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LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION
Posted by Ron Coleman on May 21, 2009
You know how you have a lump in the rug, and you press it down, right? And then the lump’s “gone”?
And then, guess what, exactly where the pressure from your foot ended, what do you see? The lump!
The lump will just move all over the rug from that technique. You can’t get rid of a lump from a bunched up carpet by just squeezing it away. You have to pull up the carpet and put back down right.
Economics? Same exact thing.
Posted in Gelt, Sisyphus, Stragety | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 17, 2009
“I have been to the mountain and I have secured the rights to the promised land!”
Emancipated, yes, but poorly managed IP-wise
The AP reports that the pimps family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. got $800,000 for “the use of his words and image” on the national memorial to his memory on the National Mall — another story I’ve been following since the very beginning of my blogging career.
According to financial documents reviewed by The Associated Press, the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by King’s family. Documents also show a “management” fee of $71,700 was paid to the family estate in 2003.
In a statement to the AP, Intellectual Properties Management said the proceeds it receives go to the King Center in Atlanta, where King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are entombed.
Listen, it’s not a government project or taxpayer money. And evidently the people collecting spare money are happy to see the King “kids” profit from their martyred father’s expensive memory:
Charon Darris, a New York banker and alumnus of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, said he raised about $1,000 for the memorial project with friends and did not have a problem with the fees.
“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable amount,” he said. “Ultimately, the kids lost their father, the wife lost her husband.”
Who are we to say what’s reasonable? I’m sure Darris is not the kind of person who would ever say, “We’re tired of hearing about the Holocaust!” and understands that once something awful happens to you, you’re pretty much good to bank on it — literally — for life.
Really, not an unreasonable amount at all.
Posted in Gelt, Heart and spirit | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 13, 2009
Remember this big-deal post? It got Instalanched and everything, and I was written off by many an otherwise friendly right-winger for it:
Just as we remember it: Socialism, fundamentally, is premised on the non-private ownership of at least some of the means of production. Obviously at best the only argument you can make for Obama-as-socialist, based on the sound bite quoted above, is that he is a “social democrat,” i.e., one who “propose[s] selective nationalization of key national industries in mixed economies combined with tax-funded welfare programs.”
So: What industry did Barack Obama propose to nationalize in his remarks, or in any remarks?
None. He proposed none, and in all probability he never will.
Harry Truman — now there was a socialist. He tried to nationalize the entire steel industry. But what would conservatives give today for a world full of Democrats like Truman?
People, you don’t have to be a socialist to be “dangerous” as a matter of economics, budget, tax policy, or, for that matter, liberty. But if you want healthy economies, balanced budgets, fair taxes — and liberty — you have to know your political economy, and you have to know who is and who isn’t a Red, if only to maintain your own credibility as loyal opposition.
Well, now Instapundit quotes the following from Jonathan Macey, which challenges my premise (not by name) considerably:
To socialize the American economy, it is not necessary to nationalize every business in the United States. All it requires is to put the corporations that control the finances of all of the companies in the economy under government control. And that is what is happening now. . . .
The initial forceful injection of capital into hundreds of financial institutions, however, is another story. It is the first step in an ongoing process to socialize American finance. When this process is complete, every company in the U.S. that needs capital will first have to curry favor with some federal agency or politician. Solid business plans and prospects for growth and profitability will be far less important than diversity plans and political connections.
We’re at the start of an unprecedented foray by the federal government into the governance of private-sector companies. . . .
Is he really describing socialism, though? Or just plain lousy, or maybe even catastrophic, over-regulation of the financial sector?
I don’t see socialism here. Disaster? Tragedy? Whatever. Red October? Not quite. Enlighten me if I’m wrong.
Posted in Gelt, Oppression, Politics and Poker | 6 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 13, 2009
BRUCE BARTLETT WONDERS WHY TEA-PARTIERS ARE PROTESTING, as the United States remains a comparatively low-tax country.
I’m quite a the “tea party” skeptic — but Bruce’s question strikes me as a non-sequitur.
If Europe jumped off the Empire State Building….?
Posted in Euroids, Gelt, Stragety | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 28, 2009
WHILE PEOPLE DISS WALL STREETERS AND INDUSTRIALISTS FOR GREED AND HIGH LIVING, note that the most expensive home in America was built by a TV producer.
Yeah, but it was the bailouts, and the would-be bailouts, that made it officially cool to hate Wall Street, though, Glenn. And I’m not so sure I have a problem with that coolness.
There’s always plenty of envy to go around, but as much as there is to despise about Hollywood, including its institutional pipeline to the Democratic Party, and as much as Hollywood gets what it wants from Congress on things like copyright law, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone “taking lunch” on Capitol Hill asking for cash bailouts of “the industry.”
Posted in Americana, Gelt, Medialites | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 9, 2009
The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman finds something to smile about on Purim — someone who finally demolishes a Jewish stereotype:
“With his spectacular loss of billions of dollars,” he said, “Madoff has accomplished what billions of ADL press releases and full-page ads have somehow been unable to.
“It’s a shande for the goyim, and we couldn’t be prouder.”
I for one feel a lot less pressure now, that’s for sure.
Posted in Gelt, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on March 6, 2009
Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.
Judging by the failures of the great Wall Street investment houses and the worldwide crisis of commercial banks; the collapse of East Asian, German and American exports; the death rattle of the U.S. auto industry; the plunge of stock markets everywhere; the sickening rise in global joblessness; and the growing shakiness of governments in fledgling democracies that opened themselves to the world market — judging by all these, a more social capitalism is on the horizon because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.
Wow, really? Funny, because looking out my window the world looks more or less the same as it did last month. And I’m up on the 44th floor, okay, so I can see quite a bit of it.
This is not merely facetiousness; rather, it is a key point. It’s odd that a “democratic socialist” would miss this point, but maybe, on consideration, it’s not. Let’s flesh it out.
Very, very wealthy people losing almost all their wealth — or, Madoff victims aside, losing more wealth than most of us could ever dream of, but still being immensely richer than the fantasy of that same dream — is not “taking much of the known world with it.” The same goes for once-powerful institutions such as commercial and investment banks. What on earth kind of socialist sees the fall of such “robber barons,” exploiters, real live capitalist pigs, as “taking much of the known world with it”? The bigger they are, the harder they fall, right?
An 8.1% unemployment rate is rotten, but “most of the known world” would seem to be some profound multiple of eight. Is the prospect of a massive reduction in the United Auto Worker’s cashflow, and its ability to finance its political projects, really the end of days?
Foreclosures on unreasonably overbuilt, stupidly overfinanced McMansions? That’s most of what world, exactly?
I’m not underplaying the economic crisis we’re going through now; but it is not quite the hoped-for collapse of capitalism that Marx, like a modern-day goldbug, predicted “any day now.” Obviously if the UAW takes it on the chin because of massive unemployment in Detroit, that is bad all around… in the near term.
On the contrary, this moment in economic history, and the reason it can and is taking place now, is as good a proof of the vitality of the market as there is. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gelt, Medialites | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 25, 2009
I blogged at LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® about what Sam Bayard explains masterfully as the
settlement of Jones Day‘s trademark lawsuit against real estate news site BlockShopper.com. In the lawsuit, Jones Day alleged that BlockShopper infringed and/or diluted its trademark by using the name “Jones Day” to identify two of its associates who purchased homes in Chicago and by using anchor text in hyperlinks from each associate’s name back to their lawyer bios on Jones Day’s own website (here, here).
In my post, in Sam’s post, and in another post I linked to by blogger Ryan Gile, the main question is: What did Jones Day accomplish? By virtue of the bad publicity garnered by this lawsuit, as well as what appears to be a friendly rollover by a local federal judge, these associates’ bio pages at the Jones Day website are getting hit more often than could conceivably ever otherwise happen. The settlement is essentially a face-saver for Jones Day, which must realize that on appeal it would lose the bit of leverage it got in early proceedings due to inexplicable rulings, while having outgunned the financially overwhelmed defendant website that could not afford an appeal anyway. What was gained, we all ask?
Simple: That rare commodity of loyalty.
It is not, as Bayard quotes Public Citizen blogger Paul Levy as saying, “in some ways, Jones Day ‘achieved a great deal.’ It sent a message to other websites that “it is not a firm to be trifled with, and that, when Jones Day ‘”asks” you to do something, you had better do it or you are going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourselves.'”
No. No major law firm needs to prove that by going through what Jones Day did in this case. That’s what they’re selling right out of the box.
What Jones Day did was keep an implied promise to its employees, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gelt, Lex scripta, Stragety | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on February 24, 2009
Reuters says insurer AIG is “bracing for a fourth-quarter loss of roughly $60 billion …. It would be the biggest loss in a quarter in corporate history.”
Well, I think Reuters means “in history,” not in “corporate history,” seeing as how not even AIG has had a quarter quite that bad before and seeing as how no single person (i.e., non-corporate person) has ever managed to drop quite that much in 90 days.
What a lost journalist opportunity, too. How often do you get to report on the the worst thing ever in any category — much less in a category everyone can comprehend, like losing money?
But why quibble when we’re in record territory? The fun thing about being “too big to fail” in the Bush-Obama era is that you have lots of company! In fact that’s what Uncle Sam has these days, too, as it gobbles up lots and lots of equity in tanking businesses — lots of “company,” get it?
You don’t get it?
You will.
Posted in Gelt | Leave a Comment »
