Reprint Heaven: John Neville (1925 - 2011)

The Age Of Reason: Tuesday

Neville As Karl August Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von Münchausen

The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson: It seems to me, sir, that you have rather a weak grasp of reality.

Baron von Münchausen: Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash -- and I'm delighted to say I have no grasp of it, whatsoever!

--  Johnathan Pryce, John Neville, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (1988)
Dir: Terry Gillam

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Reprint Heaven: Think People Feel Differently Now?

(From October, 2009)

 Sign Outside The New York Stock Exchange; October, 2008

Dear American Banksters:

Do you think anyone has changed their feelings... ?

Just Sayin'.

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MEHR:  In the New York Times, you might find this an article worth reading.

During the worst of the financial crisis, according to prosecutors, Serageldin had approved the concealment of hundreds of millions in losses in Credit Suisse’s mortgage-backed securities portfolio. But on that November morning, the judge seemed almost torn. Serageldin lied about the value of his bank’s securities — that was a crime, of course — but other bankers behaved far worse. 

Serageldin’s former employer, for one, had revised its past financial statements to account for $2.7 billion that should have been reported. Lehman Brothers, AIG, Citigroup, Countrywide and many others had also admitted that they were in much worse shape than they initially allowed. Merrill Lynch, in particular, announced a loss of nearly $8 billion three weeks after claiming it was $4.5 billion.

Serageldin’s conduct was, in the judge’s words, “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks.” Nevertheless, after a brief pause, he eased down his gavel and sentenced Serageldin, an Egyptian-born trader who grew up in the barren pinelands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to 30 months in jail. Serageldin would begin serving his time at Moshannon Valley Correctional Center, in Philipsburg, where he would earn the distinction of being the only Wall Street executive sent to jail for his part in the financial crisis.

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MEHR, MIT SCHWEIN: And then, there's this:

The U.S. economy and the stock market were booming on April 21, 1998, when the heaviest hitters of the Clinton administration met to discuss a controversial topic: whether the government should regulate a profitable but risky corner of the financial markets. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs... co-chairman, attended. So did his deputy, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve. The meeting’s odd woman out was Brooksley Born, the little-known chairwoman of a little-known agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who exhorted her colleagues to consider regulating privately traded derivatives such as swaps contracts.

It’s no secret she lost. Her defeat that day left regulators not only powerless but clueless about the explosive growth in credit default swaps during the decade that followed, which allowed speculators to bet on an ever-rising housing market. The subsequent bust in 2008 caused the most devastating economic downturn since the Depression.

Now nine pages of handwritten notes from that pivotal meeting have emerged, documenting for the first time what happened behind closed doors...

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Chernobyl Fun Park Opens

William Daniels - © New York Times

Not to be outdone by the Japanese, Sad Vlad The Putin and Russia's slightly lesser oligarchs have created a new family-themed fun park at the site of what (until March 11, 2011) was the worst nuclear disaster on the planet -- Chernobyl.

With bright colors, snappy architecture, a mutant wildlife petting zoo and theme restaurants, "It will rival the Dizni Walter place," said Ergun Tismevonasky of the Greater Chernboyl Lead-Lined Chamber of Commerce. "I am never believing what they say. Chernobyl is like park. Bring the children you can spare."

Admission for the first fifty thousand visitors is free, but you will have to purchase transportation and radiation gear, and bear costs of disposal of your irradiated body.

Click On Image To Enlarge; Easy! Fun! And Less Than 50 Rads/Hr.!

Certainly appears to be a DizniWorld sort of construction, doesn't it? As reported in the Sunday New York Times, Chernobyl was caused by a string of human errors culminating in an explosion, a breach of containment, and fires which spread radioactive particles across the (then) southern Soviet Union and later the planet.  Fukushima was the result of a natural disaster which exposed a string of human errors -- specifically those committed (and continue to be) by Japan's nuclear conglomerate, Tepco.

Before Chernobyl, before Fukushima, the possibility that a serious, uh, "incident" could happen at a sizable nuclear facility which lost power to its critical systems as a result of a serious natural disaster or an, uh, "dislocation" in the social order, is fair to good.

I continue to be stunned that anyone believes reactor-based power generation is safe -- but I'm just a Dog and nobody listens to me.

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Downton Abby Normal

I feel it's incumbent upon me to remind that Downton Abbey, BBC's hit on PBS, the 'let's-have-three-cheers-for-the-rich-toffs' series, has opened for the past four seasons with the same image of Lord Robert Grantham and Isis, his Labrador Retriever, walking up towards the palatial family home of the Crawleys.

Or, a higher class of soap opera with the high production values of British television -- and brought to you by the image of the hind end of a white dog.

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Random Black Dog Bark Bark Barking

In These Times

(Winston Churchill -- world leader, champion of England's titled class; boozer, dilettante painter and cigar aficionado -- used to call the bouts of depression which seized him periodically as "The Black Dog". I'm not a black dog, but am feeling a bit 'dark' these days (indeed; no surprise there), so be warned.)

The current economic situation in the United States, also described as 'The New Normal', could be summed up in these points:

• Salaries and Wages = Nearly Flat For Over A Decade -- Luckily, we have had almost no inflation during the same period, but if you're not bringing home more money even a modest rise in prices can hurt;  
• It's Not That Jobs Are Created; It's What Kinds Of Jobs -- Employment numbers have gone up to a degree in construction and some manufacturing sectors, but the broadest gains in total jobs have been in the Service Economy -- maids and waiters and towel boys and gardeners and spa attendants and boat crew lackeys;
• Unemployment Figures Continue To Ignore The Lost Workforce -- A news item like "US Jobless Claims Hover At Pre-Recession Levels... [which offers] further evidence of the economy's underlying strength" might make you believe everything is 'finally getting back to normal' after the Go-Go, 'Lil' Boots' Bush years and the Crash.  
• >>> The numbers receiving unemployment payments, as reported, is shrinking -- but the number of people who have been unable to find work since the fall of 2008 (no pun intended) is ignored. No one really knows how many people are in this category -- and even the new Fed Chairman, Janet Yellen, questions whether there is more unreported 'slack' in the labor market than unemployment figures suggest.
• The Gap Between The Top One-Tenth Of One PerCenters And Everyone Else Has Grown in the past decade. Period. We are a more stratified and less socially-mobile culture than at any time since the end of the Second World War. 
• >>> The proof is in two points:  The average annual income of the bottom 90% of Americans is approximately $30,000 -- the annual income of the .01% is $24,000,000 ; and, the distribution of all wealth (not just annual income, but 'who owns what') in America is lopsided:  42 percent of everything is owned by the top One Per Cent, while the bottom 80% of the population owns just 5%.  That's of everything -- real property (homes, office buildings, land), stock, bonds, cash, cars, et al.

The current definition of The New Normal is "Secular Stagnation", where job growth is modest (we still haven't reached the percentage of full-time employed in the overall U.S. workforce as existed before 2008).  Large corporate employers have continued to keep wages low, while executive and managerial bonuses have gone up. The pension and health coverage benefits of their retirees is shrinking, and those just entering the workforce understand their employers will only provide the minimum, band-aid-for-their-conscience safety net of benefits. It ain't your grandfather's work-world any more.

Obligatory Image Of Happy Children, Enjoying Life In Modern America ©

In Middle Of Nihilist Blog Rant

 It's just one Dog's opinion, but you might have the feeling, looking around, that we're becoming a society where a layer of the truly wealthy, the Owners, live in security and privilege, nearly invisible to the rest of the world, while the rest of us... don't.

We buy the products and use services which they've significantly invested in -- or, they own the raw materials, or the land, or the ships. It's like the difference in San Francisco between those who "ride the bus", and everyone else (though employees of Google and Facebook and eBay and Yahoo are just as much Tools and servants of the .01% as the rest of us). We're fleeced by corporations, finance companies and banks, manufacturers, and employers from our first day to our last, and in the end a company the wealthy own will rent our children pennies to put on our eyes.

But, take heart. Paul Kingsnorth, former environmental activist, is fairly certain that we are moving swiftly into a period of climatic upheaval and that the chance of an apocalyptic die-off in the human population, a Mad Max coming to a street near you, is a certainty as ecosystems fail and power systems can't be sustained. Meaning that (according to Kingsnorth, and other environmental researchers) no matter what we do, we're doomed.

The good part, I suppose, is that the Uberwealthy will suffer, die, and slide into extinction along with the 99%. And there won't be any pennies left for the Boatman, let alone our eyes.

Well. I recall a comment made by Martin Luther -- devout christian; constipation sufferer, author of the 95 Theses whose efforts created the Reformation and centuries of civil war in the christian world; religious and political radical, misogynist and anti-Semite.  He said: If I were told that the world would end tomorrow, I would still go into the garden and plant an Apfelbaumchen (little apple tree).

And so must we all.

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MEHR: BITTE SCHIESSEN SIE MIR SOFORT:  As another sign that civilization has passed its peak and is now in irreversible decline, if you were a shareholder of Warren Buffet's Berkshire-Hathaway corporation, you would be attending the company's annual meeting in Kansas City -- and like any gathering In These End Times, you get the chance to take home a Tschochki or two, you lucky, far-sighted investor, you.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will sell rubber ducks of Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charles Munger wearing Mexican-themed outfits at the company’s annual meeting, which falls two days before Cinco de Mayo. The “fiesta ducks” sport sombreros, multicolored ponchos and — in Buffett’s case — a maraca, according to an advertisement in the visitor’s guide to the May 3 event, which will be held at the CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraska. The souvenirs will be sold by Berkshire’s Oriental Trading party-supply business for $5 a pair.

 View The Terror And Shame: Click On Image To Enlarge! Easy! Fun!

(Picture courtesy of the Berkshire-Hathaway Annual Meeting Brochure,

Which You Can See In Its Entirety Here)

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Your Money's No Good Here, Mr. Putin

Sad Vlad Doubles Down




There's something about the tragedy playing out in Ukraine since the Fall of last year -- and in particular the attitude of Sad Vlad, The Putin (who always, to me, seems sad; he is Sad Vlad) which reminds me of Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining.

A man finds a sense of belonging and place, self-justification and a measure of success, but only within a terrible illusion of evil and death -- one that ultimately consumes him: The image of Jack Torrance at the bar in the Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel, believing he's in the middle of a party and not realizing where he actually is -- or is not -- and what's coming. 
 

LLOYD:  Good evening, Mr. Putin.  (Leans forward) What'll it be?  

 PUTIN:  Hair of the bear what bit me, Lloyd!

 LLOYD:  Crimean Surprise; certainly.  How's everything going, Mr. Putin?

 

PUTIN:  Y'know, I don't understand it, Lloyd. I never laid a hand on their goddamned heads, those Ukrainian-whatevers. I love the little sons of bitches! There's not a goddamned thing I wouldn't do for 'em. And look how they treat me. 

LLOYD:  Ukrainians. You can't live with them, but you can't live without them. 

PUTIN:  Words of wisdom, Lloyd; words of wisdom.

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It Came From Outer Space

And Did Not Want Our Women

One year after a meteor sliced through our atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia and exploded, we escaped being hit by yet another really big piece of primordial space rock. This asteroid measured roughly 885 feet wide (nearly the length of three football fields) and raced past us at about 27,000 mph.

The good people at SpaceWeather.com reported on it, and other Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (or, PHA's), giving us all food for thought.

 Click On Scary Graphic To Appreciate It More Fully -- Easy & Fun! (SpaceWeather.com)

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Reprint Heaven: Hope? What Was That About?

(Hopey-Changey, Sorta: I keep watching the antics of our current President [his defense of the excesses of the NSA, and his sudden about-turn-support for completion of the Keystone Pipeline, just to name two recent examples]. I continue to be disappointed and wonder why I am at all surprised.

(The financial structure which helped create the 2008 Crash is still largely unregulated -- it's true that some financial institutions have been slapped with fines and exposed for price-fixing LIBOR, insider trading, and malfeasance in using investor funds to shore up losses and cooking the books. But the shadow market in derivatives, for example, is opaque to all but the people who benefit from it, and chugs on unabated and largely unfettered by oversight or common sense.

(I recently saw an estimate [sorry, folks; do your own research] that the amount of derivatives globally is now in excess of $100 Trillion. Should we ever have another Bad Day At The Race Track as we did in September, 2008 (Or October 29, 1929), that part of the iceberg of international finance we can't see will make things very interesting.

(And, I keep watching the antics of the wealthy and privileged -- a bit like running down a two-lane blacktop towards a pickup truck that's driving on, slowly picking up speed. Our Lords and Masters Of The Universe are in the back of the pickup, watching all of us try and catch up to the truck as it pulls away... and the truck just keeps getting father and farther out of reach, no matter how hard any of us run.  From October, 2009.)

(Margaret Bourke-White, Soup Line, From The 1937 Book

[With Erskine Caldwell] 'Have You Seen Their Faces?' )

All right; move along. Nothing to see here. Go on, or I'll run ya in.

According to Glen Greenwald this morning, Adam Storch, VP of Goldman-Sachs' Business Intelligence Group, has been appointed the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the United States' Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division.

Let me repeat: A Vice-President of Goldman-Sachs, the investment firm which participated in ruining the nation's economy, benefited hugely from the Bush TARP program and the Obama continuing bailout; and has current former employees in key positions in the current administration; will be in charge of enforcing securities and trading regulations for the financial industry in the United States.

( MEHR, u. SPATER: And the 29-year-old Storch is only one of quite a long list of former Goldman employees in the administration.  That people in finance take positions in government isn't unusual --  but past a certain point the numbers alone are surprising.)

Uh-huh. I've broken up a larger paragraph of Greenwald's post below to make a point:

In October of last year [Greenwald writes], a Goldman-Sachs Vice President, Neel Kashkari, was named by former Goldman CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Pauslon to oversee the $700 billion TARP bailout.

Bernanke; Ex-Goldman CEO Paulson; Lil' Boots (Photo: MSNBC)

>> In January of this year, Tim Geithner hired a former Goldman-Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, to be his top aide and Chief of Staff.

>> In March, President Obama nominated Goldman-Sachs executive Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures markets, even though (or "because") Gensler confessed to lax regulation during the Clinton administration over the very derivative instruments that caused the financial crisis.

The National Debt As Percentage Of GDP (Matt Yglesias, 10/3/08)

>> In April, Goldman hired as its top lobbyist Michael Paese, the chief aide to Rep. Barney Frank on the House Financial Services Committee, which Frank chairs.

Of course, only an irrational, raving conspiracy theorist would believe that any of those events have any connection at all to this, from today's Washington Post:

"The nation's largest banks, preserved from failure by federal aid and romping in markets revived by federal aid, are racking up vast profits even as the broader economy struggles to emerge from recession . . ."

"Goldman said it earned $3.19 billion between July and September, nearly the most it has ever made in three months, a record it set earlier this year."

(Billboard, Connecticut Ave. and Morrison St. NW, Washington D.C., 2009)

Worldwide economic collapse was avoided after the Fall of 2008. It should surprise no one that after the U.S. Government transferred trillions of dollars to the banking and investment sector, then that sector's performance improved.

But if the surviving banks are bigger and more powerful than before the crisis and crash (which is not over), if they are not subject to greater, independent scrutiny and regulation... then one of the primary stated goals of the government -- to eliminate the risk and ensure that circumstances which caused the economic meltdown would not happen again -- well, that's just a complete failure.

This was one result of the Crash of 1929, through New Deal legislation -- creation of the SEC, a regulatory agency which had never existed before. It was part of a sweeping reform of both the securities and banking system, which we need now, badly -- and won't get. Because the fix is in.

(Source: Contexts.org; Data through mid-2005)

What's occuring isn't free-market Capitalism. It's gaming the system for a narrow group of players which benefits them, enormously, while the remainder of the population suffers and struggles.

It's trickle-down, Supply-Side, We-got-ours-and-fuck-the-rest-of-you Darwinism that favors the top one-tenth-of-one per cent of the population. I'm sorry to disappoint the Teabaggers, but this isn't 'Socialism' at all. It's theft.

Why is the President allowing this to occur? Like any crime, you ask Who has motive? Who benefits? and, Who can get away with it?
...

The Financial Services Committee in the House -- Representative Barney Frank's committee (remember Michael Paese? Frank's former top aide; who now works for Goldman?) -- yesterday passed a bill to regulate derivatives which Greenwald says "is so filled with loopholes it may end up exempting most industry players" -- an absolute benefit for Goldman-Sachs.

Greenwald concludes, That the administration continues, so brazenly, to place Goldman-Sachs executives in the very government positions with the greatest power over the financial industry illustrates how little effort is devoted to hiding what is really taking place.

Our political circus -- the 'Birthers', 'Teabaggers'; Limbaugh, Beck and Bachmann -- only keeps our eyes off the People Behind The Curtain. Those sparkly, shiny, noisy advertisements on teevee beckon us on, to a future filled with consumer goods and elite access that can never be ours. 99% will live in prefabricated dwellings, while the %0.10 live in the sort of safety and comfort, for themselves and their children, that we will never even see a photograph of in one of Rupert Murdoch's Fox Tabloids.

Better Than The Goddamn Reds! -- ad campaign of the American Industry Council, 1935,
showing all three major billboards in a series (The central one appeared in Bourke-White's photo,
Soup Line) Life, however, was much harder for most people than these ads portrayed.
For those running the show, it always pays to promote cognitive dissonance.

Meanwhile, the same groups of players, more or less, manage to benefit year after year and generation after generation. Does anyone believe that 'former' employees of Goldman-Sachs, now in government, won't make decisions which protect their friends? And after four or more years on small government salaries, where will they go? Back to work at Goldman, of course.

In 2001, it was a huge tax cut for the upper 2% of America's population. This time, in 2008 and 2009, banks and investment houses are being handed our money directly, and with little oversight as to how they use it. They certainly aren't lemnding more money -- which was the point of the bailout, to free up capital to lend, stimulate the economy and create jobs for the millions out of work.

But, no. Instead, they're holding on to the Bush-TARP and Obama-bailout funds. They're paying out huge bonuses to their executives. They're continuing to squeal that things are hard, and that they may need more money.

Didn't we just have an election, which in part was about a corrupt, incompetent, Rich, Frat-Boy leader who dragged the country into debt and an utterly mismanaged war, while he and his "Have and Have Mores" friends did so very well?

Who was all the Hope you spoke about for, Mr. President?

Everybody knows the dice are loaded,
everybody rolls with their fingers crossed;
everybody knows the war is over;
everybody knows the good guys lost
-- Leonard Cohen

Speak, America -- Speak! Good Boy.

Mongo Is Listening

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Turning

Pete Seeger (1919 - 2014)

©Andrew Sullivan / New York Times

I think he would want us to sing. And to resist -- not fight -- but to sit down in a place not far from Wall Street and decline to be moved; to stand in front of the tank; to call things that are happening by their right names -- and remember a lesson that The Few would like The Many to forget: That we are all family, trying to do the best we can, and that the highest thing we can do is make the journey easier for each other.

Now he knows what we do not. Stand up, and sing.

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