bigmagic’s posterous

Excellent! Suitable for framing - or indicting.

From the NY Times:
..a matrix of Wall Street chiefs and private-equity bosses, as well as their personal contributions to politicians in 2007 and 2008, as recorded by the Center for Responsive Politics. The list, which gives politicians’ titles at the time, also illustrates the political action committee money given by each chief’s firm and its employees.

More via dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com

Our #1 econo-man here at the BigMagic blog, Nouriel Roubini, actually likes the public/private Big Sh*tpile plan from Treasury Big Shot Caspar Milquetoast Timothy Geithner.

Secretary Timothy Geithner's new toxic asset plan is a serious step in the right direction in that it creates a public-private partnership to buy the troubled assets of financial firms - in other words, to do the necessary cleansing. Up until now, with all the government bailouts, the financial system has been barely treading water. With this plan, it will still be a hard swim, but, at least, there is a path to shore.

More via nydailynews.com

Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated.

This was quite a few of them, including Uighurs from China and, incredulously, citizens of the United Kingdom ("incredulously" because few doubted the capacity of the UK to detain and manage terrorists). Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man,..

..the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

More via thewashingtonnote.com

This is a fairly reasonable article by Felix Salmon in Portfolio.com but the last line in this clip brought me up short.

the real people, the angry people, the unemployed people -- and with them their elected representatives in Congress. They're not interested in such distinctions any more, they're not interested in what's fair or what's sensible. They saw their real wages stagnate for decades as the orgy of plutocratic self-congratulation reached obscene levels only to keep on growing. All they ever had was the American Dream: the idea that they, too, might one day become dynastically wealthy and join the overclass.

Now, of course, that dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits.

More via portfolio.com

If this is a description of The American Dream we are in worse trouble than I thought.

The irony of this "idea" is that this warped and debased definition of The American Dream is itself responsible for more of the current destruction of our economy, our democratic institutions and our nation and planet than any other reason. That The American Dream is driven entirely by the heedless accumulation of wealth and power leaves a nation impoverished by its own greed, as we now see plainly (or should). The systems created in our society to support this pathetic, miserly "idea"; commercial, social and democratic, can't be sustained, as we now know. That mainstream media and opinion-makers unquestionably assume this craven materialism and lust for gain as a priori for The American Dream is itself sad, sad commentary on our collective souls.

Trying to prop up the broken machinery of greed that drove us to this precipice of global economic meltdown and environmental catastrophe will only guarantee we continue down the path to inevitable destruction. We will have built the idol Moloch and sacrificed our world.

What to do? Resist the cry of Moloch! Embrace ecstasy and dreams and the earth and the people, seek illumination and joy and laughter. The rest is Moloch.

Excerpt from HOWL and other poems by Allen Ginsburg - 1956
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

You thought you'd heard it all, or at least most of it, but NO! the evil that is Darth Cheney knows no limit. Seymour Hersh has the goods on Cheney: the Vice President's Office was a branch of Murder, Inc.

What's next? Killing babies for sport?

I wish I could say I'm surprised. Disgusted, sure, but not surprised. Surpised? That will come the day he is held accountable.

Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring'

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

More via minnpost.com

Main Entry:

¹le·ver·age

Pronunciation:

\ˈle-və-rij, ˈlē-; ˈlev-rij, ˈlēv-\

Function:

noun

Date:

1830

1 : the action of a lever or the mechanical advantage gained by it
2 : power , effectiveness <trying to gain more political leverage>
3 : the use of credit to enhance one's speculative capacity

via merriam-webster.com

Emphasis mine

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." said Archimedes. Tim Geithner believes this as well. The lever is described below. The "world" is, in this case, the Big Sh*tpile. And the fulcrum, gentle reader, is you and me and our tax monies and the "full faith and credit" of the United States of America. Let's hope the fulcrum holds.

Andrew Ross Sorkin gives a good one-pager on the Big Plan to get the Big Sh*tpile off the Books and wind down the Big Bailout.

In a fact sheet it released Monday, the Treasury offered an example of how leverage is supposed to function in the Obama administration’s plan.

If a bank wants to sell troubled loans with a face value of, say $100 million, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will examine the loans and determine the appropriate amount of leverage, up to a 6-to-1 debt to equity ratio.

Assuming the highest leverage ratio is allowed, that means that if the loans sell for $84 million after a competitive auction, the buyers will only need to put up $12 million, or 14 percent of the purchase price, in equity. The Treasury would put up half that amount, or $6 million, and the private investors — who could include hedge funds, private equity firms or some kind of consortium — would also put up $6 million. The remaining $72 million would come from bonds that are guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

That set-up implies that, if the loans end up being worth only $72 million, the Treasury and the private investors would see their equity wiped out. At less than that, the FDIC starts absorbing the loss.

On the other hand, if the loans end up being worth $96 million, both the Treasury and the private investors will have doubled their money.

More via dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com

the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

More via nytimes.com

But you knew that already.