CIT said late Wednesday that negotiations with regulators about a possible rescue had broken off after days of round-the-clock talks.
The move marked a defining moment for the Obama administration and showed it's drawing a line in the sand on federal rescues for troubled financial firms.
The stock market had a selloff of CIT stock yesterday, reducing the value of what's already a penny stock by 75%. The overall market, however, was unaffected -- a clear signal that the markets aren't concerned about systemic failure if CIT goes under. Nevertheless, CIT shares are back up this morning on speculations of a rescue by debt holders.
Three prominent retail trade groups sent letters to financial regulators this week warning that the failure of CIT would rip a hole in the industry supply chain. Dunkin' Donuts said the ability of its franchisors to open new stores or expand operations could be affected. And New York bankruptcy lawyer Jerry Reisman said he received more than two dozen calls from panicked stores and apparel manufacturers, some of which said they may not have the money to pay their employees today.
"To the person who was concerned about the 300 so-called patriots gathered at Veterans Park for a tea party, first of all, they weren't protesting war. They were not cheering on the troops. They were not protesting for better benefits for our U.S. troops. Those so-called patriots with their little tea bags were protesting for tax breaks. Maybe that's why TimesDaily didn't find it newsworthy."
A zero-sum game is one in which any player's win is another player's loss. If two people each have fifty marbles, the total number of marbles in the game can never exceed 100. If one player wins a marble, the other has to lose one of theirs.
That's fine for marbles, but what about those who've lost their marbles -- or never had them? Senator Jeff Sessions, for instance, sees race relations as a zero-sum game:
"Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another." Sessions unwittingly provides a window on the racist mind: a job for a brown person is one less job for a white person; a scholarship for a black person is one less scholarship for a white person; empathy for a yellow or red person is prejudice against a white. The racist mind sees all ethnic groups in competitive opposition, and even makes empathy a limited resource.
That mental landscape is the origin of all prejudice; the leap from racism to chauvinism, homophobia, or back again, is a small one. Why ban gay marriage? Because it will hurt straight marriage. Why pay a woman less than a man for the same work? Because it will hurt manly breadwinning (and by extension, male prerogatives).
It's all nonsense, of course. In reality, whenever prejudice loses everyone wins:
As I said on Wednesday, Jeff Sessions had an agenda in his questioning. It is the same agenda Pat Buchanan laid out in his editorial Tuesday:
What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.
The original culture warrior, Buchanan's solution for a party in dire need of minority membership is to double-down on divisive racial politics. Racists have red-baited every social movement and advance since the Civil War; even now, two decades past the End of History, Buchanan can't give up his fossilized thinking. He even wants to make the word "equality" a dirty one.
Last night, Rachel Maddow called out Buchanan about his call for Republicans to intensify their race-based politics. The back-and-forth is illuminating:
Buchanan and Sessions speak the language of zero-sum politics. Inverting Clausewitz's axiom, they see America as a limited field to be won in a perpetual race-competition. Obama's very presence in the White House proves they are wrong; but in their own minds, it proves they are right.
From 2003 to 2008, the Fiddleworms gave out square, black stickers with the letters "FW" in the same font as those Bush stickers. On more than one occasion, I got confronted over the one on my Honda. Each time, I just said "Fiddleworms" out loud until they realized I was crazy and left me alone.
Opensecrets.org has analyzed the nay votes on health care reform legislation in the Senate committee. To no one's surprise,
Those members who voted "no" today have received $1.1 million more on average from the health sector since 1989 than those who voted "yes" ($2.2 million versus $1.1 million). This includes contributions from the employees and political action committees of health companies to the lawmakers' candidate committees and leadership PACs.
Those members who voted "no" have received $118, 227 more on average from insurance companies than those who voted "yes" -- $250,000 compared to $131,800. This includes health and accident insurers, HMOs and health services.
Those members who voted "no" have received $266,182 more on average from pharmaceutical and health product companies than those who voted "yes" -- $520,100 compared to $253,950.
About 90% of the human race is middlemen. Yet they have been cut out of the modern economy everywhere except Washington DC. Maybe it's time we just cut out the political middleman and sold senate seats to corporate America.
Let's auction off the Senate with sealed bidding every six years. Corporate lobbyists can just give the cash directly to the taxpayer, producing a windfall to pay for clean elections, cap-and-trade, and some decent health insurance. I don't really care if Jeff Sessions finds a new job or not.
I met Buzz Aldrin when I was six. Y'know, walked on the moon with Neal Armstrong? Seriously -- I'm not making this up. He walked on the moon, it wasn't faked, I promise.
(Isn't it a sad measure of our times that people are more likely to disbelieve in the moon landing than in my meeting an astronaut?)
I was six, and visiting my grandfather in Chicago for the summer. Grandpa was Aldrin's financial adviser. Of course, at age 6 I was suitably impressed by his credentials: he had me at "astronaut."
Just a week before he showed up, I'd been to the Chicago museum of something-or-other, seen a mock-up of the Mercury capsule, and bought a little plastic model of it.
My uncle Russell (only barely out of his teens at the time) encouraged my Apollo-landing fixation with his own posters and pictures of those images later misused by MTV (this was 1978; cable TV wouldn't rock for another four years).
I was impressed with Buzz, but Russell had a terrible hero-worshipping crush on the man. Buzz was very patient and kind with us. My uncle got to drive Mr. Aldrin to the airport; and because I hadn't pestered him too much, I got to ride in the back seat.
But a great big airshow had shut down traffic along Lakeshore Drive. The road to the airport was jammed up with slow-moving traffic. Plus, it was summer in Chicago, and the air conditioner wasn't working very well. So my uncle was sweating it and getting really upset: here he was, privileged to serve his boyhood hero, but failing to get him to the airport on time or in comfort.
Buzz was fully aware of Russell's discomfort. He couldn't not be. But he did something then -- something I would not forget -- something that made me sit up in a crowded theatre some years later and yell out loud.
Buzz leaned back in his seat (they were bench seats back then -- bucket seats were almost unknown) and winked at me. Then he closed his eyes, smiled, sighed, and announced:
"I AM A LIZARD ON A HOT, SUNNY ROCK."
He said it in a voice that made the rattling air conditioner go quiet. His voice had a serenity that dropped the temperature in the car ten degrees. Buzz was so calm that Russell and I both sat back in our seats and...smiled.
And this is the weirdest thing his voice did: it made the traffic move faster. Somehow, some way, the moment we stopped worrying about the traffic jam, it started to work itself loose.
I hear what you're thinking: Where the hell did this Lizard business come from? Years later, a light bulb went off during this sequence of scenes:
These men were going where no man had gone before. The Mercury capsule is a tiny spaceship about the size of a phone booth. NASA was looking for men who wouldn't lose it under pressure, who had a special talent for dealing with stress.
Because fear is one thing, but giving in to your fear will never save you. The ancient greeks named the servants of Hades 'Pain' and 'Panic' because both of them can kill your mind.
Lizards are cold-blooded. They can move fast when they need to, but they don't know how to panic -- they're not built that way. NASA wanted men in touch with their inner Lizard.
From that day forward, it's been a special gift Buzz gave me. Whenever stress gets to be too much, I close my eyes and smile that way (it's the same smile Quaid has in that scene about 6:40 of the way through) and announce, for all the world to know, that I am a cold-blooded creature, and this heat feels good.
And you know what? It works.
Today, 40 years after leaving Earth for the moon, Buzz Aldrin has an op-ed at the Washington Post proposing that NASA go to Mars by way of the moon, using the Red Planet's twin moons -- named for the gods of fear and panic -- as bases for exploration. I say it's only fair to name the spaceship for some species of lizard.
You'll excuse me for lacking any sympathy with Americans subject to a health care surcharge as part of a public option:
A family making $500,000 in AGI will contribute $1,500 to help reduce costs and provide access to affordable health care for all Americans -- 0.3 percent of their annual income. And a family making $1 million in AGI will contribute $9,000, or 0.9 percent of their annual income.
In other words, if you make a half million or more your taxes go up about $4.11 a day to give Americans health insurance. That's a Starbucks venti latté. Per day.
Stovepiping denial, USA Today asks: "Could We Be Wrong About Global Warming?"
Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
Predictably, global warming deniers are in a tizzy. Michelle Malkin and YIDWithLid have leapt upon this national news story as "proof" that global warming is a lie aimed directly at capitalism. Longtime climate change denier and Glenn Beck guest Anthony Watts has given them a veneer of truthiness withSCIENCE!
But while the entire paper is not available online, the summary conclusion finds that CO2 levels 55 million years ago
can explain only between 1 and 3.5 °C of the warming inferred from proxy records.
Some perspective is in order: climate change modeling says we can save the world by limiting the rise in global temperature to two degrees.
You've probably noticed that this website has some new ads on it. That's because I am now a "professional" blogger, which is not the big deal you might expect.
No one actually pays me an hourly rate to blog, nor am I paid in cents by the word. Instead, bloggers earn rates for every X number of page loads, each click, and a tiny commission on sales coming through our sites. Until now, a few generous donors have made it possible to maintain the site, but it has never paid for itself. Hopefully, over the coming months that will start to change.
Here's the thing about the ads: Google's been my sole ad provider until now, and their ads suck. I haven't figured out their trick for chasing mAnn Coulter off your computer screen. Now that I've signed on with a good company, there's not going to be anything unwholesome in the ads.
Furthermore, the Amazon widgets on the right contain nothing I don't like or want; and while I have a habit of posting, say, an Amazon mp3 widget in a morning blog where I rave about some band you've never heard of, you can rest assured the music is actually part of my own collection.
Matt Osborne is an unpaid spokesman for the Bureau of Public Secrets. His opinion letters have been printed in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and daily papers since he was 15 years old.
A (mildly) disabled veteran, he also writes fiction at
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Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press. A keyboard is my press; this is my news. It's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.
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