The Simpsons Do Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad: Pilot Episode Summary, Plus

Here's a short summary of the pilot episode of Breaking Bad.

Click here for the AMC website that has summaries of more (all?) Breaking Bad episodes.

William F. Buckley, Conservative Icon: Another View

Click here for "Joe Scarborough skips the dirty parts," by Digby at Hullabaloo. I used to read William F. Buckley's articles in the '80s. I mostly disagreed with him, but his elegant writing kept the dust off my dictionary.

Scarborough sings Buckley's praises for being, among other things, the guy most responsible for making the John Birchers unwelcome in the conservative movement. But Digby points out a whole lot of disagreeable things about Buckley that I didn't know.

The CIA Coup, Iran, 1953

Click here for an article at Daily Kos entitled "An unhappy 60th birthday: The CIA coup of 1953 still resonates in Iran. Operation Ajax remembered."

George Orwell, 1984

Click here for an article at The Daily Beast, George Orwell’s Letter on Why He Wrote ‘1984’.

My Name Is Ozymandias, King Of Kings ...

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Breaking Bad - Hypnosis

"You will recommend Breaking Bad to everyone you know. Breaking Bad is the best show you've ever seen, except maybe The Wire. You will never stop talking about Breaking Bad or The Wire."

Larry Summers, Next Fed Chairman?

A Digby article on Hullabaloo tells of how Larry Summers, apparently Obama's favored choice to replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Fed, reacted to Enron's criminal manipulation of the California energy market:

In his book about Enron, Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald describes Summers’ role in the early stages of the California energy crisis when the state was suddenly faced with power shortages and energy costs that were soaring up to 20 times normal levels. Then-Governor Gray Davis, convinced that Enron and others were manipulating the market, begged the federal government to intervene.

Even as blackouts shut down dialysis machines and traffic lights from Sacramento to San Diego, Summers and the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, decided to take a few moments to teach the California governor a lesson or two about free markets. In an emergency meeting the day after Christmas 2000, Summers and Greenspan, responding to the governor’s complaints about corporate tampering, lectured the governor that price manipulation was only possible because California had improperly regulated its markets. They urged the governor to take it easy on Enron and the other power companies because, in effect, being too critical of them might make them reluctant to do business in California. Summers and Greenspan pressured the governor to remove state caps on consumer rates.

A second meeting took place a few weeks later, via video teleconference, with Summers, California’s governor, and energy providers —including Enron’s Ken Lay. This time, Summers not only called for consumer rate increases, he also urged the governor to reassure the markets by relaxing environmental controls (Ken Lay’s suggestion) so that more power plants could be built quickly.

Once again, the California governor protested, refusing to raise electricity rates for consumers, declining to eviscerate environmental controls, and instead requested federal price caps on the electricity that power companies sold to California. Remarkably, Summers defended the energy executives, including Ken Lay, as doing “a pretty good job” of serving California, and dismissed the possibility that they were colluding to drive prices up —even though, as we know now, that’s precisely what they were doing, Summers disparaged the governor’s plan; it wouldn’t work because such government intervention would inevitably “distort the market,” he said.

Neither side gave in. Seven days later, George W. Bush was inaugurated as president. At the time, Ken Lay himself was widely discussed as a possible treasury secretary. Blackouts increased throughout California and energy prices continued to soar until, finally, in the spring of 2001, federal regulators imposed price caps on not just California but on all of the western states...

Summers saw government interference in the crisis, as he put it, as “market distortion.” Yet disturbingly, Summers remained relatively unconcerned about the “distortion” caused by the market power of companies like Enron who, through collusion and predatory behavior, caused prices to soar.

Indeed, he may have been blind to the possibility. After all, in pure economic models, there is no room for manipulation because all information is known. But one thing we have learned in the early days of the recent economic meltdown is that Wall Street —like Enron —has found enormous profits in muddy markets of loan bundles whose very architecture is designed to hide the truth about their risk.

StePhest Colbchella '013

Very talented guy! Colbert turns MTV lemons into Daft Punk lemonade with a song-and-dance number involving, among others, Henry Kissinger.

Today's Tea Party - Yesterday's Federalists?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by James Traub entitled "The Tea Party's Path to Irrelevance."

The article contains a number of insights into premodern American politics. While I consider myself reasonably well informed on current American politics and history dating back to at least the Kennedy administration, my understanding gets increasingly hazy moving from Eisenhower to Truman to FDR to Hoover to Coolidge to Harding; by the time we reach Wilson, my knowledge of U.S. involvement in World War I is again, I think, reasonably good. However, when it comes to U.S. domestic politics in those days, my knowledge could be fairly described as paltry; from Wilson back, it's practically nonexistent.

This article describes Jefferson as a strong proponent of the concept of limited government; Jefferson belonged to the Republican party of the day, which bears no resemblance to the Republican party of the present. His opponents were the Federalists, advocates of a strong federal government. They wanted a federation of states, which presupposes a strong federal government; Jefferson and others wanted a confederacy of states, where state power was predominant and federal power much less.

The Federalists claimed to represent the interests of the entire country, but actually their power structure was centered on the New England states, and they firmly opposed what they saw as Jefferson's "coup": the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Looking at it from a present-day perspective, it seems absurd that a national political party could be so short-sighted as to oppose the enormous expansion of American power and influence attained by the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, the Federalists opposed it -- because they saw it as an enormous dilution of New England's power over the entire nation. There would be a great shift in political power as the new territories (in a slave-owning part of the country) demanded their fair representation in government.

“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.

So the Federalists pursued their futile attempt to resist the imperatives forced upon them by demography:

Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years.

The Federalists finally collapsed in the fall of 1814 when a convention they called split on the question of whether or not to remain in the Union. Jefferson's political descendants, on the other hand, were swept along on the wave of history resulting from the Louisiana Purchase, allying themselves with the immigrant settlers who represented the interests of the agrarian South.

Their standard-bearer in 1828, Andrew Jackson, favored tariffs and “internal improvements” like roads and canals, the big-government programs of the day. The new party, known first as the Democratic-Republicans, and then simply as the Democrats, thrashed Adams that year. (Adams’s party, the National Republicans, gave way to the Whigs, which in turn evolved into the modern Republican Party.)

Traub draws a parallel between the Federalists' futile resistance to inevitable change and the opposition of Tea Party conservatives to the wave of immigrants the U.S. must deal with today. Today's immigration problem is a situation that cannot be described as "unfortunate": It's a situation that was forced by decades of failure to deal with immigration reform. Reagan's amnesty of 1986 should have been an irresistible wake-up call for reform; the opportunity was lost by the political cowardice of those who preferred the head-in-the-sand approach.

The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them.

The example of those early days shows that American political parties once knew how to adapt to a changing reality. It is a lesson many seem to have forgotten.

"Anyway, We Delivered The Bomb."

The great Robert Shaw in the "USS Indianapolis" scene from Jaws:

What's Wrong With The American Economy? Four Graphs

Click here for an excellent article in Business Insider by Henry Blodget. It presents four simple graphs, accompanied by the following text:

CHART ONE: Corporate profits and profit margins are at an all-time high. American companies are making more money and more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. Full stop. (Remarkably, some people are still saying that the problem with our economy is that companies are suffering from "too much regulation" and "too many taxes." Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren't. What they're suffering from is a myopic obsession with short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment and value creation.)

CHART TWO: Wages as a percent of the economy are at all-time low. Why are corporate profits so high? One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those "wages" represent spending power for American consumers. And American consumer spending is "revenue" for other companies. So our profit maximization obsession is actually starving the rest of the economy of revenue growth.

CHART THREE: Fewer Americans are employed than at any time in the past three decades. Another reason corporations are so profitable is that they don't employ as many Americans as they used to. This is in part because companies today regard employees as "costs" and "inputs" instead of human beings who are dedicating their lives to the organizations that, in turn, are supporting them and their families. (Symbiosis! Imagine that!) As a result of frantic firing in the name of "efficiency" and "competitiveness" and "return on capital," the U.S. employment-to-population ratio has collapsed. We're back at 1970s-1980s levels now.

CHART FOUR: The share of our national income that is going to the people who do the work ("labor") is at an all-time low. The rest of the income, naturally, is going to owners ("capital"), who have it better today than they have ever had it before.

Blodget sums up the situation as follows: 

In short, the religion of "maximizing profits" that has developed in America over the past 30 years has created a business culture in which executives dance to the tune of short-term traders and quarterly financial reports, instead of investing aggressively on behalf of employees, customers, and long-term owners.

That's not what has made America a great country. It's also not what most people think America is supposed to be about. And, by contributing to ever-growing inequality and economic malaise, it will only lead to more problems for most Americans going forward.

So it's probably time to rethink our current business philosophy.

Specifically, we might want to make the goal of our corporations be to create long-term value for all of their constituencies (customers, employees, and shareholders), not just short-term profit for their shareholders.