When the financial world was turned upside down last fall, there was gnashing of teeth aplenty at what seemed to be the Bush Administration’s bailout after bailout of wayward banks. One side of the aisle complained that the government had no business tampering with free markets and the other complained that why should public money…

“Let History Judge” was the title of the book of one of my favorite Soviet-era historians — Roy Medvedev. I used to visit him back in the 1980s in his yellow-colored apartment building in the northwest quadrant of Moscow. His type of five-story building was called a “Khruschovy” after Khruschev because lots were built in…

A word to the Wise: be wary when you mess with a street-wise Italian guy from Philly. That’s Eugene P. Trani, the outgoing president of Virginia Commonwealth University, to be precise. Trani’s 19-year tenure at VCU has been marked by huge successes and some serious questions about abusing his power. On the plus side, Trani…

ADDICTION TO AUTONOMOBILES – AND THE SETTLEMENT PATTERN THAT AUTONOMOBILES SPAWN – IS THE DRIVING FORCE COLLAPSING A SOCIETY THAT HAS BECOME DEPENDENT ON LARGE, PRIVATE VEHICLES FOR MOBILITY AND ACCESS. General Motors filed for bankruptcy yesterday. This is only the latest in a string of events that document how the Autonomobile Industrial Complex in…

WAL*MART WILL NOT BE THE CAUSE OF CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE BUT IT IS A GOOD BELLWETHER ON THE CURRENT TRAJECTORY Two comments on the recent post NOTE ON WAL*MART require further consideration. On 5/28/09 at 3:49 PM TooManyTaxes said: “I’m not sure whether this one has been asked before. If so, I apologize.” No need to…

One of my recurring nightmares is that I wake up one morning to find Virginia and the U.S. transformed into a right-wing theocracy. If I go to a public library, I find my Internet access is severely restricted to information that a government committee has deemed morally and politically acceptable. A bourbon and water in…

Often, BR discussions have fluctuated about the remedies for the current financial crisis. The arguments seem endless, but then the problems are huge. And, properly, I think, they surround real concerns about massive government deficits and massive injections of liquidity. One place for some perspective is the June 11, issue of the New York Review…

At a party over weekend a regular reader of BR suggested that EMR needs to go back and make sure that a failure to respond to some of Larry’s “summaries” does not suggest Larry is right or that there is no sound counter argument. As luck would have it, even though EMR has been very…

BR bloggers, you know who you are. You live in economically-distressed, forlorn areas such as Great Falls, McLean or the Countryside subdivision of Henrico County. Your brains are secretly hard-wired to the platform committee of the Republican Party. You project tolerance, but well, not exactly so. In your collective opinion, the housing crisis has been…

It’s the thesis of my new blog, “Boomergeddon” (or, “The Retirement Crisis”) that the federal government will reach the brink of financial insolvency within the next two or three decades. If you buy my argument, another question logically poses itself: Who will provide essential government services when the feds go broke? Not California, that’s for…

Funny how movements spring from nowhere. That’s the case with the Waxman-Markey “Cap and Trade” bill to restrict greenhouse gases that I filed about yesterday. There’s no question that the bill has legs given the orgy of lobbying over it that seems to have sprung from nowhere and is supplanting the economic crisis and the…

Is a serious plan finally in the making to limit carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.? It very well could be since a number of key Democrats in Congress, including Rick Boucher from the Virginia coalfields, have agreed to a number of closed-door compromises that might make it fly. The bill is being shepherded by…

Kudos to EMR and Peter G. for keeping Bacon’s Rebellion a lively venue for discussing real issues during my prolonged absence. I’m parachuting in just to say hello — and to let Bacon’s Rebellion readers know about my new blog, The Retirement Crisis. While Bacon’s Rebellion explores the theme of environmental sustainability, The Retirement Crisis…

When I was nine years old and was living in the Washington suburbs, my father, a Navy doctor, decided to retire. He chose to move us to central West Virginia and join a medical practice — a strange choice since we had no ties at all to the area. But Dad was always altruistic and…

The Virginia Port Authority has always been a kind of strange duck — not quite public, not quite private. Its leadership swings one way or the other as whims suited. If it needed money from the state’s transportation funds, it was suddenly more public. But if the news media wanted data about top officials’ salaries,…