LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive for August, 2009
Milton Nascimento Sings the Jet Samba
Brazil’s Milton Nascimento sings Anton Carlos Jobim’s musical celebration of Rio de Janeiro, Samba do Avaio (The Jet Samba) . The lyrics reference the statue of Christ the Redeemer that towers over the city and the Guanabara.
Minha alma canta
(My soul sings)
Vejo o Rio de Janeiro
(Seeing Rio de Janeiro)…..Cristo Redentor
Braços abertos sobre a Guanabara…Karen de Coster on Matt Yglesias on Public School Funding…
Hmm..some flying fur:
Matt Yglesias has a blog post called “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity” to which Karen de Coster administers several unkindest cuts.
The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.
Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.
Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have.
[Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It's not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].
So let me toss my two cents in.From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.
Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).
He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.
As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..
What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.
Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.
It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.
Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.
Posterboyz of the Science-Industrial Complex: Vol. 1
The Daily Mail had this in June:
“A scientist who advises the Government on swine flu is a paid director of a drugs firm making hundreds of millions of pounds from the pandemic.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), a 20-strong task force drawing up the action plan for the virus.
Yet he also holds a £116,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, the company selling swine flu vaccines and anti-virals to the NHS.”
Note, 25% of that is in the form of shares, so he would directly benefit if the company’s stock were boosted by larger sales. But, apparently, he’s completely unrepentant about it.
There’s more:
During the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, Sir Roy’s advice to Tony Blair led to the culling of more than 6million animals.
The previous year at Oxford University, Sir Roy was at the centre of controversy after claiming a female colleague had slept with her boss before getting a job. He was forced to apologize and pay compensation.
A university inquiry in the wake of the scandal found that he was in breach of rules by failing to disclose his business interests as director and shareholder of International Biomedical and Health Sciences Consortium - an Oxford-based biomedical consultancy, which had awarded grants to his research centre.
Sir Roy was forced to resign, although his career soon recovered. He moved to Imperial College within months, was made the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientist and, last year, took over as Rector of Imperial College, London where he earns up to £400,000 a year.
If Pigs Flu……
From Bill Engdahl via Financial Sense.com:
The Pew study notes, ‘That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..
Tamiflu and Rummy
In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.
What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold.14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.…….
….. Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.”
Government Profiting from Bailed-out Banks
In the news, AP reports:
“Critics of the bailout were concerned that the Treasury Department would never see a return on its investment. But the government has already claimed profits from eight of the biggest banks.
The Times cited government profits of $1.4 billion from Goldman Sachs, $1.3 billion from Morgan Stanley and $414 million from American Express. It also listed five other banks — Northern Trust, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, U.S. Bancorp and BB&T — that each returned profits between $100 million and $334 million.”
The government has also collected about $35 million in profits from 14 smaller banks, the Times reported.
Ayn Rand On What Dooms Societies
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.
– Ayn Rand
Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell on Obamacare..
My Comment:
Especially note the comments on the video about the complete end of medical privacy in the US
There will be (is?) a dossier on every citizen that contains their medical information, their financial transactions/status, their legal problems. It will be (is?) available to the government, to homeland security, probably to the police, to insurance companies..and to whoever any of these entities want to give it to..
And that’s apart from the snoops, crooks, personal enemies, corporate spies, domestic and foreign spooks, advertisers, computer hackers, vigilantes, activists, and private eyes who might get their hands on it. Sleep well, my friends.
As Ron Paul points out in this video, vaccinations by themselves are not necessarily the problem, (although we probably do far too many of them, with far too little long-term testing). The problem is the federal government taking vaccination programs over, on a massive scale, in military style, and with the threat of force behind them.
That’s a problem. Not to mention the history of germ warfare and CIA black ops, that, of course, is supposed to be only the stuff of tin-foil hat theories.
Yeah. I wish...
Anne Applebaum on Ted Kennedy
Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy declared, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
That image – the women in the back alleys, the doors shutting on the citizens’ fingers – was powerful enough to prevent Bork from winning Senate approval. It is thus not unfair to say that the vitriol that has surrounded Supreme Court nominations ever since is one of Kennedy’s legacies, too….”
— Anne Applebaum in The Telegraph.
My Comment
Ms. Applebaum nails it. The “borking” of not just Supreme Court nominations but of political figures in general goes back to this sad episode in media history.
The Kennedys are American royalty, like the Bushes. So on an occasion like this, it’s probably not appropriate for an outsider to say more. Anyway, I was glad to see that conservatives, even rather shrill ones like Michelle Malkin, have been restrained enough and allowed Ted Kennedy’s family a few days of solemnity and sympathy, before discussing his political or personal flaws.
Why More Swine Flu Deaths in Bangalore?
From Sify.com:
“State health commissioner P.N. Sreenivasachari told IANS: ‘It’s difficult to say why Karnataka, more precisely Bangalore, which is endowed with adequate healthcare facilities, is witnessing large number of swine flu deaths. We too are puzzled.
‘We can say the virus is already in the air and it’s time people became more aware and cautious to stop the spread of the virus. However, from the point of view of the administration, we have provided adequate healthcare facilities to treat swine flu patients,’ added Sreenivasachari.
Principal secretary (Health) I.R. Perumal said people should not get panicky.
‘People with swine flu like symptoms should immediately get themselves checked, as the city is well equipped to deal with the pandemic,’ added Perumal.
On Friday, two deaths were reported from Bangalore, one came from Bijapur.
My Comment
Why? I have no idea. More international travelers is one reason and a plausible one. But I confess I couldn’t help thinking about this piece I wrote in 2005, “Terror Hits Bangalore.”
One result of swine flu scare-mongering will be a shift of money to influenza research - hitherto absent in India. That means funding for drug trials. I wonder who the lucky drug companies are that will benefit?
The two states hit hardest are Karnataka (where Bangalore is) and Maharashtra (where Bombay is). Those are also the states that are the destinations of most foreign travelers and where India’s IT business and stock market are located. Bangalore is the home of a booming biotech business. And a locus of the anti-globalization movement as well. Just thinking out a loud…
Deaths so far are a hundred or less. That’s in a country of roughly a billion and a quarter where tens of thousands die from traffic accidents (300 a day or around 100,000 a year) and from water-borne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and jaundice. Hundred of farmers are committing suicide. None of that has qualified for the term pandemic….OR for the accompanying switch in research funding..
Here’s some information on malaria in India in 2008:
“While the official figures state that in 2008 India had 1.5 million malaria cases, resulting in 924 deaths, the real number of deaths is higher by several orders of magnitude.
“These numbers are a joke,” said Sunil Kaul, a doctor who works for a volunteer organization called the Ant that treats villagers. “In Assam alone we had at least 1,500 deaths last year.”
The real number of malaria-related deaths in India was closer to 40,000 in 2008, according to various non-governmental sources and some government officials who didn’t want to be named.”
Under-reporting and lack of knowledge about the disease are two of the main obstacles in retarding the spread of malaria. But interestingly, it’s also international organizations like WHO that obstruct progress in many ways:
“These problems are further complicated by foreign agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which — under the influence of global lending agencies like the World Bank and big pharmaceutical companies — have pushed India to adopt prevention methods that don’t suit the local conditions and to initiate huge, ill-considered projects rather than targeted ones. ….”
More here at The Global Post.
Theodore Roethke On Learning Where to Go
One of my favorite poems, and certainly my favorite American poet.
The Waking
- Theodore RoethkeI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go….etc.
Swine-Flu is a Man-Made Panic..
My new piece on swine-flu is up at Lew Rockwell.
Please note, I have it as Harold Varnus in the piece. It should be Varmus, as in my previous blog post on the subject. In my defense, I wrote it mostly in very dim light…
“The latest in the barrage of media reports on swine flu is a Bloomberg news report (August 25, 2009) that it might hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the US and over-burden hospital intensive care units.
This comes from a planning scenario released by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology
The Bloomberg story cites some theatrical numbers:
- Half of the US population infected (that is, over 150 million people)
- 300,000 people in hospital intensive care units
- 30–90,000 people dead
- By-pass surgery emergency operations disrupted
But hidden in paragraph 5 of the Bloomberg piece is the most pertinent part:
These numbers are only “scenario projections” that were “developed from models put together for planning purposes only,” says a Centers for Disease Control spokesman.
So.
- Statistical projections.
- Projections from models of past pandemics. (And not the past, as in 1968 or 1957, but way back, as in 1918.)
- Projections developed for planning purposes only.
That’s three stages removed from anything you could call reality.
But perish this tenuous link with facts, PCAST wants Obama to rush through vaccine production so that 40 million people can be infect – er – injected by mid-September.
And who should make that decision?
A doctor? The surgeon-general? A medical team?
Why, the homeland security adviser!
That’s John Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, deputy executive director of the CIA under George Tenet, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2005 during the exact period when the CIA became most heavily involved in torture practices in Iraq and elsewhere.”
Note:
I wanted to state here that my social views are quite liberal, and I do not have any objection to voluntary family planning and contraception. I’m also firmly pro-choice. And in terms of the environment, I support far greater consideration by each of us, as individuals and as communities, for animal life, nature, and conservation.
But those are my personal views. Putting the legal and physical force of the corporate- state behind those preferences, in the form that Holdren apparently thinks will work, is, in my view, completely misguided.
Call for Indian Co-conspirators, Activists…
If you are an Indian doctor, nurse, farmer, agronomist, or engineer, and are interested in sustainable development, self-sufficiency, alternative fuels, alternative health, organic herbs and healing, yoga or astrology…
AND
And are concerned about food and water in India in the future, I would be interested in hearing from you.
Scientists Who Developed Vaccine Won’t Take It Themselves? (Correction added)
– Wayne Madsen on Guillain-Barre syndrome and the swine flu vaccine
My Comment:
I’m hearing that I misunderstood this and it’s the makers of the small-pox vaccine who are baulking.
I’ll try to track that down.Meanwhile, why would you trust a government that sends secretive letters to neurologists admitting fears it won’t admit to the public that’s getting the vaccinations?
Bill Lets President Seize Emergency Control of Private Cyber Networks
In the news:
“Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.”Read more here.
My Comment
Please note “behind closed doors.” This was supposed to be an ultra-transparent administration, right? To make up for the secrecy and tyranny of George Bush…..
Remember?Ecclesiastes on the Government Bail-Outs
“That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.”
— Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth), 1:15
The Political Ideology Behind …
The Political Ideology Behind Swine-Flu Hysteria: A new piece about swine-flu that I’m still working on:
T.. http://bit.ly/28gTpWThe Political Ideology Behind Swine-Flu Hysteria
A new piece about swine-flu that I’m still working on:
The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, the creators of the swine-flu scenario, has three co-chairs:
1. John Holdren (Director, White House Office of Science & Technology, Obama’s “science czar”)2. Eric Lander, (head of the Broad Institute, MIT)
3. Harold Varmus (CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, NY)
A little digging fills in the details.
1. Holdren:
Holdren isn’t just any old bureaucrat. He’s a climate change expert who holds the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
(The ‘Teresa’ is, of course, John Kerry’s wife when she was spouse of Ketchup king, John Heinz)
The support for climate change policies goes hand in hand with support for nuclear technology that Holdren believes is needed for those policies. He also believes all nuclear energy should be under the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy.
Climate change and “peaceful nukes” have been the beneficiaries of a huge PR effort over the last 15-20 years, largely stemming from the Pentagon, specifically, from Andrew Marshall, a charismatic theorist of American dominance whose Office of Net Assessments is the most influential outfit you never heard of. This PR typically derides any dissent from climate orthodoxy and downplays the enormous costs and risks involved in the global move to nuclear energy.
There’s more. As early as 1969 Holdren teamed up with neo-Malthusian doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich to advocate population control to “fend off the misery to come.” In 1977, he and Ehrlich, as well as Anne H. Ehrlich, co-authored a textbook (”Ecoscience”) in which they discussed “a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls…..”
Check out this site for some truly mind-boggling quotes:
Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.
Independence Day: Alfredo Zitarossa Sings Adagio en Mi Pais
Adagio en Mi Pais (Adagio in My Country), written and sung by Alfredo Zitarossa.
Zitarossa was a beloved and important Uruguayan composer, poet, singer, and journalist, who was ostracized for his involvement with the Frente Amplio of the left, during the 1970s, at the time when the military junta (with its torturous secret police) came to power in Uruguay. Zitarossa’s songs were banned in the Southern Cone countries and he himself was forced to live in exile in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. He died young in 1989 at the age of 52. The most characteristic voice of resistance in Uruguay’s second “independence,” he makes a good subject for a post on Independence Day (Dia de la Independencia) , which happens to be today.Behind every door
my people are alert,
and no one can silence their song,
and tomorrow they will sing again.
In my country we are tough,
the future will show that.[Here is a complete translation by Yoshi Furuhashi, Monthly Review Press]
A bit of history: Uruguay won its independence from a triangular war between Spain, Argentina, and Brazil between 1825 and 1828. As the second smallest country in South America (after Surinam) it’s still somewhat overshadowed by its giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, with whom it shares it western and northern borders respectively.
Uruguay has many things to recommend it to a libertarian temperament. It’s a small country. The culture is unpretentious and laid back. It’s the home of the gaucho, the ferociously independent vagabond cowboy of South America. And the national motto, Libertad o Muerte (Liberty or Death) echoes Patrick Henry’s famous words (”Give me liberty or give me death”) before the Virginia Convention in 1775.
It’s traditional to go out on the night before Dia de la Independencia and I made it to a neighbor’s asado (barbecue). According to the Uruguayans, the asado, mate (the ubiquitous herbal tea that is sipped through a straw), and tango all come from Uruguay, not Argentina. Of course, in Argentina, you hear another story.
The asador did a fine job with the wood fire that cooks the meat. I took a shot at it too. The idea is to spread out the embers as they fall through the grate of the parrilla (grill)* from the log fire. Too many in one place and the meat gets burned. Too few and it doesn’t cook. Most of our guests wanted their meat - the world-famous Uruguayan organic beef - well done, so the asador and I were quite busy. The beef cut is called tira de asado (a cut from the ribs) and is mixed with other kinds of meat, like chorizo (sausage). We served the asado with chimichurri - a relish from oil, oregano, garlic, and chopped belly peppers - and with baguettes and clerico (made by mixing fruit drinks and wine).
*The term parrilla is also used, by analogy, to refer to torture and to the torture-rack, which were wide-spread in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil…..
For the role of the US in fostering the routine use of torture in Uruguay, read this piece by Bill Blum.
A Plague of Locusts: A True Ta…
A Plague of Locusts: A True Tale from Argentina…..: The Gaucho is no farmer, and all his land is given up .. http://bit.ly/5fcnV
A Plague of Locusts: A True Tale from Argentina…..
Reading the history of these regions, I came across this early example of the futility of trying to fend off nature…
No other part of the world has in recent years suffered from such a
plague of locusts as the agricultural districts of Argentina. They come from the north in clouds that sometimes darken the sun. Some of the swarms have been estimated to be sixty miles long and from twelve to fifteen miles wide. Fields which in the morning stand high with
waving corn, are by evening only comparable to ploughed or burnt lands. Even the roots are eaten up.In 1907 the Argentine Government organized a bureau for the destruction of locusts, and in 1908 $4,500,000 was placed by Congress at the disposal of this commission. An organized service, embracing thousands of men, is in readiness at any moment to send a force to
any place where danger is reported. Railway trains have been repeatedly stopped, and literally many tons of them have had to be taken off the track. A fine of $100 is imposed upon any settler
failing to report the presence of locust swarms or hopper eggs on his land. Various means are adopted by the land-owner to save what he can from the voracious insects. Men, women and children mount their horses and drive flocks of sheep to and fro over the ground to kill them. A squatter with whom I stayed got his laborers to gallop a troop of mares furiously around his garden to keep them from settling there. All, however, seemed useless. About midsummer the locust lays its eggs under an inch or two of soil. Each female will drop from thirty to fifty eggs, all at the same time, in a mass resembling a head of wheat. As many as 50,000 eggs have been counted in a space
less than three and a half feet square.During my sojourn in Entre Rios, the province where this insect seems to come in greatest numbers, a law was passed that every man over the age of fourteen years, whether native or foreigner, rich or poor, was compelled to dig out and carry to Government depots, four pounds
weight of locusts’ eggs. It was supposed that this energetic measure would lessen their numbers. Many tons were collected and burnt, but, I assure the reader, no appreciable difference whatever was made in their legions. The young jumpers came, eating all before them, and
their numbers seemed infinite. Men dug trenches, kindled fires, and burned millions of them. Ditches two yards wide and deep and two hundred feet long were completely filled up by these living waves.
But all efforts were unavailing–the earth remained covered.— “Through Five Republics on Horse-back: Being an Account of Many Wanderings in South America,” G. Whitfield Ray, 1915
My Comment
An apt metaphor for most government intervention..
Efforts to tackle our own plague of locusts are just as futile..Sometimes nature must take its course…and right now, nature demands that a season of fat be followed by a season of lean..
Goethe, the Libertarian: ̶…
Goethe, the Libertarian: “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
– Johann.. http://bit.ly/eKGM9Goethe, the Libertarian
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
– Johann Wolfgang von GoetheGeorge Kennan on the Realities…
George Kennan on the Realities Behind US Foreign Policy: I have been meaning to post the entire text of the famo.. http://bit.ly/3m03zz
George Kennan on the Realities Behind US Foreign Policy (Links added)
I have been meaning to post the surrounding text of the famous passage in which George F. Kennan, a noted Sovietologist, cold warrior, and advocate of realpolitik, expressed his view that US policy in the post-war years should be unsentimental in its attitude toward Asia. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950 (under George Marshall and Dean Acheson), Kennan was one of the principal architects of US post-war strategy and the formulator of the policy of long-term “containment” of the Soviet Union. So the piece makes for interesting reading today, especially in light of the following:
*the destruction of Asian savings by the US government-generated debt & dollar tsunami
*the rise in food prices in Asia
* the ongoing rush by Asian governments (along with everyone else) to buy up world farmland
* the potential for global water-wars in the immediate future.
KENNAN:
II. Far East
“We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. …..
…In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better……”
— George F. Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS23), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948
[From Russell Wvong’s website, via
Gilles D’Aymery in a piece on the improper use of this quote by Noam Chomsky and others atSwans Commentary.
Paper Back Edition of “M…
Paper Back Edition of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”: The paper back edition of “Mobs, Messiahs.. http://bit.ly/SiNCY
Paperback Edition of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”
The paper back edition of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” is coming out in a week or so. You can find it on Amazon. A part of the book can also be found in the new edition of “Financial Reckoning Day.” I haven’t checked the new “Empire of Debt” yet.
“Mobs” is a pretty good book and as easy a read as you’ll find on the financial crisis. We also don’t miss a beat on the technical details. Check it out, and you’ll see we were on the money on nearly everything about the last two years…..
Robespierre Contra Danton: Pow…
Robespierre Contra Danton: Power Versus the People:
This is an insightful segment from the powerful French film.. http://bit.ly/wbkchRobespierre Contra Danton: Power Versus the People
This is an insightful segment from the powerful French film Danton (1983), by Polish director, Andrzej Wajda
The film is based on the short story, Danton’s Tod by the Romantic German playwright, Georg Buchner, and contrasts two of the leading figures of the French Revolution - Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. The two revolutionaries fall out when Danton, the man of the people, dissents from Robespierre’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror.
Wajda made the film in France but used Polish actors for Robespierre and his flunkies to convey his contempt for the Communist government in Poland, which was at the time trying to break the popular movement, Solidarity, by imposing martial law on the land. The French actor, Georges Depardieu, is tremendous, especially in the scene before the Revolutionary tribunal that condemns him to die. But this scene too is powerful, if a little black and white, in its contrast of the sickly theorist and vain “idealist,” Robespierre, who claims to speak for “the people,” and the vital, if corrupt, man who is actually one of them.
The scene makes a fitting commentary on a certain malignant strand of liberalism in America today.
Dante on Neutrality in Times o…
Dante on Neutrality in Times of Moral Crisis: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in ti.. http://bit.ly/K4HcT
Dante on Neutrality in Times of Moral Crisis
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.”
– Dante Alighieri
Government Conspiracy Theory B…
Government Conspiracy Theory Blames Hybrid Mortgages for Depression: Tom di Lorenzo at Lew Rockwell blog has thi.. http://bit.ly/2wn2ZB
Government Conspiracy Theory Blames Hybrid Mortgages for Depression
Tom di Lorenzo at Lew Rockwell blog has this:
“Following Alan Greenspan’s pathetic “don’t blame me” speeches and books, various Fed branches have parroted his view that the Greenspan Depression we are in was caused by thrifty Orientals whose savings drove down interest rates. So imagine my surprise upon receiving a hard copy of a Dallas Fed publicaton entitled “Taming the Credit Cycle by Limiting High-Risk Lending” and reading that “The present troubles emerged to a large extent from the growing use of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages . . .” Huh? What happened to The New Yellow Peril?
There is no mention at all — not one word — of the role of Fed monetary policy in creating the housing bubble. The culprits, say these self-serving excuse makers (the author is Jeffrey W. Gunther), are “lightly regulated institutions” that are in need of the Fed’s “disciplining force.”
My Conment
Mr. di Lorenzo can relax - this new tack does nothing to exonerate Greenspan. Look at this USA Today piece from early 2004, when housing was already showing bubbl-y tendencies:
“He [Greenspan] said a Fed study suggested many homeowners could have saved tens of thousands of dollars in the last decade if they had ARMs. Those savings would not have been realized, however, had interest rates shot up.
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.”
Read through the whole piece and it’s clear that American house buyers actually “preferred the stability” of the traditional fixed rate mortgages. In other words, it was only a concerted PR effort by Greenspan & Co. that changed people’s tastes in this.
Let that put an end to any moralizing of this issue. Yes - rampant consumerism and debt binging exacerbated the problem. But the problem wasn’t caused by some moral defect in American consumers. It was caused by policies deliberately pushed by the federal government in the hope that the consumer would succumb. The chairman of the Federal Reserve thus acted no differently from any confidence man or grifter who spots a mark (a naive, uninformed person easy to manipulate), then sets about winning the mark’s confidence before baiting the trap….
You can see the chairman’s own words to the national association of credit unions on February 23, 2004. (Skip down to the last 2-3 paragraphs to catch the gist)
And now, just like any con man, the Fed chairman too blames his victims.
They had it coming to them...
Staying On in Uruguay: It̵…
Staying On in Uruguay: It’s 12:20 PM and I’m writing this at the computer terminal at Tres Cruces bu.. http://bit.ly/11ln0z
Staying Put in Uruguay
It’s 12:20 PM and I’m writing this at the computer terminal at Tres Cruces bus station in Montevideo.
Tres Cruces - three crosses - must be one of the most comfortable stations I’ve been in. It’s really a combination of a mall, an information booth and a train station. This is Uruguay’s central terminal and you come here if you want a bus to Punta del Este, or Punta del Diablo, or Salto, or to Colonia, or even to towns in Argentina. The trains in Uruguay are old. If you don’t have a car, you take the bus. Tres Cruces is also where you buy your fare for the buquebus (book-eh-boos), which is the ferry that takes you across the bronze water of the Rio dela Plata, between the two capitals. You can also catch the more scenic (and slightly cheaper) water ride offered by Trans-Uruguay from Carmelo to Tigre, a popular Argentina get-away, about an hour to Buenos Aires.
A tall white cross signals where the station is, slightly hidden behind the road.
It’s drizzling faintly outside now, but nothing like the chill rain and sharp wind earlier in the winter. In any case, I don’t plan on going out. I mean to spend the rest of the night here, reading and catching up with some friends. And I thought I’d catch up a bit on my blogging too.
My excuse is that the past two days were a bit frantic, because I couldn’t make up my mind whether to return as I’d planned….or to ignore my ticket and stay on.
The ticket, in case you’re wondering, was $840 including taxes, which I’m told is a very good deal. I was hoping to get something under $800 but I missed that….because I postponed my departure from May to June at the last minute…..and then some friends landed up and took up a couple of weeks more of my time. A good time was had by all, but when you’re dying to make a move, it can be exasperating waiting around.
Some tips on picking tickets:
*Always try to travel off-season and on weekdays, if you can.
*Prices on deals aren’t always predictable. It used to be that you needed to book well in advance to get a decent price. But I’ve noticed that these days deals can be had for dates just a couple of weeks ahead.
*Sometimes they’re offered by local airlines, like Lan Chile or Pluna (the Uruguayan airline). Other times, they’re cobbled together in the US by some American airline. A good practice is to check the consolidator sites, a couple of fare-searchers like Orbitz or Cheap Tickets, and then go through the promotions on Delta or American or a couple of the South American airlines.
*You need to do that a few times a week for 2-3 weeks - and bingo, you’ll spot something.
Take home point?
Like so many things, it’s a matter of numbers. Turn up enough cards, and you’ll find the trump.. of course, you’ll turn up a few jokers too. But that’s the way the game goes.
But deal or not, I don’t like wasting something I’ve bought. So I looked into changing it.
Too bad, bargain tickets turn out to have restrictions. In this case, I’d need to pay a penalty ($100 - not too bad) and then I would have to pay the difference between my return leg and a new ticket. Well, this time of the year, one-way tickets from Buenos Aires or Montevideo to Miami are about twice the price of my round-trip. Unbelievable. And that’s the way it is right through to the end of December. The reason is you have to stick with a one-way on the airline you came from. I almost thought I’d go back and get another round trip and come back in a few months. It seemed smarter than paying $1500 for a one-way ticket. But I didn’t know if I’d have the stamina to repeat this trip so soon.
Anyway, the decision was made for me. …as the best decisions often are. I got up later than I should have. I needed to have left on the ferry by ten at the latest. Instead, I was still going back and forth over the pros and cons.
That doesn’t explain why I’m stuck at Tres Cruces at midnight, of course, but the guard is signaling that I have to close up for tonight and so the explanation will have to wait for another day… adios…
Lysander Spooner on Government…
Lysander Spooner on Government by Consent: “The only idea … ever manifested as to what is a government of .. http://bit.ly/2yskB2
Lysander Spooner on Government by Consent
“The only idea … ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this — that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”
– Lysander Spooner, via Jim Bovard
Thought Control and the Sex Po…
Thought Control and the Sex Police: The media these days has an unhealthy and strange preoccupation with the sex.. http://bit.ly/O0coW
Thought Control and the Sex Police
The media these days has an unhealthy and strange preoccupation with the sex lives of politicians and “public figures”… especially when they’re adulterous.
All this, despite journalists’ protests that they’re interested in “privacy”…
The issue becomes doubly important because of the role sexual blackmail…or worse yet, sexual libel.… plays and has played in controlling political mavericks, reformers, or even whistle-blowers, whether in government or elsewhere.
I call it strange, because modernity is supposed to have removed itself so far from oppressive mores and bourgeois conventions….and yet in most commentary on the subject, one finds nothing more than the same hideous cliches - about guilt, predation, sex-pots, cheating, and high drama….
In point of fact, most spouses wander (or more accurately, cultivate fantasies of wandering) because of lack of emotional connection in their marriage.That’s clear from Mark Sanford’s tepid (yawn) revelations..
Now, as a good Tory-Bohemian, I find myself often on both sides of this issue.
On the one hand, the nostalgic popular imagery of It’s a Wonderful Life, and Father Knows Best…..
And, as a Christian - even an unorthodox one, the fact that one is supposed to admire the impossible standard set in the Sermon On the Mount…
A standard that no normal human could follow to the letter..
A standard that perhaps no normal human should follow to the letter.
[I wonder if that was the point Jesus was trying to make?]Yet, while no one casts stones at anyone for not giving away all his belongings, or for failing to keep the sabbath, or for slandering or lying, or for fraudulent business practices, strange that even the most benign friendship should bring out the sex police.
(As an example, think of McCain’s supposed affair with a lobbyist - an affair both of them denied and for which no proof existed beyond the media’s fervent desire for a little dirt…and mind you, if one were to be precise, it was McCain’s marriage itself that was grounded in adultery…Cindy being a former ‘other woman’).
Stranger yet, the sex police these days are usually so-called leftists and liberals.
Their modus operandi would have made the gestapo proud…If there’s anything calculated to keep women out of public life, it’s this intensely misogynistic and pornographic scrutiny. If you don’t think that’s what all this is, why haven’t we been treated to sexualized nudes of, say, George Bush, as we have of Hillary?
Why wasn’t Ralph Nader lynched by the media mob in the same way as Cindy Sheehan?
So my sympathies are with scarlet women (and men), then and now, paraded up and down while the public stones them symbolically. Even Eliot Spitzer has my sympathy. The man after all did try to cordon off his extramarital life from his wife and children. He had that much concern for them. It was the guardians of public morality who had none.
I admit it. When there’s a stoning, I’ll take the side of Hester Prynne and Anna K.
I prefer Tolstoi’s intelligent, ambitious, restless, sexual, and deeply moral adulteress, to either her vain, shallow lover or her wooden, hypocritical husband….or even to her brother’s long-suffering wife, the plaintive, babied-out Dolly - so aptly named.
Tolstoi, being a man, could give Anna no credit for anything except beauty or sexuality, but the fact is, you read the novel for her. ..and not for Dolly, or for Levin, or for Karenin, or for Vronsky. She’s worth them all.
The other woman…..
Who’s to say how much this unspeakable she profited countless miserable marriages, neutered husbands, and pathetic, damaged children…by taking up the slack (physical or emotional) of the immoral “business arrangement,” by which I loan you my body to make babies and play with, and in return you fork over 50% or more of everything you make, or will ever make, while we endlessly bait, hurt, rob, insult, control, extort, blackmail, bore, manipulate, wound, sue, demean, abuse, and torture each other verbally, emotionally, and physically….all in the name of holy matrimony.
What a fraud….
And that’s how many children are raised today. Any wonder they became traumatized adults, easily manipulated by propaganda?
Where would respectable Victorian marriage have been without the brothel, asked Shaw..
And where would the nuclear family be without countless other women, whether they were only friends, sisters, neighbors, and “office wives,” or whether they crossed the boundary into a physical relationship?
Thank God for other women….and for other men.
It takes a village to raise a married couple…..
We all have an image of the other woman in our heads: the calculating predator who moves in on happily coupled men. The cloistered, diamond-draped mistress. The office sexpot who’s always just a little too close to your guy at his holiday party. She’s a staple of novels, movies, tabloids, even history books - from the restless Emma in Madame Bovary to Fatal Attraction’s bunny boiler to, most recently, Eliot Spitzer’s hotel call girl. And if you’ve never seen it, go YouTube the legendary clip of Marilyn Monroe purring “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to her rumored lover, J.F.K. That’s the other woman as we usually imagine her.
More at Glamour, via Truth to Power blog.
The Federal Reserve Game
Play the Federal Reserve Game. [Thanks to Eddy Elfenbein’s Crossing Wall Street blog).
Libertarians seek a place in the New Hampshire sun - Boston.com
Libertarians seek a place in the New Hampshire sun - Boston.com
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Anti-Sinitism….and All That….
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].
Elis Regina Sings “O Bebado e a Equilibrista”
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 EnglerEvening 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 onAmerican Idolatry: White-Washing Hank Greenberg
In 2005, Fortune Magazine ran this piece by Devin Leonard. I just came across it in my mail, where it was lying forgotten at the bottom of the inbox.
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…
Madoff Mistress Was CFO of Women’s Zionist Organization of America
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.Samuel Adams On Who Wins
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds”
– Samuel AdamsHousing To Recover Peak Only in 2020, Says Expert
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….
Americans Holding Swiss Bank Accounts Being Turned Over to IRS
“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.
Otherwise, it doesn’t look quite so heroic.
Foes - and Fans
Tina Brown at The Daily Beast:
“Powerful women always interpret hostility as unrequited love.”
Atta girl.
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