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That's how many hours are left until spring begins. Here on the Vineyard it has not been as bad a winter as the rest of the Northeast seems to have had. Thus far, there have been only two major storms and no days where the temperature was in the single digits - at least as far as I can recall. And this week's MV Times reported the earliest sighting of snowdrops in anyone's memory.

More rantings

I guess today is one of my "being an old fart" days. Two op-eds in today's Boston Globe are almost perfect fodder for praising the good old days when I was young.

Kevin Cullen, a regular Globe columnist, has a funny piece about our 21st century attitude towards snow. Yes, we listened to weather reports back in the days, but there was a lot less 'forward planning' by the powers that be. My parents did not receive a telephone call at 6 a.m. informing them that school was canceled today because of the weather forecast. Nor were government workers told to stay home because a storm was expected. But such practices are becoming de rigeur even in the hardy New England state of New Hampshire.

Ellen Shell, a professor in the graduate program of BU, laments the practice of aspiring scholars focusing on grades rather than knowledge in their college days. Just about all of the applications for graduate school that she sees are from students with an average of A. Although she does not mention grade inflation, she identifies a reason why the grades are so high and that is because the students are taking easy courses, where they can get an A, rather than challenging courses, which would better prepare them to be teaching the citizens of the future.

In other words, we are adopting practices that will eventually give us a world where people are afraid to venture outside or run the risk of not being considered a genius. It was more rigourous, challenging and better in the 20th century.

Seeing the World

I had coffee today with a few men friends and, through a twist in the conversation, the subject of the draft arose. For some reason we started talking about our youth and significant things that happened at that time which affected the rest of our lives. A common thread was being drafted into the military. While just about all of us are relative pacifists, all but me had served time in the armed forces. They were all lucky enough to have served in comparative peace time, but serve they did.

One of the things it did for them was expose them to a world beyond their neighborhood. They were exposed to different cultures (both foreign and domestic) and a way of organizing a work force. This exposure was not restricted to the guys alone; their parents were well aware that their children were at risk because the nation was at war.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It would have been nice if steps had been taken to move from our militarism to a more peaceful approach to others, but, at least, the soldiers, their families and friends knew that risks were being taken for our nation. In these days of the professional army, who is really aware of the full costs of our militarism? How many soldiers do you know? Are your children in the military?

Poor auditing + Derivates + Greed = Greece Today

It seems that some form of derivatives and the accompanying securitization have been involved with just about every loan of substantial sums in the 21st century - be it a loan to the guy next door or a country. Manana is the catchword. Tomorrow my house will be worth so much more, I'll be rich. Tomorrow I'll be out of office and won't have to be around when the bills come due.

The leaders of Greece wanted to join the European Monetary Union in 2001 but had too much debt on their books. So, they called on the wizards of Goldman Sachs who were able to transform the debt to currency trades and, voila, Greece met the standards of the EMU. Now why the EMU was not able to discover this - this being the fact that Greece did not meet the EMU's standards - is interesting, shall we say.

Since Greece was able to get what it wanted in 200,1 it tried it again last year when the economy went south. They paid Goldman another $300,000,000 to make the bad things go away. It does not look as though the magic worked this time.

Talk about a run of bad press

Bloomberg has a lengthy article recounting possible connections between the National Highway Safety Administration (NHSA) and Toyota. The connections were two former employees of NHSA who joined Toyota in fairly good positions. Christopher Tinto is Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Christopher Santucci works for him. Both have lobbied NHSA on Toyota's behalf particularly with regard to safety issues, such as those now in the press. Both were good at their jobs as they were able to kill investigations concerning the safety of Toyotas.

What will Geithner and company do about the rising risks in commercial real estate?

They've seen what is probably the largest default yet in commercial real estate - Stuyvesant Town. While it's unlikely that we'll see any larger defaults, it is virtually certain that we'll see many defaults on commercial real estate. The Congressional Oversight Panel thinks that about half of the loans up for renewal in the next five years are underwater today. That represents $700 billion, which is not exactly small change, particularly when many of these loans are not held by Geithner's friends, the "too-big-to-fail" banks, but by much smaller banks, the ones our government has not paid much attention to except when they fail. Will they start paying attention?

The panel concludes:

"The Panel is concerned that until Treasury and bank supervisors take coordinated action to address forthrightly and transparently the state of the commercial real estate markets – and the potential impact that a breakdown in those markets could have on local communities, small businesses, and individuals – the financial crisis will not end."

They don't make them like this anymore

Imagine! This was on national television in 1972.

Still Pushing

Elizabeth Warren has a very simple op-ed about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) in today's Wall Street Journal. Her argument is that banking is based on trust and the past several years has seen bankers misuse that trust. The CFPA would help restore this essential trust. Yet the bankers are doing everything they can to kill it without realizing that they are really committing suicide.

Never say never

From Bloomberg:

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast yesterday whether a downgrade of U.S. bonds from their AAA rating is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

The boy is a veritable sage.

Who is Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic?

I’ve never heard of Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic, but there is a fascinating interview of him by Dahr Jamail. Mestrovic teaches at Texas A&M but has spent a lot of time studying war crimes and testifying at such trials. He actually seems to be someone to whom we should pay attention.

Basically, Mestrovic asserts that, as a matter of policy, our Army commits war crimes and makes sure that only low level soldiers are brought to “justice” should the crimes become known outside of Army circles. And, he claims that this policy is not new. In fact, it can be traced to our early days; Tocqueville wrote that, unlike the Spanish, English or French, we passed laws that validated our mistreatment of others, such as the Indians.

In addition to historical antecedents we have a problem in the fact that we as a democratic country have to live with an army that must be authoritarian. And in an authoritarian world, some are bosses (in the worst sense of that word) and some are workers. Mestrovic claims that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib slept in cells (as did the detainees) and did not have access to toilet facilities. Mestrovic goes on to point out that terrorists who are tried in our courts will have more rights than soldiers tried by court-martial.

Secrecy is necessary in battle, but Mestrovic believes that secrecy can be carried too far. In just about all courts-martial any attempt by the defense to introduce the Rules of Engagement under which the accused operated is thwarted by the court.

Mestrovic urges us to adhere to international law and to stop trying only underlings; the brass bears the responsibility for war crimes and should be brought to trial.

Dumb and Dumber

From the Huffington Post

The Slough of Despond

As you can see from the statistics on the left, my output has decreased substantially since May. Part of this is due to life changes, but my growing disillusion with our government leaders may account for more of the decrease in the number of postings I’ve made. I’m old enough to have been disappointed by our leaders more than once in my lifetime. Maybe it’s happened too often and this latest grouping of supposed leaders is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I was hopeful that Obama would, in fact, attempt to change this country and return it to a position where it really was a force for good for its people and for the world. Clearly, that has not happened and it certainly does not seem likely to happen. We continue to live in a dream world; the only thing our leaders really care about is winning the next election. The idea of sacrificing for the greater good has vanished. The concept of responsibility is vanishing. We are willing to outsource everything from manufacturing to running our parks to feeding our school children to defending this country. And, we have constructed a system whereby it is just about impossible for anyone but a dyed-in-the-wool politician with gobs of money at her disposal to enter the higher levels of government. So, how can we change the way this country is run?

I attributed a fair amount of Bush’s problems to his inability to hire good people. Obama seems to have the same problem; his people may be smarter than the Bush personnel but they have little appetite for change and that is what we really need now. The chances of our winding up in tomorrow’s economy with the same risks we had in yesterday’s economy are quite high. People are still dying in Iraq and a lot more are dying in Afghanistan. What changes are being wrought in those hell holes?

How do we get people who understand mathematics and are not afraid of a filibuster? Bush got his way with less support than Obama has. Why can’t Obama act as well as he can speak? When do we get leaders who are willing to cut the largest defense budget in the world? Wouldn’t a smaller defense budget enable us to cut the deficit and do the things a civilized nation should do?

Sadly, I no longer see this happening in my lifetime.