It’s good to see that the banking industry’s loyal Senate employees danced to their bosses’ tune by turning down an effort to cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent. One-third of all credit card holders are currently paying interest rates between 20 and 41 percent.
According to one newspaper account, “The banking industry, which had some heavy-weight representatives monitoring the vote off of the Senate floor, warned that an interest rate limit could cause a sour reaction in the financial markets.”
In a plutocracy, the proles have but one function and that is to bend over so they can support the financial markets on their collective back.
Only 33 Senators voted for the amendment that would have capped interest rates. Democrats who voted against it said they did so because they thought such an amendment would doom the bill.
What they meant is that opponents of the cap would have threatened a filibuster, thus killing the bill.
If the democrats (sorry, but they don’t deserve an upper-case “d”) had any backbone, they would have forced a filibuster. Making opponents drone on and on in opposition to a cap on interest rates would have smeared both the Republicans and the banking industry with the shit of their own greed. At a time of high unemployment and foreclosures it would have been a public relations disaster to force banking industry controlled senators to defend a forty-percent credit card interest rate.
Opponents of gay marriage are quick to quote the Bible in support of their position. They conveniently ignore the Bible's fifteen condemnations of usury. This is because they consider loan sharking good business and gay marriage immoral.
That is why we’re a Christian nation.
--Case Wagenvoord
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Good Life
Life is so much sweeter under Obama. The evil perpetrated by the Bush administration was done so by an inarticulate idiot; with Obama, the same evil goes down so much easier because it is perpetrated by a smiling and articulate young man who seems to be much too nice to be associated with such nastiness.
He promised us change, and change we are getting. His Justice Department invokes the “State Secrets” doctrine to prevent lawsuits by former detainees who were tortured because, under Obama, they really mean it, whereas Bush invoked the same doctrine simply to hide his administration’s dirty laundry. Obama’s administration was very courteous when it threatened to withhold valuable intelligence from Great Britain if it allowed a suit by a former detainee to go forward, whereas the Bush administration would have been very rude about it.
Now Obama is bringing back military commission to try terrorists who are not accused terrorists because the very fact that they are at Gitmo is prima facie evidence that they are guilty of something.
The fact that he campaigned against these commissions will not stop him from doing his duty as dictated to him by a by the Beltway’s bureaucratic blob that slimes along under the unstoppable force of its own momentum.
It is a comfort to all red-blooded Americans to know that Bush’s eternal war of the empty policy will continue uninterrupted. However, being the good marketer that he is, Obama did go to the trouble to rebrand it.
The only difference between 9/11 and the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center is that 9/11 succeeded in bringing the towers down. That was the intent of the ’93 bombing. The terrorists parked their van in the South Tower with the expectation that the blast would cause the South Tower to collapse and take the North Tower with it.
What is interesting about the ’93 blast is that without torture, a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, rendition or black holes, all the conspirators were found guilty in a court of law that observed all of the niceties of rules of evidence and defendant rights. Yet, even with torture, a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, rendition and black holes, the 9/11 conspirators are still at large.
(Correction! I think they did catch one, but he was so tortured that he not only confessed to 9/11, but he also confessed to plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty and to blowing up the USS Maine in Havana harbor.)
Things will improve under Obama. We’ll feel so much better about ourselves as we continue to do the same things over and over again. Our security depends on our ability to produce more terrorists so we can justify the boated defense budget that is necessary to keep us safe because we keep on doing things that produce more terrorists thus necessitating an even bigger defense budget...
This is our vision thing.
--Case Wagenvoord
He promised us change, and change we are getting. His Justice Department invokes the “State Secrets” doctrine to prevent lawsuits by former detainees who were tortured because, under Obama, they really mean it, whereas Bush invoked the same doctrine simply to hide his administration’s dirty laundry. Obama’s administration was very courteous when it threatened to withhold valuable intelligence from Great Britain if it allowed a suit by a former detainee to go forward, whereas the Bush administration would have been very rude about it.
Now Obama is bringing back military commission to try terrorists who are not accused terrorists because the very fact that they are at Gitmo is prima facie evidence that they are guilty of something.
The fact that he campaigned against these commissions will not stop him from doing his duty as dictated to him by a by the Beltway’s bureaucratic blob that slimes along under the unstoppable force of its own momentum.
It is a comfort to all red-blooded Americans to know that Bush’s eternal war of the empty policy will continue uninterrupted. However, being the good marketer that he is, Obama did go to the trouble to rebrand it.
The only difference between 9/11 and the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center is that 9/11 succeeded in bringing the towers down. That was the intent of the ’93 bombing. The terrorists parked their van in the South Tower with the expectation that the blast would cause the South Tower to collapse and take the North Tower with it.
What is interesting about the ’93 blast is that without torture, a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, rendition or black holes, all the conspirators were found guilty in a court of law that observed all of the niceties of rules of evidence and defendant rights. Yet, even with torture, a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, rendition and black holes, the 9/11 conspirators are still at large.
(Correction! I think they did catch one, but he was so tortured that he not only confessed to 9/11, but he also confessed to plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty and to blowing up the USS Maine in Havana harbor.)
Things will improve under Obama. We’ll feel so much better about ourselves as we continue to do the same things over and over again. Our security depends on our ability to produce more terrorists so we can justify the boated defense budget that is necessary to keep us safe because we keep on doing things that produce more terrorists thus necessitating an even bigger defense budget...
This is our vision thing.
--Case Wagenvoord
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Leadership Training
Here’s a scary thought to add to your collection of scary thoughts: All of our current leaders now in power, every one of them, grew up on television.
Think about it.
All of our presidents, CEOs, CFOs, congress folk, mid to senior-level bureaucrats and managers, who are making the decisions that impact on our fate and well being grew up watching westerns, sitcoms, cop shows, cereal commercials and “Gilligan’s Island.”
That’s something to keep you awake nights!
The last president to come of age prior to television was Bush I. (It’s fun to figure out which television shows most influenced the president since him. For Clinton, it was “Soap,” for Obama, “Jeopardy,” and for Bush II, “The Gong Show.”)
One must ask how all this television prepared our leaders for their roles. Well, for starters, we could say it:
· Reduced their attentions span.
· Led them to believe that any problem, no matter how complex, could be easily solved within a sixty-minute format.
· That when confronted with a problem, it was prudent to go with the least objectionable solution.
However, the most profound influence all those hours of television had was to imbue them with the belief that in any given situation, image trumps substance. If it looks good, it is good. If Lucy can clean up the mess before Ricky gets home, there was never a crisis.
We are seeing this dynamic at work with the much-hyped stress tests Treasury administered to our zombie banks. Asia Times columnist Julian Delasantellis does an incisive job of deconstruction the tests.
The banks’ strength was tested against a best-case/worst-case scenario. The problem is that the worst case scenario was too optimistic. As Delasantellis explains,
The problems inherent in this mendacity are obvious. If economic assumptions turn out to be overly rosy, then the assumptions on the banks’ economic health, especially the health of their mortgage, commercial real estate and credit card loan portfolios, should be suspect as well.
In other words, the much-vaunted stress tests were little more than spin. In spite of this, Wall Street popped an orgasm, even though investors should have been able to see through the scam. That only goes to show that greed rots the brain.
Delasantellis said,
I heard more than a few market commentators opine that is was due to a feeling that Geithner had morphed into Alexander the Great and had at last cut the Gordian knot. The problem of bank toxic mortgage and other collateralized assets that had bedeviled the markets for coming up two years now had finally been solved, and much in contravention to what spoilsports and worrywarts like me have been saying, the problem’s not all that massive.
So now all we hear about is the green sprouts pushing themselves out of the muck of economic ruin. The possibility of these shoots are poison ivy is ignored because the end credits are rolling, and all has ended well; Beaver has confessed his sins with such sincerity that dad has doubled his allowance as a reward for his mischief.
So, we can all sleep well tonight knowing that life is just one big sit com.
--Case Wagenvoord
Think about it.
All of our presidents, CEOs, CFOs, congress folk, mid to senior-level bureaucrats and managers, who are making the decisions that impact on our fate and well being grew up watching westerns, sitcoms, cop shows, cereal commercials and “Gilligan’s Island.”
That’s something to keep you awake nights!
The last president to come of age prior to television was Bush I. (It’s fun to figure out which television shows most influenced the president since him. For Clinton, it was “Soap,” for Obama, “Jeopardy,” and for Bush II, “The Gong Show.”)
One must ask how all this television prepared our leaders for their roles. Well, for starters, we could say it:
· Reduced their attentions span.
· Led them to believe that any problem, no matter how complex, could be easily solved within a sixty-minute format.
· That when confronted with a problem, it was prudent to go with the least objectionable solution.
However, the most profound influence all those hours of television had was to imbue them with the belief that in any given situation, image trumps substance. If it looks good, it is good. If Lucy can clean up the mess before Ricky gets home, there was never a crisis.
We are seeing this dynamic at work with the much-hyped stress tests Treasury administered to our zombie banks. Asia Times columnist Julian Delasantellis does an incisive job of deconstruction the tests.
The banks’ strength was tested against a best-case/worst-case scenario. The problem is that the worst case scenario was too optimistic. As Delasantellis explains,
The problems inherent in this mendacity are obvious. If economic assumptions turn out to be overly rosy, then the assumptions on the banks’ economic health, especially the health of their mortgage, commercial real estate and credit card loan portfolios, should be suspect as well.
In other words, the much-vaunted stress tests were little more than spin. In spite of this, Wall Street popped an orgasm, even though investors should have been able to see through the scam. That only goes to show that greed rots the brain.
Delasantellis said,
I heard more than a few market commentators opine that is was due to a feeling that Geithner had morphed into Alexander the Great and had at last cut the Gordian knot. The problem of bank toxic mortgage and other collateralized assets that had bedeviled the markets for coming up two years now had finally been solved, and much in contravention to what spoilsports and worrywarts like me have been saying, the problem’s not all that massive.
So now all we hear about is the green sprouts pushing themselves out of the muck of economic ruin. The possibility of these shoots are poison ivy is ignored because the end credits are rolling, and all has ended well; Beaver has confessed his sins with such sincerity that dad has doubled his allowance as a reward for his mischief.
So, we can all sleep well tonight knowing that life is just one big sit com.
--Case Wagenvoord
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
What Social Contract?
I love Matt Taibbi. Usually, the Rolling Stone writer is right on. However, he missed the target in a recent piece when he wrote:
The Social contract has to be considered broken when some dumb schmuck can go to jail for five real years for selling a bag of weed while a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and had all possible advantages gets nothing but a bailout and a temporarily lowered bonus regime for destroying billions of public wealth.
Social contract? You mean there’s a social contract? Then where in the fuck is it? In what dusty bin of our national archives is it being stored? Was it shredded with the Big Dick’s documents, or with the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions?
Have we ever had a social contract? You know, that mythical document praised by Hume, Locke and Rousseau, the contract in which the public agrees to be governed in exchange for certain civil liberties that are guaranteed by the state.
Whoops! Silly me. A social contract is normally found in democratic republics that exist by the consent of the governed. The first thing a plutocracy does when it achieves power is to burn the damn thing.
Plutocrats can do that because they have the money and the spin to dumb down the public until it votes for a branded image instead of a platform. We saw this with Obama’s election as he rode into the White House on a political platform that consisted of five words: "Change you can believe in," with change being defined as no change other than the public being screwed with a smile instead of a sneer.
Medieval peasants had a social contract that consisted of mutual obligation between peasant and lord. The peasants had the sense to revolt when the lord failed to meet his obligations. We’re too damn polite to do the same.
There are no peasants in the corporate state because there are no reciprocal obligations between the rulers and the ruled. The Beltway and Wall Street are fortified castles surrounded by the grass huts of a public that is sinking slowly into despair and impoverishment.
Nowadays, the lords’ retainers wear suits instead of ermine and armor, and they carry leather shoulder bags instead of swords. Had they lived in medieval times, they would have been called brigands; now they head up the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.
--Case Wagenvoord
The Social contract has to be considered broken when some dumb schmuck can go to jail for five real years for selling a bag of weed while a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and had all possible advantages gets nothing but a bailout and a temporarily lowered bonus regime for destroying billions of public wealth.
Social contract? You mean there’s a social contract? Then where in the fuck is it? In what dusty bin of our national archives is it being stored? Was it shredded with the Big Dick’s documents, or with the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions?
Have we ever had a social contract? You know, that mythical document praised by Hume, Locke and Rousseau, the contract in which the public agrees to be governed in exchange for certain civil liberties that are guaranteed by the state.
Whoops! Silly me. A social contract is normally found in democratic republics that exist by the consent of the governed. The first thing a plutocracy does when it achieves power is to burn the damn thing.
Plutocrats can do that because they have the money and the spin to dumb down the public until it votes for a branded image instead of a platform. We saw this with Obama’s election as he rode into the White House on a political platform that consisted of five words: "Change you can believe in," with change being defined as no change other than the public being screwed with a smile instead of a sneer.
Medieval peasants had a social contract that consisted of mutual obligation between peasant and lord. The peasants had the sense to revolt when the lord failed to meet his obligations. We’re too damn polite to do the same.
There are no peasants in the corporate state because there are no reciprocal obligations between the rulers and the ruled. The Beltway and Wall Street are fortified castles surrounded by the grass huts of a public that is sinking slowly into despair and impoverishment.
Nowadays, the lords’ retainers wear suits instead of ermine and armor, and they carry leather shoulder bags instead of swords. Had they lived in medieval times, they would have been called brigands; now they head up the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.
--Case Wagenvoord
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
A clarification
I will continue to post on this site. The only difference is that the loving scorn and compassionate sarcasm will be written in my name.
It's Time!
The time has come for Belacqua Jones to ride into the sunset. It’s been a wonderful six-year run, but he’s finally come to the end of the trail.
Several factors played into this decision. First, and foremost, it just ain’t the same without George! The blog began as “Open Letters to George W. Bush.” After the election, I tried several different approaches, but none of them had the same bite.
I was also starting to feel constrained by Belacqua’s persona and point of view, and I noticed that my posts were drifting towards a more expository style.
However, even though Belacqua is gone, the snark and bite will remain. The only difference is that now I can have more fun.
I look forward to your comments and feedback.
--Case Wagenvoord
Several factors played into this decision. First, and foremost, it just ain’t the same without George! The blog began as “Open Letters to George W. Bush.” After the election, I tried several different approaches, but none of them had the same bite.
I was also starting to feel constrained by Belacqua’s persona and point of view, and I noticed that my posts were drifting towards a more expository style.
However, even though Belacqua is gone, the snark and bite will remain. The only difference is that now I can have more fun.
I look forward to your comments and feedback.
--Case Wagenvoord
Monday, May 11, 2009
The Fed Plays Softball with the Banks
Someone at the Fed didn’t get the word. This deluded individual thought the bank stress tests were about evaluating the banks’ ability to survive a further downturn in the economy.
Wrong!
The stress tests were part of an elaborate PR campaign to restore investor confidence by pretending that terminally ill banks are hale and hearty. According the to the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal,
The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation’s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining.
Of course they did. You can’t go around scaring investors by telling the truth. For example, the original stress test showed Citibank with a gaping $35 billion capital hole. This simply wouldn’t do, so the hole miraculously shrank to $5.5 billion.
According to the paper, “Bank of America was ‘shocked’ when it saw its initial figure, which was more than $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.” So, the Fed obligingly reduced it to $33.9 billion.
The paper then reassures us that, “Government officials defended their handling of the stress tests, saying they were responsive to industry feedback while maintaining the tests’ rigor.”
This is like a court of law being responsive to a criminal’s feedback when it comes time to sentence him.
Apparently, the Bank’s derivative holdings were not a factor when conducting the tests. Writer Mark Whitney quotes F. William Engdahl who points out that five U.S. banks hold 96% of all US bank derivatives. These are the credit default swaps everyone is talking about.
JP Morgan Chase is sitting on $88 trillion of these babies, with Bank of America holding $38 trillion and Citibank with $32 trillion.
But, Bernanke assures us that the banks are healthy.
Of course they are. Any corpse looks healthy if you rub enough rouge into its cheeks.
--Belacqua Jones
Wrong!
The stress tests were part of an elaborate PR campaign to restore investor confidence by pretending that terminally ill banks are hale and hearty. According the to the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal,
The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation’s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining.
Of course they did. You can’t go around scaring investors by telling the truth. For example, the original stress test showed Citibank with a gaping $35 billion capital hole. This simply wouldn’t do, so the hole miraculously shrank to $5.5 billion.
According to the paper, “Bank of America was ‘shocked’ when it saw its initial figure, which was more than $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.” So, the Fed obligingly reduced it to $33.9 billion.
The paper then reassures us that, “Government officials defended their handling of the stress tests, saying they were responsive to industry feedback while maintaining the tests’ rigor.”
This is like a court of law being responsive to a criminal’s feedback when it comes time to sentence him.
Apparently, the Bank’s derivative holdings were not a factor when conducting the tests. Writer Mark Whitney quotes F. William Engdahl who points out that five U.S. banks hold 96% of all US bank derivatives. These are the credit default swaps everyone is talking about.
JP Morgan Chase is sitting on $88 trillion of these babies, with Bank of America holding $38 trillion and Citibank with $32 trillion.
But, Bernanke assures us that the banks are healthy.
Of course they are. Any corpse looks healthy if you rub enough rouge into its cheeks.
--Belacqua Jones
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