Nightly No-Business Report

Barry Ritholtz, as he often does, straightens us out on the Fannie/Freddie SEC litigation:

Yes, we know: The usual liars and assclowns have latched onto the SEC litigation against the F&F execs for their the own biased reasons, as if lying executives somehow vindicates their own lies about the causes of the crisis. The suit is about statements made after housing peaked in both price and sales volume and was already heading south.

Let’s take a look at the SEC suit, and note what is being litigated, and what it might mean for other banking and mortgage execs.

This is a relatively straightforward case of securities fraud. The defendants knowingly misled investors about the volumes of risky mortgages that their companies were purchasing as the housing boom turned to bust. The complaint names former Freddie Mac execs CEO Richard Syron and former Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd as defendants. Four other high-ranking former GSE execs are also named.*

Proving these charges is a simple matter of comparing the actual holdings against what the execs said to investors in public statements.

 Paul Krugman lays it out clear as a bell on the Ron Wyden fiasco:

What Wyden did was to give cover to the fundamental fallacy of right-wing attempts to dismantle Medicare: the claim that market competition is the key to reducing health care costs. We have overwhelming evidence on this — and it just isn’t true. Looking both within the United States and across countries, if you ask which systems are best at cost control, the ranking looks like this:

Government provision as well as financing (socialized medicine) > single payer > market competition

Why doesn’t the market work here? Ken Arrow explained it all half a century ago. Patients by and large don’t have the information to evaluate medical treatments; in any case, they mainly buy insurance rather than medical care directly; and insurers profit not by providing the most cost-effective care, but by trying to insure people who won’t need care.

And it’s not as if market competition hasn’t been given a try; in this country it has been tried over and over, by politicians who won’t take no for an answer.

  Here's news reportage about the eurozone crisis and how it's not being addressed:

A comprehensive solution to the euro zone debt crisis is beyond the region's reach, rating agency Fitch said, warning that six of its economies including Italy and Spain could be hit with credit downgrades in the near future.

The warning late Friday, the second time in two weeks that the bloc has been threatened with multiple ratings markdowns, heightened pressure on leaders to get to grips with the turmoil.

Fitch also said it might also cut AAA-rated France within two years and urged the European Central Bank to take a more active firefighting role.

One ECB policymaker said Saturday that time was running out to come up with solutions to a crisis that could spark a global slump. Another said the bank would not expand the bond buying program it launched to keep a lid on vulnerable states' debt costs. [boldface mine and is a huge eurofail, IMHO]

If the ECB can't face up to the fact that it's got to take the heat off the rising interest rates on Irish, Portugese, Spanish, Greek, and Italian debt, the whole eurozone could go up in smoke, as in bye-bye euro (taking the global economy down with it). The solution I hope for -- as do economists of note -- is for the ECB to issue eurobonds. As Alexander Mercouris says of eurobonds, "It is in fact nothing more nor less than yet another device to get Germany to guarantee the whole of the eurozone’s sovereign debt." Makes sense to me. As Atrios would say, na ga na happen. Hope that sentiment is wrong. Otherwise, we're circling the drain.


To end on an unhappy note, Calculated Risk determines there are 974 problem banks the FDIC may or may not have to move on in 2012:

After a four week hiatus, the FDIC got back to closings. Also, the OCC got back to releasing its enforcement activities on the first Friday after the 15th of the month. As a result, there were several changes to the Unofficial Problem Bank List this week. In all, there were five removals and two additions, which leave the list standing at 974 institutions with assets of $398.3 billion. A year ago, the list held 920 institutions with assets of $411.4 billion.

The removals include one cure, two unassisted mergers, and two failures. The OCC terminated an action against BNC National Bank, Glendale, AZ ($667 million Ticker: BNCC). Viking Bank, Seattle, WA ($387 million) and AmericaUnited Bank and Trust Company USA, Schaumburg, IL found merger partners. The two failures were Western National Bank, Phoenix, AZ ($163 million) and Premier Community Bank of the Emerald Coast, Crestview, FL ($126 million).

Given the calendar, the FDIC is likely [finished] with closings in 2011. If so, the year will end with 92 failures at an initial estimated cost of $7.2 billion for liquidating assets of $35.9 billion, which translates into a resolution cost of about 20% of failed bank assets. Buyers were willing to pay a deposit premium in only 22 of the resolutions and loss share agreements were done in 57 resolutions covering $17.9 billion of failed assets acquired.

The additions include First Federal Savings and Loan Association of McMinnville, McMinnville, OR ($346 million) and SouthernTrust Bank, Goreville, IL ($52 million).

The OCC converted a few Formal Agreements or previously OTS issued Supervisory Agreements to Consent Orders. Next Friday, we anticipate the FDIC will release its enforcement action activity for the month of November.

 Maybe something grand will happen to fix all this stuff. And maybe Ben Bernanke with fill bazookas full of money and shoot them at the proletariat. I'm not holding my breath.

Free Information Is a Human Right

As human rights go, this one would be a no-brainer were it not such a relatively new concept, and were it not that it's not universally adopted for various insidious, evil, and, occasionally, ethical reasons.

For example, Hollywood doesn't want information to be free if that means letting crackers steal and redistribute their "intellectual property." The same goes for the record company moguls that shudder at the idea that music should be free. Then there's the whole host of software companies that believe their products should be paid for, too.

I have no quarrel with any of them, even if they fight their own citizens more than, say, the Chinese or Indians. I suppose that's for practical reasons, though some are political, as well.

No, the kind of information I'm speaking to relates to the general category of communication, which has by now become a subset of information technology, though a rather large one at that. Information technology, including cell phones, SMS (messaging), laptops, tablets, PCs, servers, and the whole area of server farms that host the "cloud," add up to an earth-shaking, transformative, on-going event that will irrevocably change life as we know it.

I was listening to NPR late in the night when a broadcast of the World Affairs Council had a program on innovation in communication, and the show presented three entrepreneurs whose ideas were emblematic of the power of information and of the revolution underway. One, microWorkers, was the brainchild of a young woman whose non-profit offers micro-work to the four billion (her figure) who exist on three dollars or less a day. This micro-work, each unit being worth 10 to 25 cents or so, involves data-processing on one level or another. Each task has to be simple, repeatable, and easy to evaluate, allowing good workers to accrue reputations for reliability. Naturally, this effort was aimed at alleviating poverty.

Another man had helped create Ushahidi -- the Swahili word for witness -- that mapped crises using Google maps and then set up a multiple-channel crowdsourced system using the cloud to accumulate and then distribute real-time information during a crisis. It currently operates in 133 countries.

The third man's contribution -- from Qualcomm -- was the use of cell phones linked by Bluetooth and other interfaces to simple diagnostic devices such as blood-pressure and blood-sugar meters to allow remote diagnostics in rural regions anywhere in the world.

Oximeter connected to cell phone for diagnosing pnuemonia

Each venture spoke to a widespread need for which communication devices could offer solutions in very human areas of conflict resolution, hunger and poverty, and healthcare availability. Who would have thought that cell phones -- now affordable and widely available even in rural, impoverished Africa -- could lead to solutions as disparate as those above?

And this is only the beginning of an explosive period in technology development. Even five years from now we'll be living in a brave new world, this one, I hope, more benevolent than that envisioned in the book of the same name. And it will be, if information is free.

The revolutions of the Arab Spring were greatly enabled by social media, and even the recent protests over election fraud in Russia might have been quashed were it not for the fact that, from this time forward, the whole world is actually watching. Where information is free, the people have a better chance to be.

Without cell-phone video, would the UC Davis pepper-spray incident have had such resonance? Pick your own example. They're now everywhere to be found.

Where information is successfully closed off, as in Syria and Iran, it's harder for movements to gain traction. However successfully the Green Revolution was quashed, the world will never forget how the masks were pulled from the faces of the Ayatollah and his minions: the Islamic Republic is ruled by bloodthirsty murderers. Such a public outing accrued to Bashar al-Assad, even with his more successful closing of the communications networks in Syria. Even the Arab League and close allies like Turkey and Russia have had to repudiate him. Hopefully, his days are numbered.

The U.S. is guilty on a number of levels in making information unfree. The national-security label is over-used, and Congress has for years, under the guise of protecting decency or, more recently, "intellectual property," tried to restrict information flow. Usually there's a Republican hand leading this, but there are plenty of Democratic enablers, to be sure.


Whatever your opinion of Julian Assange and Wikileaks is, the enterprise is a worthy one. Hopefully, a better business model will emerge and a better entrepreneur will step forward to expose government wrongdoing wherever it occurs.

China is a whole topic unto itself. I wish for every breakthrough in dismantling its Great Firewall. Hopefully, communication technology will rise to the occasion in this very important struggle.

Tiananmen Square 1989. What would have happened were it today?

Free information is revolutionary and transformative. Nowhere, for practically any reason, should its flow be curtailed. It is, undeniably, a human right, one that affords little comfort to despots, be they third-world despots or white-collar criminals like Jon Corzine. We can now know -- and in the future, by what factor multiplied? -- what's going on everywhere in near real-time.

I'm not such a rosy optimist that I think we're on the brink of world peace. We're just as likely on the brink of extinction (think global warming). But as each day passes, another innovation can bring opportunities for good health, decreasing poverty, better education, increasing transparency, freer people, broader knowledge on issues and crises, and so on.

Free information is good for us, notwithstanding the occasional lost dollar from piracy and counterfeiting. But the alternative, where information is strictly controlled, either on national security grounds or to protect the 1%'s almighty dollar, is bad for us. Fight control of information at all costs.

Free information is a human right.

Nightly No-Business Report

Wake up, wake up, c'mon, puppy!

The State of the Nation, econ-wise:

From MSNBC -- 1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income:

By Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

Is it really Amazon v. Apple? Via Barry Ritholtz:

If you invested $1,000 dollars into both companies in 1997, your Amazon investment would be worth $30,000 more than your Apple investment today.

As Barry sez, ginormous chart here (click to enlarge).

Okay, never bought stock in either, or Google. I guess I just don't like high-flyers! BTW, Apple stock was so far down in 1997 without Jobs that it was a long way back. Don't know what a difference that makes...

Martin Wolf explains how the UK is destroying itself:

I wrote a column on November 24 2011 entitled “Why cutting fiscal deficits is an assault on profits”. My point was summarised as follows: “If the government wishes to cut its deficits, other sectors must save less. The questions are ‘which ones’ and ‘how’. What the government has not admitted is that the only actors able to save less now are corporations. The government’s – not surprisingly, unstated – policy is to demolish corporate profits.”

 I like to read Martin Wolf. Not because he makes me feel good, mind you, but I like to hear something resembling the truth of the matter. His view rings true. Follow it here (free registration required).

Via Paul Krugman (quoting Kevin O'Rourke):

“So, we hear Ireland is recovering”, a French friend said to me last night.

(Mind you, they said something similar in the summer of 2010. Our government has an incentive to sell the Irish good news story, and “Europe” has an incentive to buy it.)

So, here are the latest employment data, reporting the largest seasonally adjusted quarterly fall in employment in two years, and which surely deserve a thread of their own. [boldface mine]

 The key to this story is that Ireland was another of the countries that had austerity forced on them by the EU Overlords. The Irish, in their humble acceptance of the fate as forever-cursed, have given in, thus protecting the banksters. How's that working out? Employment there is tanking, as it is everywhere in Austerityland. And why is it important to us? Hint: Europe is our 2nd largest trading partner.

Finally, just for fun, this is how Jon Corzine rulz:

 A House committee is expected to disclose on Thursday that MF Global, under Jon S. Corzine, stripped critical powers from its top executive in charge of controlling risk, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The move left the firm short-handed as it was grappling with the implications of its $6.3 billion position on European sovereign debt, a trade large enough to wipe out the firm if it soured.

 Happy economy, citizens! Join the Occupy Wall Street and be one of the 99%! Join the Tea Party and be, ah, what? (one of the 99%.) Don't tell the conservatives, they'll go ballistic!

Throw the Bums Out

An American citizen in its native habitat, the real world.

In my post, The Long Goodbye, I spoke with a growing sense of despair, one that's understandable given the self-inflicted cataclysm our Dear Leaders are steering us towards. But then I read this in the WaPo:

The American electorate is primed to throw out record numbers of incumbents in the 2012 election, according to new polling from the Pew Research Center.

Everywhere you look in the numbers, which were released this morning, you see political land mines for incumbents.

Sixty seven percent say they want to see most Members of Congress voted out in 2012, the highest that number has ever been in Pew polling. And, while people are more favorably inclined to see their own Member re-elected, (50 percent yes/33 percent no) those numbers still match historic lows.

Among political independents, the numbers are even more grim. Just 15 percent of independents want to see most members re-elected in 2012; only 37 percent want to see their own incumbent win a new term next year while 43 percent would like to see their own Member lose.

Most of the time I've spent paying attention to politics, the numbers in these polls were always rendered irrelevant by the "except their own representative, which they highly support." This is might really be different. So how do we make it so?

• Stop giving money except to newcomers you've vetted and feel truly enthusiastic about. Elizabeth Warren, Darcy Burner, or Tammy Duckworth come to mind. The rest, even an incumbent you like, the hell with them.
• Call, email, or snail-mail your representatives on every level, even state, city, and county, and remind them constantly of your views on the issues and that the jig is up. You'll vote against them and campaign relentlessly to usher them out of office. And NO MONEY unless you see them working for the welfare of all the people. A whiff of bankster love, and it's over.
• Pick some way of being active in politics. Go to town meetings and help whip up support for your issues. And your activism should be local and issue-specific, but if you're pissed at Ron Wyden for blowing up the Democratic Party advantage on Medicare -- while endangering seniors who've paid all their lives for health security in their so-called Golden Years -- then be unrelenting in your contacts with his office. Find ways to make them hear (representatives in Congress make it difficult to get email from non-constituents). Make their ears ring!
• If you don't like them, vote them out. The idea that protecting the Democrats because they're marginally better may be self-defeating. What if both sides of the aisle believed that the exit door was one false move away? Republicans and Democrats alike would start to think, "Can't we all get along?"
• Boycott corrupt businesses. Leave the big banks for local ones and credit unions. Let's not leave them on Move Your Money Day. Let's leave them for good. And don't shop Walmart or any other big player that fights unions. Unions may be the way to bring back the middle class. That's a no-brainer. Oh, and if an airline screws its unions, avoid flying on that carrier. Contact your favorite airline and tell it that destroying unions through Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a surefire way to lose your business for good.
• Support bloggers who rally citizens to the cause.
• Big must: Fight all attempts to curtail the freedoms we have on the Internet. Don't fall for the hooey that they're only trying to protect their copyrights. They want to control all content. That's their game. Stopping piracy is just a bonus.
• Be a protester, be Person of the Year, every year. If you don't like something, go disobey civilly.

You get the message. To be truly non-partisan while remaining effective might just mean that we've got to throw our own bums out, regardless of party affiliation. It'll scare some sense into them!

Leave me alone, I'm occupied!

Talk about Media Narratives

Spot on.

h/t John F.

The Long Goodbye

I'll miss the United States I grew up in. As I child, I saw and felt a number of things that didn't sit well with me, but I had what is no doubt an irrational trust that these things would be righted. I was suitably freaked out by the Cold War and the arms race that accompanied it, but I trusted that mutually assured destruction was an adequate deterrent. I did fear an accidental explosion, but, again, I believed in the notion of fail safe, even after seeing the movie of the same name. I believed that I was surrounded by adults who would keep me from harm.

I had no such optimism about civil rights, having witnessed the Jim Crow South as a young child. That experience did, however, prepare me to appreciate what was accomplished by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The face of the fifties, the Nelsons

I actually believed in George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Ozzie and Hariett, and all that crazy 50s hokum. As much as I liked that face of America, I liked rock 'n' roll, Bob Dylan, the counterculture, and protesting the Vietnam War even more. Now that was an identity I was comfortable with, and I thought it was just as American as Eddie Haskell and the Cleavers, even more so because we had discovered some real values of love, kindness, sharing, and a desire for real freedom for all Americans.

Okay, I might have been wrong about the 70s, but...

As the 60s and 70s progressed, I could sense that the promise of freedom for all in America was becoming true both legally and culturally. I felt freer and quite optimistic. Even the Watergate scandal was, I felt, a vindication of the rule of law, not simply a glimpse at the soft underbelly of corruption in politics. We had rooted out the evil it stood for.

Camp David Accords

I was an unabashed fan of Jimmy Carter and am to this day. He was ahead of his time on alternative energy, should be credited with beginning to modernize the armed forces, forged the only meaningful peace treaty ever signed between Arabs and Jews, and could have done more if he hadn't been dealt a lethal blow by the Iranian hostage crisis. His stand on human rights as a central value of the U.S. looks so moral compared to George W. Bush.  He was a dignified, humble, and honest man, rare in a president. Maybe he didn't manage Congress well and backed down too easily (et toi, Obama?). He has, as a former president, had a positive impact on both our country and the world, and he has largely rescued his legacy in his long retirement.

Things declined rapidly under Ronald Reagan. Many people don't remember how Reagan took on the labor unions and gave them some punishing blows, striking at the heart of the middle class. His tax policies were the beginning of a new resurgence in income inequality that continues to this day. The Iran-Contra scandal -- and its long and flaccid unwinding -- showed that corruption and hypocrisy can be tolerated by those ideologically inclined to do so. Reagan's policies initiated what could be called the Great Stagnation, the beginning of the end of the middle class, with most new wealth going to the top and never trickling down.

Bush the elder's contribution to this continuum was not nothing, but he continued the Reagan years and belief systems. Oh, he won a war and presided over a recession that was his undoing, if only because his blue blood made him genetically disposed to looking insensitive to the plight of everyday Americans, which he was, like his son who would later follow him.

The Clinton years were a respite to the ongoing American decline. Poverty rates declined dramatically, and by and large the Clinton scandals were made up. The Lewinsky affair was a national embarrassment on several levels, not the least of which was the idea that oral sex was a legitimate reason to toss a president. The return of budget surpluses amid a true economic boom was a plus. The repeal of Glass-Steagall was not, and we'll be regretting that stumble for some time. Also, enshrining the heads of Goldman Sachs as the watchdogs of the Treasury drew an arc to cataclysm we'll be reeling from for years.

If I screw this up, can I still keep the flight suit?

George W. Bush was too epic a failure to describe as an "arc." It was more like the descent into a deep crater. All of the events are chronicled: tax cuts one and two; not one war but two, neither of them funded; Medicare Part D that set drug costs at unsustainable levels that add continually to the national debt; the flawed and callous execution of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that haunt us to this day; a complete abdication of our responsibilities as humans, Americans, and citizens of the world with our lawlessness at Guantanamo, coupled with our adoption of torture and indefinite detention; the dramatic increase in poverty rates coupled with stagnant wages for the middle class, along with more and more income inequality as the rich got the bulk -- as in the Reagan years -- of any new wealth. There's more, much more. I leave it to you to enumerate further.

I know, hope is not a plan.

We come to Barack Obama. He wouldn't be such a disappointment if he hadn't promised so much, either in what he explicitly said or in the way he said it. There was so much promise, but he didn't deliver.

Of course he was hobbled from the beginning by economic circumstance. He was mercilessly pounded by an intractable opposition in spite of solid majorities in Congress. He produced a reasonably balanced health care reform law; he managed TARP well enough, if only in letting it unwind the way it was arranged when it was handed off to him by Bush; he showed grit by bailing out the auto industry, saving jobs; his stimulus package did save jobs and averted a depression, one we may experience anyway. Obama, too, can point to foreign policy victories in the war against terrorists -- though his use of drones is disturbing -- and his wise handling of the Arab Spring.

Let's offer Obama tax cuts in exchange for ripping his heart out.

But talk about unwindings, we've been experiencing a long one beginning with Obama's failure to stand up to Republicans -- and recalcitrant Democrats -- on the Bush tax cuts during the 2010 lame-duck session. Since then, it's been one remarkable cave-in after another, on a whole range of issues, from the debt-ceiling debacle to the most recent apparent lack of guts on the payroll-tax-holiday extension. Along the way, human and civil rights have been seriously imperiled, first with such tacit acceptance of Bush-era illegalities, and later with the failure to try detainees in public courts where they belong and the failure to close Guantanamo. Now, we're on the brink of watching Barack Obama allow a law to pass, without a veto, that could lead to American citizens being detained indefinitely without habeas corpus or public hearing. Shameless is not strong enough a word. It's the final nail, and yet it feels as if there are more nails to hammer and more disastrous shoes to drop. One, it seems, may involve the beginning of the end of Medicare, just as an aging America needs it the most.

It's cheaper to give bankers money than to prosecute them.

When they write the book on Barack Obama, a dismal coda will be the way the Fed, while managing to sustain growth with smoke and mirrors, kept shooting bazookas-full of money to the banksters and the bastards that caused all the financial mayhem in the first place. I accept that an honest opinion can be held that the world financial structure had to be saved, but I would have preferred -- and I mean this sincerely -- that those bazookas of cash were pointed at the people whose homes were being foreclosed upon and whose livelihoods were being destroyed one job at a time. Let the wealth trickle up for change. We know it doesn't trickle down.

It's been dismal watching the inept way our law enforcement mechanisms have failed to prosecute white-collar, financial crime while our local police forces look more and more like paramilitary units as they sweep through the Occupy movement's encampments in Homeland Security riot gear in the middle of the night. However you view OWS and its tactics, this blatant disregard for the well-being of practitioners of non-violent civil disobedience throws a bad light on our current American culture.

Adding to -- some might say spearheading -- our decline are the Republicans so bent on destroying Barack Obama that they have forged a true contempt for the American people and our plight in the middle of the unraveling of our national economic model. When we'll come back is anyone's guess, but it won't be with the help of the Republican Party, which believes in growth through destruction of cherished American institutions.

Right about now, in an essay like this, comes the usual declaration that I hope Barack Obama gets re-elected, along with a return to Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. And I admit, I don't have it in me to say I'll never vote for this abysmal failure because it's true, that I fear even more a Republican sweep of all three branches of government, especially in the wake of Citizens United and the never-ending free money it delivers in a political era still dominated, yes, by the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Armey, Ari Fleischer, Rupert Murdoch, and the Koch brothers. I shudder -- as if for real zombies, vampires, chainsaws, and Blair witches -- to think of that America.

Cutting spending creates jobs. (hehe)

In the end, I guess this could be what America's long goodbye looks like: zombie ideas instead of real zombies, and the eventual abdication of electoral power by a hoodwinked and bamboozled population of people who believe in "taking responsibility for their own actions" and living a life "based on faith in God and Country" and "it's our money and we should decide how to spend it," even though taxes will no doubt go up or be maintained on the subservient 99% while they all but vanish on the 1% who have underwritten the bamboozlement.

 It's depressing, this long goodbye, but that doesn't mean it's not underway. This journey from naive child to worried senior citizen has taken a lifetime. I wish I had another one with which to fight back.

Maybe they'll let me come back as George Carlin...

Big Reality: It's All About the Narrative (no kidding)

Long enough ago that I don't remember, maybe it was 2005 or 2006, I went to a conference where George Lakoff, the Berkeley cognitive linguist professor and author, was the keynote speaker. It was a small enough gathering -- in the beautiful setting of the Asilomar Conference Grounds on the Monterey Pennisula -- that I kept running into him, even having dinner together one night. He drove two points home: one, it was all about framing the debate, and, two, it was also very much centered around the dichotomy between the nurturing parent(s) and the authoritarian father figure.

The parent dichotomy is central to the social conservative viewpoint versus the feminist/liberal/pro-choice construct, thus defining a HUGE issues arc, and it was undeniable that this arc is all about the Old Testament notions of religion. Dad dictates, Mom subserves, and kiddies duck.

So much devolves from those social conservative notions: guns good, because Dad is armed (apparently in more ways than one). Mom subserves, because someone carries the babies (one guess, Mom). Kiddies duck, because, guess what, someone's got to knock some sense into these (once and future) sinners, and that's Dad (God) and his servant (Mary, I mean Mom, since, well, Dad did, ah, well, wasn't exactly Archangel Gabriel). Which, just so you know, makes Mom unclean, according to the Old Testament, and, I suppose, at the very least, weirdly unchaste, New-Testament-style.

So this explains a lot of the conservative narrative -- oddly supported by the mainstream media because sex is icky and the Archangel Gabriel is not. And Mary -- analogous to all our Moms, in case you didn't guess -- is also not. (She didn't have sex with nobody, not even God, especially not God.)

Isn't it weird that our political media narrative has to do with sex, archangels, virgins, messiahs, and a God that didn't have sex? Yes, it is weird, but that doesn't mean that it's not true (that the narrative is about these weird things, I mean).

Part two of George Lakoff's message over some medallions of beef at Asilomar: the Republicans (conservatives) are better at framing messages, WAY BETTER. One, they do it first, and, two, they do it relentlessly. Relentlessly. It's what they do. They do it better because they're a small-tent party. Democrats (liberals) can't do it because they've got like a ton of messages, can't frame. Impossible.

Okay. Time to point fingers: I'm on this because of Atrios and Paul Krugman, who didn't exactly conspire this evening but did a not-uncommon act. They noticed some shit. So I noticed the shit they noticed, and I'm on it like a bee to the honey tree. Mixed metaphors.

Anyway, Krugman sez:

I learned much of what I know about the political economy of the Second Gilded Age from Tom Edsall. Writing for Campaign Stops, Edsall has some important things to say about how economic narratives will play next year. He argues that the polling data

point to an election in which the competition to define the substantial disagreements between the two parties will be crucial to the outcome. Will deficits and debt continue to dominate as they did in 2010, to the advantage of Republicans, or will inequality and government intervention to promote job creation be central, favoring Democrats?

Now, the truth is that Republicans shouldn’t have an advantage on debt and deficits: the historical record shows that Republicans are, in practice, far less fiscally responsible than Democrats. But the fact that a Democrat is present at a time when large deficits are unavoidable due to the state of the economy opens the door to spurious GOP attacks; and because Very Serious People always focus on entitlement cuts rather than revenue, the anti-government stance of the GOP can be presented as being about deficits rather than what it really is, hostility to anything that helps the unfortunate.

And Atrios points:

WASHINGTON—Hold the condolence cards, but the recession cost the rich.

The share of income received by the top 1 percent—that potent symbol of inequality — dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data. Within the group, average income fell by about a third, to $957,000 in 2009 from $1.4 million in 2007.

Analysts say the drop largely reflects the stock market plunge, and most think top incomes recovered somewhat in 2010, as Wall Street rebounded and corporate profits grew. Still, the drop alters a figure often emphasized by inequality critics, and it has gone largely unnoticed outside the blogosphere.

Here's where the rubber meets the road: if the top 1 percent lost a substantial amount of their funny money, the poor lost an even more substantial amount of their non-funny money, as in they can't get enough to eat. The rich? They cut one of the flight attendants on their private jet because, you know, it's prudent.

Okay, as for Krugman's point? Very Serious People in the journalism circles that hover around DC and other centers of the powerful elite -- Wall Street, Houston, Kansas City, Atlanta -- will think about the rich and forget about the poor and knee-jerk worry about their Overlords, not their underlings.

Both Atrios and Krugman are often a little pessimistic about the chances that a true narrative will emerge, and I agree. The 99% pay their own bills, mostly, but rarely bills of the Very Serious People. the 1% pays the bills of the Very Serious People as a cost of doing business. Hence the word combo we're fucked.

Will something change in our favor this election cycle? It did in 2008, and it changed back in 2010. Since then I don't know. I want to say people are getting wise. Plus, when I described the GOP field as being ne'er-do-wells, has-beens, and freaks, I wasn't kidding. I was being kind. They're actually clowns, freaks, and liars so large I could spot 'em on the floor of the Grand Canyon from the rim, and I've got horrible distance vision, they're that messed up.

My hope is that, as indications continue to grow, a lot of people are also noticing their, uh, limitations. Plus, Obama must've read George Lakoff's book. His messaging is getting better, finally.