Doom!

Atrios links to Calculated Risk links to Charlie Rose interviewing Nassim Taleb: "Dr. Doom is an optimist!"

The basic message: "It is going to happen very quickly. It's going to be a lot worse."

Signs of the Apocalypse

In Hard Times, Is Best Buy’s Best Good Enough? - NYTimes.com:

“Out of this storm comes new operating models,” Mr. Dunn says. “The ecosystem is going to change. We see storefronts closing.”

For now, though, Best Buy has a potent weapon in its battle with the discounters and online sellers: its staff. Members of Best Buy’s sales staff, a k a “Blue Shirts,” go through a 20-hour training program, then spend two weeks shadowing an experienced sales staff member around the floor. Historically, the Best Buy training program has been so strong, some people in the industry say, that competitors often waited for Best Buy to let staff go after Christmas, and then snap them up.

Ms. Di Folco, the actress, says: “Most of the time, I find really informed people who can actually answer my questions. It’s like they seem to be electronic junkies versus kids wasting time at a part-time job they don’t enjoy.”

Its sales force may give Best Buy a competitive advantage even in a holiday season when many customers are interested in rock-bottom prices.

“The importance of the salesperson is directly related to the price of the product being sold,” says Chris Denove, vice president at J. D. Power & Associates, the consumer research firm. “If you’re talking about toothpaste or pencils, the salesperson is immaterial, but when you’re talking about high-end electronics such as flat screen TVs, the salesperson can be critical.”

20 hours of "training" is now an historically strong training program, and Best Buy's staff leads the industry. Good lord!

Into the Pit of Darkness

Econbrowser: The auto downturn is very serious: "The wrenching changes that might be immediately ahead could mark the beginning of a frightening new phase in the economic downturn."

When?

Talking Points Memo reader: "Here is something progressives really need to address. On Sunday morning political shows, three Democrats are confirmed as guests: Carl Levin, Barney Frank, and Charlie Rangel. It's as if Democrats didn't just win huge electoral advances in the Presidential, House, and Senate elections. So we get the same thing we've had the past 8 years--republican hegemony on Sunday. Kyl? Check. Gingrich? Check. Steele? Check. Jindal and Shelby? Check and check? Just look at The Page for the whole list. When is the 'liberal media' going to give some of the oxygen to Democrats?"

The perfect storm of the election did not reach the Media. And, it is a serious problem. Tellingly, TPM doesn't put its own voice forward -- it uses "a reader" to make this point.

The corporate Media is a right-wing propaganda operation, which poisons the political discourse. This is a serious problem.

Is Your Money Safe?

Felix Salmon: "Is Your Money Safe at Citibank?"

If you have to ask . . .

Truth and Consequences

James Wimberley:

"will Obama undo Bush's legacy and restore America to its previous prestige and hegemony?

No. . . .

Sometime around 1991, shortly before fairly amicable splitting up of Czechoslovakia, I found myself talking to a group of Czechoslovak university rectors. I hit on a metaphor for their moral condition: the folk tale of the Sleeping Beauty. She had been, like the countries of the Soviet empire, bound in lethargy and illusion by the spells of wicked magicians. The enchantment breaks, and the young woman wakes up. But she does not wake up to the world of her memories. Time is not cheated; the light of day is harsh; the world has changed, and is indifferent to her pathetic story. Her hope of survival and happiness depends on her accepting that there is no going back.

I think this applies to the USA today. George Bush and Osama bin Laden have between them blown the American moment of hyperpower glory. Relative decline was as inevitable as in 1945, but while Truman, Acheson, and Marshall delayed it by trading hard for soft power in a web of new global and transatlantic institutions, Bush and the neocons accelerated it by hubris and stupidity. Obama's administration will start with a lot of goodwill, but it should not mistake this for a willingness to put the clock back.

The always grandiloquent epithet "Leader of the Free World" now fails the giggle test. And Larry Summers would be a bad choice for a job that will involve a regular diet of humble pie.

After the Storm . . . another storm?

Hullabaloo: "this time, instead of a mere womanizing good old boy from Arkansas, we will have a president who these people literally believe is a foreign, barbaric, baby killing, communist, Muslim terrorist. They think the liberals have illegitimately taken over the political system and are literally endangering the country in order to force their foreign philosophy on Real Americans. They believe that violence is always the best way to deal with enemies, lest they live to fight another day. They are hoarding guns. You do the math."

The rump of the Republican Party -- especially in greater Appalachia and (the white-supremacist parts of) the Deep South -- notably including the Republican caucus in Congress -- is Stupid and Crazy. Shorn of the parental supervision usually provided by Responsible Rich, who have migrated to the Democratic Party, they will stand ready to resume Power as a neo-Populist fascism, and if Obama is killed, or makes some serious policy errors, they may just get the chance.