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Iranian Nukes And The Drumbeat For War 2: Armed & Fabulous

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After two failed wars, a decade, thousands of deaths and a trillion dollars gone, you’d think the American political class would give the war franchise IP a rest. Hollywood studios, which are really just IP arbitragers, might have counseled it.

But things change. And Hollywood could tell any White House 2012 is an eon away from 2003. Today, Hollywood is all about re-purposing and re-selling IP into new packages. No more waiting. Remember Bush CoS Card unartfully quipped -“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” to explain the September 2002 ramp up for war?

2003 Hollywood might have agreed. Studios used to wait before rebooting IP franchises. Then around 2005 they learned that they could reboot franchises within 6-7 years.

Rebooting The 2002-2003 War IP In An Age Of Likes, Pinning And Tweets

War On Iran Over Nukes The Sequel

Social media tossed Hollywood’s now quaint 6-7 year reboot wait into the dustbin. Proof? By 2012 it’s normal to talk about rebooting Transformers for 2014 after Transformers 3 came out in 2011. Soon the reboot planning will begin at the same time as the original is in production. Television commercials blare at us ‘that’s so 40 seconds ago’. Why not selling war?

And so it goes. If the current war with Iran agitation feels familiar, you’ve got some remaining vestigial long term memory. Don’t worry. You’re not part of the IP’s demo.

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Whatever You Do, Don’t Tweet About This: Intelligence Community Wants To Monitor Social Media

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Large standing military and security forces have troubled ruling regimes from the dimmest tribal pasts down to today. Governing ideology doesn’t matter: totalitarian, Marxist-Leninist, Mao-ist or American corporatist democracy/demotic – all rely on and are often threatened by these – in political science terms – ‘power institutions.’

FBI, Surveillance, National Security State

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So Obama, Some Catholic Bishops And Rick Santorum Walk Into A Bar . . .

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What’s most discomforting to you? The Administration starts its 4th year of protracted, partisan trench warfare. Somehow it forgot that Catholic bishops and their friends nearly derailed the entire health care boondoggle over abortion issues. How precisely does one forget that searing experience?

Obama apologists claim re-energizing a new ideological front against them was the goal all along. Or if not the goal, they quickly add, don’t worry. Rick Santorum benefits – genius kung fu.

All of which tells us that Obama and Friends really don’t understand contemporary politics and our polity. Still. At this late date. Their calculations remain small, traditional, rooted in the Old Consensus.

Barack Obama, Catholic Bishops, Birth Control, Right To Life, GOP Primaries

Galvanizing reluctantly dormant social wedge issue politics will not serve to improve participatory political pluralism. Such easily avoided political malpractice energizes the most anti-liberal democratic, anti-Enightenment forces and gives them legitimacy.

Whether it temporarily benefits the electoral fate of a single individual is completely besides the point. Only neophytes look at this in the temporary tweet blip landscape. Giving voice to these forces needlessly will de-stablize and echo in politics beyond today’s 24 news cycle. Amateurs may think this is just a hornets nest within Rightist circles (a) today’s Movement began as ‘just a hornets nest’; (b) MSNBC, San Francisco and the Upper West Side are not the only Democratic weathervanes.

Obama by necessity is not only his own political agent. He — as any president — serves as steward for the fabric and weal of society. Some compromises and concessions are the oxygen for participatory democracy. When that itself is under siege and question, all the more reason to avoid such a Freshman Unforced Error.

Astute observers of American culture and politics know this to be true. This unnecessary political fumble? An augur. And reminder of what ‘victory’ will mean.

Homeowners Thrown Under The Bus – What’s In Your Wallet?

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Team Obama heralds today’s settlement among 5 banks, the feds and 49 states. $25 billion “to help hard working Americans”. Were that it so.

Under terms of the settlement, the five lenders won’t have to pay out the bulk of the $25 billion. Some $17 billion represents credits applied toward targets lenders have to modify some of the loans on their books. Some of those modifications would have happened anyway. Based on a complex formula, bankers will earn credits on a sliding scale depending on the type of modification. The least costly refinancing methods might earn a lender as little as a nickel on a dollar; the costliest would generate a dollar-for-dollar credit.

And so on. Our old friendly acquaintance Liz Warren observes she “hopes [the settlement] is the beginning, not the end” of efforts to hold banks accountable for their destructive duplicities. Fake sincerity is equally grating, whether from Obama’s toothy visage or Mitt’s coiffed animatronics.

The settlement marks another kind of accounting transfer labeled as a ‘payment’. Mostly, money is merely moved from account to another. In that scheme of faux payments, California wins big. “$18 billion” in “payments” out of the “$25 billion paid”.

The real beneficiaries — as we know — are in fact the banks, not American citizens. A few specific Americans will benefit from the settlement’s narrow targeting. But the banks pay out almost nothing.

The State AGs posture saying the real victory is that banks will run the foreclosure mills with less blatant disdain for maintaining mere pretenses. Appearances must be maintained – that’s our victory. Americans who were evicted by bank fraud within a specific window – Jan 1, 2008-Dec. 2011 – will receive. . . $1,500. But hey, banking executives obtain some protection for liability. Turn that frown upside down!

What Barry announced is actually what Mitt Romney has been promising – expedite foreclosures, clear them out, fix ’em up and sell/rent. Realtors are on board with that. The liquid class are too, expanding holdings, buying at the bottom. Banks can now begin clearing overhang, improve their balance sheets. All needed, we are told, to improve the economy and get lending going again.

Except, of course, banks have essentially free money (ours, in almost zero interest accounts) and from the fed. And lend it out at obscene multiples – forget about gouging us using our money with debit card fees. Moreover, the banks’ current balance sheets are almost wholly separate from corporate America’s refusal to invest or spend over $2 trillion in idle cash. So let’s stop lying to ourselves.

Americans are trapped in upside down mortgages to the tune of $750 billion. This settlement will not apply to more than 5% of that market malfunction. And contrary to what politicians say, the very (slight) incentives in the Settlement further encourage banks not to help those remaining trapped underwater, even (especially) if completely current.

Those Americans and others are left behind, drowned out by photo ops and press conferences. Their distress and its resolution will have far greater impact on (a) returning economic growth; (b) a vibrant (as opposed to moribund functional) real estate market; and (c) ultimately the banks’ own well being. How inconvenient of them.

No one here likely would argue that a functioning real estate market responding to true market signals isn’t essential for the economy. Healthy (but not predatory) banking still eludes us, too.

Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is just what went down – millions of Americans thrown under the bus for optics and the possibility — maybe — of helping bank balance sheets.