Goodbye to Wall Street as we know it?

(I’m not concerned for Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley—they’ve grown fat and ludicrously wealthy over the years and are now attempting to outrun the consequences of some very bad bets. But if they’ve given in to pressure, or if they have indeed requested, to “reform” as more tightly-regulated entities, it means that they’re extremely worried that the run on their assets will continue if they don’t take drastic measures to reassure people. Which in turn means that even they, reputed to be the smarter banks (for example. Goldman managed to make money from a significant piece of the credit crunch last year), are in too deep. Again, I don’t care about these people. But they’re still immensely powerful, and if there’s colossal financial damage coming, they’ll do all they can so that it rains on us, not them—as the administration’s appalling bailout proposal makes clear.)

The Interior Department Knows How To Party

I often think that it might be better to take George Carlin’s approach to life, and to view it as a big carnival/freakshow put on for the entertainment of those who can look at it that way. Generally, I take things a little too seriously to do that, but then things like this come up: “Oil brokers sex scandal may affect drilling debate”.
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Government Takes Over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

So the US Government has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pillars of the mortgage industry in the US… they were originally state entities, went private but with government support, and are now state-controlld again.
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I hadn’t heard of Michael Hudson before, but I found what he had to say in this interview rather interesting. He gives explanations that sound plausible to me for a number of apparent oddities in the world economic system, for example his first answer about why the US can sustain such a huge deficit.
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In Minneapolis/St. Paul, there’s been plenty of democracy suppression over the last few days, with various police forces raiding homes and gathering points of groups planning to protest the Republican National Convention. Glenn Greenwald covers the bases here, and also has a follow-up about Federal involvement.

As pointed out in a letter to Glenn, this isn’t new by any means (nor, I suspect, is it restricted to the Republican convention—I’d be rather surprised if the same stuff didn’t happen around the DNC). It also goes back a lot further than the letter-writer suggests (they cite 2000 as the starting point).
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The United States outspends the next five or ten countries on the list combined when it comes to military spending. However, I’ve always been sceptical about translating this into actual military power, because it seems that tremendous amounts of waste clearly go on… even if other countries waste a percentage of their own military budgets on boondoggles and industrial subsidies, I suspect that the US is even worse due to the huge amount of money concerned.
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This morning, via A Tiny Revolution, I came across a wire news story from Bloomberg that has the form of informational content but contains almost no useful information.
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I was going to post a link to this Clay Shirky article yesterday, but then saw that it had made it to BoingBoing and decided not to bother.

However, I think it’s worth posting even if most readers do check BoingBoing. It’s rather interesting, and worth calling out.
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From the what-were-they-thinking department: the German supermarket chain Lidl has been caught spying on their employees.
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Contrary to what you might expect, this post is not a rant against Wal-Mart per se. I was prompted to write it after reading this CNN article about Wal-Mart suing a disabled woman who was an ex-employee. The summary is that she was in a bad accident, was covered by Wal-Mart health insurance for her treatment, then successfully sued the person responsible for the accident—at which point Wal-Mart sued her to recover that money, because her employment contract entitled them to recoup the money they spent on health insurance in that fashion. The CNN article raises some questions about this, but I think they’re the wrong questions.
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I finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance today. It’s an excellent book, covering a broad swathe of life in India during The Emergency, a period of what was essentially dictatorship form 1975 to 1977. It’s also extremely depressing.
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Okay, so it’s not quite “thinking”, but it’s $150K/year to accumulate ‘interesting people’ and summaries of the zeitgeist for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
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The New York Times writes about the rising wave of cognitive enhancement pharmaceutical use, bringing to mind Alan Glynn’s novel The Dark Fields, which explores the territory in an interesting and disturbing way.
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More than one percent of the adult population in prison. More per capita than any other nation on the planet, and more by raw numbers as well. This is the leader of the free world*?
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It’s mind-boggling to me that the United States is actually trying to build a fence between itself and Mexico. I mean, really. A fence? A fence seven hundred miles long?
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This John Lanchester article in the London Review of Books is an excellent overview of the current credit-related turmoil in the markets and includes a good summary on how banks work. Their manner of operation, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, looks remarkably like sleight-of-hand.
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Last Monday I went to a Long Now Foundation seminar by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan—both books I would recommend to just about everyone. The title of the talk was “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought”, and while Taleb did talk about our historic inability to predict what was going to happen in the future, I didn’t feel that ‘future craziness’ was actually a major theme. (If you change “Crazier” to “More Unpredictable” you get a more accurate title.)
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Short post today, I’m not feeling well. I’ll just point you to Jonathon Schwarz’s note regarding how National Review acknowledged serious errors in a piece of theirs reporting on Lebanon.
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Every few months I get a wave of bounceback messages from a variety of email servers, caused by some spammer(s) using my domain as the domain for their From addresses. This morning I probably received over three hundred of them, and that was a relatively small number in comparison to some prior instances.
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Perry Anderson’s ‘Depicting Europe’in the London Review of Books is an excellent overview of Europe’s current political condition, its recent past, and its near-term direction. Anderson makes clear the widening democratic deficit in the European Union, an unsurprising outcome of having elites create new layers of separation between them and those they rule. He also argues forcefully against the idea that the EU and the US are at loggerheads, or that they represent two markedly different political philosophies, and that despite surface appearances, Europe is politically more a US pawn than it has been for decades.
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I went to a Naomi Klein lecture this evening. She was promoting her new book, The Shock Doctrine. I haven’t read it yet, but certainly intend to now that I’ve been to this lecture. The overarching idea she put forth is that corporatist ideas are pushed through after disasters in order to take advantage of public confusion, and that the psychology of shock is applied deliberately by elites in order to push their agendas.
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At dinner with my parents yesterday, I had salmon. This is quite common, I often eat salmon when I’m at their place. But after dinner, my father commented “That might be the last of it.” At first I thought he meant that we’d eaten all of the salmon they’d bought, although I’d thought there was about half left… then he explained that he meant that it might be the last I’d have with them because salmon might no longer be available.
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I’m reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs at the moment. It’s an exploration of what Levy calls “raunch culture”, the pornographization of American mainstream culture. One of her points that I think is worth examining is the distinction between sexiness and sexuality.
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