Americans Are Too Depressed To Have Sex

 


So says the porn industry whose tongue-in...(averted gaze)-cheek request for a $5 billion bailout from the federal government is making waves all over the Internets and "old media" this morning.

Puh-leeaze, I've been saying this since last autumn. What with all the Ponzi schemes, CEO suicides, and the general collapse of capitalism, the lustre is gone! My daily visits to various fetish and Ukrainian midget domination sites have decreased from about 40-45, to no more than 5 or 6. All on work PCs, of course; I wouldn't want to infect my home machine with any kind of adware or spyware, I mean really. What am I, some schmuck on wheels?

According to porn magnate Larry Flynt and "Girls Gone Wild" king Joe Francis, the porn industry is not recession proof. TMZ website reports that the Dynamic Duo of porn will be heading to Washington to ask for a $5 billion porn bailout.

"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind," Flynt says. "It's time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America."

Francis sees his industry like the big three automakers, only BIGGER: "Congress seems willing to help shore up our nation's most important businesses; we feel we deserve the same consideration."

And why not? According to an article in the Atlantic, video sales have been falling by 15 percent a year since 2005, and online content doesn't deliver the returns it used to, now that Web sites such as RedTube and PornHub basically give it away. Struggling companies need investors to help buttress their operations, and those that are thriving in a brutal market need funding for growth.

But don't despair, Nation's Pornographers: enter AdultVest, a hedge fund run by Francis Koenig that invests in porn-related assets. He sees the porn downturn as temporary and believes that technological improvements will trigger a turnaround.

One example: iPorn, a start-up in AdultVest's portfolio that is developing an application to deliver porn to the Apple iPod. Personally, I'm holding my breath until it's feasible to actually have intercourse with our iPods. I mean, why not? They do pretty much everything else.

"The industry's not going anywhere," Koenig says. "You've got 6 billion people on the planet," he laughs, "and they're all horny."

True that. Now let me get back to...work. I feel a slight tingle in my loins already. Things are looking up, my friends. Pun intended.

It Sure Ain't Your Grandpa's New Deal

Sorry for my lack of words for the last few days, since the VP debate. Preparations for the imminent arrival of baby are really starting to take up a lot of time, especially on the weekends.

So we now have a $700 billion bailout plan. What I'm not clear on is if that figure is inclusive of the $150 billion worth of "sweeteners" they added on to win over more members of the House or if what we really have is an $850 billion bill.

I'm so mad about this I can barely stand it. And not for the same reasons as the "fiscal conservative, free market" Republicans that voted against it. They think you should just leave the free market alone and let what happens, well, happen.

The problem with that mindset is that what just happened is what happens.

No, I hate this because it is nothing more than a big giveaway for the people who created this mess and does nothing to help the financial situation for most people in this country. The claims by politicians that the bill includes limits to executive pay is greatly exaggerated as nothing stops these companies form paying their CEOs huge salaries, just a limit to their severance packages.

We missed a great opportunity in this country to create a real economic recovery bill and we blew it. We could have done something to grow this economy from the ground up, as Obama likes to talk about but seems to not have any real proposals for such a thing. Like FDR rebuilt the economy during the Great Depression.

(I wonder if it will eventually become known as National Depression I, the same way that the Great War became World War I when there was another great war, after we finally admit that we will be in another depression just as big soon enough?)

We really had the chance to kill several birds with one stone by forming a new public works program. We already know that the infrastructure in this country is crumbling, or as I heard Rachel Maddow put it one time during the primary season, it is "made of sugar."

$700 billion could have gone a long way to fixing/replacing aging bridges, roads, fixing up our neglected national parks, building clean energy facilities like wind farms, fully funding and expanding Amtrak (including starting a real high-speed rail system), building new public transportation systems in cities without them as well as expanding and modernizing old ones in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.

We would have put people in the construction business to work almost immediately, one of the biggest needs right now with almost no new homes being built. So many more jobs would be created with all those people back to work and going out and spending their money in our economy.

This would help a lot of people, though not all, who are behind on their mortgages keep their houses. Combine that with something the feds should be doing, but the states have started to do themselves, forcing the banks to work out new lower mortgage rates for subprime borrowers.

Other primary benefits would be a modernized infrastructure that is not falling apart, cleaner energy sources and more transportation options in a time of higher gas prices and concerns about greenhouse gasses. All of these are things that we desperately need.

If we are going to add another $700 billion+ to our Chinese credit card, wouldn't this be a better use of that money?

I'm not delusional about the idea that this kind of bill would have actually gotten through a Congress with too many Republicans and a president who would have vetoed it and called it Socialism.

But I am disappointed that Obama didn't take the opportunity to call for something like this and instead supported the payoff to corporate America. We can't build the economy from the bottom up with just talk and no action.

And then there is John "as president I'll veto every pork-barrel spending bill that crosses my desk and I will make them famous" McCain, who had no problem voting yes on a bill that may actually be the most pork-laden one in history.


I'll be writing my next post, more than likely, about the dilemma, as a progressive, of whether or not to vote for Obama to expand on my statement of disappointment above.

I'm also planning on expounding on the issue of transportation soon, an issue near and dear to me and something I'm not hearing enough (or anything, really) about from any candidate. Stay tuned.

Now It's Personal

OK, maybe it's not really that big of an impact on me. But it is kind of eerie to be watching TV and see someone announce breaking news that the bank where I have my checking account and a credit card has collapsed and been seized by the federal regulators.

I imagine, with so many Seattle people reading (and writing) this blog, and that Wamu was the biggest bank in the country, I'm not the only one here who finds this a little unsettling.

I do tend to believe that right now my money and credit are safe, the creation of the FDIC after the Great Depression (thank god for one regulation not being struck down by Phil Gramm) is exactly for this things like this. And JP Morgan Chase has snatched the assets right up, they are saying that there won't even be a service disruption and branches will be open as normal tomorrow.

But still, is it possible that we may actually see something like a run on the banks, something that our whole lives has lived in the realm of our grandparents stories?

The ramifications of the current situation are becoming mind-boggling.

Racism in the rhetoric?

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here, making commentary on a radio segment I heard yesterday, but for which I can find no audio clip or transcript. I usually like to have alll of my ducks in a row, don't want to give someone on the other side of the political divide the opportunity to call bullshit.

And, given that my lilywhite ass is going to be talking about perceived racism, I'm walking shaky ground.

The segment in question aired yesterday on NPR's Day to Day and discussed the proposed financial bailout. One of the guests was Minnesota Rep Michele Bachmann (R).

The portion of her comments that pricked up my ears was about help for struggling homeowners - if we're bailing out the companies that marketed bad loans, why aren't we also helping those individuals stuck under the same bad loans?

Bachmann, and I'm paraphrasing as fairly as I can here without a transcript, responded that she wanted not one bit of public money to enrich a private individual. She said that we shouldn't be bailing out people who borrowed beyond their means, who want to keep their home but have no intention of honoring their debts. She blamed the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, saying that we had a hundred years of stable lending practices undone by what she called, and on this phrase, used more than once, I am absolutely clear, "social engineering."

Now, given the timing of the end of what she called stable lending practices (not terrible long after the Civil Rights movement), given her throwing around of the phrase "social engineering," given that the CRA was designed to ensure available credit (not the predatory lending we have seen) to underserved (and therefore, especially given its timing, disproportionately minority) communities, am I really the only one that reads Bachmann's rhetoric as "everything was fine until we started giving those lazy, greedy darkies home loans"?

It was some damned charged rhetoric she was throwing around, and she isn't the only one. To my mind, the subtext is pretty clear. I was disappointed that she wasn't pressed more on this. The MSM too often lets slide this kind of blatantly institutionalized racist talk because it is safely couched in terms the speaker can defend as innocuous.

I'm curious to see how much more of this kind of talk will be slung around, and whether anyone will stand up to it. Unfortunately, my hopes and my predictions in this case are not aligned.

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EDIT: Forgive the mistake, but the NPR show in question was actually To the Point. I will edit further with audio links or transcripts soon.