Canada on my mind
The trip is now under control and my senior sky-is-falling moment is over. I have moved into the acceptance stage of grief, having lost a key right I had enjoyed up until recently: my right to drive into Canada just because I want to.
I understand that thanks to a Western Hemisphere agreement our government forced onto other countries, the days of easy border crossings are gone forever and for good cause. For too many years easy border crossings by Canadians have imperiled our great nation, and put our freedoms at risk.
Canada: the East Germany of North America, a threat that can be contained, but not diminished.
Cue Paul Krugman with how this kind of logic impacts our financial sector:
In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, the financial industry accounted for a third of total domestic profits — about twice its share two decades earlier.
These profits were justified, we were told, because the industry was doing great things for the economy. It was channeling capital to productive uses; it was spreading risk; it was enhancing financial stability. None of those were true. Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage.
So why were bankers raking it in? My take, reflecting the efforts of financial economists to make sense of the catastrophe, is that it was mainly about gambling with other people’s money. The financial industry took big, risky bets with borrowed funds — bets that paid high returns until they went bad — but was able to borrow cheaply because investors didn’t understand how fragile the industry was.
Circles, squares and triangles. That was the high school civics game we played over the course of three days one week my senior year. Each day one group got to make the trading rules. On the third day my group was in charge and our first rule was that other groups had to agree to any trade offered by anyone in our group. By the end of the class I owned everything. Which I then gave away to a cute girl I liked which pissed off our coach/instructor to no end but which gave me valuable insights into how Wall Street works.
Wall Street works because they say they do. Since I played circles, squares and triangles in the spring of 1971, Wall Street has used those rules to guarantee themselves profits at the expense of those who do the actual work.
If the Bush-Cheney administration didn’t turn you into some kind of Marxist, you weren’t paying very close attention. Fortunately, there’s a solution.
An intriguing proposal is about to be unveiled from, of all places, the International Monetary Fund. In a leaked paper prepared for a meeting this weekend, the fund calls for a Financial Activity Tax — yes, FAT — levied on financial-industry profits and remuneration.
Such a tax, the fund argues, could “mitigate excessive risk-taking.” It could also “tend to reduce the size of the financial sector,” which the fund presents as a good thing.
When I first started going to buddy Jon’s annual 4th of July party in the mid-70s, my enthusiasm for poker tipped the balance and what had always been a friendly game suddenly turned into a round-the-clock game that lasted for days. Jon’s wife, the saintly Joanie, solved that problem by instituting a poker troll. Each hand you had to ante into the troll.
It was over done the first year and all but killed the game, but they tweaked the rules and it became an institution. An institution with rules. Rules that kept the game from creating its own alternate universe in which poker players were in a room all their own and not part of the party anymore.
It’s time to re-introduce Wall Street to the rest of America and a perp walk would work just fine for me.
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Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the slavery blame-game in which he focuses on how West Africans enabled the slave trade.
Pretty much like teabaggers enable Wall Street, actually.
This mess wasn’t imposed on us by Wall Street alone. Confused Americans have been led to think that economic bondage = freedom.
Slavery was, in many ways, an enlightened institution when contrasted with the present day system of debt peonage and a market that despises labor.
No one’s talking about eliminating the minimum wage anymore, but we’re still not making forward progress. For that certain mine owners need to be imprisoned and countless financiers have to be stripped of their ill-gotten bilk.
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Cue the WashPost reviving the SEC workers watched porn story.
It’s true. Under BUSH-CHENEY they did exactly that as doing their jobs was frowned upon. But the Post is re-running that story to damage the SEC now that it’s doing its job and bringing charges against the cheating bastards who kept skimming off the top until they ended up with most of the cow.
No link for propagandists, but I will steal today’s Toles cartoon from them.
It would be nice to see a study summarizing how many businesses were cannibalized to death from 2001-2009, but that trend actually ran from 1981-2009.
Bill Clinton let Bob Rubin keep the drains running on time and yes, we have no money in our day to day economy today.
Which is maybe why the WaPost stoops to run ads for obviously fraudulent products now. This one ran next to that Toles cartoon:
To be honest, I did not click on them, but if you send me $23.74, I promise you’re just as likely to get an iPad as you would be if you clicked on that ad.
But unlike the WaPost, I don’t sell ads to lying sleazebags.
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America’s most sleazy:
Liquor ad dependent media “flipped” results of marijuana legalization poll
Pope Ratsy (who apparently doesn’t like being sued)
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Via Vick, Ted Rall on the Tea Party and why the right doesn’t “get it.”
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Like the US, Thailand has problems. Unlike the US, Thailand’s red necks shirts are turning violent.
Travel to Bangkok is no longer advised. Thaksin Shinawatra’s gullible followers are shutting the country down.
They have cause, but have foolishly united under a corrupt banner as far removed from economic freedom as a Wall Street dividend is from worker ownership.
The world must change, but so far all the revolutions are being financed by the people whose heads should have been put on pikes long ago.
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Etc.:
Scientology tracts banned by Russia for being “extremist materials”
Sherry Johnston video (Tripp’s other grandmother)
Air Marshal accused of rape at gunpoint
MPR (and Bill Kling sister org PRI) suck up 8% of the NEA’s latest grant to Minnesota arts groups
CP’s Best of issue dinged for lack of classical music (why stop there? the new staff isn’t rooted in this community well enough to have a clue about most categories, let alone which ones to add)
“circles, squares and triangles”
DRIVE
I like the new banner. I always wondered what the Norwegidesk looked like.
I’ve often wondered that myself, not having seen the top of it in over ten years….