Dana Blankenhorn

Europe's FDR Moment

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Something about this latest market move south troubles me.

It may have to do with the politics of the players. I've been writing at Seeking Alpha for almost a year now, and if there is one thing I've learned it's that most of the voluble small investors I see there are Republicans. Usually conservative ones.

Which means they buy the whole malarkey of the right. That the only way out of deficit is to throw grandma from the train. You can't raise taxes on the “wealth producers,” because they'll either quit or move. We can't cut the military budget, neither. Nope, it's break the promises of two generations, Medicare and Social Security. Otherwise you're not serious.

Something else I've observed about these folks. Pessimism doesn't quite cut it. Cynicism doesn't quite cut it. Armageddon-ism sounds closest. They assume the worst in people, they see unmitigated disaster at every turn, yet they seem to assume someone other than themselves will suffer when that happens.

Isolation and Engagement

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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What those who follow politics in the short term don't understand, and those who take the long view do, is how you can see which side is rising or falling quite easily, through a simple study of isolation and engagement.

As political assumptions and the industries behind them fade and die, those who follow those assumptions tend to become isolated from the wider world.

You can see this easily in retrospect. Hard reality turns to sepia. The Confederacy became the “lost cause” because slave-owners became isolated from the reality of mechanization. The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era as speculators and the native-born became isolated from the real life of the industrial economy, while those who embraced change prospered and defined a new era of finance.

The Lessons of Europe

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As this is written a second European panic is taking place, one you can put alongside the one from last year. (Picture from TotallyMoney.)

But even while the markets are roiled, policymakers are learning some serious lessons:

1. Countries aren't people. There is no austerity fairy.

2. Traders like action. Action is all they create.

England and the Threat from Immigration

When Americans think of a “threat” from immigration, we are thinking demographically. (Click below to meet the two gentlemen to the right.)

We think, rationally or not, of millions of low-skill workers, either taking public services from us or low-wage jobs. “They're too lazy to work. They're stealing our jobs.” 

England is a completely other country, especially in its politics, and I sometimes wondered why until I came across the story of Yougov.

I was mainly looking for an interesting Seeking Alpha story, some hidden gem that just reported earnings. That's not Yougov.

Oh, it is of some mild interest that they're buying up U.S. market research outfits like Harrison Group and Definitive Insights, so that it now has more employees here than in Old Blighty.

How People Enslave Themselves

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Among the great mysteries of human existence is the fact that, while freedom may indeed be the endowment of our creator, people find ways to enslave themselves.

The instrument for this is fear. Fearing others dehumanizes the one who is feared, and sets up the one who fears to be dehumanized in turn.

I got a little taste of that last weekend.

It's become a trope, the young, attractive woman who suddenly drops an “n-bomb” on friends of the guy who has been chasing her, causing him to back away. It's a new trope because, until very recently, the bomb would be dropped in private and wouldn't bother our hero at all.

In this case, I was discussing current events with an otherwise sane and attractive woman in the Atlanta suburbs when the Trayvon Martin case came up. My view is that it's manslaughter, what Jerry Seinfeld once called “I can't believe it's not murder.” A law dubbed “stand your ground” is giving ordinary citizens a license to kill, leading them to believe that in protecting their neighborhoods with deadly force they will be presumed to be acting in the name of the law.

That's not what the law's advocates say it's for, but the confusion means murder charges against citizens claiming the victim is dangerous will be hard to make stick until the law changes.

This tragedy almost befell my own neighborhood of Kirkwood in Atlanta, a year ago. Some kids were harassing a convenience store clerk, and the new neighborhood watch leader apparently came upon the scene, waving his gun around to frighten them off. The gun was not fired, but the watch captain resigned. Kirkwood came that close to being Sanford, Florida.

Had that happened one of my neighbors, a kid who looked much like Trayvon Martin, might be dead. I thought the President was very statesmanlike when he pointed out, in the name of comforting Martin's family, that “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon.” This was a kid, shot in the street, and the lack of an investigation should trouble everyone.

But not the woman I was talking to. “That was very divisive,” she said. This got my back up, and her husband stuck up for her. “If a kid like that, in a hoodie, came walking around here, you'd want to know what he was doing.”

Barbie Doll Drift

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has a new book out.

It's called “Drift.” 

It describes the last decade as one of increased acceptance of a madness, the idea that you can fight wars without having to pay attention to them, even pay for them, leading to a society divided between those who fight the wars and those who send people to fight our wars.

Good premise. Interesting book. Maddow is one of the most intelligent and verbally agile TV hosts I've ever seen. (Even those who hate her have to admit to her verbal agility. She's a Rhodes Scholar, for pete's sake.)

But as Maddow was interviewed by other MSNBC anchors, and people like Jon Stewart, it occurred to me she's been going through her own drift.