I admit it. I'm stuck on this subject. I find myself barely able to contain my rage every time I think about these greedy bastards taking our money and giving themselves massive bonuses after tanking the entire world's economy. What if we just pick one of these bonus babies at random, drag him out of his home, and let people who've lost their homes stone him in the public square? I know, I know, it's just not a thing I ought to be advocating. It's a violent revenge fantasy, and it's beneath me. But it would only take one, I'm guessing, for the others to voluntarily give back their ill-gotten loot. A guy can dream, can't he?
I learn things every day. Last night's address to the join session of Congress was not, technically, a State of the Union address. The Constitution calls for the president to inform Congress on the state of the union "from time to time." Early presidents did so in writing. Woodrow Wilson began the modern practice of addressing Congress in person in 1913. Because the State of the Union address is traditionally given soon after Congress convenes, newly-elected presidents, who presumably still don't have a firm grasp on the actual state of the country, have avoided calling their first speeches to a joint session of Congress a formal State of the Union address. Whatever President Obama calls the speech, we all know what state the country is in.
True, the stimulus bill gives less back to Colorado than to any other state but one. On the other hand, the Democratic National Convention was held in Denver, and Obama came here to sign the stimulus bill, as well. I guess we should be grateful for what we got. They say we get less because we're in better shape than most of the rest of the country. If this is better than everywhere else, things must be even worse than we thought. I've reserved my spot under one of the new bridges the stimulus package will build.
GM and Chrysler, evidently having burned through the billions already given them, are back in front of Congress, asking for more bailout money. I'm proposing that we create a new measure of automotive efficiency, one that reflects current realities.
I kept wondering why, no matter how much money got put back into the banking system, the credit markets won't unfreeze. Then it hit me. Every time these guys refuse to lend money, the government ponies up more billions. If it were me, I'd keep playing that game until the Treasury was empty, which apparently is exactly what the bankers are doing. There's a reason why they're rich and we aren't.
Never let a good metaphor go to waste. Steroid use is a highly versatile one; it can be used in reference to anything that's large. A-Rod's admission that he used performance enhancing drugs just gave me a reason to plug it into this cartoon.
Let us hope that the partisan bickering over the details of the stimulus package doesn't derail the whole thing. I'm glad to see Obama using the bully pulpit more forcefully. To deride the stimulus package as nothing more than a huge government spending bill is silly; that's what a stimulus bill is. The whole theory is that government is now the agent of last resort--the only one left with enough money to get the economy up and running again. Economists from both sides of the aisle agree on this. The only ones who don't seem to understand it are the ones blocking the progress. This should not surprise us, given that their policies helped create this mess in the first place. Their mantra seems to be, if stupidity and arrogance got us into this mess, then why can't stupidity and arrogance get us out of it?
Picking up the theme from my last cartoon, the outrageous money grab by top managers continues. What astonishes me is the rationale given by some otherwise very smart people for paying such insane sums: that you have to pay this much to keep top talent. If the top talent was dumb enough to give his janitor a million dollar loan without checking to see if the guy could pay, I say fire the talent and hire the janitor. Bet he wouldn't make the same mistake.
President Obama rightly called to task the Lords of Wall Street for their late-year bonuses in the billions of dollars to men and women whose manipulations destroyed not only their own companies, but the entire world's financial system. My first thought was, "how can they possibly explain this one." Then I realized, these guys are so far removed from any semblance of reality they probably don't think they have to. And if they bothered to, it would probably be something like this cartoon.
Well, so much for the era of bipartisanship. It lasted--let's see--eight days. The House Republicans, under the leadership(?) of Minority Leader John Boehner, have decided that obstructionism is preferable to cooperation. The stimulus package has its flaws, to be sure, but the GOP is making its stand not against its contents, but against an agenda that won handily in the last election, and is supported by a vast majority of Americans. Whatever. The Democrats now own the economic future. Having turned their backs on the president and his program (and made the spurious charge that they were not included in the discussion) the Republicans can only be hoping that the economy fails to respond. It's a pathetic political strategy that places its hopes for redemption on the continued suffering of the American people.
Republican opposition in the House to President Obama's stimulus package is stiffening under the direction of House minority leader John Boehner. Yes, the same guy who originally opposed President Bush's bailout. Given how badly that was managed, Boehner may well have been right in opposing it, but the alternative he offered up was so tepid and unrealistic that nobody took him seriously. I have no idea whether Obama's huge spending program will turn the economy around, and I doubt anybody else does, either. We're in uncharted territory. Boehner may again be correct in his dour assessment of the President's proposal. What I do know is, given their performance the last eight years, Republicans have lost all credibility on economic matters. To hear GOP leaders, who offered up vast helpings of budgetary pork (remember the farm and highway bills, to name two notorious examples) complain about unnecessary spending in the stimulus package is laughable. What do they offer now? The same tired litany of tax cuts and cuts to social programs. Given the catastrophic failures of their economic philosophy, I'll go with the new guy and his ideas for now.
They're at it again, attempting to repeal the smoking ban in bars and casinos. The evidence continues to mount that the smoking ban has had a profoundly positive effect on public health. Heart attacks actually decline in cities that ban indoor smoking. This will never stop the diehards, though. I do feel a bit for those few neighborhood bars which are suffering business loss because of the ban, but understand: this bill is being driven by gambling casinos, not by small mom and pop establishments. The casinos have seen a big drop-off in business because of the economic downturn, and want to repeal the smoking ban to get more folks in the door. Sorry, the public health is more important than your profits.
These are desperate times, and Colorado is no exception. The estimated budget shortfall is a whopping $604 million. This is no time to worry about the fine points of political ethics. As Illinois Governor Blagojevich understands, this thing is golden, and we shouldn't give it away. There must be some multi-billionaire out there willing to pony up large for a senate seat. The bidding starts at $604 million.
This cartoon may seem a bit self-serving, given the recent news about this newspaper. I'm most likely to be unemployed fairly soon, no longer doing the job I love. In the week following the announcement that the Rocky is for sale, the Miami Herald was put up for sale, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times announced it was borrowing millions against its new building. As worried as I am about my own fate, I'm more worried about an America with a severely weakened newspaper industry. There's a reason the First Amendment gives special treatment to the press. We're the watchdogs of a free society.
Yes, we make plenty of mistakes, yes our judgment can be impaired by personal bias, yes we can be intrusive and annoying. But there's no ready replacement for what we do. We're where the news comes from. Newspaper reporters generate most of the stories you read, hear on the radio and see on television. Sure, bloggers fill some of the vacuum, but the blogosphere does not operate under the rules of journalism. It propagates many more false stories, lies, libels, flights of fancy, rumors, and deliberate distortions than it does credible news stories. For all our errors, we ink-stained wretches of the legitimate press try to adhere to strict standards of fact-gathering and of vetting the information we gather before we print it. When we make mistakes, we correct ourselves.
Those of you who dismiss the press as simply biased, of blindly pressing an agenda, have not worked in a newspaper newsroom and seen firsthand the care taken every day with every story by disciplined reporters and editors. This is especially true when we are breaking a story about political or financial malfeasance, which may be the most important job we do. When we are acting in the role of watchdog, and we've caught a burglar, we absolutely want to get it right. You need to look no further than today's paper to see what I mean. Laura Frank's dogged investigative work on the continuing failure of the federal government to compensate ailing Rocky Flats workers for illnesses they contracted making nuclear bomb parts with radioactive material is the newspaper at its best. Who else is going to do that job when we're gone? Who's going to stand up for the sick and the dying and force our government to honor its commitments? I shudder to think what this society might become without strong, vital newspapers performing the eternal vigilance that makes a democratic society viable.
Well, it's been quite a run, both for the Rocky and for me. This newspaper is the oldest continuously operated business in Colorado, 150 years next April. It has recorded the entire history of the city of Denver, and it will be very sad for many of us if, as most in this business expect, it ceases to exist. I've been the editorial cartoonist for this newspaper for more than a fifth of its existence, and I can't fathom not coming into the newsroom every day--not being here on election night, not rushing in to cover a major breaking story--not having that special bond we ink-addicted wretches share.
When I joined the paper in 1978, a daily newspaper was a citadel of wealth and power. For most of my career, the survival of the paper was never really in doubt, even in the height of the newspaper war between the Rocky and the Post. That it could collapse in just a few short years was unthinkable, but time and technology march on, and this infernal new medium called the internet has taken away both readers and revenue, and rendered our business model obsolete. Readers have flocked to the online edition, where the product is free, and where advertisers have been reluctant to follow. Craigslist, in particular, has drained newspapers of their lifeblood--classified advertising--and there's no revenue stream out there to replace it. If this cartoon drips with bitter irony, forgive me. It's hard to laugh right now, unless it's gallows humor.
The Big Three is back before Congress, hats (with much smaller head sizes) in hand. This time, they handled the symbolic stuff a tad bit better. Instead of flying in three separate corporate jets, they drove, although they haven't gotten the hang of carpooling yet. And they all agreed to cut their hefty salaries. We don't know about bonuses or stock options. And this time, they have plans to downsize their industries, to make them more efficient, and to redesign their fleets for more fuel economy. That they came up with these plans in only two weeks is a miracle, given their inability to answer basic questions about their strategies for saving their businesses the last time they came begging. Somehow, I can't quite envision the same self-satisfied dinosaurs who presided over the years-long decline of the American auto industry being up to the task of evolving it quickly enough to make a difference now.
George W. Bush. in a wide-ranging interview on ABC, actually used the "sorry" word. It was way short of an apology, of course, but in his own limited way, he expressed remorse for the state of the economy, and for the jobs lost to the economic catastrophe that's taking place on his watch. He's right, of course, that it wasn't all his administration's fault. Some of the regulatory changes that allowed the pirates of Wall Street to abscond with the national wealth happened during earlier administrations, but Bush's will always be remembered for presiding over the worst economy since the Great Depression. His absolute faith in a marketplace unfettered by any rules, abetted by his party's coziness with K Street lobbyists, and his willful refusal to heed the many warnings that preceded the collapse, made a preventable disaster inevitable. Some legacy.
keep hearing the business pundits on tv tell me that we must be close to bottoming out, that the market is undervalued, that stocks can't fall forever. Tell that to my 401(k). I'm waiting to hear one tiny tidbit of good news, but I'm beginning to think it's going to be a very long wait.
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