wake up, sleepyhead

I finally caught up on some much-needed sleep...like 10 hours of it...but this is not the town where one should be sleeping her time away. I don't even know what's going on in the world right now--especially with politics--which might be a blessing. However, I just opened up Yahoo/UK and saw a headline story about Britney Spears. Even here, I guess I can't escape from the same banal, useless news items.

Last night I had a fantastic dinner at Moti Mahal. I've been wanting to come here for a long time, and it lived up to its promise.

Now I need coffee. Dare I go to Starbucks?

Why many Americans don't have a clue...

Recently, I've noticed that whenever I go to my gym--where exercise in front of a wall of flat-panel TVs--I'm absolutely inundated with nonstop broadcasts of Sarah Palin. The worst offender is CNN, who seem to have suspended most other news or information in favor of repeating endless video loops of this woman's handful of speeches and public appearances since she was nominated for this slot by John McCain a few weeks ago.

Sarah Palin is the Britney Spears of 2008, and her function is probably to serve as a distractor from real issues. CNN is not much different than FOX News, after all. Which is why I don't normally watch TV. I can find out what they're showing and saying easily enough, without letting it stream into my brain without resistance.

However, as some of us know already, the more you watch TV, the less you know. Increasingly so in the past few years. Why? One theory, which I find plausible, was put forth about four years ago by Robert Kennedy Jr. in this video, which I'm unable to post directly on this blog.

He talks about the overturning of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan in 1988. Until then, television and radio programmers had an obligation under the Fairness Doctrine to report the daily news at a certain time and act in the public interest. So instead of the Fairness Doctrine, we got FOX "Fair and Balanced" News.

After this legislation was dismantled, it released some of the oversight on the media owners: corporations and a new group of extremists who began to consolidate the number of media outlets and gave birth to extreme radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who use the public airwaves to vent their personal prejudices in the name of news.

The problem became exacerbated in the years that followed: not just under Reagan and Bush Sr., but under Clinton, who basically disarmed the FCC, and allowed the media ownership to consolidate to the point where we now have just five owners that run thousands of outlets (newspapers, radio, TV, and Internet providers).

None of this is new information to many of you, but 20 years later, some Americans don't have a clue about what they don't know, and some of them might not care. This is why they vote against their own best interests: they receive their information from only five corporations and religious groups. Nothing else gets in, and they're either not curious enough or they don't know where to look for an alternative news source.

As Kennedy points out, the changes in legislation and ownership basically got rid of a generation of investigative reporters, and in previous eras, it was the investigative reporters who "connected the dots" to trace the origins of situation--exactly the kind of information we've sorely needed in these past few years, and especially now, with the stock market crashing and a pivotal presidential election ahead.

Now what we have is a riot of useless video loops (Sarah Palin, celebrity gossip, bloopers, and so forth) interspersed with guests on talk shows who represent a particular ideology--usually the one that the network's owners favor.

It's easy to see the results on Internet bulletin boards: anonymous web posters who blame people like Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi for the Wall Street meltdown or who claim that Barack Obama is an Arab and a Muslim. And then, quite possibly, settle in front of their 50" flat TV screen for another evening of "infotainment."

Through the Past, Darkly

With all the turmoil going on in the stock market... and the tires popping on the financial institutions every day... I decided to go on a treasure hunt for the "Savings and Loan Scandal Trading Cards" that I bought back in the early 1990s. I wanted to get a refresher on this financial crisis from the early days of banking deregulation to see if it would give some background on what's happening now. And it sure did.

So who were the players? Let's start with card number 1, which had Ronald Reagan on it. He signed the Garn-St Germain Act in 1982 -- the legislation that deregulated the savings and loan industry--and he allegedly said it was "the most important legislation for financial institutions in fifty years...I think we have hit the jackpot." And indeed, his friends did.

Card number 14 was Neil Bush -- George W's brother, and George H. Bush's son. In 1985, he started his own savings and loan called "Silverado Banking." Heartwarming name, isn't it? He also had his own oil company, "JNB Exploration," which benefited from millions of dollars of loans from his savings and loan. His oil business didn't go well, and he didn't have to pay back the loans. And his two business partners (who were also investors in his oil company) got $90 million in loans from Silverado, which they defaulted on. According to the story, his father (then the vice-president of the USA) protected him with a team of legal specialists, and Neil got away with "a slap on the wrist."

So let's talk about the father. George H. Bush is on card number 16. As vice president, according to this card deck, he chaired the Presidential Task Force on Deregulation. They didn't just work on deregulating the banking system, but also on issues that affected things like consumer safety. But he allegedly had close ties to some of the other players in the savings and loan scandals, too--not just his son--receiving a $100,000 gift to his 1988 presidential campaign from Charles Keating himself (as in "The Keating Five," which John McCain was part of). There's speculation, not proven, that he delayed the seizure of his son Neil's Silverado Banking venture till after the 1988 election. The day after he was elected president, the bank was seized. It could just be a coincidence...

Now here's a blast from the past. Card 21....Don Regan. He was first the Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and then Chief of Staff. But before he became part of the Reagan government, he was the head of Merrill Lynch, which is back in the news again now. According to the chronology, while heading the Treasury Department, he used his treasury position to try to deregulate the savings and loans even further. Later, he was linked to the Iran-Contra scandal and forced to resign.

Oh, but here's one more card of particular interest. Card number 35 is Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve. Another proponent of deregulating the banking industry, he used to work for Charles Keating. According to the card, he also pressured Congress to abolish the Glass-Steagall Act, which was created in 1933 to keep banks out of "risky businesses like stock market and real estate." How ironic that the Glass-Steagall Act created the FDIC, the very entity that is set up to rescue the failing bank institutions (and presumably our deposits) today.

Looking backwards at stories like these help to form a bigger picture of the financial debacle now, and I thought I'd take a break from rearranging my deck chairs on the Titanic to share them with you.

"The Savings and Loan Scandal Trading Cards" are copyright 1991 through Eclipse Enterprises in Forestville, CA. I don't know if they're still for sale today.

Landfill for sale

Tonight I was running an errand when I saw this pile of garbage for sale in a retail shop. While these absurd McCain versus Clinton dolls are out of date by several months already and largely irrelevant, they were already worthless crap when they were manufactured.

It's a perfect example of some of the useless merchandise that's for sale everywhere and basically needs to be discarded soon after it's purchased. In fact, these awful dolls are a bargain compared to the action-hero figures you can buy on this website. But all of these useless items will end up in the dump, along with the pet rocks, sea monkeys, and chia pets of yesteryear.

I'd love to see the numbers for the sell-through on this junk. Whoever made it thinks that people (or at least Americans) are idiots. Whoever actually buys it proves that my worst fears might be true.

New Orleans, Part Deux

As Hurricane Gustav draws closer to the coastline....and just days before the Republican National Convention begins, I'm getting angry all over again when I think about the government response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

Never before has this country allowed an entire city to be destroyed: this government turned away planes bearing foreign aid of food and supplies, and banned the Red Cross from entering New Orleans. They left the people sitting in crowded stadiums for days without food and water. They left the dead lying on the streets. When Bush finally took an interest to what was happening in New Orleans, he told his FEMA director "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" (he wasn't), and talked about how sorry he was that Trent Lott's vacation home was damaged in Mississippi.

Instead of helping the people in New Orleans who were under water or swimming for their lives -- they shot some of them. On TV, we watched Louisiana state troopers turning people away from a bridge....their only escape out of town. Even today, we don't know how many people died there. We never had a memorial or a public commemoration. By some accounts, 1,600 people died. Others estimate the death toll as much higher.

Now, in an election year, with another hurricane barreling in, we can't forget what happened -- we shouldn't dismiss the images we watched in horror on TV just three years ago. Barack Obama nailed it in his speech the other night when he asked if we wanted a US government that "sat on its hands while a city drowned."

We can't control natural disasters. But we *can* control how we respond to them. To the evacuees from New Orleans in 2008: my thoughts are with you. And I hope you're not abandoned by the government this time.

"Our government should work for us, not against us. "

In case you missed Barack Obama's monumental speech at the Democratic National Convention....or you just want to watch it again and feel empowered for a change....here's the speech in its entirety.

Livin' la vida local

During the past few years, I've spent part of my summer in Paris. This year, however, I couldn't do it logistically or financially. But I realized that -- in some ways, anyway -- I can live in my own hometown in a similar way that I can when I'm in Paris.

So I took the metro to the local farmer's market on Saturday (the open market at the ferry building downtown) and loaded up on produce and goodies...then made a feast for myself at home of local dry-farmed tomatoes (the most amazing tomatoes you'll ever eat!), fresh basil, mozzarella, garlic curd (from the local Spring Hill Creamery...garlic curd sounds weird, but it's delicious), olive oil, and balsamic glaze. The result? Delicious.

I live in a cool city, too, and there are lots of local things to enjoy. For now, if I'm missing Paris, I can just turn on TV5 Monde and pretend...