Memnison Journal

This works for either me or Meredith.  There’s some question as to whether Susan has been in Mexico; if she was, it was to take two steps over the border in Tijuana or something.

This is Mere’s states.  California from when we brought her home, Massachusetts from a trip to the Boston Worldcon, and the rest are family visits of one sort or another.  Consider that she has a sister in Alabama and Susan has major family in South Dakota, plus side trips, and you can dig this.

This is me.  Aside of California, all the rest were covered with my family before I was 20, and mostly when I was small.  California got hit at the San Francisco Worldcon in the mid 1990s, and three more times in mid-2000.  Alaska got picked up in 1971.

And this is Meredith’s ‘places she wants to go’ list.

Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘.

Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in  OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response.

Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if you aren’t married in Arkansas.

And monks are beating the crap out of each other in the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary and one of my favorites on economics, writes:

After the market closed today, Bank of America announced a significant deterioration in people’s ability to repay credit-card and other consumer debt.  The central fact is this: consumers in the real economy are coming to the end of their capacities to keep spending. They can’t take on any more debt. And with the costs of energy, food, and health insurance all soaring, they’re doing the only thing they can. They’re pulling in their belts. They’re leaving the malls. They’re not buying a new car or TV or anything else they can do without.

For years, regardless of the business cycle, American consumers were the Energizer Bunnies of the world economy. Their spending kept it going. But now the Energizer Bunnies have turned into scared rabbits, and they’re going back into their holes.  Yes, we need better regulation of Wall Street in order to avoid the sort of bubbles and distrust that have generated a credit crisis. But even more than that, we need to get money back into the pockets of average American consumers — including major investments in infrastructure, affordable health care, and a more progressive tax code.

Agree absolutely.   Basically, we were strongly encouraged to pick up the same mantra of Bushian economics - borrow and spend like there’s no tomorrow.  That was the way to pick up from the recession from the early part of Bush’s term, and from the shock of 9-11.  The entire bubble around the world has been built on the idea that the vast majority of people had a demand for goodies, and that the people that got them would pay for them forever.  The Chinese got rich on using their manpower for building stuff, and highly dependent on outside sources of raw materials and energy.  The Russians got the idea that oil and gas would make them rich.  The energy speculators in oil thought that the boom times would support eternally a spiraling cost for oil, and bid it up (which is why oil has taken such a dive; all along, it’s been speculation driving things).

If the consumers can’t pay their bills, it doesn’t matter how tightly the big lenders made bankruptcy laws - you can’t get blood out of a turnip.  However, you can very swiftly eliminate the possibility that any new money will come in to the system by pauperizing the American worker to the point where they can’t afford to buy anything.   And then it all comes tumbling down.

I forget what the usual percentage is on Christmas season sales, but I do know that it’s huge-and I expect to pick up presents early at sales, and limit myself.  And we’re in better shape than a lot of others…and this season may bankrupt a lot of retailers.

From Nico Pitney in HuffPo:

3) John McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any member of the Senate except for Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. He hasn’t cast a single vote in five months, since April 9. All of a sudden, McCain is demanding that the presidential race shut down so he can return to Washington?

4) A reminder: President Bush was able to debate John Kerry while he was president. For all of his sudden urgency, McCain acknowledged just yesterday that he had not even read the administration’s three-page bailout proposal.

and the South China Morning Post is reporting that Chinese banks have been ordered to stop interbank loans to US banks.  Not sure if that’s for certain, but it’s a cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face move, since a bank failure in the US (or a recession of major proportions, take your pick or both at once) would collapse the symbiosis between China and the US.

If you think *we* were in a grows-forever plan-accordingly spend-like-drunk-sailors cut-off-the-top-for-me bubble, the Chinese government is stable ONLY so long as the prosperity of recent years keeps rolling in at the rates they’d like to become accustomed to.  When that stops, and a lot of Chinese realize that the good times are over, all of the simmering resentments over government corruption, greed and whatnot will boil over in a very very nasty way.  The still-poor and the recently-well-off will be both down in the dumpster.  Add to that a lot of unemployed young men who don’t have prospects for future work or future brides (see also: one child policy).

The Chinese have about 2 Trillion of US foreign Reserve currency in hand.  Every time you buy a Moosehunter Barbie doll for your kid, or a million other things, your cash ends up (in part) over there.  Of course, if all of a sudden, the value of those dollars goes to hell because the Treasury just printed up a lot of extra bills to pay for bank stuff, and the Treasury expect Chinese banks to buy up the T-bills that support that money….and nobody’s buying…

The Chinese are not doing a spread the wealth plan, anyway. From Xinhua:

Admittedly, China now boasts the most profitable lenders in the world after market-oriented reforms transformed State-owned banks into commercial lenders. But domestic financial market and financial institutions remain unable to meet the country’s growing demand for financial services to fuel its economic growth.

For instance, the government has spearheaded a national campaign to revive the rural economy. But by the end of last year, as much as 7 percent of villages and towns lacked any financial outlets offering simple, low-cost financial services to boost local economic growth and raise farmers’ living standards.

One last thought: who would you rather have pick the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, and the Secretary of the Treasury?

More excerpts from the journal, this time from the day we actually adopted Meredith (the day after we got her).  Again, see some pictures of the day on Flickr - the picture below is something the Jiangmen paper later got out of the files of the orphanage when the paper was running that stupid ‘Dick the Wonder Sheep’ story about the twins in the fall of 2006.

Today is/was the eighth anniversary of our adoption of Meredith in Guangzhou, China - and it’s a big day around here.  As you may have guessed, she’s the center of the household, and we all love the stuffing out of this wild, brave, wacky child. Below is some material from the Journal for the day we got her; here’s a link to my Flickr site for a set of pictures from the day we got her and the next day.

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.

I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do know that I’m a Race Traitor for adopting a non-white, right?).  I’ve listed to my daughter ask me about swastikas that she saw marked up on her school grounds, and have to explain about people who hate her for her ethnicity.  I’ve seen it in action for nearly fifty years, in all of its ugliness.  I know better than to apply that badge easily or thoughtlessly.  And that racism is something that is everywhere, in every country and racial group.

However, I do think that McCain is an opportunist without honor who has thugs working for him who are willing to pull every trick in the book and use any tool to get him elected, including racist ones to amplify the stuff Hillary first brought out and tried to use against Obama.   If McCain had any honor, he’d go out of his way to squelch it all.

The people who support Obama the most, by and large, are the young who are civic-minded and are beyond the ideas of racism or absolute adherence to a party. The people who are the most against him tend to be the older ones who can’t get past the idea of voting for a Democrat (no matter how bad the Republican) or a black (no matter how awful a candidate the white guy is) for President.

And there are people who have very specific issues.  If you are totally wrapped around anti-abortion issues, you may well feel that Palin’s basic advocacy of that position trumps anything else.  If you are fixed in the idea that taxes are an evil in all situations, and you make over $600,000 a year, you may find McCain’s low tax strategies far more important of an issue than any other.

Much more below the cut.

You want examples of what happens when government looks the other way and deregulates business?

Remember that whole business last year about pet food being loaded with plastics byproducts that could fake protein in feed tests by the Chinese government?  It’s happened again, in China, over fake baby formula, loaded with the same stuff, which fudged the same tests. The stuff was sold over half of China, and is out of the country - both in Taiwan and here, in Chinese grocery stores.  (As as an adoptive parent who got only three things that weren’t paperwork from the Chinese government - the kid, the clothes on her back and a bag of provincial-government-baby-food-factory formula, you bet this make me pissed.)  Wonder when the overloaded and undersupported FDA will pass this on to the human food chain here?  They already did, but told us not to worry yet.  And this sort of baby formula crap has happened before in China, too, in 2004, but the wild-west of anything goes business there doesn’t stop them.

You remember that MBA president and all of the big Wall Street financial people, along with people like former Senator Phil Gramm, told us we didn’t need all those silly regulations, and that we were all a bunch of whiners about the economy, and that everything was just fine?  Watch now, as the biggest financial houses collapse because these guys decided to play double or nothing craps with the economy on fake credit and endless foreign borrowing with no real collateral.  Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac - with Washington Mutual and General Motors sitting in the spillway, ready to take the slide.

A lot of people made a fast buck or zillion - and your money becomes worthless, your company can’t get credit, your house faces foreclosure while your job teeters on the brink.

At any time in the last five years or so, did the management at any of the major investment banks say, “these mortgage-backed securities are extremely risky, and we’re not going to get too involved with them?”  Naw.  There was too much money to be made, and if we didn’t, well, someone else would look good in their quarterly report.  Primarily, the people making the decisions were looking at Possible Fantasic Profits and made sure they had a wonderful, cushy golden paracchute so they could get out with millions personally, damn the company and the country.

Keep an eye here in the near future on this.  And - frankly, who has illegitimate babies, flag pins and so on is nothing compared to this sort of Crapola - the title of this entry above was Sarah Palin’s idea of how she and McCain would fix the economy, along with more tax cuts.  Jesus Wept, lady!  That’s what got us into the mess in the first place!

The central bank of China has $1 trillion of US debt securities (including mortagage stuff from Freddie Mac and the like) , and the dollar’s fall and the tumble of mortgage securities in the US has led to a serious depreciation in those assets.  Problem is that they don’t have an easy way to fix the hole.

1. Sell them at fire sale prices to get rid of them, and the US stops buying from China and goes broke.
2. Change the valuation of the yuan versus the dollar and the US can’t afford to keep the Chinese production machine going and stops buying suddenly far pricier Chinese goods.
3. Stop buying the US debt, and interest rates in the US will skyrocket and the dollar will collapse.  (Remember, the US government is propped up by Chinese debt, especially after Bush’s deficits and tax cuts for the wealthy and the wasteful way the wars progress (or not).)

By buying United States bonds, the Chinese government has been investing a large chunk of the country’s savings in assets earning just 3 percent annually in dollars. And those low returns turn into real declines of about 10 percent a year after factoring in inflation and the yuan’s appreciation against the dollar.

The yuan has risen 21 percent against the dollar since China stopped pegging its currency to the dollar in July 2005.

The actual declines in value of the central bank’s various investments are a carefully guarded state secret.

The political system in China is predicated on the idea of an endless boom in business, where everyone benefits.  While the boom lasts, the social conditions that could lead to the collapse of the present system are papered over.  If it fails, everything can go to pieces.

….that, oh, maybe, those schools in Sichuan province were made out of crap materials that enriched the local governments with kickbacks from the contractors.  it’s possible….

Chinese elephant forced to undergo heroin withdrawal, takes methadone instead of spiked bananas.

We are trying to trudge through an immense pile of TiVo’d stuff, and still have half the gymanstics and the opening ceeremonies to go through.  A few thoughts:

1. I can’t imagine who the heck programmed this stuff, but lawzy me, I never knew that the USA audience was so up on nearly naked women - er, beach volleyball, volleyball, etc.  I found it irritating.    Mere wanted to know why the programming was so limited in scope and USA-centric.
2. They can cut the preliminary rounds for practically every sport, and I’d be just as happy.
3. No, we didn’t watch much swimming.   We did see the US-China basketball game, but that was it for basketball.
4. Diving was wonderful, and the Chinese divers were superb.
5. Gymnastics was wonderful, and the Chinese team was incredible.
6. Meredith wasn’t sure if it would be a huge faux pas to room for the US and for China.  We said - sure, feel free!  And she did.  She also got to be a huge, perceptive critic on the performances.
7. Mere was also interested in some of the field sports that she’d never seen before, like discus, javelin, hammer and shot put.  Part of this was because of the movie MATILDA.  (Mere has been turning into a stone Roald Dahl freak, which is fine with us.) Me, I was surprised to see that the hammer isn’t a hammer anymore.
8. We felt that the Chinese female gymnasts probably were underage, but that the IOC would be jerks to yank the medals after the fact.  It’s not the kids’ fault.  Blame the Politburo.
9. Mere was particularly rooting for Jiang Yu Yuan, whose name ( 江鈺源) is close to Mere’s (江玉彩) Jiang Yu Cai, but the Yu means something else for Mere….Yu Yuan = Treasure Source, Yu Cai = Colorful Jade.  I tried to explain to Mere that Jiang is a fairly common family name, and that we have no idea what her original birth family name was.  However…

Part of the effort to not-upset-the-foreigners, dog is off Beijing menus during the Olympics; it’s a cold-weather food anyway, as noted in the article.

Some stray items:

• The whole Edwards/Hunter thing just gets weirder and more frayed by the moment.  Rielle Hunter’s old website was purged off of the Internet Archive; I would imagine that required a specific request from Hunter.  And a lot of the old follow-the-money issues are getting snarly; the same deep pockets that are paying off Hunter at present donated exactly enough to Edwards’ PAC at the right time to pay off her final ‘bill’ for services to the PAC.  Dammit, John…
• Paul Krugman points out with a rock that the present world system of commerce, trade and power that we’re used to can collapse pretty easily and quickly.  A very good read.

And if Russia is willing and able to use force to assert control over its self-declared sphere of influence, won’t others do the same? Just think about the global economic disruption that would follow if China — which is about to surpass the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation — were to forcibly assert its claim to Taiwan.

• The Brazilian Navy found the remains of that priest who took off in a whole bunch of balloons attached to a lawn chair - out in the middle of the ocean.  *Burp*

…another thing about cheap oil is the whole notion of producing something on the other side of the world for consumption here…and how that goes to pieces when the price of shipping / oil rises dramatically.

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

Specifically, what’s really getting beat up is the idea of using places like China as a cheap location for labor while the raw materials are shipped first to it from places like the USA, and then the finished products are shipped back to the USA.