Dean Christakos« The Slits Play at The Black Cat | Main | How to Deal with Those People »
November 8, 2006
I Told You Things Had Changed
I spent this evening in Baltimore at the victory party for John Sarbanes, whom I volunteered for over the weekend, along with helping to to GOTV work for O'Mally and Cardin. Some friends from Cambridge ended up working for Sarbanes this year, and they gave me a call when they needed help, so I hopped in my car and headed out to Baltimore. Things seem to have turned out well.
Ok, while certain races didn't turn out quite the way I had hoped today, it doesn't even phase me. As I said back in August, "I amar prestar aen..." I could feel it.
There's an interesting comparison to this election and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Around March of 2000, it was revealed that MicroStrategy, a rising star in business software services, had basically been lying about their revenues. Their revenues looked like they were rising by double-digit percentage points ever year because when the company would sign a services contract with a client, the company would add the value of that contract to that quarter's revenues, even if the revenue itself were to be disbursed over a period of years as the work got done. The stock fell by more than 90%. Then over the course of the next year, we learned that lots and lots of companies that otherwise appeared healthy were doing the same thing. The appearance of success kept everyone from looking deeper to see what was really going on until a moment in which people did look more deeply into what was happening, at which point everything unravelled, culminating in the collapse of Enron by the end of 2001 along with several other dot-com era companies that used rather creative accounting processes to state their revenues before being outed. This is what happened with congress over the past year. There was nothing that made the Republicans in Congress more corrupt, more incompetent, or more ignorant this year than they were in 2004 or 2002 or 2000. What happened was that suddenly they couldn't hide this fact any longer and everything came apart at the seams simultaneously.
Posted by Dean at November 8, 2006 2:00 AM
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Comments
Congratulations!
Posted by: Marina at November 9, 2006 7:47 AM
Congratulations!
Posted by: Marina at November 9, 2006 7:48 AM