My new piece, “Anti-Sinitism and All That,” is up at Lew Rockwell.
Here’s a part of it:
“Shooters (See also para-shooter, green man, leprechaun)
Just as birthers show an untoward preoccupation with Barack Obama’s birth certificate, shooters spend an inordinate amount of time looking for “green shoots” in the economy. Where everyone else sees dry brown weeds, shooters see lush tropical foliage with jobs flowering, the stock market surging, a glint in Jim Cramer’s eyes, and a song on every broker’s lips.
Most psychiatrists consider shooters dangerously delusional. They note that shooters often overlap as a group with anti-Sinites. Greenspan, for example, is both an anti-Sinite and a shooter.
A small radical group of psychologists, however, claims that shooters are harmless visionaries, no different from the people who claim to see little green men or leprechauns. Following intense lobbying by these radicals, shooters were reclassified in the DSM-IV as suffering from a personality disorder rather than a psychosis.
[A sub-class of the shooter is the para-shooter. Para-shooters, as their name suggests, are a parasitic group, largely made up of incompetent CEOs and bureaucrats. Para-shooters, while usually not shooters themselves, depend on shooters to hang onto their perks and privileges. This is especially true of one variant of para-shooter, the golden para-shooter. Golden para-shooters are nearly always full-blown psychopaths].
Brazilian pop singer Elis Regina (1945 – 1982) is one of my new finds. One half of an album Elis and Tom (with Antonio Carlos Jobim) that’s considered one of the best in bossa nova, Regina was a passionate, supremely gifted, and original performer. Not as overtly political as other singers, her own unconventional life and stage presence lent weight to her political engagement. She was once vilified for a public performance in support of Brazil’s military junta (1964-1985) that later turned out to have been coerced. After that, the cartoonist Helfil, one of her detractors, became her friend, and she joined him to support a popular movement demanding the amnesty of political prisoners and exiled artists and intellectuals.
This was the subject of her classic 1979 performance of “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (Blanc/Bosco), which refers to “the return of Henfil’s brother.” This was the cartoonist’s older brother, Betinho, a leading sociologist, who had been exiled. Regina’s campaign was an important contribution to some 5000 Brazilian political prisoners returning from exile.
O Bebado e a Equilibrista
The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker (1979)
Lyrics: Carla Cristina Music: Aldir Blanc/João Bosco Translation: Steven Engler
Evening fell like a bridge
A drunk in a funeral suit reminded me of Chaplin’s tramp
The moon, like some brothel madam
Begged a rented shine from each cold star
And clouds, up there in the blotting paper sky
Sucked at tortured stains
What insane pressure
The drunk with the bowler hat made a thousand bows For Brazil, my Brazil’s night Is dreaming of the return of Henfil’s brother
Of so many people who left, in a dangerous situation
Our country is crying, gentle mother
Marias and Clarices are crying on Brazilian soil But I know that pain this sharp can’t be pointless
Hope dances on the tightrope with an umbrella
With each step on that rope you can hurt yourself
Bad luck, the balancing hope Knows that each artist’s show must go on
So. There was at least one mainstream journalist hip to the revered boss of AIG. I take back my general denunciation of the media on this point. Apparently, what was missing was the larger picture…
Well, that’s what bloggers are for. We supply the big picture. We connect the dots…
Here’s a part of the piece:
“Not long after starting a prestigious new job as general counsel at American International Group, 48-year-old E. Michael Joye received an alarming piece of news. AIG, an employee confided, had for years been improperly booking premiums it received for workers’ compensation insurance. If true, it meant that the insurance company was cheating state governments out of tens of millions of dollars used to pay benefits to injured workers.
Joye, a former Navy lieutenant who had left a blue-chip law-firm partnership to join AIG, investigated the matter personally. He soon heard even more shocking news: that AIG chief Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg knew about the practice–and had done nothing to stop it. Greenberg was one of the all-time great American CEOs. Could it really be true?…..
…According to Joye’s notes, one employee even described a meeting about the matter at which Greenberg had asked, “Are we legal?” When an employee responded, “If we were legal, we wouldn’t be in business,” Greenberg “began laughing, and that was the end of it.”
Nonetheless, Joye reported what he had learned in meetings with Greenberg and Thomas Tizzio, then AIG’s president. Then he wrote them a memo that couldn’t have been blunter. AIG’s behavior was “permeated with illegality,” he wrote; these “intentional violations” could produce criminal fraud and racketeering charges and “expose AIG to fines and penalties in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” as well as civil suits producing “astronomical damages awards.” AIG, Joye wrote, needed to end the illegal practices immediately, fire all those involved, report the violations, and make restitution.
After finishing the memo, Joye met with Tizzio. What was Greenberg going to do? Nothing, Tizzio told him, according to Joye’s later account. Greenberg had decided that correcting the problem would be too expensive. (Tizzio declined to comment.) Appalled at the news, Joye tendered his letter of resignation on the spot, packed up his office, and left the building. He had been at AIG for eight months……..
Hank Greenberg, however, did move quickly to deal with the thorny problem of a former general counsel who might publicly accuse him of condoning fraud. Two weeks after Joye quit, Greenberg sent a short note to Jules Kroll, founder of the well-known corporate-intelligence firm, forwarding background material about Joye. ……
Joye’s abrupt parting with AIG was not a case of skittishness brought about by the current spate of investigations into insurance industry accounting. No, Joye left AIG in January 1992, and for 13 years he remained silent about what he had discovered there. …….
But Joye never forgot his glimpse of the way AIG’s CEO did business. Even after retiring to his home near Princeton, N.J., he kept his AIG files. And so, this past spring, after New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into Greenberg’s long-buried secrets, Joye came forward to offer one of them up.”
My Comment
Notice how the universal (and well-merited) emphasis on the wrong-doing of Goldman Sachs, the company, or on AIG, the company, takes the focus off Greenberg. See, for example, this piece by Matt Taibbi, which does just that.
But worrying about AIG, or GS, as companies, at this point – while useful and necessary – is in some ways beside the point. The problem is not any company or organization itself but a network made up of people who use companies like GS or AIG or Citi. They’re the culprits of the financial crisis.
This network communicates outside the formal communication channels usual to business and government. You’re going to get relatively little looking for an email record or phone record — as a smoking gun. Or rather, even if you did find it, it would be secondary.
Take Blankfein’s presence (Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs) at the bail-out pow-wow hosted by Tim Geithner. Outing this gives you a tea-pot dome type scandal, but then what? The scandal can quickly be resolved by disposing of the offender. But that does next to nothing to disrupt the network. The rest of the insiders can always get another member to pick up the slack.
That means that in this game there are bag-holders... and there are players.
Vikram Pandit is, from that perspective, a bag-holder. Franklin Raines is a bag-holder. Bernie Madoff may have been turned into a bag-holder, but he was also a player.
And Hank Greenberg is a player, for sure.
Just my speculation, this Friday afternoon, as winter starts closing up shop in the Southern Cone. It was warm enough today to walk around without a coat. A couple of weeks more and spring will be here…
Apparently, ole Bernie played fast and loose not only with lucre, but with the ladies….in this case, the chief financial officer of the Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization of America).
Sheryl Weinstein’s account, “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” will be published Aug. 25 by St. Martin’s Press. Amazon.com Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. are accepting advance orders through Web site listings that disclose no details about the relationship and say that the author is “to be announced.” The author is Weinstein, said John Murphy, a spokesman for New York-based St. Martin’s.
Weinstein, 60, has denounced Madoff publicly at least four times this year, including at the June 29 court hearing where he was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison for masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Weinstein told the judge she met Madoff 21 years ago when she was chief financial officer at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America Inc……
In addition to details of the affair, the hardcover book will include photographs and intimate descriptions of Madoff, Murphy said.”
My Comment:
As if getting ‘taken’ financially and emotionally wasn’t enough, the imprudent Ms. Weinstein now wants to go public. And to be linked forever with her nemesis. What won’t a buck – even a rapidly depreciating, underweight buck – do to people’s good sense and self-respect.
Dear Ms. Weinstein, he was a creep. He screwed you over.
Put as much distance as possible between him and you, physically and virtually.
Unless you want us to start wondering about you too..
I mean, the sentencing within 6 months, the flurry of high-profile books…
lots of handkerchiefs and wands waving…..
Maybe we should check the sleeves and see what’s being disappeared in this story.
A gloomy forecast of where the US housing market is going at US News & World Report — Nowhere.
“Economist Celia Chen of Moody’s Economy.com has published a forecast suggesting that residential real estate could take 10 years to recover in most states-and 20 years in Florida and California.
Chen predicts that house prices will stop falling by the second quarter of 2010……..
By the time house prices stop falling, they’ll be down 43 percent from peak prices reached in 2006, as measured by the Case-Shiller home-price index.
That will mark the deepest housing correction since 1890, and probably ever in the United States (meaningful data go back only to the late 19th century)………. Nationwide, price levels won’t regain the peaks of 2006 until 2020. In the worst-hit states, Florida and California, the rebound will take until 2030. Five other states won’t hit their 2006 peaks until after 2023. Anybody who doubts that it could take that long should consider the real estate bust in Japan, where prices are still down by half from the peaks they reached 15 years ago.
Other states, mainly those where the housing boom was muted, will bounce back faster. Homes in Texas, Oklahoma, and a handful of southern and Farm Belt states could regain peak prices within seven years, after falling by less than 10 percent.“
My Comment
The article goes on to point out, correctly, that housing takes up about 17% of the economy, so a prolonged Japanese-type slump makes any kind of “green shoot” being hyped today more likely to be astro-turf than lawn.
Actually, housing takes up more than 17% of the economy. If you factor in all the related services, from construction to home furnishings to financing, it probably takes up between 30%-40% of the economy.
Add to that the ongoing slump in commercial real estate, world-over, and you can see why some of us are legging it.
Some anecdotal evidence:
I spoke to an Indian management consultant recently. He’d just returned from visits to China and Cambodia and was extremely pessimistic about the prospects for real estate recovery there economic recovery in China. He suggested a mark-down of about 40% from current prices.
Offices are sitting vacant everywhere. Traveling in the north of Morocco in 2008, I visited one of the hot-spots of investment – the coast from Tangier to Tetuane. Hotels and apartment complexes were springing up on every available expanse of beach. But a businessman who was involved in exporting and importing clothes (from China) and semi-precious stones (from India) was skeptical. He said a lot of the residential boom there was tied up with the government’s effort to develop tourism and some of it was driven by drug money in search of a place to hide. Business, he said was not so good. He’d been trying to sell a warehouse for over a year, and despite a 15% markdown, had found no takers. He showed me a warehouse full of inexpensive women’s clothes, suits for $4-$5, made in China.
There were no buyers to be had. He was even thinking of shipping them to the US, because shipping costs had fallen so low. At least in the US, he said, you could find a market….
Everything, it seems, depends on the American consumer….
“UBS paid a $780 million penalty earlier this year and turned over names of about 300 American clients in a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. In that case, UBS admitted helping U.S. citizens evade taxes, which experts say is not a violation of Swiss bank secrecy laws.
So far, three UBS customers whose names were divulged under the prior agreement have pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court. Hundreds of others holders of secret accounts at UBS and other Swiss banks have voluntarily come forward to the IRS under an amnesty program that requires payment of taxes and penalties but generally does not include the threat of prison.”
My Comment:
I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand it bothers me that people who entered into a commercial agreement in which secrecy was part of the explicit deal are being “outed.”
On the other hand, I don’t think you should evade tax (avoidance is different from evasion) in ways that seem less principled than self-interested.
OK, OK, self-interest is a good thing and our taxes do go to fund war, mayhem, and looting…..
But then you shouldn’t accept anything the government’s involved in – not housing loans, not subsidies to business, not policing, not roads….none of them. In that case, I’d say your stand was principled.
Here are some of the criteria the feds use for spotting your average domestic terrorist:
1. Referencing the New World Order and pointing out pro-Zionist domination of the media (it says Jewish, but I daresay they include critics of Zionism, even if the critics parse the racial issue carefully and without bigotry, as I believe I do) CHECK
2. Anger toward the Federal Reserve System
CHECK
3. Concern that assignment of US army personnel to Homeland Security functions could lead to dissidents being placed in FEMA concentration camps (their language, not mine)
CHECK
4.Anticipation that the economic collapse of the United States might lead to a declaration of martial law CHECK
5. Fear of universal conscription into military service
CHECK
6. Belief in support for gold-backed currency [interesting use of “belief in” — I wonder at myself…]
CHECK
7. Distrust toward the IRS, ATF, FBI, and FEMA
CHECK
8. Support for former Presidential candidate Ron Paul
CHECK
9. Sporting the Gadsden Flag (a picture of a rattle-snake with the logo, Don’t Tread on Me).
CHECK
Oops, me bad. I just thought it was, well, a picture of a rattle-snake with the logo, Don’t Tread on Me…..
[I don’t fly any flags…I just linked to it on facebook ‘cos I liked the spirit of it]
Who’s the Gadsden guy?
Nine counts of terrorism.
Not bad for a nerd who spent most of her time in the US in a library or at a computer terminal.
Now think what might have been, if I’d put my mind to it.