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The Brits have voted, and when that voting is combined with their parliamentary system and the strange bedfellows deal the Conservative party cut with the Social Democrats, the U.K. finds itself with a new Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Cameron, who has vowed to get the U.K. back on the path of fiscal responsibility, even if it takes a variety of painful austerity measures, has never, and will in all probability never have to, deal with anything remotely resembling an austerity measure himself.  He was born to the upper crust, educated in the finest and most expensive schools money and position can buy, and is clearly comfortable ruling from his pedestal of privilege.

Do as I say, not as I do, and all that.   Jolly good.  Can’t wait to see what happens when the first round of civil servant layoffs or pay cuts are announced.

Not to be outdone by that side of the pond, yesterday in NY state soon to be ex-governor David Paterson had no problem forcing an unpaid furlough on 100,000 state workers, while simultaneously granting pay raises to some of his top aides and appointees.  It’s not surprising.  The governor’s admitted to an affair (clearly an indulgence, rather than a display of forbearance), been accused of protecting a misogynist aide, and regularly parked himself squarely under various clouds of suspicion, rather than walking the straight, narrow road of self-discipline.

We mocked the chairmen of the automakers when they flew into DC in their private jets asking to drink at the public trough, and yet we continue to elect characters without character.

If in fact one gets what one deserves, then we need to tighten up our own acts as citizens, so that we deserve better.

UPDATE:  a Federal judge put a hold on the furloughs for state workers.  Turns out Paterson’s attempts at austerity are not only hypocritical, but may well be unconstitutional and therefore illegal.  At least the guy’s consistent.

                          

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Funny Or Die has a great video up today that “brings together the Saturday Night Live actors who have played every American president since Gerald Ford” (plus a not-to-miss guest spot by Jim Carrey playing “The Gipper”). In the video, Barack Obama gets a visit from the ex-Presidents to get a few tips about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

By now we’ve learned there is no Invisible Hand Of The Market and there is no such thing as Utopian Socialism. Like the presidents before him, Obama has to balance capitalism and socialism. That’s a pretty tall order. So criticize him if you must – and I guess we must – but remember that the handful of presidents before him couldn’t do it either. If they had, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

                          

editors note: check the Twitter (Tweet) section for details on the new LK TWIST format.

According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal the “number of man hours an organization devotes to winning the Super Bowl” is one million.

The number of man hours this nation spends, every week, watching tone deaf people attempt to sing is in the tens of millions.

Mindless.

And we wonder why our economy is faltering and our educational standing in the world is sinking like a stone.

                          

According to this morning’s NY Times, “Iceland’s Leader Vetoes Bill to Repay 2 Lenders“ $5 billion owed to the British and Dutch governments.

Iceland, a nation of around 320,000 people as of 1/1/09, played fast and loose by borrowing low and lending higher (known as the “carry trade”) until it, like most American mortgage lenders, got hit with the sledgehammer of its borrowers inability to pay Iceland back.

Speaking of sledgehammers, should a private citizen attempt to back out of paying their local bookie or loan shark, a few burly types would be dispatched to coax payment from the reluctant debtor.

In this case, the equivalent of breaking bones might be an embargo of foodstuffs, or credit, or even withholding military assistance should Putin and his thugs decide that they’d like a bit more control of the waterways connecting northwest Russia with Europe and the North Atlantic, waterways that Iceland sits smack dab in the middle of.

Then again, the Western powers probably wouldn’t appreciate that unintended consequence of spanking Iceland.  We’re already stretched thin in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, while desperately trying to prevent Israel and Iran from precipitating WWIII.

So the British and the Dutch, neither of which is in fine economic form themselves, will continue to attempt to squeeze water from a stone, or, in this case, a block of ice.  My guess is that, for appearances sake, their methods will remain civilized, although if they had their druthers, they’d probably opt for a little street justice.

Extrapolating a bit, I wonder how many of those Brooks Brothers Bozos would have taken the irresponsible risks they took if they knew that the result would be an old school back alley beat-down instead of a government bailout?

                          

Jobs.  They ain’t comin’ back.  Summit all you want; they ain’t comin’ back.

Corporate America has learned to squeeze blood from a stone, getting stunningly large productivity increases from Americans desperate to keep the jobs they have.  Whether it’s GE or IBM or AOL, they’re not about to give back their profit margins with new hirings.

Construction jobs aren’t coming back; not with the excess dwelling and office capacity that currently exists.  And the only source of funding for new, future oriented industries like solar panel production is…..CHINA.  So unless the Chinese want to build more than a few isolated solar plants in this country, the displaced auto and construction workers, among others, have to hope for unemployment benefit extensions to keep food on their tables.

And the big O decides to commit money we don’t have, and blood we don’t need to spill, to a war in a country that isn’t a country at all, as far as its own inhabitants are concerned.  Aside from Kabul and the surrounding region, what we call Afghanistan is tribes and warlords spread out on a land mass whose borders are figments of our imagination, not their reality.

If O was as courageous as he is articulate, he’d take the advice of an enlightened and farsighted friend of mine who advocates mining on the moon as well as capturing and beaming solar energy to earth from space, and immediately make that the prime  military directive.  And instead of outsourcing work to Blackwater (now “Xe”) and Halliburton, let’s go to the UAW, get the names and numbers of laid off factory workers, and give them first dibs.

Now there’s a new national defense initiative.

Otherwise, count on 8+% unemployment as the new normal/best case scenario for at least a decade, and expect a bit of organized civil insurrection and/or individuals going postal with increasing frequency.

P.S.  Decreasing jobless claims and fewer monthly job losses aren’t a positive sign.  The only positive sign will be substantial hiring numbers.  The rest is spin meant to placate the populace.

                          

What these 3 franchises have in common, besides their geographic proximity, is that they play in stadiums that sit next to  abandoned stadiums that have been deemed obsolete or, in the Jets case, next to the stadium they’ll occupy next season, as their current home is due to be mothballed following the current campaign.

So in this era of gargantuan government deficits, whether national or local, government largesse has been extended to the fat cats who own professional teams, while government belt tightening causes increasingly crowded classrooms, decreasing social services, and higher property taxes.

It’s not like the pro teams couldn’t live without their new digs; they just felt they needed more luxury boxes and softer seats to satisfy their elite season ticket holders.  And yes, I’m aware that building the new stadiums required a labor force that had two years of steady work.  Ask them now how they feel about the ultimately toxic combination of their current unemployment and their kids receiving a sub-par education that takes the “D” out of American Dream.

It’s a poor reflection on our system and society when we subsidize the class that doesn’t need subsidizing, while imposing harsher burdens on the class that does.

And it’s an indication of our shortsightedness as we slowly destroy the middle class workers/consumers that have kept this country humming.

We”ll keep humming, but it’s no longer a happy tune.

                          

No bumper music today. No time for gussied up production. Some things are too important to wait on and this is one of them.

I’d be shirking my duties if I didn’t get into the ugly and nationally embarrassing unintended consequences of the Obama presidency. Unintended consequences, by the way, is just a fancy name for outcomes that weren’t expected or desired as a result of a particular action. In this case, that particular action, which is producing some putrid side effects that reflect poorly on more Americans than I’m comfortable thinking about, was the election of the first black president of the United States.

This past Sunday, Maureen Dowd, who I don’t particularly enjoy reading (I find her kind of snarky), opened the mainstream media floodgates with her piece on the racism fueling the anti-Obama movement, including the anti-health care reform protests, and the anti-government intervention tea parties, among others. A lot of anti’s.

Jimmy Carter, another character I have my differences with, but who also happens to be an 85 year old white southerner with no fear of speaking his mind, confirmed that from his vantage point, only a fool couldn’t see the racism that runs through the roots of the anti-Obama groundswell.

And then CNN picked up the ball, and they’re running with it big time, featuring a Klansman type who forgot his hood named Mark Williams. Monday they had him on a panel with Gergen and Carville; last night he went one on one with Roland Martin. The unmitigated hatred for Obama flows out of this guy’s pores, and he’s a wily, clever bastard. On TV at least, he stays millimeters and milliseconds away from dropping his euphemisms and going straight to raw hate speech. On his web site he doesn’t bother holding back. Ugly stuff.

And he’s got plenty of followers. Under the guise of representing the working stiff, and that’s his description, “the working stiff who pays the bills”, he’s tapped into a whole bunch of folks who, especially now that their personal economic outlooks aren’t all that bright, are ripe for the picking.

Which raises some difficult but necessary questions.

Who among the Obama supporters, over half of the Americans who came out to vote last November, foresaw what, in retrospect, was the very easy to predict emergence of the racism that still lies just beneath the surface of tens of millions in this country?

Did any of his supporters, of which I was one, whether they were in Obama’s inner circle, people who worked on the campaign, college students, union workers, black or white, take into account the highly combustible combination of a black president and a severe economic crisis?

And, in 20/20 hindsight, would this awareness of the almost inevitable re-surfacing of racial tensions have changed anyone’s vote, either out of fear (because Mark Williams and his crew are pretty damn scary) or out of the sad but quite possibly true understanding that the country wasn’t ready for a black president?

Clearly, racism and sexism are still running neck and neck, judging from a recent quote about Hillary attributed to President Bush by one of his former speechwriters, in which Bush was heard to say something to the effect of “Wait till her fat ass is sitting at this desk”. But there’s a precedent for Hillary; her name was Margaret Thatcher. There’s no such precedent for Barack Obama.

It’s time for all good men and women, black or white, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat, to forcefully declare that the issues before us will be debated and decided based on the merits. It’s time for all good men and women to reject catering to or cowering in the face of Mark Williams and his ilk, who are nothing but white supremacists masquerading as populists.

It’s time for all Americans to dig deep and wrench out the best in themselves, however difficult that may be while dealing with economic hardships that can easily cause them to blame others, instead of displaying the fabled American quality of picking one’s self up by one’s bootstraps and taking responsibility for getting back on the horse.

We either get civil real quickly, or get suited up for some very uncivil times ahead.

Better to face things now, or lie face down in them later.

                          

He talked about the substantial increase in customer traffic he’s seeing on his lots as a result of the Cash For Clunkers program, in which the government takes $4,500 of taxpayer money to help fund the purchase of a new car by someone who trades in an old one that gets lousy mileage. Knowing a handout disguised as a stimulus program when they see one, savvy Americans burned through the billion dollars allocated to the program in 4 days, not the 4 months the government anticipated.

Further justification (as if more was needed) for a total lack of faith in government projections and economic reports.

Our elected officials, quick to spot a winner when they saw one (it’s always past tense with them), are feverishly trying to take another 2 billion smackers out of the taxpayer’s pockets, those being yours and mine, and subsidize additional car purchases by wily fellow citizens. One of the morsels Jackson revealed was that the credit worthiness of the people taking advantage of the Clunkers program was, as a whole, better than the average customer his company’s used to seeing.

Why exactly am I helping to buy new cars for people with good credit? For that matter, why would I want to help buy new cars for people with tainted credit? I make car payments every month, and I certainly wish they were smaller. So why does the program benefit those whose needs conveniently fit into the time frame the government decreed? How about a 10-15% reduction in MY car payments?

Better yet, how about using that money to re-train auto workers to do something in an industry that won’t need constant support for the next couple of decades? The auto industry is like a drunkard at 1AM on a Sunday morning with his left arm draped over one pal’s shoulder and his right arm over another’s, being helped out of the Bailout Bar and Grill yet again and safely tucked into a cab. One that was made in Japan.

Please don’t mistake the above for a lack of willingness to do a good turn for others. I’m quite happy, for example, to see the government using taxpayer dollars to buy enough swine flu virus to immunize us all, regardless of each citizen’s ability to pay.

Now that’s universal health care.