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t r u t h o u t | Goldman Admits It Had Bigger Role in AIG Deals

Reversing its oft-repeated position that it was acting only on behalf of its clients in its exotic dealings with the American International Group, Goldman Sachs now says that it also used its own money to make secret wagers against the U.S. housing market.

A senior Goldman executive disclosed the "bilateral" wagers on subprime mortgages in an interview with McClatchy, marking the first time that the Wall Street titan has conceded that its dealings with troubled insurer AIG went far beyond acting as an "intermediary" responding to its clients' demands.

The official, who Goldman made available to McClatchy on the condition he remain anonymous, declined to reveal how much money Goldman reaped from its trades with AIG.

However, the wagers were part of a package of deals that had a face value of $3 billion, and in a recent settlement, AIG agreed to pay Goldman between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. AIG's losses on those deals, for which Goldman is thought to have paid less than $10 million, were ultimately borne by taxpayers as part of the government's bailout of the insurer.

Goldman's proprietary trades with AIG in 2005 and 2006 are among those that many members of Congress sought unsuccessfully to ban during recent negotiations for tougher federal regulation of the financial industry.

via www.truth-out.org

Opposition grows to police repression in Toronto

Demonstrators have been hauled into detention cages, strip searched and denied legal counsel. There, detainees suffering from concussion and deep lacerations were denied medical attention. A diabetic entering into shock was denied treatment for four hours.

The “kennel” as it was dubbed by police guards, was crammed with people arrested for such egregious offences as carrying “dangerous weapons” such as protest signs and noise-makers. Smokers carrying lighters have been accused of possessing “incendiary devices”. Youth with the temerity to wear black clothing have been swept up by the police dragnet in a program dubbed “catch and release” by rank-and-file cops. (A collection of eyewitness accounts was published by the Toronto Star here.)

In one particularly provocative action, hundreds of heavily armed riot police corralled some 200 people Sunday night at a downtown street-corner, forcing them to stand in a driving thunderstorm for four hours. This “kettling operation” detained not only youth demonstrating against the G20 but commuters heading home from weekend shopping, dozens of citizens departing from world cup soccer celebrations, journalists covering the police build-up and entire families resident in the area. The scenes of drenched and shivering people, crying children and distressed family pets have struck a chord amongst broad layers of the city’s populace.

News anchors covering Monday evening’s protest against police brutality have been shocked by the size of the spontaneous outpouring of opposition to the repressive measures unleashed against the citizenry. As the march proceeded from downtown police headquarters towards the site of Sunday night’s “human corral”, people heading home from work joined the procession. A cacophony of car horns, stuck in traffic, rhythmically beeped in time with chants of “No police state”! Thousands of riot and mounted police, aware of the symbolism of the march, moved to block the route towards the kettling site.

Blocked from heading westward, the crowd marched to Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, the seat of the municipal government, shouting “Shame, Shame” in criticism of the social democratic mayor, David Miller, who issued statements over the weekend supporting the police repression.

The march then proceeded to Queen’s Park, the grounds of the provincial legislature, to register its opposition to the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty that earlier this month secretly passed a provision massively expanding police powers.

via www.wsws.org

LENIN'S TOMB: Capitalism, recession and resistance

Capitalism was bailed out at a global cost of some $20tn. But this didn't resolve the crisis - it shifted it from the private sector to the public sector, saving the investment banks from outright collapse at the expense of the public treasury, leading the sovereign debt crises we've seen. Now, having rallied behind bail-outs, global ruling classes are increasingly shifting behind austerity and structural adjustment after the fashion of that imposed on the 'global south' in recent decades. But that in turn will merely shift the crisis on to a new plane, because the private sector is not well-placed to make up for the sudden contraction in demand that is being imposed. There's nowhere to pick up the slack.

Look at the US. Money supply is plummeting, which means the rate of investments and transactions is collapsing. Companies aren't borrowing, consumers aren't borrowing, which means they aren't spending. Structural unemployment remains extremely high. Emergency legislation is being introduced to prevent nearly two million Americans from suddenly losing their unemployment insurance in the next week - though the extension is only until 30th November. If unemployment figures continue to be poor, some investors now say they are worried that the US will face a second recession. The fantasy of renewed growth led by auto sales, always groundless, has just been dealt another blow as sales fall. Now consider China. Having invested in a proportionally much larger stimulus than the US, its sluggish performance is sending Asian stock markets reeling. The strike wave that I described continues to roll on, which means that capital may find its ability to transfer the costs of the crisis to the Chinese working class limited.

via leninology.blogspot.com

Exercises in facing reality: hoarding as faith in a future

I've become interested in the tv shows about hoarders and hoarding. The footage of people drowning in their things, overtaken by their things, evicted and oppressed by their things absorbs me. My own tendencies to hoard are minimal. I much prefer the satisfaction of throwing things away, giving things away. It's like the inside version of weeding a garden.

Paul views things rather differently. He appreciates people's regard for the things around them, particularly those hoarders who see something unique and wonderful in every broken lamp or old game ("well, we might find another one at a yard sale and then we can combine them and have all the pieces"). I had a friend in Vienna who lived above the flea market. When it rained, he would race down to the market and buy as many of the old toasters and appliances that he could carry. He hated the thought that the appliances would be left drenched and helpless. Anyway, Paul has viewed the therapists on these hoarder shows as the bad guys, that is, as a kind of ideological thought police trained to rein in the hoarders and make them into proper consumerist subjects rather than subjects whose consumption has become so excessive as to be an illness or syndrome.

Last night, though, Paul said something a little different. My daughter and I are painting her room and refinishing her floors (a nasty job that immediately redeems those who undertake it). This means that all her items are now in her brother's room (her brother is on a camping trip in the wilderness; I figure that if I'm not done when he gets back, at least he's become accustomed to roughing it). So the room is difficult to navigate. There is a small path through bookcases, toys, and mattresses over to the bed. Every surface is piled high with stuffed animals, baskets of girly things, pillows, paper, extra lamps. We look like hoarders. And Paul, who is in the process of painting of the kitchen in an apartment in the building he owns, noticed that the occupant of the apartment has saved lots of little packets of soy sauce and other condiments. She hasn't lived there in a year, but she had saved the packets in case she needed them. Or someone else, like one of her kids or a friend who might stay for a weekend, needed them. She saved the condiments because she was imagining a future where they would be needed. Don't must of us have a little bit of the hoarder? And if so, why the impulse to denigrate people for and cure them of their hoarding?

What if these hoards of items are not remnants of a past that cannot be let go, symptoms of loss, but instead elements of a hope for a future? On one of the hoarding shows, the expert convinced a woman to get rid of some of knitting needles and yarn stash. Those items are about a future, future projects, and a step toward undertaking those projects. Another hoarder was a dumpster diver and an artist. He saw a future in each wonderful object. It would become art. It might not be art yet, but that was the future he imagined for it.

I see these hoarder shows as sharing the current moment with post-apocalyptic fiction. Both mark the end of the future. Our capacities to imagine a future not overrun by zombies and violence seem too pathological, too fantastic. They have become evidence of an imagination unconstrained by reality. Throwing out things is a way to throw out options, alternatives, different futures. The lesson these hoardist missives impart is that one must consume properly, along one path. Futures are not allowed.

Krugman: The Third Depression

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

via www.nytimes.com

Bill Connolly "What was fascism?"

Fascism is extreme and scary. So today the Right must not allow it to be remembered as a reaction to the failure of unfettered marketeerism. Thus publicists such as Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism now redefine it to mean any large intervention of the state into the economy, even if it is to reduce poverty, respond to recession, regulate capital more carefully, or respond to global warming. Keynesianism, the New Deal, anti poverty programs, are now placed under the umbrella of “liberal fascism”, even though these developments in the thirties actually helped to ward off the fascist potential simmering in several states. Goldberg is the most literate of a band of media talking heads such as Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who identify the large state as such with the drive to fascism. But why ignore its one party character?  That fact must be avoided to push the equation between state size and fascist tendency. Okay, Why insist that a large state is key? That claim allows the contemporary Right to ignore or deny how market failure spurred  fascist reactions the first time around and to insist that a minimally regulated economy is the only way to avoid the danger now. To the extent an underregulated market allows inequality, global warming, and a extreme boom/bust cycle, to that extent all social movements and state actions designed to ward off those effects can now be deemed irrational and counterproductive. Hence the need to evade how unfettered capitalism promotes global warming.

via contemporarycondition.blogspot.com

Zizek in the Guardian

Žižek is, if anything, more demonic and unhealthy-looking than his photographs, his matted hair and greying beard surrounding a face that looks like it's never seen sunlight. He suffers from diabetes, a condition not helped by his nomadic lifestyle and manic disposition. "I have exploited you," he says by way of greeting, "in order to have a few hours free from the duties these Spanish leftists expect me to perform."

He seems both eager and uncomfortable and ushers me quickly upstairs to the apartment that is his temporary home. As a cleaner flits about, I ask him if he is surprised at his popularity, particularly among the young.

"My God, I am the last person to know the answer to these questions," he says, looking genuinely dismayed. "But, really, I am now thinking there is so much pressure on me to perform. I am getting really bored with it. I am a thinker, but people all the time want this kind of shitty political interventions: the books, the talks, the discussions and so forth." He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. "I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this."

He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? "I am doing that right now!" he shouts. "I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life's work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel," he says, sighing again. "But people just want the shitty politics."

Reviewing In Defence of Lost Causes, the British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton concluded that it was "a frenetic, eclectic parody of intellectual scholarship, by one so assured in his grasp of the finer points of Kafka or John le Carré that he can afford to ham it up a little." Only time will tell if Žižek is serious about becoming utterly serious, but if he devotes the rest of his brilliant, brainy, slightly bonkers, utterly singular life to Hegel, and Hegel alone, it will be a great gain for pure philosophy and a great loss to radical, risk-taking political theory.

"He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives," says Sophie Fiennes, "precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society. We need a radical hip priest and Slavoj is that in many ways." The very thought, I suspect, would have him quaking in his proletarian boots – and free airline socks.

via m.guardian.co.uk

trying to photograph a bridge

trying to photograph a bridge
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

from my window at the Maritime Hotel in Rotterdam

Obama celebrates jobless “recovery”

The Obama administration has launched a public relations campaign entitled “summer of recovery,” kicked off by Vice President Joe Biden at the White House Thursday, followed by a presidential appearance Friday at a construction site in Columbus, Ohio.

The purpose of this public relations exercise is to mask the dismal reality of mass unemployment and protracted economic stagnation, and to justify a turn to austerity policies and budget-cutting.

The “recovery” campaign coincides with the decision of the US Senate to block the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of workers, with a faction of Senate Democrats using the claimed “recovery” to justify the termination of extended benefits.

The number of unemployed workers losing benefits because of the Senate inaction will hit 1.2 million by the end of this week. An even more dramatic consequence would be the impact on state governments if the bill is not passed by June 30, the last day of the fiscal year for most of the 50 states. As many as 900,000 state government workers could face layoff under emergency measures that would be taken as a result of failure to enact the $24 billion in aid to state-run Medicaid programs.

According to the Department of Labor, nearly 7 million workers have been unemployed for more than six months. Millions have been out of work continuously for more than two years—a phenomenon virtually without precedent in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Foreclosures threaten 5.7 million families. Credit card delinquencies have jumped by 60 percent since 2005.

via www.wsws.org

Protection, invasion, control

Protection easily slips into attempts to control.

As my kids get older, I find it increasingly difficult to navigate this slippery edge.

All sorts of parental interventions make sense for a five year old. Generally speaking, five year olds should not be allowed to walk around town with their friends at 3:00 am. It isn't overly coercive for parents to want to prevent their five year old from smoking, drinking, and experimenting with drugs. Sex play with kids in the same age group can generally be kept at a minimum with supervision and diversion, and this minimum or remainder is likely a pretty good thing, although it can be challenging for parents to be comfortable with it. Repression here might be necessary for being a not too terrible parent (that is, parents should repress their energies and impulses to control and freak out).

But what about when the kids get older? Some of my friends are pretty easy going about drugs. Their mentality is that they did it and as long as the kid is doing well and staying out of jail, then there isn't a problem. Folks I know with adult children wonder whether they set the wrong model with too much drinking, that is, with their own drinking and with letting their underage kids have keg parties at their house (basic idea--recognize the kids will drink; keep them from driving). On the sex front, no one I know preaches abstinence (I've tried to teach my kids that sex before 30 causes leprosy). It's almost like the general view is let the schools teach safe sex and then do our best to keep the kids busy and over-scheduled (really, just an easy extension of our lives onto theirs: most of us are too over-extended and exhausted for much action).

I like to think that doing one's best to insure that a kid has reasonable self esteem, a sense of a safe home environment, a sense of parental care, interest, and love provides the context needed for working out his or her own sexuality. Then I worry that my orientation is too liberal as in individualistic, a presumption of autonomy onto someone who is at the mercy of peers, hormones, and popular culture (but who isn't?). I've considered a more Maoist approach (or is it Quaker? Scientologist?): interrogation, revelation, confrontation, and renunciation. But this seems way too invasive, too much of a violation.

Why is it that raising teenagers seems to demand that we close our eyes and jump?