The national achievement last night defies words of any consecration or commemoration. Finally this country sees through our legacy of mystifying fear and prejudice. Dreamers, for once, have prevailed.
I took a look at the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges, specifically their trading stats for Jan. 2008. Combined for that month, they executed 442.6 million trades, which would add up to a huge heap of money extracted from the securities industry. A penny-per-trade tax strikes me as far more reasonable, but I suspect the captains of corporations at Wall Street would squeal like stuck hogs in objection, all the same. Anyway, I sent a note to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Finance & Urban Affairs to make the argument as follows:
Dear Committee Members:
Over the past week I’ve paid close attention to the news headlines depicting the financial crisis the United States faces. Of all the solutions bandied about, I’ve yet to hear anyone propose a penny-per-trade tax on the execution of any equity, mutual fund, option, futures, or credit default swap transaction.
If trading has been the very mechanism that distorted the value of our assets, shouldn’t it also be the process by which Wall Street lends a hand in resolving this crisis?
Respectfully yours,
Subject: $1-per-trade tax on securities (buying and selling)
Dear Sen. Dodd,
I write to thank you for your efforts to hold Wall Street accountable over the current financial crisis this country faces. If I may be so bold as to suggest one phase of the solution to this potential economic cataclysm: a
$1-per-trade tax on buying and selling of securities (stock, bond, mutual fund, option, futures, credit default swaps, et. al.) that can go towards defraying the cost of the much-heralded $700 billion bailout.
If the investment banking and securities industries have had a part in bringing our economy to the edge of ruin, then perhaps it is a modest proposal to expect they participate in its salvaging.
Respectfully yours,
Jude Folly
Pregnant and unwed are the least of her problems. Anyway, I’m convinced that for almost every occasion there is a Smiths song that commemorates.
With a number of contenders sniping for visibility and sound bites, the presidential primaries proved far more interesting than the two-candidate race we now witness in the months leading to the November election. I admit the change we seek from that last seven years of Bush administration incompetence, nepotism and deception - may not amount to the dramatic policy sweep our country merits.
Yet, the choice between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain strikes me as overwhelmingly obvious.
I’m on the edge of my seat reading about the Congressional deliberations over the FISA bill. Very briefly, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act attempts to balance privacy rights vs. national security by requiring a court-approved warrant for a wire tap of any U.S. citizen, allowing a spy agency up to 72 hours to file for such approval after the fact (as amended in 2002; see p. 14).
Sounds reasonable, no? That’s of course if you have a pre-9/11 mentality that inspires your opposition to any of the Bush administration’s power-grabbing maneuvers.
I digress. As I read of Sen. Chris Dodd’s preparation to filibuster the House-approved ‘compromise‘ (granting immunity to telecom corporations that enabled NSA’s violation of FISA), I came across this nifty web site, MAPLight.org, that tracks political contributions to elected officials on what appears to be an issue-by-issue basis. There were a number of Democrats who initially opposed granting immunity to telecoms now recently flipped to support it.
Put the coin in the slot, pull lever.
While living in San Francisco in the late ’90s I first browsed Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown in one of the free Bay Area weeklies. His cartoons strike the viewer’s eye with their amateur-quality (even for political cartoon standards) illustrations, sinister facial expressions and squalor-tinged settings.
Depicting whichever political scandal or celebrity idiocy of the day, Troubletown simply followed a public figure’s rhetoric to its most demented and self-serving conclusion. There’s something appealing about the crudely drawn figures that lends a deviant quality to the makers of media mayhem. You’ll often find them sketched with a diabolical brow and knowing sneer; dark rings under the eyes of those tirelessly at work on sordid schemes.
Take a look at his response to the enormous financial debt the United States owes to China. It’s a stark yet clever reminder of the lender-saturated advertising one most likely will endure while watching television or listening to the radio.
Who seriously cares? The Huffington Post seems to be mining this story to unearth acrimony between McCain and Bush that errupted around the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina. At the time a push-poll of mysterious origins queried voters whether or not they’d vote for John McCain knowing that he had fathered a black child out of wed-lock.
What has troubled me to this day about Sen. McCain is that he hasn’t had the self-respect to publicly tell the Bush organization to screw off; the South Carolina dirty tricks he swallowed clean so he could one day earn the Republican presidential nomination.
From Glenn Greenwald’s post in Salon.com yesterday that discusses in part ”the twisted, petty personality-based themes that dominated” the 1988 presidential election and how they may factor in this year’s race for the White House–I found a link to a Washington Post piece about the challenge that candidate Sen. Obama faces in minting his own ‘brand’ of patriotism.
I won’t deny the factors of appearance and likability at play in a race for public office, but could we just once pry open the shell of this narrow notion of patriotism–lapel pins, flag saluting and cheerleading for national belligerance–and open the conversation to include such matters as the federal government upholding checks and balances established by the Constitution, defending civil liberties, and providing due process to those detained by the U.S. government? These principles define our country just as crucially as any flag waving gesture, no?