Morning thoughts

Three things.

1) I had a dream last night about going to see Sarah Palin speak. It was in a school gym. The crowd, was already staunch Republican: she was preaching to the choir. I remember listening to her spout off all of her standard venom, and listening as the crowd got more and more riled up, and getting more and more pissed off at them. And then she made some line to the effect of, "and then we'll have peace, just like when Nixon was president." And then, unprompted and in complete unison, the crowd chanted "VIETNAM AND CAMBODIA" and then burst into roaring laughter. This is my worst fear about America: that all of the people who are excited about John McCain and Sarah Palin, that 47% of the electorate or whatever it is today, are fully aware of what it is that those two are promising us, they fully understand the truth behind the lies, and are playing along with the joke anyway. I'm terrified by the prospect that all of America understands how we would get screwed by a McCain presidency, and half of them are going to vote for it anyway. My better hopes for the country insist that most McCain voters are good people who just understand the world in a completely different way, but I was still rattled anyway.

2) Perk up though! For all of those of you who feared the worst after McCain and Palin got their convention bump in the polls, you can ease up on your apartment search in Toronto. McCain's little spike is on its way right back down.

3) Harold Meyerson has a fascinating op-ed in the Post this morning giving his final "screw you, you earned this" to Wall Street as we know it. He blames the investment community for creating a whirlwind circle-jerk where big money breeds bigger money without actually contributing anything to the community that allowed it to flourish, allowing the broader national economy to falter enough that when it was time to collect the "projected earnings" (a.k.a. theoretical future money), the actual money wasn't there to back it up.

During the late, lamented Wall Street boom, America's leading investment institutions were plenty bullish on China's economy, on exotic financial devices built atop millions of bad loans, and, above all -- judging by the unprecedented amount of wealth they showered on the Street -- on themselves. The last thing our financial community was bullish on was America -- that is, the America where the vast majority of Americans live and work.

Over the past eight years, the U.S. economy has created just 5 million new jobs, a number that is falling daily. The median income of American households has declined. Airports, bridges and roads are decaying. Rural wind-power facilities cannot light cities because our electrical grid has not been expanded. New Orleans has not been rebuilt. And as productive activity within the United States has ceased to be the prime target of investment, household consumption -- more commonly known as shopping -- has come to comprise more than 70 percent of our economy.

[...]

Finance set the terms of corporate behavior over the past quarter-century, and not in ways that bolstered the economy. By its actions -- elevating shareholder value over the interests of other corporate stakeholders, focusing on short-term investments rather than patient capital, pressuring corporations to offshore jobs and cut wages and benefits -- Wall Street plainly preferred to fund production abroad and consumption at home. The internal investment strategy of 100 years ago was turned on its head. Where Morgan once funneled European capital into American production, for the past decade Morgan's successors have directed Asian capital into devices to enable Americans to take on more debt to buy Asian products.