Gold’s up again. Is Blankfein going down?

Posted on August 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

The bald little man in the oversize suit who lives in a $26 million apartment next to Central Park may yet have that smirk wiped off his face. He hasn’t been charges in any civil or criminal case — up to now, Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has turned a blind eye to Wall Street improprieties — but it’s never a good sign when a master of the universe thinks it’s prudent to hire a heavy-duty defense attorney.

From Reuters:

Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has hired high-profile Washington defense attorney Reid Weingarten, according to a government source, as the Justice Department continues to investigate the bank. Blankfein, 56, is in his sixth year at the helm of the largest U.S. investment bank, which has spent two years fending off accusations of conflicts of interest and fraud. The move to retain Weingarten comes as investigations of Goldman and its role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis continue. The news spooked already jittery investors. Goldman shares fell sharply in the final minutes of regular trading after Reuters reporting the hiring …

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) in April released a scathing report that criticized Goldman for “exploiting” clients by unloading subprime loan exposure onto unsuspecting clients in 2006 and 2007, and concluded that its top executives misled Congress during testimony in 2010.

Goldman Sachs stock “tumbled”. Not surprisingly gold soared, this time above $1,900 an ounce, at roughly the same time.

Idle speculation: Many Wall Street executives who contributed to the Obama campaign in 2008 are throwing money at Mitt Romney this year, supposedly because Obama backed the not-so-impressive Dodd-Frank Act. What if Obama were to hit back by authorizing serious investigation of Wall Street firms that caused the financial collapse?

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Politics, The New Depression, Uncategorized, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

NY Fed’s bottom line: Banksters above the law

Posted on August 22, 2011 by oddmanout215

Most people who buck the system are easily pressured to change course, but a few are more likely to get their back up and hold steady, at least until the pressure becomes unbearable. Gretchen Morgenson wrote today of one such stubborn fellow:

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal.

In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks.

Mr. Schneiderman and top prosecutors in some other states have objected to the proposed settlement with major banks, saying it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities.

Donovan says he contacted Schneiderman out of a desire “to speed up help for troubled homeowners” victimized by so-called robo-signing, forged documents and other foreclosure tricks used by big banks. But Schneiderman and attorneys general in other states don’t like the idea of a pay-off to homeowners that would bar possible future litigation against banksters:

“The attorney general remains concerned by any attempt at a global settlement that would shut down ongoing investigations of wrongdoing related to the mortgage crisis,” said Danny Kanner, the spokesman for Mr. Schneiderman. His office has opened several inquiries into mortgage practices during the credit boom.

The U.S. Department of Justice is on board with Donovan — Let’s settle now and help the poor homeowners, and not look closely at the banks that helped ruin the economy. And you can be sure Barack Obama is on board — or, rather, hiding below deck in the hope that voters won’t notice how big a part he has played in letting banks off the hook for what are, at the very least, highly dubious business practices.

Footnote: Is this chutzpah or mere stupidity? Kathryn S. Wylde, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said she told Schneiderman

“… it is of concern to the industry that instead of trying to facilitate resolving these issues, you seem to be throwing a wrench into it. Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.”

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Support our couch-potato patriots

Posted on August 21, 2011 by oddmanout215

Jackass proclaimed hero. Mission accomplished.

What’s with The New York Times? Week after week this summer, its editors have been running thoughtful essays on the Sunday Review section’s front page. Maybe they’ve decided to move away from predictable analysis pieces by staffers to guest writers who are used to thinking independently.

This week’s essay is about an annoying symptom of America’s decline — i.e., the tendency of far too many people to “infantilize” themselves through mindless worship of the military and belief in American exceptionalism. Think of George W. Bush strutting in his flight suit under the “Mission Accomplished” banner:

It’s a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them… The cult of the uniform also bespeaks a wounded empire’s need to reassert its masculinity in the wake of 9/11. “Dead or alive,” “bring it on,” “either you’re with us or you’re against us”: the tenor of official rhetoric in the ensuing years embodied a kind of desperate machismo…

“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators.

Posted in humor, Iraq war, mainstream media, New York Times, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Obama bans war criminals. Very funny.

Posted on August 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

It’s good to see something by Nat Hentoff, who wrote for Village Voice when it was worth reading and is still fighting the good fight against people in powerful positions who break the law. The subject matter of Hentoff’s recent article should surprise no one:

By executive order on Aug. 4, President Barack Obama refused entry to the United States of war criminals and human-rights violators (jurist.org, Aug. 4). He ignored, as he often does, the deeply documented factual evidence of war crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney administration along with grim proof that the Obama administration also violates our anti-torture laws and the U.N. Convention Against Torture we signed. Take, for example, right now under Obama, “The CIA Secret Sites in Somalia” (the nation.com, July 12).

In what will be an historic 108-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” Human Rights Watch is further accelerating the rising insistence here on accountability from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet for having not only authorized these war crimes, but also failing “to act to stop mistreatment, or punish those responsible after they became aware of serious abuses” (www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0711webwcover.pdf).

Not only has President Obama rejected an independent criminal investigation of these highest-profile officials, but also, adds Human Rights Watch, of Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, David Addington (counsel to Cheney) and, among others, John Yoo, author of the unsparingly cruel, aptly dubbed “torture memos” from the Ashcroft Justice Department that gave “legal cover” to allow torture.

Hentoff’s piece reminds us of the difference between “disappointing” and “disastrous.” Some people look at Barack Obama’s record — his collapse on the debt ceiling issue, betrayal of organized labor, expansion of the war in Afghanistan, extension of the Bush tax cuts, refusal to push for jobs programs, failure to push for prosecution of Wall Street crooks and possible war criminals, and so on — and say his presidency has been disappointing.

Others look at Obama’s record thus far and say it is disastrous. I don’t think historians will have a hard time making the right call on this one.

Posted in Congress, enviromentalism, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Some ‘Rain’ to keep us sane in Philly

Posted on August 20, 2011 by oddmanout215

At last the rain god intervened to clean the stinking streets — am I paraphrasing Travis Bickle? — after the hottest July on record in Philly. And now there’s a chance this will be the city’s wettest August on record.

Some people don’t like the rain, as the Beatles noted on the flip side of “Paperback Writer”:

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
They might as well be dead.

Not me. I’ll take the rain over the heat and feel fortunate not to be in Texas, where a record drought continues despite climate-change denier Rick Perry’s much-publicized rain dance in April. I’m sure Perry is devoting much deep thought to this matter.

The Philly heat wave broke with a flourish last Sunday, when a morning drizzle turned into a downpour that rarely let up until evening. I took a break from writing and went for a run in the afternoon after I dug through the rubble in my basement and found an old bill cap to keep the rain off my glasses.

Running to the Delaware River and back from the Italian Market is my version of going to church on Sunday. It’s much better for body and soul, especially when the temperature dips below 90 degrees and you feel cool rain streaming down your back instead of sweat.

After my run I ducked into a coffee shop (not vegan) and dripped water all over the floor as I ordered. The counter guy looked at me funny, as most people do these days, and said, “Where did you get that cap?”

I took it off and looked at the lettering on the front: Super Bowl XXIII. I realized the cap must be from the ton of stuff left by my son Barney when he moved out of my house years ago. Where Barney got the cap is anybody’s guess, although I’m sure it wasn’t at Super Bowl XXIII, he was three years old at the time.

“At the Super Bowl, of course,” I said. “What’s the matter, it doesn’t look so good?”

As if it mattered. If I worried about looking good, I wouldn’t run in the rain.

Posted in arts, humor, livable cities, Philadelphia, pop music | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

You can’t tell the cops (SEC) from the robbers

Posted on August 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

As you probably know, e-mailed information often ends up in databases that can be used against us by government agents, corporate spies or even acquaintances out to avenge real or imagined injuries. (I spent two years unsuccessfully trying to salvage online materials that were stolen or destroyed by a malicious hacker who’d pretended to be something else.)

And it’s just as easy for online criminals to destroy evidence of their crimes as it is for them to harass and steal from non-criminals. This is a point Matt Taibbi underscores in his most recent piece on Wall Street corruption, a story the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell:

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – “18,000 … including Madoff,” as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

A jobs-led recovery — what a concept!

Posted on August 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

A report written by Rutgers law and economics professor Philip Harvey pushes for a jobs-led recovery in place of the jobless recovery over which Barack Obama has chosen to preside up to now.

Harvey’s plan involves quick creation of a million jobs in fields such as “childcare, eldercare, education, public health and housing, construction and maintenance, recreation and the arts. And as many as 414,000 jobs created outside the program. Annual cost in program spending: $46.4 billion. Actual net cost, taking into account revenues and savings: only $28.6 billion.”

Go here for more info on the report. Meanwhile, here’s a killer detail from Harvey that helps explain why some of us think Obama has been the worst Democratic president in recent history:

…We currently need about 8.2 million more jobs to reduce the nation’s unemployment rate to 4.5%. Creating that many jobs in a program like the one described… would require a net increase in federal spending of about $235 billion during the first year… If the Bush-era tax cuts had been allowed to expire at the end of 2010, the federal government would have collected about $295 billion in additional revenue during 2011. This would have been more than enough to cover the cost of the job program…

Footnote: Robert Reich is hoping Obama’s recent call for jobs creation is serious, but no one knows how many jobs Obama has in mind or how hard he’ll fight for them. If past performance is an indication he’ll throw in the towel early, probably with the idea of saving the jobs issue for his re-election campaign.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, livable cities, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Cost of Bush’s wars? At least $12K per American

Posted on August 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

The U.S. in Afghanistan is looking a lot like the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. The cost of the war there and in Iraq, our other quagmire, is one of the two main causes of our record deficit, the other being lowered tax rates on the filthy-rich ultra-wealthy.

From McClatchy Newspapers:

… Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department… Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American… According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan …

Call your Congressperson and tell him/her you want your $12,000 back and you don’t care if he/she has to go straight to Dick Cheney’s door and threaten to shake the loot out of him and his Halliburton buddies. Even better if we could get the money back and have Cheney and Dubya extradited to one of those countries eager to try them for war crimes.

Any day now, right?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, Iraq war, Politics, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

More songs about buildings and bikes

Posted on August 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

I was watching a sunburned woman with red hair in a thick braid. In the corner of my eye, a bike rider zoomed past and disappeared behind a bus. I stepped into the street for another look, but the rider was a block away by then and I couldn’t see much of the bike.

It occurred to me that I’m still edgy — Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire — three weeks after my Iron Horse was snatched and I set out to replace it.

I wasn’t what you might call laid back before the theft, but at least I didn’t look at bikes as if they were obscure objects of desire, stirring up feelings that have little to do with practical needs.

Replacing a good bike is like trying to replace a so-called soul mate, except it usually becomes clear afterwards that the latter was merely a warped projection of one’s self-image, an illusion, while the former seems even more real and reliable once it’s gone. Soul mates often end up trying to kill you in one way or another, but the worst you need fear from a good bike is an occasional flat tire.

Which might be why I’ve been watching bikes more closely than I watch girls, pardon my politically incorrect usage. Sometimes a gaggle of bikes will be chained together at the same pole and I’ll stop to make sure my old used-to-be isn’t among them waiting to be rescued, and so what if I have to “retire” the thief, Rick Deckard-style?

The used bikes I see for sale at local stores are either battered and tired looking, or square and insubstantial, like certain suburban women in my distant past. Sometimes I’ll walk past one of the few public buildings in Philly where bike racks have been installed, and I’ll stare at a row of two-wheelers, amazed that bikes hardly ever resemble one another and never look remotely like my ex.

The guy who owns the shabby shop where I bought my Iron Horse has promised for weeks he’ll get used, affordable hybrids in stock, but I stopped by again yesterday and all his used bikes were clunkers. He had two brand-new hybrids, each priced at $400, not including taxes and a good $50-plus lock, and I thought of saying something rude but at that moment an ancient new wave song came on the radio and filled my head with ironic art school vibes:

A straight line exists between me and the good things.
I have found the line and its direction is known to me.
Absolute trust keeps me going in the right direction.
Any intrusion is met with a heart full of the good thing.

“The Good Thing” is right around the corner, I’m sure. Maybe it’s that elusive new bike.

Posted in arts, enviromentalism, Great Recession, humor, livable cities, Philadelphia, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Low wages = no recovery. Suck on that, Perry.

Posted on August 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

He walks tall, he talks tall, he sucks a mean corn dog in Iowa but, as Paul Krugman notes, Rick Perry is merely another well-groomed Republican liar when he promises to speed the country’s economic recovery:

In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act. So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

Perry governs an anti-union state with the highest percentage of minimum-wage jobs, a magnet for corporations systematically lowering the standard of living for average Americans. As Krugman observes, Perry’s slash-and-burn approach to jobs creation — low wages and weak regulatory policies — are a recipe for an even more depressed economy in the future:

… At a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

Does Perry get it? Of course he does. He’s George W. Bush on steroids, with the same low cunning and an uglier disposition. He’s convinced Americans are too gullible to understand that bringing down wages does nothing but enrich the people who own, invest in, or spin lies for corporations. And he will fire guns, hold prayer vigils and suck anything you put in front of him rather than tell this truth.

Footnote: The God-fearing gun toter is a hypocrite as well as a liar, as pointed out recently by Juan Cole:

[Perry] is another one of those dreary Red State governors who denounces federal taxes but is first in line for federal help. In fact, he covered a $6 billion shortfall in the Texas budget with $6 billion in stimulus money from Barack Obama, and now boasts of his governing skills with regard to the economy.

Posted in economic collapse, enviromentalism, God Squad, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments