A bankster prerequisite: Scamming 101

Posted on September 28, 2011 by oddmanout215

Matt Taibbi explains what triggered Wall Street protests

Actually, this long quotation from a February interview of Taibbi explains why it’s accurate to think of crooked investment bankers — banksters — as scam artists as well as degenerate gamblers of other people’s money:

… These banks were taking… subprime mortgages, and they would have these billion-dollar pools of mortgages where, in some cases, 70 or 80 percent of the loans were to people who had no identification or no jobs or who had put no money down into the mortgage. And then they were taking these loans and applying this phony baloney, hocus pocus math, these derivative instruments, and turning them into AAA-rated investments. And they were marketing, again, these securities to, say, state pension funds as AAA-rated investments, which means credit risk almost zero. So they took the stuff that they knew was very, very risky and very, very likely to default, and they were going to the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio, the state of New York, and saying, “Hey, this is almost as safe as — or in fact, it is as safe as United States Treasury bonds. You should buy this, and you’ll earn a little bit more than you’ll earn if you buy T-bills.” The reality was, they were just taking absolutely worthless stuff and sticking it with these people and then fleeing the scene.

While reading Taibbi’s words, I remembered years ago interviewing a police detective whose specialty was tracking down scam artists, usually guys who worked street scams involving gullible people making ATM withdrawals. The stakes are much higher on Wall Street, and the banksters in the sharp suits are just as sleazy as street scammers. So why aren’t they in jail?

Footnote: The protests are “about” bankster fraud resulting in the destruction of vast amounts of middle-class assets, but are also in reaction to the fact that banksters and corporate chiefs more or less own most of the major officeholders in both political parties and thus make a joke of government by and for the people.

Posted in casinos, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Times columnist snickers at Wall St. protesters

Posted on September 27, 2011 by oddmanout215

To my knowledge, only one story regarding the ongoing Wall Street protests appeared last week in The New York Times, and it was the sort of snarky, condescending dispatch you might expect from a Republican legislative staffer, not from a reporter for a daily. Here’s Ginia Bellafante’s lead paragraph:

By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.

Bellafante’s account is sketchy, to put it mildly. Throughout the Sept. 23 piece, she describes the crowds in the park and in the marches as smaller than the participants reported and dwindling by the day. She quotes a few random goofballs instead of the many knowledgeable people on the scene who could have articulated the protesters’ grievances. She assures us that those involved in this first real sign of a backlash against the Wall Street crooks who crashed the economy are practitioners of “pantomime progressivism.”

Shades of Tom Wolfe, but without the wit or the sense of history. I couldn’t help wondering if Bellafante has ever been hungry or homeless, or even slept outdoors. If she was ever arrested and locked in a shitty smelling cell, or shot with Mace or pepper spray, or clubbed over the head, thrown to the ground and held in place by a cop pressing his boot to her face.

You know, the sorts of things that happened to those silly protesters after Bellafante went back to her desk in the comfortable Times building.

Maybe Bellafante should be reassigned to the fashion section, where she might do less harm. Not likely. I’ll bet she was high-fived by her way-cool colleagues for writing such a fashionably snide article.

Footnote: The above post corrects an earlier version that referred to Bellafante as a reporter. It turns out she’s a columnist, which means the Times ran no “hard news” stories last week about the protests.

FYI: Bellafante seems a good example of what Will Bunch referred to when he suggested mainstream reporters would rather file a negative story than seem “unsavvy” — i.e., in sympathy with causes or groups of people who are deemed uncool or out of fashion.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Liberal decries DN’s report on police violence… Huh?

Posted on September 26, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here’s how Nathan Schneider of Democracy Now! responded when police violence — and the documenting of it by amateur videographers — finally forced some mainstream publications to stop pretending Occupy Wall Street isn’t happening:

In an article that recounts as many gory details as will fit, the [New York] Daily News devotes only two short paragraphs to what the protest is actually about and what protesters have been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” True, but too little. The real story for the Daily News, it seems, is not this unusual kind of protest, or the political situation which it opposes, but the chance to have the word “busted” on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain.

The DN’s front-page story wasn’t good enough for Schneider because it didn’t offer a detailed explanation of what has sparked the protests. WTF! What did Schneider expect from a tabloid, or from any other mainstream media outlets on the scene? Police violence was the story on Saturday, so that’s what was reported.

The MSM has had plenty of time — years, in fact — to report the unfairness and, in many cases, the possible criminality of those who work “the system,” especially the Wall Street banksters. They chose not to report these things, except in vague terms that masked the direct link between the banksters’ conduct and the ongoing economic meltdown.

Schneider should be celebrating a victory, but he seems wistfully disappointed. In regard to the MSM, he’s like Prince Andrei in War and Peace, lamenting the madness of war.

Above all, Schneider’s tone is reasonable, like that of the faux Democrat Barack Obama:

We in the press need to think more highly of our readers, as well as of our own ability to report on stories that don’t depend simply on the shock value of violence, or on cheap-shot ridicule, or on stifling formulas. For many Americans, nonviolent direct actions like this occupation are the best hope for having a political voice, and they deserve to be taken seriously as such.

Sometimes liberals make me sick.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Meet Blankfein’s buddy, Officer Badass

Posted on September 25, 2011 by oddmanout215

A young man is pushed and wrestled to the ground by a cop, then handcuffed. His crime? Not immediately retreating as the cop swaggered toward him on the sidewalk. The victim appears to say something to the cop right before the assault. Maybe “Why are you harassing peaceful protesters?” Or just “Why?”

Whatever he said, his actions clearly weren’t posing a threat to the cop.

The video shows, for anyone who cares to see it, how quickly cops in America can fly out of control in situations that involve large or small groups exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. The cop in this video isn’t behaving like a law officer but rather like a thuggish corner boy in the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up. (He’s also behaving like the cops in that neighborhood, but that’s another story.)

Videos that show similar misbehavior by cops at Occupy Wall Street are posted on Huffington Post, and many other videos are likely to appear online if police violence continues.

This is how journalism often happens these days. Increasingly, journalism does not happen through America’s corporate-controlled mainstream media, which have all but ignored the Wall Street protests for the eight days they’ve been in progress. I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein and the other banksters are grateful.

Footnote: If the protests were in Cairo rather than on Wall Street, The New York Times would have put them on its front page.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Facebook’s budding tyrant (like, comment, share)

Posted on September 24, 2011 by oddmanout215

I was scrambling eggs the other day and in the background on the radio was Mark Zuckerberg, gushing about the wonderful changes taking place on Facebook, and why it’s such a good thing that Facebook is taking over the social-networking world and making every bit of information about everyone available to everyone else, all the time, everywhere.

Not long before this, I’d read a Q&A on the new round of Facebook changes and encountered gems such as this:

Q: What is the scrolling, Twitter-like list of my Facebook friends’ activities doing on the right side of the new layout?

A: Facebook calls this the “ticker” — not to be confused with, but similar to, Twitter. The idea is to show a live feed of everything going on with your Facebook friends and pages you follow as it is happening. There will be information here that doesn’t appear on your regular news feed, such as songs your friends are listening to on the music service Spotify, news stories they are reading or, eventually, even movies or TV shows they watched on Netflix.

I’d thought Are you kidding me? but the horror didn’t really kick in until I heard Zuckerberg in full visionary mode. It hit me that this super-achieving dweeb really is out to take over the world and rearrange it to fit his vaguely totalitarian views on information, communications and community.

He’s 26 years old, but only someone with the mind of an old Stalinist would be so dead-set on “making the world open and connected” — the phrase written on the inside of Zuckerberg’s hoodie — as if there is anything inherently good about unlimited openness and connectivity.

It might not even strike Zuckerberg as ironic that he’s the gatekeeper of this brave new world; that he and his cronies are aiming to control who’s connected to what, by grabbing everything else on the Internet and serving it up to users as they see fit.

From the New Yorker:

The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company—what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy.

We shouldn’t take for granted that Zuckerberg’s invention will remain benign. In fact, anyone who doesn’t see Facebook as a potential monster probably thinks he or she really has 780 “friends.”

Footnote: I use Facebook (a few of my friends really are friends) but in a minimal way, and the time I spend using it decreases with each new creepy revelation about the people who control it.

Posted in mainstream media, Politics, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

‘Liberal’ media, Wall Street thick as thieves

Posted on September 23, 2011 by oddmanout215

Will Bunch commented on its invisibility. So did Firedoglake. Keith Olbermann discussed it with Bunch on Countdown, and even Stephen Colbert noted its conspicuous absence from mainstream news reports.

I’m referring to the “occupation” of Wall Street (Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza, actually) by a small army of idealists hoping to persuade Americans that their most dangerous enemies aren’t in Afghanistan but rather in New York City, in the skyscrapers that house the banksters who wrecked the economy in 2008 and put a permanent dent in American living standards.

So why aren’t mainstream media outlets covering an event involving would-be reformers of the deregulated, and often unregulated, financial services industry? Bunch pretty much answered the question he raised:

… Many reporters are somewhat liberal in their personal leanings… And since professional journalists are often obsessed with proving their “balance” above all else, and weak-kneed on reacting to right-wing criticism dating back to Spiro Agnew, that means bending over backwards to show they’re not ignoring something conservative like the Tea Party… The other ultimate goal of the modern journalist is to appear “savvy.” And what could possibly be more embarrassingly unsavvy than taking seriously the ambitions of a band of granola-eating missed-the-60s dirty bleeping hippie wannabes – crazy enough to think that they can change the world.

So what would it take to compel reporters from, say, The New York Times to travel a few blocks to cover a new phase of the class war that’s been going on in America for thirty years?

It would take more than the embarrassment of seeming “unsavvy,” or of being scooped by the Guardian (as usual) and Russian TV.

It would take an influx of “occupiers” so large and defiant and organized that reporters could no longer ignore the angry mood of the country, not without seeming to engage in suppressing a story simply because it runs counter to the interests of their employers, the owners of the MSM.

Footnote: I should have noted, as I usually do when the subject comes up, that Paul Krugman, Gretchen Morgenson and a few other staffers at NYT are aggressively critical in their coverage of Wall Street’s con men. But these people are commentators and analysts, not reporters.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, New York Times, The New Depression, Uncategorized, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Adios, summer girl. Or is it ‘sun-eyed’ girl?

Posted on September 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

Summer’s gone and good riddance, I’d rather any weather than a heat wave in Philly. But I still like the idea of summer, which I associate with old memories of hitchhiking, seashore towns, and chasing girls who enjoyed being caught.

Beck Hansen associates summer with… who knows? No one else making pop music since the early 1990s is more enigmatic. The scrawny space cowboy has cranked out scores of carefully crafted songs wrapped in swirls of sound that dazzle and amuse. He’s had it both ways — commercial success and the freedom to intermittently record albums so quirky and downbeat, he pisses off even ardent fans (shades of Dylan and Neil Young.)

Beck borrows from hiphop, Delta blues, bossa nova, electronica, whatever comes to mind as he writes and records. His postmodernist tricks are to disguise that he’s a throwback — a gifted songwriter and multi-instrumentalist always looking to improve on his existing work.

“Girl,” from Guero (2005), is a sunny melody with lyrics that grow darker the closer you listen. The boy pursuing the girl — … And I know I’m gonna steal her eye she doesn’t even know what’s wrong… — is probably a stalker, or worse.

Beck’s little joke is that he’s not singing “My summer girl” on the chorus. “Sun-eyed,” maybe. It sounds like “summer” (to me, at least) because that’s the word his melody has set me up to expect.

Footnote: I love the surprise of Beck’s acoustic slide guitar jumping up front for the interlude before the final chorus. It sounds like a tangle of conflicted urges.

Posted in arts, humor, Philadelphia, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Belated populist rhetoric from the big chief

Posted on September 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

It’s rude and obvious, so I’ll say it: If Barack Obama had stood up to Republicans early on instead of being cowed by their enmity and wowed by his own rhetoric, he’d have a much better chance of being re-elected. More importantly, our sick economy might be on the verge of modest recovery rather than major relapse.

Instead, for reasons that remain murky, Obama’s strategy for fixing the economy was one of pre-compromise that sank his initiatives even before he launched them. Now, abruptly, a big change:

During his remarks this morning, Obama directly responded to Republicans accusing him of “class warfare,” but rather than simply deny the charge, he made the critical point that the act of protecting tax cuts for the rich is itself class warfare, in effect positioning himself as the defender of the middle class against GOP class warriors on behalf of the wealthy.

Well, duh… Did it really take the man more than two years to understand Republicans were using the class warfare charge to pre-empt attempts to re-install tax rates on the rich that were in effect in the 1990s? I doubt it. More likely, Obama has finally understood he’ll be turned out in 2012 if he doesn’t confront the grim reality that class war is in progress and the non-wealthy are losing badly.

I wish I could believe he has had a change of heart rather than a political panic attack. But then I think of his pathetic job performance leading up to the disastrous midterm elections last year, when he more-or-less disowned basic Democratic principles, and Democratic candidates, signaling Neville Chamberlain-style weakness when he should have been coming on like FDR in support of the jobless and underpaid and in opposition to Bush’s tax cuts.

A shrewder cynic would have at least paid lip service from the start to the idea that he cared about the non-wealthy.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mid-term elections, Obama, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

When serfs fight back, GOP cries ‘Class warfare!’

Posted on September 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

This week’s winner of the chutzpah award is libertarian con man Paul Ryan, for accusing the Democratic Party of “class warfare.” Ryan is a disciple of Ayn Rand, the Benzedrine-addled academic who wrote two door-stopper novels that celebrated “the morality of rational self-interest,” a concept Republicans use to justify cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, slashing aid to the poor, and privatizing everything from mail service to Medicare.

From today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Republicans on Sunday decried the notion of a new minimum tax rate for millionaires as “class warfare,” saying the proposal by President Obama may be intended to portray congressional Republicans who resist it as being callously indifferent to the hardships facing many Americans… Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said the tax proposal, which Obama is expected to roll out Monday, would also weigh heavily on a stagnating economy… “It adds further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation,” Ryan told Fox News Sunday. “Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

Ryan said a few years back that Rand was the main reason he got involved in “public service.” This would be amusing if he wasn’t in a position to potentially impose Rand’s ideology on the rest of us. “Instability” doesn’t exist in Rand’s universe, where there are two primary classes — a small group of gifted, courageous entrepreneurs and a horde of compliant serfs. Creating jobs for others wasn’t a priority for Rand and isn’t for Ryan, not unless the jobs pay badly enough to further enrich the ruling class.

I wonder how many of Ryan’s fans have actually read the artless, humorless trash that made Rand a hero to mean-spirited right-wing academics and politicians.

Regarding class warfare: In the modern American era, it’s been going on at least since August 5, 1981, when, as Michael Moore recently wrote, “Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who’d defied his order to return to work.” Reagan felt safe doing this because the AFL-CIO told its members who worked for airlines to cross the air controllers’ picket line, a death blow to their strike.

That moment of cowardice and disunity helped embolden the Ryans and Reagans of the world to wage a relentless ongoing campaign to crush organized labor and workers’ rights. They’ve almost succeeded. It’s now or never for a serious counteroffensive.

Posted in arts, Congress, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Are e-books tomorrow, or just the end of time?

Posted on September 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

Check out this from The Economist in case you’re still wondering about the future of mass-produced paper books:

To see how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books…

Is this necessarily a bad-news story, or is it just that fogies like me are too quick to equate the physical presence of books — in ceiling-high shelving units, in stacks on the floor — with literature and even literacy?

The latter, probably. Looking at a wall full of books comforts me. I like the smell of books and enjoy rubbing the pages between my thumb and forefinger before turning them.

I can’t pretend reading paper books is more elucidating than reading e-books. Nor can I argue with those who say it’s more convenient and eco-friendly to store a library of books on your Kindle than crowd your home with hard copies.

On the other hand, it’s likely the brave new world of digitization will undermine the book business, just as it has undermined what used to be called the record business, if only because it’s so much easier to steal and rapidly “share” digital files than hard copy. (Take “Purple Haze,” for example.)

Also, it’s too soon to know what digitization is doing to artists and audiences. Will consumers place as much value on instantly accessible digital content as on works that were packaged and displayed in public, in stores? Are future artists as likely to strive for innovation or even distinctiveness now that works from all eras are being randomly clumped together and accessed via digital gadgets?

William Gibson, an aging writer but not a fogie, thinks artists and audiences will do just fine. He rejects the very use of words like innovation and future, and argues that kids today think in terms of “a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.”

Gibson and his fellow novelist Bruce Sterling have noted that the present turned out to be very different (grimmer) than many people thought it would be, so much so that it is foolish to think in terms of “a grand historical schema.”

Maybe so, but my endless digital Now isn’t likely to include e-books, even if I could afford a Kindle. And I can definitely live without a BILLY bookcase, just as easily as I live without IKEA’s other crap.

Posted in arts, enviromentalism, humor, mainstream media, movies, pop music | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments