The Time For Your Job

It's interesting to note that in the economic downturn, in general, Governors will be doing worse off (unpopular budgets) and Attorney Generals will be doing well (bringing justice to white-collar criminals). The Tech Bubble bursting in 2000 created Eliot Spitzer's career, eclipsing the now-derided George Pataki (disclaimer: I arrived in NY after Spitzer was already Governor; I don't know if the economic crisis claimed him or if it was just his own self). Now, it looks like Cuomo will be eclipsing Paterson (disclaimer: I also favor Cuomo over Paterson, but not because of the budget).

Does this trend hold nationally? Does it hold in general? Is there a state-wide cycle that can be pointed to?

I ask this question because not only did NYAG Cuomo take advantage of the AIG bust to put his name into the public sphere, but CTAG Richard Blumenthal is also grabbing a national headlines, saying that AIG's bonuses may have been larger than thought. Cuomo, at least, has a legitimate interest--after all, as Spitzer established, the NYAG has jurisdiction over the big financial companies that call Wall Street home. But does CTAG Blumenthal have jurisdiction over AIG in this case? I know that plenty of AIG officials live in Connecticut (where the mobs are already gathering), but is this case really any of his business?

Or is Connecticut such a quiet, law-abiding state that the Attorney General has time to help out his neighbors?

The Bulwark of Democracy

In my head, I seem to remember the phrase "Bureaucracy is the bulwark of Democracy" appearing in one of the Federalist Papers. I can't find the damn quotation, so now I'm not sure that Hamilton said anything of the sort. But I do remember him expanding on the point that the advantage of a two-house government is that it acts as a brake on the executive branch--because government swept up by passion loses its head and acts ineffectively.

At any rate, despite that setback, my point remains. And thus, I am nervous about the AIG Bonus Clawback bill. We learned the lesson when the PATRIOT Act went through: not enough time to stop and reflect. And how did this AIG bonus thing come to pass? Because we didn't read TARP closely enough. No public reflection, no examination of the consequences, and you have a bad bill. TARP was a badly written act. So was PATRIOT Act.

How is this bill actually going to take effect? I don't know. We haven't had time to really look at the bill. And it's Senate Republicans, of all people, who are going to be upholding that view in the Senate. Hopefully that means it won't pass. Maybe it's the right policy; my gut says it's not. But I won't get the chance to find out until the bill is passed. And that's not the way it should go.

Over the last week, news arrived to me that there would be a new Arts Czar!

Well, not exactly. From the New York Times:

President Barack Obama has established a staff position in the White House to oversee arts and culture in the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs under Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, a White House official confirmed.

(...)

“It’s a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government with mainstream administration policy,” Mr. Ivey said in an interview on Friday. The White House declined to describe the position in detail, since Mr. Dale’s appointment has yet to be formally announced. Mr. Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said he expected that the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services “in relation to White House objectives.” Although there have been staff members assigned to culture under past presidents, they usually served in the first lady’s office, Mr. Ivey said.

Isaac Butler at Parabasis has some personal connection to the story, so he writes:

Dale and I served together on the Arts Policy Committee, but I do not actually know him. In creating this position and putting it in the specific department of the Executive Branch he has, Obama is following the suggestion of Bill Ivey, who headed up the arts component of Obama's transition team. So I think this is all a good thing. I don't really care about the Cabinet Level aspect of the position, frankly (although the symbolism is good!). I'm happy about it.

I'm cautiously optimistic. The White House is giving itself a lot of wiggle room as to whether this will be a policy position or a bureaucratic position. Kareem Dale has a bit of demonstrated interest in the arts, but he's certainly not a widely recognized artistic player. What will he be doing? Time will tell.

Orchestration the Play

The play I wrote and directed last spring is now available for purchase online. Click the button below, or the one on the left!





Look for the premiere of the film version soon!

Nationalization Holiday?

An idea floated across my mind today. I've been reading a lot about how one of the barriers to nationalization may be an investor run on all the banks--shareholders know that they're going to be wiped out, so they will dump stock in their bank, assuming that their bank is next.

But what if the SEC closed trading during the nationalization period? Obama announces on Monday, "Today we're going to begin a process of restructuring the financial industry, and in the interest of stability, there will be a five-day stock market holiday. Only the Federal Government would be empowered to act, they nationalize the ones they want to nationalize and assure the public that any banks un-nationalized by the end of the holiday will remain un-nationalized.

I wonder how that would play out, though. I really am not sure how investors would respond at the end of the week. I personally think they'd wind up with more confidence at the end of the week, because they'd have more of an assurance that their bank is actually solvent. But I don't know.

A Defense Of Snark

In the vein of Alphacat, Andrew Sullivan has posted Roger Ebert:

Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved.

I responded:

Roger Ebert is against snark. You've quoted him saying that snark is "vandalism." Well, he's close. Snark is street art. It's graffiti. It's something anyone can do, with little more than a release of pent-up air, and it transforms whatever you put it on. If you take any boring, functional building, and introduce some snark, it will look different. If you're bad at it--you're just doing it to ruin a bit of property and put your own name, to claim a mark on your target, to prove your own superiority--then it's petty vandalism. It lowers the value of the property and makes the community uglier.

But Ebert is overlooking the wonderful world of good snark. A carefully crafted bit of snark, used in just the right way, can change the world. Think of Banksy's better works; some snark beautifies the community, some carries a strong political message. This is valuable snark, and I hope Mr. Ebert recognizes its role in our society. What would Oscar Wilde have been without his snark? When Winston Churchill heard his opponent saying, "If I were your wife, I'd poison your tea," he had the good sense to snark back, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it." He didn't say, "Well that's an upsetting statement" or some boring, unsnarky rejoinder. And thank God for that! Jon Stewart out there may be snarking, but his Pulitzers attest to the fact that you can snark the day away and still be providing a valuable service.

But there is a trade-off. How does one become witty and snarky, if one doesn't practice? Jon Stewart is the first to admit, he was a terrible stand-up comedian. As a matter of fact, if you go back in the archives and look at Jon Stewart's Daily Show in 2000, there's a lot more of the bad kind of snark--the petty vandalism of cheap jokes. But he learned on the job, and nowadays he can snark with the best of them. He snarked "Crossfire" off the air, and that's a public service to us all.

As a resident of New York City, I sympathize with your desire not to see that petty vandalism. But I put forward to you that some snark artists are quite worth waiting for. To be sure, there's much more bad snark than good snark. But there's much more bad painting than good painting, much more bad television than good television, and many more bad blogs than good blogs.

Vice President of Satire

I elect Alphacat.