A Few Quick Things

I'm off to do laundry, clean the living room, run the dishwasher, and plant my impatiens, but wanted, first, to give a big "thank-you" to my local Assemblymenber, Roger Dickinson, for his bravery in voting for AB 934, which would restore the rights of tenants to sue for wrongful eviction. This is particularly important in foreclosure cases, where the banks behave very badly toward tenants, and tenants, thanks to our local press, know almost nothing about their rights in foreclosed properties. It should be noted that only 13 Democrats were sufficiently brave to vote for the legislation. The rest were hiding in the bathroom. I guess campaign contributions from the banks were more important to Sandre Swanson and Nancy Skinner than protecting tenants from wrongful eviction.

Next, I ran across this article this morning. (Ht Patrick) What I loved about it was this:

"His commentary reflects a left-of-centre perspective--which, oddly enough, has made him [Dean Baker of CEPR] one of the best prognosticators of the stock and real estate markets over the past decade and a half."

Uh, leftists (and I include Baker as one of us, although he is not responsible for my politics at all) have been making good predictions for a long time. In the early 1980s both Alexander Cockburn and Barbara Ehrenreich railed against policies that would increase economic inequality. No one listened, but it turned out that income inequality is a big part of our problem, and it's going to be much more difficult to fix it now. And I have, on so many occasions that I am now a "broken record" on the subject, described support for neoliberalism as smug, self-serving, sanctimonious twaddle. The left is almost always right; it just takes 30 years to prove it.

And then there's this.

Update: As you can see, I did clean the living room.