I’m watching an episode of The Daily Show from earlier this week. Charlize Theron is the guest. She is promoting her movie about the WTO protests in Seattle a few years ago. Disturbing thing #1: they showed a clip from the movie with riot gear wearing cops, tear gas, etc. Stewart jokes that this is what his walk to work looked like every day during the Repubican convention. Then goes on to kind of casually toss out that there were all kinds of protesters and cops in riot gear, but you didn’t see it in the coverage. WTF? Why not. Disturbing thing #2: In discussing the film, Theron says that she didn’t really know anything about the WTO before doing the film, but knows now how it effects every aspect of our lives from what you eat for breakfast in the morning onward. I’ve long thought of Charlize Theron as someone on the smarter end of the so-called Hollywood elite. Hearing that she knew nothing about the WTO until doing the movie was discouraging enough on its own, but I was more upset by the implication of just how few people probably know or understand about about the WTO, GATT, etc. How do you even debate what we’re doing as a nation when most people don’t even understand what it is that we’re doing. Half the people who are somewhat familiar with these things just think they equal “free trade” and are, therefore, good.

I haven’t really seen this highlighted yet, but it’s been a busy week for me where I haven’t had time to read other political blogs. In a lot of right wing analysis of the current financial meltdown, they seem to be trying to shift the blame to “1930s era regulation” or “depression era regulation”. I’ve seen several McCain surrogates, including Sarah Palin use this formulation this week. It’s impressive, at times, how focused the GOP is on its long term missions. One of those is to completely discredit anything from the New Deal era. That gets easier as fewer and fewer people who were alive during that era are around now to give first hand dispute to that shit. The Republican Party is currently laying the groundwork, rhetorically, to blame this crisis on regulation and set the stage for more deregulation as soon as it is politically palatable. They, of course, have it exactly wrong. It has been the repeal of New Deal era regulation that has led to this. It has been an intentional failure to extend the existing New Deal era regulation to the new financial services that have grown up in my lifetime that has led to this crisis.

New Deal era regulation would have prevented this stuff if it had been left in place.

According to the Wall Street Journal, state and federal regulators have stepped in to shut down Silver State Bank, largely because the results of its exposure to risky real estate loans. I’m starting to think I should add a new category for posts about failed banks. Actually, I think I will. Yikes.

This is huge. It’s been rumored for a long time, so the reaction to it will probably be somewhat muted, but it’s a huge sign that our entire financial system is in trouble. This belies an extended period of stagnation, if not recession. The feds have to be careful with how they handle this over the next couple of years.

Can anyone out there defend capitalism in this context?

The FTC has ruled against maintaining net neutrality. ISPs will now be able to charge for priority access. For those of us who run independent blogs, websites, or internet based or enhanced businesses, we can now expect our readers, viewers, and customers to have to wait and endure slow access to our sites while those some readers, viewers, and customers, will have zippy access to corporate customers who are willing to pay money to the big ISPs. This is the likely outcome. A possible outcome is that ISPs may choose to just block any website that won’t pony up the fee. So much for “information wants to be free”.

The FTC made this ruling in spite of pretty massive popular outcry against it. The FTC has advised congress against legislating to the contrary under the current Bush doctrine of requiring a demonstrated and documented “market failure” before putting any regulations into effect.

According to this article, illegal immigrants are a potential leading indicator of economic health in this country. Because the jobs they fill tend to be the most marginal jobs in our economy, hence the most likely not to be filled, illegal immigrants are less likely to shoulder the risk of that trip across the border when times are bad. Times are bad at the bottom of the economic period before they are further up it.

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting little article on the melting polar ice caps. It looks like we’ve drastically underestimated the rate at which the ice is melting. The polar seas may be navigable in summertime before too long. They may be ice free in the summer by 2050. That stuff is the focus of the article. At the end of it, though, is some info that may explain why the Europeans are so much more serious about cutting back CO2 emissions than the US is. April was the 8th straight month of warmer than usual temperatures in Germany, the 13th in France. April 2006-April 2007 was the warmest 12 months in England in the last 350 years. I’ve seen this even better explained in some temperature maps that I’ve seen online in the last year. The U.S. has certainly had some weird and warm weather at times over the last couple of years, but nothing that’s really out of bounds for us and not nationwide. Based on what Europe has seen over the last couple of years, it’s not unreasonable to think they’re at the beginning of a permanent climate change. While the early phases of that are hot, we have no way of knowing yet how that will play out long term. Climate is so complex and depends on the interplay of so many factors, that it’s hard to predict how things will end up. One theory says that global warming could bring the end or the significant decrease of the Gulf Stream system, ultimately resulting in a colder, dryer UK and western Europe. Whatever the end result, significant climate change in Europe would devastate the region’s agriculture and agribusiness.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good article on the California housing market. It could be another year before the market bottoms out here, but any drop in home values here isn’t going to make housing affordable for the average Californian. In some parts of the state that made suburbia famous, the days of single family housing construction are over.

William Rivers Pitt writes in a thoughtful piece on the Mooninite terror “hoax” in Boston (where he lives)that the Bush administration’s cynical manipulation of terror threats for political purposes while fomenting a war that will, inevitably, create more terrorists has left our younger generation in a bind: they know that a terror attack is likely and yet have reflexively grown to view terror warnings as a sucker’s game and one that you can’t fall for or take seriously. It’s also left a lot of our not so younger generation sitting with the idea in the back of our minds that the next terror attack is going to be the end of habeas corpus, posse comitatus, and constitutional rule in this country. That’s what he feared he may be seeing the beginning of when the media spent hours describing, but not showing pictures of “explosive devices” on highway overpasses and hospitals in Boston.

Nativism and anti-immigration sentiment is leading to a resurgence of the KKK, including many parts of the country outside of the South.

Don’t believe the hype that says we’ve hit a soft-landing in the real estate market. D.R. Horton is one of the nation’s largest homebuilders. In the 4th quarter of 2006, their cancellation rate was 40%. There’s currently $300 billion dollars worth of adjustable rate mortgages that are set to see their payments go up this year alone. Many of those payments could double. Housing prices in California, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona could easily fall by another 10% or more over the next couple of years.