New Old Mexico

Bloomberg is reporting some surprising good news, though unfortunately for those of us that live north of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande it affects us only indirectly. Mexico is doing rather well economically. People and institutions are backing Mexico and buying their bonds, and the Ministry of Finance says Mexico has no Sovereign Debt Stress. Well, there's a turn up for the books. Of course Mexico's bonds have improved their rating at the hands of the ratings agencies (incompetents, crooks or slaves of their corporate masters, you choose the derogatory term) and now Mexico's government debt is rated BBB rather than "unsuitable." If US Treasuries were rated BBB world finance would spin into a black hole but this is Mexico.It is safe to assume not everyone is benefitting from the new rating, but still...Mexico was always feared as a source of problems for southern US States, an exporter of desperate workers seeking money (and mythical welfare if you listen to the anti-immigrant zealots) and lately the Peak Oil crowd has expected Mexico's finances to do a toilet-whooshing disappearance with the shrinking of the Cantarell Oil Field, one of the largest in the world. Then the speculation was that illegal drug money was propping up the Mexican economy as the border states became battlegrounds for control of the access routes to the lucrative US market. Ours is the land of despair so people need their drugs to stay less unhappy... and conversely, Mexico is happy to fill our chemical needs. You can hardly blame them, the capitalist swine,for choosing to fulfill a market niche.

Yesterday Bloomberg, in analyzing comments by the teutonically named Alejandro Werner, Bloomberg found that tax increases, spending cuts and fiscal restraint have left Mexico's Government's finances in quite decent shape. One has to assume that there is some measure of truth in the deputy Finance Minister's comments, not least because PIMCO, the US mega fund manager has given Mexican bonds the green light.

These days it is difficult to take government statements at face value in light of the bullshit Goldman Sachs has pulled in Greece and Italy, and who knows where else, helping governments cover up the extent of their indebtedness, but if the Mexican story is real, and over time we shall see, then it could be a lesson learned for us in El Norte. Of course there are tons of lessons our leaders should have carried out but our dear corporations put a lock on them all. Whether or not impoverished Mexicans feel buoyed by the news will be hard to tell, from this far away. However standards of living did go up under President Fox, the oily Coca Cola salesman, during the boom years, and one can hope that a calm governmental budget scene will allow them to hold on to their gains.Plus there is the new drive to form a trading group in South America and the Caribbean excluding the US and Canada and forming their own currency, the SUCRE ( not the old Ecuadorian sucre) and trading by barter. With the decline of our empire other forms of trade and one hopes humanity, will fill the void.So much for the speculators of doom suggesting Mexicans will pour across the border to take over our economy as theirs fails, a cross-border replay of the 1910 revolution. We've already seen a net export of undocumented Mexicans going home as our economy implodes. Perhaps it won't be too long before we see Gringos pedaling pedi-cabs in the resort towns of Mexico...

More Sculptures

This is a dragonfly, and it's made of reused bric-a-brac. It sits on display at the Botanical Gardens on Stock Island as part of the annual Sculpture Key West show.It was a clever piece of work and though I have lamented previously on this blog, let me take a moment to point out how annoying it is that the Sculpture Key West show has been split through three locations. I preferred it when it was all centrally located at Fort Zachary Taylor. There it is and I shall complain no more, unless I make it to the third location, the West Martello Tower at Higgs Beach to check out the last group of pieces on display. The dragonfly was accompanied by a large display explaining in more depth than I ever imagined how these insects live and move:This phrase below caught my eye and gets the prize for least information in a clause: "...but was introduced to Hawaii around 1973." Who, why, what, etc... all spring to mind, but because mine is the mind of an old school journalist these hanging thoughts will have to remain dangling.
Big men with powerful cameras find the gardens attractive for real photography: I wandered, caught between my own impediments of pocket camera, wife and dog. Then we came across a vast spider's web which is supposedly: Ludwicka Ogorzelec's dream like fantasy out of sheer translucency or something like that.All I can say is it looked like a spider's web to me.This stray plastic bag bore a striking resemblance to the spider's web:

At first I thought it was a dog, but the sign post put me right:Made, rather cleverly out of a diver's air tank, aluminum baseball bats, bronze pots and I don't remember what else.This next one was, shall I say, enigmatic?

Because I am not an artists I would have called it "Ball On Chair" and gone home for tea.

This next one looked daft but was actually very cool.

It was a mirror lying on the ground:

And, because it was just that, a mirror, you could make it "see" whatever you want:

At the entrance to the gardens there was this sand sculpture which I found captivating. They call it Africa and apparently it is located underneath the alluringly named African Sausage Tree. What can I say, I am very fond of sausages?They have an open air workshop conveniently located across from Sandy's Café where they will teach you to do stuff like this.
It is so amazingly intricate I have no idea how they can learn this stuff never mind teach it. But the evidence is there before our eyes:The details are astonishing. I loved this croc appearing mysteriously from the sand itself:

I thought the whole thing gained weight and allure by the very fragility and temporary nature of sculpting outdoors in sand:Here today, gone tomorrow. And adult sand castle! Not a sculpture, my car with a couple of strangers standing by:I thought that Nissan looked familiar.

Eviction

This picture was used today in a headline at Huffington Post. Click to enlarge to get the full awfulness of the image. The young cop helping the man with the walker out into the snow looks like any of a number of Key West cops I know well. I dread the day.The article accompanying the picture was wondering why we have wasted so much treasure to "fix" the banks and not the mortgage foreclosure chaos. Good question. Clearly the picture struck a nerve.

Volcker Rule

There is a rule proposed in Washington that would prohibit banks from engaging in speculative investment strategies. It would in effect shut down the derivatives trades that forced we the people to bail out the banks that are too large to fail. Except, fail they would, had our government not stepped in with our money. The more time passes the more this seems to me to have been a truly duff idea. Looking back at my posts I hesitated to support to TARP funding but like legislators, Republicans were in charge at the time, I eventually agreed in my own mind that the bailout would probably save us extreme grief in the long run.

I guess I was wrong. The grief looks set to continue, as those same bankers are now saying they don't like the Volcker Rule, it is too restrictive and they bitch about Depression Era Big Government regulations and so forth. The funny thing is that thus rule comes from the Grand Old Man of Federal Reserve caution, Paul Volcker, not any one of President Obama's inner circle of Goldman Sachs alums who give him their financial advice. What a sorry bunch of Marxists these people are. Dear Leader continues to insist we give the store away to the bankers because they will save us from ourselves. Even as the complaints flow in that ordinary people are walking away from failed housing investments as though that is some moral failing. The social contract has been broken by the banks, not the homeowners, in my opinion. My aggravation at this situation has got some backing, unwittingly from Elizabeth Warren, the academic truth teller who has been quoted thusly:

"The problems could not be more obvious, and quite frankly, the solutions are just about that obvious, but we just can't seem to get the two together...The reason that we are not changing things right now is because the banks have lobbyists in Washington in numbers I have never seen...People who just want to advocate for American families, people who want some changes to level the playing field do not have that kind of lobbying power. And so what we are really watching here is a David and Goliath story."

The most frustrating thing about this ongoing and worsening economic death spiral is that solutions seem obvious, implementation seems simple enough. Yet we can never seem to quite get there, which would give weight to the explanation that lobbyists are blocking our path here as in health care reform. There is an absence of morality in all upper echelons, in business and industry most especially and for a citizen like me to suggest that there should be a moral component to financial decision making sounds extremely quaint indeed. That's how far into this morass we find ourselves. It no longer matters to our rulers that people are going hungry, that people are unemployed, that people have no access to health care. It may matter to President Obama but clearly he is as much governed by Goldman Sachs as we are in our misery.

Perhaps I am jumping the gun but I do wish there was an alternative, not just to Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens but to the Tea Partiers too. For though they peddle freedom as their watchword their social attitudes are anything but free unless you are white straight and Christian. If there is a revolution in the air it bodes nothing any good to those of us that want the freedom to be immigrants, gay and literate. It seems we are sidelined, those of us that prefer our politics with a touch of humanity and old fashioned decency. We face a future as serfs of the corporate profit machines or at the hands of proto-fascist Republicans in a minor key who want to lead us through revolution to a brave new world that I am pretty sure is not where I want to spend my golden years. even if my golden years are looking pretty brass-colored about now. Bloody hell I must be felling moody tonight. Someone tell me I'm wrong.

Jack Flats

An almost empty plate of bean and corn enchiladas at Jack Flat's restaurant on the 500 block of Duval. A pile of salsa a splotch of sour cream and a leaf of lettuce was all that was left after the vultures out drinking had devoured it.Somebody was ordering pitchers of Yuengling and I kept finding a full glass in from of me. My wife loves the bean and corn deep fried things served here and at Fogarty's as both places have the same owner . Ashley brought by a plate of nachos: For this is bar food in a sports bar. You know it's a sports bar because of the multiplicity of televisions. Hard core sports fans were taken aback by the sight of snow mobiles racing on water.It seemed like an odd sport to me but the racers were having fun. I expect if they stopped having fun and stopped their machines they would sink.Being the gloomy gus I am I looked at this stupidity and wondered if this was the bread and circus equivalent we have been warned about right before the end of the world as we know it. In the event it turned out not to be, and I had time for another Yuengling.Scott, Lars, his son Josh, wife and me lurking in a dark recess at Jack Flats. I must have had my guard reduced by beer to allow this picture to be taken. We were playing tourist though so perhaps it was in the spirit of the afternoon.I am not sure but I believe Jack Flats makes one of the best burgers in Key West.I am not very keen on walls lined with televisions as is the norm in sports bars but Jack Flats has it's own style of decoration and as it includes lots of old pictures of life in the Keys I quite enjoy taking a look: It was a decadent afternoon for the wife and I- fried food and beer in the daylight hours:And the men's loo offered all sorts of alluring promises for a good time on the water.And sporting nonsense too for those that know what this means:It may have been light outside but it was dark enough inside:

A quick look at a couple more pictures and we were out in the sun.The beer had taken it's toll on Josh struggling with his blackberry:And Scott:

A place and a time for a drink. A time and a place for a designated driver. My wife complained bitterly on the way home I am a terrible back seat driver. What can I say?

Posse Comitatus

The Posse Comitatus Act is alaw that does not allow the US military to act like police force in dealings with civilians. It is, in my opinion a very good thing. Enforcing laws is a very complicated specialized task and even though I suppose one might view a cop armed with a gun, dressed in a uniform, as only oen small step removed from a soldier, the two tasks entrusted to the two government employees are very different. Which makes this story I read on the Daily Kos rather interesting. It's by an author posting as gjohnsit and is available on their website in it's full length version. I just excerpted a couple of paragraphs for some food for thought:

If you want a glimpse of the near future of America, look no further than Samson, Alabama.Last March, Michael McLendon, a disgruntled worker from Pilgrim's Pride, a chicken processing company, went on a killing rampage that left 11 people dead. While a horrible tragedy in itself, the event was marked by something more unusual - federal Army troops from nearby Fort Rucker were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets. This fact was largely ignored by the major media.

The reason why the troops were manning traffic stops in the small Alabama town, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, was because the local sheriff asked for support from the military. The reason he couldn't handle the situation? Budget cuts in police enforcement.

What has this got to do with Michael McLendon and Pilgrim's Pride? In 2006, the giant chicken processor teamed up with Wall Street and borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to acquire a rival company. To pay for the buyout, and the executive bonuses that came with it, it cut the wages of its workers. Soon after it found it couldn't pay for the debt and declared bankruptcy. This led to massive layoffs and devastation of the tax base of the community.

So who put together the deal that bankrupted Pilgrim's Pride? Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. The Merrill banker who made the deal was recently hired by JP Morgan Chase. JP Morgan was behind the financial derivatives that has bankrupted Jefferson County, Alabama over a sewer project.

Because of the financial disaster regarding the sewer project, sewer charges were raised to more than double the national average. Poor, working residents are being forced to chose between water and heat. Cuts in the sheriff's office are so severe that plans are being made to call in the National Guard for any breakout in civil order.

If this sounds suspiciously like the scenario of a 3rd world nation in Latin America, it only means that you are paying attention.

"For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
— George Orwell