culture, politics, commentary, criticism

Thursday, January 31, 2008
The bridge to common sense just fell down. Because American bankers are greedy twits who engineered the the subprime mortgage crisis (reminiscent of the bogus S&L crisis under daddy Bush), the US wants to borrow money from China to give me my tax "rebate."

Meanwhile at least 17,000 bridges in the U.S. went more than two years between safety inspections, according to federal records analyzed by
msnbc.com.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
Houston GOP raises $500,000 for pooping difficulties. As American troops remain trapped in an Iraqi quagmire of exclusively Republican design, the GOP glitterati of Houston amuse themselves by
raising vast sums of money for the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America, i.e., the foundation for people with pooping difficulties.


Giuliani and RNC supporter Astrid and Gene Van Dyke, left,
with Vanessa Sendukas (wife of Giuliani supporter Perry Sendukas).
Photo by Dave Rossman, Houston Chronicle
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Full disclosure: I experience and have been treated for ulcerative colitis — and yet this is one of the most idiotic displays of philanthropic charade I have ever seen. There is no Crohn's crisis — it affects only 6 out of 100,000 North Americans. Contrast that figure with the 3,900+ Americans who have died in the search for Saddam Hussein's imaginary WMD — a deceptive Bush/Cheney policy these three black-tie cretins doubtlessly supported, as evidenced by their financial backing and affection for Rudy Giuliani.

It's unfortunate that all the other problems of the world — notably, the ones these people vote for — have yet to be solved. Surely Houston’s wealthiest GOP layabouts can find better reasons to play dress-up among the catastrophes and human tragedies they have caused.
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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Genius party at Davos. Here's what
the world's economic Einsteins are saying to us mere mortals:
"What we have now are the foreseeable consequences of bad economic management.''
- Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize winner for economics

"In this case the U.S. is going to have a protracted case of pneumonia.''
- Nouriel Roubini, chairman of New York-based Roubini Global Economics, citing the maxim that if the U.S. economy sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold

The U.S. economy is "resilient, its structure sound, and its long-term economic fundamentals are healthy. And our economy will remain a leading engine of global economic growth.''
- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
That last one is probably also true, but it sure stinks of pig lipstick.
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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
$5.16 trillion lost since New Year's Day. $1.27 trillion was lost only in the USA. That doesn't include the other $3.88 trillion lost by the other major exchanges &mdash for a total of $5.16 trillion lost in the last three weeks (
WSJ Marketbeat blog).

Market Cap Wipe-out
Source: Birinyi Associates

IndexCountryMarket Cap Lost (bil)% Change
S&P 500USA$1,279.7-9.7%
FTSE-100U.K.$484.5-15.6%
CSI 300China$402.3-12.3%
Nikkei 225Japan$369.8-12.9%
CAC 40France$336-16.3%
MICEX*Russia$268.7-26.6%
S&P/TSXCanada$266.7-16.2%
S&P/ASXAustralis$241.9-18.8%
DAXGermany$239.5-16.8%
Ibex 35Spain$185.3-20.4%
BovespaBrazil$170.3-21.2%
AmsterdamNetherlands$147.6-19.4%
Swiss MarketSwitzerland$119.7-12.7%
OMX StockholmSweden$116.6-17.5%
BSE SensexIndia$103.8-14.3%
Milan MIB30Italy$101.2-12.2%
FTSE/JSE AfricaSouth Africa$93.9-15.8%
OMX HelsinkiFinland$83.5-18.5%
OBX IndexNorway$76.6-25.7%
Merval**Argentina$73.5-13.5%

Junior came to Chicago right before his Middle East jaunt to tell us how strong the economy was.

It's like Katrina, but with money. Heckuva job, Georgie.
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Monday, January 21, 2008
Burning down the house. If you're a Republican, and you can't make something work the way you want it to,
just burn the fucking thing down:
Embattled Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina could still avoid prosecution despite being indicted with his wife yesterday on arson-related charges.

Medina was indicted yesterday by a Harris County grand jury on charges of evidence tampering in a probe of a suspicious fire last June that destroyed his family home, according to local reports. His wife, Francisca, was also indicted on arson charges. [...]

The fire caused almost $1 million in damages to Medina's and a neighboring home and injured several fire-fighters.
The scorched earth policy evidently applies to more than just Nazis.

Who appointed this bozo to the Texas bench? Duh, Governor George W. Bush.

And, double-duh, "Medina has no plans to resign his seat on the Texas Supreme Court."
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Bonuses for the people who brought you the subprime credit crisis. I wish I could get almost a quarter million dollars for failing this spectacularly: "According to an estimate from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the average Wall Street bonus was $180,420 in 2007." (
InvestmentNews)

And: "Mr. DiNapoli’s office estimates that the bonus pool paid by the securities industry to its employees in New York City totaled $33.2 billion, slightly less than the record $33.9 billion in 2006."

(Crossposted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
The beancounter bubble. The ascendancy of the accounting and finance professions is at the root of American problems (
WSJ):
Comparing graduates with similar SAT scores, grade-point averages, gender, age, occupation and everything else they can measure, [Harvard economist Lawrence] Katz and [Claudia] Goldin find Harvard grads who work in finance earn 195% more than similar graduates in other careers, or triple the pay. That's no typo: Going into finance means making nearly three times as much as your classmates with other careers.

In fact, pay on Wall Street and elsewhere in finance -- even more than those huge salaries of chief executives outside finance -- is a major driver of the widening gap between paychecks of the biggest winners in the economy and the rest of us. "Wall Street and legal professionals have contributed at least as much as, and probably more than, top executives of nonfinancial public companies to the widening of the income distribution," writes Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. The top 25 hedge-fund managers combined earned more than CEOs of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies combined in 2004, he calculates.
Also: "In the 1960s and 1970s, graduates of Harvard University were much more likely to be lawyers, doctors and academics than to head for Wall Street."

If we deplete our stock of American intellectuals simply to make more money — without actually doing anything to make more money, such as research or innovate — where will we end up?

Where we are. Money worship is what got us here: to the subprime mess, to hedge fund managers wildly overcompensated and undertaxed, to international wars for SUV fuel and no-bid defense contracts, to monstrous CEO severance packages, to corporate ownership of life itself through court-sanctioned genetic patents, to a legislature and presidency whose campaigns serve only as an advertising windfall for television networks and a financial windfall for the lobbyists who write the legislation.

The American ship is sinking from the weight of its own economic narcissism. Our accountants and finance professionals have been richly rewarded for squeezing the last microscopic drop of profitability out of every other profession. That's why American newsrooms don't bother with news. That's why American old age homes imprison their residents as cheaply as possible. That's why American insurance companies refuse to pay out claims for sick people or destroyed homes. That's why we've proven that America is massively incapable of nationbuilding in Iraq or in Afghanistan or even in Louisiana.

So, thanks to the beancounters who know what things cost but not how to actually do anything, American is accelerating toward becoming a third world nation. And no one in the rest of the world will give a shit, and rightfully so, thanks to our cavalier attitudes toward Iraqi civilians, toward Sudanese refugees, toward the Chinese children who sew our clothing, toward the immigrants who work on our farms and in our hotels and hospitals and in those extremely profitable old-age homes, and toward anyone who isn't white and speaks English.

When the American bubble bursts, it could end up being a good thing — but only if the beancounters are pulled from their thrones and tossed back into the basement where they belong. Because American ingenuity and insight originate not on the balance sheet but in the laboratory, not in the boardroom but in the field of play, not on the spreadsheet but in the streets where human beings live and work. American inventiveness should concern itself not with "devising, selling and trading mortgage-backed securities so complex that no one, even those Harvard grads, can fully understand them," but with activities that enhance life itself.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008

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Wednesday, January 09, 2008
God is such a liar. Look how wrong God was in what he told a
former Republican presidential candidate:
Pat Robertson acknowledged Wednesday that his prophecy of a nuclear terror attack in 2007 failed to unfold.

He also cited information from God when he predicted on a year go that major U.S. cities would be hit by "very serious terrorist attacks" causing "possibly millions" of deaths.

No such catastrophe occurred.
God said millions of people would die, and Zogby said Obama would win New Hampshire.

Does this mean that Zogby is God?
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Fire the media. Think about how the media have covered two campaigns: Dennis Kucinich's versus Fred Thompson's. The disproportionate initial respect or at least eventual attention that was focused on Thompson, delivered in large daily amounts, resulted in these New Hampshire results:
Fred Thompson: 2,849
Dennis Kucinich: 3,866
The universally reviled and mocked Dennis Kucinich received 35 percent more votes than the messianically greeted Fred Thompson.

Farther down the heap, it's a landslide!
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Greatest Hits · Alternatives to First Command Financial Planning · First Command, last resort, Part 3 · Part 2 · Part 1 · Stealing $50K from a widow: Wells Real Estate · Leo Wells, REITs and divine wealth · Sex-crazed Red State teenagers · What I hate: a manifesto · Spawn of Darleen Druyun · All-American high school sex party · Why is Ken Lay smiling? · Poppy's Enron birthday party · The Saudi money laundry and the president's uncle · The sentence of Enron's John Forney · The holiness of Neil Bush's marriage · The Silence of Cheney: a poem · South Park Christians · Capitalist against Bush: Warren Buffett · Fastow childen vs. Enron children · Give your prescription money to your old boss · Neil Bush, hard-working matchmaker · Republicans against fetuses and pregnant women · Emboldened Ken Lay · Faith-based jails · Please die for me so I can skip your funeral · A brief illustrated history of the Republican Party · Nancy Victory · Soldiers become accountants · Beware the Merrill Lynch mob · Darleen Druyun's $5.7 billion surprise · First responder funding · Hoovering the country · First Command fifty percent load · Ken Lay and the Atkins diet · Halliburton WMD · Leave no CEO behind · August in Crawford · Elaine Pagels · Profitable slave labor at Halliburton · Tom Hanks + Mujahideen · Sharon & Neilsie Bush · One weekend a month, or eternity · Is the US pumping Iraqi oil to Kuwait? · Cheney's war · Seth Glickenhaus: Capitalist against Bush · Martha's blow job · Mark Belnick: Tyco Catholic nut · Cheney's deferred Halliburton compensation · Jeb sucks sugar cane · Poindexter & LifeLog · American Family Association panic · Riley Bechtel and the crony economy · The Book of Sharon (Bush) · The Art of Enron · Plunder convention · Waiting in Kuwait: Jay Garner · What's an Army private worth? · Barbara Bodine, Queen of Baghdad · Sneaky bastards at Halliburton · Golf course and barbecue military strategy · Enron at large · Recent astroturf · Cracker Chic 2 · No business like war business · Big Brother · Martha Stewart vs. Thomas White · Roger Kimball, disappointed Republican poetry fan · Cheney, Lay, Afghanistan · Terry Lynn Barton, crimes of burning · Feasting at the Cheney trough · Who would Jesus indict? · Return of the Carlyle Group · Duct tape is for little people · GOP and bad medicine · Sears Tower vs Mt Rushmore · Scared Christians · Crooked playing field · John O'Neill: The man who knew · Back to the top






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