danajohnhill.org

I am no economist, but I have said for a long time that what is needed is more regulation not less.  It is abundantly clear now that the idea of “the invisible hand” is folly, and that laissez faire is a recipe for the very sort of financial catastrophe that is presently unfolding.  The notion that the government should get out of the way, and only inhibits growth now stands naked.  Had there been stricter rules and more stringent requirements for accountability, taxpayers would not now be faced with paying out $700 billion to greedy speculators who should have known better.

What I find disgusting is how the same individuals who have long advocated for “the market” and have claimed that the government is the problem, now seem more than willing to accept a bailout to cover their losses.  I thought the market was self-correcting.  I thought that the invisible hand ensured that everything would work out.

I am not anti-capitalist.  I strongly support free enterprise and the right of people to engage in business for profit.  What bothers me is the rank hypocrisy of those who proudly extol the market, pointing out how those with capital deserve the rewards because they assume the risk.  The present disaster, and the upcoming bailout show these people to be frauds.  They like to feel superior when they’re making money hand over fist, but when their holy system fails they do not want to be on the hook for the losses.  They want to pass the loss on to the taxpayer.  It’s sickening.

Why do I think politicians who tell outright lies and base their campaigns on said lies can get away with it?

Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

You can believe the media is biased because Keith Olberman is obviously liberal.  But if you have read a paper, or watched a national newscast you have seen exactly what Paul Krugman is talking about above.

Perhaps you read this webpage but dislike politics.  If that is the case you may want to take a break and come back in late November.  Meanwhile…

John McCain has been one of relatively few politicians whom I have respected as an individual.  I haven’t generally been on his side of the issues, but sometimes I have, and even when I wasn’t I could respect his simple, unaffected manner and, for lack of better expression, “straight talk”.  I regretted that he got shafted in 2000 in South Carolina.  I couldn’t understand why he would have supported George W. Bush in 2004 without assuming one or the other of the following was true:

1. John McCain really did believe that George W. Bush was good for America (in which case his advertisements now saying that we are “worse off than we were four years ago” suggest he has terrible judgment), or,
2. He knew that if he didn’t actively campaign for Bush he’d never get the chance to gain the Republican nomination in any future election.

Neither of those reflects very well on John McCain’s integrity, in my opinion.  But Senator McCain didn’t really lose my respect until recently.  It wasn’t picking Governor Palin as his running mate. No, I don’t believe her qualified to be vice president, and yes, I do think his choosing her was much more about securing a particular segment of the electorate that he needs in order to win.  But, that’s politics, for better or for worse (worse), and if he wanted to have any chance of winning he needed to make sure he got the cultural conservatives on his side, since he was never their first choice.

No, what lost my respect was when Senator McCain chose to surround himself with disciples of Karl Rove, who have no scruples, and for whom the ends justify the means, no matter how despicable those means are.  These are people who have no qualms about lying and cheating to get what they want.  Now there are those who claim that politicians have always lied and cheated.  This isn’t about taking a kickback on a deal to bring some pork barrel project to a district.  (I don’t begrudge Governor Palin trying to bring home money to her state; I just object to her telling bald-faced lies now, claiming she never did.)  No, what I find offensive is the way John McCain’s campaign is putting out advertisements and press releases that contain demonstrably false information.  They know it isn’t true, but they also know that the media is lazy, and that big claims get headlines, and the inevitable retractions will be buried.  The sheer number and intensity of the lies–and it’s important to call them what they are; they are not mere exaggerations or “distortions”, they are lies, pure and simple–has exceeded what a man of John McCain’s character should be comfortable with.  But there was McCain on a stage a week or so ago saying explicitly that Governor Palin sold her state jet on eBay and made a profit.  That is demonstrably false, but they used it to try and further their claim that they are reformers.  They knew that by the time the press looked into and saw that a) the plane sold through a broker, and b) it sold at a loss for the state, the correction wouldn’t make the national news, and their next lie would be the headline of the day.

The paper today highlighted how some of the more recent lies have played out:

First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.)

Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults).

Those attacks followed weeks in which Mr. McCain repeatedly, and incorrectly, asserted that Mr. Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, even though analysts say he would cut taxes on the middle class more than Mr. McCain would, and misrepresented Mr. Obama’s positions on energy and health care.

A McCain advertisement called “Fact Check” was itself found to be “less than honest” by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan group. The group complained that the McCain campaign had cited its work debunking various Internet rumors about Ms. Palin and implied in the advertisement that the rumors had originated with Mr. Obama.

So those are some pretty outrageous lies.  And what, to me, makes Senator McCain look like scum is that he has a spokesman who says the following (from the same article): “We stand fully by everything that’s in our ads,” [Brian] Rogers said, “and everything that we’ve been saying we provide detailed backup for — everything. And if you and the Obama campaign want to disagree, that’s your call.”

Then he provided no proof, no evidence, even, that any of their claims were true. And he’ll get away with it.  Later I’ll explain how.

On my trip to South Carolina I got to listen to a lot of XM Satellite Radio, as the rented Hyundai Sonata had it installed.  It was initially exciting to scroll through over a hundred channels in good sound quality.  But, for me, the excitement quickly wore off and was replaced by disgust, when I realized what a ripoff XM is.

First and foremost, XM has commercials.  I don’t know if they are on every channel, but their talk channels certainly have commercials just like regular AM talk radio.  Second, XM uses annoying DJs like any FM station, who talk over the beginning and end of songs just like crappy FM radio.  I don’t know if it was just the receiver installed in the Hyundai, but the names of songs and artist appeared only briefly at the beginning of each track, and quickly disappeared to make way for the name of the channel.  You could press an “info” button to find the song name again, but that was annoying to do for each song which you didn’t catch the name of in the first three seconds.  The classical channels (of which there were only three) would give the title of a piece and its composer–”Haydn: Sym No. 42″, for instance–but didn’t display the name of the performers, which makes the whole enterprise useless for me.  There are channels devoted to music of the 1950s and 1960s, but both operate like the crappy oldies channels you know and hate, with an extra annoying DJ and that stupid choir that sings something like “good time, great oldies…”.  Plus, the ’50s channel played “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, which is not a 1950s song at all.  Nor is “Raindrops” by Dee Clark, which they played right after.

This all may seem like small beans, but if I were paying for this service, and found it to be no better than terrestrial radio, I’d be enraged.

So, it occurs to me that I didn’t give a detailed account of the trip to South Carolina since I returned last week, so, here goes.

The Westin hotel at Hilton Head Island is nice enough.  The room was pleasant, with a large, comfortable bed, and a couch near a sliding glass door that opened to a balcony overlooking a courtyard with oak trees and a small pond with a fountain.  To the left was a small circular pool, and slightly obscured by shrubbery was a hot tub.  Beyond still more trees was the main pool, which was constantly in use by the children of guests.  There was a cabana with yellow towels to the right, which guests used both at the pool, and at the beach which was to the left of our room, beyond the dunes.  The beach access was via a boardwalk, and the sand at the end was white and deep, and at the shore a bit grittier, with bits of crushed shells.

We took a long walk the first evening, down the strand to where it curved out of sight to the west.  North of the hotel were private homes, many of which had their own boardwalks over the dunes of sea oats to the beach.  I was surprised by how wooded the beach was, with tall pine trees in several places coming right up to the sand.  I have watched for years as Atlantic hurricanes head invariably toward the Carolina coast.  It would seem, however, that this particular stretch of shore has been spared.  The large beachfront homes had, in many cases, enormous unprotected windows.  I wondered how expensive it would be to ensure these structures.

At a point far to the northeast of the hotel (visible at the bottom left of this satellite image), the shore curves sharply to the north by northwest, and marks the end of the island, and the opening of a channel into the inter-coastal water way.  It was just past that point, at some wooden pilings driven into the sand, that we turned around and headed back to the hotel.

That evening we went to a local shopping center to pick up some supplies to get us through our stay.  I bought Hawaiian Punch, which I love.  That night, and each night thereafter I watched the Olympics on TV, though I was surprised and disappointed by the small low-def television in our room.

The next morning I attempted to begin reading Robinson Crusoe on the deck down by the pool, but the shouting and cavorting of children made it so that I couldn’t concentrate.  The weather in the morning was overcast, and surprisingly cool, so that it felt and looked like Florida in the winter.  Miriam had the afternoon off, so we went exploring the island, stopping first to have lunch at a barbecue place, which was tasty.  Miriam had picked up a map from the concierge desk, and she had an idea to check out an area on the southwest part of the island which supposedly had a lighthouse.  It was terribly disappointing, however, as we found that this was all merely stagecraft.  The “lighthouse” was not a real lighthouse, but just a three or four story round structure built for show above some lame gift shops selling garbage nobody could possibly need.  There were some large yachts in the marina there, and some smaller vessels for hire to wealthy vacationers wanting to fish for sharks.  I say wealthy, because the fees were in the several hundreds of dollars per trip.  Seeing how every structure on the island (except the fake lighthouse) was painted in one of only about three or four drab colors, and how entirely void of culture and imagination this whole place seemed to be, we went back to our hotel bitterly disappointed.  It could not escape my notice that the whole Hilton Head enterprise seemed to rely on a type of caste system, in which every person I saw at leisure was white, and, almost without exception, every servant and laborer was black or Mexican.  Some of the personnel at the front desk of the hotel were white, as was an employee of a bookstore I went to.  But every person doing actual work was a minority, and it depressed me to realize how society there depended upon this social stratification.  That isn’t to say that Oprah or Tiger Woods wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms.  Rather, what was so depressing to me was the observation that, for many scores of children living in Hilton Head, or visiting regularly, this hierarchy might reinforce the notion that it is the privilege of rich people to have endless leisure, while people of color exist to serve.  I have traveled around the country, and to other parts of the world, even, but never had I seen such a degree of what was referred to in Samuel Johnson’s time as social “subordination”.  As someone who lives in a diverse community, I found this to be shocking, and dispiriting.  Vacation is obviously something that requires a certain amount of disposable income, and for many working poor, there is far less income to be alotted to liesure these days.  But, in spite of its total lack of culture, inspiration and imagination, Hilton Head, South Carolina attracts a far less varied spectrum of society than Walt Disney World.

So, finding there to be only one worthwhile attraction (the beach), and finding the next two days of our stay spoiled by rain, I spent all the remainder of my time either in my room reading, or in the lobby watching the Olympics and drinking delicious lemonade.  I am sorry to say that free lemonade was the best thing about Hilton Head, South Carolina.