As ex-Wrestler, ex-Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura once said, “You haven’t hunted until you’ve hunted man…” and leave it to Hollywood to bring that to your TV sets – Spike TV is going to showcase the Navy’s battles with the Somalian Pirates in an upcoming reality show Pirate Hunters: USN.
The ancient Romans could have loved cable TV – gladiation from the comfort of your living room!
(President Obama and Bo, the new family dog, in the White House.)
Finally, somebody is stepping up to the looming tuna fishery collapse – several small Pacific island nations are putting restrictions on tuna catches in their territorial waters. For me the news would be a lot more welcome, though, if they had done this in league with the world’s major tuna consumers in Asia and North America, as there are two major challenges facing these ‘lil nations.
First, this leaves far more ocean unprotected than protected, and from previous studies, tuna seem to get around. Second, and just as critically, poaching is a huge problem, particularly when it comes to Asian fishing fleets. Even the territory being restricted is pretty damn huge, and these cute ‘lil countries don’t have anywhere near the resources to patrol them. And let’s say they do come face to face with a serious poacher – who is going to take the Kiribati Coast Guard seriously?
Unless we can get the big tuna eater leaders on-board with these restrictions, we should seriously consider Plan B, maybe even crewed by these rascals!
(President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton on the south lawn of the White House, via TheRoot.com.)
Reuters reports this afternoon:
President Barack Obama said on Friday the recession-hit U.S. economy was showing “glimmers of hope” despite remaining under strain and promised further steps in coming weeks to tackle the financial crisis.
“We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” Obama told reporters after a meeting with economic and regulatory teams plus Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke. But he added, “We’re starting to see progress.”
Obama spoke a day after encouraging trade and jobless figures pushed stocks higher, and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers predicted the economy would emerge from a sense of “freefall” by the middle of the year.
With the Treasury Dept. and Federal Reserve trying to hush up any suspicions of major banks failing the current “stress tests,” it seems like the Obama administration has decided on conscious strategy of encouraging positive thoughts about the economy.
Presumably they’re smart enough to know there’s no way to happy-talk their way out of a genuinely deep hole (remember what they did to John McCain for saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” last fall?). But even so, maybe Obama and company think a little optimism will help keep the economy from plunging further into the ground.
The most charitable interpretation of Team Obama’s timidity in challenging the banksters is that a bolder approach would intensify the sense of crisis, with counterproductive results. Extending George Soros’ metaphor that the financial system is “on life support,” the argument would be that you don’t want to unplug the machines at the patient’s weakest point and say, “Now or never — get up and walk!”
At the same time, of course, it’s useless to keep the patient on life support if you don’t ever do anything about the underlying disease. And so the point of continued artificial support is to give more gradual treatments (e.g., the“further steps in coming weeks” promised in the Reuters story) time to take effect.
Thus, a little public optimism may not necessarily be a mirror to reflect reality, as the old saying about art goes, but rather a tool for helping to shape it — nudging stock prices higher, making people feel less nervous about spending money, and as a result buying more time to implement the serious measures that are really needed. Um, assuming that the will to take those steps actually exists.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
Reading an article about Wells Fargo Bank reporting record profits amid the financial industry’s meltdown (and resulting bailouts), Matt Yglesias snarked:
Banks are in terrible shape, and as a result of that the government is taking drastic steps to help banks out. And it’s because of those drastic steps that the banks are posting operating profits. . . .
. . . It would be a bit as if the government decided to save GM by just agreeing to purchase cars as fast as GM can make ‘em.
Apparently, Matt has a more or less direct line to the White House these days, since Reuters (among others) reported soon afterward:
President Barack Obama, saying he was committed to a strong U.S. auto industry, announced on Thursday the government would buy 17,600 new fuel-efficient vehicles from ailing American automakers by June 1.
Obama said the vehicles, part of the U.S. government fleet, would be purchased from General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, all of which had an existing contract with the federal government’s General Services Administration.
Talk about the power of bloggers! I guess those stories about connections between the Center for American Progress and the Obama administration were right on target.
I don’t know why I bother to keep posting these global warming bits…each story seems to follow much like the others. “Unprecedented.” “Greater than expected.” “Positive feedback loop.”
Today’s depressing tidbit is the loss of a Texas of ice from the Arctic. You know it’s bad when they don’t use Rhode Island as the unit of measure. Of course while we are on the subject of losing polar ice in units of New England states, scientists are predicting a Connecticutt of ice will calve from Antarctica in the near future.
Via the Associated Press: “President Barack Obama is greeted by Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, as he arrives in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, April 7, 2009.”
Josh Marshall caught this snippet in a Politico article on the meeting between President Obama and the CEOs of major banks last Friday:
“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”
But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. . . .
“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
It’s a nice quip, demonstrating the commonsense grasp on things that appeals to many of us who voted for Obama. But many of us are also concerned that such clear thinking has gotten lost in translation between the president and his top financial appointees’ plans to deal with the current meltdown. A joint profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner published last night by ProPublica and the Washington Post gives a vivid example:
In September 2005, Timothy Geithner made one of his most visible moves as a supervisor of the U.S. banking system. He summoned the nation’s top financial firms and their regulators to streamline an antiquated system that threatened Wall Street’s boom.
. . . Geithner’s summit, held at the New York Fed’s fortress-like headquarters near Wall Street, was a success. By fall 2006, the new system had all but eliminated the logjam, helping derivatives trade more efficiently.
. . . Although Geithner repeatedly raised concerns about the failure of banks to understand their risks, including those taken through derivatives, he and the Federal Reserve system did not act with enough force to blunt the troubles that ensued. . . .
. . . Looking back at his time at the New York Fed, Geithner said: “I wish I had worked to change the framework, rather than to work within that framework.”
That same sense of caution seems to have afflicted Obama and his economic team to date, as they resist calls for bolder action and treat the banksters who created the current mess as delicate, yet powerful interests who mustn’t be spooked — to the extent that Obama compared them to suicide bombers a couple of weeks ago.
This isn’t the first administration to feel intimidated, and its ambitions constrained, by the perceived power of Wall Street’s reaction (anyone remember James Carville’s famous quote about wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market?).
But in a moment of such importance, I can’t help but ask: Mr. President, why are you standing on that side of the pitchforks?
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
It dents my American pride to admit that a corrupt crony capitalist state like the PRC shows superior leadership and vision on the green retooling of their automotive industry. Talk about a lost opportunity! Instead of using the economic meltdown to recast Detroit as I suggested back in November, the Dems have chosen to throw a bunch of money into the bottomless pit of the Big Three – Obama, like a plastic-suit wearing auto dealer, is even promising to warranty your next GM purchase! WTF?!?
In retrospect we should have just pulled the plug last fall, and put those billions into Tesla.