This link was passed on to my wife by an old friend. Well worth a few minutes of your time. Makes you realize how much creativity is out there. Maybe there’s hope after all.
Some commenters on the site suspect that some of the pictures were photoshopped. Most of them look genuine to me.
This one is the fruits of free association. I suppose this is sort of a 60s cliche, but I still love the song, and these group songfests are always fun. The main players here are Paul McCartney, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, Brian Wilson, and Rod Stewart, but if you’re an aficionado, you’ll be able to spot a lot of other stars, both mega and minor.
This video is from 2002, and if you watch carefully I believe you’ll see a short glimpse of Tony Blair, who at or around that time was proving that the song’s premise was, unfortunately, not quite true.
From Pro Publica:
There are yet more delays in implementing financial reform. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has said it needs extra time to write a set of derivatives rules required by Dodd-Frank, and others that were scheduled to go into effect automatically next month may be deferred until the end of the year—leaving the multitrillion-dollar market mostly unregulated for the time being. The agency is meeting today to hammer out the details of the delay.
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The commission’s chairman, Gary Gensler, said the extra time could be considered “some interim relief” for Wall Street. He’s also said in recent days that volatile commodities prices and speculation in the commodities market show that new derivatives rules are needed.
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The CFTC isn’t the only one falling behind on derivatives rules. Securities and Exchange Commission—which is tasked with writing rules for a category of security-based derivatives—has said that it will also be delaying them and providing some “temporary relief.” The Washington Post noted that the SEC has yet to draft some of its rules.
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And there’s also this: Opponents to financial reform are still trying to repeal the bill or roll back key parts of it.
Well, Dodd-Franks wasn’t much, but it was something. Here we have absolute proof, if any were needed, that there is no constant direction in history. During the Great Depression we at least recognized the source of the problem and dealt with it, and until the banksters managed to unravel the regulations in the nineties, the solutions largely worked. This time around we made no serious attempt to do anything, and the fix is clearly in on the one half hearted attempt we did make. The Republicans are, of course, leading the way, but the Democrats are more than happy to follow.
Part of this can be assigned to bad timing. FDR came in several years after the shit hit the fan; nothing had been done and he had no fingerprints on what came before. Obama would have been better off had Bush’s depression been a year old instead of only a few months. He would have had more wind at his back to do something meaningful, though, given Tim Geithner, it’s debatable whether he would have been interested All that being said, there was no enthusiasm anywhere for putting the bankers in their places. We are, therefore, doomed to repeat this little piece of history, if we ever manage to restore the economy to the point where it’s worth destroying again.
Nice to know, too, that the bankers and speculators will be getting some “temporary relief”. How about the unemployed?
I am, I confess, chronologically eligible to join AARP, though I haven’t done so. I hold grudges, and I haven’t forgiven them for their position on the drug benefit and Medicare Advantage. Plus, I can’t face up to being old.
Anyway, my obstinacy may be vindicated, if it’s true that AARP’s about to announce a receptivity to cutting Social Security benefits.
Never trust a “public interest” group that would hire a Republican to lead it.
It appears from this article in the Times that the FBI has its sights set on Lance Armstrong, and will not stop until they get him, no matter how much it costs the taxpayers and no matter how trivial the offense. I hold no brief for Armstrong, but there is something unseemly about the top law enforcement agency in the country targeting an individual and, Ken Starr-like, relentlessly investigating until they find something to charge him with. Even Javert confined himself to chasing a guy who had already been convicted.
I’d feel a bit better about this if they were as implacable about going after the criminals that cause real harm. We all know in our guts (the same place the FBI knows about Armstrong, judging by the indication that they’re trying to gin up a witness tampering charge) that the bankers and the hedge fund guys were engaging in criminal acts—hyper-organized crime if you will. Putting Armstrong away won’t accomplish much, but I’m sure that if a couple of the big boys, rather than the peripheral players, went to jail, we might see a bit better behavior from the plutocrats. We might even avoid the next recession. A little implacability in pursuit of those criminals would be appreciated.
I’ve read at least 25 of them. A few I think I read in college, but can’t remember for sure, so I’m not counting them. Of course these lists are pretty subjective.
Every one of them is a grifter.
ABC News reports that Newt Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership organization, a non-profit dedicated to Christian faith issues, has provided contracts worth $220,000 to Gingrich Communications, a for-profit consulting firm owned by Gingrich. Another one of Gingrich’s non-profits, American Solutions for Winning the Future, which supports oil drilling, shares resources with the oil lobby, although it does not disclose in-kind payments from the industry. Moreover, Gingrich regularly meets with members of Congress under the auspices of his for-profit health care company, yet does not register as a lobbyist. “It is often difficult to tell where the work of one Gingrich entity ends and where the work of another begins,” notes the report, by Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross and Angela Hill.
James Surowiecki, writing in the most recent New Yorker makes the case for approving Elizabeth Warren’s nomination (prediction: it isn’t going to happen, and the Obama administration will leave her to “twist slowly, slowly in the wind”) and argues that the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will actually be good for the banks:
The C.F.P.B. hopes to change this, largely by insuring that consumers will be told the true terms of a deal, in a simple and clear fashion. (As an example, it recently released two possible mortgage disclosure forms, and both were two pages long.) This would obviously be good for borrowers. But it would help most lenders, too. For all the talk of the financial industry’s power, its performance over the past decade has actually been dismal. Countless lenders have gone out of business, and many of those still standing saw their stock price decimated after they loaned immense amounts of money to people who couldn’t repay it. The banks thought they were taking advantage of uninformed consumers, but they ended up playing themselves. In a more transparent credit market, almost everyone would have been better off.
This makes perfect sense, except….it only really makes sense if one assumes that Warren’s opponents, if they do not care about consumers, at least care about the long term viability of the institutions for which they work or to which they are beholden for political contributions. It ain’t necessarily so.
The big banks are not worried about going bankrupt. They know that they can count on Uncle Sam to bail them out. But even those who work for institutions that are small enough to fail have reason to prefer the status quo. A lot of Pople have gotten very rich driving the corporations for which they work into the ground. So rich that they are utterly indifferent to whether that entity succeeds or fails in the long run. They know, as well, that they can always go elsewhere, regardless of the long term effects of their actions. If they make money in the short term, that’s all that matters. From their perspective, history has shown that they can make vast amounts of money in the short term by operating in an opaque environment where it is easier to hide their fraud. Would more regulation assure the survival of more of these institutions? Probably. Would the scam artists still be able to rake off outrageous amounts of money? They fear not, and that’s the reason for the opposition.
As for the politicians, the same principles apply. No matter what the Supreme Court may say, in the end, corporations don’t give money, the people who control them give money. So long as politicians please those people, it is immaterial to them whether the corporations for which their donors work continue to thrive.
Some weeks it’s hard to find stuff for this feature. I try hard not to repeat myself, which is not easy because, along with the fact that I grow old and forgetful, I don’t keep track of what I’ve already put up. A simple database would have been useful, but it’s too late now. I considered Paul Revere and the Raiders, in honor of Sarah, but I did them already, and they really don’t rate an encore, and, thinking in the same vein, I find that there’s still a paucity of Sam Cooke on youtube so Wonderful World (“Don’t know much about history”) is out.
Anyway, I eventually found something I’d squirreled away in my youtube favorites for future use. I’ll let someone else introduce her:
Dionne Warwick, who learned her craft in my home town of Hartford, at the Hartt School of Music.
