Yesterday's news offered a two-fer on the "when's the recession/depression going to end" front: both major forms of consumer debt on personalty are still showing increasing rates of delinquency and default. So if you're a credit card company or an auto loan financer, don't look for the nightmare to end any time soon.

Or if one prefers, chapter whatever of The Village Idiot Strikes Again.

Is he pushing for Limbaugh's job?

A major plank in the Republicans' organized resistance to common sense solutions to the current economic disaster is the claim that raising income taxes on the richest Americans in order to support programs to improve the lot of poorer Americans is such a "redistribution of wealth" that it is Socialism. Or Communism! Or both. And Fascism, to boot!

Nothing gets a concerted anti-regulation propaganda effort going as quickly and widely as the hint of a possibility of a chance that the public is thinking of reining in the rich and the powerful. And so, as the media trumpet new "restrictions" on CEO compensation in one version of the stimulus bill, and the public mood toward financial industry executives and charlatans turns surly, we get: (a) odes to the beauty of greed, (b) whimpers about the lack of compassion for how expensive it can be to "live up to your station," and (b) an orchestrated dog and pony show on how onerous the new "restrictions" are.

Chutzpah. Yiddish word, loosely? Big, brass balls. Insolence, audacity, impertinence. Doing or saying something that makes others stand back and gasp at how we just cannot believe anyone can do or say something of that calibre.

I guess, too, it helps to be lost on another planet....

Thank God for the electronic revolution, cable and satellite tv, and all the other modern inventions that have given the public such an incredible range of choices. Right?

David Leonhardt's column in Tuesday's NY Times posits that the economy stinks right now, but not as bad as it stunk in 1982. To be fair to Leonhardt, the column as a whole is more nuanced than the title, "The Economy Is Bad, but 1982 Was Worse," would have you believe. But Leonhardt still does conclude that "the economy is not yet as bad as it was in the early 1980s" (though he finds it "likely" that we'll reach that low point by the end of 2009, even if the stimulus bill passes).

Looks like Eric Cantor, the Republican Congressman from Virginia, is next in line. You know, like Frist and DeLay and Santorum, and so on: the appointed Republican bulldog who growls, snarls, occasionally wags his tail, and always uses whatever other means necessary to keep the conservative troops in line and the federal government so bogged down in irrelevant and untrue detail that it can't act in furtherance of the public interest. You know, just like the job of cantor is to "Chant[] or recite[] religious texts during worship services or other observances and train[] and lead[] congregants in musical responses." Just think of tax cuts and resistance to public benefits as the religious text and you get the idea.

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Chairman and CEO Kerry Killinger had pledged in 2003 "We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe's-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we've done our job, five years from now you're not going to call us a bank."

Long years ago, Merle Travis penned a song that became a hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford, the clasic Sixteen Tons. In the song, it details life in the pre-union coal mining era:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store.

Well, guess what? We all do.....now.

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