Via the terrific Girl on the Right Blog, these helpful suggestion from A. Nonymous:
Most of us are not doing God’s work trading credit derivatives at Goldman Sachs. You may be stunned when I tell you this, because I sure as heck was when I found out: the TARP program covers none of our credit card bills. Like, zero. All of that means another tough, tough Christmas, money-wise. The desperate economy calls for desperate measures to economize at Christmas. Here are twelve ways for the twelve days:
1. The first thing to do is to keep doing more of what you’re already doing: bitching and complaining. Cry poor mouth to everyone. Tell everyone you know how tough it is. Make a Bill Clinton face while you share people’s pain and make them feel yours. Next you say, “You know, let’s make it easy this year, you don’t have to buy me anything.” Of course, that means you don’t have an obligation to buy them anything! That works with everyone except your kids.
2. Tell your young kids Santa’s not real. Kids as young as four are old enough to get real in this day and age. In Indonesia and Pakistan kids are out sewing soccer balls to support a family at that age! So just explain to them that it’s all a scam meant to con them into good behavior, tell them how much you know they wouldn’t want to connive in such a fraud, and assure them you know they’ll behave perfectly well without bribery. They’ll thank you. Someday.
3. What about the older kids? They’re all so eco-conscious these days, and that’s an opportunity for the canny cheapskate. Just tell them instead of lame games for Wii and Xbox this year, you’re saving the planet on their behalf by planting a tree with their name on it in the Amazon! You can even work up some kind of authentic-looking certificate on the computer! People in the carbon-credit business are becoming billionaires doing just that, by the way.
4. You still feel you need some real gifts? Well how about re-gifts? You’ve been given things you never opened — herbal soap, crème brûlée mix, thermal bags for keeping wine cold — pass the parcel! Just try to remember not to give it to the person that gave it to you!
5. Books are such a popular item at Christmas. So many books can be had for free! Libraries put out boxes of new, unread, unmarked books that they want to get rid of. These include books about business, money, and investing that are still very attractive and were timely when they were published last year, but are entirely irrelevant under current conditions. Also look for container-loads of books about the Bush and Clinton administrations, and anything by Dick Morris. I don’t normally advocate illegal behavior, but one exception could be Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals. Bookstores are full of this one – it’s the Obama playbook! Somehow it just seems right to go in there and liberate a copy or three, comrade!
6. One of my cheap-ass friends used to always joke, “I wanted to buy you a big plant for Christmas, but GM wouldn’t sell.” What a laff riot, and it got him off the hook for ever buying anything! Of course, now GM desperately wants to sell all its plants, so the 2009 revision of that joke is, “I wanted to buy you a big plant for Christmas, but the Chinese bought them all!” Ha ha! Your friends
will be falling over, and they won’t even notice you didn’t buy a round of drinks!
7. Speaking of drinks, ‘tis the season to bend the elbow, so herewith some recommendations from Chateau Wang. First, drink cheap beer. The cheapest stuff in my local is also the original and greatest . . . it’s Miller at $3.99 a six-pack, compared to $5.29 for Miller Light. That make any sense to you? Me neither, they take stuff out and charge you more? Forget that! Next, drink cheap wine. André’s Cold Duck is back, it’s $4.99, and it’s as good as it was when you were fourteen and sneaked it in the kitchen after the Thanksgiving dinner was cleared away. (You know you did.)
8. As for food, the trick to economizing on food is not to cook any. Instead, head over to your brother’s house and scrounge Christmas dinner there. You need to go unannounced, early in the day, in case they have the same idea of coming over and scrounging from you. If that was the plan and your sister-in-law makes no move to put a turkey in the oven, give her one of your Miller’s and she’ll at least come through with some Dinty Moore. Note: If you were to show up on the doorstep at 7:00 AM, there are secondary benefits – you can reconnect with the Christmases of your childhood, when you punished everyone by getting up too early, and you’ll get breakfast too.
9. Here are the hard liquor recommendations from Chateau Wang. You want to drink cheap, cheap liquor too. The venerable and cheap bourbons and ryes from Old Huckaby, Rebel Heaven, and Elihu Walton lack the sophistication of single-malt Scotch, but they have all of the wallop! Also consider cheap and nasty tequila like Don Cheech and Señor Pepe brand – they mix great with green Gatorade!
10. You don’t feel you can scrounge 100% at your sister-in-law’s house? Try this recipe that will cost about 25 cents: Mix two cups of flour with a quarter teaspoon each of baking power and salt, and add up to two cups of water to make a heavy dough. Add a few raisins if you have any, tie it up in a clean handkerchief, and boil it in water until it’s time to go home. Then discard it. Tell them it’s
the dumpling Oliver Twist had in the workhouse at Christmas. Your brother’s family doesn’t read! They won’t know! Ha ha! Give them a copy of Rules For Radicals.
11. Christmas trees are $60 at the VFW, and wreaths are $20. That make any sense to you? Me neither, so here you have many ways to go. You could wait until 4:30 on Christmas Eve, by which time the guy working at VFW will have gone home and abandoned whatever Charlie Brown Christmas trees he has left. Freebie! Option two, you may live in a place where trees are plentiful all around – neighbor’s yards, parks, and so on, if you “catch” my “drift” (wink wink!) Freebie! Another idea, if Border’s Bookstore actually survives far into this Christmas season, you may be able to buy one of the jokey artificial trees they had there last year – these things were some kind of intellectual joke, made with like a few bare wires covered in tinsel; this choice shows a certain post-modern hauteur which goes very well with Dinty Moore and Cold Duck. It’s about $5.99. But you can make it yourself, using wire coat-hangers, spray adhesive, and metallic flock or confetti. That’s a good thing!
12. Finally, we have to get control of this holiday again. Twelve days my wonderful arse! Our Jewish neighbors get by with just eight nights for Hanukkah, and even that is way too much noodle pudding. Let’s do away with this business of Christmas as a 3-month long retail opportunity. The retailers have been unloading container loads of useless crap from Yiwu, China into their Christmas displays since just after Labor Day! With the cheap and nasty Christmas I have outlined here, we can let them know that that is just not the way we want to be living anymore.
Have a happy.
Showing posts with label Class Warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Class Warfare. Show all posts
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Mao nostalgia in China
On October 1, the People's Republic of China marked its 60th anniversary with an impressive military parade, musical performances and portraits of Sun Yat-sen, Deng Xiaoping, and Mao Zedong.
It's the occasion for a boomlet for Mao nostalgia in China. This, one can kind of understand. He was the founder of the PRC. After liquidating his rivals, he was the maximum leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
Here's today's article on the nostalgia for Mao in China: Mao presides again in China as nostalgia runs high. It's fun stuff. Young people who don't know more about him than his name and image are taking the commercial opportunity to sell T-shirts, hats, badges and snow globes.
In the US, within the Obama administration, Mao Zedong is also enjoying a revival. Communications Director Anita Dunn commends him as a political philosopher to the graduating class of a parochial school. Manufacturing Czar Ron Bloom cites with approval Mao's saying that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" ["Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224].
The thing is this. In China, it is not Mao's Communism that is being celebrated; the country has spent the last thirty years correcting the leftist errors of the previous thirty. Apart from the retail opportunity, Mao's real reputation in China is as a nationalist (not a Nationalist, which in China is a different thing):
Seek truth from facts, as Deng Xiaoping always said. Mao Zedong's reputation in his homeland has very little to do with his Communism at this stage, and everything to do with his nationalism. Which is fine -- it is his homeland after all.
But like many others, I would like to know just what it is that his highly-placed admirers in the US Obama administration are getting out of Mao Zedong at this time.
It's the occasion for a boomlet for Mao nostalgia in China. This, one can kind of understand. He was the founder of the PRC. After liquidating his rivals, he was the maximum leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
Here's today's article on the nostalgia for Mao in China: Mao presides again in China as nostalgia runs high. It's fun stuff. Young people who don't know more about him than his name and image are taking the commercial opportunity to sell T-shirts, hats, badges and snow globes.
In the US, within the Obama administration, Mao Zedong is also enjoying a revival. Communications Director Anita Dunn commends him as a political philosopher to the graduating class of a parochial school. Manufacturing Czar Ron Bloom cites with approval Mao's saying that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" ["Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224].
The thing is this. In China, it is not Mao's Communism that is being celebrated; the country has spent the last thirty years correcting the leftist errors of the previous thirty. Apart from the retail opportunity, Mao's real reputation in China is as a nationalist (not a Nationalist, which in China is a different thing):
1 Mao would work with anyone, anywhere to resist Japanese aggression, including the Nationalists or the Americans, even to the extent of putting the Red Army under their command.
2 Mao unified the war-torn Chinese mainland under Chinese rule for the first time since 1644.
3 In its first five years, the PRC under Mao was drawn into superpower conflict with the US in Korea, and managed to stay in the fight with the nuclear-armed US to secure a draw on the peninsula.
4 When Mao fell out with Khruschev, the PRC found itself surrounded by enemies: the USSR to the north, Taiwan with its US backing to the east, India with its designs on Tibet and implicit backing of the UK, US, and USSR to the south. Mao prosecuted a war in the Himalayas and backed them all down, sustaining the country's independence through a dangerous time.
5 Forty-five years ago this week, the PRC got the bomb; if any of the other powers thought attacking China would be easy, after that it meant mutually assured destruction.
6 When the time came for a new way forward, Mao came to terms with Richard Nixon, and it was easy for the two cold warriors, as if getting reacquainted with old friends. This upset the balance of power in the far east, putting the USSR on the defensive. As much as the US played the China card, China played the America card.
Seek truth from facts, as Deng Xiaoping always said. Mao Zedong's reputation in his homeland has very little to do with his Communism at this stage, and everything to do with his nationalism. Which is fine -- it is his homeland after all.
But like many others, I would like to know just what it is that his highly-placed admirers in the US Obama administration are getting out of Mao Zedong at this time.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Financial Market Conditions at Mid-Year
As one of the many Americans who depends on a positive business and investment environment for his prosperity, I regarded the election of Barack Obama as president with Democrat supermajorities in the House and Senate with some concern.
More than the usual number of my fellow businesspeople and investors went over to that side, contrary to their own interest as it always seemed to me. Of course many of these unlikely Obama voters were as eager for hope and change after eight years of George Bush as anyone else. But if they gave consideration to the implications of Democrats supermajorities led by Obama for the economy from which they draw life and livelihood, they allowed their desire to believe to outweigh more sober analysis.
Obama took them in with the charisma, the gaseous uplift, and the promise of racial reconciliation; they convinced themselves that the redistribtionist, high-tax, anti-business, anti-capital policies to which he rallied his party constituted red meat for the Democrat base, not a program for governing.
This misapprehension survived the election, and permitted modest financial market recovery through the end of December 2008, followed by modest declines through Inauguration Day. On Inauguration Day, President Obama delivered a speech that any fair-minded listener would have to admit was far less than a rhetorical tour de force, and far more evocative of class envy and racial struggle than everyone expected.
Financial markets tanked that day and kept tanking for weeks, pressured further by the stimulus package that offered precious little real economic stimulus, but rather a shocking grab bag of packages to traditional Democrat constituencies, with not the merest nod to the rights or concerns of the minority.
We experienced headlong collapse from Inauguration Day through first week of March. Obama Democrats in the business and investment community awoke too late to the realization that the Democrat program now encompasses nationalization of vast swathes of industry on the pretext of emergency (autos and banks) or necessity (health care); that owners' property rights are provisional and expendable; that the ideological attachment of our rulers' to the green agenda trumps their duty of care to the free-market economy; and that they mean to bleed the productive sectors of the economy to feed the non-productive to the fullest possible extent they can get away with.
So far, so bad. But then something interesting happened -- we had a dramatic bounce in stock markets from March through early May. Some of this is probably discounting the possibility of a 1929-37 depression, correctly. Some might even be what I regard as an unrealistic pricing in of a rapid economic recovery, when what we still have in prospect is a deep and long recession as in the 70s and early 80s.
But some of the bounce is almost certainly due to the business and investment interests of this country re-assessing President Obama's grand and ambitious schemes and concluding that they represent impossible over-reach. Rightly or wrongly, they came around to the view that most of this stuff will never come to pass. On this view, Obama has expressed extreme initial positions just as a negotiating tactic to get more than he could with conventional bipartisanship, but less than he asks. Republicans and responsible Democrats in Congress will push back on the crazier ideas. The American people will not go along, will resist with mute passive aggressiveness and loud argumentation, once the full implications are clear. And if it is not just a tactic, if Obama really insists on every bit of what he says, Republicans will gain enough seats in 2010 to apply the brakes, if not an outright majority. One way or another, the entire Obama agenda can and will be resisted.
This is a bull item in the market since March.
After stock price gains of over 30% from March to May, markets have stalled since then, and fallen into a few air pockets. The public policy problems for the markets at this point remain the administration's apparent readiness to overturn our carbon energy-based economy and its radical intentions toward the 15% of the economy that health care represents.
But the overarching sentiment problem comes from yet another reassessment among business people and investors: even if the entire Obama agenda can be resisted and its worst effects rolled back later, on this new view a tremendous amount of violence can still be done to the U.S. economy now. In the meantime, we are still losing jobs at a sickening pace while Obama and the Congress waste unimaginable sums of money on projects lacking any other point beside paying off their friends and allies.
In the background the Chinese, our principal creditors, are objecting more and more forcefully to American fiscal unsustainability and the debasement of the U.S. Dollar that this portends. The managers of other erstwhile basket-case economies, Russia, India, and Brazil, tut-tut their agreement and back calls for changes to the global reserve system.
At the very least, these mid-year movements call upon investors to review their portfolio allocations with care. My own view is currently defensive on U.S. Dollar assets, light in risk assets in general, and seeking for growth mainly in Chinese stocks.
More than the usual number of my fellow businesspeople and investors went over to that side, contrary to their own interest as it always seemed to me. Of course many of these unlikely Obama voters were as eager for hope and change after eight years of George Bush as anyone else. But if they gave consideration to the implications of Democrats supermajorities led by Obama for the economy from which they draw life and livelihood, they allowed their desire to believe to outweigh more sober analysis.
Obama took them in with the charisma, the gaseous uplift, and the promise of racial reconciliation; they convinced themselves that the redistribtionist, high-tax, anti-business, anti-capital policies to which he rallied his party constituted red meat for the Democrat base, not a program for governing.
This misapprehension survived the election, and permitted modest financial market recovery through the end of December 2008, followed by modest declines through Inauguration Day. On Inauguration Day, President Obama delivered a speech that any fair-minded listener would have to admit was far less than a rhetorical tour de force, and far more evocative of class envy and racial struggle than everyone expected.
Financial markets tanked that day and kept tanking for weeks, pressured further by the stimulus package that offered precious little real economic stimulus, but rather a shocking grab bag of packages to traditional Democrat constituencies, with not the merest nod to the rights or concerns of the minority.
We experienced headlong collapse from Inauguration Day through first week of March. Obama Democrats in the business and investment community awoke too late to the realization that the Democrat program now encompasses nationalization of vast swathes of industry on the pretext of emergency (autos and banks) or necessity (health care); that owners' property rights are provisional and expendable; that the ideological attachment of our rulers' to the green agenda trumps their duty of care to the free-market economy; and that they mean to bleed the productive sectors of the economy to feed the non-productive to the fullest possible extent they can get away with.
So far, so bad. But then something interesting happened -- we had a dramatic bounce in stock markets from March through early May. Some of this is probably discounting the possibility of a 1929-37 depression, correctly. Some might even be what I regard as an unrealistic pricing in of a rapid economic recovery, when what we still have in prospect is a deep and long recession as in the 70s and early 80s.
But some of the bounce is almost certainly due to the business and investment interests of this country re-assessing President Obama's grand and ambitious schemes and concluding that they represent impossible over-reach. Rightly or wrongly, they came around to the view that most of this stuff will never come to pass. On this view, Obama has expressed extreme initial positions just as a negotiating tactic to get more than he could with conventional bipartisanship, but less than he asks. Republicans and responsible Democrats in Congress will push back on the crazier ideas. The American people will not go along, will resist with mute passive aggressiveness and loud argumentation, once the full implications are clear. And if it is not just a tactic, if Obama really insists on every bit of what he says, Republicans will gain enough seats in 2010 to apply the brakes, if not an outright majority. One way or another, the entire Obama agenda can and will be resisted.
This is a bull item in the market since March.
After stock price gains of over 30% from March to May, markets have stalled since then, and fallen into a few air pockets. The public policy problems for the markets at this point remain the administration's apparent readiness to overturn our carbon energy-based economy and its radical intentions toward the 15% of the economy that health care represents.
But the overarching sentiment problem comes from yet another reassessment among business people and investors: even if the entire Obama agenda can be resisted and its worst effects rolled back later, on this new view a tremendous amount of violence can still be done to the U.S. economy now. In the meantime, we are still losing jobs at a sickening pace while Obama and the Congress waste unimaginable sums of money on projects lacking any other point beside paying off their friends and allies.
In the background the Chinese, our principal creditors, are objecting more and more forcefully to American fiscal unsustainability and the debasement of the U.S. Dollar that this portends. The managers of other erstwhile basket-case economies, Russia, India, and Brazil, tut-tut their agreement and back calls for changes to the global reserve system.
At the very least, these mid-year movements call upon investors to review their portfolio allocations with care. My own view is currently defensive on U.S. Dollar assets, light in risk assets in general, and seeking for growth mainly in Chinese stocks.
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