Burning Down the House
By Michael Moore
RSN: October 21st, 2010
So how do the Wall Street boys feel after destroying the world economy while
pocketing billions, and then getting bailed out by everyone else in America?
I'm sure they're filled with remorse and desperately trying to make it up to
us. Right?
"The first thing that needs to happen, I think, is to get these people out
of their homes," a man wearing a bespoke blue-striped shirt, a Hermés tie
patterned with elephants, and Ferragamo loafers said recently. "Correct!
I'll explain," the veteran member of a bank restructuring and advisory team
said...
"The question to me is not do you foreclose or do you not foreclose. The
question is when and with what philosophy you foreclose," the man on the
bank restructuring team said. "If you want to reduce the amount of leveraged
homeowners you have, you need to ultimately kick them out of their homes." A
colleague walked up: His recommendation was to burn houses. "It would lower
the supply."
That's from a new article about Wall Street in the New York Observer, the
newspaper for Manhattan's richest people. It's the only paper I've ever seen
that's printed on pink newsprint -- except for the Financial Times, the
paper for the world's richest people. (I don't know whether rich people are
naturally attracted to pink paper, or whether it's really expensive and only
they can afford it. Whatever the reason, it's meant to say fuck you to
everyone else.)
Anyway, here's what I'm wondering: Millions of people are getting kicked out
of their homes who need a place to live, millions of homes are sitting empty
and their value decaying along with their neighborhoods, and all this banker
can say -- with a straight face, I presume -- is to burn down the houses?
Isn't that insane?
It is -- because capitalism is insane. It doesn't matter that we have a
giant oversupply of something, and a giant number of people who desperately
need that specific thing. The only thing that matters is: can this something
be sold at a profit? If not, the obvious solution is to reduce supply by
setting it on fire. And maybe this will create a business opportunity for
the Koch brothers to sell tissues to America's newly-homeless as they watch
the empty houses burn down.
And here's the punchline: though I'm sure that Wall Street banker had no
idea, there's nothing new about this. We've been here before. Here's a
famous passage from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck about the insanity
of a system that required California farms to burn food during the Great
Depression, even as people starved:
Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge and skill,
men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for
greater crops of plants...These are great men...They have transformed the
world with their knowledge...
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to
keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads
of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the
fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a
dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt
kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the
people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the
fruit -- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow
here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all
our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks,
and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit
cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must dill in the
certificates -- died of malnutrition -- because the food must rot, must be
forced to rot...
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing
heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
The Democrats, led by Franklin D. Roosevelt and pushed by unions, harvested
the Depression's grapes of wrath and created with them the foundations of
middle class America. And someone's going to harvest 2010's grapes of wrath.
But it doesn't have to be us. In fact, if you're like me, you're getting
very worried about who it might be.
(h/t Paul Krugman for the New York Observer article)
***
How Did an Entire Political Party Decide to Reject Climate Change Science?
Posted by Steve Benen
Alternet: October 10, 2010
This post first appeared in the Washington Monthly.
Ron Brownstein notes in a terrific new National Journal column just how
striking it is to see a major American political party decide, all at once,
to reject climate science in its entirety.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague, a prominent conservative leader in
the U.K., was in the U.S. last week, and described climate change as perhaps
the 21st century's biggest foreign-policy challenge," He added, "An
effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity."
His strong words make it easier to recognize that Republicans in this
country are coalescing around a uniquely dismissive position on climate
change. The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate
science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the
globe, even conservative ones. [...]
Just for the record, when the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences
last reviewed the data this spring, it concluded: "A strong, credible body
of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused
largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range
of human and natural systems." Not only William Hague but such other
prominent European conservatives as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and
German Chancellor Angela Merkel have embraced that widespread scientific
conviction and supported vigorous action.
Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any
democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here.
Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says
that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there
is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."
And in case this isn't clear, unanimous Republican opposition to any
meaningful efforts to combat global warming makes any kind of coordinated
international effort impossible.
What's more, as the climate crisis intensifies, and the need for swift
action becomes even more painfully obvious, the GOP line is getting worse,
not better. How many Republican U.S. Senate candidates on the ballot this
year support efforts to address global warming? None.
I realize that part of the problem here is that Republicans reject the
science because they oppose the solutions. If they acknowledged reality, GOP
officials would no doubt have a harder time explaining why they don't want
to deal with a climate crisis that has the potential to wreak havoc on the
planet in dramatically dangerous ways.
But the result is the same. The combination of deliberate Republican
ignorance and the Republican scheme to break the United States Senate makes
the crisis even more serious, with little hope on the horizon. It also
speaks to a larger truth - because there's no commonly shared reality among
Democratic and Republican policymakers, the prospects for compromise are
effectively non-existent.
Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine this morning noted, "I don't know who first
described politics as the 'art of compromise,' but that maxim, to which I
have always subscribed, seems woefully unfashionable today."
Yeah, I wonder why that is.
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