CapitalistImperialistPig

Who exactly, is all that bank bailout money going to, and why? For me, that's the central mystery of the TARP. George Bush, the Republican Congress, and their market fundamentalist allies apparently enabled the greatest financial swindle in world history. What they did was to recklessly and egregiously fail to carry out their legal responsibilities to oversee and regulate American financial markets. Instead, they tolerated and cheered on a culture of dishonesty and theft. Joe Nocera , writing in the New York Times, looks at how it worked at AIG, which he calls ground zero for the mortgage backed securities scam. (Hat tip to Arun G) So far, the US government has poured $150 billion dollars into this one company, money that the taxpayers are unlikely to ever see again. AIG lost all this money by selling a type of insurance called a credit default swap, insuring banks, hedge funds, and others against the risk that the vast pile of toxic assets in mortgages would not go bad. Unlike oth...

Or at least the stupidest one I can remember at the moment. If The Dark Knight doesn't manage to kill the Batman franchise it won't be for lack of trying. Despite two academy awards and a whole potful of excellent actors, this utterly incoherent piece of crap is as bad as Batman Begins was good. I suspect that some of these excellent actors did a good job, but unfortunately it was almost impossible to detect any acting through the monumentally idiotic plotting and preposterous situations presented here. This movie was seriously missing a writer and a director.

Drillbit Taylor is a completely forgetable teenage movie that taps into one of the classic school story themes: bullying. Skinny, shy and nerdish freshman and friend get crosswise with nasty senior bullies. I'm not quite sure that this is a universal experience, but is surely is common. Aside from being skinny, shy, and nerdish, I was hardly classic bully bait - I was tall and on the football, basketball, and track teams, but I did manage to attract a few, so my guess is that being bullied is more the rule than the exception. I imagine that bully and bullied are re-enacting ancient rituals of dominance competition that go back to our apelike ancestors and beyond - chimps do it, monkees do it, and quite likely birds do it. Natural though it may be, for many adolescents it makes life a living hell, promoting drug abuse, gang membership and occasionally, suicide and murder. Adults can ignore it, try to rigorously suppress it, or even channel it via rituals such as hazing. Somewh...

One of Bobby Jindal's more exotic talents is exorcism, or the casting out of devils. Joe Klein quotes an excerpt from an article on his participation in an exorcism written by Jindal about 15 years ago: Strangely, I found myself repeating the Hail Mary until it became a chant. Being a recent convert to Catholicism, I had yet to accept the Catholic doc­trines concerning Mary and considered any form of Marian devotion to be idolatry. Though I had never before prayed a Hail Mary in my life, I suddenly found myself incapable of any other form of prayer. Somehow, Mary's intercessions allowed me to find peace during that long night; I knew that I had sur­vived the worst and that I would exit with my faith intact. It terrified me to recall how close I came to turning away from Christ out of fear. The crucifix had a calming effect on Susan, and her sister was soon brave enough to bring a Bible to her face. At first, Susan responded to biblical pas­sages with curses and profanities. M...

The headline this AM says Citigroup gets a new deal from US, but not this time at Taxpayer expense. I don't believe it. I think that the principal effect of conversion of the government's loan to common stock is to put us lower on the list to be paid back.

Paul Krugman is not happy with Geithner's apparent plan to keep feeding cash to the zombie banks. He has a nice quote from the guy he calls the leading expert on Japan's lost decade, Adam Posen: The guarantees that the US government has already extended to the banks in the last year, and the insufficient (though large) capital injections without government control or adequate conditionality also already given under TARP, closely mimic those given by the Japanese government in the mid-1990s to keep their major banks open without having to recognize specific failures and losses. The result then, and the emerging result now, is that the banks’ top management simply burns through that cash, socializing the losses for the taxpayer, grabbing any rare gains for management payouts or shareholder dividends, and ending up still undercapitalized. Pretending that distressed assets are worth more than they actually are today for regulatory purposes persuades no one besides the regulators,...

Various wack radio wingnuts have decided that it's time to secede from the Union, presumably because it was such a rousing success last time they tried it. Last time it was about slavery, but this time it seems to be more about the rest of the world considering them to be a bunch of dope and alcohol addled racist nuts. The new nation, if anybody should join, will be known as the CSA, for "Cracker States of America." I have no idea what that means.