People’s Party, and the most credible challenger to the rule of Pakistan’s current military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, was assassinated yesterday in Rawalpindi, outside the capital city of Islamabad.

The only woman ever to lead a majority Muslim nation was attacked as she was leaving a rally, where she had addressed a throng of supporters just days prior to parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8, 2008. She apparently died as a result of a skull fracture sustained in an explosion the suspected assassin detonated, killing himself and more than 20 others. Read more…

Oct
26

The Sky Is Falling

At a conference of army leaders from 38 European nations organized by the chief of U.S. Army Europe in Heidelberg, Germany yesterday, United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates decried the commitment of European nations to winning the War on Terror.

Referring specifically to the mission in Afghanistan, Mr. Gates said the outcome there — as well as the future credibility of the 60 year-old trans-Atlantic “security project” known as NATO — is “at real risk” due to the failure of some European nations to meet U.S. expectations of arms and personnel.

Mr. Gates’ comments should be understood on a par with the ravings of the apocryphal bearded-man, the one with a sandwich-board draped across threadbare shoulders, reading “THE END IS NEAR.” Read more…

Sep
28

Well And Truly F*cked

President George W. Bush came one step closer today to wielding the power to undo nearly 800 years of human progress with the stroke of a pen.

By a vote of 65 – 34 (Maine’s Olympia Snowe could bring herself to neither a yea nor a nay on the matter), the U.S. Senate approved The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which is, in the august chamber’s quaint description, “a bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.” Read more…

Sep
11

We Shall Not Forget

I feel it’s necessary to make this retroactive post for the record. It’s a link to an amazing litany of facts one ought consider each year on the anniversary of 9/11.

Thanks to my friend Paul Burke for posting it on Journey Home.

Go back to top