It only applies to 80,000, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the millions of mortgages about to reset. Plus, as Mish points out, seems designed to help lenders, not homeowners. Big surprise, eh?

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It’s getting so California heat waves hardly rates as news, except of course if you live there, like Sue and I used too, and blackouts happen. When it’s 109 and the power goes off and with it air conditioning and traffic lights, then things get unpleasant quickly.

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We’ve been in Tucson Arizona for a few days. Per capita income here is a low $29k. The economy is primarily based on providing homes and services for the retired. Some retirement projects have thousands of homes, all nicely managed and well-run, but most are dead set against allowing homeowners to install solar power. How crazy is that? It’s a desert here. Yesterday was 106 F. But the managed communities won’t allow solar because some pinhead thinks it might mar the beauty of thousands of roofs. Or so they think. In ten years such obstinate thinking in the face of reality will be looked at as being nearly criminal.

Driving around you see lots of billboards for the big national home builders. Lennar. Pulte. Standard Pacific. I’m sure lots more are here too, and right now they are all dead in the tracks because of the subprime crisis. Since the economy here revolves around building homes, unemployment will now be rising rapidly.

Tucson seems a microcosm for cluelessness about climate change as well as a city about to get impacted hard by the subprime debacle.

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Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, has a piece on Hugo Chavez, inquiring if Chavez actually said something that was attributed to him. Here’s what Chavez may or may not have said (roughly translated from Spanish).

The PSUV [Chavez's party] doesn’t call itself “marxist-leninist” because it is a dogmatic thesis that has passed and doesn’t accord with the reality of today…the thesis of the working class as the motor of socialism and the revolution is obsolete…the worker of today is another thing, is distinct, is involved with information and telecommunications technology and Karl Marx could not have dreamed of these things.

Rather than take this idea and explore it, Proyect instead questions the motives of various socialist groups for spreading this thought, apparently because it’s not properly socialist and disrespects Marx. What is it with the socialist Left that they spend inordinate amounts of time having such theological, oops sorry, political arguments? The Gospel According to Karl. Thou Shalt Not Deviate or Question.

When Marx did his writings, the line between working class and bourgeoisie was clear and defined. Workers worked in the factories and the owners exploited them. The class boundaries were completely obvious to everyone.

In 2007, especially in the U.S., the boundaries aren’t clear at all, and Marxists do themselves and those they wish to organize a disservice by trying to make the class structure of today fit that of 150 years ago in England. Let’s take an M.D. who works for Kaiser, he makes $150,000 a year, has a nice house and drives a Mercedes. But he doesn’t own the means of production so therefore under Marxist theory, he is a member of the proletariat, of the working class. But I doubt he or anyone else views him as working class. Nor would approaching him as such be an effective organizing technique.

Also, especially in the U.S., most do not identify themselves as members of the working class, but as middle class, even if they aren’t. To organize, you need to reach people where they are now (or where they think they are), not where your theory tells you they should be. Also, most jobs here are service-oriented and involve some, maybe a lot of technology, and that tends to blur class boundaries even more.

Marxist theory needs some updating to bring it into the 21st century technological service-oriented world. And after 150 years, why wouldn’t it?

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