More Insight into the Economic Crisis

and our gummint's putative efforts to fix it -- just a taste of what I'm trying hard not to feel sick with rage about this morning. (Emphasis {bolding} supplied in all instances.)

From Buzzflash 3/30/09, citing economist Jeffrey Sachs, WaPo, and The New York Post (much more at the foregoing link):

The banks have zeroed in on Geithner's cash giveaway bonanza, the "Public Private Investment Partnership" (PPIP) . . . . As expected, Bank of America and Citigroup have angled their way to the front of the herd, thrusting their pig-heads into the public trough and extracting whatever morsels they can find amid a din of gurgling and sucking sounds. . . .

"As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner orchestrated a plan to help the nation's largest banks purge themselves of toxic mortgage assets, Citigroup and Bank of America have been aggressively scooping up those same securities in the secondary market, sources told The Post...

"But the banks' purchase of so-called AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities, including some that use alt-A and option ARM as collateral, is raising eyebrows among even the most seasoned traders. Alt-A and option ARM loans have widely been seen as the next mortgage type to see increases in defaults.

"One Wall Street trader told The Post that what's been most puzzling about the purchases is how aggressive both banks have been in their buying, sometimes paying higher prices than competing bidders are willing to pay."

. . . . Thus begins the next taxpayer-subsidized feeding frenzy featuring all the usual suspects. The race is on to vacuum up as much toxic mortgage paper as possible so it can be dumped on Uncle Sam at a hefty profit. Nice. These are the same miscreants the Obama Administration is so dead-set on rescuing. It's crazy to help people who use the cover of a financial crisis to fatten their own bottom line. Let them sink and be done with it.

From Geopolitics-Geoeconomics, 3/30/09 (more at the link):

What Geithner does not want the public to understand, his ‘dirty little secret’ is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000 allowed the creation of a tiny handful of banks that would virtually monopolize key parts of the global ‘off-balance sheet’ or Over-The-Counter derivatives issuance.

Today five US banks according to data in the just-released Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activity, hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default. [The five are, in order of decreasing magnitude, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and the merged Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank.] . . .

The Government bailout of AIG to over $180 billion to date has primarily gone to pay off AIG’s Credit Default Swap obligations to counterparty gamblers Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, the banks who believe they are ‘too big to fail.’ In effect, these five institutions today believe they are so large that they can dictate the policy of the Federal Government. Some have called it a bankers’ coup d’etat. It definitely is not healthy.

This is Geithner’s and Wall Street’s Dirty Little Secret that they desperately try to hide because it would focus voter attention on real solutions. The Federal Government has long had laws in place to deal with insolvent banks. The FDIC places the bank into receivership, its assets and liabilities are sorted out by independent audit. The irresponsible management is purged, stockholders lose and the purged bank is eventually split into smaller units and when healthy, sold to the public. The power of the five mega banks to blackmail the entire nation would thereby be cut down to size. . . .

This is what Wall Street and Geithner are frantically trying to prevent.

From Rolling Stone, 3/19/09 (much more at the link):

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. . . .

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

From NYT, 3/29/09 (more at the link):

Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

From Information Clearing House, 3/30/09, citing The Wall Street Journal and WaPo (much more at the link): "If Obama is serious about restoring confidence in the markets, he should replace current SEC chief Mary Schapiro with Eliot Spitzer." If Obama were serious, that is.

The lesson to me is, we ALL need to start working a lot harder to understand what's being done to us.

A Few Items from the Current DU T-Shirt Contest

(here) ("DU" = democraticunderground.com):

CALL CONGRESS!!! RIGHT @#$%&-ING NOW!!!

Nice post, Freeper.
[I mean . . . that's my entry.]

Also:
Something about narwhals. Maybe something like "NARWHALS RRRRAAAAAWWWWWWRRRRRR."

'What's that?' (pic of DU/brain). 'That's the brain cells you're saving with DU.'

Democratic Underground: Where Stoners and Gun Nuts Coexist Happily (most of the time).

Girls, Guns, Gays, and Government Spies -- all at DU.

Republicans: Bugs on the Windshield of Progress.

Democratic Underground: The Letters in Our Name Can Be Rearranged to Spell, 'Red Ground - A Comedic Turn.'

We're Democrats Because the Letters in 'Republican Party' Can Be Rearranged to Spell, 'Prepay Lubricant.'

PAUL KURGMAN [sic] IS A PASTY [followed by pic of a pastRy].

DU: Casting Asparagus on Morans Since 2001

DU: Where Sinners Post Logic

DU: We've Told You So Since 2001

DU: Now with Even More Democracy!

DU: You probably Won't Like Our Hair

DU: You Can't Not Look at It

Peace: Not just for Hippies Anymore

My mother spends all her time on Democratic Underground . . . and all I get is this crappy t-shirt.

DU: Because You Can Handle Reality.

We Come to Bury Conservative Idiots, Not to Praise Them.

The truth awaits you.

New Robot with Biological Brain

Per Seed,

"Life [for Kevin] Warwick’s new robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. 'It’s an innate response of the neurons,' says Warwick, 'they try to link up and start communicating.'

"For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.

(snip)

"At first, the young robot spent a lot of time crashing into things. But after a few weeks of practice, its performance began to improve as the connections between the active neurons in its brain strengthened."

Big Brothers Are Watching You

Per The New York Times,

"A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated [at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries] and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world . . . .

"R]esearchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved [because, as one of the researchers commented, 'this could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians.'] . . .

"Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information. . . .

"The malware . . . has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets . . . [and it] can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. . . ."

Still Think We Don't Need Paper Ballots?

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers:

"WASHINGTON — The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering.

(snip)

"In a presentation that could provide disturbing lessons for the United States, where electronic voting is becoming universal, Steve Stigall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections in developing nations. His remarks have received no news media attention until now.

"Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.

(snip)

"Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren't connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn't always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines."

(Emphasis supplied. More at McClatchy, one of the few decent print sources left.)

UPDATE: You can find an updated analysis of the stats from the last few national elections here.

Texas: the Other Canada?

Many don't realize, there actually is some cool stuff from TX (such as Southwest Airlines -- and remember, the Bushes are fake Texans).



A few more cool people, places, things from or that started (or got revived first) in Texas: Janis Joplin, Ornette Coleman, Barry White, Leadbelly, Michael Nesmith, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Buck Owens, Lyle Lovett, Meat Loaf, Dale Evans, ZZ Top (ok; but they're cool ironically), Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Richard Linklater, Farrah Fawcett, Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek, Ethan Hawke, Joan Crawford, Steve Martin, Tex Avery, Terrence Malick, Alvin Ailey, Molly Ivins, Ann Richards (can't resist including this quote from her speech at the '88 Dem. Nat'l Convention re- Bush Sr., just in case anyone hasn't had the pleasure: "Poor George, he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."), Walter Cronkite, Jim Lehrer, Katherine Anne Porter, Gene Roddenberry, the Dallas Video Festival, SXSW, and/or gallery, the Webb Gallery, Cadillac Ranch, regional theater (thanks to Margo Jones), Undermain Theatre, Julian Schnabel, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, James Magee, James Surls, Vernon Fisher, Good/Bad Art Collective, Erick Swenson, The Art Guys, Robyn O'Neil, Trenton Doyle Hancock, lots of other cool artists and galleries, the Rollergirl revival (see the Texas Rollergirls), Kitty Wigs, the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, Whole Foods, Austin ("more music venues per capita than any other U.S. city"), Chinati, chicken-fried bacon, fine tex-mex dining, and Big Tex!

List by no means complete; still, not bad for a state that's big but still pretty sparsely-populated.

Another NASA F-up (Not):

Per MSNBC, "NASA's online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. . . . The name 'Colbert' beat out NASA's four suggested options in the space agency's effort to have the public help name the addition. . . . NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. . . . [The 230,539 votes for Colbert] clobbered 'Serenity,' one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. . . ."

Any chance NASA secretly wanted Colbert to win? He certainly contributes to my serenity.

More at the link.

GREAT Article on AIG and the Bail-Out

in Rolling Stone.

(Seems like they and The New Yorker are among the few print media left in the U.S. doing real journalism anymore. Wonder if they're suffering as much as the print media owned/eviscerated by conservatives {i.e., most of the rest})?