The Nomad Turns His Gaze Back Home...
The Nomad was able to catch the first Presidential debate, this being my first chance to actually see the candidates speak live. I was impressed with Barack Obama’s knowledge of foreign policy, supposedly his fatal weakness. He clearly does his homework, while John McCain (who looks like a demented Buddy Lee doll come to life, by the way) leans on his years of experience in botched wars as a qualification! Buddy Lee slammed Obama for his lack of experience on foreign policy and supposed “naiveté.” Obama’s correct judgment to be against a moralistically justified, misguided war is a foreign policy qualification that The Nomad values much more than Buddy Lee’s cynical willingness to have taxpayers foot the bill for a war that is helping foment terror instead of combat it.
The Nomad was also predictably disappointed to hear the political pundits and analysts dissect the
debate afterwards. The pundits roundly applauded Buddy Lee’s one-liners (i.e. Vladimir Putin having the KGB in his eyes) and lamented that Obama lacked such quips. Is this the Emmy’s or a Presidential debate? If the former, perhaps Charlie Sheen should be in the running. If the latter, I’m not judging my candidates on their ability to throw out crowd-pleasing zingers.
The pundits and analysts consistently killed Obama for “being on the defensive” when he directly answered Buddy Lee’s charges of inexperience and naiveté, yet killed him again for not addressing this in his final statement, when he instead chose to talk of his family’s immigrant roots in Kenya and the seriously declining image of the U.S. abroad. The debate was, after all, about foreign policy, yes? Perhaps our standing in the world is a relevant point to close on.
It’s become clear that after incorrectly handing Florida (and thus the election) to Al Gore in 2000, as well as the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton this year, these jokers don’t know anything, and will continue to deem everything “too close to call” until the election is over to avoid demonstrating (again) their general uselessness.
The other story The Nomad has continued to follow is the crisis on Wall Street. The nut of it is quite simple: bad lending practices, particularly in the housing sector, exposed banks to toxic debt as people who should not have received loans in the first place began to default when the Fed’s lending rate went back up to a normal 5.25% in summer 2006 after bottoming out at 1% in 2003.
How things reached the point they have, and the long-term implications of it, are more complex. Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman from 1987-2005, repeatedly insisted that there was no housing bubble, precisely as he helped create that bubble by lowering the lending rate, a move that spurred banks to give away free money to irresponsible people. Current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke also
denied the possibility of a housing bubble after being tapped by Bush to succeed Greenspan. In 2005, Bernanke called soaring home prices “largely the result of strong economic fundamentals,” while Greenspan called the price jump in the housing market simply “froth” in some local markets:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602255.html.
Huh?!? These are the people who got us into this mess, and now we’re supposed to foot a $700 billion bill to bail them out? As Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution, The Atlantic Monthly, and ESPN.com notes, the proposed $700 billion bailout came just a week after Treasury Secretary Paulson declared that “under no circumstances” would further bailouts be necessary:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/080923.
Said bill was, as we’ve seen, rejected by Congress, and it remains to be seen if, and in what form, a bailout will be approved.
From a broader perspective, the Bush administration’s policy of fiscal recklessness and corporate bailouts is simply the economic philosophy of Ronald Reagan run amok. Reagan, of course, bailed out Chrysler in 1981 after their gas-guzzling cars became wildly unpopular in an era of high gas prices and economic recession. Some economists have wondered whether it may not have been better to let Chrysler fail:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/business/17leonhardt.html?scp=2&sq=Lee%20Iacocca&st=cse.
Surely we would not have been sending tens of billions of petro-dollars to Russia if Reagan had forced Detroit automakers to innovate their automobiles towards fuel-efficiency or die (like Chrysler should have). Propped up by petro-dollars, Russia now feels bold enough to invade Georgia, sign an agreement to send $1 billion worth of arms to Venezuela, and quickly step in to back formerly U.S. trained and equipped Bolivian anti-narcotics troops (I say “formerly” because Bolivia’s President ejected the U.S. Ambassador and thus its associated functionaries earlier this month, including anti-narcotics
support as well as my once-upon-a-time employer, the Peace Corps).
If Buddy Lee had looked closer, instead of seeing “KGB” in Putin’s eyes, he would have seen the $$$ that the U.S. has been sending Russia. Globalization is real, and so are its consequences. That means that economics and foreign policy affect each other, and antagonizing Putin and Russia while paying them large sums of money for their oil, as Buddy Lee would like to continue doing, may not be sound policy, economic or foreign.
Seemingly lost in the shuffle of this financial crisis is the long term implication of the crushing national debt the U.S. now boasts, and which my generation will be saddled with. Our national debt has more than doubled in the last ten years alone, to over $10 trillion! The same Gregg Easterbrook, in his column, TMQ (Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a football column, no less!), is the only member of the national media that The Nomad has found to be railing against the Baby Boom generation’s cynical exercise of accumulating and passing this crushing debt to their children (see above link to Easterbrook’s column). Indeed, why aren’t the young outraged?
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