Bob Pisani of CNBC, who reports from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, said of the plunging market 14 July: "It all began well, but in the end was disappointing because they (equity traders and futures traders)sold into the rally."
A little translation: The news prior to market opening had been that the government (that is you and I and our tax dollars) would infuse capital into the vaults of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (The giant U.S. Government-chartered corporations that purchase mortgages from lenders and re offer them to investors as mortgage-backed securities. Together, they hold 50% of the mortgage debt in the country.) That should have inspired buying which would have bolstered the two Fannies. It did, but only briefly.
More Pisani from his blog later: "What happened? Futures were up pre-open, we started strong...and then faded away. It is not a good sign that financials--the very group that was supposed to be helped by the Fannie/Freddie news--are flat to down."
Loyal to the economy, these market traders. "Selling into the rally tells us they expected the news of an up market in the beginning, then took their profits." Is this any way to run an economy? Do these people really care about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who need the help of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? "Selling into a rally" is just greed. It has nothing to do with empathy or even a hint of patriotism shown toward less fortunate fellow Americans. It's just selfishly taking advantage. A lot of unethical acts are legal. Not all "selling into rallies" is a bad thing. This one was. If you know someone who profited from selling into today's rally, point the finger.
The rhetoric surrounding the death of Tim Russert did not take me off guard. Though saddened and admittedly prayerful for the loss of his humanity on our fair planet, I questioned the repeated encomiums (particularly those issuing from other NBC colleagues of Mr. Russert's from CNBC (the financial incarnation) and MSNBC (the political version) marked by the following lofty phrases:
He (Russert)led the way; (He) always encouraged us to dig deeper, (You))trusted this man from Buffalo; the power and authority coming from Tim Russert; he set the gold standard of going after (the truth); Meet the Press (Russert's famed program) was a record for America...
On listening to these expressions, one experienced the feeling Mr. Russert was being apotheosized, that these folks weren't broadcasting to us "out there" but talking among themselves while perpetuating certain myths that they obviously believed about themselves and the subculture in which they operate, which is the political world of Washington, D.C. In their almost private, though televised, interlocutions, they were making Russert into a God.
Yet, what can we believe about Russert? Truly, when the mourning, fellow journalists grieved "the loss of a wonderful colleague, of a great son and himself a great father," one could embrace their words on a humanistic level, yet become cautious when dovetailed with the professional legacy. After all, Tim Russert and his colleagues have occupied only a niche in American journalism, one may say an insular, circular, and frankly neutered niche of political journalism. This fact rendered the praise half-true--that which spoke of Russert as a decent human being. The rest, extending to the legacy left to journalism, somewhat improbable, almost imaginary. To his credit, and as Tim Rutten said in the Los Angeles Times, "(Russert) understood the foundational value of initial questions and how to follow up effectively on his guest's responses," a practice Charlie Rose could surely cultivate. Furthermore, Russert worked diligently at his facts and tested his guests on these facts. "He disagreed civilly."
Agreed, we all have appreciated these qualities in Russert, so different from the staged animus and confrontational approach of so many political shows these days. What proved troublesome, alluded to above, was the "circular" milieu Russert operated in while being "Russert" that "fueled a descent into "character" status, a cloying willingness to trade on sentimentalized Catholic boyhood and working-class roots" (Rutten). Thus, we knew "our boy" was in there with the "big boys" digging out the truth, exposing political misdeeds. Yes, in his way he was "in there," but more along political lines than journalistic, and this tarnishes his legacy.
Thus, the critical problem with Tim Russert's credentials comes from the fact that his professional career rose from the seed-bed of politicsto the interviewer's podium. Despite his own emphasis on spending time with family, and we believe this, Russert still seemed charmed by the powerful elites operating in the unseemly, broken world of Washington, D.C. where "leadership" and "ethics" is just empty rhetoric, and "ethical leadership" an oxymoron. Though Russert claimed he was "not a very social animal.... I don't go to many cocktail parties" (as told to TV Week), he did attend enough parties to get himself into serious historical trouble. He had become a celebrity in his own right, "descending into character status" as Rutten says.
That Tim Russert was an honest man in his family life and among his colleagues seems reliable; that his personal ethics stemmed from his belief in a higher power seems most credible; but, that he might have been self-deceived to think he could operate as a purely objective journalist getting the story out for all us "common" folk "out there," also appears likely. Russert probably spent too much social time with Washington's power brokers. That is, he wasn't strictly operating as a journalist, even while believing he was. If it is true that Russert had become an "insider" journalist, as many do, then he violated the warning of a truly eminent political journalist, I.M Stone, who discouraged anything but a strictly subject-object relationship with the powerful. Subject-Subject would have been unthinkable to Stone. Stone admitted attending but two social gatherings during his entire illustrious career. It was Stone who also said: “Rich people march on Washington every day.” We may complete the implied, if paradoxical syllogism:
"If rich people march on Washington (in the form of well-paid lobbyists), and if "Washington" is comprised of those who are influenced by the lobbyists who in turn represent the rich and well-connected, then Washington must be run by people really effectively representing those rich and well-connected people."
It was said by Lawrence O'Donnell that Russert read the New York Times and the writings of the Washington Press Corps each morning. How should that impress those millions of us who live in St. Louis, Oxford, Mississippi, and Los Angeles? "Meet the Press is a record for America," said O'Donnell. We may ask: for America or for the goings-on in the Beltway, which is more similar to the Paris of Louis XVI than the Washington of John Adams, FDR, or even JFK.
Nevertheless, the circular, dizzying world Tim Russert worked in put Dick Cheney in Russert's studio one Sunday morning blurting out a headline from that morning's New York Times, a headline based on information fed to the New York Times almost certainly by Cheney's White House staff (see Lewis "Scooter" Libby" further below). This interview became one of the two dramatic terminuses of Tim Russert's political destiny, the other being his personal run in with Libby himself "who claimed Russert leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to him. Russert went to the grand jury to deny it and Libby went to jail," an exposed liar. (Nancy Henry). Important to add that Russert, when he interviewed Dick Cheney, said he had not understood that the White House had leaked the same story to the New York Times that Cheney the same morning "delivered" on Meet the Press, "a record for America," as Lawrence O'Donnell states. (see video below).
In a word, the most honest and succinct praise and revelation about the late Tim Russert might have been: "Tim Russert was a working class Catholic guy from Buffalo" who went on to become a celebrity himself, a Washington "insider" journalist. Again, that he personally operated by a strict code of ethics, no doubt, but that his professional ethics remained as flawless, leaves doubt. In any case, let us be clear, Tim Russert plainly compares not to the plutocratic dissemblers, war mongers, and war profiteers that we know manifest as Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney. While we may love Russert for trying, and understand the inflated praise coming from authentic friends and colleagues who themselves operate in his insular journalistic world, we may conclude that the two Vulcans, Libby and Cheney, preyed upon an honest naïf, used him. Chris Matthews' own description of Russert: "If he was anything, he was you and me, he was America." This sounds right to me. Cheney and his gang fooled America, and he fooled the journalist Russert, our said, avatar operating in Washington.
More on Libby, who couldn't have proven healthful to Russert's heart:
"What few have realized at this historic moment is that for the past four-and-a-half years, Libby has been "scooting" from scandal to scandal. Libby has been at center stage for the other major national security scandals of the Bush administration, including the Iraq intelligence debacle, the secret meetings about Halliburton contracts, and doubtless others we have not heard of yet.
It was Libby - along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House - who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11. (emphasis mine).
For a now historic look at Tim Russert's destined drama with Dick Cheney see the video from Bill Moyer's Journal, thePBS television program in which he questions Russert on Russert's famous interview with the vice-president. Or should we say, the deputy president of vice:
The headline in the Los Angeles Times read:"Berkeley likely to reverse declaration on Marines"
One would "likely" believe that the citizens of the small city across the bay from San Francisco would think better than to engage in a conflict with the United States Marine Corps of Semper Fi fame ("always faithful"). There are a lot of tropes (rhetorical devices) in this article. Let's identify them:
To begin, the headline itself probably contains the rhetorical device, Zeugma, intended or not. Zeugmameans "yoke" in Greek. Zeugma is a figure of speech describing the joining or "yoking" of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun. Zeugma may employ ellipsis, the omission of a word or words in order to avoid redundancy, not the case here. Regarding the headline, "Berkeley likely to reverse declaration on Marines," the omitted words (in blue) as gauged upon the context of the article:
The BerkeleyCity Councillikely to reverse its declaration on marine corps recruitingat this time."
These are scarcely redundant words. They are necessary words if one is to avoid not only rhetoric but also a misrepresentation of the event in Berkeley. The verb "declare" (taken from the noun, "declaration," would be "yoked" with the omitted word "corps recruiting." A relevant omission for one engaged in a rhetorical acts, whether he intended to engage, or not.
These words were not omitted to "avoid redundancy" but to, by rhetorical device, suggest that the Berkeley City Council was generically "out to get" the "marines"and always has been because it is the "devil." (see later reference to devil).
It turns out the Berkeley City Council has gone on record as not being opposed to the institution of the marine corps, but does not wish in the context of this particular point in history to allow the marine corps to recruit young people in its city limits, young people sent to fight and possibly die in a war most members of congress and many high-ranking military brass now admit was ill-considered.
The writer of the piece, John Glionna, wrote such phrases as: "...the liberal city's antiwar stance." (rhetorical device:innuendo: indirect suggestion (usually derogatory) Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Here, Glionna suggests that only liberals may be opposed to the war). He did not need to modify the city of Berkeley with the term "liberal." In the piece itself, Glionna makes it clear a good many "conservatives" appeared in counter demonstrations. Were there any conservatives who agreed with the city council's decision? We don't know. Left out of the reporting.
It would appear that conservatives are mostly "for the war" and for maintaining recruiting efforts within the Berkeley city limits: reactionary members of both federal and state legislatures in Washington and Sacramento (California's Capitol City) "threatened to withhold million of dollars in federal and state funds" previously dedicated to the city. As it turned out, "antiwar protestors outnumbered pro-military protestors 2 to 1." More innuendo: suggesting that to be opposed to a given military adventure is to be opposed to the military and the strategic defense of the nation. Noticeably, many generals have come out and opposed the war, a fact Mr. Glionna omitted from his piece. (refer to above link).
Glionna concludes his reporting by quoting a "pro war" "pro recruiting" protester offering his view of the Berkeley City Council and the city itself: "Do you think the devil will ever be converted? Not on your life." Hyberbole (overstatement, overkill), a rhetocial device which Glionna chose to use, although quoted by another, and which punctuates the article by concluding with it, sort of like a crescendo in a musical composition. Zeugma is also used. The "yoked" word which is omitted is clearly the word "Berkeley," the "devil" Berkeley.
Final note, a rhetorical question: Is this a clear example of the bias of the "liberal" media?
Believing it puts people off to catalog the achievements of prodigies like Robert Gupta, the twenty year old violinist who recently joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, I thought it relevant to emphasize that like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, (post 1/30/08), Gupta is a philosophical person. Yes, Gupta took a biology degree from Marist College in New York with an interest in neurobiology at age seventeen, and a Master's Degree in music from Yale University at age nineteen, but like Jabbar, who couldn't help being a great athlete in addition to standing seven feet two inches tall, Gupta couldn't help being born with musical genius. Note, geniuses must work hard to fulfill their potential; perhaps it's a philosophical aspect that separates a successful genius from a failed one. What other quality do the two share besides their natural abilities provided at birth? Each is a reader, each is a philosophical person. Jabbar took a degree in history from UCLA and never stopped reading. He has also written two well-received books with historical themes. Gupta, who turned off cartoons as a youth preferring to watch New York Philharmonic concerts instead, said of himself to Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez,
Music is "exhilaration, joy, complete release." Interestingly, Gupta also believes that immersing himself in science, history, and philosophy makes him a better violinist. "To be an artist, you have to know something outside your instrument," he said. "You have to be a human." (emphasis mine)
In an age of specialization, these philosophical words seem well worth considering, not solely for the individual, but for the culture all individuals together create.
The meaning of "Prime Time" according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
1: the time period when the television or radio audience is the largest; also: television shows shown in prime time, 1958.
2: the choicest or busiest time(emphasis editor)
The rankings for national prime-time viewing for American network television the week of December 31, 2007 through January 6, 2008 (Nielson) were as follows:
Number 1: National Football League Playoff Game, "Jacksonville vs. Pittsburgh"
25.74 million viewers
Number 26:Democratic Debate
9.36 million viewers
Breathtaking! The United States currently spends $9 billion a month to fund its military exercise in Iraq; 36 million Americans live in poverty; nearly 800,000 black men occupy American prisons--almost five times the number of twenty years ago, and the dollar weakens each month while being questioned as a reserve currency. Nearly 3:1 Americans chose to watch a game rather than a political debate dealing with the above named issues, impactful issues affecting their lives. Those in the world without voting rights must look on in wonder.
Once again, a contributing explanation for American political apathy: A recent report released by the National Endowment for the Arts finds that "an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year." Further bad news: 72% of high school graduates were "deemed by their employers as 'deficient' in writing."
The report emphasizes that "literary readers" are more likely to exercise, visit art museums, keep up with current events, vote in presidential elections and perform volunteer work, demonstrating that reading "creates people who are more active....(and that) People who don't read, who spend most of their time watching television, playing video games, or visiting unproductive (editor's word) internet sites seem to be significantly more passive. Finally, the report projects that at a time not so far off, "The majority of young Americans will not realize their individual, economic or social potential."
Bread and Circuses? Certainly, we've identified the circus. We'd have to visit the consumer economy to help explain the bread part.
From the desk of Guy Geldworth:
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