The Power and the Money

A lawsuit-in-waiting

I’ve been travelling.  More on that later.  Before I left, however, I managed to catch the Yankees in a 2-1 victory over Oakland.  Great game.  Low-scoring fast-moving pitchers’ duel.  Oakland’s second-baseman tried to fake a throw to first and wound up looking like a minor-leaguer to the uninformed. 

Didn't hurt that I was, for the first time in my life, watching from a luxury box with an Army colonel and a professional opera singer, among others.  As the opera singer’s brother said:  “It's like having the world’s greatest hi-def television.”  Plus Italian sausage and all the beer you could drink.

After all that luxury, we hadda go get some pizza (and more beer) over on 157th Street.  And what did we see?

The sign below the green Presidente neon logo reads, literally, “Proper-looking young women needed to work.”

The usual figurative reading of “proper-looking,” however, isn’t “proper-looking.”  It’s “white.”  Or at the very least, “white enough for the person doing the hiring.” 

I must be missing a joke.  Right?  This is the 21st century. 

At least there’s a “For Sale” sign on the door. 

Observatorio Argentino, versión del aire

So, as TPTM's Woman in Argentina reported, the Argentine Senate rejected the new soybean export tax by one vote. The farmers' opposition, real and ... er ... symbolic, paid off.  But the English news media is missing the real story.

The real story isn't that Congress nixed the export tax.  The real story is that the President imposed it on March 11th without intending to go to Congress at all.  She only went to the legislature under popular pressure and the threat of a Supreme Court case. 

This presages trouble.

Observatorio Argentino 4

What, no comment on Miami drivers?  Well, let's talk about Argentine politics instead.

On Tuesday, the government will be organizing counter-demonstrations against demonstrations put on by farmers angry over the Senate's looming approval of a hike in the country's soybean export tax.  The lead man organizing the counter-demonstrations?  The fellow in the black shirt in the below video:

That takes the phrase, "politics is a full-contact sport," to a whole 'nother level.  More below the fold.

Miami Dice

Congestion pricing.  The idea makes total sense.  Why allocate road space the way the Soviet Union allocated everything?  It makes total sense to charge for the privilege of taking up space on the road, and it makes even more sense to charge more when more people want to take up that precious space.

Which is why Florida is building the I-95 Express.  I-95 in Miami-Dade and southern Broward is currently five lanes:  four regular, and one HOV lane, which can only be occupied by cars with more than two people in them during peak hours.  The Express plan expands the freeway to six lanes, for "local," just like now, and two "express."  The express lanes are separated from the regular lanes by these little rubber tubes, with entrances and exits from the local lanes several miles apart.  In a few months, the Express lanes will be electronically tolled, using the Sunpass system. 

So this week they open this thing in Miami-Dade.  No charging, yet, it's a "test period," to get drivers used to the new set-up.  And why a "test period"?  Because, well:

Mayhem on I-95 as new lanes open
I-95 toll lanes cause chaos, crashes
New Express lanes on I-95 Causing Chaos For South Florida Drivers
Northbound I-95 Bedlam

Miami drivers, you see, are a little, well, self-centered.  And not very good.

Acribillado en mi colonia

"Acribillado" is a good word.  It carries the connotation of the English "ventilated," or "plugged," only it's not a colloquial term in Spanish.  The formal way to translate it would be "riddled with bullets." 

An unidentified gunman fired six bullets from a 9m m handgun into a prominent Mexican defense attorney, Marcos Castillejos, when he was sitting in his car on the corner of Montes de Oca and Mazatlán in the Condesa neighborhood this morning.  It's the most recent of several assassinations in Mexico City.  Most of the recent killings, like the head of Federal Investigation Agency, Igor Labastida, have been linked to the federal government's recent assault on the northern drug cartels. 

This killing might also be linked to the cartel war somehow:  Luis Cárdenas Palomino, the head of the federal Department of Public Security, is Castillejos's son-in-law.  Then again, it might not be.  Sadly, contract killings haven't been that rare in Mexico for a long time, and there are plenty of other possible motives.  Castillejo defended the accused in the murder of a comedian, Paco Stanley, a few years ago. (Stanley was killed in a taco joint off the Periférico freeway that I used to haunt).  The Stanley killing is shrouded in mystery (he was politically connected) and God only knows what could be crawling out from under that rock. Castillejos was also hired by the head of the association of street peddlers, Alejandra Barrios.  She was charged with murdering the husband of one of her competitors. In addition, the street peddlers are currently in the middle of an epic battle with the city government, which has been successfully squeezing them out of the historic old city.  If I were an investigator in this murder, that's where I'd start.

In other words, I wouldn't make too much of this recent killing, although I suspect that John Robb might anyway.  It's sad, but it doesn't represent a worsening.  Just more of the same. 

I recommend Ganchoblog for more. 

A birthday endorsement

Was the American Revolution a good thing?  After all, Canada didn't turn out so badly.  Without the American Revolution, neither World War would have lasted as long, if they even happened at all.  North American slavery likely would have ended earlier and without the bloodshed — considering the damage of the Civil War and the horrors that followed Reconstruction it hardly could have ended worse.  And then there's the possibility that the retention of the First British Empire might have prevented the pointless expansion of the Second.  Any one of those things marks a whole lot of hurt stemming from from annoyance at a couple of badly-placed taxes, and I haven't even mentioned Napoleon.

But there is a silly case for the defense.  And here, Brad Delong makes the serious one:

I, however, firmly endorse and support the American Revolution, in the sense that it looked like the right thing to do at the time. Remember that the political evolution of Britain toward democracy was not foreordained as of 1775. (Indeed, the pressure exerted by the example of the United States was a powerful democratizing force in Britain throughout the whole of the nineteenth century.) Britain in 1775 was a corrupt monarchical oligarchy — albeit one with much softer rule, a much more effective state, and a much broader and more open system of political competition within the oligarchy than has been standard in human empires. It is quite likely that — absent the American Revolution and the Great Democratic Example across the seas, and absent the long reign of Victoria — the political evolution of nineteenth-century Britain would have stuck where it was at the accession of George III, or even moved backward away from democracy to some degree.

It is one thing to be a Dominion in close alliance with and owing some degree of allegiance to a rapidly-democratizing Britain. It is another thing to be a colony of a superpower ruled by a corrupt coterie of landlords.

Happy birthday, America!  See you at the party tomorrow. 

What's in the new name?

I just changed the name of this blog.  Why?  Well, three reasons.  First, the original name, while cute, didn't really capture what I mostly write about.  Which is, well, power and money, with the occasional digression into other stuff.

Second, well, The Power and the Money is the name of my first book.  Yes, it was a play on Graham Greene.  Never said I was that creative.  Go buy it!  (But help elect Barack Obama first.)

Third, it's punchier.  (Sadly, I seem to have lost my Caribbean readers in the switch from the Muirs' blog.)  I suppose I like punchy titles.

In related news, I switched the font size down one level.  Is it now too small?  Typepad doesn't seem to offer much of a range of choices in that regard, and the old font seemed a bit big.  But I'd be happy to switch it back:  the idea is to be reader-friendly. 

Happy Canada Day!

Happy birthday, nation to the north!

For a very interesting post on some of the political developments that preceeded Confederation, see Randy McDonald. 

At times, I wondered if there was a reason other than political inertia why the British didn't make the obvious concession to Canada, and grant representation in Parliament.  Randy's post raises the possibility that the result of such a move would have been another Ireland.

Or not.  I don't pretend to fully understand the dynamics of Irish independence, either.  Can anyone explain why the British never moved to better integrate their remaining North American holdings with the British Isles?  Was such a thing even considered before the first Imperial Federation proposals in 1884?

Still, Britain's loss was America's gain, in that we have a solid, strong, and very admirable neighbor to the north.  So here's to the objectively fairest, justest, and best-managed polity on the North American continent.  The only thing wrong with it (beside the weather) is that she just plain ain't my own.

Which is why, emotionally, I'll be celebrating the birth of the bestestest polity in North America three days from now.  And one even better for the great example across the northern frontier.  So, from a patriotic American, with all my heart, ¡Viva Canadá, viva!

Blowing hot or blowing cold?

A few weeks ago I was at a conference where I heard a former Bush Administration official publicly wonder whether democracy was a good form of government for a nation of 300 million.  Now that's disillusionment! 

His disillusion stemmed from many things — it must be a sad thing to be a conservative these days — but some of it stemmed from this map:

The fact that good wind power isn't where the people are (or in all that many states) makes federal support highly intermittent.  The federal tax credit for wind comes and goes, gets renewed, expires, gets renewed, expires ... and with its see-sawing so see-saws wind investment.  Similarly, it's practically impossible to get federal support for the necessary investments in long-distance HVDC lines, which is why PG&E has so much trouble coordinating across only the West Coast. 

Peek this chart of the gross increase in electrical power generation, in gigawatts:

Is it good or bad?  Too much coal and gas, but the nation is on track to double its windpower by the end of the year, even with erratic federal policies. 

The reason is state mandates, good old command-and-control systems that force utilities to get a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources by a certain deadline.  (Spiralling fossil fuel prices don't hurt, although coal prices remained pretty flat until 2008.)

And who started the trend?  Well, I don't like the answer ...