Republican cannibals. The sphere of Republican fraudsters behind the Bayou Fund hedge fund scandal (background) keeps growing (WSJ):

Today, Ms. [E. Lee] Hennessee finds herself in the middle of a battle over the apparent collapse of Mr. [Samuel] Israel's hedge-fund firm, Bayou Management LLC, and the possible disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars. She and her husband, Charles Gradante, run Hennessee Group, which vets hedge funds for wealthy investors, and are two of the booming industry's biggest promoters. On their advice, Hennessee clients say they had invested tens of millions of dollars in Bayou.

[...]

Ms. Hennessee, a North Carolina native, said she has never encountered a fraud since founding her company in 1987 as a division of E.F. Hutton. In 1997, Hennessee struck out on its own. She and her husband are routinely quoted in media stories about hedge funds. Ms. Hennessee was also a vocal supporter of President Bush. "Help!," she wrote in an email she sent to fund managers during the previous presidential campaign, "the current administration is favorable to the hedge-fund industry and we need to do all we can to keep them in office."

During the debate over an SEC rule requiring registration by hedge funds, Mr. Gradante argued in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC should avoid being too heavy-handed in regulating the funds because most frauds "could have been curtailed by the gatekeepers of the industry."

Could have been, but weren't. Self-regulation among pirates is doomed to fail, isn't it? Argh!

Hennessee, like CFO Daniel Marino and founder Samuel Israel of Bayou, was a generous contributor to Bush. So was her partner and husband Charles Gradante, who was also featured in a softball interview with Fox News's Neil Cavuto barely a month ago.

Naturally, these Republican fraudmeisters would be opposed to regulating hedge funds, because it becomes that more difficult for them to defraud their investors. (Although pesky regulations never got in the way of Bush mega-contributors like Enron's Ken Lay from siphoning tens of millions in Enron stock and converting it into self-titled real estate and annuities, over four years before he would come to trial.)

Why do I write about this? To help establish the pattern. Bush Republicans are the purest form of parasite — they will steal from the poor (New Orleans, Medicare, tax policy), the rest of the world (Iraq, Blair's UK), the middle class (Enron, gas prices), and even their true base: the richest of the rich.

This is cannibalism of the highest magnitude.

{ 7:39 AM }

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Timeline of a disaster. Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly has put together a must-read chronology of the cumulative policy and budget choices that led to New Orleans' desperate situation today.

{ 2:01 PM }

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Fraud in high places. The other Bayou story looks worse and worse every day too (WSJ):

The Connecticut hedge-fund firm under scrutiny in what authorities believe may have been a massive fraud emptied five Citibank accounts over the course of six days in July 2004 in withdrawals totaling $161 million, bank records show.

About $100 million of that money is the subject of a court fight between Stamford-based Bayou Fund LLC and Arizona authorities who seized the funds after concluding that there was reason to believe they were being used in a fraud.

The remaining $60 million -- and possibly much more -- remains unaccounted for.

Only $161 million missing? Bayou Fund CFO Daniel Marino and founder Samuel Israel III were generous Bush contributors, in keeping with the consistent pattern of fraud established by irrational tax cuts, Medicare "reform," Social Security privatization, Iraq WMDs, Enron, Halliburton, and the various failures and frauds of all the other cronies of the thieves in the White House.

{ 1:29 PM }

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Nero W. Caligula.

President Bush, left, plays a guitar presented to him by Country singer Mark Wills, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. AP Photo.

"Imagine, just imagine, what would have happened if Bill Clinton was photographed playing his sax at some photo-op while still warm, bleeding bodies were being pulled from the wreckage of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

"We would never, and I mean never, have heard the end of it. There would be no relief from Nero references which would then be conflated by the sex-obsessed moralists to Caligula references." — Mykeru

UPDATE: Bush bandmate Mark Wills sings a song called "How Bad Do You Want It" that pretty much sums up the Bush platform:

It ain’t how good you are
It’s how bad you want it
It ain’t how good you are
It’s how bad you want it
Translation: Greed trumps competence.

{ 12:43 PM }

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Monopoly: Iraq edition.


From a Fark Photoshop contest on the theme of new versions of Monopoly. Image by Nanashi.

See it full size — the reduced size above doesn't do it justice.

{ 9:16 AM }

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The hourglass economy. Nobody in American public discourse talks about the poor much anymore. Meanwhile, as Wal-Mart has already figured out, the poor have become a business opportunity (WSJ):

Save-A-Lot has quietly become one of the nation's most successful grocery chains by courting a demographic supermarkets have long ignored: the poor. The Earth City, Mo., chain is blanketing the country with tiny, cheap stores catering to households earning less than $35,000 a year, generating higher profits than most grocers while doing so.

Save-A-Lot is one of an emerging breed of no-frills supermarkets known as "hard discounters" who are changing the way Americans buy cheap goods and increasing pressure on branded food makers to keep prices low. Their growth illustrates how food retail, like other consumer industries, is splitting away from the middle. Save-A-Lot and the upscale Whole Foods Market Inc. are thriving, while Kroger and other traditional chains flounder in what some economists call an hourglass economy.

There is less of a spectrum and more of a dichotomy of economic classes in America now.

This, when referring to things like retirement assets or healthcare, is what Bush Republicans mean when they say "choice."

Rich or poor.

{ 8:45 AM }

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Are there hedge funds in Hell? Another day, another Republican scandal (WSJ):

Eric Dillon, a money manager from Seattle, flew east on Aug. 16 and took a limousine to the Stamford, Conn., offices of Bayou Management LLC. The hedge-fund firm had abruptly said three weeks earlier it was shutting down its funds, but investors hadn't yet gotten their money back. Mr. Dillon had an appointment to discuss the matter with Bayou's chief financial officer, Daniel Marino.

No one responded to Mr. Dillon's persistent knocking on the entrance to Bayou's offices in a cream-colored cottage on the Connecticut waterfront, so he entered through an open back door, say the local police. On Mr. Marino's desk, he found a typed six-page letter that began, "This is my suicide note and confession," says Stamford Police Sgt. Gary Perna, who responded to Mr. Dillon's subsequent 911 call.

The letter asserted that Mr. Marino, along with Bayou founder Samuel Israel III and a former partner named James Marquez, had "defrauded all these investors" from "about 1998 to now," Sgt. Perna adds.

[...]

Mr. Marino's letter is now a key exhibit in a widening probe by federal and Connecticut law-enforcement agencies of what investigators believe may be a fraud involving hundreds of millions of dollars. Bayou claimed it had $440 million in assets earlier this year, and at one point last year put the figure at more than $500 million.

Bayou is the latest of several hedge-fund traumas in the past year that have prompted fraud investigations. While the industry doesn't appear to be rife with such problems, Bayou underscores the risks associated with these funds, after years of explosive growth in this loosely regulated corner of the investment industry. Wealthy individuals and institutions, lured by the promise of outsize returns, have flooded into the private partnerships. More than 8,000 hedge funds now oversee an estimated $1 trillion, more than double the number of funds and the sum under management five years ago.

I smell a government bailout in the works.

What's the Republican connection? Fraudmasters Marino and Israel are generous contributors to another master of fraud: George W Bush.

{ 6:57 PM }

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