RE ANOTHER VIEW WHY 'STIMULUS PACKAGE' IS A DIRTY WORD

THE MAVERICK EXECUTIVE OUTLAW

RE KRUGMAN TODAY MORTGAGE MORASS: SOME LIKE IT YACHT

He's quite right. His solutions, at bottom of his article, will not be appropriate.

Recall that 'Thurston', back in '06, in Boca, or later, in Bonita Springs, had asked rhetorically,

"Who do you think they will bail out, you or me?"

The Obama Administration, according to Krugman, is apparently confirming Thurston's judgment.

'Some like it Yacht.' Incidentally, sad to note Tony Curtis' passing, this past week.

RE E H CARR AND DAVID KAISER'S POST RE ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AGAIN

Just a few words, as I have discovered that this early 20th Century Historian, of history, politics, and 'International Relations', shared some of my views and conclusions, before 1950, and put them into print.

He also diverged from my views in crucial respects, but at least he was fighting the good fight.

Some of his observations, eg about 19th Century underpinnings, the Benthamism so to speak, and related trends, of people like Wilson, are especially refreshing, in this arid wasteland of the intellect.

Also, some of his thoughts on what one might call the 'wish fulfillment' aspect of 'specialists', and of 'experts', in various fields, (he deals especially with politics and economics), prefigures some of my observations on this subject, and on many other affected fields, specialization in general, really. (See also my remarks on David Kaiser's blog, History Unfolding.)

Others of his, Carr's, views, e.g. his view of Smoot-Hawley, diverge drastically from mine.

RE The End Of The Tunnel and NYT article re Wall Street Investment Bubble developing nations

"Foreign regulators beware..." Here comes the next bubble. As they note, this is nothing really new, except perhaps in its magnitude.

Question: why shouldn't the average American beware?

Re my previous post, below: "Although rates are at historic lows now, surprisingly few 'property rights Americans' have been 'stepping up to the plate' lately, or are likely ever again to do so, as their sources of income are increasingly drained away abroad."

The Maverick Executive would perhaps say, in a Texas drawl so characteristic,

All this good investor money has to go somewhere,

why not abroad, where it'll do some good?

RE MORTGAGE BACKED SECURITIES

Here is an article I found on Krugman's blog. It is a useful summary. It contains other references for those who want to see some implications.

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/foreclosure-fraud-for-dummies-1-the-chains-and-the-stakes/

Cartoon RE NYT EDITORIAL TODAY IRAN PAPER TIGER Maverick Executive as Don Quixote

Mise en scene:

Why not show the Maverick, at the Rodeo, say dismounting from the Don's horse, having lassoed 'Tony the Iranian paper tiger'.

Tony, of course, will be resisting, but he is flat, after all, noose around his neck, or back paws.

The caption above:

Put a tiger in your tank.

The one below:

How the Maverick likes his gas.

RE DIAMOND NOBEL PRIZE AND THE ECONOMIST CUL DE SAC

A classic economists' Morton's fork:

"...whether today’s unemployment is a cyclical result of recession, or a structural mismatch between workers’ skills and employers’ needs."

The truth, of course, is that it is neither, nor both, nor some third or fourth economist's ostensible cause.

But the economist must play his game with a very limited deck, and the really important questions to ask are why that has been the case?

Some of the actual causes of US unemployment are contained in references to works by others, and my remarks connecting them, contained in various posts on this site. It helps to have watched it unfold, out of the corner of one's eye, for decades.

RE CURRENT 'CHINA BASHING'

To see how this term came about previously, re Japan, and how it was used very effectively back then, to defuse perfectly legitimate criticism, mainly of the US system of economic and political patronage to foreign client states and major corporations, and was not so much really about 'bashing' foreign regimes as such, see prior posts re Trading Places, Trading American Interests, Japan Who Governs, etc.

It was easy then to manipulate American academic and public opinion away from taking a serious look at how the US government tried to administer business and foreign policy, globally. It has been a pathetic story, going back to the Marshall Plan really.

RE NYT editorial today China Emerges as a Scapegoat in Campaign Advertisements

Seen this coming for decades.

Unfortunately, most Americans will not be able to see that both parties' big players, especially the Republicans, but also heavily the Democrats, have long been sold on this low wage gravy train.

One 'scapegoat' I referred to earlier appears to have been found, but I suspect it will be temporary.

RE TERMS SEARCH THIS SITE RE EG THURSTON ROBERT MACAIRE HOWELL

For those individuals who want to review Thurston Howell's talk for those pages published so far, given in 2006, the Bing terms search device at upper left is available on this website.

There had been a prior version, or two, done e.g. for the Local Government Lawyers' Certification Review Course, but that was not published in the language in which it was delivered. There are, however, audio tapes of that presentation.

TOXIC PROPERTIES AND NONTOXIC ONES

Let's put it like that.

We already read, as I had predicted, there are becoming two sorts of real estate, for title insurance purposes.

All those properties for which creditors' claims were securitized, are now toxic.

One often would not know who claims them or owns them; multiple possible claimants are common.

All those against which there were no securitized mortgages issued, are sort of nontoxic.

Question: In some cases, can one be in reasonable doubt even about nontoxicity?

In our litigious society, why not, if some claimant thinks they stand to gain some advantage by so claiming?

Say, a 'dirty bomb', dropped on the US real estate market and on the rest of the world by lazy fare Entrepreneurs, just doing the imaginative creative investment device Wall Street thing.

RE NYT After Foreclosure, a Focus on Title Insurance

SEE MY PRIOR POST ON THIS TOPIC JUST THE OTHER DAY.

THE MAVERICK EXECUTIVE OUTLAW

Let's sketch briefly one image here that must resonate across God's country.

The story still being told is that if only more clever entrepreneurs would come forward, and create, that things would improve drastically overnight.

One problem with this frankly utopian propaganda chimera, has to do with the stubborn refusal of banks, now fat from federal money from the bailout, to get back to lending in the marketplace, ostensibly because of all the super high risk kinds of businesses out there, like restaurants, bars, discos, retail of all kinds, etc, etc., whereas doctors' offices, lawyers, less so ostensibly.

Thus, our Maverick is starved of good old fashioned grub.

Mis En scene for a cartoon:

We show the Maverick Executive Thurston Macaire, inside a bank lobby, at a teller window. He is dressed in a bedraggled wide striped seersucker suit and tie, but with cowboy boots, a ten gallon hat, and a gun belt visible.

The sign above the window says 'Entrepreneurs' Window'. He is at it.

He's got his big six shooter pulled from its holster, and trained on a bitter looking middle aged looking well dressed woman with horn rimmed glasses and a boufant behind the window. She is disgusted, but appears unphased by this confrontation, as if it happens every day.

The caption above:
The Maverick Executive's Stimulus Package

The one below, which he is saying:

"Never Mind What I want It For.
It's Going To A Good Cause."

RE THE END OF THE TUNNEL

It should not be a big surprise, but many Americans feel more strongly about so called 'property rights', and blindly oppose all government projects, even those like this, which deprive few if any of their house or office,

even as they are generally being divested of their central one, their homes in many cases, en masse, by even bigger 'property rights' (oligopolistic creditors' rights) right now, than one would otherwise suppose.

It's a constitutional thing.

Also, an indoctrination thing. Americans are rabid about abstract things like property rights because of propaganda designed to limit the effectiveness of government to govern.

They have been wilder about the property rights issue, in context, that really took off after Kelo, crippling all public projects,

than they are now about the much bigger badder fact that crooked and negligent private banks and Fannie and Freddie pumped up the mortgage market then caused it to pop on millions of home owners (but also a lot of 'property rights' speculators, now with creditor property rights egg on their dirty faces), losing their properties to the big property rights, the creditor banks, the same entities which were bailed out by All Americans just at the same time.

A lot of other aspects of the national commonwealth turn out to be more critical than just isolated 'property rights' home ownership:

having a job to pay a large, long, traditionally expensive, mortgage, over decades has generally been necessary.

Although rates are at historic lows now, surprisingly few 'property rights Americans' have been 'stepping up to the plate' lately, or are likely ever again to do so, as their sources of income are increasingly drained away abroad.

See David Kaiser's current post

His site is 'History Unfolding'

'Knowledge Gaps', the current post.

RE KRUGMAN THE END OF THE TUNNEL

He does a great essay sometimes.

How should American politics be reformed to accomplish what he infers is needed, instead of what the NJ governor has done?

Do you think it has anything to do with the system of 50 states, and their picayune politics?

A dumbed down electorate is also in play.

Also, I guess the construction lobby in NJ, (lobbies are where it is at, after all), is weaker there than other lobbies.

Maybe NJ wants a private road system, say little toll booths every few hundred yards, armed brigands at toll booths?

Lazy fare at work writ large.

RE MORTGAGE DEBACLE AND SOME QUESTIONS OF TITLE

Some of the issues, which few Americans had thought about until the other day, have to do with real property title implications of mortgage backed securities.

Even if they had done it right, some good, but technical, arguments might be made that securitization itself clouds title, even without lender due diligence negligence seen on a monumental scale.

Securitization itself, arguably, even before the bubble burst, constituted a permanent cloud on titles of all properties so encumbered.

Legal issues, of course, differ, state by state; and there are, of course, 50 of them.

A good argument might be made that all US properties encumbered by securitized mortgages should be entitled to a federally, or affected banks, funded quiet title action against multiple lenders, as there is no way to determine ab initio which lender is the legitimate one, after negligence and banking consolidations, and may never be known with certainty.

It is an impractical, but logical, legal feeding frenzy, brought on by failures of regulation and private self restraints.

My suggestion is that banks should generally be forced by the federal government to write off all these properties as bad corporate decisions, leave the property owners with tainted titles, and go from there.

Some other alternatives, none good either, spring to mind.

Caveat emptor.

NEW CASANOVA HAND VERTICAL INTEGRATION BUT WORLD IS FLAT CARTOON

Let's go ahead and do a WORLD IS FLAT/US IS FLAT image, and combine that with a 'vertical totalitarian integration', POST BELOW, image, for our viewers, and see what that, combined, looks like:

It is an image toward which the Tea Party, conservative religious right Republicans, many many Democrats, and even market-state, Casanova Hand, lazy fare afficionados, have been, inexorably, inclining.

It will have the economically hollowed out, and now squashed-flat, American economy, as a flat lateral pancake;

and the totalitarian, vertical, oligopolistic, media-global-industrial integration, discussed most recently by Krugman, although these are certainly not his terms or interpretation, but mine, as the vertically integrated market capitalist post.

When these two pieces are combined, pancake suspended on the vertical post, we will thus see a large Christian-looking 'cross'.

The sign of the cross, so to speak. Simple, really.

The caption above might read:
POLITICAL PARTIES' CRUSADE RAPPROCHEMENT

The one below:
'A Global Moral Pillar for a Flat Nation in a Flat World:
The End of History, and The Last Man,
Again and Again'

OR

'Entre Chien Et Loup:
At Night, All Cats are Gray
At Night, All States are Flat'

Bob Herbert and Krugman NYT October 5 and before MICROECONOMICS VERTICAL TOTALITARIAN INTEGRATION

Combine that with Krugman's latest remarks, and you have quite a summary of current fast moving trends toward some kind of oligopolistic totalitarianism.

Great investigative editorializing by Krugman. Krugman is at his best, as far as I am concerned, when he stays away from economics as such, and discusses, how shall we say (keep his comments grounded in something), the 'microeconomics' of the takeover of society by politico-media, and industrial global, 'megafirms'.

Let's call it VERTICAL INTEGRATION.

Totalitarianism would be the ultimate in 'vertical integration', wouldn't it? The Germans tried it, after all.

They, the big big backers, thought they could control the forces they 'amassed' politically. cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

After all, they only really want an even freer lazy fare environment.

Things are such that Americans will not dig themselves out of the politico/economic pit into which they have long been digging themselves by reasoned effort, but rather will be driven to some new, even less enlightened, measures, probably by major adverse developments, initially commercial or financial ones perhaps, from abroad.

RE KRUGMAN'S MOST RECENT ARTICLE SUNDAY

He makes the usual comments, but here refers to certain processes as 'natural', processes which bear no resemblance to normal uses of the term.

If it is 'natural' for trade to overcome national political agendas, everywhere, over time, then political efforts to control domestic industries and economies are inherently 'unnatural'.

A Chinese, Indian, or other , worker is as politically important, and as natural for US policymakers, and all other countries' policymakers, to represent politically, as an American one.

That's economics, as a narrow discipline, for you.