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Obama is ask­ing for ideas, and while I have no faith that they will go any­where, I sent one in anyways.

Namely, I’d like to see a sov­er­eign wealth fund ulti­mately respon­si­ble to the Treasury, under advise­ment of Commerce and Labor. The man­date for the orga­ni­za­tion would include:

1. Ensuring restored mar­ket liq­uid­ity by sheer force of grav­ity (if pos­si­ble), or via the right of the stock­holder (as necessary).
2. Providing ven­ture cap­i­tal to entre­pre­neurs, par­tic­u­larly in carbon-negative (e.g. clean energy, pub­lic tran­sit, etc.), eco­log­i­cally renew­ing (e.g. toxic waste cleanup/disposal, recy­cling, etc.), and high-tech (e.g. high-speed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions) industries.
3. A lender of last resort for sta­ble com­pa­nies dur­ing dire times (e.g. right now).

I also had points about cre­at­ing a fed­eral credit rat­ing agency, but I think the end goal would be bet­ter served by requir­ing out­side audits of credit rat­ings. I also had a point in there about invest­ing in exist­ing busi­nesses who add jobs in the U.S., but I think you’re guar­an­teed to have pretty severe cor­rup­tion in such an invest­ments pro­gram, to the point that it under­cuts the prof­itabil­ity of the program.

It isn’t a par­tic­u­larly rad­i­cal idea, most resource-rich coun­tries already have SWFs, and Sarkosy was stump­ing for this in Beijing weeks ago. Further, it’s my under­stand­ing that much of this author­ity is already held by the U.S. gov­ern­ment today. The pri­mary change is reor­ga­niz­ing the dis­parate author­i­ties into some­thing resem­bling an invest­ment bank — with the tax­payer as share­holder and a man­date for profitability.

Oversight must be absolutely air­tight, per­haps a well-funded adver­sar­ial orga­ni­za­tion within the exec­u­tive branch (a joint oper­a­tion by Justice and the SEC which pro­vides their inves­ti­ga­tors with a petri dish of what non­sense to look for in the pri­vate sec­tor — per­haps they will then be able to keep up with changes in the mar­ket?) in addi­tion to the more tra­di­tional over­sight exer­cised by Congress.

I can­not stress enough that the suc­cess of such a pro­gram — rather than it’s devo­lu­tion into a cookie jar of far­ci­cal pro­por­tions—requires that there be as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble who’s feif­doms depend on root­ing out cor­rup­tion in such a program.

48 hours later, and I’m already com­pos­ing an apolo­gia for Obama. Well, let’s get into it on Rahm Emanuel:

1. I live in Chicago
2. I con­tributed money to Obama’s campaign
3. Emanuel is the rep­re­sen­ta­tive for my district

To be hon­est, the main rea­son I had for both­er­ing to vote in the elec­tion before the bailout was to vote against Rep. Emanuel. Primarily for his efforts to oust Dean in favor of Harold Ford — in spite of the obvi­ous “right time” for Dean’s 50-state strat­egy. However, after learn­ing that he and Frank were the only ones in Congress who appeared to have any clue about what was going on, why those hap­pen­ings were so dan­ger­ous, and why the national gov­ern­ment had to step in, that choice became an ambiva­lent one.

Whatever your com­plaints against some­one, you have to respect them when they know what they are doing, and what they are doing is directly related to the biggest cri­sis in two gen­er­a­tions — as opposed to the rest of the House, which refused to pass an emer­gency bill until after they added another $300bn worth of absolutely pure bullshit.

The back­ground is this: Friday night on the way home, some dum­b­assed yup­pie on the bus was yak­ing loudly on thie phone about how he didn’t want to see it, because he didn’t need to see another movie about how bad America was. The yup­pie in ques­tion later went on to sug­gest An American Carol instead, appar­ently pre­fer­ring Naked Gun direc­tor David Zucker to Ridley Scott.

Spoilers below.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve updated the blog theme, and I’m just enough of a pre­ten­tious bas­tard to talk about it.

Two years ago, I took a pho­to­graph of the “back forty” behind my apart­ment build­ing. The build­ing itself was stuck at the edge of civ­i­liza­tion, at the end of a small cul-de-sac hang­ing off a street which divided the pseudo-suburb of DeKalb, IL from the farm­land which sur­rounds it. I’ve one of that series of shots as my desk­top wall­pa­per for a while now, some­thing I stopped last week.

The image itself seemed fit­ting for my exist­ing blog title (Homage To Icarus), and I’ve always wanted to use it as a back­ground spread for this blog. Along the way, I decided to re-implement the blog as a soft­ware project, stored com­pletely in sub­ver­sion, using ven­dor branches of Wordpress, built in Zend 6 (Eclipse + some pro­pri­etary PHP stuff that I don’t actu­ally use for this).

The theme itself was based on a thought I’d had a long time ago about the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Namely, the utter shame­lesness and pro­pa­ganda of it. As back­ground, the United States makes it’s friends look bet­ter, and it’s ene­mies look worse than they really are. There’s more than just an ele­ment of car­toon­ish silli­ness every time some bas­tard or other is des­ig­nated “The Next Hitler” by an spokesper­son for the Executive Branch. Every gov­ern­ment does it to their for­eign rivals, and the extrem­ists in one’s own coun­try are also like­wise attacked.

What arche­typal Western gov­ern­ments typ­i­cally do not do is call other mem­bers of the gov­ern­ment “trai­tors,” schem­ing to sell Our Country down the river to who­ever the bad guy is this time around. In this regard, what the 2004 elec­tion reminded me of most was read­ing George Orwell’s descrip­tions of polit­i­cal life in the 1930s; the faux nation­al­ism that dis­be­lieved all of Stalin’s crimes (on the part of the left) and invented hor­rors by the anti-fascist resis­tance (on the part of the right). It’s sim­ply depress­ing to look at the garbage that peo­ple are expected to believe about their polit­i­cal ene­mies: Reds Crucify Nuns, Kerry con­spires to sell out U.S. with Jane Fonda dur­ing Paris Peace Talks, and this is work­ing right up to today, Barack Obama a secret Muslim, per­son­ally respon­si­ble for the cap­i­tal cri­sis.

So I started type­set­ting this web­site like a book printed in the 1930s. The header was set in a fat serif type, like the chap­ter title of a flour­ish­ing book — as opposed to one that would sim­ply print the chap­ter title in bold upper­case and waste a half a page. I dithered about that, added and removed other graph­i­cal ele­ments like the sidebar.

And this week­end I had time to sim­ply sit down and work on the site. Given then exi­gent cir­cum­stances (i.e. the implo­sion of the econ­omy), I started googling for “1930s,” and ended up see­ing some adver­tise­ments and page lay­outs from Popular Mechanix, the obvi­ous pre­cur­sor. At that point the right answer pre­sented itself: don’t model this on a book from the 1930s, model it on the other side, a mag­a­zine adver­tise­ment. The rest was sim­ply a mat­ter of fin­ish­ing the implementation.

So far as future work, what I’d like to do is retract the side­bar into a tab, and I’m think­ing about the use of drop shad­ows and gra­di­ents to give a dis­tor­tion effect when it slides out… We’ll see .

[Disclosure: I dropped a day’s pay on Obama’s cam­paign about a week before the pas­tor thing hap­pened, and hope I never feel com­pelled to write about this elec­tion again.]

Matt Taibbi is (as usual, and in spite of his ridicu­lous hump­ing of Hunter Thompson’s legacy) repeat­edly cor­rect in his assess­ment of American pol­i­tics as a bunch of nin­nies totally inca­pable of see­ing ele­phants in liv­ing rooms. Conversely, Taibbi and myself are instead part of Generation Meta, and tend to be more engrossed by the men­tal gym­nas­tics required to avoid­ing see­ing ele­phants inside liv­ing rooms than the ele­phants themselves.

Proving Taibbi’s point (again), Obama is cur­rently attempt­ing to “limit the dam­age” (changed to “lim­it­ing fall­out”) for para­phras­ing “What's the Matter with Kansas?" to a well-heeled audience in San Francisco.

Choice quote from the Taibbi arti­cle (mainly because it’s still rel­e­vant in this lat­est mountain-out-of-molehill): “It’s also a great exam­ple of how the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion process has become more about enforc­ing the atti­tudes of a cul­tural ortho­doxy than a sys­tem for choos­ing leaders.”