US Politics via Singapore

Former House Speaker and Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich. Image via NewsOne.

For anyone who didn't believe the 2012 presidential election in the United States was charging full steam ahead in 2011, votes are now underway in the Republican presidential primary. The next round of voting happens in South Carolina on 21 January, and big money is being spent on behalf of candidates jockeying for the nomination. Some of it comes from Singapore.

The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands, the company behind the Marina Bay Sands "integrated resort" in Singapore, has put $5 million (£3.26m) of support behind Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. The billionaire's company faced dire economic times in 2008, but the company's gambling ventures here and elsewhere in Asia have proven massively profitable.

Adelson has been transparently active in both American and Israeli politics for several years, and he undoubtedly will not cap his political spending at just $5 million this year.

Elections 2010: Don't trust Prefident Thomas Jefferfon

The United States holds its general 2010 election on Tuesday.  Many Americans will be greatly relieved to see the end of the campaign season and the endless string of television advertisements involved. The cacophony makes viewers suspect that even though TV was a twentieth-century invention, attack ads are a permanent fixture of American politics.  ReasonTV suggests such theories are not far off the mark.

Further Troublesome English

I recently laughed at the words chosen in translating from Japanese into English an online booking form for a Tokyo ryokan.  This is rather unfair because the person who undertook the translation did his task fairly successfully, and native English speakers are not much better themselves.  Here is the letter of instruction I received with my absentee ballot for the Missouri 2010 primaries.

Please read your ballot instructions carefull.

The computer's spell-check function could have presented this mistake.

FDIC Insured

Don't Panic.  Your bank has failed.

I tried to log in and check up on my savings account yesterday and was immediately welcomed by the message shown above.  One of the US bank regulators, the much maligned Office of Thrift Supervision, had declared the bank failed, shut it down, and put it into receivership.  

Fortunately, this means only mild inconveniences for me.  Firstly, I had only a few hundred dollars at this bank.  I opened an account here because of a good offering on interest rates plus frequent flier miles, but once those interest rates came down I moved most of that money elsewhere, just one individual in the hot money supply.  No one is winning that game these days

However, retail banking customers in the United States are almost always insured against failure.  The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, colloquially FDIC and sometimes Fi-Dec, has guaranteed savers' money since 1934.  The institution insures accounts up to $250,000 at participating banks for each customer.  Banks, rather than taxpayers, put up premiums and fees that the become the purse out of which savers are made whole.

When a bank becomes insolvent the FDIC swoops in over the weekend and closes down operations in an orderly manner before Monday morning. The FDIC has been exceptionally busy and perhaps overworked in this recession.  Around 140 banks had to be closed in 2009, and another 26 have been named so far this year with another three weeks left in the first quarter.  But I, for one, am thankful for the assurance.

(Winter) Olympic Dreams

Professional blow-hard Stephen Colbert is ready to race.

Comedy Central's "right-wing" personality Stephen Colbert has thrown his weight behind the US speedskating team ahead of the 2010 Winter Olympics.  For those outside the US and not aware of the Colbert Nation, Stephen plays a bloviating pundit who hosts a news/commentary show airing directly after Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," where he earned his comedy stripes. "The Colbert Report" (don't pronounce the t's) specializes in hyperventilating obscurantist diatribes à la televised rabble-rousers   Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, or Bill O'Reilly.  The mockery extends even to aesthetics with a set  laden with flags, eagles, and red-white-and-blue bunting -- all surrounding a huge desk in the shape of a "C."

Colbert manifests the sort of personality cult that accompanies such commentators by exhorting his followers to attach his name to whatever they can. Fans have responded. His nomenclature empire now includes a water beetle and the undetermined solution to a mathematical problem.  Most famously, loyal voters made "Colbert" the name for a new wing scheduled for installation on the International Space Station.  NASA balked and instead invented a COLBERT acronym for an exercise treadmill in the station. >>Follow the link below left to read on.

Summer's End

British Summer Time (BST) came to an end yesterday. Britain returns to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), making it now eight hours behind us in Singapore. Singapore doesn't bother with daylight savings time gimmicks because the island lies about 50 km north of the equator. At this latitude the days are always about twelve hours long. In the USA, Daylight Time was expanded by Congress in 2005 to begin earlier with and run later starting with calendar year 2007. American clocks will fall back on 1 November 2009.

Putting the "Real" in Real Estate

Update (9 July 2009): The Times Magazine has removed this slide show from its website because several photos in the series were "digitally altered" and "did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show." These alterations were not disclosed by the artist, and alert viewers (hat tip: Simon Owens) produced evidence of computer manipulation, such as the composition of a timber-framed interior created by photographing half the scene and completing the tableau with a mirror image of the initial photo.

A seven-bedroom "stockbroker Georgian" house in Greenwich, CT, now in repossession. Image by Edgar Martins for the New York Times Magazine.

Last night the Passengers explored the streets of Singapore’s Chinatown and sampled some excellent street vendors’ food. Among the topics of conversation was the incredible downturn in real estate prices across the developed world. Even Singapore has been hit as asking prices for high-end apartments in our building are rumored to be down 50% or more. Most Singaporeans remain stunned by the incredibly perverse lending undertaken by American consumers at the height of the bubble. Retail banking here seems quite staid by American and British norms. Try finding a savings account in Singapore that pays more than one percent APY.

On this topic I want to call attention to a photo essay commissioned by the New York Times Magazine last week. Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins thoughtfully captured the overreach in real estate in the United States. With emphatic verticals and deep fields of vision his images show aspirational follies in the household, holiday, and commercial markets. The depopulation and abandonment on display reveal the hubris behind each project. Leaves blow through an unsecured living room. Timber frames wait for dry wall, and a solitary box mysteriously blocks up the only opening in a concrete edifice. Martins describes his visualizations attempts “to portray the inherent movement in stillness. Sometimes objects become almost like events.” Here the viewer has been inserted in the uncertain moment after building has stopped but before new action has begun.

Downtown condos in Phoenix, AZ, stand unfinanced and unfinished. Image by Edgar Martins for the New York Times Magazine.

These photos do ask the viewers to roll up their sleeves and avert failure. The slideshow title “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” leaves little doubt that an unfavorable judgment has been passed against American indulgence, and the images feature almost no tools that suggest a means to finish the work. Building materials appear on a street of downtown condos, but no forklifts are available to move them. Trash litters a driveway in Georgia without a dumpster to clear it. Furthermore, the artist and/or editors have chosen to visit unsympathetic locations, including those hyped by the artist’s patron. Building for a wealth population in Greenwich, CT, also allowed for spectacular losses on speculative homes. Las Vegas seemingly drew upon an inexhaustible pool of perceived wealth until homeowners balked at the high price demanded by Sin City. Martins' series once again points up the ability of images to make tragically real the stories told by journalists and economic data.

An unfinished model home in a Chandler, AZ, subdivision appears as an abandoned cathedral through Edgar Martins' lens.

Politics explained

For all of you wondering how America's two-party political establishment functions:

Theologically speaking, the two parties have divided the Seven Deadly Sins as follows: Republicans oppose lust, sloth and envy; Democrats scorn gluttony, greed, wrath and pride. Little progress is reported.

Thank you, Gene Lyons.

Primary Care Primer

Wherever I travel abroad and no matter the political situation in the United States, talk about life in my country invariably circle around to America’s labyrinthine system of health care. Generally, I welcome the chance to explain life in those United States to any willing listener/reader. I hope, probably naively, that conversations about real experiences help everyone to humanize and understand a world full of social caricatures. Most of the perceived deficiencies of the United States (or any country, really) are actually peculiarities, like two-party politics or SUV's. Usually, I feel I can give some apology and for my nation's various quirks that makes America less cartoonish. However, in discussions about the American health care system I have yet to find myself an apology, and every year our medical arrangements become even more “perverse and baffling,” whether measured by individual stories or systemic statistics. Simply put, a major illness can carry catastrophic and ruinous costs, and medical insurance provides only a modicum of security.

Americans understand very little about how they pay the doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies that provide their medical care. This has contributed greatly to inaction against the system’s incentives and inefficiencies. It also explains why health care reform becomes a political rallying cry about once a decade. For those abroad who want to know what Americans live through when they get sick and for those Americans who wonder why it has come to this and how to fix it, I have a sampling of the really informative and provocative journalism (bold links) that has been generated by the current clamor for medical coverage.

Presently, dissaffection has reached a level where Americans are actually willing to pay increased taxes for adequate health care coverage, but we are still fearful of what change could mean. As always, the Economist do summaries of the existing situation really well. For a detailed look at the difficulties in containing health care costs, read Atul Gawande's "The Cost Conundrum," a New Yorker piece cited by the Obama administration. Dr. Gawande also wrote an insightful, and more encouraging, look in 2008 about how various European nations built their health care systems. For a more global perspective in providing patient care, listen to NPR's All Things Considered's examinations of Taiwan and Japan for Frontline.

Gawande's assumption that Americans will probably want to keep insurance as the mechanism for paying medical bills has proved accurate given the current discussion of a so-called "public option" for medical insurance. Robert Reich and Paul Krugman both write repeatedly about the economics of how a public option might control costs. Of course, a badly designed public option has serious risks.

Of course, all of this political chit-chat rides the daily shifts of opinions and optimism, but much of America appears to be debating and thinking about what they want in the health care. I only hope that what we want will be good for us, too. Anyone else read a good story or study about American health care? Click on "comments" below and clue us in.

Update (29 June 2009): Columnist David Brooks delivered an incredibly astute assessment of the legislative machinations toward health care reform a couple weeks ago. It's one of the cleverest passages of non-partisan political commentary I have read in some time.