by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Global system, North America
Via Steve Clemons, this excerpt from a speech by Leo Hindery – an Obama economic adviser and Chair of the New America Foundation’s Smart Globalisation Initiative – which is due to be delivered later today at a conference organised by NAF:
As we all know, the Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in troubled mortgages, which would raise the statutory limit on the national debt to $11.3 trillion from $10.6 trillion. This $700 billion is over and above the $85 billion already committed to AIG, the $29 billion related to Bear Stearns, and the very conservative $25 billion associated with the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The solutions being proposed are the most expensive combined bailout in the nation’s history and will sharply curtail the ability of the next president to push for tax cuts or new spending. And yet I believe they are not nearly enough, since they do not adequately cover the exposure associated with leveraged loans and, especially, the credit-default swaps market which has ballooned to a nearly unimaginable $45.5 trillion, from $900 billion in 2001.
This credit-default swaps market, which was developed by financiers who hired the best lobbyists they could to keep regulators away, is essentially nothing more than insurance on debt, but because there are now many more credit-default swaps outstanding than there are bonds for them to cover, it could potentially be a black hole of distress at least as large as the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Tens of trillions of dollars ago these swaps became nothing more than a way to gamble with almost no money down.
Alan Blinder suggested over the weekend that “the root cause of all of [our credit problems] is declining house prices”, and he is correct – but his observation ignores the fact that to this particular root ball were grafted a lot of other financial instruments which have together grown into one heck of a tree.
Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan and Richard Shelby of Alabama, and others, were more right than wrong when they said last week that more than likely “we’re talking about a trillion dollars.”
by Richard Gowan | Sep 3, 2008 | North America
There’s brave. Then there’s Alaska brave:
The boyfriend of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s unwed, pregnant daughter will join the family of the Republican vice presidential candidate at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.
Levi Johnston’s mother said her 18-year-old son left Alaska on Tuesday morning to join the Palin family at the convention where Sen. John McCain will officially receive the Republican nomination for president. The boy’s mother, Sherry Johnston, said there had been no pressure put on her son to marry 17-year-old Bristol Palin and the two teens had made plans to wed before it was known she was pregnant.
“This is just a bonus,” Johnston said.
She took the words right out of John McCain’s mouth, I’m sure.
UPDATE: curse my cynicism. McCain stands by his fellow maverick!
This image will probably reassure the pro-life lobby that the candidate is very, very committed to defending the unborn. But after Barack Obama sportingly declared that he’d stay out of Palin family affairs, should Mr. McCain be getting involved?
by Daniel Korski | Aug 31, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America
As the Gulf Coast gets ready to evacuate and plans for the Republican Convention have been throw into disarray, an interesting question has emerged. To what extent can the Obama campaign use its well-established, grass-roots network to assist the official recovery effort?
Yesterday in Ohio, Senator Obama said he would mobilize its e-mail list of supporters to encourage them to volunteer or send contributions:
We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back. I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary.
Helping victims of crises can be politically-expedient, as well as the humanitarian thing to do. When Russian-Israeli tycoon Arcadi Gaydamak used his money to build “refugee” camps for victims of Hezbollah’s rockets he wrote himself into Israeli politics.
Barack Obama does not have money, but it is common knowledge that his campaign’s e-mail/grass-roots network is the largest in political history, and campaign team expects to raise $1 billion online during the 2008 campaign, 12 times as much as John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004. Many analysts believe that Obama, despite what the national polls say, will eventually pull ahead of McCain because of the national, internet-aided network.
But the idea of using this network for national, non-partisan purposes is novel, though logical. If it is eventually used to help victims of the hurricane and if Obama is elected to the White House could this network be “federalised” or serve as a nucleus of a new Kennedy-style Peace Corps or a way to take the newly-established Civilian Reserve Corps a step further?
by Richard Gowan | Aug 28, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
Readers have welcomed my decision to eschew the NYT op-ed page in favor of RZA’s commentary on the election, but it turns out that the Wu-Tang Clan is a cabinet of all the wits. MTV reports that Raekwon has also been in Denver, although technically for a show rather than punditry… but wait:
He wants Barack to win, but said he’s worried that “if he do win, they’re going to put him in a situation where the country’s going to be haywire,” meaning that Obama could be set up for failure since he would be entering the presidency at a difficult economic time for the country.
He also commented on John McCain, saying, “McCain is cool but nobody knows about McCain. Barack is connected to the community, and people in the community want to see a change.”
The point about McCain is a bit weak, but the fact that 2009 may be a bad year to be a new president is a good one – and less glib than, say, Thomas Friedman’s column yesterday. Still, this is all somewhat short on policy ideas. For those, turn to Wu-Tang’s Method Man, who set out this strategy while in the UK in June:
The rapper is a big fan of the Democrat but he insists no new president should be allowed to lead the country without visiting the toughest areas of America.
He says, “My people never feel the effects of who changes the world or who’s in office because it never trickles down that low on the scale. We don’t feel the President’s power down there (in Compton, LA, as in “Straight Outta…”), we just feel the poverty. Blessings to Obama and the whole Obama click. Hopefully he’ll bring his ass to Compton and walk through the war zone to see what it is. Somebody told me, ‘Why would he go there; that’s dangerous.’ That’s why he should go!”
With half the press hard at work linking LBJ, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama (OK, Robert Caro had a rather fine piece in the NYT about all that) it’s a fair point.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 26, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Do you know who these people are?
You do? OK, get off this blog and play outside. You don’t? Then you’re over 16. They are the Jonas Brothers, a Disney-produced band with an enormous following among early teens in States. Last week, we found out that Dick Cheney’s a fan too, as the lads visited the White House to make a public service film about national parks and the Veep brought his granddaughters by to say hello.
About time. The Brothers have “visited the Bush White House three times, and are noted Evangelical Christians”. This leads us to the all-important question of which celebrities we can expect to see in the White House as of January next year. I’ve highlighted Barack Obama’s success in bringing RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan into public politics, but musicians up to and including Kanye West are descending on the Democratic Convention in hordes like never before. That has not, of course, stopped the Democrats from reportedly booking Springsteen and Bon Jovi to headline before Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday – they may have a fifty-state electoral strategy, but musically they’re all New Jersey.
The real question is, however, what the celebrity coterie hanging around a McCain White House might look like. The candidate launched a small war with Paris Hilton, and is trying to spark something similar with Madonna. Earlier this year, Doonesbury ran a great series of comic strips about a Hollywood fixer trying to recruit stars for the Republicans, settling for a lesser Baldwin brother. Now, the NYT blog reveals, politics is imitating satire, but at a sub-Baldwin level. Here’s its account of a recent fundraiser in Hollywood, oddly entitled “McCain’s celebrities”:
The (press) pool reported that the actors in the crowd included Gary Sinise, Dean Cain, Jon Voight, Jon Cryer, Angie Harmon, Craig T. Nelson and Lorenzo Lamas, among others.
Shouldn’t that be “McCain’s celebrity“? Jon Voight is, of course, a big name. The rest? Gary Sinise was good as the guy left on the ground in Apollo 13. Erm, Dean Cain was solid in the Superman TV series in the mid 1990s, but let’s face it: co-star Teri Hatcher has gone further. So what are we to make of this?
Mr. McCain was cheered when he told the crowd that he “would like to thank so many brave and courageous people who are here that happen to be in the business of Hollywood who are risking their entire futures and careers.”
He must be thinking of Dean’s rumored involvement in Maneater, in pre-production:
A former FBI profiler, now a sheriff of a small town and a single parent of a high school aged daughter, begins to profile a series of unexplained murders only to learn that the monster he’s profiling may be himself.
Ooh, I’m looking forward to that. If nothing else, Mr. Cain hamming it up sounds more fun than a celebrity gala at the McCain White House.
