Category: politics & causes

It turns out the word maverick came from an actual person named Maverick who didn’t brand his cattle. His family is still around and has included civil rights lawyers, accused communists, & a member emeritus of the San Antonio ACLU. That is, not people who are voting for John McCain, but they also object to him calling himself one.

Ms. Terrelitta Maverick, now 82, says, about John McCain: “He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

Here’s a great description of why the economy greatly depends on Congress acting to rescue the credit economy.

The financial services sector is the heart of the economy.  They have fucked up badly in the last couple of years, but really, they’ve generally fucked up because we have allowed it.  Companies don’t exist to provide good jobs or good benefits.  Companies exist to turn a profit, and public companies exist to return value to their shareholders.  They are made to do this on a quarterly basis.  A good quarterly report returns profit to shareholders.  A bad one returns no profit to shareholders (generally).  So why would we think, after removing regulations and failing to enforce most of those that remained in place, that Wall Street would do anything beyond what we have made it possible for them to do?  And that, in a nutshell, is to work the system – mostly within the law – to return insane short-term quarterly profits and therefore shareholder value.  The idea that business would think a) long term (when we are painfully short-term focused from a market perspective; and b) do things to benefit people rather than their own bottom line is counter-intuitive because we don’t reward business for behaving in that fashion.

But do go read the whole thing.