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Book review with comment

Sunday, January 30, 2011

I just finished Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, and I highly recommend it. It is an excellent account of the scam artistry that destroyed the economy, and is, like the vampire squid to which he compares Goldman Sachs, (the arch, but not only villain of the book) sucking the life blood out of the country. It’s a more readable and less circumspect version of the recently released Financial Commission report, leavened with humor, most of it dark.

A short synopsis: This country is controlled by Wall Street traders, who have no allegiance to anything other than their own personal gain. They are systematically siphoning money from the American economy into their own non-productive pockets, with the help of politicians who are more than satisfied with crumbs off the table, aided by a corporate media that diverts the attention of the mass of easily deluded Americans away from the oligarchy that is controlling the country and toward socially divisive trivialities, all while they are hollowing out the country by selling off its assets to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Even shorter synopsis: this country is toast, burnt to a crisp by Wall Street.

Well, you probably knew all that, but the book is still worth reading, since he sets it all out in a highly readable fashion.

Speaking of the financial crisis, it at least appears as if it will be harder to make the “no one could have seen this coming” defense the inevitable next time it happens. As the Times’ Gretchen Morgenstern observed this morning, in discussing the Commission’s report:

Yet the report still makes for compelling reading because so little has changed as a result of the debacle, in both banking and in its regulation. Providing chapter and verse, for example, on the bumbling and siloed management at the nation’s largest banks is enlightening, in that many of these institutions are even bigger than they were before. With too-big-to-fail institutions now larger than ever, we are almost certain to go through another episode like 2008 in the not-too-distant future.

This has become almost conventional wisdom, though amnesia may set in soon. Still, even while the memory and the realization are fresh, we do nothing, which proves yet again who is really pulling the strings.


Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, January 28, 2011

To the people of Egypt. Here’s hoping that they come out of this with something better than they’ve got now.

I realize, by the way, that the word “crusade” is problematic, but you can’t have everything. It’s a wonderful song.


Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, January 28, 2011

Back in the early 80s, my wife and I went through a period when we watched a lot of MTV. Those were the days when they actually played music videos, with VeeJays and everything. One performer we saw a lot of was Cindi Lauper. I’ve often wondered what happened to her. It seems she’s still around, as a matter of fact. Here she is singing her first, and probably biggest, hit, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Now, here she is singing an acoustic version of She-Bop on a Queens subway stop somewhere. Ignore the annoying Ellen Degeneres. In fact, start at about 2:00 and you can avoid most of Ellen.


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Democrats preserve the filibuster

Friday, January 28, 2011

If you were interested in knowing how interested Senate Democrats are in actually governing, you now have your answer: not very.

I’ve said before (too lazy to find a link) that we would know whether the Democrats had any serious intentions to accomplish anything by whether or not they did anything substantive about the filibuster.

Well, they didn’t. Apart from one or two welcome but relatively trivial reforms, nothing has changed.

The Democrats declined to play hardball, and in fact adopted a procedure that required 67 votes to do anything, which guaranteed they would fail. The Republicans, in turn, promised not to play hardball and deprive the Democrats of the filibuster in 2012, should the Republicans take over. The Democrats apparently believe, or pretend to believe, that they can trust the Republicans. And maybe they can, on that issue, because the Republicans can easily cow enough Democrats to overcome just about any filibuster. Anyway, the Republicans, from a strategic point of view, know they won’t care about getting rid of filibusters in 2012. They all know they aren’t likely to take the White House, so they won’t be passing legislation. All they are going to want to do is prevent legislation from passing, which they can do whether they are in the majority or the minority.


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The Definition of Chutzpah

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

This is rich:

Robert G. Burton wants UConn to give him his $3 million back.

Burton gave the money to the University of Connecticut to build the Burton Family Football Complex in Storrs. Now, citing disagreements with the school’s athletic director and a desire to be consulted about the new football coach, he wants that donation returned and his family’s name taken off the facility altogether.

We live in an age completely lacking in honor, in which our rich feel they have a right not only to unspeakable riches, but constant massaging. Maybe I’m naive, but I always thought that a gift was something that one gave without strings, and it is rather tacky to demand it back, no matter what the circumstances. Mr. Burton appears to think that gifts are made with unspoken but implicit conditions, one of them apparently being that the giver has the right to have his ass kissed, the number of times and the length of the kisses being directly proportional to the amount of the gift. I feel his pain. I give regularly to my alma mater, and not once have I been consulted about hiring decisions. But, if truth be told, if my ass kissing theory is correct, my kisses would be so few and brief it would not be worth pulling down my pants.

Now, in a rational world, the folks at UConn would conclude that Mr Burton has destroyed any bargaining power he has. A gift is a gift, and they are under no legal obligation to return it. Since he has announced that UConn is dead to him, UConn has nothing to gain by giving him a dime. They should, therefore, tell him to stick it. But this world has gone mad in many ways, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave him his money.


Filed in Local issues | | Comments (3)

Thieving China

Sunday, January 23, 2011

There’s no better blog, in my opinion, than Dean Baker’s Beat the Press, in which he skewers the press for its economics illiteracy, or, at times, for its seeming deliberate ignorance of the facts. Today he criticized the New York Times for characterizing the Chinese as thieves for stealing our intellectual property.

With reference to intellectual property, the New York Times told readers that, “China has a well-earned reputation for theft.” Intellectual property rules are defined by each country. China can only engage in “theft” if it has set up rules that is violating. In many cases, its laws on intellectual property do not provide clear protection to U.S. firms, therefore they may not be engaging in anything that can be described as “theft.”

This brought to mind the fact that, if China is indeed stealing, they may have gotten the idea from us, as they are certainly following the example of the United States when it was a developing nation. History buffs will recall that Charles Dickens used one of his lecture tours here to complain about the fact that his work was being appropriated by American publishers without a dime going to him.

What upset the Americans with their hero, whom they greeted as the most welcomed visitor since Lafayette (Forster, I, 186), was his stand in favor of International Copyright. Without it American publishers were paying no royalties on imported manuscripts. Few people of good will thought the policy equitable, but their objection was to Dickens’ use of his platform as a guest artist to speak out on business and politics. When he did so, some accused him of petty self-serving, in spite of the fact that International Copyright would also serve the interests of American authors, then ignored or short-changed by publishers who could easily pirate foreign materials. In any event, Dickens was equally disturbed by his sponsors’ undemocratic desire to muzzle him, to make him take the stance of an uncritical hero, as if democracy were a fait accompli on this side of the Atlantic. As the copyright issue inflated, it became for Dickens a symptom of a much more pervasive disease, name [sic] the American preoccupation with image-making.

So there’s nothing new under the sun. The likelihood is that the lack of copyright protection for foreign authors was a boon to American publishers, who got their content for free. While American authors may have felt a bit of a sting with regard to their foreign sales or even pirated editions here, those sales were negligible at the time, and, in any event, the publishers probably had more clout with the Congress than the authors. The publisher’s interests probably changed as American sales picked up abroad. There’s probably a similar dynamic going on in China. Once they have secured their place as our lords and masters, and we begin consuming their content, you can rest assured they’ll suddenly see the wisdom of copyright protections. We really can’t complain, since we blazed that path for them.

Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

What’s with Enfield?

Sunday, January 23, 2011

It would appear that the Republicans that are running Enfield have a secret agenda: enriching the ACLU, which is entitled to attorneys fees from losing defendants when it vindicates the constitution. After handing the ACLU a slam dunk victory when they insisted on having the high school graduation in a church, the Enfielders decided to censor the library in so outrageously open and notorious a manner that they might as well just write the ACLU a check now and skip the litigation.

From what I can discern, the Republicans manufactured a controversy about the showing of the film “Sicko” at the public library, then forced the town manager to pressure the librarian to cancel the film. Among other things, they made unveiled threats to wreak retribution at budget time if he failed to pull the film. Then, much to their apparent surprise, they found out that this isn’t Mississippi, and people didn’t take kindly to censorship.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Enfield Republicans have learned nothing from the graduation fiasco. Instead of retreating, they are doubling down. The town manager has gagged the town librarian, and imposed a rule that fact based films can’t be shown in the film series without presenting “multiple sides” of each issue.

I’m assuming this is his way to try to retroactively confer constitutionality on the actions of the council and himself. He must be a particularly spineless and/or incompetent town manager if he
didn’t have the brains or the balls to warn the council away from this in the first place.

The ACLU has taken an interest. I wonder how the taxpayers in Enfield feel about the Republicans once again needlessly spending their money in yet another attempt to subvert the constitution? And where, by the way, do these crazies come from and why are they congregating in Enfield? It seems like a perfectly nice place, but maybe there’s something in the air.

A Facebook group has been formed to oppose what the town did. Join up by clicking on the link. There’s an amusing exchange there between some rational types and one of the people on the video, a guy named Don Christmas, who was at the council meeting complaining about DCF taking him to court all the time (for, if he is to believed, telling his kids that despite their last name, there would be no Christmas for them if they did not shape up). Apparently he’s in favor of censorship too, but the funny part is that he can’t understand why people in the Facebook group think he’s ranting when he WRITES IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, without punctuation, and in incomplete sentences.

Al Robinson (ctblogger) has been doing yeoman work on this issue, particularly in trying to get video of the council meeting up on the internet. As this is written, he’s located it and, I understand, is trying to edit it so that the pertinent parts of the meeting can be uploaded. The full video is here. I skimmed through it, but I think I missed some of the pertinent stuff. I should add that while this whole thing clearly appears to be ginned up by Republicans, there’s a Democrat on the council who is every bit as dumb as his Republican colleagues. He agrees with the absurd assertion that it’s not censorship on their part to stop the showing so long as anyone who wants to watch the movie can see it elsewhere. By that logic, of course, they could mandate that certain books be taken off the shelves since you can always buy them on Amazon. He also seems to think that libraries are only for kids. The movie, by the way, was to be played during school hours, so one must wonder what a kid would be doing there at that point and why this “Democrat” thinks being in the same building as people watching Sicko would make a kid uncomfortable.

It goes without saying that these same people wouldn’t have uttered a peep (despite their protestations to the contrary) if the librarian had been airing a right wing film, Ben Stein’s anti-evolution (and anti-fact) film Expelled, for example.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Local issues, Republicans | | Comments (2)

A tax by any other name

Saturday, January 22, 2011

The New York Times is reporting that a move is afoot among the banks to charge a fee for debit cards. Right now, it appears that U.S. Bank is going to lead the way. Economic dogma would lead one to believe that other banks, in order to compete, would try to take U.S. Bank’s customers by touting their fee free debit cards, but that’s not the way things actually work. The other banks will institute fees and, somehow, justify it as a way to compete with U.S. Bank.

This is not about recovering costs, of course. In fact, a little thought would lead any rational person to conclude that bank fees for processing transactions have been either instituted or raised as the actual cost of processing transactions has gone down. Remember back in the days when you needed to actually go to a bank and withdraw your money from a real live person. That cost the customer nothing, and still costs nothing. Electronic transactions are cheap by comparison with the cost of paying people to process transactions, and all-electronic transactions cost less than processing checks. Yet, the less the banks must pay, the more the banks charge, and let’s not even get in to ATM charges. This is all about maintaining bloated profits. And why? Because they can:

The executives hinted that to recapture revenue that most likely will be lost from recent legislative changes and proposals, the bank might change its checking account pricing, reduce rewards and “perhaps” add a debit card fee, among other moves.

Translation: We have been stopped from making excessive profits on certain portions of our business, so we will seek to make them elsewhere. If the debit charge is, as I suspect it will be, a per transaction charge, then it will be the equivalent of a sales tax. We are already paying such a hidden tax on every credit charge, and if I’m not mistaken, a lower charge on debit transactions. Ask any merchant how much tribute they have to pay to the credit card company on every transaction, so a fee on debit cards would be on top of that. The customer doesn’t see the current charges on the receipt or on a statement, but they pay it.

Naturally, this gouging will go unnoticed and un-protested. The supremely ignorant people of the United States would rather protest against any increase in, lets say, an actual sales tax, the proceeds of which go to such unnecessary things as schools, roads, police, etc., rather than to useful things like banker’s bonuses.

It would be interesting to find out the extent to which the non-financial sector of our economy is being stifled by the fact that the banking industry is in a position to drain off so much money without providing anything of value in return.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music-Hey Joe

Friday, January 21, 2011

Part of the fun of this feature is the search process, which often involves sort of surfing a stream of consciousness. Last week I was looking for an acceptable version of Walk Away, Renee to post (there isn’t one), and, in one way or another ended up watching Rickie Lee Jones singing Chuck E’s in Love. Rickie Lee Jones made me think of Patti Smith, which led me to this performance, which includes a version of Hey, Joe, embedded within what I guess you would call a medley, though that word hardly seems to fit Patti Smith.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to put together a collection of performances of this venerable song. Take your pick, or watch them all. The song has an interesting history, as you can see for yourself on Wikipedia. Even its authorship is somewhat shrouded in mystery, with many folks believing it’s a traditional song. It does seem to be somewhat out of its own time, which is, in fact, the sixties, or perhaps late fifties. You can understand how a listener might assume that it had been around forever.

Today, most people might think that Jimi Hendrix, or possibly the Byrds, propelled this song into the public consciousness, but in fact this group was the first, and in fact the only group, to make a hit out of it. The Leaves:

The Byrds version isn’t on youtube, but Hendrix’s is:

Despite the leaves, it seems like all future versions flow from Hendrix. The Who:

and ZZ Top:

Finally for something that isn’t completely different, but any rock song with an accordion is surely somewhat different. Buckwheat Zydeco:


Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

This is not a good idea

Friday, January 21, 2011

One of the signal successes of the Obama administration was student loan reform. The previous system, in which private entities got paid for handing out government guaranteed loans, invited fraud and corruption, both of which accepted the invitation. Other than shunting money that should have gone into student loans to private companies, private involvement added nothing to the process. Among other things, it encouraged the growth of for profit “educational” institutions, which specialized in giving useless educations to desperate people. Since the government made good on defaulted loans, neither the schools or the lenders had any incentive to look carefully at the buyer, or at the prospects that the “education” would be of any use to the victim.

Now, having cleaned up that system, there is a chance that the Obama administration may institute a similar system in the mortgage industry. Incredibly, the folks that brought us the subprime mess are stepping forward to argue for a system similar to the old student loan system for handling government guaranteed mortgages:

As the Obama administration prepares a report on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, some of the nation’s largest banks are offering a few suggestions.

Wells Fargo and some other large banks would like private companies, perhaps even themselves, to become the new housing finance giants helping to bundle individual mortgages into securities — that would be stamped with a government guarantee.

What could go wrong, other than a repeat of 2008? Fondly must we hope, fervently must we pray, that the Obama Administration will decline to guarantee a new round of mortgage madness.


Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)