Timmy's Folly

After six months and two administrations, it appears that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has come up with a bank rescue plan that rather resembles the one that Bush's Treasury Secretar Paulson proposed and then abandoned.

Rather than reorganize zombie and failed banks, the Feds will subsidize the purchase of "toxic" assets by investors, presumably hedge funds and sovereign funds. The Feds will insure them against downside risk.

The fundamental problem remains the same. If the assets are sold at current market value, providing another buyer will do the banks no good. If the assets are set above market value, the taxpayers are rewarding the banks for betting on the wrong horses. Of course, it's conceivable that these assets will turn out to be worth more than the current market price, but then, so might that swampland in Florida and that bridge over the East River.

I have said to my liberal sister, but not written here, that TARP, proposed by George Bush, puts the final nail in the liberal/conservative distinction as it has been understood in this country. If Bush was prepared to nationalize AIG and run a huge deficit for this purpose and to bail out the banks, the traditional notion that the GOP resisted government interference in the economy and deficit spending had become non-operational. The same for resistance to the expansion of executive power. Thus I feel justified in linking to Paul Krugman's piece today, in which he announces his "despair" over this plan:

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But 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.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

I never thought I'd be agreeing with this man, but he's right. Put the zombie banks out of their misery rather than throw good money after bad.

As an anthropologist, I think you have to look at the real connections between people, not just at economic theory. What links Robert Rubin (Clinton's Treasury Secreary), Paulson, and Obama gurus Geithner and Summers, are personal ties of patrons and clients over time. The institutional link is Goldman, Sachs. In short, the same inmates are running the asylum, whether "D" or "R" is after their name.

Obama, of course, can't fire Geithner because he has no Plan B and losing Geithner so soon would discredit Obama.

In short, we are stuck.

Baa, baa, baa

The blogsophere has been lit up with the controversy over the abortive appointment of Ambassador Charles Freeman to assist the Director of National Intelligence in preparing estimates for the President.

Freeman, apparently, worked for a Middle East think tank funded partly by Saudi money (as opposed to those funded by Zionist money), and was insufficiently on board with the new-Cold-War -with-China meme of the neocons, having pointed out that the Tienanmen Square débacle could have been avoided if the problem had been addressed before tanks were needed. Freeman had also questioned Sacred Cow No. 1, the "special relationship" with Israel.

This was not a policymaking position, but a reporting position, where a critical approach is precisely what's needed, as opposed to a sheeplike adherence to conventional wisdom.

Well, baa, baa, baa! Steve Rosen, accused spy and ex-AIPAC staffer, and co-thinkers in the shrill Zionist bunker, began to kick up a fuss, a call was made to Rahm Emanuel (the President's chief of staff and son of an Irgunist, that is to say, a Zionist terrorist), and after the foofaraw ran on for a few days, Freeman was induced to withdraw.

The neocons at contentions are all high-fiving, while simultaneously accusing anyone who points out that there is an Israel lobby of antisemitism, or, if they suspect you're Jewish, "self-hatred." They are gabbling about "human rights" (something that doesn't bother the Israelis when they're peddling arms, in Beijing among other places) and "democracy" (synonym in Israel for "dysfunction" and not-to-be-mentioned in Palestine, where Hamas was chosen in a free election).

I have broken my rule and posted a few times at contentions, but have concluded I must stop. Anger is destructive generally, as is my political anger in particular, and my gorge rises at the arrogance and hypocrisy of these people. If you want to be a Zionist, go to Israel and take your chances. Keep the U.S. out of it, and considering that ethnic cleansing, land and water theft, and the semi-starvation of Gaza are ongoing, get off your high horse.

The continuing power of the Zionists as a veto group on their issues, and as political contributors even after Madoff, is a reality, and a danger to the Republic.

Snobbish, but Funny

Not safe for work, either.

Dog Bites Man Dept.

Pedestrian Is Struck, Then Dragged 17 Miles
By AL BAKER and KAREN ZRAICK 32 minutes ago

A pedestrian was hit by an S.U.V. in Queens, then struck by a van and dragged into Brooklyn. He is dead.

From the February 11, 2009 New York Times website.

Point Taken

HT: Phil Weiss

On the Abuse of the Dead

Even our dead are not safe. They have been called up, disturbed, dredged from their mass graves and forced to testify against their fellow human beings in pain, to confess a hatred that was alien to them and to offer themselves up as justification for a new cycle of suffering in Palestine. Their ghosts have been enlisted to help displace fellow Jews from Arab homelands, and to bequeath to them that same alien hatred, conscripting those of us descending from Arab lands to become enemies of our own memory and past.

--International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

HT: Philip Weiss

Strange New Respect List, Take 1

Juan Cole
Robert Fisk
Barack H. Obama

Candidate Member

Frank Rich

I Never Thought I'd Say Anything Good About Frank Rich

I generally refer to the man as "the insufferable Frank Rich." I despise his smug, self-satisfied East Coast liberal snobbery and his obsession with homosexuality.

However, this week he is right. He points to the sober tone of Pres. Obama's inaugural speech and the severity of the crisis we face. Rich says it's wrong to blame our woes simply upon the incompetence or misguided policies of W. Rather, our problems are deep in our culture and require a collective rethinking.

This debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility washed over our culture not just through the Marie Antoinette antics of a Schwarzman and a Thain but in mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment. Cable networks like Bravo, A&E, TLC and HGTV produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called Subprime Pornography. Some of the series — “Flip This House,” “Flip That House,” “Sell This House,” “My House Is Worth What?” — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness.

The austerity of Obama’s Inaugural Address seemed a tonal corrective to the glitz and the glut. The speech was, as my friend Jack Viertel, a theater producer, put it, “stoic, stern, crafted in slabs of granite, a slimmed-down sinewy thing entirely evolved away from the kind of Pre-Raphaelite style of his earlier oration.” Some of the same critics who once accused Obama of sounding too much like a wimpy purveyor of Kumbaya now faulted him for not rebooting those golden oldies of the campaign trail as he took his oath. But he is no longer campaigning, and the moment for stadium cheers has passed.

I can't quarrel with the man.

One good column does not earn Rich a place on my Strange New Respect list. But for once the man staggered into the truth.

Goodbye, contentions

For some time now, I have regularly read contentions, the group blog of the odious neocon journal, Commentary. I have also commented regularly, challenging the policies and worldviews advocated there, especially support for Israel, which has become a criminal state, whose original creation is now in question.

I've decided, now, to give up contentions. I'm also done with the zionofascist Caroline Glick.

Since the Gaza "operation," aka war crimes, I have found myself beside myself with rage whenever i open the page there. The rationalizations and the reality behind them are so odious, that I find myself descending into anger. I spend a lot of energy censoring myself.

We are taught to eschew anger. If my anger accomplished something other than annoying the regulars on the site, I might feel differently. It makes no more sense to comment on contentions than to do so on Stormfront or Vanguard.

But if I convince no one, lower myself, interfere with my spiritual progress, it's time to move on. Something positive would be better.

Koi Polloi

I sometimes post on Goodreads, which I recommend if you're bookish or like people who are.

Some ladies concluded that the fear of death being less than seductive, Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" might be poetical, but to them was unappealing. One thing led to another, and I dropped the following into the tank:

Had we but tank enough, and slime,
This koi-ness, lady, were no crime.
We would swim ‘round and think which way
To flit, and pass our long love's day;
Thou in the filter’s flow
Shouldst sweet flakes find; I in the glow
Of the heater would eat grain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
To be gefilted for the Jews.
My algaeical love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy tail-fins gaze;
Two hundred to adore each gill,
But thirty thousand for my fill;
An age at least to every fin,
And the last age should your heart I’d win.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's drift net fishers hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
The fish-knives of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall one day be filetted,
And in some fish store rudely billeted,
And then you’re gone; a corn-meal batter,
Your streamlined form shall flatter,
Or your lithe form shall one day fill,
Some suburbanite’s new grill.
The grave is fine for poet’s flesh,
But fishes seldom there do rest.

Now therefore, while multicolored scales
Sit on thy back, some bright, some pale,
And while we indulge our feeding frenzy,
With energy that bards must envy,
Now let us batten while we may
On food men sprinkle every day,
Rather at once it all devour,
Be fattened by its nutrients’ power,
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
Leave your caviar with rough strife,
And I’ll swim by and give it life.
I know we cannot make our sun
Stand still, but they say the two-legs have more fun.

I Won't Ever Be Able to Read Tom Friedman Again With a Straight Face

Sliced, diced, and salted. Here.

The graphs are to die for.












Friedman does write for the Times, once home to Abe ("I'm writing as bad as I can") Rosenthal.

Excerpts:

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

* * * *

So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be? All the other ideas he spent the last ten years humping have been blown to hell. Color me unimpressed that he scrounged one more thing to sell out of the smoldering, discredited wreck that should be his career; that he had the good sense to quickly reinvent himself before angry Gods remembered to dash his brains out with a lightning bolt. But better late than never, I suppose. Or as Friedman might say, “Better two cell phones than a fish in your zipper.”

HT: Rod Dreher.

The NY Times Story on Dr. Abul Aish

Here.

Pray for this man, if you're the praying kind.