When all around you seems like hell

When all around you seems like hell
Just one sip will make you well
– Medicine Show

The LA Times has an amusing story about a Senate committee hearing on the question of whether DC has too many czars. The best is the paper headline stating, “Experts finds no fault with Czars,” sort of like, “King’s ministers say monarchy is good.” Bradley H Patterson a “presidential scholar,” gets off the most amusing line redefining American government, “The president’s personal staff are independently responsible only to the president — and in the end he is the only czar that is” — hey ho!

Czar of course is Russian derived from Caesar, the great assassin of the Roman republic. Well I suppose it’s better to have a lot of czars than one, but it’s a bit different than Tocqueville’s understanding of associations as the bedrock to American democracy, writing:

“Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations…In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.”

We need to rethink the art of political association in this country.

Speaking of combining, Yves Smith has good piece on the securitization market, which is D - E - A - D, dead. The NYT story she quotes states,

A once-thriving private market in securities backed by home mortgages has collapsed, from $744 billion in 2005, at the peak of the housing boom, to $8 billion during the first half of this year.

Actually, this is  good thing, unfortunately that’s not what our financial czars think. Paraphrasing Grover Norquist, we need to shrink the financial industry to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub.

Joe Costello was communications director for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean’s effort in 2004.