Today the federal government wants to bail out an industry that can't meet its obligations. But it increases the chance that the next time, it will be the federal government that teeters on the brink of financial doom.
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Add it all up and you find that our government has suddenly run up a trillion dollars in new liabilities. That sounds like a lot—unless you compare it with Washington's other outstanding commitments. Currently, the national debt stands at roughly $10 trillion, which is about three-quarters as large as our entire annual gross domestic product. But The Concord Coalition, a Washington-based fiscal watchdog group, says explicit and implicit obligations amount to $53 trillion—"almost as much as today's net worth of all household assets."
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With each year, government spending rises, and the budget deficit gets bigger. As the baby boom generation retires, the gap will grow. Given current trends, federal outlays stand to double between now and 2050, while revenues remain roughly stable.
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When you spend more than you bring in, you have to borrow to cover the difference. In the next three decades, the government's official debt is on track to triple. But at some point, the Treasury predicts, "the world's financial markets would likely cease lending to the United States."
Daily Iowa [sic], your blind partisanship and lack of pride in yourselves as journalists never ceased [sic] to amaze me. Christopher Patton, in particular: You are a real piece of work.
I'm glad for you if you feel uninvested and comfortable with what's going on in Washington right now that you'd rather McCain and Obama not be there. (In spite of Bush's televised request Wednesday night.) Personally, I want them to be in Washington right now. I'm very anxious about what's happening right now, and I wish I could be in Washington myself.
I don't know if you heard, since to tell from his Google Reader that Patton is more interested in gossip about McCain and Palin than hard news right now. (The fatal flaw of "Indy Media", as I posted yesterday.)
Washington Mutual failed last night, in the midst of all this. The first savings and loan to shut down amid all the mortgage banks, potentially taking with it hundreds of thousands of people's savings. The Federal Reserve Board, our foremost authority on the nation's economy, is telling us we have a problem, and events are bearing that out. Barack Obama spent the majority of the caucus season, as well as most of the last two weeks, touring the country talking to his constituents about the sad state of the economy and how he's going to fix it all if only we elect him! Was he just posturing too, the dozens or hundreds of times he has talked about the financial crisis and hard-working Americans losing their homes??
This is what I hate most about this country. You complain about the candidates not focusing on the issues as much as anyone, and when push comes to shove you forget the issues and fall in-line behind your candidate!!
Our economy is in history-making economic trouble. McCain and Obama have both been summoned to Washington by Bush do something before things get worse. Get over your stupid blind obsession with McCain and Palin, at least until congress [sic] has a chance to stabilize our country's economy, for crissakes!
"I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana. "The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you've got to do the deal right now, it usually means they're going to get the better part of the deal."
[T]he plan came first, and all this stuff about price discovery is an after-the-fact rationalization, invented when people started asking questions.
It has seemed very strange to me that such a supposedly crucial economic program would be based on such an exotic argument. My sneaking suspicion is that they started with a determination to throw money at the financial industry, and everything else is just an excuse.
An e-mail that began as a rallying cry from a lone journalist to an influential circle of friends to protest the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street has ignited a national day of street protests. Some demonstrators plan to dump their rubbish in front of the bronze bull sculpture near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan Thursday.
"People are going to bring their own personal junk that they think is worth as much as the junk financial instruments that the government is proposing to buy from the Wall Street banks," says Andrew Boyd, an activist and freelance online-video artist for nonprofit groups in Manhattan. "We're hoping that people show up with their 8-track cassette collections, their old Spice Girl CDs, their surf boards that got bit by sharks and old Enron stock certificates."
This is the time when politics matters the most, not the least.
When the philosophical differences that each party organizes around are put to the test of reality.
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Suspending your campaign basically says: all that over the past sixteen months? It wasn't important. Ignore what I said or did.
Too late.
The tough thing here for McCain is that nobody in Washington asked him to come back; nobody seems to need him to come back; and that Democrats simply do not trust John McCain's motives.
Last week, Sen. McCain said the fundamentals of the economy were strong.
To Katie Couric, he said that the country faces its worst crisis since World War II.
David Letterman tells audience that McCain called him today to tell him he had to rush back to DC to deal with the economy.
Then in the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, “Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?”
Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, “You don’t suspend your campaign. This doesn’t smell right. This isn’t the way a tested hero behaves.” And he joked: “I think someone’s putting something in his metamucil.”
“He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?”
“What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!”
"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person will be the next president," Obama said. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."
Regarding McCain's call to join him in Washington to help participate in the debate over the economic recovery plan, Obama said, "If I can be helpful then I'm prepared to be anywhere, any time ... [I] don't want to infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics."
McCain senior advisor Mark Salter told reporters Wednesday that the Arizona senator’s decision followed two days of discussions with colleagues on Capitol Hill, who told him that the bailout plan from Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson faced an uphill fight.
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He added that McCain would take part in the debate as scheduled if Congress reached agreement on the measure by Friday morning.
Hard to know how this will play, but Obama has an opportunity here to say something like: “No way. If you want to be Commander in Chief, you need to be able to juggle foreign policy and economic policy at the same time. I’m ready to juggle both, and I’m ready to debate on Friday evening. I won’t take my eye off the economic crisis, and I’ll do everything I can to move the appropriate bills forward. But the American people deserve a debate on all of the issues affecting them, and they’ve been looking forward this debate. I have been too. This election is too important to postpone a discussion of the issues, and I hope John McCain changes his mind.”
It’s easy to see what McCain is trying to do here: Take the initiative, appear presidential, one-up Obama’s rhetoric of “coming together to solve big problems,” and put Obama in a box of either being for the debate or against quick action to steady the economy.
Obama needs to get out of this trap, and quick. He needs to agree or, as I suggested at first blush, strongly disagree—and he needs to do it soon, before a conventional wisdom develops around McCain’s move. The longer Obama waits, the more likely the conventional wisdom about McCain’s move is going to become: Bold, bi-partisan, politically shrewd, game-changing, initiative-grabbing, presidential.
Maybe it’s time for the media to pull all reporters—print and television, photographers and videographers—off the McCain campaign. Entirely. Press coverage of a campaign is supposed to be a two-way street. The candidate wants to get his mug on television, he wants his rallies and speeches broadcast and written up, he wants to use the media to reach the voters. In exchange for allowing themselves to be used, the candidate is supposed to make himself available to reporters and anchors, answer questions, hold press conferences. The McCain campaign isn’t holding up its end of the deal. It’s using the media to reach voters without making Palin and, increasingly, McCain available for questioning.
Several bloggers today have pointed to this obviously disturbing article from Army Times, which announces that "beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st [Brigade Combat Team] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North" -- "the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities."
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For more than 100 years -- since the end of the Civil War -- deployment of the U.S. military inside the U.S. has been prohibited under The Posse Comitatus Act (the only exceptions being that the National Guard and Coast Guard are exempted, and use of the military on an emergency ad hoc basis is permitted, such as what happened after Hurricane Katrina). Though there have been some erosions of this prohibition over the last several decades (most perniciously to allow the use of the military to work with law enforcement agencies in the "War on Drugs"), the bright line ban on using the U.S. military as a standing law enforcement force inside the U.S. has been more or less honored -- until now. And as the Army Times notes, once this particular brigade completes its one-year assignment, "expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one."
The financial markets are on the verge of implosion and the economy looks like it's going to hell, but online video is still growing at a ridiculous rate.
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"The cat is out of the bag," says Mark Trefgarne, CEO of LiveRail, an online video advertising company. "The networks have accepted that the internet is the future. If ad revenue slows down, I don't think it's going to necessarily hinder their long-term view of the medium. No executive of a major media company who takes their job seriously would say, 'Ad revenue won't keep up with costs, therefore we won't expand online.' This is the time that they need to build a position online."
What happens if we fail to act in time to avert the financial catastrophe that Treasury Secretary Paulson says is now upon us:
* Companies that made very bad investments would lose money, and some would go bankrupt.
* Other countries would probably stop lending us as much money until the shakeout was over.
* For a time, we’d have to stop living beyond our means with borrowed money that pays for massive imports from China and the oil producers.
* More people who bought houses they couldn’t afford would lose them.
* Our economy, which had been boosted unsustainably by phony wealth and a housing Ponzi scheme, would no doubt underperform for a few years until the shakeout was over, causing hardship for tens of millions.
* This might trigger a global economic slowdown, causing hardship for hundreds of millions.
What happens if we fail to act in time to avert the climate catastrophe?
* We cross carbon-cycle tipping points, such as the loss of the tundra, beyond which there is “no redemption.”
* We head toward CO2 concentrations this century that are triple or quadruple preindustrial levels.
* We should expect 0.8 to 2.0 meters of sea level rise this century, inundating the homes of 100 million people.
* We face desertification of one third the planet and loss of the glaciers that provide water to a billion people.
* We face loss of more than two thirds of the species on the planet, and a hot, acidic, and largely lifeless ocean
* We face humanity’s self-destruction — 6°C total planetary warming.
It isn't very Googley to stand on the sidelines – whether the challenge involves search, apps, or clean energy. So we're working to be part of the solution. Specifically, we have embraced the challenge of developing a gigawatt of renewable electricity that is cheaper than electricity from coal – in years, not decades.
In ten years, we envision a cleaner, greener world -- running on wind, solar, and steam - with clean cars plugged into a clean grid. But for that vision to become real, the technologies to power it will have to be economically competitive -- otherwise they won't scale. So we are focusing much of our effort on technology innovation to drive down the costs of key renewable technologies. We are fundamentally optimists -- we believe that when innovative people focus on the right problems, they can find solutions. And when renewable energy is cheaper than fossil-based alternatives, and when plug-in hybrids are as cheap as traditional cars, they will take off in the marketplace.
Apparently, the same political faction that has cheered on every instance of unchecked, absolute executive power over the last eight years -- which demanded that the President, and he alone, decide which citizens, including Americans, can be spied on, detained, even tortured, and that no oversight or disclosure was needed for any of that -- has suddenly re-discovered their desire for checks on federal government power. The reason? They say it themselves: with the looming prospect of an Obama presidency, they may no longer be in charge of that Government and these "small government conservatives" have thus suddenly re-awoken to the virtues of checks and balances, oversight and other restraints.
Teenagers with lesbian and gay parents have created a video that shows their normalcy and highlights their healthy families. The group is using the piece to help strengthen community support to oppose California's Proposition 8.
A recent poll indicates that fifty-five percent of likely voters oppose Prop 8, an increase from 51 percent who opposed it just a few months ago. The percentage of undecided voters has been steady - at 7 percent.
If a majority of voters approve - Prop 8 would define marriage as being between a man and a woman in the California constitution. It would nullify a May ruling by the California Supreme Court that overturned a 2000 gay marriage ban as unconstitutional.
The decisions that will be made this weekend matter not just to the prospects of the U.S. economy in the year to come; they will shape the type of capitalism we will live in for the next fifty years. Do we want to live in a system where profits are private, but losses are socialized? Where taxpayer money is used to prop up failed firms? Or do we want to live in a system where people are held responsible for their decisions, where imprudent behavior is penalized and prudent behavior rewarded? For somebody like me who believes strongly in the free market system, the most serious risk of the current situation is that the interest of few financiers will undermine the fundamental workings of the capitalist system. The time has come to save capitalism from the capitalists.
Are you ready to shell out $2,500 to help Wall Street firms that made bad (often government-influenced and government-incentivized) decisions?
Doesn’t matter. You’re going to. Either through taxes or devalued currency. And that’s just until the next crisis, which is inevitable now that we’ve sent the message to big corporations that taxpayers will pay for their mistakes.
And don’t blame this on the free market. There’s nothing free-market about any of it. It’s corporatist socialism.
Maybe if I wish real hard, Sec. Paulson will announce a federal bailout of Radley Balko’s student loans.
First, the fact that Democrats are on board with this scheme means absolutely nothing. When it comes to things the Bush administration wants, Congressional Democrats don't say "no" to anything. They say "yes" to everything. That's what they're for.
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What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.
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I don't pretend to know anywhere near enough -- in terms of either raw information or expertise -- in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are -- yet again -- being blindly entrusted to solve this.
This week, a group of leading technology vendors that include Cisco, Sun, Ericsson, Atmel, Freescale, and embedded open source developers, founded the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects Alliance to promote the 'Internet of Things,' in which everyday objects such as thermometers, radiators, and light switches are given IP addresses and are connected to the Internet. Such IP-enabled 'smart objects' give rise to a wide range of applications, from energy-efficient homes and offices to factory equipment maintenance and hospital patient monitoring.
For those who recognize that "libertarian Democrat" is no more oxymoronic than "libertarian Republican," a solid case can be made for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a Leader of the Free World who won't take that American Exceptionalism conceit as seriously as "Country First" Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Sure, we'll have to endure four or even eight years of warbling by Barbra Streisand at White House dinners. And I am under no illusions: Obama has more Populist-Progressive than Madisonian inclinations. But, guys and gals, Ms. Wasilla is no less stomach-churning than Babs. And the actual Republican presidential candidate is even more authoritarian than his Progressive hero, Teddy Roosevelt. John McCain is no friend of Friedman.
In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek "nous" meaning "mind" + "sfaira" meaning "sphere", in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere." In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere.
For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the goal of history.
It will be great when the instant I think of something to tell my friends, or something I need from my friends, they're available to me in some way. Remember when Google embedded IM into Gmail, and you could suddenly see -- without changing applications -- that the friend you were about to email was online and easily reachable right at that second? That little green bubble of presence right in front of our eyes brought a little extra ping of closeness that email hadn't had until then. That was in 2006, at the start of the AJAX-powered wave of dynamic web apps. Now, many sites and services are adding even more sophisticated plumbing (like profiles and friends and presence and comments) that brings the immediacy of social interaction to more and more places on the web. Reaching your friends can be really active, as IM is today, or it can be passive, like changing your status message.
In the coming decade, the web will become as effortlessly social as chatting with your family or roommates at home is today. Social features will be embedded and around and through all variety of spaces and places on the web. Sometimes you'll go to a place because you want to see your friends, and sometimes the place you're in will get better because you can bring your friends there. It will make it easier to strike up new relationships, new communities, new expressions of what your life is about. The web will connect people to the small moments that in many ways matter most.
Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your living room, or on your device in your pocket. YouTube and other sites will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and much, much more.
In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.
In coming years, computer processing, storage, and networking capabilities will continue up the steeply exponential curve they have followed for the past few decades. By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful in most respects. Computer programs, more of them web-based, will evolve to take advantage of this newfound power, and Internet usage will also grow: more people online, doing more things, using more advanced and responsive applications. By any metric, the "cloud" of computational resources and online data and content will grow very rapidly for a long time.
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Thus, computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information. Today's Google search uses an early form of this approach, but in the future many more systems will be able to benefit from it.
What does this mean to Google? For starters, even better search. We could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognize the plot or the symbolism. The potential result would be a kind of conceptual search: "Find me a story with an exciting chase scene and a happy ending." As systems are allowed to learn from interactions at an individual level, they can provide results customized to an individual's situational needs: where they are located, what time of day it is, what they are doing. And translation and multi-modal systems will also be feasible, so people speaking one language can seamlessly interact with people and information in other languages.
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Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.
On the final night of the convention, as Senator John McCain was preparing to address delegates inside the Xcel Energy Center, the police prevented marchers who did not have a permit from crossing two bridges that led to the convention center. Later, as demonstrators took to the streets near the state capitol, the police lobbed flash grenades into the crowd while thick plumes of tear gas clouded the air. Then, several hundred demonstrators and more than a dozen journalists were directed onto a third bridge, where they were ordered to sit and place their hands on their heads.
Those trapped on the bridge included two reporters for The Associated Press, a photographer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and two Fox News editors.
“At some point even a journalist has to recognize that they are in violation of the law,” Tom Walsh, a St. Paul Police spokesman, said as the arrests were taking place. “Are they going to get arrested or are they going to cover it from a distance?”
In Montana we have about 7 percent of the people that have been there for 400 generations. Their immigration policy would be a lot different if they could have it over again. When people talk about westward expansion they call it an eastern invasion. Immigration policy is not a debate that just happened this year. We’ve been debating it for 150 years.
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I want to repeat the principle: families who want to come to America, work in America, raise families in America, ought to be welcome because that’s the thread that has made this blanket so warm in this country. We need to have a system that allows people a path to citizenship.
Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”
Bess' first run-in with Palin's religious forces came when he decided to write his book, "Pastor, I Am Gay." The book was the result of a theological journey that began in the 1970s when Bess was asked for guidance by a closeted homosexual in his Santa Barbara congregation. After deep reflection on the subject, Bess came to the conclusion that "gay people were not sick, nor they were special sinners."
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When it was published in 1995, Bess' book caused an immediate storm in the Mat-Su Valley, an evangelical stronghold dotted with storefront churches. Conservative ministers targeted the book, and the only bookstore in the valley that dared to stock it -- Shalom Christian Books and Gifts – soon dropped it after the owner was barraged with angry phone calls. The Frontiersman, the local newspaper that ran a column by Bess for seven years, fired him and ran a vicious cartoon that suggested even drooling child molesters would be welcomed by Bess' church.
And after she became mayor of Wasilla, according to Bess, Sarah Palin tried to get rid of his book from the local library. Palin now denies that she wanted to censor library books, but Bess insists that his book was on a "hit list" targeted by Palin. "I'm as certain of that as I am that I'm sitting here. This is a small town, we all know each other. People in city government have confirmed to me what Sarah was trying to do."
According to FBI figures released today, about 873,000 people were arrested on marijuana charges in the United States last year, 5 percent more than in 2006 and a new record. This is the fifth year in a row that marijuana arrests, which are up 167 percent since 1990, have increased. In 2007 marijuana arrests accounted for nearly half of the 1.8 million drug arrests; as usual, the vast majority of the pot busts, about 775,000, were for simple possession.
