Remora

Limited Inc plans, God willing, to take a trip on a plane again some day (correcting an earlier version of this post that pinged on Alan's grammatical radar -- see comments). Nobody, to put it mildly, has been calling for our services lately. Is media dead, or like Elvis is it out there in hiding, its death a huge fake-out? Well, that's a story to cry about at some later point. More relevant point is that we would like, really, not to have to confront villains on our flight. It is part of the wish list that includes not running out of gas, getting the dinner from the first phase of when the hosts are handing them out (I hate it when I have the seat that is just above the dividing line, so I get the dinner and drinks last), and not setting next to a whacko. Yes, I prefer flying undisturbed by gun or knife or even tweaser toting loonies stalking down the aisle, none of that. But securing airline customers from such unpleasantness seems to be a very low priority in D.C. right now. A high priority is making sure that companies like Argenbright Security keep raking in the dough. Here's the WP story
Shaping a Compromise on Airport Security by Ellen Nakashima and Greg Schneider

The grafs about Argenbright, apparently the nation's largest provider of airport security, strike a comic note:

"Last month federal investigators found that Argenbright was employing security workers who did not speak English at Dulles International Airport. When investigators gave a skills test to 20 Argenbright workers at Dulles, seven failed. The company was already on probation for serious security violations last year at the Philadelphia airport, for which it paid $2.3 million in fines and restitution and several managers went to jail.

"Argenbright Security was founded in Atlanta in 1979 by Frank Argenbright, who sold the company in December to Securicor PLC of Britain for about $175 million. Workers from Argenbright were on duty at Dulles and at Newark International Airport when terrorists hijacked flights from those locations on Sept. 11."

The house repubs and our C-i-C Bushypoo seem to believe that the old system should be fluffed up like you fluff up the pillows for the guests, after which the attention will be off it, money will flow, and we can all go to sleep again. I sometimes forget that capitalism's unremitting focus on profit produces, in times of stress, a blindness to prudence ever surprising to the outside observer, or victim. Let's see if short term memory loss is the norm in Congress, or a mere aberration.

Remora

It is a barbarous place. Men are tortured by being confined for years to silent underground chambers. Some are cast into prison for violating taboos against using unclean plants, and left to rot the best portion of their lives away. Others, for petty thefts, can receive what amounts to a life sentence.

No, we aren't speaking of some Moslem republic in Central Asia -- we are of course describing the legal system of California, in many respects more regressive than the penal system of England, circa 1815. In such darkness, untouched by the recently much vaunted fruits of Western Civilization (Limited Inc is exaggerating -- there are some very sweet sex videos coming out of the Valley), a small but astonishing victory for reason was reported by the AP's David Kravets in this story:

Federal court throws out 50-year 'three-strike' sentence for shoplifter in California

lede graf:

"A federal appeals court threw out a shoplifter's 50-year sentence under California's "three strikes" law as overly harsh � a ruling that could lead to hundreds of challenges from defendants who received near-life terms for petty crimes."

further down, the casus and crux, a scandal to the Greeks and a stumbling blocks to our homegrown redneck element, who are no doubt even now petitioning for an end to the reign of the pernicious judiciary:

"[Leonardo] Andrade got 50 years in prison for stealing nine videotapes, valued at $153, from a Kmart. The court noted that kidnappers and murderers could receive less time than Andrade, who had a record of several nonviolent, petty crimes."

Of course, given the barbarity of a considerable portion of the electorate, which has sublimated its grandfathers' thirst for lynching into a penal code of a dense, complex ignorance, and a penal archipelago that has safely euphemized its systematic cruelties under such euphemisms as 'solitary' , no doubt this will be an issue on the hustings. How can our children be safe when bloodthirsty video thieves are allowed to prowl the aisles at KMart with impunity? We can just see the torches burning in the suburbs of Los Angeles, all the Day of the Locusts faces, the masks under the masks of reaction, like some Georg Grosz nightmare.

Remora

Put the current deadlock in Congress in the growing list of things that haven't changed since Everything has changed. Tom Delay, who might be the best friend the Democrats have in Congress, pretty much kicked ass on the House vote that killed federalizing screeners. The real deal here is, why pay anything for defense of the Heimat when we could all just equip our private persons with guns? That obviously is in the Sugarland rep's mind, a mind forged in Texas and exhibiting all the qualities that make Texans proverbially obnoxious.

The Times story today quotes the usual airline officials saying that spending bucks on security is a huge priority, meaning sub voce that it ranks just below finding cheaper peanut packet dealers. And all the usual wonks say they have studied every aspect of the baggage system (the very thought of studying every aspect of the baggage system makes Limited Inc reach for our coffee and gulp a big caffeine laden swallow), and that basically, we are being screwed. Screeners from McDonalds, an antiquated bag matching system, and some airlines are training their pilots to use stun guns. Is this America, united, fighting against terrorism? Or is it corporations and Repubs fighting against decency and common sense? Okay, it is the latter, I'm not asking the tough questions this morning. Back thought has to be, they've done the plane strategy, surely they'll move on to the dams or nuclear power plants or something.

Here are two grafs:
"Critics note what they regard as a pattern of slow response by the government and airlines to air disasters.

Bag matching has been debated since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988. The new federal rules on airport screening that were scheduled to be issued in mid-September were devised after the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in July 1996. Implementation of the rules, which call for tripling classroom training for screeners, among other steps, was delayed for two-and-a-half years while the F.A.A. tried to figure out how to measure screeners' performance. The agency now says it has held off imposing the rules until Congress agrees on new security legislation."

Yes, infinite, infinite imbecility.

Remora
Brent, of the Weblog review, sent us notice that Limited inc was being reviewed there today. We'd submitted in the hope of sweetness and light and blurbs. He seems enthusiastic enough about us to rank us just below a man whose claim to immortality is posting pix of naked gals on his site. This is not exactly the kind of applause we were shilling for. We like to think the comparison is with Adorno's Minima Moralia, or Peguy's Cahier; instead, the competition is with boobs on a stick. Oh how the mighty are fallen.

Further site specific comments. I've installed a comments code thingy, and we will see if it works this time. I noticed that my archives get that awful AOL dialogue box about do you want to continue using scripts, which is a drag. But I am hopeful I'll iron out the kinks.

Notice:
Hey, if you read Limited Inc regularly, you might want to pitch some pennies in our pot. This is a call to all good men and women of conscience -- the rent's overdue, the electricity is overdue, and the liquor bills are insurmountable. So send us checks, money orders, or warm women's undergarments: Make your check out to Roger Gathman, 615 Upson, #203 Austin, Texas 78703. We'd say, hey, you'll feel better, but really, who cares about you? We just want to make it to next month.

Remora

LimitedInc has made known its shameless crush on the NYT's Gretchen Morgenson. Some have compared it to the howling of a mangy, dying dog at the full moon; others, more mercifully, have compared it to an aging groupy's vain attempts to tempt teen Christian rockers into a three-way. Be that as it may, Limited Inc does not have the same hormonal surge for Floyd Norris. Sometimes his column stirs up thought, and sometimes dust. Today's is a little warning about deflation, with the reminder that hey, deflation is what happens during depressions. Although of course that isn't wholly fair - the great deflation of the 19th century, as we all know, while immiserating peasants and artisans, was a great boon to the urban proletariat and all who made their bread out of the workingman's bones.

Well, Norris takes the opportunity to advise the Fed. Here are two relevant grafs:

"Lower interest rates this year have kept the housing and auto sectors from collapsing, as they usually do early in economic downturns. But housing has started to weaken. "It now appears that a downward path of housing prices will accentuate the negative wealth effect from the stock market's decline," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

A decade ago, Japan's central bank was slow to loosen credit after its bubble burst. There is no way to prove its reticence was the cause of Japan's malaise, but it did not help. It is a precedent that Mr. Greenspan surely recalls."

Well, not causing and not helping are a pretty vague jam to put in the gaps in the story of Japan's excellent bust. It is part of the superstition of the era that central banks operate a little switch when they tighten or loosen money - that they operate as the heart of the financial body. There the central bankers are with their waterworker caps on, turning faucets on and off, and here we are strung out along the financial circuits, getting just the right amount of juice. But Norris's quaint idea about loosening credit ignores the backstory: the Japanese housing market is differently structured than ours, and lowering credit when a real estate bubble like Tokyo's is busting might not make a whole hell of a lot of difference. I mean, to cover his ass on that point, Norris has to reference the speed of the cuts -- but when you cut as much as the Japanese did and the patient is dead, it is hard to see that the speed had too much to do with it. Capital doesn't appear magically when it can get a better rate of return elsewhere, which is why Japanese money fled to the USA. And really, when, as in the heyday of the Japanese insanity, Golf Club memberships are selling for five million bucks, you know the system has gone too screwy to be fixed by your friendly central bankers. Norris is citing the Japanese example to wave his finger in front of Greenspan's nose, as though the Fed hasn't been lowering its interest rate in the most aggressive fashion in, well, that Limited Inc remembers. The Fed's magical mystery rate depression, a hommage to obsessive compulsion, is bringing us into alien territory. When the interest rate gets this low, as Paul Krugman has observed, we definitely start unsettling the markets. The fed's low rates have been helpful in keeping the auto industry booming insofar as zero percent financing means the companies loose less on the transaction, but face it, this boom is has the sick room smell of the housing market with the S&L's in the late 70s -- one of those borrow low from us as we borrow high from other people, which eventually grabs and eats your ass.

Remora

It is a don't ask, secret service man, need to know, high security kind of time in these here States. The ever vigilant FBI, when it is not dispatching its finest to sniff out those anthrax villains (men who have schooled their avoirdupois in some of the tough, tough donut shops of Manhattan, heros who, in the past, have won such accolades as the world's longest search for the world's oldest mobster (goes to those Boston Pros for chasing the ever elusive Whitey Bulger, who if caught might, heavens, reveal little tidbits about what FBI Men were on his payroll in Beantown), well those guys are keeping a weather eye on the foreign element. As proof, we have in our prison cells an unknown cohort of foreigners arrested after the WTC and kept without legal counsel, or communication with the outside world, and given over, on ocassion, to those merry bashings prisoners and guards, in our name, have to righteously deal out to those with the telltale brown skin and the arabic name. Andrew Gumbel of the Independent has the story:


"More than seven weeks after the attacks, the Justice Department says it has taken about 1,100 people into custody but almost nothing is known about who they are, why they have been detained, what charges, if any, have been filed, and how many of them have been cleared and released. One man has died in custody, in New Jersey, and others are being held indefinitely on immigration violations."

Ah, and there's more in the bottom grafs:

"The scanty reports to have surfaced about detainees are not encouraging. Some are said to have been beaten � either by their guards or by fellow prisoners, with the guards looking on. In at least one case, a detainee appeared in court with fresh bruises clearly visible.

A Saudi Arabian student, Yazeed al-Salmi, reported that he spent 17 days in custody in San Diego, Oklahoma and New York despite being told early on that he was not a suspect. He said he was denied contact with his family, held in solitary confinement, prevented from washing or brushing his teeth and repeatedly humiliated by his guards. "They don't call you by name," he said of his time in Manhattan, "they call you 'f****** terrorist'."

You know, if this keeps up, maybe one of those intrepid D.C. liberals will grumble about it in a few years.