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Journalism and other myths.

Swift Boating

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If there’s one irrevocable law in politics, it’s that whatever works will be done and re-done until it fails completely.  The stakes for a Presidential include the most powerful office in the world and total expenditures of $10B.  No one is going to run a campaign based on wild new ideas unless they absolutely have to.

So it should come as no surprise that 2012 is turning into a mirror of 2004.  The only thing that seems wrong with it is that the challenger’s side didn’t anticipate and devise an effective counter to this year’s equivalent of a “Swift Boating” – changing what should be your opponent’s greatest strength into their biggest liability.

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A New Beginning

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Barataria stands as a blog with a purpose.  Most of the time, that purpose is to tell the stories lost in the jargon of economics and finance that have come to define our recent lives far more than most people are comfortable with.

If we can’t grab what is happening around us and make it our own, how can we call ourselves a free and democratic society?  Barataria does what it can to offer a different way of looking at what is happening and relate it in story form, free of unexplained jargon.  Hopefully, this will help to make a more real and useful politics.

After a few months of big events and heavy articles, it’s time to summarize the Baratarian view on the big economic picture in one polemic and invite your comments.

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Global Currency

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Imagine a single currency, all around the world.  No more converting between Dollars and Euros and Pounds, the money in your wallet is your ticket to ride anywhere.

Sound like a fantasy?  Throughout history it’s been more or less the standard.  The coins from one era might come from Rome or Madrid or London or Beijing, but one accepted unit of exchange was the norm until very recently.  In many ways, the standard now comes from twelve Federal Reserve banks in paper form, printed with green ink.

But we’re a global society now, with total worldwide trade taking up nearly $8T of the global product of $52T.  Is it time for a new global currency that isn’t subject to the needs and politics of one nation?  More and more, the answer is “yes”.  But getting there, as with anything international, is the hard part.

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Solar Weather

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It’s not just that it’s hot.  It’s the stifling stillness that has settled in over the center of the continent that slowly suffocates, like a python wrapping around its prey.  A year that started out promising, with plenty of warmth and rain early on, has turned deadly for crops throughout the grain belt of the US.

The price of corn has shot up 40% in the last month as a terrible harvest falls ahead of brown, dead stalks grimly standing in the fields.  As much as a third of the grain belt states is in “severe drought” conditions, and it’s likely to only worsen.  This is the kind of shock our economic system simply cannot handle right now, already weakened by bumbling in financial centers far from where people do actual work.

What has caused such awful weather?  It’s always hard to say exactly, but we can be sure this will last a while longer – and it is too late for most of the crops.

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Taxing Returns

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Why hasn’t Mitt Romney released more than one year of tax returns? “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” said conservative columnist George Will, on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”  Will has a reputation for being particularly honest when his side is screwing up, but he’s far from alone in his assessment.  It’s far more damning when Bill Kristol weighs in – “He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It’s crazy,” Kristol said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You gotta release six, eight, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.”

Why are the conservative pundits hitting this so hard?  What’s at stake here is not just Romney’s candidacy or even the whole Republican ticket that wants to keep the US House.  There is a core myth that has driven Republican rhetoric for decades based on a concept of “fairness” that could come crashing down if this plays out badly – and the pundits know it.

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