Jonathan Birge

Here is an e-mail I just got from the Libertarian party, suggesting that perhaps we should be a little more upset than we are with the bailout. Even if you’re not normally inclined to listen to the Libertarians, I think they have a point here. A trillion dollar bailout to avoid a financial disaster? That is a financial disaster, and one being paid for by the wrong people!

Like most Americans, I’m sure you were glued to the news about the “financial crisis” and the government’s “fix” for the problem. You probably heard that the government was going to come in and save the mortgage industry by bailing out failing corporations. And, you probably heard both Barack Obama and John McCain say that this bailout was necessary, and good for the economy.

What you probably didn’t hear was that it was going to cost up to $1 trillion dollars, and you were responsible for this money.

“American taxpayers will come up with the money,” says the New York Times.

Such a number is hard to conceptualize if you’re not the government. So, in order to show you just how much $1 trillion dollars really is, we’ve put together these figures:

One trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) is enough money:

• To buy everybody living in Los Angeles at least one Lamborghini Gallardo. 
• To buy 88,052, 394′ custom mega yachts; enough to stretch around ¼ of the world. 
• To buy everyone living in Belize and Malta a Manhattan apartment.
• To get half of the Democratic Party into a fundraiser for Barack Obama at the $28,500 admission price. 
• To give one out of every two men in the United States a Men’s Presidential Rolex watch.
• To buy every woman in the United States a Tiffany Diamond Starfish Pendant.
• To get two Mitsubishi 73″ HDTVs for every household in America.
• To buy four copies of The Office: Season Four on DVD, to every person on earth.
• To send everybody in America on an all-inclusive vacation to Tahiti (and some people can stay a few extra days).

AND…

$1 trillion is enough money for everyone in Buffalo, NY to buy their own 65-acre island in Panama.

This is how much the government is going to cost you (roughly $3,278 for every man, woman and child in the United States).

Barack Obama is for it. John McCain is for it.

But, Bob Barr and Libertarian Party are against it.

“No one voted to pour taxpayer funds into Wall Street,” says Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, “and no one voted for the government to take over an insurance company. If the Federal Reserve can spend as much money as it desires to bail out any company that it desires, is there anything that it cannot do with taxpayer funds?

One can credit the academic far Left with the current climate of gender politics, where the difficult goal of equality has largely been forgotten and in its place we have the expedient of reverse sexism. So, it is an irony that must be pretty damn savory to those on the Religious Right that the same identity politics invented by the Religious Left have led millions of independent women across the country to rally behind McCain simply because they can identify with the profoundly unqualified Sarah Palin as one of them. From a recent Post article:

“She justifies what we do every day,” said Beth Tweddle, who works in sales and carried a sign she drew herself, saying “We [heart] Pit Bull Palin.” Tweddle was already a McCain supporter, she said, “but Sarah just energizes us and got us out here because she does what we do, she lives like we do.”

We don’t live in an age of looking up to authority anymore. We don’t cotton to the idea that there are people who are our betters. In this time of “American Idol,” bedroom bloggers and the belief that experience, knowledge and education don’t necessarily mean a whole lot, Palin is a symbol, a statement that anyone can make it if he or she really tries.

Karla Rupp, a real estate agent, went to see Palin on behalf of her three children, especially the one who has multiple disabilities and is in a nursing home. Val Lewis couldn’t stay away — “that’s how empowering it is to have Sarah up there. I have four children; she has five. And we get it done.”

…

“She’s just as flawed as we are,” Tweddle said. “It’s not the fact that she’s a woman but the way she does it all. And let me tell you: There’re more American parents with unwed pregnant teenaged children than American parents with Harvard grads. She’s real.”

For hours, I walked through the crowd talking to people, mostly women. Again and again, I heard variations on this idea: “She’s more like us than Obama, McCain or any of the others,” as Rupp put it. “She knows what we go through.”

…

Most people I spoke to readily conceded that Palin lacks experience with or knowledge of many important national and foreign issues. But, as Allison McGarvey, a teacher who lives in Stafford County, said, Palin is “a courageous woman, and what she doesn’t know, she can learn quickly. Let’s face it, no president knows all the issues. Anyway, I don’t see how a candidate can pick one stand and just stick to it. The world situation changes every day. It’s their moral and ethical background that’s important.”

…

Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin’s lack of experience as an asset. “I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent,” said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. “And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things.”

Yup. They sure can.

Ever since I found out Al “We’re all going to die” Gore’s mansion requires its own small spotted owl-fired power plant to heat the pool, I’ve started to suspect politicians may be duplicitous as a group. So I’m not surprised to find out yet another politician turns out to be a falsely sincere hypocrite. No, the real news here is that the National Enquirer was right about something! They scooped all the major media outlets for this story. Now how did that happen?

From the I Think I Just Threw Up in my Mouth a Little Bit Department:

Kerry and Brown save us from ourselves with our money

The senate just voted to go ahead with the $300B mortgage bailout. As usual, it was accompanied by much self-righteous chest thumping from our ever generous politicians:

“What better gift on independence could we give the American people than a sense that this, their Congress of the United States, can come together, despite political differences, and craft legislation to make a difference for our country,” Dodd said.

The government is using taxpayer money to bail out mostly greedy, dishonest people who lied on mortgage applications to buy houses they couldn’t afford (many of them second investment homes) and this is Dodd’s idea of celebrating the spirit of American independence? It’s all Orwellian DoubleSpeak to me. They’ve even “branded” this as “Protecting the American Dream.” Since when is the American Dream for responsible people to be forced to pay for the mistakes of real estate speculators?

This isn’t about helping the poor, who are an ignorable voting bloc. This is about posturing politicians buying votes with welfare for the middle class. They try to make it sound more respectable than it is by spinning it as a bailout of people who were “swindled” by loan originators, many of whom apparently didn’t fulfill their basic obligation to act both as loan officers and surrogate mothers to their customers.

I say this having narrowly escaped personal destruction at the hands of these evil corporate raiders myself. When I bought a house several years ago, I believe my loan officer not only had the temerity to take me at my word when I told them I had a job, but they never once stopped by the house to see how I was doing. It was almost like the whole thing was just business to them, and I got the distinct impression they weren’t willing to take any responsibility whatsoever for my decisions, even though I’d been in their office for almost a half hour, which pretty much made me family in my book.

If our corporate conglomerates do not take a personal interest in our well-being, then who will? Our friends? Do we expect our parents to teach us things like being responsible with money and eating in moderation? Fortunately, John Kerry is brave enough to fight for us by having lobbyists craft legislation that he will generously have his own staff submit to the Senate which will allocate other people’s money to this pressing problem.

Maybe this bailout is not so much worth getting upset over as a single event, but it is a depressing reminder of how low our culture has sunk, as reflected in the moronic demagoguery we put up with from our elected officials. It’s not so much that they are cynical enough to “solve” our mortgage crisis with such shortsighted foolishness, but that we, as a country, are stupid enough to buy it. The next time we get an asset bubble, how many of us are going to do the responsible thing? What kind of message does this send regarding the need for individual fiscal responsibility? Is this the psychology of a nation of people you’d expect to successfully compete in the world?

The Democrats have nothing to be proud of here. They are a long way from the days of FDR. Before, when the country hit a rough spot, progressive thinking dictated that we’d engage in tax-funded public works. Before, in times of war, we’d pinch pennies and buy savings bonds. Now, when we encounter a rough patch during a war, we send out $600 checks against borrowed money and squander tax money on private bailouts.

I think I’m going to cheer myself up by maxing out my credit card and buying a pet monkey. If bread and circus is how we’re going to play this, then I damn well want a fucking circus.

Let’s just be honest: this whole primary has both race and gender playing far more of a role than anybody wants to admit. Enough so that it’s a bit scary for the future of our union. Some of this is the inevitable Balkanization that goes along with hard times, and of course most of it is that identity politics are clearly going to come for the fore in an election between the first viable black and female candidates. While it’s clear from exit polls that race and gender are playing a large role, there are so many variables in play that it’s not even clear what the net effects are. Maybe “black community support” (I believe that’s the accepted euphemism) has helped Obama as much as white racism has hurt him. Likewise, while it’s fair to say that Hillary has dealt with a lot of sexism, it’s also certainly true that her chromosomal configuration has gotten her a lot of votes from women who would never otherwise go against an Oprah fatwa. After all, it’s not like Hillary and Obama differ noticeably enough in policy to register more than a few percentage points of difference otherwise. In fact, the only thing most Hillary supporters dislike about Obama is that he is just one too many liberal dreams come true for one electoral season. It’s a politically correct embarrassment of riches, and so the race is decided by a convoluted calculus of reverse/forward-racism/sexism in every possible permutation (and there are six, for those keeping score).

Obama knows well enough to not point out the obvious subtext beneath so many of the results, if for no other reason than he knows any voters who are shallow enough to vote for her in the primary just because she’s a woman will most certainly be willing to vote for him in the general because he’s not entirely white. So long as he doesn’t point our their soft bigotry in the first round, he can count on it in the second. The beauty of identity politics is that while it doesn’t withstand any mention, it doesn’t need it. You don’t have to reach out, you just have to have your picture taken. One of the big mistakes I think Hillary made was playing the gender card, no matter how indirectly. Most people are perfectly willing to be biased as long as you don’t ask them to be. His far better grasp of this unspoken dynamic is probably why nobody saw Obama crying for a second about racism when Hillary won a completely improbable proportion of the votes in West Virginia. He was happy to leave things be at the networks’ polite referral to her win as due to her “highly favorable demographic of middle class white voters,” even though everybody knows that to be code for “racist ignorant hicks.” I’d probably even give West Virginia the benefit of the doubt of simply liking Hillary better if they didn’t run up the score so obscenely. When a state full of people who can’t even decide whether or not they are Republican or Democrat swing 60-40 in a primary between nearly identical candidates, you can fairly, if not politically correctly, assume that there is something going on other than an intelligent appraisal of domestic policy. I’m sure the picture of Obama in a turban transits West Virginia’s sole fiber optic cable far more often than her health care policy PDF.

Just keep repeating the words “post-racial, post-racial, post-racial” and hope nobody will notice the buck naked emperor.

For a group that is so focused fairness and justice, Democratic leaders seem to have a really shaky understanding of at least one of them. From watching their tortured machinations in trying to handle the Florida and Michigan primaries, the nation is learning a lot about the way Democratic politicians think, and might help explain what they mean when they speak of “social justice.”

In my book, fairness and justice are distinct. In general, justice is hard to define; Plato wrote a very long book trying to do so. In this context, however, I believe justice simply means keeping your word. Even if it results in unfairness (as all decisions in life ultimately do). Fairness is an observation, whereas justice is a course of action. When Florida’s democratic leadership foolishly and arrogantly decided to go against their word and move up their primary, it was unfair to their citizens, because it meant–as they should’ve known–the disenfranchisement of their voters. The damage was done then. The just thing to do is keep the rules intact and not seat the delegates. The unfairness of this, and I agree it is, is something the voters of Michigan and Florida should take up with the perpetrators of it. If an organization sets up a rule, and all parties agree to it, you have a contract. A just society honors its contracts, plain and simple. Considerations of fairness may inform which contracts we choose to enter, but not on whether or not we keep to them.

The fact that the Democrats consider keeping promises, following rules and dealing with the consequences of one’s actions completely secondary to weakminded attempts at making everybody feel happy and entitled is very telling of their leadership. It’s also emblematic of the kind of thinking that is often behind their efforts towards social “justice.” To wit, there are a lot of parallels between Democrats’ baby-splitting solution to the Florida and Michegan delegates, and their proposed bailouts of mortgage-holders. Sure, everybody will be happy in the short term, but what kind of precedent does it create? Why follow rules when there are no consequences for them?

Of course, the Republicans may be worse; these days, it seems, they are utterly unjust merely as matter of convenience to themselves. What a great choice we have.

Yesterday there was a horrible crash on our commuter rail in Boston. One train drove into another that was stopped at a control light before a station. (Below is a map of the rough crash site.) Both were westbound trains, and the crash happened on a straightaway above ground. In other words, it’s hard to find an excuse for it to have happened. These aren’t freight trains. I ride the Green Line all the time, and they can stop very quickly. While it’s probably unfair to render early speculation on crashes in general, it seems fair to do so in this case. When a two car trolley plows into another on a long straightaway, either the driver wasn’t paying attention (the most probable) or there was a massive mechanical failure that rendered even the backup braking system inoperable. Either way, incompetence is very likely the culprit, the only question is whether or not it’s maintenance- or operator-related.

Update: Preliminary reports show that the driver ran straight through a red light, going four times the proper speed. Eye witnesses on the train have the driver talking on a cell phone at the time of the crash.

This will not be surprising to any regular rider of the MBTA. By and large, the people employed by the T are militantly lazy, uniformly belligerent, and often surprisingly incompetent. I’ve seen operators of the Red Line, supposedly the highest level job in the T, forget which stop they were at and open up the wrong doors at a stop, the ones on the inside of the tunnel where the dreaded third rail is. That could kill a person. As we were watching the Green Line wreckage unfold on local news at a downtown bar (near a Green Line stop, as it happened) the bartender remarked “Given how often those guys come in to get drunk, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.”

The MBTA is a terribly run organization, expensive and inexcusably unreliable given the fact that Boston is a tiny city with very little distance to cover. We probably have a tenth of the mileage of New York’s transit system (if that), and yet a ride on our little four line subway system costs the same as New York’s massive network. Take a look at Manhattan’s subway and bus system map and then look at ours. It’s hard to believe they cost the same to ride. But the cost could probably be forgiven were it not for the poor management. The T has been around for 52,000 rush hours, and yet they still seem completely taken by surprise by each one. It’s not uncommon for 3-5 trains to go by in rapid succession in one direction while you wait 30 minutes for one to go by in yours, and it’s often too packed to get on. Maybe in another 100 years they’ll figure out how to anticipate demand for their services so the trains don’t all get bunched up during rush hour.

Why is the T so bad? I think one big reason is the corrupt Boston version of union labor. Only in a public union do you get 60k a year to make change and the promise of a fat pension when the company you work for is $14 Billion in the red. And being overpaid is just one benefit. The one that hurts the public even more is the fact that in a really “good” union, doing your job badly isn’t an acceptable basis for termination.

I’m not inherently anti-union. It’s all fine when we’re talking about guys screwing interior panels into Fords. In principle, I think it’s ludicrous they get paid more than college professors, but the fact that we can choose to buy Japanese cars puts a little accountability into the system. (Which the autoworkers unions are finding out as they get laid off by the hundreds of thousands because their cupidity priced the American automotive industry out of existence.) But some situations are ripe for union abuse, and public transportation monopolies are a union organizers dream come true: a captive customer base who have to buy the product, no matter how expensive, for an essential service that renders the threat of a strike hugely effective.

Poor working class folks in Boston who aren’t members of extortionist unions have no alternative to the T. And so when union abuse renders a system so unreliable and yet so expensive that it charges people $2 to ride a Disneyland version of a real subway, ironically it is the working poor who disproportionately suffer the consequences of this experiment in “fair labor.” Are they not just as much deserving of protection as the guys sitting in air conditioned boxes doing nothing because their union contract precludes them from being fired? Who is representing their collective interests from having to pay too much to get to work?

When a union becomes just as much problem for the underclass as anything corporations are doing, let’s just call it what it is: another concentration of power that’s being abused. While unions have historically been forces for fairness, they have now largely grown into legal organized crime, a protection racket run under the threat of strike. How bad will the T have to get before we point the finger at the unions and call them out on their abuses? How bad will public schools have to get before we force accountability on teacher’s unions? How many American industries will have to be priced out of existence? An honest society has to object to any unfair abuse of power, whether it comes from a guy wearing a tie or a blue shirt.

If you are inclined to object, the next time you are sitting on an airplane waiting to take off, think about the fact that the person in charge of your life was promoted to that position for possessing no merit whatsoever other than having stuck around long enough.*

*This doesn’t apply to JetBlue, Southwest, or SkyWest, which are among the few non-union airlines in existence and are also, not coincidentally, just about the only airlines not in bankruptcy or just coming out of it.