I’m an old warehouse hand, so I can wrap my head around the concept of pallets. You probably can, too. A full pallet is approximately 4–² X 4–² X 4–².

All this talk about “stimulus packages” and “bailouts”…

A billion dollars…

A hundred billion dollars…

Eight hundred billion dollars…

One TRILLION dollars…

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I’d take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like…

(h/t PhillyBits, via twitter…)

While Sarah Palin is rightly criticized for refusing money from the Obama stimulus package that would help special needs children in her own state of Alaska, she sees a bigger priority for those Alaskan citizens with special needs, and she has set out to defend them. She will fight to the end, evidently, against Barack Obama making fun of the Special Olympics. Here’s her comments from the Daily Beast:

“I was shocked to learn of the comment made by President Obama about Special Olympics,” Palin said in a statement. “This was a degrading remark about our world’s most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world.”

She added:

“These athletes overcome more challenges, discrimination and adversity than most of us ever will. By the way, these athletes can outperform many of us and we should be proud of them. I hope President Obama’s comments do not reflect how he truly feels about the special needs community.”

Let’s get this clear. Barack Obama made a stupid statement and immediately apologized. He is also in favor of funding education for those with special needs, having put his money where his mouth is. Sarah Palin has a special needs child, and she’s willing to spout off as some kind of representative for the special needs community, but she is unwilling to go to bat for any special needs child, preferring to prance across the national Republican stage instead.

Sure, I had written about this earlier this morning, but it needs saying again. She is a phoney and should be called on it every single time she shows herself to be a phoney.

Perhaps she merely wishes to be the poster girl for Republican hypocrisy. But even that is a very hotly contested battle. Still, this statement by Sarah Palin surely puts her in the running.

Following my long week of dogging the AIG executive bonus issues, I had planned to spend this day unwinding a little bit. Those plans were made before I spent the morning reading (and digesting) Matt Taibbi’s latest Rolling Stone piece, The Big Takeover.

It’ll take you awhile to read through the article, but after you’re finished, I promise you that you’ll have a better handle on the depth of the financial crisis this country is facing, why Fed chief Ben Bernanke is full of shit when he says “we’ll see the recession coming to an end probably this year”, and who the major players were that got us into this mess.

Here’s your “Marie Antoinette moment” from Taibbi’s investigation:

“We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats,” AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

“But didn’t these –highly expert people’ basically destroy your company?” I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn’t fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit’s operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can’t even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. “These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs,” says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. “They don’t function well without them.” … [emphasis mine]

Basically, Taibbi says, we’re screwed.

The financial future of this country rests in the hands of a very few people who, ultimately, were at least partly responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place: Bernanke and Geithner, along with their ex-Goldman Sachs minions.

After reading Taibbi’s lengthy piece, it’s clear that there is absolutely no accountability for the strategies that have been put in place to solve the problems. Congress can hold all of the hearings that it desires, but neither Geithner nor Bernanke (or the unilateral policies of Treasury or the Fed) are answerable to congressional oversight.

If, as AIG CEO Edward Liddy claimed on Wednesday, AIG execs who received bonuses are really paying them back, it’s not necessarily because they’re trying to stave off the Marie Antoinette moment that’s at hand (although that could certainly be a motivator), but because whatever bonus money they’re now receiving is literally WAM – walking around money – for these execs. Their bank accounts are already fat from spending your money at the Wall Street casino, and $2 or $3 or $6 million extra dollars just doesn’t mean that much to them.

And no, there aren’t going to be any scraps left at the table for you at the end of the day.

Update: Greenwald puts some wood on this one and hits it out of the park. And confidential to Joe Nocera: your douchebaggery is showing.

Earlier today, I posted a link to a New York Times article on the heat that AIG executives are currently feeling. Needless to say, I’m not particularly sympathetic. While I don’t think anyone in the progressive blogosphere is overtly calling for a Marie Antoinette-style social accounting, there’s a certain visceral satisfaction in knowing that the AIG bonus kerfluffle is causing a bit of angst among the upper crust.

The NY Times article implies that AIG execs are scared for their families and children due to anonymous / unsourced “death threats”. That’s completely understandable, if true. However, I find it odd that according to the same article, none of the unidentified execs who’ve expressed this concern have actually contacted their local authorities. Wouldn’t it make sense that if someone were receiving such threats, that they’d be getting on the phone to their local constabulary and demanding that someone in law enforcement investigate the threats? Or that they’d at least be packing for a quick getaway to the house in Aruba for a week or two until the current shitstorm passes?

One other thing that’s caught my interest over the past few days is a variety of comments I’ve read regarding the potential for a populist uprising – AIG bonuses only having been the straw that broke the camel’s back. While some of the comments seem supportive, many of them work a variation on an old Beatles theme: “You say you want a revolution; we’d all like to see the plan.”

The funny thing is, the lyrics to the song, Revolution can be viewed as Lennon and McCartney’s parody answer to the concern trolls of their day. Or not. Pick your interpretation.

In the late 1960′s, at the height of the Vietnam war, The Beatles were trying to tell us something:

You say you want a revolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world…

You say you got a real solution
Well you know
We’d all love to see the plan…

Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were visionaries. We can argue all day (and probably a college semester worth of academic analysis) over the meaning of the lyrics. But if you view the lyrics in terms of current day discourse in internet forums, the words make a lot of sense as applied to the online “want a plan” concern trolls.

There has been no revolution in the course of history, including America’s own revolution in the 18th century, that really had a plan, per se. Revolution, peaceful or otherwise, has always been the spawn of perceived social injustice.

True social change happens because we, the people finally hit a breaking point. Revolutionary incidents just happen – there aren’t flow charts, power point presentations, war gaming, etc. – just a critical mass of pissed off people of regular means who have finally gotten tired of the status quo.

Revolution tends to be preceded by attempts to change the system internally. When those attempts are co-opted from the inside, or fail due to brutal oppression, people start to try to force the desired social change from the margins of society. Incident by incident, the margins start to push toward the center, and if / when momentum for change builds to a rolling boil, either the lid flies off the pot (violent revolution) or cooler heads from both sides reach for the heat controls and turn down the flame via accommodation of grievances.

But let’s be clear: revolution never starts with a plan. It begins with true anger (and disparate incidents) that eventually coalesce into a larger action. When that larger action grows sufficiently to become self-sustaining, change finally happens – and then the power point slides can be developed to map out a path forward.

Revolution is messy and untidy, by lack of an inherent plan or design. Lennon and McCartney parrot today’s concern trolls:

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright…

It’s hard to believe that anyone in a civilized society in 2009 would actually view violent civil unrest as a desirable outcome of social injustice, and we can all hope that it will never come to such a conclusion. But many years ago, long before the Beatles pressed their first vinyl, Thomas Jefferson expressed a “natural law” that even Clarence Thomas could get behind:

…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…

We’ve reached a point of national self-examination where it’s time to truly reconsider the direction we’re heading, and America’s contribution to global society.

Barack Obama was elected president on a platform of step-change, not incremental improvements. The 2006 congressional tidal wave that carried over to 2008 was born from the same desire. I opined many months ago that to affect real change, Obama had to be willing to be a one term president, and totally dismantle the status quo, no matter how loud the howls from the right wing oligarchs.

That’s the first stage of revolution described above: where attempts need to be made to work from the inside. And that’s OK, as far as it goes. If Obama is not willing to take the chances, and is not willing to be a one term president, then it’s easy to imagine that the margins will start to push on the outside of the envelope. That’s when it gets ugly.

We can all hope and pray that the need for such a radical social overhaul will never become so black and white, because there will always be charismatic (and less desirable) potential leaders ready to fill the void from the margins. The end result could be truly less desirable. Unfortunately, that is exactly the outcome that our government and its corporate benefactors seem to be courting.

Some days, it’s almost like they’re daring us.

There’s a nexus coming together in this country, and while some are using the metaphor of pitchforks and the proles storming the castle (the rich, at AIG, at least, seem very afraid of this scorn, as evidenced here and here), it is beginning to seem to me as if the rich, those metaphorically living in the castle, are guilty of tea bagging, if not pitchforking, themselves.

I suppose I come to this conclusion first from Michael Hiltzik’s column in the Los Angeles Times. His title somewhat says it all: “The belief that the wealthy are worthy is waning.” The thesis here is that many in our country rallied against progressive income taxes that hit the rich because they themselves pictures themselves as being rich someday, sort of like Joe the Plumber, you know. They had a myopia concerning the true American condition. We all know that Joe the Plumber will get nowhere unless he milks the right wing media with his image, and Joe will therefore continue in self-delusion. But the average American, Hiltzik says, is beginning to see through this Republican myth.

Let’s face facts. The Republicans are the ones, perhaps further back than Gingrich or even Reagan, who perpetuated the myth that cutting taxes on the wealthy would result in good jobs for everyone, including the possibility that everyman may one day become rich himself. Not so much nowadays. The false veneer on this theory is peeling off, like a Laffer Curve going south. They set the stage with their constant attempts to reverse the progressive system of taxes in this country, led now by Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform, a group Republicans listen to almost as well as they bow to their leader, Rush Limbaugh, as mindnumbingly stupid as that act of bowing is.

What really blew the top off, though, is their penchant for deregulation. We’re seeing an economic meltdown because of unregulated securities now, and AIG’s insuring those risky schemes, but what we’re also seeing on the side is the steadily declining respect for the rich. Sure, many rich people are philanthropists, and there are fine people among the rich. When the taxes go up on them, as the current national feeling will assuredly lead to, they will go up on me and my family as well. But let’s make sure to note that the deregulation was spurred by a system of rewards cloaked as bonuses. Sure, the former Chair of AIG claims he wouldn’t have given out the bonuses that are so controversial now, but he gave out similar retention rewards. It was the name of the game for far too many years. Risky products are dreamed up by money managers whose bonus was directly tied to short-term success. They became the rich. By exploiting the system they have tea bagged themselves.

AIG’s defense? They are now going after taxes they say they don’t owe because they derived from offshore tax shelters. Yes, banking regulations evidently enabled them to legally shelter a whole batch of their tax obligations, and AIG wants that 306 Million Dollars back, even though the funds helping them fight the IRS were provided by the federal government. These folks just don’t know how to leave well enough alone. The gall, we say, at every turn where they spend our money on bonuses or suing us! Should we be so surprised?

Now the Republicans have started this stupid Tea Bag campaign. It mimics the Boston Harbor protest from our American Revolution, but there ain’t no redcoats here. As Bob Cesca notes, the Republican Tea Bag campaign is about reducing taxes on the wealthy at a time when the entire American electorate is glued to the TV waiting for the next shoe to drop in the Wall Street mess, caused by the Republican deregulation and greed that the Tea Bagging goal would ostensibly reward. Sure, Republicans are railing against AIG bonuses, but as usual they have no plan. They’d rather protest using Tea Bags, and referring to an insulting sex act. Yeah, Republicans claim to stand for high moral values, but even their protests are coarse and ugly. What they’ve done with such absurities is tea bag themselves.

It would be enough if the Republicans had only Tea Bagged themselves, but they have done the bidding of the markets and those who pretend to stand for the rich for so long that the rich are the ones feeling the Tea Bag, full in the face. Conspicuous Consumption is coming to an end, I’m guessing, at least for a long time, and I’m betting Thorstein Veblen would be proud. But this isn’t about a 120 year old theory. This is about today, about the dangers of runaway and unregulated capitalism and how it can destroy our economy. The Republicans called for that deregulation, trusting int he blind hand of supply and demand to care for everyone. That ship has sailed, and judging by their stupid Tea Bag campaign, the GOP is far, far from recognizing that fact.

Richard wrote the other day about Andrew Cuomo demanding the names of those receiving bonuses at AIG. Heck, those bonuses, presumably claimed for “merit” at a company that received 182 Billion in bailouts – they’re today’s biggest story. AIG’s Chairman and CEO Edward Liddy made a complete hash of his testimony yesterday, claiming the performance bonuses are legitimate, but also saying he’d asked his executives to give some of the money back. Ludicrous reasoning there, and while it has been reported, the media seems to have given Liddy a pass. Certainly GOP Chair Rush Limbaugh is defending Edward Liddy and those bonuses, and many of the rest of the Republicans are dishonestly blaming Christopher Dodd.

Let’s get this straight. It is very simple. AIG performed miserably last year with the highest quarterly loss in the last quarter ever seen in the history of business. They performed so miserably they needed a bailout, a fucking HUGE bailout. That someone at AIG thought it was OK to give out bonuses is a sign of just why AIG hit the Guiness Book of World Records under the category of quarterly losses – they’re making stupid business decisions.

Hey, and here’s another stupid business decision. They blew off New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo when he asked for a list of the names of those who were raking in the bonuses. It doesn’t do to get Andrew Cuomo mad. And yesterday Andrew Cuomo got a court decision that helps him in investigating AIG. Remember when he asked for details on those last minute Merrill Lynch bonuses and Bank of America, new owner of the failed Merrill Lynch, told Cuomo to take a hike? Well, New York State Supreme Court Judge Bernard Fried has ruled and forced Bank of America to comply. From ABC News:

Attorney General of New York Andrew Cuomo took Bank of America to court to force them to reveal the information, after the bank said it was proprietary. But Wednesday New York State Supreme Court Judge Bernard Fried denied Bank of America’s motion to keep the names secret saying the Attorney General of New York has the “authority to decide whether the information he gathers as part of his investigation should be kept secret or public.”

Wednesday’s decision could set a precedent on the issue of revealing bonus details to the public. Cuomo has also subpoenaed AIG to reveal the names and amounts of the controversial bonuses issued late last week to members of their Financial Products division, blamed for the insurance company’s disastrous losses in 2008.

“Today’s decision in the Bank of America case is a victory for taxpayers. Let the sun shine in. Justice Fried’s decision will now lift the shroud of secrecy surrounding the $3.6 billion in premature bonuses Merrill Lynch rushed out in early December,” said Cuomo following the decision.

“Bank of America chose litigation over transparency and we are gratified that this tactic has failed. AIG should take heed and immediately turn over the list of bonus recipients we have subpoenaed. The deadline for responding to our subpoena is tomorrow. More litigation is not the answer – it is time for AIG to come clean,” he warned.

AIG is certainly going to have to attend to Cuomo now. Whether Cuomo has a legal case is another matter. Still, AIG and the marketing of insurance products needs to be exposed probably more than those bonuses. It appears they did little in the way of investigatng the risks involved in insuring sub-prime mortgage backed securities, an investigation that used to be at the heart of the insurance business. That was the job of those guys with the eyeshades in the back room – to figure out whether the risks were worth it. Instead AIG appears to have let marketing create newer and riskier products, and then to pay the marketing “geniuses” huge bonuses for their steady insurance acumen. What a mess.

Meanwhile, folks everywhere are being foreclosed upon, including churches. And AIG executives, flush from years of insane bonuses, sit pretty.

Ah, this is going to be one special book. The right wingers will flock in droves to the local bookstores to buy it. George Bush has signed a contract with Crown Publishing to write a book on decisions he made since 9/11. The tentative title is “Decision Points.” From the New York Times:

As widely expected, former President George W. Bush, like many past occupants of the Oval Office, is writing a book. But rather than delivering a more traditional presidential memoir, Mr. Bush plans to explain 12 difficult personal and political decisions he has made.

Mr. Bush mentioned the book Tuesday in his first speech since leaving office, delivered in Calgary, Alberta. The book, tentatively titled “Decision Points,” is to be published in 2010 by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House.

According to Robert B. Barnett, the Washington lawyer who negotiated the deal with Crown on Mr. Bush’s behalf, the book will cover Mr. Bush’s decisions relating to Sept. 11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Barnett said Mr. Bush would also write about why he ran for president, his decision to quit drinking, his discovery of religious faith, and his relationships with his parents, wife and siblings.

Mr. Barnett said Mr. Bush began working on a draft two days after he left office.

Hmm. It is so tempting to go for the cheap shot here. Aw, what the heck. I’m going to let it go. A book full of whiney excuses about bad decisions is not worth working up either a cheap or a pithy comment.

This has also been reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. And the blogs are going wild, as one might imagine. Way to go, Bushie.

I spent my St. Patrick’s day in New York City, tilting at a very large windmill – American International Group.

After a weekend of stewing about the outrageous bonus payments that a group of top AIG execs received, I decided on Monday that I wasn’t going to simply sit behind a keyboard and vent my outrage any longer. So, on Tuesday morning, I hopped on one of the Chinatown buses that runs between Philadelphia and NYC (what a great deal – $20 round trip, and I didn’t have to drive!), and headed for AIG’s corporate headquarters at 70 Pine St.

The walk from NYC’s Chinatown to the financial district isn’t particularly far – probably less than a mile – but there’s so much in the city for the senses to take in that it seems longer. As I made my way down Broadway from Worth St., I decided to take a short detour down Fulton, and walked over to the World Trade Center area. I’ve been to NYC many times since 9/11, but never visited the site to pay my respects.

What started as a quick side trip up the block to view a recent gash on American history became almost a quest. The area is totally fenced and blocked, and there just isn’t a good vantage point to scope out the construction / reconstruction activities from street level. So I headed down Liberty St. toward the West Side Highway, through throngs of construction workers at lunch, headed up the stairs toward the 1 World Financial Center building, and was finally able to get a fairly decent view from the skyway to 1 WFC.

It struck me how so little has really been accomplished at the site in the 7-1/2 years since the buildings came down. Certainly, there have been many logistical and political issues involved in the reconstruction, but when you actually see the hole for the first time, it’s surprising that there has been so little local or national will to rebuild the area.

As I left 1 WFC, making my way toward Broadway I walked past the many small stores and eateries at street level. I tried to visualize what it must have been like to be a cashier in one of those shops when the towers came down, and I wondered how long this whole section of lower Manhattan had been basically uninhabitable before the bodegas and restaurants could reopen. My mind wouldn’t wrap around the imagery, so I let it go, but I clearly need to revisit that entire corner of my head sometime in the future.

Heading back down Broadway, I noticed a police car – no, two – no, three or four – with their light bars blinking near the corner of Cedar. I knew that I was getting close to Pine St., and there were news reports that security had been ramped up at all AIG facilities due to threatening emails and phone calls. Was the NYPD presence part of the security response?

As I turned down Pine St., it was clear that the cops weren’t on the street for AIG, because there didn’t appear to be any security personnel in view as I walked toward the headquarters building, two blocks distant. In fact, except for a small placard on the front of the building, and the address being stenciled on the window of the lobby coffee shop, I would have missed the building entirely. That’s the way the canyons of the financial district unfold.

I stopped in front of 70 Pine St. to take a picture. It’s a huge building, but has a deceptively small entrance for a 66 story skyscraper. From inside the building lobby, through a single revolving doorway, a security guy watched me warily as I snapped the photos, but I continued moving. I circled the block, and stopped in a Duane Reade drugstore to pick up a piece of poster board. Outside of the store, I pulled a Sharpie pen out of my backpack, created my sign, folded it, and put it in my pack. The logistics of my protest were now in place…

(more…)

This has been a long time in coming:

Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a change on medical marijuana policy Wednesday, saying federal agents will target marijuana distributors only when they violate both federal and state law. That would be a departure from the policy of the Bush administration, which targeted medical marijuana dispensaries in California even if they complied with that state’s law.

“The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law,” Holder said in a question-and-answer session with reporters at the Justice Department…

It’s nuanced, but read that again: federal AND state. Not federal OR state. Not “go after those people who violate federal law”.

Beside the fact that pot laws in general make almost no sense, there is an increasing body of evidence (supported now by decriminalization or medical use legislation in 13 states) that a medically defensible use exists for marijuana as a safe, effective, and non-addictive remedy for pain and other psychoactive ailments.

Is the AG’s position the start of staking out a sensible path forward in examining all laws regarding personal use and possession of illegal drugs in the U.S.? It’s hard to say. What isn’t hard to understand is that a vast percentage of prison inmates in the U.S. (local, county, state and federal) are being lodged on drug offenses. The “war on drugs” has long been not only a losing battle, but has been waged primarily on the addicted, minorities, and those in less fortunate economic circumstances.

Compassion. It’s a rare word when framed in terms of the war on drugs, or of personal users caught in the net of enforcement.

In hard economic times, though, when the potential for revenue generation via taxation begins to make fiscal sense, it’s funny how the lens on medical marijuana can start to change almost as quickly as an optometrist says, “1 … or … 2?” during an eye exam.

I say “compassion”; someone else (of a more conservative, but pragmatic, persuasion) says “sin tax”.

In the end, we arrive at the same destination.

Actress Natasha Richardson has died from injuries sustained during a skiing accident earlier this week. She had been on life support since the time she was admitted to the hospital in Canada, and was then subsequently transported to a NY City hospital.

Life is fragile and short. That a routine slip and fall on a bunny slope, during a beginner’s skiing lesson, could result in fatal injuries is quite a shock. That it could happen to one of the premier actors of a generation makes us all feel a bit more vulnerable.

RIP, Ms. Richardson, and sympathies are extended to husband Liam Neeson, their children, and and everyone in her family.