UP@NIGHT

Music to the rescue in the face of economic troubles….In this case some saxophonists.

Another reason to support the arts, even in times of trouble.

In times such as these, our times, when unregulated capitalism has once again proven that it can bring down the house, literally, it’s worth reminding ourselves about the voices that have spoken so eloquently in favor of selfishness over the years.  (Not Adam Smith, by the way; he thought that sympathy was a basic feature of human nature.)  Here is Colbert discussing one of the leading lights of selfishness, Ayn Rand.

The Word – Rand Illusion | March 11th | ColbertNation.com

On Capitalism Run Amok, readers might want to check out Sullivan’s site today, March 23rd, “Are The Jacobins At The Gates?” Let’s just say, a bit over the top, but worth a look.  (Btw, Sullivan thinks of himself as a conservative.)

P.S.  Interesting fact:  Stephen Colbert was a philosophy major at Hampden-Sydney College.  Training in philosophy has its uses.

AIG, Bernie, foreclosures, housing bubble, -401K, recession, depression, global financial meltdown, Eric Cantor, Mad Money, etc.

It’s time for a break, if only a short one.    

Let’s return for a moment to how our grandparents (or perhaps our great-grandparents) kept their spirits up in the Great Depression. From “Follow the Fleet” (1936): 

The word is out.  Unless AIG pays their executives millions more in bonuses, they might lose the best and the brightest of their employees.  Corporate raiders will swoop out of the clouds and plunder their human capital.  And then where would AIG be?  And then where would we be?   (According to FOX, if AIG cannot retain their top execs, it has threatened to morph into a black hole and take the inner planets with it.)

But wait.  We may have nothing to fear but fear itself.   Let us not forget that AIG is in the business of insuring companies against their own incompetence.  The solution is simple.  AIG should insure itself against its own incompetence through one of its products, for example, FinancialGuard (see below).  So, even if it were to lose its best and brightest by not paying out the bonuses, AIG could still survive through the miricle of insurance.

……

Here is AIG/Australia hawking one “product” that can help save it (and us):

FinancialGuard™ Civil Liability Insurance

What is it?

Professional indemnity insurance on a civil liability basis

Why do you need it?

The activities of regulators, the changing distribution of financial institutions products and a more informed and litigious consumer environment lie behind the increase in the frequency of civil liability claims against financial institutions….

Our Civil Liability product provides blanket protection against the financial consequences of a legally enforceable obligation in which a civil liability is incurred arising from services provided. Covers includes defence costs and civil penalties.

Who needs it?

All Financial Institutions including Banks, Building Societies, Investment Management Companies, Insurance Companies and Stockbrokers.

…….

And under a discussion of assets on the AIG site we find the following pitch:

A company’s assets are vital to its operations. And protecting those assets is essential to the well being of a business. Assets can be tangible and intangible and can include a company’s corporate reputation, as well as physical assets such as property or goods. We offer standard or customised programmes on a domestic or global scale as well as a wide range of products covering more demanding and specialist risks.

Protection of assets!!  Protection for corporate reputation!!  Protection from the activities of regulators!!  AIG can save itself (and us). 

Up until now little beside blind greed and gross incompetence have been offered to explain AIG’s behavior.  Here is an alternative hypothesis: Someone inside AIG decided that the best way to stimulate the market for its financial insurance products was to come up with an example (AIG’s own failure) that would scare the daylights out of even the most confident of finance people, pushing them right into the arms of AIG’s financial insurance sales force.   Insanely diabolical, wouldn’t you say?

And if this hypothesis is incorrect, I have another:  AIG is a corporate comic genius.

P.S.  Here’s five bucks.   Feel free to buy yourself half a dozen shares of AIG.

And here is Late Night with Conan O’Brien – Stephen Colbert String Dance Off (2/17/09)

Here are several labels that have recently and often been applied to Obama: pragmatist, bipartisan, compromiser, and centrist.   The Republicans take no prisoners strategy regarding the stimulus package–which has been driven not by concerns about pork, but by an ideology that still affirms that the market always knows best–has depended on using Obama’s bipartisanship to their advantage.  They typically view him as someone whose pragmatism guarantees a willingness to compromise and operate in a bipartisan fashion.  And yes, it’s true,  Obama would prefer bipartisan solutions.   But be not confused, Republican comrades, pragmatism and bipartisanship are not two sides of the same coin.

Obama, as I have argued elsewhere, is not only a political pragmatist, but a philosophical one.  Two points here:  1) Philosophical pragmatists are not dogmatists; they are falibilists who are suspicious of those who claim to possess certainty in political and ethical matters.  2) Broadly speaking, pragmatists seek what works.

Much confusion is possible regarding these points.  One might think that if someone doesn’t believe in certainty and also looks to what works, he isn’t deeply committed to any values.  This is specious inference.  Pragmatists can be deeply committed to any number of values.  They just don’t think that they have a direct line to the Deity regarding the truth of these values.

So, then, how does this relate to the Republicans’ misreading of Obama?  Republicans have been assuming that Obama’s desire for bipartisanship and compromise is at the heart of his pragmatism.  If they push hard enough, his pragmatism (read: desire to get things done “only” through compromise) will win the day for them.  They will be able to hold back the tide of reform.

But bipartisanship and compromise are strategies and goods, not absolute goods for the philosophical pragmatist.  The pragmatist respects them because they speak to his or her commitment to fallibilism and community, and because they might help us get the job done.  However, if they are failing as strategies to achieve pressing ends, a philosophical pragmatist will not hesitate to engage in triage.  If people don’t have jobs and are without medical care, if the economy is in a death spiral, well, we have an obligation to address these problems.  Be nice to do so through having everyone on board, but we can always return to pursuing bipartisanship another day.  It’s a good, not The Absolute Good.

If bipartisanship is not working as a strategy to get the stimulus package through, which Obama deeply believes is necessary for the well-being of the country, his political and philosophical commitments, and temperament, will move him to turn his energies to figuring out what will work.  And what will work here may turn out to be an offensive against recalcitrant Republicans whose failed policies cost them two elections, 2006 and 2008.  And you know what, he’s got the upper hand if he makes this move. (Republicans might think that Obama wouldn’t dare because he will need them down the line.  However, if they aren’t playing ball now, he can’t be sure they will do so down the line.)

A piece of advice to Republicans:  Don’t push this guy too hard.  You are dealing with a mindset that you haven’t seen in a couple of generations. You will end up regretting it. (He’s perfectly capable of wearing the black hat.)

(Image from The Boston Phoenix)

UPDATE, February  9th, 2009, PM.  The following is an excerpt from The New York Times of Obama’s first press conference as president:

So my whole goal over the next four years is to make sure that whatever arguments are persuasive and backed up by evidence and facts and proof, that they can work, that we are pulling people together around that kind of pragmatic agenda. And I think that there was an opportunity to do this with this recovery package because, as I said, although there are some politicians who are arguing that we don’t need a stimulus, there are very few economists who are making that argument. I mean, you’ve got economists who were advising John McCain, economists who were advisers to George Bush — one and two — all suggesting that we actually needed a serious recovery package.

And so when I hear people just saying we don’t need to do anything; this is a spending bill, not a stimulus bill, without acknowledging that by definition part of any stimulus package would include spending — that’s the point — then what I get a sense of is that there is some ideological blockage there that needs to be cleared up. [emphasis added]

….

UPDATE, February 10, 2009  Peter Baker in the New York Times writes (excerpt):

Taking on Critics, Obama Puts Aside Talk of Unity

“It is not too late to craft a bipartisan plan that creates more jobs and helps get our economy back on track, and Republicans stand ready to work with the president to do this,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, said after the news conference.

For his part, though, Mr. Obama seemed to suggest it was too late, and that the time for bipartisanship lay further down the road. He said he recognized that some Republicans had good-faith doubts about his program, but he also characterized some of the opposition as an effort to “test” the new president.

(Baker’s article, which includes discussion of the press conference, is worth a read.  It’s clear that Obama’s pragmatism does not require him to stick to  “bipartisanship” and that the Republicans are about to find out that they have overplayed their hand.   Poor Boehner, the Republicans’ goose egg vote in the House, of which he was so proud, is coming back to haunt him.)

….

UPDATE, February 14, 2009, excerpt from UPI.com:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (UPI) — U.S. President Barack Obama plans to travel and campaign more to pressure Republicans in Congress rather than trying to win their loyalty, sources say.

Now that a mammoth, $787 billion economic stimulus bill has been approved virtually without Republican support, White House advisers have determined that Capitol Hill horse-trading with GOP opponents wasn’t successful and that Obama should instead tap his immense popularity and public salesmanship skills to push legislation in the future, the Washington publication Politico reported Saturday.

Posters from the WPA, Library of Congress Collection

Sometimes you can almost smell a cheap shot.

The stimulus package that passed the House last week failed to receive one Republican vote.  Among the worthwhile provisions in the bill is fifty million dollars for the National Endowment for the Arts.  This is no mere give away.  The money would help to stimulate the economy, even though it is a rather paltry sum for the whole nation–the price of one CEO’s jet to be exact.   But the arts certainly make for an easy target, especially when you are willing to lie about  the contents of the bill.

While the debate over the stimulus package was raging, the Republican whip, Mr. Eric Cantor, claimed that $300,000 had been set aside in the bill for a sculpture garden in Miami.  Well, here are the facts.  No such provision exists in the bill.  It seems that Cantor felt that the package wasn’t specific enough for his taste, so he decided to claim on national TV that a project that had been funded in the past is in the current bill.   From Politifact.com (St. Petersburg Times):

In an interview with Fox News on Jan. 23, 2009, Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, said that in a meeting with President Obama, Cantor asked if he “could use his influence on this process to try and get the pork barrel spending out of the bill. I mean, there’s $300,000 for a sculpture garden in Miami.” . . .

“We don’t know what they’re going to spend it on,” Bradley [a Cantor spokesperson] said. “There is no direction to the NEA on how to spend it.”

So to give people an idea of how the NEA spends its money, Cantor’s staff looked at some recent grants awarded by the NEA.

And in 2008, the NEA gave $300,000 to the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami to restore an outdoor statuary. The Vizcaya estate is one of the country’s most intact remaining examples from the American Renaissance, a period when the very wealthy built estates to look European. The $300,000 grant was to help restore some of the outdoor sculptures — statues, urns and fountains — that had been severely deteriorating due to South Florida’s salty, damp and subtropical climate, not to mention the hurricanes.

But again, this was an NEA grant from last year .

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Yes, there certainly have been more serious lies by politicians, but the point is that here you have the House whip willing to make stuff up (non-existent pork)  in order to help sink the stimulus package.  Pretty shameless stuff.   (As a matter of fact, Eric, it’s a shanda fur die goyim. You should know better.)

The fact is that 1) artists have lost jobs in the current recession and 2) the arts are economic engines in many communities.  There is good statement on the website of the National Endowment for the Arts detailing reasons for supporting the provision for the arts in the stimulus package.  For example, the statement cites a report by the National Governor’s Association:

A recent study released by the National Governors Association titled Arts & the Economy: Using Arts and Culture to Stimulate State Economic Development states, “Arts and culture are important to state economies.  Arts and culture-related industries, also known as ‘creative industries,’ provide direct economic benefits to states and communities:  They create jobs, attract investments, generate tax revenues, and stimulate local economies through tourism and consumer purchases.”

P.S.   Eric Cantor appears to be a major piece of work.  Here he is trying to blame Congress during Jimmy Carter’s administration for the current housing crisis.

UPDATE  2-11-09.  More Cantor…This guy is just what the Republicans need to make sure that they remain the minority party for the next few generations.  Go, Eric (and his Office), Go.

The Plum Line, Greg Sargent’s blog
Cantor’s Office Responds: Video Depicting AFSCME Members As Goons

As a professional philosopher what I am about to do here on this site, on this day, is sacrilege. Instead of making arguments against John McCain’s ideas (or lack thereof), which I do elsewhere, I am going to mock him. What I will be doing is a form of ad hominem argumentation, which is to say, arguing against the person and not his ideas. Definitely Verboten. But in my defense, first, McCain really doesn’t have any ideas. Second, he started it with Paris and Spears, comparing Obama to a gas pump (which was really the point of McCain’s gas commercial, think about it), and then by bringing in Moses. Third, this is a political contest, not an academic dispute. So, the gloves are off. If Obama can’t respond in kind, I can.

On this site, here and now, and in the coming weeks, you will find revealing insights into McCain the man. Each of these images have been cursor selected for their revelatory power. (Suggestions for additions are welcome. As a matter of fact, following Larry Geater’s idea, let’s see this as a contest.  Submit your entries under Comments.)  Stayed tuned. And in the meantime, take your pick and start circulating some visual memes around the Web.

On how to run a tight ship and be a Cylon, BSG’s Colonel Saul Tigh is John McCain (or vice versa):

On knowledge of the economy, John McCain is Alfred E. Neuman (with green $ backgrounds):

On military preparedness and guns: John McCain is Elmer Fudd

On general competence, anger, and far-sightedness, John McCain is Mr. MaGoo:

The Young John McCain and the Young George Bush. Can you tell the difference?

McCain before and after a recent election make-over:

John McCain having another senior moment, confusing the phrase “a thousand years in Iraq” with “a thousand year Reich.”

And then after “recovering,” some eight or nine minutes later, fantasizing about his place in the cosmos as a celebrity because of his win on American Idol: