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Well, the Presidential election is only one day away…after which, the US begins the 11 week transition period to a new administration!
As established by the twentieth amendment to the US Constitution, “the terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” So what exactly happens between election day and January 20th? There are a lot of interesting stories about that, which help convey the strong tradition behind lengthy transition periods in the US. In addition to the history, the General Services Administration has various (semi-)recently documented responsibilities during this period under The Presidential Transition Act of 2000, while other branches of the government focus on their respective areas. For example, the Office of Personnel Management focuses on…personnel changes, while the military plans for possible incidents during this time. But what exactly will President-Elect Obama or President-Elect McCain be doing? As you might expect, they’ve already started planning their administrations, an activity they have far more time to accomplish prior to the “official” transition than our friends in some other countries.
Do you know what to do if your vote is suppressed? GOODVOTE.ORG is a group of volunteers from the technology community and blogosphere who simply want the will of the voters to be reflected in the result of the 2008 election. Our only purpose is to make sure that when legitimate voters are challenged they know who to turn to for help.
The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of voters from swing states have been illegally purged from voter registration lists using social security numbers.
Unsure whether your vote will count? Check here.
Project Vote 2008 aims to repair “vote caging” [discussed previously] by compiling Google spreadsheets of affected households. Check your own status, and alert friends or neighbors you find there that their voter registration status is at risk for “alleged or actual deficiencies.”
Governor Palin gets prank called. “Like we say in France, [we could go kill some baby seals].” The transcript is here.
via the gang at metafilter.com
Last month (Sept. 16, 2008) the American taxpayers bailed out insurance giant American International Group (AIG) to the tune of $85 billion dollars. So, asked “what ya’ goin’ do now after the bailout?” top executives said “party it up at the St. Regis Resort Monarch Beach (Dana Point, CA) for a week (September 22 – 30, 2008). Total costs? Invoice: $443,343.71. “$200,000 dollars for hotel rooms. Almost $150,000 for catered banquets. AIG spent $23,000 at the hotel spa and another $1,400 at the salon.” Said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD): “They were getting manicures, facials, pedicures and massages while American people were footing the bill. And they spent another $10,000 dollars for I don’t know what this is, leisure dining. Bars?”
Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.
There’s justice in the gibes. Everyone agrees that something major must be done. But Mr. Paulson is demanding extraordinary power for himself — and for his successor — to deploy taxpayers’ money on behalf of a plan that, as far as I can see, doesn’t make sense.
Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing? He’s making it up as he goes along, just like the rest of us.
So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:
1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.
2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.
3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.
4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”
The Paulson plan calls for the federal government to buy up $700 billion worth of troubled assets, mainly mortgage-backed securities. How does this resolve the crisis?
Well, it might — might — break the vicious circle of deleveraging, step 4 in my capsule description. Even that isn’t clear: the prices of many assets, not just those the Treasury proposes to buy, are under pressure. And even if the vicious circle is limited, the financial system will still be crippled by inadequate capital.
Or rather, it will be crippled by inadequate capital unless the federal government hugely overpays for the assets it buys, giving financial firms — and their stockholders and executives — a giant windfall at taxpayer expense. Did I mention that I’m not happy with this plan?
The logic of the crisis seems to call for an intervention, not at step 4, but at step 2: the financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.
That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)
But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.
I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.
But I’d urge Congress to pause for a minute, take a deep breath, and try to seriously rework the structure of the plan, making it a plan that addresses the real problem. Don’t let yourself be railroaded — if this plan goes through in anything like its current form, we’ll all be very sorry in the not-too-distant future.
This article: Racism and the Race — Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive brings to the forefront one of the issues that’s such a huge factor, but that everyone is tiptoeing around.
Racism in this presidential election really scares me. I know how racist lots of people are. Those who were born after desegregation not only don’t have, but cannot understand the racism of those who remember “colored” drinking fountains, and lunch counters where black workers weren’t welcome, and different doors into hospitals, different treatment at the hands of the justice system…it’s impossible, I think, for us to understand how radically the world changed because of Lyndon Johnson and his courageous decision to end his own political career and give the south to the Republicans, so that all people, regardless of skin color, would be protected under the law.
Segregation didn’t even start in some southern states until the 70s. I was one of the first kids bused into a “bad neighborhood”. And ya know, when I left the chain link fence, and went home with a school friend…there wasn’t anything “bad” about the neighborhood…it was just filled with black folks. The houses were just like the houses in our blue collar neighborhood…filled with kids and peanut butter and laughter.
But that’s not how the grown ups saw it. They threw rocks at our buses, angry at the government for busing white kids into a black neighborhood, and taking it out on the cowering 6 year olds in the bus. I can’t even imagine how horrible it was for the black kids bused into the white neighborhoods.
To this day, older towns in the South (this may be true in the North, I don’t know), are divided along an unspoken, but firmly dividing line. It’s weird. I recently visited a whole bunch of places, and every town had a street, or an avenue where one neighborhood stopped and the next racial neighborhood picked up…and there’s this sort of weird zone between the two where almost nobody goes.
I think the “black” thing is a much bigger issue than many people think it is. Especially those of us that are progressives. We want to believe that it doesn’t matter, that people have evolved in the 40 years since Selma, that equality has taken hold in the hearts and minds of the people around us.
But I fear that it hasn’t. I think the Republican-fed hysteria about “affirmative action taking away jobs from good white people” has taken root and grown strong. Media distortion of crimes have made people afraid of black men. I have two black families in houses across and catercorner from my house. One of the men is a doctor, and one of them is a social worker who fosters teen boys. The first thing I heard from a few neighbors was how our property values were going to go down. In the 21st century! Seriously. And when I said “Erm…how does a doctor make property value go down?”, they looked around and whispered “Well…you know…”, as though I were going to be part of their racist conspiracy by refusing to say “Wait? You mean because they’re Black?”
Racism is alive and growing, and I fear that it may be the downfall of not just Obama, but of the entire country. For if the electorate defines what’s right by the color of the candidate’s skin…we have lost so much more than hope. We’ve lost our humanity.
