The Political Whore

This oughta give some shivers to all the free marketeers out there (and honestly, shouldn’t that be everyone?). The New York Times reports:

Only five days into the Obama presidency, members of the new administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are already dancing around one of the most politically delicate questions about the financial bailout: Is the president prepared to nationalize a huge swath of the nation’s banking system?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has alluded to internal debate over whether large banks should be nationalized, while aides to President Obama have avoided the word and are looking into alternatives. Privately, most members of the Obama economic team concede that the rapid deterioration of the country’s biggest banks, notably Bank of America and Citigroup, is bound to require far larger investments of taxpayer money, atop the more than $300 billion of taxpayer money already poured into those two financial institutions and hundreds of others.

But if hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment is needed to shore up those banks, and perhaps their competitors, what do taxpayers get in return? And how do the risks escalate as government’s role expands from a few bailouts to control over a vast portion of the financial sector of the world’s largest economy?

Barack Obama, in one of a handful of first-day moves and executive orders, has frozen White House salaries:

President Barack Obama is bringing some belt-tightening to the White House. In one of his first official acts, the president announced an immediate pay freeze at current levels for senior White House officials. According to the Associated Press, the freeze would apply to about 100 aides earning over $100,000 a year.

“This will enable the White House to stretch its budget to get more done for the country. The president and his staff recognize that in these austere times, everyone must do more with less, and the White House is no exception,” the White House press office announced in a statement.

More from the Wall Street Journal blog.

And in case you wonder just how much those White House staffers were making, here is the latest info on the Bush White House from 2008, as detailed in an report to Congress. The Washington Post lists them all (except for the office of VP Cheney, which predictably declined to report them), including these (former) top earners:

Read the rest of this entry »

President Barack Obama wasted no time in wading into the stickiest messes left at the White House. Whether he’ll have any success for them is a matter that we won’t know for some time.

According to the White House press office, Obama put telephone calls in to the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority this morning. Along with some pleasantries, the afternoon is being devoted to dealing with Iraq and the economy, the WH schedule shows:

1:15PM-2:15PM President Obama Addresses Staff and Cabinet Secretaries

POOL PRESS

2:30 PM President Obama Attends White House Open House

Base of stair case on the ground level by State Room.

POOL PRESS

3:15PM-3:45PM President Obama Meets with Economic Advisors

Roosevelt Room

CLOSED PRESS

4:15PM-5:15PM President Obama Meets with Iraq Military Commanders

CLOSED PRESS

This just in: The owner of the Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and Newschannel 8 is suspending its contribution to the employee 401(k) program starting April 1.

From: MG Employee Communications
Sent: Mon 1/19/2009
Subject: Letter from Marshall Morton

Dear Fellow Employees,

Media General faces an extremely tough business climate in 2009. On the positive side, we got an early start addressing the softening economy and have significantly reduced expenses. We are ahead of many of our peers in implementing sound strategies to address the changes underway in our business. However, the deep global recession is making it difficult to forecast business performance for 2009. We anticipate continued revenue declines in nearly all advertising categories. It is prudent in times of uncertainty to manage our business and cash flow conservatively.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obama thinks so. And one economist is arguing that Japan’s experience proves it. From my Recessionomics column this week:

Let’s see what Richard C. Koo, the author of The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession and chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, has to say about such things. (OK, yes, the Taiwanese national is also a U.S. citizen who has done quite a bit of work here in the states and was with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but still …)

Koo’s book examines how Japan fixed its economy in the 1990s, when its condition was similar to what the rest of the world is experiencing today. His solution, as boiled down by a writer for Canada’s The Globe and Mail: “Spend, spend big, spend till it hurts and when you are tired of spending, spend some more.”

Read the rest here.

The NYT reports:

The government reported on Wednesday that retail sales fell for a sixth consecutive month in December, as Americans holstered their credit cards and cut back on spending, even as stores offered discounts of 80 percent to entice shoppers.

Sales at department stores, restaurants, gas stations and a host of other retail businesses fell 2.7 percent last month — nearly double what economists had been expecting — and were 9.8 percent lower than sales last December, the Commerce Department reported.

The full report in .pdf.

At least, that is what Bloomberg TV finds in this not-quite helpful report of prognostication from Wall Street’ers who mostly have a vested interesting in pimping the market and pushing consumer confidence up:

Presidential counselor Ed Gillespie makes the case for how Bush and his Administration are misunderstood in Real Clear Politics today. Among the points that attempt to rebut what Gillespie calls “myths” about the Bush record:

President Bush’s time in office is ending as it began, with our economy under stress. The recession President Bush inherited as he entered office ran through the attacks of September 11, 2001, but during the recovery that followed, and due in no small part to the tax relief President Bush worked with Congress to provide, this country experienced its longest run of uninterrupted job growth – 52 straight months, with 8.3 million jobs created.

And:

The across-the-board tax cuts provided tax relief to every American who pays income taxes, created a new bottom 10 percent bracket rate, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and actually increased the share of the Federal income tax burden paid by the top 10 percent of individual earners from 67 percent in 2000 to 70 percent in 2005. Furthermore, this Administration removed 13 million low-income earners from the income tax rolls completely.

You can read all of Gillespie’s “myth-busting” here. And I’ll post the rebuttals to this piece of spin as they arrive.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out Talking Points Memo’s “The Day in 100 Seconds.” It’s amazing how many video clips can be crammed into a minute-forty.

• Obama unveils team of Superfriends to fight crime around the globe.
• First up for the Superfriends …
• Politico: Alex Sink won’t run against Sen. Martinez.
• …but Martinez is vulnerable.
• Pat Kemp wins Hillsborough Democrat chief’s job.
• Crist’s plan to suspend foreclosures through the holidays hits Time magazine.
• Breaking news! Breaking news! We’ve been in a recession since December 2007.
• The stock market takes a shit.
• The Pentagon plans 20,000 troops stationed in the U.S. by 2011.
• And the new host of Meet the Press is …
• The stars aligned. Did you miss it?

The Florida Home Builders Association is in such dire straits that it actually called a newser today to announce that the banks are killing them:

Here’s what’s happening in a nutshell: Banks that gave loan to builders in better economic times are now reappraising the value of their loans. The loans were based on earlier projections of home prices and, now that those values have dropped — by as much as 30 percent — banks want builders to make up the difference. Banks are conducting ‘capital calls’ and demanding large amounts of cash from these builders to restore the original loan-to-value ratio.

No surprise, the builders can’t manage it. “The cash call is forcing builders into insolvency,” said Jay Carlson, president of the Florida Home Builders Association. The building industry troubles that are already wreaking havoc on the state’s budget “have gotten much worse and the result will be further deterioration of Florida’s economy.”

The answer, they all say, is a time out — not a bail out. They want a moratorium on lending insitutions calling in loans. They want government — state and federal — to help homeowners to stop the spiraling decine in homeownership that has 54,000 homes in foreclosure in Florida and homes around all of them rapidly declining in value. And they want Congress to stop banks from taking bail-out money on the front end, but closing credit to builders on the back end.

Read more here.

That would the only explanation for today’s Qunnipiac Poll about the economy in our state:

Florida voters are surprisingly upbeat about their personal financial condition, as 56 percent say family finances are “excellent” or “good,” and 43 percent say they are “not so good” or “poor,” according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. But only 31 percent expect things to get better in the next year, while 21 percent say they will get worse and 44 percent say they will stay the same.

Lying about your personal financial condition makes sense. After all, who wants to admit, even to a pollster in anonymity, that their household budget is shot to hell, that they have more personal debt than some small Latin American nations, and that the Holiday Season is going to be slim pickins.

credit: thetruthabout/flickr.com

The poll even hints at this disconnect between our view of how we are doing and the way we tell others about it:

Voters say 59 – 20 percent that they are worse off then they were a year ago, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.

“The housing meltdown hit Florida worse than most of the rest of the country and unemployment has risen there, yet voters aren’t nearly as pessimistic about their situation or their prospects as in some other states,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

(So we’re either more optimistic than the nation at large or too stupid to know we’re in real trouble in the Sunshine State. I vote for the latter.)

“Only 53 percent say they are somewhat or very dissatisfied with the way things are going in Florida today, while 47 percent are very or somewhat satisfied. That’s pretty optimistic given the economy, stock market crash and predictions that the recession could be deep and long,” said Brown. “There are higher levels of pessimism in other parts of the country.”

“A November 13 Quinnipiac University national poll showed a record high 82 percent level of dissatisfaction.”

And anyone wondering just how much red remains in this purple state of ours need look no further than the poll’s top answer for our economic woes:

Floridians say 58 – 30 percent that more cuts in local property taxes are needed, in part because local officials have failed reduce assessments to reflect the decline in property values. They think 73 – 22 percent the voting public, not the Legislature, should make the tax cuts. When it comes to the state budget, they want spending cut rather than taxes raised….

That’s right, giving homeowners a few measly hundred bucks back on their annual property tax bill makes a helluva lot more sense than improving our economy, growing better-paying jobs and upping our education system so we are competitive in the global market.

Palm Beach, Fl. Fifth-grader and aspiring reporter Damon Weaver interviews Joe Biden, asking the veep candidate what it is that a VP actually does. He likes Biden’s answer enough to declare them officially “homeboys.”

• Florida early voting sites to stay open longer each day to better disenfranchise the citizenry.
• Q Poll: Obama ahead by 2 points in statistical tie.
• LAT-Bloomberg: Obama up by 7.
• Obama cuts McCain’s lead to just 2 points in McCain’s home state, Arizona!
• … but the McCain campaign says the race is tightening. Rrrrriiigggghhht.
• Our daily “Nearer My God to Thee” Media update: Time Inc. will lay off 600 workers; Gannett to cut 3,000.
• Enjoy those big gains from yesterday Dow fans. They should be gone by this afternoon.
• Tonight’s half-hour Obama ad will not run on CNN, but will lead into the World Series on Fox.
• Speaking of which: Game 5 resumes tonight — if it doesn’t snow!
• Rate cut! Rate cut! Rate cut!
• The credit crunch finally hits the cards.
• Christian Science Monitor to dump the print paper and go Web-only (mostly).
• Consumer Confidence disappearing faster than your employer’s match of your 401(k).
• Ralph Nader rallies 150 troops in Ybor City.

That would be Jennifer Stone-Anderson, a 51-year-old artist who is out of work and had two months on her hands to paint an elaborate mural on her 2004 Saturn Ion touting the candidacy of Barack Obama.

The south St. Petersburg resident showed off her rolling campaign ad in our parking lot today, pointing out the giant globe that’s really a lit-fuse bomb; Arlington National Cemetery (”where our soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried”); a pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness; and the admonition to recycle (curbside or otherwise) in St. Pete but not to “recycle Bush-McCain.”

Stone-Anderson said she painted the white Ion with acrylics she had leftover at home, on and off, weather permitting, for two months.

Oh, she gets some dirty looks driving it around town. One woman recently told her the “art was ugly.” Stone-Anderson said that made her lose her temper. Others compliment the artwork. Still others slip notes under her windshield wipers, enough for her to put small notes under them directing McCain supporters to use the right wiper and Obama supporters to use the left.

She hopes to get some work soon so she can hold onto the car; she said she took a loan against a 1977 life insurance policy to make her latest (and possibly last) car payment. SEE THE PICS BELOW… Read the rest of this entry »

OK, you ask, what the fuck is a Credit Default Swap, and why should I care? Well, they’re the derivative financial instruments that have been a major reason why we’re in this economic shitstorm. Last night’s 60 Minutes did a superb job of explaining these unregulated “side bets” that have been called Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Watch this segment. It’ll explain to the layperson, to the best extent possible, how Credit Default Swaps work and how they fucked everything up. And it’s bound to get you righteously pissed off.

I tried to embed the video here, but the fucker wouldn’t play, so click to check it out.

I love this guy. Thomas Friedman pimped him a few years back in his globalization followup, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Time called him the Hero of the Environment 2008. Now Van Jones — a Yale Law grad, social activist in Oakland, Netroots Nation keynoter and the hottest up-and-coming voice on creating “green-collar jobs — is out with his own book, The Green Collar Economy. It is a great companion to our Fix It Now series and the Green issue we printed in April.

Here’s the cover copy for the new book:

Provocative, personal, and inspirational, The Green Collar Economy is not a dire warning but rather a substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country–the failing economy and our devastated environment. From a distance, it appears that these two problems are separate, but when we look closer, the connection becomes unmistakable.

In The Green Collar Economy, acclaimed activist and political advisor Van Jones delivers a real solution that both rescues our economy and saves the environment. The economy is built on and powered almost exclusively by oil, natural gas, and coal, all fast-diminishing nonrenewable resources. As supplies disappear, the price of energy climbs and nearly everything becomes more expensive. With costs and unemployment soaring, the economy stalls. Not only that, when we burn these fuels, the greenhouse gases they create overheat the atmosphere. As the headlines make clear, total climate chaos looms over us. The bottom line: we cannot continue with business as usual. We cannot drill and burn our way out of these dual dilemmas.

Instead, Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.

Rachel Carson’s 1963 landmark book Silent Spring was the pivotal ecological examination of the last century. Now, rising above the impenetrable debate over the environment and the economy, Van Jones’s The Green Collar Economy delivers a timely and essential call to action for this new century.

And some video of Jones:

Politics and media headlines on a Monday morning. What could be better than that? Daily updates in the box to the right, that’s what:

• Chicago considers forming a “gay-friendly” high school.
• Krugman wins the Nobel Prize for Economics.
• Weekend newspaper endorsements: Obama 15, McCain 0. (That gives Obama a two touchdown-plus lead.)
• 14 presidential candidates on the Florida ballot; getting on just takes a meeting you dub your “national convention” and 27 members in your political party. Trust me, the Whore Party will be ready for 2012, you betcha.
• Watch for McCain “push-back” on TV to start around Oct. 20, for early voting.
• The felon vote.
• Other than on Amendment 2, voters have little awareness of other constitutional amendments on the ballot.
• Newspaper web advertising revenue growth “slows to a crawl.”
• Tampa Tribune endorses two incumbents and Blair challenger Kevin Beckner.
• Another senseless Internet-related death.
• Yeah, there’s another tropical storm wayyyyy the hell out there.
• Democratic glee at the Republican dismay. It’s called schadenfreude.
• Kristol: McCain should fire his campaign.
• Washington politicians, lobbyists shielded Wall Street from liability for bad loans.
• The “Barack Osama” absentee ballot in upstate New York.
• McCain’s web-only Ayers ad is a “pants on fire” lie.
• McCain’s fans are turning on him; booing him for saying they didn’t need to be afraid of Obama:

The New Republic has been asking people “How will America change as a result of the economic downturn?” I was checking out yesterday’s entry by Michael Lind, a Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and director of its American Infrastructure Initiative, when I hit the following statement:

The emerging system might be called “lemon corporatism.” A managerial state dominated by oligopolies and monopolies, where government encourages employer paternalism as an alternative to public welfare spending, would resemble contemporary Japan and the dystopian America of “Rollerball.”

Priceless. The rest of the essay is also worth reading.

Did I just see a tease with Gilbert Gottfried giving The Today Show’s Ann Curry tips on how to be a stand-up comedian?!? Strange days indeed. Plus all the political and media headlines, with updates throughout the day:

• Al-Arian loses bid for appeal in Supreme Court.
• First he got bounced from a Bill Young campaign event; now write-in sheriff’s candidate Greg Pound has been bounced from a Palin rally.
• The big FLA swing for Obama.
• A guilty plea in the Wellcare Medicare scandal.
• 160 jobs gone in Plant City.
• Florida Clergy for Fairness.
• The real impact of the anti-gay Amendment 2.
• The do or die fatigue.
• Sarah Palin had a middling-size crowd (at best) in Clearwater yesterday. Though I’m guessing it will be larger than Joe Biden’s Wednesday.
• In Palin’s Estero stop, lots of terrorist-baitin’ and Husseinin’ goin’ on, you betcha.
• Hey, didja know that the I-4 Corridor is an election battleground?
• Prepping for Yom Kippur.
• Siegfried cranks a brewski.
• What’s worse: consorting with a past violent anti-war activist, or consorting with a fatcat banker who wrecked the savings and loan industry and cost taxpayers billions in the 1980s?

Our financial reorganization is drawing quite a bit of interest from all over the place (on the same day, unfortunately, that the Tampa Tribune is laying off a few more workers, including editorial page columnist Joe Brown). Here’s a sampling:

It is the unfortunate direction of all print media. Newspapers, magazines, and such media depend on advertising to survive. Why would someone want to pay $10-30 for 3-4 lines of text in classified advertising when a free ad with unlimited text, anonymized response links (so unknowns do not call your home), and multiple photos on a place like Craig’s List [tampa.craigslist.com]? The Tribune, TBT, and Creative Loafing still get more overall local readers, but until they update, they cannot compete. One would think by now the Tribune would even have special links in the ads so that those that pay to list them can have pictures added online.

I like Creative Loafing because of the activity listings and local stories (the Tribune seems to have little real local content that isn’t focused on car crashes, press releases, or celebrity news). When is the last time anyone recalls the Tribune really doing an in-depth, politically dangerous expose on any subject? They did have a long article regarding accidental arson in Plant City years ago, but I wouldn’t really term that as an expose. — comment on tbo.com

Eric Deggans reports on a dispute between CL and one of the investors who financed the Chicago-Washington purchase last year:

Despite a story on the Washington City Paper Web site quoting Creative Loafing Inc. president Ben Eason saying “this filing has little to do with the acquisition,” documents included with the bankruptcy filing indicate the company had trouble keeping up with payments on a $30-million loan taken last year to pay down $15-million in debts and to purchase the two newspapers.

According to documents included with the bankruptcy filing, Creative Loafing missed an interest payment of $282,219 on Dec. 24, a $10,000 servicing fee on Dec. 31 and an interest payment of $294,369 due Jan. 24.

Also according to the documents, as the media economy grew worse, Creative Loafing negotiated agreements to modify the financing terms with Atalaya Funding in New York and BIA Digital Partners. But last week, Atalaya said the company was in default, though Creative Loafing disagrees, according to the court document.

Creative Loafing has asked the court to prevent Atalaya or Atalaya and BIA from taking control of the company, allowing Eason to focus on reorganizing to better meet its debt obligations and develop the online revenue sources prompting the Reader and City Paper purchases.

From Erik Wemple, editor at our sister Washington City Paper:

The move does contain good news for editorial departments in the chain. Eason announced that cuts to edit staffs at all the papers would be rolled back but stressed that all the papers should proceed with “Web-first” publishing strategies, in which writers and editors customize their content for the Internet and subsequently transfer that content into their print products.

From The Business Journal in Tampa Bay:

The bankruptcy filing comes the same day Creative Loafing sued Atalaya Administrative LLC, Atalaya Funding II LP and BIA Digital Partners SBIC II LP asking a judge to stop a default on $40 million in loans. In the suit, filed with the same court, Creative Loafing said the lenders failed to act in good faith when they refused to negotiate lowering the financial covenants. Without the injunction, Creative Loafing says it has no other options in stopping the default, as it would be “too late to save the debtors’ businesses, reputation, and close-knit and effective management.”

From paidcontent.org at Washington Post:

Likely means the BIA funding went south, somewhere along the line, as of course did the company’s fortunes. The company also denies any connection between the acquisitions last year and Ch 11, and says there won’t be any major layoffs…lotsa spin in there, if you ask me.

From our sister Chicago Reader:

In a telephone conversation with executives of his newspapers, Eason sounded relentlessly chipper, and he emphasized that all his company seeks from bankruptcy is the opportunity to restructure its debts. Liquidation is not being considered. “This is a profitable business,” he declared. “The company has a good cash flow. It has a good market position. Online revenues more than doubled in the last year.” But print revenues have fallen off dramatically over the past year at Creative Loafing and throughout the newspaper business. He said in the past three months total revenues were down 10 to 15 percent from the same months a year ago.

The douchebags at Philebrity:

Food for thought: So Creative Loafing, an alt-weekly chain/parent company thing that mostly covers cities you would not live in with even with somebody else’s dick, totally screwed the pooch and declared bankruptcy so that its papers — including Washington City Paper — can better “focus” their efforts online. You can see where we might be going with this: With the Philadelphia Weekly having been rumored to have slashed its freelance budget entirely (no shit! more on this later!) and the City Paper spectacularly lunching its most spectacular issue of the feckackular year, is this a trend that might look juicy to guys like Paul Curci and Anthony Clifton? Our guess: Not yet, but it will.

The Gawker:

This may be just a foreshadowing of some painful days to come for alt-weeklies in general—we also hear the Village Voice may be on the verge of some layoffs.

Olympic fever and the dull days of August have slowed real news to a trickle. Sports Illustrated has a list of the 25 best sports videos (that contain no actual sports) on YouTube. Here is #1. (Warning: Not for the kids.)

• While the world watched the Olympics, war broke out in Eastern Europe.
• Incidentally, if you missed Friday night’s incredible Opening Ceremonies, they can be seen here.
• Lieberman on McCain’s short list, proving past performance is not a vetting factor.
• Who the hell is Robert McGovern, and what the hell does he have to do with the Edwards mess?
• Be the first to know Obama’s V.P. choice.
• The U.S. poised for an economic recovery?
• R.I.P. Issac Hayes, R.I.P. Bernie Mac, R.I.P. Whaley’s Market.
• The Rays break the team record for wins in a season.

Just got off a conference call set up by the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive strategy group, that outlines the launching of its Economic War Room. The distribution center for progressive economic messages will send out daily e-mails with message points and polling data once both national conventions are done, co-director Robert Borosage said.

The bottom line: The Democratic message on the economy was falling flat because it was all about criticism without giving solutions. Voters didn’t disagree with the criticism of the GOP and the Bush Administration, pollster Celinda Lake said; but any five or six people sitting around a dining room table would have come up with those same criticisms. Voters want to hear how we can get out of this mess.

“A critique of the economy doesn’t win; a populist and focused solution wins in polling,” Lake said. The economy “is a powerful issue out there. The voters, if anything, want to hear more about it.”

(Her thoughts were echoed in an AARP poll released today.)

Drew Westen, Emory psychologist and “The Political Brain” author, added that the framing of the message matters, with populist and even progressive themes testing well in the campaign’s polling. “It matters a great deal how you talk about the economy,” he said. “It’s not about the rich vs. the poor;. It’s about the special interests vs. the rest of us.”

Westen provided a fascinating breakdown on why John McCain is winning the energy-message battle with Barack Obama, despite the fact that the Democratic economic platform tests better with voters. Republicans understand much better than Democrats, he said, that voters think in nonlinear and subconscious ways. Connecting rising gas prices with the solution of new offshore drilling works because the mind instantly recognizes that we need to drill to get more oil. Making the case that offshore drilling will take 10 years to have an impact on prices and will only lower them by an estimated 3 percent takes more thought and is less intuitive. So even if people hear that counter-message 1,000 times, they still make the positive connection between “drilling” and “more oil,” and “more oil” and “lower prices.”

It is nice to see today’s kids are taking advantage of our right to protest.

Two girls in Salt Lake City are protesting rising gas prices after their mom was forced to cut cable TV from the family’s budget because they could no longer afford it. The girls are upset because they can’t watch their favorite cartoons.

This is the way things work in America these days. Despite the world seemingly beginning to fall apart at the seams, there is little real uproar here in the US.

It’s because we’re all at home watching TV. Sometimes it takes something like cartoon deprivation to get us to take a stand.

Once we have to forego more of our guilty pleasures and distractions, we will all be on the streets protesting, despite the fact that it likely won’t force the price of gas any lower. Never mind the real issues; just don’t take away our Comedy Central.

I can see the signs that would be carried by the picketers:

“Beer should be an everyday thing, but gas prices have eaten away at my beer money! Stop the madness!”

“My Explorer runs on oil but my big-screen HD TV doesn’t! I can’t afford either!”

“My children deserve a future filled with electronic gadgets and video games! How can we leave them that legacy?”

We have become disconnected because we are so contentedly preoccupied. We find it easy to ignore what’s going on as long as we have something to distract ourselves with. It will be interesting to see the reaction once gas prices double again and we are forced to choose between paying for what we need and what we just really want.

How good are the good times in the waning days of the Bush II administration? Well, in addition to a numbing war in Iraq, the end of goodwill toward the U.S. around the world, soaring oil prices, a stunted energy policy, out-of-control food prices and taxpayer bailouts of fat-cat Wall Street firms, we now have this:

We are rationing rice.

That’s right. Rice.

From the AP:

The two biggest U.S. warehouse retail chains are limiting how much rice customers can buy because of what Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., called on Wednesday “recent supply and demand trends.”

The move comes as U.S. rice futures hit a record high amid global food inflation, although one rice expert said the warehouse chains may be reacting less to any shortages than to stockpiling by restaurants and small stores.

Sam’s Club followed Seattle-based Costco Wholesale Corp., which put limits in at least some stores on bulk rice purchases.

Thanks again, Dubya.

(Photo by Francesca:Nocella)

So, even our nation’s worst president ever is starting to realize that the economy is facing some “challenges.” Now, this from the Trib about Florida and Tampa Bay’s propensity to slip into recession:

It may be a blue way to open the new year, but some economists say Florida has up to a 60 percent chance of falling into recession this year.

It’s not just Florida as a whole that’s at risk, either. Some regional economies, including the Tampa Bay area, stand a greater risk of recession than others, largely because of their deep ties to the housing industry.

Moody’s Economy.com ranks Tampa as the ninth most likely metropolitan area in the nation to go into recession in 2008.

If the state goes into recession, with or without the nation, Florida would probably see rising unemployment, layoffs, and reduced spending.

OK, by strict economist definitions, maybe Tampa Bay is not already in a recession. But I doubt that anybody living here doubts that we are already there, and headed for worse. Small businesses are not growing and adding jobs; tax reform isn’t working; home and biz insurance is still out of control; and the state has done little to diversify its economy beyond tourism, growth & housing and cheap service-industry labor.