BBQ!

Here's a picture of my birthday present:

Notice that huge, ugly flat spot on the left? That's a big iron plate. While I was at the BBQ store, I pointed to it and said, "What the heck is that?"

The clerk said all the Americans that come in say the same thing. Cheaper Aussie BBQs have nothing but a flat plate! I don't understand why; if you don't have a grill, it's not a BBQ, it's a stove. I already have a stove, thank you.

Anyway, I bought another grill rack to replace it, and cooked burgers for the Aussie relations for my birthday. I've also cooked chicken and steak on it (I think this might be Sara's present, too, since I suddenly seem to be cooking dinner twice a week). The good news is, I can eat steak again! Properly cooked, I can't tell it's grass-fed instead of corn-fed.

But at $27 a kilo, I don't think I can eat a lot of steak.

Scandals down under

Here's another difference between Oz and the US. Right now we have a major scandal developing; an MP has been caught spending hundreds of thousands of other people's money on hookers and booze. He's probably going to lose his job, and his seat will probably go to the Liberals, thus changing the balance of power in Parliament. This probably spells the end of the Carbon Tax, since the Liberals are our conservative party (Labor is our liberals. Can you imagine an American political party called Labor? Neither can I.)

The member for Dobell is a former national secretary of the Health Services Union, who is accused of paying for escort services and drawing out more than $A100,000 ($104,000; £63,000) in cash on the union credit card. Mr Thomson has claimed that other union officials had access to that credit card, and denies any wrongdoing. But Fairfax media claims to have obtained documents revealing that phone calls were made to two Melbourne brothels in 2006 from rooms hired in his name.

The scandal that could bring down Australia's government

The difference, of course, is that sex scandals happen so frequently in American government that nobody expects them to change anything.

American infantilism

This author points out that our men and women in uniform deserve more than being put on a pedestal; they deserve to be treated as human beings. Along the way he points out everything that is wrong with American political life:

“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants. 

An Empty Regard

Although the authoritarianism of the Right is obvious, this disease also affects the Left. Every time you see a Progressive whinging about how Obama does not provide enough "leadership," you're seeing this sickness: this infantile desire to have someone else save us from ourselves.

Comments

Several people have complained that they cannot leave comments. I just tried to leave a comment on my own blog and was repeatedly denied.

I switched the comment type to "pop-up" box, which I loathe, but then when I tried to comment I saw red text at the bottom saying I wasn't allowed to use the blockquote tag. On the old form, when comments were listed by pages, I never saw any error messages. Just failure.

Let me know if this new format still doesn't let people add comments.

It's as bad as you feared

Matt Taibbi's article in the Rolling Stone demonstrates the extent our system has been captured by the financiers.

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

It's all there: investigations being quashed, records being destroyed, SEC officers leaving their jobs to take cushy positions at the banks they were investigating days earlier. And it's all illegal, but the few people who pointed it out over the years were demoted or fired. In some cases the SEC turned over their investigation to lawyers hired by the banks under investigation.

We will never know to what extent the most recent financial collapse was due to pure fraud and corruption, because the people keeping the records destroyed them. They don't want us to know. Frankly, I think that tells us everything we need to know.

What is amazing to me is that the current crop of Republican politicians is busy blaming poor people for the bad economy, and asserting that poor people should pay to fix it. And yet ordinary people - that is, non-hedge fund managers - still call themselves Republicans. Future historians will look back on this period the way we look back on the Robber Barons, and marvel that such blatant plutocracy was so unrelentingly popular with the people being robbed.

Chickens come home to roost

“I think the U.S. has every chance of having a good year next year, but the politicians are doing their damnedest to prevent it from happening — the Republicans are — and the Democrats to my eternal bafflement have not stood their ground,” Ian C. Shepherdson, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, a research firm, said in an interview.

G.O.P. on Defensive as Analysts Question Party’s Fiscal Policy

Oh really, Ian, you're baffled? Completely flummoxed? You can't imagine why Democrats have not stood their ground and calmly explained sound fiscal policy to the electorate - the same electorate that has been fed voodoo economics for thirty years? For the last three decades professional economists have stood beside the financiers and politicians while they touted Libertarian mantras like "Taxes are theft" and "Government is the problem" and "Welfare queens," and now you're baffled that the political climate can't communicate the truth?

This is the price of the deal Reagan made. You lied to the Religious Right, got them to sign onto your tax and regulation free paradise, and proceeded to loot the entire planet. And now, when the looting has to stop so that the rich people will still have actual countries to live in, you're shocked that you can't just turn the mob around and send them home? After thirty years of shameless lying, you can't understand why people can't tell the difference between lies and truth anymore?

This is going to be a tough decade for rich people. They are going to remember that they need the mob they've spent the last thirty years belittling. Millionaires who assert that they owe the government nothing are going to suddenly realize that the only thing standing between them and a Chinese concentration camp are all those working-class folks, those simple-minded buffoons who took slogans of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity seriously. Because the Chinese will totally sue you in World Court, extradite you, take your cash, and put your ass in a rice paddy with a shovel. And the shovel handle will be broken.

And the only thing stopping the Chinese from carrying out the destruction of the Western financial class is the Western working class, those millions of dupes both serve in and pay for the armed forces that stop the Chinese from saying international law is whatever they say it is. For years you've used the power of those dupes to say international law is whatever you say it is, right down to poisonous IMF austerity policies that were forced on other nations (policies suspiciously similar to the ones you are currently complaining about). And for years we went along with it, because frankly life under a Chinese communtariat did not sound as appealing as life under a free-market grab fest.

Ah, but you fixed that, didn't you. When the current crop of Republicans gets done destroying every single regulation, breaking every union, and eliminating all worker protections, then an awful lot of people are going to look at the overworked, overcrowded, oppressed Chinese middle class buying cars and pianos and wonder, "Why can't we have it that good?" And then you'll come crying to us about freedom and liberty and the American way, but it will be too late. You will have sucked all the blood out of that empire.

This is how empires fall: they become so successful that failure becomes inconceivable. At that point the political class stops asking for shared sacrifice to make the empire succeed, and concentrates on just making themselves succeed. After a while, this inward-focused gaze steers the entire nation off a cliff, and somebody else - somebody who was serious about shared sacrifice, like those Chinese fellows who execute corporate officers who screw up too badly - takes over the road.

America, in its blind patriotic exceptionalism, buried under religious purity tests that have replaced politics, saddled and broken by a financier class that crashed the global economy two years ago and yet is already back up to its old tricks, sure as heck looks like Rome devoting all of its political capital to simply keeping the current emperor from being assassinated by the next one.

Look, somebody agrees with me:

 The global financial system may exist to bring borrowers and lenders together, but it has become over the past few decades something else too: a tool for maximizing the number of encounters between the strong and the weak, so that one might exploit the other. Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets....

The last buyers in the entire world, several people on Wall Street have told me, were these willfully oblivious Germans. 

Also in the article is this insightful glimpse into the German mind:

This preternatural love of rules, almost for their own sake, punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a division of a German insurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red armbands to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm, to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t want just hookers: they wanted hookers with rules .

It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!