Happy St. Patrick's Day

Image credit: Dooley's Hotel

Courtesy of Elaine's Irish Blessings:

May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire.

And try to go easy on the green beer. (h/t Bustednuckles)

Are You Bored Now?

Image credit: Screenshot of The Daily Show by Cujo359

One of the things that struck me about Jon Stewart's evisceration of Jim Cramer last week is that in a truly educated society, Cramer would have just been a loudmouthed nobody to begin with, at least based on his work for CNBC. As Stewart demonstrated, he was consistently and sometimes spectacularly wrong about companies that he featured on his show. His Twenty-Five Rules of investing, while generally sound advice, are mostly the sort of commonsense stuff that no one with a college education should need to buy a book to understand. Yet his Mad Money books sold like hotcakes. All Stewart had to do was look at Cramer's past pronouncements on specific stocks, and show the videos in which Cramer basically pooh-poohed any indications of trouble when, in fact, the things were days away from tanking.

Prior to this interview, my only impressions of Cramer came from seeing him on cable TV as I was trying to tune into something that wasn't CNBC. I wondered why anyone would pay attention to him. He struck me as an arrogant man who tended to make his point by belittling or shouting down anyone who disagreed with him. Such people seldom turn out to be thoughtful.

It's no irony that Stewart strikes me as one of those people who, when they were kids, never asked "why do I have to learn this stuff? It's boring!" Of course, it's possible that he did, and he was lucky enough to have known someone like my father at the time.

Yes, I once asked that question. In fairness, I was ten years old at the time. I barely knew what it was I was learning, let alone why. Like most kids, I didn't like learning mathematics. One night, my father collected some of his old engineering and science textbooks together, and showed them to me. As I looked at page after page of incomprehensible equations and tables, he tried to explain, as near as I can remember, that mathematics was one of the tools we need to understand the universe. To truly understand the world, you need to understand math.

You also need math skills to communicate that understanding to others, and you'll need language skills. You need to be able to construct coherent sentences and paragraphs, and string them into coherent lines of reasoning or a sensible story. That's why it's important to learn English, or whatever language you speak.

We seem to be a nation full of people who asked that question, and never got a good answer. A close relative of mine was telling me a story about the place she worked recently. Her company was having some sort of trivia contest. One of the questions was "Who delivered the Gettysburg address?" The company she works for is less than 150 miles from Gettysburg. Believe it or not, surrounded by college-educated people, she was the only one who knew.

Why do you need to learn about history, you might ask? It's just a bunch of facts and dates and stuff. I give you George Santayana:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

And, I might add, among the condemned will be those who never learned about it in the first place.

President Lincoln gave the address weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg. That battle, the largest ever fought in North America, changed the course of the Civil War. Had the Union lost it, we might have become two countries, one that tolerated slavery and one that didn't. Our history since then, with perhaps a quarter of our population and resources gone, would have been very different. We would no doubt have been rivals, assuming that we never got back together. The Monroe Doctrine might have ceased to matter. Our current politics would have been almost unrecognizable, with the remaining United States being a progressive society that would have put Europe and Canada to shame, instead of the other way round. Or, we could have been involved in ruinous wars for the next half century.

Slavery, and the racism it caused, continues to haunt our politics today. It is one of the reasons we have a Senate that is not representative of our populations, and it is one of the reasons that the filibuster, a device that often makes our current Senate ineffectual, has continued as an institution for so long.

Anyone wanting to understand our current political situation needs to understand the results and implications of the Civil War. More than any event after the Revolution, it shaped the country that we are now.

Writers could learn lessons from that speech, too. They could learn that, as one of Shakespeare's characters put it, brevity is the soul of wit. That address, so short in comparison to the other speeches given at the dedication of the cemetery that day, was easily the most memorable. It was memorable mostly because it was able to encapsulate the feeling and hopes of that moment in fewer than three hundred words.

Of course, all one needed to remember to answer that trivia question was that Gettysburg was a major battle of the Civil War, the President gave an address at the cemetery a few weeks later, and that Abraham Lincoln was the President at that time. And yet, it was a poser. Clearly, there are a great many people in this country who don't understand one of the most important events in our country's history.

When I wrote this article about the causes of the banking crisis, I used mathematics that I learned in high school. Admittedly, the experience of buying a house gave me an insight into the situation, as did some understanding of economics. Nearly every college graduate should have had the economics knowledge, though, and I think that most people who haven't attended college could figure out the basics. They should, at least. Yet this too, seems beyond most peoples' comprehension in America. I've heard and read so much obvious bullshit being thrown around on this issue that I'd have thought we were discussing quantum mechanics or brain surgery. There's a considerable amount of special knowledge required to understand a national economy, assuming that anyone actually does. Nevertheless, the facts clearly do not support the idea that this crisis was caused by "sub-prime" mortgages forced on banks by the government. All you have to do is look at the numbers. Losses from other forms of real estate loans, including so-called "prime" loans, dwarf those from the sub-prime portion, and there are more losses that have little or nothing to do with real estate.

Wonder why you need to learn civics? What's all that stuff about the branches of govenrment, and who cares what habeas corpus means, anyway? Why should you know what's in the Bill of Rights?

We've been in a slow slide toward dictatorship for the last ten years or so. The Congress, which is supposed to be an independent part of the government that makes the laws and decides on a budget, has simply ceded that authority to the President. The President, in turn, has decided that he doesn't have to be bound by any of those laws and budget things if he doesn't want to. And I'm not just talking about the last President, either. We're a few years away, at most a couple of decades away, from having no freedoms worth mentioning, and it's doubtful that most people will have noticed even then.

All those rights that TV cops are always complaining about aren't there to protect criminals. They're there to protect you from your government. Without those rights, and the rule of law, the government has nearly unlimited resources with which to destroy you or any other person it deems to be a problem. Without representative government, which in our government is Congress, the government will do whatever it feels like, whether or not it's good for the country.

That's why civics is important. If you don't know how your government is supposed to work and why, it will work however it damn well wants to, and it will run right over anyone who gets in its way.

Jim Cramer is certainly a part of the problem, as are the others like him. He justly deserved being humiliated on national TV. His employer, CNBC, must shoulder some of the blame. But in the end, we as citizens bear responsibility as well. When we have had the choice between quality news sources and news shows that are entertaining, we've chosen the latter far too often. When faced with complicated choices, we focus on irrelevance, on trivia, and on nonsense.

People who understand science and statistics wouldn't be afraid of immunization.

People who understand engineering, construction, and controlled demolitions wouldn't believe that someone demolished the WTC when it was full of people, and surrounded by people. People who have the least understanding of logic wouldn't have believed that the Clintons had Vince Foster killed, for that matter.

People who knew as much about biology, chemistry, and physics as I did when I graduated from high school wouldn't believe in creationism.

People who had some idea that people in the rest of the world have their own concerns and problems wouldn't believe that they award Nobel Prizes on the basis of what will piss off our President.

We waste so much time and energy on nonsense that shouldn't even be a consideration that it's no wonder that we don't even pay attention to the stuff that's killing us. If we ever do get around to those issues, people inevitably focus on trying to figure out who sounds the most confident, or who is better dressed, because they have no fucking idea what anyone's talking about. Either that, or the politicians concentrate on speaking in sentence fragments about feelings and "morality", lest anyone be confused.

We can't exist as a nation if the people who vote are as uninformed as this. So I have some advice for all you folks who are wondering how it came to be that guys like Jim Cramer got away with what they did for so long - get a clue. Cramer got away with it, as has the news business in general, because you, collectively at least, were too damn ignorant to figure him out, and because you wanted to be entertained more than you wanted to be informed. The modern world isn't a place for ignoramuses.

And you kids, when you wonder why you have to learn all that seemingly meaningless and difficult stuff, learn it. It's important. You'll find out why later. Plus, you'll be less ignorant and foolish than your parents and grandparents. That alone should make it worth the effort.

Bringing Them Together

Glenn Greenwald summarizes the thing I feared would happen:

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it's becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years. Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true: they are rushing to actively embrace them.

Obama's "enemy combatant" policy: following a familiar pattern

I literally do not know what to do. I explained since early in this Presidential campaign that I thought Obama would be about the last Presidential candidate to roll back the excesses of the Bush years among the Democrats who ran. Even Hillary Clinton gave me more reason to trust her on this issue. Yet here we are.

So, what I'm going to do is this. Every time I write an article about some extraordinary power the Obama Administration has decided is warranted for itself, I'm going to combine images of Obama with something that symbolizes that excess. Today, it's this. This picture symbolizes as well as any the unaccountable nature of the Bush Administration's rendition and torture policies. Both have been embraced, in slightly reworded form, by the Obama Administration.

If he's going to ignore the Constitution that is supposedly a scholarly interest of his, then he will wear the shame that comes with that action. At least, he will wear it around here.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention emptywheel's article at FireDogLake from Friday. In it, she also makes a compelling case that Obama has been trying to appear as though he is opposing the Bush Administration's excesses, while he is actually embracing many of them.

This is the reason I am using these visuals. I want him to be associated with these excesses on the most basic level possible. The visual confluence of these images is the strongest way I can think of to get the message across.

I hope fellow bloggers aren't shy about stealingembracing this idea.

UDPATE 2: Over at FireDogLake, I made this comment on an Oxdown diary that's relevant to all this. In fact, I'd say that anyone who doesn't realize this at this point is going to be no use trying to change the Obama Administration's course on human rights and government power:

Unfortunately, the pattern that’s developing suggests that Obama really doesn’t want to deal with [the Bush Administration's] crimes, because he wants to claim at least some of the extraordinary powers that W claimed for himself. President Obama’s choice to surround himself with people like John Brennan and Greg Craig speaks volumes. These are people who have apologized for, and in Craig’s case supported through his actions, the overreaches of the Bush Administration. It’s extremely difficult to believe that Obama was not aware of their background before he hired them. He is certainly aware of their background now.

We don’t merely need to persuade Obama to do what he knows is right. We need to persuade him that it is right. Failing that, we need to figure out how to persuade him to do it anyway. To say the least, this is a disheartening realization, but it’s true nonetheless.

Obama Outrage: Holder to Pursue Every Legal Avenue to Prosecute Cheney and Bush for Crimes of Torture: Comment #9

Obama isn't doing this because he's backed into a corner. He's certainly not doing it as part of some master plan to discredit such power grabs. He's clearly doing this because he needs to or wants to, and maybe both.

Quote Of The Day

Some of you may recall that I'm not a fan of Rahm Emmanuel. There are days when he earns his pay, though, and yesterday was one of them. Justifying President Obama's decision to mention the problems his administration has inherited from the previous one, he said this, according to the Washington Post:

"The truth is that 98 percent of [Obama's] speeches are about the future, and 2 percent are about inheritance," Emanuel said. "Whereas I think for Republicans it's 2 percent about the future, and 98 percent hope that the people have amnesia."

Obama's New Tack: Blaming Bush

That quote encapsulates the Republican strategy as well as any I've seen. Sadly for Republicans, I don't think people have gotten amnesia quite yet.

It's That Day Again

When I have to increment the number I respond to this question with:

Age?



Image credit:I Has A Hotdog .


Have a good day. I'm going to celebrate by not watching all the infuriating and depressing crap that's in the news lately.

Discovery Launch Scrubbed

Image credit: NASA

eWeek summarizes the problem:

A leaking gaseous hydrogen vent line forces NASA to scratch planned March 11 launch. Depending on what repairs are needed, NASA said it was keeping the option open for a March 12 night launch to deliver the International Space Station's fourth and final set of solar array wings, completing the station's truss, or backbone.

NASA Scrubs Space Shuttle Discovery Launch

There was concern about a failure of this part on the last shuttle mission, rather than a detected failure on this one, according to a NASA handout on the problem:

During space shuttle Endeavour’s STS-126 mission in November 2008, flight controllers identified that [Gaseous Hydrogen (GH2)] was flowing from one of the shuttle’s engines at a higher than normal rate. To compensate, the other two gaseous hydrogen flow control valves reduced the amount of their flow and there were no issues during launch. After landing, the main propulsion system was inspected and engineers discovered the GH2 flow control valve poppet on the suspect line was cracked and a small piece was missing.

The poppet on the valve acts like a pop-up on a sprinkler to let the GH2 flow. The damaged valve was removed from Endeavour and shipped to the vender (Vacco) for disassembly. It was then sent to the Boeing Co. in Huntington Beach, Calif., where engineers determined that the crack was caused by fatigue.

The concerns are whether a failed poppet or poppets could cause:

1) a rupture in the gaseous hydrogen line, resulting in loss of pressure to the external tank's hydrogen tank. This could result in a main engine shutdown.

2) an over pressurization of the hydrogen tank, forcing open a vent line that could expel hydrogen into an oxygen-filled area.

STS 119 Flow Valve Fact Sheet (PDF)

They're waiting for some tests to be completed on this valve before going ahead with the new mission.

As most of us remember, hydrogen gas in the vicinity of oxygen can be very bad. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor here, I'd say.

As the quote indicates, this mission is another International Space Station construction mission. The mission is to change ISS from the way it looks in the photo above to this:
Image credit: NASA. Click for larger image.

The blurry bits are already on the ISS. The part that's most visible is the new solar array and the S6 truss that it's connected to.

NASA describes this new addition:

The International Space Station’s power generating capacity is set to get a boost early next year with the installation of the starboard 6, or S6, truss segment and solar arrays. The S6 is the final piece of the station's football-field-long backbone.
...
Each set of solar arrays has a wingspan of 240 feet. Like the other three already installed on the station, the S6 solar array wing has two arrays with 32,800 solar cells. The solar panels convert sunlight to DC power, which is routed to the batteries and either sent on to power the station’s equipment or stored for use when the panels have no sunlight to generate power. Rotation joints steer the solar panels so that they can track the sun as the station moves in its orbit around Earth.

Photovoltaic radiator panels are attached at a right angle to the arrays to permit circulation of cooling fluid that reduces battery and electrical system temperatures.

More Power To Them

This power increase will support increasing the size of the crew that can stay on the ISS from three to six. Once the remainder of the Kibo is added in May, six person crews should be possible. According to NASA's schedule, there will be seven more flights to add more parts to the ISS, five by the shuttle.

Unless it was done on the Mir station, I don't think we've ever had that many people on one spacecraft for an extended period. The ISS has now been in space for ten years (PDF), and so it has now definitely surpassed that old record of Mir's.

The effort and expenditure necessary to gain even this small foothold in space show how far we have to go before we can consider working or living there.

I Forgot To Mention

Ask Google Images for an elite clock, and you will see this, among others. Image credit: Chosen Elite Store


There are a couple of things I forgot to mention last Sunday.

First of all, you remembered to set your clocks ahead one hour, right? Good.

Second, it's time for another Carnival of The Elitist Bastards. This one is over at Dana's place. Enjoy.

Hypocritical Wanker Of The Day Award: John Boehner

It took almost a year, but someone finally managed to knock Rahm Emmanuel off his perch. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) is quoted as having said this last Sunday:

House Minority Leader John Boehner said that struggling American families "don't see government tightening its belt," and argued for a spending freeze because government, he said, should "lead by example."

Boehner: Government Needs To Tighten Its Belt

What happened to the party of "go shopping"? They were happy enough to expand government spending when they were in power. The libertarian Reason Online wrote this about Bush's spending back in October, 2005:

"After 11 years of Republican majority we've pared [the budget] down pretty good," Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) crowed a few weeks back during ongoing budget deliberations. But nothing could be farther from the truth, at least since the GOP gained the White House in 2001. During his five years at the helm of the nation's budget, the president has expanded a wide array of "compassionate" welfare-state, defense, and nondefense programs. When it comes to spending, Bush is no Reagan. Alas, he is also no Clinton and not even Nixon. The recent president he most resembles is in fact fellow Texan and legendary spendthrift Lyndon Baines Johnson—except that Bush is in many ways even more profligate with the public till.

Bush the Budget Buster

Am I to believe they suddenly got religion now? If there was ever a time for extra government spending, it's now. As Paul Krugman explains, the GOP is so far out of its mind it's having an out-of-body experience:

What’s insane about Boehner’s remark? He’s talking about the current economic crisis as if it were a harvest failure — as if we faced a shortage of goods, so that the more you consume the less is left for me. In reality — even most conservatives understand this, when they think about it — we’re in a world desperately short of demand. If you consume more, that’s GOOD for me, because it helps create jobs and raise incomes. It’s in my personal disinterest to have you tighten your belt — and that’s just as true if you’re “the government” as if you’re my neighbor.

Can America be saved?

Krugman's question is a good one. Can America be saved? I really doubt it at times. When the people who run one of the major parties alternate between spewing nonsense like this, and openly hoping the Obama Administration, however hamfistedly it might be trying, fails to fix the economic crisis we are in, you really have to wonder. What's worse, the changes the GOP insisted on so it wouldn't filibuster the bill made it far less effective than it might have been otherwise.

Boehners' efforts have managed to acheive something I thought would be impossible: make the Democrats in Congress look good in comparison.

If these are the kind of leaders we come up with, you have to wonder if we're worth saving. One thing's for sure, John Boehner's constituents should be ashamed of him. If they're not, then they sure aren't worth saving.

It's Still Winter Around Here

Image credit: Cujo359 (click to enlarge)

Apologies to dial-up users, but this is a nice photo.

Not all that long ago, I was telling a friend who just recently moved to this area that winter tends to end by late February up here in the Pacific Northwest. Not this year. This isn't a photo from December, it's from today.

One of these days, winter will end. Possibly by Spring.

The Cliff Is In Sight

This is a chart, produced early February, of job losses in the current recession and in previous ones. (Click to enlarge) Image credit: Speaker of the House

Two different financial experts, with different backgrounds and experience, smacked the Obama Administration around today regarding their handling of the economy. The first was Warren Buffett, who was interviewed on CNBC today:

The economy, ever since we talked in September, we talked about it being an economic Pearl Harbor and how--what was happening in the financial world would move over to the real world very quickly. It's fallen off a cliff, and not only has the economy slowed down a lot, people have really changed their behavior like nothing I've ever seen. Luxury goods and that sort of thing have just sort of stopped, and that's why Walmart is doing well and you know, and I won't name the ones that are doing poorly. But there's been a reset in people's minds, and we see that in something like Geico where year after year after year we say you can save some money insuring with Geico, and year after year there's been a certain number of people who have said, `You know, I've got this pal, Rotary Joe, and I've been insuring with him and for 100 bucks, why should I shift?' Every week we're just seeing it build and build. More and more people are calling. Our price differentials haven't widened, our advertising isn't that much different, but the American public really has changed their buying habits. On the reverse side, our jewelry stores just get killed in a period like this. And high end gets hurt the most, next down gets hurt the second most, and the lowest people get hurt the least.

Buffett Breakfast on CNBC (Transcript for March 9, 2009)

This is one small part of the conversation, of course, but it's an important one. The sense of urgency, and some of the reasons for it, are what are interesting in this context.

The other financial expert, who gave an even more ominous warning, is Paul Krugman writing today in the New York Times:

President Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy was “massive,” “giant,” “enormous.” So the American people were told, especially by TV news, during the run-up to the stimulus vote. Watching the news, you might have thought that the only question was whether the plan was too big, too ambitious.

Yet many economists, myself included, actually argued that the plan was too small and too cautious. The latest data confirm those worries — and suggest that the Obama administration’s economic policies are already falling behind the curve.

To see how bad the numbers are, consider this: The administration’s budget proposals, released less than two weeks ago, assumed an average unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for the whole of this year. In reality, unemployment hit that level in February — and it’s rising fast.

Behind the Curve

[emphasis mine]

Even two weeks out from the signing of the stimulus bill, it's already looking pitifully inadequate. Let me just return to something I wrote about Saturday:

The best news I can tease out of this data is that at least the rate of job loss is no longer accelerating. It's been about 600k for each of the last three months. That's not very good news when we're shedding more than half a million jobs at a time. Of course, as I've pointed out before, we also need to add more than 100k jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. If this rate of job loss continues, we will have fallen almost an additional ten million jobs behind by the end of this year. [W]e were already in rather bad shape.

Two Giants In Trouble

Trying to project out unemployment as I did is obviously specious. A national economy seldom stays linear or predictable for long. The reason I did it, though, was to give some sense of the kind of trouble we're in for if things continue as they are, which is to say, largely uncorrected. The chart that begins this article, which was produced by Nancy Pelosi's office, should make that danger abundantly clear, particularly since you can now continue that green line further downward. So, keep that ten million jobs deficit in mind as you read on.

Krugman continues:

Employment has already fallen more in this recession than in the 1981-82 slump, considered the worst since the Great Depression. As a result, Mr. Obama’s promise that his plan will create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 looks underwhelming, to say the least. It’s a credible promise — his economists used solidly mainstream estimates of the impacts of tax and spending policies. But 3.5 million jobs almost two years from now isn’t enough in the face of an economy that has already lost 4.4 million jobs, and is losing 600,000 more each month.

Behind the Curve

We're way behind already. The best thing the stimulus bill could have done was continue state and local programs that were being cut back or stopped because the states and municipalities are running out of money. That money would have gone immediately to programs already in place, and thus would have had immediate effect. This is the sort of thing you'd expect an emergency stimulus bill to do. Yet that was part of the stimulus package that was "compromised". The collective idiocy of this Congress is nothing short of mind boggling.

Still, they don't look so bad compared to what the Obama White House has been trying to do to deal with the banking crisis. Even though many economists have recommended that the failed banks be nationalized, the President continues to pooh-pooh the idea as the notion of a few random fruitcakes:

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of Taliban

A strawman false dichotomy. As a fan of rhetorical fallacy, I have to love the efficiency of that statement.

Here's Krugman's conclusion:

The broader public, by contrast, favors strong action. According to a recent Newsweek poll, a majority of voters supports the stimulus, and, more surprisingly, a plurality believes that additional spending will be necessary. But will that support still be there, say, six months from now?

Also, an overwhelming majority believes that the government is spending too much to help large financial institutions. This suggests that the administration’s money-for-nothing financial policy will eventually deplete its political capital.

So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

O.K., that’s a warning, not a prediction. But economic policy is falling behind the curve, and there’s a real, growing danger that it will never catch up.

Behind the Curve

This is the danger. The work to prevent this needs to start now. Anyone who thinks that Obama's ratings will remain high despite his not having accomplished things that will help average folks out, and help retain their jobs, is an idiot. I'll grant you there are quite a few of those wandering the halls of Congress, but they, and any like-minded idiots in the White House, had better start getting with the program.

UPDATE: Over at FireDogLake, commenter selise pointed out this article:

The struggling companies whose freewheeling business practices have contributed to the country's economic woes are getting a lucrative return on at least one of their investments. Beneficiaries of the $700 billion bailout package in the finance and automotive industries have spent a total of $114.2 million on lobbying in the past year and contributions toward the 2008 election, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has found. The companies' political activities have, in part, yielded them $295.2 billion from the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), an extraordinary return of 258,449 percent.
...
President Obama collected at least $4.3 million from employees at these companies for his presidential campaign.

TARP Recipients Paid Out $114 Million for Politicking Last Year

While there may be other motivations, this money alone is a good explanation for why none of the folks who actually could do it seem interested in nationalizing failed banks.