Will candidates’ financial plans work? - CNN.com

(CNN) — In the wake of the country’s financial meltdown, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain have been telling voters they’ll fix the economy while their opponent would only make it worse.

As the economy dominated voters’ concerns, McCain and Obama stepped up the political blame game and got more specific about how they would deal with the country’s financial problems.

The candidates’ focus on the economy comes during a week of roller coaster activity in the financial markets:

There was the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, a Bank of America buyout of Merrill Lynch and a government bailout of insurer AIG. Then, President Bush on Saturday asked Congress for the authority to spend up to $700 billion to purchase troubled mortgage assets and get things under control.

To summarize:

McCain wants to fire the current SEC chief (who is leaving at the end of the Bush Administration anyway); set-up a Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust to protect companies against bankruptcy; and set-up a commission to streamline government agencies. What’s missing? Funding.

Obama wants to pass a Homeowner and Financial Support Act to “provide funds to prevent catastrophic failures in the financial industry and help keep people in their homes”; a $50-billion emergency economic stimulus package to create a million jobs rebuilding infrastructure and schools, and assist local governments so they don’t have to cut services; and ease bankruptcy laws for individuals. Again, what’s missing? Funding.

For the most part, I obviously prefer Obama’s plan, since provides for jobs and education. I’m not sure I agree with easing the bankruptcy laws … the people who got mega-mortgages and now can’t afford to pay them have to pay some price for their stupidity. Somehow, allowing them to keep their McMansions doesn’t seem quite like the right way to do it.

When I was buying my current home, I bought a tiny little condo, because I wanted to make sure that I could afford to pay my mortgage no matter what. I wanted a 30-year fixed; and that’s what I got. So why should someone who makes less money than I do, but who bought a $400,000 home on an option-ARM get to keep their house?

Maybe that sounds cruel, but somewhere along the line, you’ve got to inject a little reality into the discussion.

Now, this particular story is not about the stock market, but it’s yet another example of how irrational fears and rumor-mongering can feed a situation, making it worse, and potentially forcing a situation where rumor becomes reality.

Nashville pumps dry after panic about rumor of no gas - CNN.com

(CNN) — Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy: An estimated three-fourths of gas stations in the Nashville, Tennessee, area ran dry Friday, victim of an apparent rumor that the city was running out of gas.

Officials said panic regarding a rumor of a lack of gas caused customers to to rush to the pumps.

“Everybody has just gone nuts,” said Mike Williams, executive director of the Tennessee Petroleum Council.

He said he has no idea about the origin of a rumor that there was going to be no gas in Nashville. One reporter called him, saying she had heard that Nashville would be without gas within the hour, he said.

Hearing the rumor, drivers rushed to fill their cars and trucks.

CNN called 13 Nashville gas stations at random. Only two reported having gas, and one said it was almost out. The stations said they were being told they would not get more until Monday or Tuesday.

Katie Givens Kime, visiting from Atlanta, Georgia, was trying to fill up her tank for the trip home when she ran into trouble — when she was already low on gas.

“We panicked and looked online,” she said. “And holy cow, there is no gas in the city. … It has definitely gripped the city, for sure.”

One store clerk told her there was no way she could get gas to go back home, she said.

Williams said some drivers were following gas trucks to see where they were headed, and lines at some stations were a mile long. Fuel was continuing to enter the city, however, as pipelines were working and barges were coming in.

He likened it to Southerners rushing out to stock up on bread and milk when they hear it might snow. As stations began running low, the situation snowballed, he said.

One station reported selling as much gas Friday as it usually does in a weekend, Williams said.

The phenomenon seemed to be isolated to the Nashville area, he said.

Givens Kime said she found a station online that still had gas and waited more than an hour to pump it.

“People were freaked out,” she said. A “renegade bunch” of men helped direct traffic to and from the pumps, even taking drivers’ cash inside for them. She described people filling cans and other containers as well as cars.

She said that the station was not engaging in price gouging but that “emotions were running very high” among drivers.

Sounds kind of like a run on a bank … or mass panic to liquidate holdings in a portfolio because someone says the sky is falling …

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world–and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

— Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 15.

To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.

— Ibid., pp. 345-346.

Had an appointment with the crazy doctor tonight … and I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about some of the things that have been going through my head the past week or so.

Things like:

1. Beating myself up for stepping out of my comfort zone, and failing. Rather than beating myself up, I should be proud that I allowed myself to go into a situation where I might fail.
2. Trying to figure out what it will take to stop falling for people who are not available. I know why I do; as long as the people I’m attracted to are not available, either because they’re already in a relationship, because they live far away from me, or because it’s just not a good match due to lifestyle differences, then I don’t have to worry about opening myself up … I can just keep my walls where they are, and let them get higher and thicker and more impenetrable.
3. Figuring out what I’m going to do with my career.

In reality, it’s all about dealing with my anxiety, learning how to control it, without letting it control me. It’s about continuing to put myself out there with my friends, continuing to risk, and continuing to live life.

BILLY BRAGG - WAITING FOR THE GREAT LEAP FORWARDS

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Hugo Chavez highway filling up with gasoline
Little Donald Rumsfeld spies a rich lady who’s crying
Over luxury’s disappointment
So he walks over and he’s trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
To prepare to be bombed back into the Stone Age

In the former Soviet Union the citizens demand
to know why they’re still the target of Strategic Air Command
And they shake their fists in anger and respectfully suggest
We take money from our missiles and spend it on our hospitals instead

The Cold War is now over but the stakes are getting higher
I’m frightened of collateral damage
And of friendly fire
And I don’t believe we can defeat no Axis of Evil
By putting smart bombs into the hands of dumb people

Mixing Pop and Politics they ask me what the use is
I offer them my acupuncturist, my masseuses
While looking down the corridor
Out to where my ego is waiting
I’m looking for the New World Order

Jumble sales are organised, all my mates got fat
Even after all this time you can still me a fax
You can be active with the activists
Or sleep in with the media
While you’re waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

One leap forward, two leaps back
Will YouTube give MTV the sack?
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Here comes the future and you can’t run from it
If you’ve got a t-shirt I want to be on it

If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune
But this is reality not American Idol

So join the struggle while you may
The Revolution is just an ethical haircut away when you’re
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

NEGATIVITY

We all experience negativity — the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout, there is a sense of one’s own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul-smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

   — Chogyam Trungpa, from “Working with Negativity,” in THE MYTH OF FREEDOM and the Way of Meditation, page 93. Shambhala Library edition.

Okay … so I’m not actually studying drugs, but I sure seem to be taking a lot of them.

I’m so tired of taking pills, and I consume at least 11, every day, for various ailments. Anti-depressants, anti-spasmodics, migraine meds, prescription analgesics (non-narcotic), vitamins, and so on.

The worst part is having to take medication to sleep; and even that medication doesn’t work as well as it should. Last night, I went to bed at 9:30, and basically just laid there until about 11:00 when I finally drifted off. Then I woke up at 2:30 … was awake until about 3:30, when I drifted off again, before getting up at my usual 5:00-5:30.

So while 9:30-5:30 sounds good, in reality, I only got about 5 hours of sleep.

This is typical.

I don’t think it’s the caffeine, since I’ve cut WAY back, and generally don’t consume any after about 2:00 anymore … and I take most of my meds in the morning, so unless any of them have speedy/stimulating side-effects that only hit 16 hours later, that’s not it either.

One of these days, I’ll be able to stop taking pills, and will still be able to get a good night’s sleep.