Coming here has reminded me (again) of what a huge, diverse country this is. First observation: There are almost no public signs here that there’s a national election afoot, whereas back home in Virginia there are Obama or McCain yard signs nearly everywhere you look and the airwaves are saturated with the two candidates’ advertising. That’s because Virginia is seen as “in play”, whereas California is seen as so solidly in the Obama camp that it’s not worth much of anyone’s time to do much organizing for that race here.
I have seen a couple of Obama t.v. ads here.
Another difference: “Back east,” which is how a lot of Californians refer to the east of the country even if they’re not personally from there, we celebrate this annual holiday called Columbus Day. I think it was established as a means of secular afirmation/self-affirmation for Italian-Americans… Anyway, there’s a big Italian-American fraternal organization called Knights of Columbus that I think has worked hard to try to win maximum observance of Columbus Day. Here, as far as I can tell, few institutions observe it. Indeed, the Columbus “brand”: is viewed by many Californians as racist and possibly also genocidal. My son, who recently moved to Berkeley (N. California) said that there the day– which in the east was observed on Monday– is instead observed as “Native Peoples’ Day.”
Yesterday I drove from LA around 75 miles east to a small city called Riverside. For some reason these often scary, traffic-clogged highways are called “freeways.” So this is the “freedom” GWB seeks to impose on everyone else around the world? Yikes! (Not having a decent mass transit option strikes me as distinctly restrictive rather than liberating.)
At lunch at Riverside Community College, my hosts talked some about the terrible effects the mortgage/housing collapse has been having on the local economy and on the quality of life of some local people. One person described her mother now living in a house “surrounded by heaps of junk” which are all that’s left of a new multi-house development that went bust and couldn’t be finished.
In that context, I found this post yesterday from Calculated Risk pretty poignant. It’s the juxtaposition of the two items from above the fold yesterday’s LA Times… The photo there, which is of the wildfires now threatening some places in the northeast of Los Angeles’ massively sprawled out conurbation, sits right under a headline announcing, in effect, the “end of casino capitalism as we know it”, i.e. Paulson’s decision to injact $250 billion of taxpayer money into nine big national banks.
Will it indeed be the end of casino capitalism as we know it, though? Who knows? That depends a lot on how the re-regulation gets enacted, as well as how Paulson and his successor use the extraordinary powers the Treasury department has been given…
Anyway, I gotta run to prepare for my two talks today.
5 thoughts on “Notes from Southern California”
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Why should Californians care about a country and culture that is located thousands of miles away? What does it have to do with us? All we are is a source of money that the Americans can use to bailout the losers in New York and to fund their never-ending wars. We don’t share their values or culture. We get relatively little of their corporate welfare (we pay out a lot more than we take in). The results of their elections don’t really mean all that much to us. Very few of the presidential candidates even showed up out here, and when they do it’s just to fly in and out for a fund-raiser. Our needs are irrelevant to them, just as their needs are irrelevant to us. Personally, I think we should go our own way, as should most of the western states.
Do your homework – K of C is a Catholic charity founded by an Irish priest in the late 1800’s. Nothing to do with Italian pride. The name was chosen because at the time they were approaching the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ New World discovery (please don’t remind me that Native Americans had already discovered the new world).
But I dunno, maybe they are spearheading efforts to revive Columbus day since he was such a good Catholic, tirelessly converting multitudes of heathen savages 😉
Helena
Economic Collapse in Ukraine is probably the nastiest hangover from the financial crisis for the world.
The Russians have the cash. They will suggest that the independence idea wasn’t so wondeful at all. Sbigniew Brzezinski says in the Grand Chessboard that Ukraine is the key and Kazakhstan is the prize. Elections in Ukraine soon.
And Brown and Sarkozy want to do a summit to rework the world financial system now. They can’t wait till after the US election. Will Mssrs Bush and Paulson manage to sabotage the lifeboat?
Bags of shooting in prospect. Oh Cringe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/17/globaleconomy-marketturmoil
The western financial crisis is turning global as capital-flows throughout the developing world have been transformed by the credit crunch into destructive riptides for scores of economies.
Many boom nations of eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America are among those abruptly stalling, leaving governments wrongfooted by an investment exodus. Economists have been drawing up a critical list of vulnerable countries – identifying those struggling with giant current account deficits, undercapitalised banks, overheated stockmarkets and exposures to short-term overseas borrowing.
“The three Baltic states along with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria and Romania – and of course Iceland – are at the top of the list,” said Nick Chamie, of RBC Capital Markets. He singled out Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as least able to mimic the recent western bank bail-outs that have helped more mature economies reduce some of the most damaging effects of the crunch.
Officials from the International Monetary Fund rushed to Kiev earlier this week. A succession of Ukrainian governments have failed to tame a foreign credit-fueled consumer boom and soaring inflation. An emergency IMF loan of up to $14bn (£8.1bn) is being lined up as the local currency, the hryvnia, plummets.
Shaky states
The creditworthiness of at least 10 countries around the world has more than halved in the last six months as the global credit crisis deepened, according to the credit data firm Markit. The cost of insuring against default sovereign debt issued by Ukraine with a face value of $10m, has jumped fivefold since April to $1.7m a year. This indicates the markets believe there is a strong chance the government – in emergency talks with the IMF since Wednesday – could go bust, with creditors recouping little of their loans to the country. The likelihood of heavy losses is even greater for those holding Icelandic sovereign debt. The cost of insuring $10m of Icelandic debt is $1m a year, more than three times what it was six months ago. Other countries with sharp deteriorations in their creditworthiness include Kazakhstan, Argentina, South Korea and Serbia. Meanwhile, despite the rash of bank bailouts in the UK, the cost of insuring $10m of government debt for this country remains relatively low, rising from $140,000 to $410,000 since April. This makes the cost of protecting UK sovereign debt against default almost exactly the same as the cost for buying similar protection on debt issued by McDonald’s.
BBC news reports that McCain has violated the 11th commandment.
They report that Joe the Plumber has been found out and does not stand up to scrutiny.
Would you like poatatoes with the pie Shirin?
Boiled, Roasted,or Sauteed?
Oh Bother. I have done a Dan Quayle.
Spell checker on the next generation blog please Helena.