Monthly Archives: December 2010

Cultural Foot-And-Mouth Can Kill

Art, Music, Pop-Culture, Technology, The Zeitgeist

An abundance of flying objects and a minimalist script, as far as music and language go: This encapsulates the artistic tastes pervading the culture. “Sixty Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, however, was enraptured by the sounds of a bad band called “The Edge,” collaborating with Bono, another three-chord wonder, to produce the “new musical ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.'”

In order to better describe the audial effects he wanted to achieve, Bono told “The Edge”: “ta, ta, ta, tum; give me that John Lennon-kinda sound.” He can’t even read music. Neither could they, presumably. That was “the creative process in real time” to which Stahl treated her viewers.

About the pretentious director, Julie Taymor—without whom Bono said he would not have been willing to warble worthlessly—the media seem to be saying less since her set has started buckling under poor Super Man and his supporting crew. She must be a card-carrying liberal.

The show’s financial scaffolding is rickety too. It so happens that Taymor’s talents for entertaining are not commercially viable: she has been at this production longer than the Iraq war has been entertaining the political deadheads. Before its financial sponsors can break even, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” will have to run for decades. That is if it holds up.

UPDATED: Deadbeat States

Debt, Economy, States' Rights

Socialism is secondary to state squandering—and a consequence of it. America is a debtor nation. The defining characteristic of the Unites States is debt—public and private; macro and micro, federal and state.

I sincerely hope you are not invested in municipal bonds. The “$3 trillion municipal bond market, where state and local governments go to finance their schools, highways, and other projects,” is about to come crashing down.

“60 Minutes” (CBS): “By now, just about everyone in the country is aware of the federal deficit problem, but you should know that there is another financial crisis looming involving state and local governments.”

It has gotten much less attention because each state has a slightly different story. But in the two years, since the ‘great recession’ wrecked their economies and shriveled their income, the states have collectively spent nearly a half a trillion dollars more than they collected in taxes. There is also a trillion dollar hole in their public pension funds.

The states have been getting by on billions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, but the day of reckoning is at hand. The debt crisis is already making Wall Street nervous, and some believe that it could derail the recovery, cost a million public employees their jobs and require another big bailout package that no one in Washington wants to talk about.

‘The most alarming thing about the state issue is the level of complacency,’ Meredith Whitney, one of the most respected financial analysts on Wall Street and one of the most influential women in American business, told correspondent Steve Kroft.

Whitney made her reputation by warning that the big banks were in big trouble long before the 2008 collapse. Now, she’s warning about a financial meltdown in state and local governments.

‘It has tentacles as wide as anything I’ve seen. I think next to housing this is the single most important issue in the United States, and certainly the largest threat to the U.S. economy'” …

“…The problem with that, according to Wall Street analyst Meredith Whitney, is that no one really knows how deep the holes are. She and her staff spent two years and thousands of man hours trying to analyze the financial condition of the 15 largest states. She wanted to find out if they would be able to pay back the money they’ve borrowed and what kind of risk they pose to the $3 trillion municipal bond market, where state and local governments go to finance their schools, highways, and other projects.

‘How accurate is the financial information that’s public on the states? And municipalities,’ Kroft asked.

‘The lack of transparency with the state disclosure is the worst I have ever seen …’ Whitney said”

MORE.

UPDATE (Dec. 21): The Guardian (UK) has taken note: “US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds. … American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn.”

NoBamas Bearing Presents, Please

Barack Obama, Britain, Celebrity, English, Foreign Policy

The singularity solipsistic Obama and his uncouth wife once gave the Queen of England an iPod filled with images and audio of his Highness’s inaugural and DNC addresses.

From the grandeur of her White House Crib, the FLOTUS is famous for giving Prime Minister Brown a box of 25 DVDs including “ET,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Star Wars,” “a cheap gift which spoke to the giver’s impoverishment. The DVDs were also region-encoded for North America and could not be played in Britain. Brown gave Obama ‘a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship.'”

“Sarah Brown lavished books and ball gowns on the Obama girls. Mrs. Obama reciprocated by giving the Brown boys two lousy, plastic, ‘matching models of the helicopter which ferries her husband around.”

MORE in “Gangsta Gifts.”

“Before the DVD and gift-shop gaffes, there was the weightier matter of the bust of Winston Churchill. ‘The valuable bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein had been loaned by the British government to George W. Bush,’ wrote syndicated columnist Diana West. ‘One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.'”

As Daniel Hannan noted, Obama “used the Louisiana oil spill to attack an imaginary company called ‘British Petroleum’ (it has been BP for the past decade, ever since the merger with Amoco gave it as many American as British shareholders). … He managed, on his visit to West Africa, to refer to the struggle for independence, but not to the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery.”

The return of the Churchill bronze confirmed the suspicion that Obama was anti-Occident. The habit of giving inappropriate, thoughtless presents—as he and his family are deluged with wild effusions of love and lavish gifts—this shows Obama to be, well, a bit of a pig.

Maybe Prince William and Kate Middleton think that inviting the rude American duo to their wedding is infra dig. Or, perhaps it’s as the press has reported, and “President Obama and his wife Michelle will not be invited to Prince William’s wedding next year’ because the ‘royal couple is eager to ask ordinary citizens to attend rather than VIPs.'”

Because Prince William is not yet heir to the throne, his wedding to Kate Middleton is not classed as a ‘state occasion’ – and the couple feel under no pressure to fill the 2,000-strong guest list with heads of state, the Mail understands.