Planes, trucks and boxes: Alaska preps for return of 2,000-pound wild wood bison, gone century Daily Reporter
Australia Floats Plan to Save Great Barrier Reef WSJ
Cloudy With a Chance of Cholera Audobon
Ex-UBS Trader Darin Must Face U.S. Libor-Rigging Charge Bloomberg. “Rigging” of which executives were entirely ignorant. No doubt.
Dark Web’s ‘Evolution’ market vanishes along with $12 million Naked Security. That’s “$12 million” in BitCoin.
Currency hedging takes on new importance for global stock funds Reuters
Rich Man’s Bank Hit by Bank Run, Collapse, “Bail-In” Wolf Street
Why Has Germany Bailed Out A Tiny Bank? Forbes
Exclusive: Deutsche Bank revamp plan to hit retail hardest – sources Reuters
Grexit?
Left-wing Greek PM to visit austerity champion Merkel AFP
German media: Greece to remain liquid until April 8 Deutsche Welle
The bailout crisis: Germany’s view of how Greece fell from grace Guardian
Nazi Extortion: Study Sheds New Light on Forced Greek Loans Der Spiegel
The army and the people, united Ekathimerini
Mayor unveils scheme to support poor in Athens with help from Norway Ekathimerini
Far-right leads polls heading into French vote AFP
Guest post: the part-time technocrats driving Ukraine’s banking reform FT. Reads like a beat-sweetener, to me.
Syraqistan
UN sets emergency Yemen meeting as US withdraws Al Jazeera
Yemen crisis: US troops withdraw from air base BBC
The messages from Israel’s election The Electronic Intifada
Kurdish militant leader says armed struggle with Turkey ‘unsustainable’ Daily Star
Imperial Collapse Watch
A Judge Just Ordered the US Government to Release Thousands of Detainee Abuse Photos Vice. By “abuse” is meant “torture.” Surprised to see Vice adopting old-media mealy-mouthed locutions. Anyhow, so much for soft power…
At Kodak, Clinging to a Future Beyond Film New York Times
Technohubris
Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley WaPo. John Perry Barlow,
the Dead’sBob Weir’s sometime lyricist. Sigh.The Moral Hazard of Big Data The New Republic. “[A] surprising proportion of digital marketing is about finding marks.” Surprising?
A $6.6 Million CEO Dreams of a “Doctor-Less” Future Health Care Renewal. More lunatic triumphalism from over-paid CEOs.
A decade in, the “Quantified Self” is still more hope than reality Pando Daily
50 Million Users: The Making of an ‘Angry Birds’ Internet Meme Wall Street Journal. The “squishy” foundations of technology diffusion metrics.
Facebook, Google, and the Economics of Time The Atlantic
Two days, one chat, three phone calls and two lies from Comcast Houston Chronicle. More shopping.
Obamacare Is Spurring Startups and Creating Jobs Bloomberg. Startups to manage ObamaCare’s useless and artificially created complexity because markets.
Twitter and Facebook hit with separate gender discrimination suits Pando Daily
The changing geography of US employment FT Alphaville. Looks like the jobs are where the water’s not going to be.
Class Warfare
Who Needs a Boss? New York Times
It’s illegal to prevent workers from talking about wages. T-Mobile did it anyway. WaPo
Mexican farmworkers strike over low wages, blocking harvest Los Angeles Times
The Race to the $100 Million Spec House WSJ
Punishment’s purpose: How humans became hardwired for justice Reuters. For some definition of “justice.”
Freedom of choice is less important than a pension free of risk FT. But wait. I thought shopping was always good?
Borio, Erdem, Filardo and Hofmann on the Costs of Deflation The Grumpy Economist
The Yield Curve and Economic Activity, Again Econbrowser
The FOMC’s LIBOR-like NAIRU fix The Top Note. Yikes?
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Best synopsis of why I do not like what Facebook and the internet is doing to the world, from “Facebook, Google, and the Economics” of Time The Atlantic
“Facebook, too, is an engine of consumer surplus, but it earns its prodigious income by monetizing time spent, rather than time saved.”
Facebook does not exist to make out lives simpler. It exists to make it more complex. And we are paying for the privilege.
It is elective behavior for people that want to participate in their irretrievable loss of privacy
The only problem that finance and for the most part technology solves for is how to separate you from your money.
They do a pretty fair job as well solving the problem of how to separate us from what used to be a representative form of government.
Health Care Renewal … pretty much any “new and improved” proposal today is the product of grifter management. Big Data is the new panacea. Artificial Intelligence … which already failed at medicine decades ago … but now combined with Big Data, it is supposed result in the spontaneous generation of insight. I wish someone would come up with an app, like Angry Birds … say Angry Patients … which can replace all the health care managers.
For over 30 years now, the invention of the spreadsheet has given every innumerate maniac the idea that they can model reality, and that by changing the model, they control the reality that the model mimics. Usually “changing” means reducing expenditures by removing employees from employment … but strangely never the most expensive employees.
It would seem that the most identifiable transformative power of “big data” and “artificial intelligence” to date, is the “power” to “transform” overpaid, self-important blowhards into “visionaries,” at least in their own minds.
“Artificial” intelligence. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Here, courtesy of Thesaurus.com, are the synonyms and antonyms for “artificial”:
Synonyms for artificial
adj fake; imitation
unreal
bogus
counterfeit
ersatz
fabricated
factitious
faked
false
falsie
hyped up
manufactured
mock
phony
plastic
sham
simulated
specious
spurious
substitute
synthetic
unnatural
Antonyms for artificial
genuine
natural
real
unaffected
unpretentious
Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.
Cite This Source
Wow, great insight about the impact of spreadsheets.
And now exponentially worse with big data and employees increasingly treated as interchangeable widgets. It still surprises me how subject matter expertise is not respected at all, especially at the management level in the public sector.
john perry barlow, ‘the dead’s lyricist’?! for shame, lambert!…
robert hunter holds that particular distinction. so much so, that he’s the only rock lyricist ever admitted to the rock’n’roll hall of fame as a band member…
jpb was a johnny-come-lately (’71), who wrote primarily for weir, who’d had a ‘falling out’ with hunter…
so, no, virginia: the eternally gorgeous, deeply moving ‘ripple’ was not written by some self-appointed libertarian guru/genius blowhard. it was written by robert hunter…
Oh, sheesh. You’re right. Must be the brown acid…
Mr. Natural is on the beige paper L. The brown stuff has too much residual toxins in it. (If Hunter et al were part of the MKULTRA trials, they got the pure Sandoz LSD, distributed to doctors and psychologists under the trade name “Delysid.” With that stuff, the paper is any colour you want it to be.)
The irony here is profound. Some of the best and brightest counter cultural agitators were radicalized by the CIA. Those s—s behind ISIS have a lot of catching up to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b75lkYUWkA
“all british spies”
When’s Hawkwind’s lyricist Michael Moorcock going on the R n R Hall of Fame ballot if lyricists are so damned important:(?
When Stormbringer tells him to.
Counting stars by candlelight, all are dim but one is bright;
The spiral light of Venus, rising first and shining best,
On, from the northwest corner, of a brand new crescent moon,
While crickets and cicadas sing, a rare and different tune,
Terrapin Station
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAIvo6QkOgc
I’m not much of a Grateful Dead fan, never have been nor will I ever be, but Terrapin Station 1977 (Robert Hunter wrote the words, Jerry Garcia wrote the music) has got to be, despite what the critics say, one of the finest rock songs ever written. It is sixteen and a half minutes of pure brilliance, both in terms of music and lyrics.
Naomi Klein reviews new book about the difference in popular response to the first Gilded Age as opposed to our own.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/books/review/the-age-of-acquiescence-by-steve-fraser.html
Perhaps a different explanation is that 21st century America is a far more middle class country than in the 19th century and it’s the middle class that is getting the shaft this time around. The hollowing out has moved upscale. While the poor undoubtedly struggle with their Walmart wages their privations are nothing like the world of Sinclair’s The Jungle. We are now, still, a very rich country and will have to become a lot less rich before anything changes. IMO. But sounds like the book is a topic worth discussing.
I think there are some interesting points here also. As Klein discusses in ‘This Changes Everything’, extreme extraction is moving into more developed areas with more potential to fight back. We are seeing the dangerous movement of hazardous products and destruction of drinking water which are bringing together many diverse groups.
Similarly the wrath of neoliberalism is moving strongly into areas such as Greece and the US is better understanding the revolving door (kudos Yves) and the fact of inequality and where all the income gains have gone since the financial crisis.
This is spawning Blockadia, Syriza etc.
Just saw this headline in the Guardian about the French election.
‘Abandoned’ French working class ready to punish left’s neglect by voting for far right’
Well, New Deal facilitated consumer capitalism was depoliticizing. What did anyone have to do?
Go get a job that was already fixed up all nice for you and make sure you and your family, if you had one (and you were supposed to have one), were dependent on no one other than you. That’s it. Do that much you’re practically above reproach. This is why we see so many people doing so many iffy things to meet quota, especially now that it’s falling apart. “I was just doing my job”– it’s a no brainer. We have almost no other morality in this country, certainly not any that’s widely shared.
When young people protest anything the trolls come out in force and tell them to STFU and get a job. If they’re black, they tell them to pick up their pants and get a job. If they’re white, they tell them to take a bath and get a job. We don’t even teach traditional civics any more. Which makes sense, if your sole right and responsibility is “get a job.”
I used to think that education was the most effective depoliticizing tactic going all the way back to the founding era (and it is one such), but now I really see the light. Get people doing the one thing you want them doing anyway, and tell them it’s the way they exercise their rights.
It’s a closed circuit mentality, even long after they start shorting the current.
wow. you guys are gonna hate this one. Holy Smokes! (No pun intended).
Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore takes it to the “Warmers” with a big stick. The stick is probably a dead plant. It died for lack of CO2, but now that humans are making CO2 plants are reveling in joy. That’s a weird thought. I know when I walk in the woods I feel I’m surrounded by a quiet and massive intelligence. But when I walk the streets of New Yawk I feel I’m surrounded by idiots who either loot for a living as financial/social frackers or who wanna be extras on some episode of Mafia Wives or the Supranos. (Disclaimer: I’m being a little colorful here for narrative impact). So maybe there’s something to what Mr. Moore is saying.
This is sort of interesting, actually, at least for me since I don’t get emotional about it or about so-called warming in general. I’ll just wear a lighter jacket.
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/03/20/why-i-am-climate-change-skeptic
The stick was probably clearcut by Asia Pulp and Paper, which chops down rain forests in Indonesia and pays Moore to provide public relations. See this article. Or maybe the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, a group set up by loggers to fight environmentalists. Or one of the many other logging groups his PR firm works for.
I feel I’m surrounded by a quiet and massive intelligence
it’s the loose confederation of earthworms conspiring against you
I’m another that doesn’t get all hyped up beyond doing my small share to not leave a HUGE footprint and be a good steward.
The reality is at one time our Earth experienced an ice age and then the Earth warmed up enough to create a climate where life thrived- and that was long before an industrialized globe. So while I understand that humans do impact our environment, I also think there is some credence to the idea that our planet may experience cyclical behavior that has less to do with us and more to do with the planet itself.
Both sides of the debate kind of annoy me because both use misinformation.
Not exactly, cwaltz. Over 99% of climate scientists agree that human activity is changing the climate. The remaining two, three scientists are like Willie Soon from Harvard: massively in the pay of fossil fuel interests. If you’re in a position to evaluate the scientific evidence, it’s very clear at this point.
Recently, research indicates that past ice ages had more to do with (naturally produced) greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than orbital mechanics, which people previously assumed was the main driver.
Add in that greenhouse gases are at the highest level they’ve been for millions of years, which includes several cycles of ice ages, and that
Climate change is slow compared to a human lifespan. It’s going to take centuries for the full effect of current CO2 levels to be felt. And the further we let ourselves slide down this road, the less humans can do to change anything as its bite gets worse and worse.
Yes, your hair should be on fire about it.
At one time, 99% of the scientists believed in the existence of the “Ether”.
Your point is?
you mean in 1860? i dunno about 90%, and i suspect you don’t either, but we know a lot more now than we did then. if your point is that scientists can be wrong, well, duh, but why do you think they are in this case?
(Hmph. Reply to this with links to sources has fallen into moderation, or maybe even spam. Help, please?)
…thanks for the credible contradiction. It’s amazing how often some folks seek to disclaim any responsibility for AGW. (As an aside: my experience is that ALL links in a comment get sent to “moderation” purgatory.
Some (not all) comments with one link or even two or three links will avoid moderation, but when a comment has five links, plus a block quote, like Quixote’s comment, moderation is almost a certainty. It’s just a minor annoyance built into the system to protect us from bigger annoyances.
The enzyme that fixes carbon in plants (rubisco, =rbcl, =ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase) works in either direction depending on the conditions. In isolation, higher CO2 leads to more carbon fixation, higher oxygen leads to less.
What happens in real life is that high temperatures lead to more water transpiring through the plant. When it’s hotter than the plant is adapted to, its “plumbing” can’t move the water to the leaves fast enough, so even if there’s plenty of water in the ground (which usually isn’t the case when it’s hot) the plant starts to wilt.
When that happens, plants close their stomates. Stomates are the openings that allow CO2 to reach the cells where it can be fixed. When the stomates are closed, no new CO2 reaches the cells. The plant does, however, keep splitting water which liberates oxygen from the H2O. So, locally, at the cells where rubisco operates, oxygen concentration becomes high.
And that means that the carbon fixation reaction moves the opposite way: CO2 is produced from carbohydrates.
So, tl:dr; high CO2 levels will only lead to better plant growth if the climate stays cool. Which isn’t happening.
Thanks for this. I, too, have wondered about this question. Your response is cogent — but I confess the complexity of all the issues surrounding climate change makes my head hurt.
“Human Emissions Saved Planet”
This would explain why scientists observe so few habitable planets elsewhere in the galaxy, or even universe – if they are finished looking there already. Hard to argue the evidence there. Earth coulda become a scrap lump of rock hurtling around a sun just the same as everywhere else. The more I think about it, it all does sound like a greenie thing to me – Greenspeace, Greenhouse Effect, Greenspirit Strategies. It all seems to flow with a sense of subtle cohesiveness. Then if we can green the Earth’s poles, people can move there too, if they hanker for cooler climate.
Now, the oceans rising bit could be a little inconvenient for some. Say, those living on the first floor in Manhattan. However, as I understand New Yawk, they would be the least productive idiots and they can move and rip people off in some higher elevation location in the heartland. There’s probably somewhere that won’t turn into a dustbowl. The more productive ones may enjoy beachfront high rises. Put in yacht parking, or if you only rate floors 2 thru 6, you can always bolt a Marlin fishing pole rig to the balcony. Everyone will be working from home by then anyway – probably interacting with an orbital HFT trading bot.
PS: I think trees are the smart ones in forests. They’ve been around a long time and are wise. Expert in Idle Philosophy too. Not much else to do if you’re a tree. Dr Tremens used to think so too – saying he would lose himself in the woods for days at a time.
if we can green the Earth’s poles, people can move there too, if they hanker for cooler climate.
South Pole , ok , North Pole, maybe no so much unless you have a nice boat.
Not much else to do if you’re a tree.
They live in a state of anxiety about the next dog w/ a full bladder, or worse yet than that simple indignity, the opposable thumbed mammals w/chainsaws.
Going Green for sure. It makes me wanna go out and get those Edward Green shoes.
http://leffot.com/shop/index.php/shoes/edward-green/asquith-dark-oak-5515.html
faaak what an afternoon. roaming around Queens on foot under a warming yellow sun and infinite blue sky glass highrises shooting up everywhere just over the river, just like flowers out of the dirt. You have to go East if you want the blue collar strips the autoshops, the warehouses, the empty streets, the tenements the avenues the faces, strange and foreign. That’s what I want. That’s what I got. I took at least 30 pictures. All film. Maybe a few will turn out to be OK. I left the film next to my cable modem and it heated up a few weeks ago. We’ll see if it ruined it. At any rate, the stuff that goes through your head walking around by yourself in the middle of everywhere but in the middle of nowhere. Faaak. I can’t even describe it. You see the face of young girl from Pakistan holding her sister’s hand by the subway platform and you think of something you read in Ulysses Grant’s autobiography about America, what he said it was and what it would be, and what Lincoln said, and then you think of Robert E Lee and Grant and Lee and what they were fighting over and about the Confederate JEB Stuart on the Rappahanock thinking he’d die and his soul would go to God as a reward for piety in the service of Christiandom and about what they all would think if they saw what you just saw. and the high rises out of the dirt, ugly boxes of glass, the future right there forming and 100 years from now somebody will be standing on the balcony right there were there was nothing last year and the girl and her sister will be dead and Grant and Lee are dead and it’s like a river running through time the way the light runs in colors through the blue air, the way the glass and steel boxes rise up from the dirt, endless and eternal under the sun. That’s good for about 8 blocks. Then you think it’s alll a differential equation, change in being with respect to time, dB/dt, but what’s F(B) what’s the integral? That’s what every thought is, an integration of dB/dt into F(B), then you see something colorful, paint and boxes and boards and wires, by an auto body shop closed on Sunday and there’s nobody within a quarter of a mile in the middle of nowhere in Queens where the entire new Yawk skyline is gray in the shadow of the bright western sun that makes all the colors in the dirt and you frame it carefully, taking meticulous care for the composition and the trajectory of lines from the corners of the frame, and take 3 pictures. hahahah. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s a Sunday afternoon in my book! Fuccin A! dB/dt. and F(B) = Beautiful.
Yikes. My toes cringe at the thought of being confined in shoes like that. My toes want to be free!
But glad to hear you’re still enjoying yourself, even tho, clearly, we are all gonna die.
A memory snapshot modeled by math: F(B) = Fuccin A! dB/dt
Way better than any PhD can do.
btw i don’t think he was a founder of greepeace. he was a member when the organization changed its name, from what i’ve read.
Expensive spec homes
Kind of surprising. I thought the point of paying $30 million for a house was so you could get exactly what you wanted. Is it so much trouble to tell an architect what you want? Or, uncharitably, maybe the tastes of our wealthy are so underdeveloped that all they need to know to want it is the price.
Or maybe the house is bought as an investment that never gets lived in.
Yay America.
Did you watch the video posted here several days ago in which the bald, “luxury brand professor” was talking about Apple, Google and Facebook?
He was talking pretty fast, but one thing I remember him saying was that “luxury” was “easy.” All rich people want the same things.
One of the few things that I got out of the video is that if Amazon is to survive as a pure-play e-commerce company, it must offset its extremely high transportation expenses by either buying the US Postal Service or a large chain of gas stations. This is something which has crossed my mind as well.
I suspect they’re not all that married to retail. There’s easier, better, lower-touch money available on the web services side — which is, incidentally, the same infrastructure on which their retail “app” runs, open to the public.
I thought the point of paying $30 million for a house
These are not the result of the OCD buyer with an architectural vision like the guy building the mud hill in Close Encounters, these are to bamboozle buyers, many foreign, with the illusion that think they are parking asset value in the US when in fact they are really employing US trades people, architects, builders, appliance dealers, pool service companies ect ect ect to essentially dig an expensive hole and throw as margined $30MM of stuff into it.
Ultimately these monstrosities become perpetual not for profit local employers as they require maintenance budgets equivalent to employing a small southern town and will eventually go for garage sale auction prices and get torn down due to tax liabilities.
Personally if I were a 20-30 something bitching about not having a job, or a lucrative skills, I would go apprentice in a trade building this stuff. I know a good plasterer or mason can pretty much name their price here in the Chicago burbs, I imagine it is even more the case where this ridiculous stuff is being more popularly built. built.
Holy cow, torture photos! Disclosure against interest of probative evidence of crimes in universal jurisdiction!?! Gee, our government must be very honest and true to have done that. Even with a gun to their head.
After it submits its report on situations of gravity or emergency – as directed by the Human Rights Committee and subject to confidential inquiry by the Committee Against Torture and to pending ICC investigations – the US drops some photos of hillbillies humpin nekkid tied-up A-rabs. That keeps the evidence out of the US response.
Then, at the treaty body plenary, when USG bad faith is being raised, the government points to its subsequent action and says, “look, we’re still trying ever so hard.” The idea is to do the absolute minimum while warding off a C or D assessment, which would pique the interest of the International Criminal Court on admissibility grounds.
That’s the US policy, a day late and a dollar short. In this way the regime hopes to eke out a few more years of impunity – at the risk of another European mutiny like the one in wikileaks cable 04BRUSSELS4274. They’ll need to get the world war underway before that happens.
Re “Dark Web’s ‘Evolution’ market vanishes along with $12 million Naked Security. That’s “$12 million” in BitCoin”
The irreversible nature of Bitcoin transactions is a feature; people just need to be more careful. These types of Bitcoin thefts will continue unless and until users (in this case, dark market buyers and sellers) demand multi-signature wallets or similar tech. A multi-signature wallet requires m of n signatures (typically 2 of 3) to spend bitcoins. (This is a particularly good way of controlling e.g. corporate spending, where x number of directors have to authorised spending, or e.g. the finance director controls several private keys giving more weight to his sign-off.) Here, one private key would be sent to the host, one would stay with the user and the third would be encrypted locally (i.e. by the user selecting a password) and copied to various places. The upshot: it would be impossible for a host to steal everyone’s bitcoins because he or she would only ever control one private key for each address. Of course, decentralised marketplaces simply won’t have hosts, so this may well soon become moot. (It’s “Bitcoin” by the way, no capital “C”.)
Billion-dollar bank heist through ATM hacking barely gets reported, $190B annual losses by merchants in the US due to credit card fraud…but a Bitcoin heist for $12M? OH MY GOD BITCOIN IS EVIL!!!!!
Relative to the Comcast story, I’ve gone through a similar situation with Mediacom more than once over the last 4 years. Their goal is essentially to get you to just give up and eat the raise. I fought it the first time I went through this crap and eventually won, but the second time I just gave up. Intentionally forcing you through multiple phone calls and massive hold time and call cutoffs and severe frustration with their intentional stupidity are all part of the plan and I’m sure it works for the most part.
The best, though, was AT&T Roadrunner service. After living in one State/Town for a total of 6 months my internet connection failed. I contacted AT&T and was told that since I had this connection for over ten years they would fix it, but they would also have to raise my rates. I informed them that I had only been a customer for 6 months. I was then told directly by the local AT&T Manager that in order to prove my obviously false residency claim I would need to supply them a copy of my tax returns for the previous 5 years and that a statement from the Landlord was not acceptable… I kid you not. Needless to say, I lost that one.
Most cable companies are nothing but sophisticated blood suckers backed by laws they wrote.
The evil PT Barnum.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/03/benjamin_netanyahu_can_t_be_trusted_he_says_he_didn_t_mean_what_he_said.html
The babeIfish is telling me “I freely admit to lying about this, but you should believe me now” BeeBee is a most remarkable Bullshitter. He forgoes any nuisance complication of trying to obfuscate. Hey I lied OK? Nothing to see here. This may be the dawn of a new political paradigm. Hey, I make not claim that I tell the truth, got a problem w/ that? No? OK good.
says The Guardian at the link… Nobody says about the firewall that will protect precary or unemployed people or poor retires from the debt-deflationary whirlpool that will ensue…
Antidote: fluffy tail, big nostrils; must be Panthera in the mountains of Pakistan.
Aka snow leopard?
Perhaps Yves will have this tomorrow: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/asia/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-obit/index.html
Again you can agree/disagree with his policies, but he’s always stricken me as a man who did what needed to be done.
john perry barlow–the name sounds inconsequential
A fellow parishioner (long since deceased) in the Episcopal church I attended on the North Shore of Chicago where rich folks live was a senior partner with one of the (former) Big 8 accounting firms. He left the business in disgust, after getting a good taste of the faked auditing his partners committed of the “LDC” program, particularly as it was being operated by the carefree folks in the upper reaches of Continental Illinois Bank.
He was good enough to share some details: this was a great scam by our US rulers to get South and Central American and other “less developed countries” into deep debt trouble. All the players cheerfully dove into the moral-hazard pool. The loans, and eventual losses, amounting to Big Money in those pre-2008 days, were guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the US (taxpaying) public. The bank officers and their federal contacts knew these were pre-failed transactions, but defaults were no cost to the banksters, who as bank officers were paid a percentage of the amount of the loan as their bonus or commission. And not “career-limiting” to the feds involved. They also got lots of free sex, drugs, bribes, and rock’n’roll from the Big Players in the governments and financial entities in the LDCs. No harm, no foul, right? A lot like Greece and Spain and Ukraine and everywhere else, including Detroit, right? I offer this little link as a bit of history, published by the FDIC itself, to add some context and detail: https://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/history/191_210.pdf
Some of us remember the Savings and Loan deregulation debacle, and vaguely recall Mike Milken and Chuck Keating and Lincoln Savings and Loan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis The LDC bail-over was on the same order of magnitude. Nothing’s changed, just the acronyms — the thieves, the shameless grabbers, selling the same ultimately bitter pills to the rest of us, are all still out there, knowing they will be long gone or at least immune to any consequences when the patient once again lapses into cachexia and coma, with fevered relatives scrambling to refill the drained blood vessels for the next Vampire Squid encounter. And the apologetics run on forever too — e.g., the S&L mess was per some Players just due to “incomplete deregulation,” with a host of problems that supposedly caused that were NOT THEIR FAULT!!! http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SavingsandLoanCrisis.html
Yves is convinced the 11 million individual Greeks, elite scammers and farmers and taverna owners and waiters and sitters, all in it more or less together, are nothing but gyro meat, whatever they do, to be sliced away, packed into dark rye sandwiches with a soupcon of tzatziki and a slathering of Senf to make the meal even more piquant. They are just one of the foodstocks for the set of financialist appetites that have been pulling this crap since Hammurabi incised that first recorded Uniform Commercial Code, way back when? http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp It’s getting to where even the Squids are in danger of finding themselves without an ocean of Real Economy Wealth to swim and hunt and ravage in.
Who in all the world, what collection of people, have a prayer of intercepting the incoming Squids on their next inventive bleeding attack from out of the darkness, from behind that cloud of artfully ejected ink?
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins
Thank you so much for the link. How do we forget about such patent proofs of the real nature of the Game? Interesting that our Rulers let testimonies like that get published, or stuff like Naked Capitalism for tha matter? Maybe to reinforce our sense of the inevitability of It All, and the seeming futility of opposition or at least resistance? One wonders: did any of the individual troops or supply clerks or techs or pilots or cooks on all those alien ships in the imaginary world of “Independence Day” dream of or hope for something more, something better than serial planetary rape and murder? Old Smedley Butler, having put in his decades as a highly effective drone, sure did. Maybe the groupthink of the aliens was just too overwhelming, or maybe their rulers had literally bred or gene-modified it out of them…