Have Your Say in the $3 Trillion Spending Spree

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The Boston Globe has an interview with Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel that is overseeing the bailout of America's financial system (thanks to Lex for the pointer).  It's a pretty quick read and if you're at all interested in what's going on with your trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the financial muckety-mucks then I suggest you read it.  Here's the end of the interview, which I think gives you an idea of the stakes:

Q: Is there anything else that you would want people to understand?
A: I don't have a badge and a gun. The power of this panel is derived entirely from the voice of the American people. If they stay out of the policy debates, then Treasury can spend at will and reshape the American economy with no one in the room but insiders. If they are involved, the policies will look different.
It's the design of the rules going forward that will tell us or that will determine whether we are moving to a cyclical economy with high wealth, high risk, and crashes every 10 to 15 years. Or whether we will emerge, as we did following the new regulatory reforms in the Great Depression, with a more stable economic system that benefits people across the economic spectrum. It's an amazing moment in history.

So How’d You Spend Your Easter?

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I'm willing to bet your Easter Sunday was a tad more relaxing than mine.  To begin with my Easter-eve didn't end until well after 4 a.m. because, well, just because.  And it wasn't a good "because." Then we overslept and didn't make it to Easter service, which is saying something since the service didn't start until 11.  After that I decided to take care of all the bushes that had been torn out of our front yard and made into two big piles when our new septic field was installed last week.  I lost count, but I think it was something like ten mature bushes and one small tree that were all piled together, and since bushes are bushy they weren't easy to get apart, and trimmed down and moved to our rather large brush pile in the woods behind the house.  Even with the kids' help it took the better part of five hours and let me tell you those root balls weren't light. The fact that my chainsaw broke down midway through and I had to start sawing by hand didn't help matters, and of course the fact that I'm not exactly in fighting trim hurt my cause too.

Why am I sharing this with you?  Well, because my 42-year-old body is very unhappy with me today.  About every other sentence I type prompts spasms and cramps in my forearms.  My lower back feels like a really ticked off elephant ran over it at least 10 times.  My arms look like a deranged cat used them as scratching poles.  My shoulders are so sore I can't really lift my arms above my head.  But the worst part truly is the realization that I'm getting freakin' old.  Ten years ago, heck even five years ago, I'd have shrugged this off like it was nothing but today I can't even shrug.  I was going to ask the question "If I feel like this at 42 then what am I going to feel like at 52?", but I already know the answer.  At 52 I'll be just fine because I'm damn well going to pay somebody to do the job for me.  That, my friends, is what they call hard earned wisdom.

Apparently America’s Top Model Search NOT Coming to W-S Journal Newsroom

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In what appears to be an ill-fated attempt to buck up the morale in the Winston-Salem Journal newsroom managing editor Ken Otterbourg had this to say (found in an Arizona Republic article about how reporters are depicted in movies):

"Reporters are always better-looking in movies than in real life," said Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor of theWinston-Salem Journal, in North Carolina. "There's a phrase I use to describe most people who work at newspapers – myself included, all genders – which is 'newsroom pretty,' which is a lower grade of pretty than real-world pretty." 

Oh snap! But let's be fair and share the Big O's other quote in the story:

"In real life," Otterbourg said, "the sort of revelatory scoops on which movies are made rarely happen. It's more of a series of steps and monk's work at a courthouse or the like. And most reporters – even the good investigative ones – tend to have better social skills than the lone wolves of the movies. . . . Being a journalist is about getting people to talk with you, and nobody is obligated to talk to us. You can't do it by being a jerk."

To sum it up: reporters are really friendly, yet homely folks who toil in the bowels of places like the courthouse.

In defense of the Big O I should also point out that in the movies the actors are better looking than whomever they're depicting, whether it be reporters or lawyers.  The most notable exception, of course, would be any film in which Dustin Hoffman was the actor.

More On the Time Warner Tiered Pricing Plan

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Ben Hwang posted the best explanation I've seen about Time Warner's new pricing scheme for internet data usage.  His analogy using water, hose and bucket really helps put the issue in perspective and goes a long way towards tearing down some of Time Warner's arguments for the pricing.

BTW, Ben's one of the people behind Merchant's Mirror which is a local start up that I think will make some waves in the near future.  They've just moved into the incubator at Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship in Greensboro so I think you'll be hearing a lot about them.

Panic at the AP Disco

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I wonder if the folks at the Associated Press are having some sort of weird contest to see who can do the dumbest stuff possible.  First they steal every losing play of the recording industry's playbook circa 2005 and then they start attacking their own affiliates for embedding videos from the official AP YouTube channel.  I'm really not sure what's funnier, that they went after their own affiliate for embedding their content or that the AP exec handling the matter didn't even know that there was an official AP YouTube channel.  And of course he wouldn't have known that AP could turn off the embed function themselves and the problem would have been solved.  You can read/hear/see all about it here.

Transparency When No One’s Looking

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Last night we had a public meeting for the Lewisville Planning Board so that we could explain the access management ordinance that we've been working on for the town the last couple of months.  One person from the public showed up and since she represents a coalition of realtors and developers she was essentially paid to be there.  Now I know this stuff can be dull as dirt, but this is where the rubber hits the road.

Let's put it this way.  If you plan on building in Lewisville in the future and you want to know where you can access a road from your property, i.e. build a driveway, and you want to know what kind of driveway you can build, how far away it has to be from your neighbors' driveways and other details then you might want to take a look at what we're doing.  Or if you want to redevelop your land, you might want to know how the new ordinance will affect you.  Whatever, this is the kind of stuff that directly affects people but even when we advertise the meetings, as we did this one, people generally don't show up in droves.

Access management is just one of the things we're working on right now.  Because our Town Council declared a six month moratorium on development until we can get some new ordinances in place we're meeting every week to work on an access management ordinance, a stormater/watershed ordinance and a multi-family housing ordinance.  All of these will affect propert owners in one way or another so I would recommend that people check in on our meetings to see what's going on. 

Now, we're by no means the final word on these ordinances.  We'll eventually send our recommendations to Town Council and they'll make the final decisions, but most citizens don't realize that by the time it gets to the Council a ton of work has already been done and they've missed some golden opportunities to influence the ordinance before it even gets to the powers that be.  Every one of our public meetings has a public comment segment and we really do welcome any feedback we can get.  In fact we've already incorporated changes to our early drafts of the ordinances thanks to the feedback we've gotten from people who attended earlier sessions.

If you're a resident of Lewisville or are a business owner in Lewisville you really should check out what we're doing so you can be part of the process.  Don't wait until everything's 99% done and you have to fight the inertia of a downhill train.  It's not too late.  We continued our deliberations until our next public meeting which is May 13 at 7:30 at the community center next door to the library.  Hopefully we'll see you there.  If you'd like to catch up on what we've been doing you can check out our minutes here.

American Idiots

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Found this via Ed Cone: Kevin Phillips doesn't think the average American can grasp the scope of our financial disaster, and because of that we're doomed to be continually led down the path of financial cornholery by the same abusers who have taken us this far.  Have to say I probably agree, and when you read Phillips' post you might too.

The principal inventors, hustlers , borrowers and culprits were the nation's 15-20 largest and best known financial institutions – including the ones that keep making headlines by demanding more bail-out money from Washington and giving huge bonuses. These same institutions got much of the early bail-out money and as of December 2008 they accounted for over half of the bad assets written off. The reason these needed so much money is that they government had let them merge, speculate, expand and experiment on dimensions beyond all logic. That is why the complicit politicians and regulators have to talk about $100 billion here and $1 trillion there even while they pretend that it's all under control and that the run-amok financial sector remains sound.

This is a much grander-scale disaster than anything that happened in 1929-33. Worse, it dwarfs the abuses of debt, finance and financialization that brought down previous leading world economic powers like Britain and Holland (back when New York was New Amsterdam). I will return to these little-mentioned precedents in another post this week.

But for the moment, let me underscore: the average American knows little of the dimensions of the financial sector aggrandizement and misbehavior involved. Until this is remedied, there probably will not be enough informed, focused indignation to achieve far-reaching reform in the teeth of financial sector money and influence. Equivocation will triumph. This will not displease politicians and regulators leery of offending their contributors and backers.

Reader Mail re. Medical Facilities in Clemmons

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Got this anonymous email today and thought I'd share to see if anyone's heard about this:

On Monday, April 6, an unnamed Urgent Care provider has announced its intentions to the open a new immediate care clinic in Clemmons, NC, located close to the proposed Novant Hospital location, pending state and local approvals. The clinic will feature the same state-of-the-art technology and equipment including electronic medical kiosks, digital radiology and flat screen televisions. Medical care services will range from school and sports physicals, lab work, x-rays, prescriptions, vaccinations and walk-in medical and urgent.

Last Month, Wake Forest University Medical Center’s physicians group announced plans to build another new $2 million to $3 million multispecialty clinic in Clemmons.

My anonymous emailer's address is "saynotonovant" at a free email service provider, and what I gather is that he (or she) thinks that Novant's proposed hospital will lead to more facilities being built in the area.  I'm also supposing that he thinks one of those facilities is being built by WFU which is also building a hospital in nearby Advance.  If all this is true we'll soon have a veritable health care mecca in Clemmons.

Obama Turning Into a Skid or Accelerating Into a Concrete Wall?

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Penn Jillette writes a commentary piece that asks the right questions about our current straits in his own quirky way.  It comes down to this: is spending our way out of the recession/depression a counterintuitive necessity like turning into a skid on an icy road, or is it a suicidal decision like accelerating your car as you approach an oncoming reinforced concrete wall?