'Pretty Boy' Paulson and the Goldman Gang

Paul B. Farrell in MarketWatch, 6/28/09:


'Public Enemies' run, not rob, our banks today

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Yes, two Great Depressions linked in a mysterious time-warp: Bank robbers and robber banks. Back in the dark days of the first Great Depression John Dillinger was admired, a dapper Robin Hood. Banks were the real villains.

Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and "Machine Gun" Kelly were the "American Idols" of their day -- "Public Enemies" to the FBI. But folk heroes to an angry public who cheered when Dillinger destroyed bank records during holdups.

Yes, good ol' John cared for the little guy, our "stand-in," a secret way of getting back at the crooks running America's banks. Imagine him storming into a bank in a three-piece suit sporting a Tommy gun. In broad daylight! A real man. He leaps over a counter confronting a scared teller, gently taps a stack of bills with his gun barrel: "That's your money, mister?" He nods. "We're here for the bank's money, not yours. Put it away."

Banks were easy pickings for Dillinger, strategies he picked up in the slammer: "They ain't tough enough, smart enough, or fast enough. I can hit any bank I want, any time. They got to be at every bank, all the time." And he cleaned up, till a friend ratted on him.

Today it's far worse. Back in the 1930s we got a flood of new laws and regulations protecting small investors and consumers. Today we just got Obama's proposed new legislation that's already being watered down by Wall Street lobbyists. How? Easy.

[...]

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The Man in the Mirror

James Howard Kunstler's latest, June 29, 2009:

As America entered the horse latitudes of summer, befogged in a muffling stillness on deceptively calm seas, we were distracted for a while by visions of a pale death angel moonwalking across the deck of collective consciousness. Eerie parallels resound between the sordid demise of pop singer Michael Jackson and the fate of the nation.

Like the United States, Michael Jackson was spectacularly bankrupt, reportedly in the range of $800-million, which is rather a lot for an individual. Had he lived on a few more years, he might have qualified for his own TARP program -- another piece of expensive dead-weight down in the economy's bilges -- since it is our established policy now to throw immense sums of so-called "money" at gigantic failing enterprises (while millions of ordinary citizens wash overboard, without so much as a life-preserver) [...]






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Pensioners 'kidnap and torture' financial adviser

The Telegraph, 23 Jun 2009--A group of wealthy pensioners have been accused of kidnapping and torturing a financial adviser in Germany after he lost £2 million of their savings in the financial crisis.

The men, dubbed the "Geritol Gang" by police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.

Two of his kidnappers are said to have hit him with a Zimmer frame outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, before he was bound up with duct tape, bundled into the boot of a car and driven 300 miles to the home of two of the abductors on the shores of Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria.

"I was bleeding from my eyes, nose and my mouth," he said. "But the nightmare had only just started."

[...]




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Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away

Chris Hedges in Truthdig, 6/23/09:


Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

[...]



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Dim bulb in Seattle

King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Sean O'Donnell, speaking about a Seattle child rapist:

"Many of us have the perception of the sex offender or the child molester as the person living under the bridge with scraggly hair and no teeth. The only difference between the defendant and that individual is that he's got all his teeth."

Way to stereotype the homeless. As a prosecutor, he should know that most child molesters are either a relative or a neighbor of the victim. That is, they come from the exact social milieu. If an outsider, he's much more likely to be a priest than a homeless man with no teeth.





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Leave Iran Alone!

Statement by Ron Paul before the US House of Representatives, June 19, 2009:


I rise in reluctant opposition to H Res 560, which condemns the Iranian government for its recent actions during the unrest in that country. While I never condone violence, much less the violence that governments are only too willing to mete out to their own citizens, I am always very cautious about “condemning” the actions of governments overseas. As an elected member of the United States House of Representatives, I have always questioned our constitutional authority to sit in judgment of the actions of foreign governments of which we are not representatives. I have always hesitated when my colleagues rush to pronounce final judgment on events thousands of miles away about which we know very little. And we know very little beyond limited press reports about what is happening in Iran.

Of course I do not support attempts by foreign governments to suppress the democratic aspirations of their people, but when is the last time we condemned Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the many other countries where unlike in Iran there is no opportunity to exercise any substantial vote on political leadership? It seems our criticism is selective and applied when there are political points to be made. I have admired President Obama’s cautious approach to the situation in Iran and I would have preferred that we in the House had acted similarly.

I adhere to the foreign policy of our Founders, who advised that we not interfere in the internal affairs of countries overseas. I believe that is the best policy for the United States, for our national security and for our prosperity. I urge my colleagues to reject this and all similar meddling resolutions.






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Iran faces greater risks than it knows

Paul Craig Roberts in Online Review, Jun 19, 2009:


Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, tells the story of the overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddeq, by the CIA and the British MI6 in 1953. The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets.

The 1953 street demonstrations, together with the Cold War claim that the US had to grab Iran before the Soviets did, served as the US government’s justification for overthrowing Iranian democracy. What the Iranian people wanted was not important.

Today, the street demonstrations in Tehran show signs of orchestration. The protesters, primarily young people, especially young women opposed to the dress codes, carry signs written in English: “Where Is My Vote?” The signs are intended for the Western media -- not for the Iranian government.

More evidence of orchestration is provided by the protesters’ chant, “Death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad.” Every Iranian knows that the president of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed Westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator, as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him.

The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.

[...]


.......................................

Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch, 6/19/09:


Is This the Culmination of Two Years of Destabilization

A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

[...]



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I have two poems

in the new Jubilat. In one, "get hoovered" is printed as "get hovered," but that's my fault for not correcting the proof. I'm pretty bad at reading proofs, since my mind is on whatever I'm preoccupied with at the moment, not a poem I wrote a year ago. Here, the copywriter is obviously not familiar with "hoover" as a verb, a chiefly British usage, but UK and American English are still one language, no?

Baltimore

Walked at least 7 miles through Balmore yesterday. In Hampden, I talked to an old man who recommended Mike's Place for lunch, but the food was only so-so, the service chaotic. To be fair, it was the waitress' first day on the job, and the owners, an older Korean couple, appeared new. Down the street was Café Hon, made famous by John Waters. On its facade, a huge pink flamingo. I saw a man singing in his basement window. "It's rare to see a person so happy," I said. "These days," he added.

[more]





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Seven of my poems,

"How It Is", "The Most Beautiful Word", "Bardic", "One-Sentence Stories" (excerpts), "Obsolete Maps," "The Proper Age For Marriage" and "She Said," are in today's Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a London-based newspaper. According to translator Tahseen al Khateeb, it is one the most prestigious and influential in the Arab world. Many thanks to Tahseen.

Irony abounds

in the current American indignation over the Iranian election. We seem to forget that our 2000 and 2004 Diebold-rigged selections were equally flawed. Remember Florida and Ohio? Americans have also deleted from their junk media-addled memories the massive protests after the Mexican election of 2006, when Bush was quick to endorse the winning candidate, Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party, despite widespread concerns over voting irregularities. Calderon was our boy, as was Vincente Fox, who signed the NAFTA pact that further wrecked Mexico. Under that agreement, we got to dump our subsidized corn onto the Mexican market, bankrupting their farmers so that their sons and daughters were forced to work in American assembly plants along the border, if not cross it outright to labor in the construction bonanza of our housing bubble. McMansion erection over, many Mexicans are without jobs, stuck up North without a paddle. Some have been chased through the streets and beaten up by our native-born lumpens. As often happens, the poor unleash their anger on each other, while their white collared muggers and rapists sip a chocolate martini out of sight.

Why do we subsidize corn? It's because Coke, Pepsi, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and all the other big boys of our food and drink industries depend on those golden kernels, think of cornfeed and the ubiquitous corn syrup, for their profits. In short, the government is taking your tax money to fatten Burger King.








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Nasa prepares to bomb the moon

The Telegraph, 6/18/09:


Nasa scientists are preparing to launch a space mission from Cape Canaveral carrying a missile that will fire a hole deep in the surface of the moon

The aim is to see whether any traces of water will be revealed by the disruption caused to the planet's surface. Nasa will analyse the space cloud caused by the explosion for any sign of water or vapour.

Scientists expect the impact to blast out a huge cloud of dust, gas and vaporized water ice at least 6 miles high - making it visible from Earth.

[...]







...........................................................................................
Below, a still from Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune), 1902, 35mm film, black and white, silent:

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Curious Courvoisier ad

shows a dreadlocked black man and a black woman walking on the heads of white men. Camden:

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The American Empire Is Bankrupt

Chris Hedges at Truthdig, 6/14/09:

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

[...]






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John Dolan writes about being down and out,

Alternet, 10/15/08:


[...] if you have a dog you’re cutting down on your chances of getting a job. This one howls when she’s left alone, another legacy of her traumatic puppyhood, so one of us had to stay with her most of the time. It was like being handcuffed to the wretched unheated ex-fishing boat we were living on.

The boat was another contributor to our debacle; it was something else we should have sold off right away, even at a 90% loss. The idea behind that damn boat was that instead of paying the insanely high west-coast rents, we’d live on the boat for free. This is a very bad idea. Any idea you have of retreating to some simple, free habitation should be regarded with deep doubt. The thing is, you can’t get back to the comfortable, heated world from a place like that boat. No internet. You need the net if you’re ever going to claw your way back. You need a working shower, which that boat lacked. Otherwise you develop that look, that smell you first encountered in the Free Clinic waiting room. It’s not a good look, job-wise. Maybe if we’d gotten rid of the dog I’d have had a chance.

But you lose more than that. You change completely, more than you realize, to the point that even if you get a break you can’t grab it. After months of applying for teaching jobs without even getting answers, the perfect job opened up for me at a local college. It was half creative writing, half teaching literature and composition, all my specialties. But when the interview started I realized I was no longer someone who could talk the quiet, polite, oblique version of self-promotion demanded by academic hiring committees. I was too deeply, permanently spooked by our condition. I was just plain wrong, unhireably wrong in every way. No hot water on the boat, and I needed to shave the graying wisps of hair on my big bald head, so I’d shaved in the McDonald’s men’s room on the way to the interview, with a cheap Bic shaver. You can guess the results: it looked like a bobcat had tried to roost on my scalp, and been evicted after a violent struggle. The used sport coat we’d spent our last $20 of Visa credit on at Value Village didn’t seem to fit nearly so well, once I was inside that humming, immaculate classroom where the interview was held. And I had become a louder, more desperate, excessive person. When I tried to sound positive, it came out furious. When they asked me, as I’d known they would, why someone who’d taught at bigger universities wanted to come to this small rural campus, I said truthfully, “I’d rather teach here in the forest than at Stanford.” It didn’t come out enthusiastic, it came out strident. After months of being a bum, I was the wrong volume, the wrong temperature. I could feel the job slipping away, and in fact they hired a local guy who was friends with the director, even though my cv kicked his cv’s ass.


[...]




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William S. Lind

on our collapse, military and societal, 4/21/09:

[...]

So long as America pursues an offensive grand strategy, Fourth Generation war will ensure her defeat. The reason is Martin van Creveld’s concept of the power of weakness and its intimate relationship with legitimacy. In a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm. At root, Fourth Generation war is a contest for legitimacy between the state and a wide variety of non-state primary loyalties. American power lacks legitimacy because, on the physical level, it is so overwhelming. That is the power of weakness: anyone who stands up to the American military becomes a hero. In turn, any state the American military supports loses its legitimacy. The more places America intervenes militarily, the more states lose their legitimacy, to the advantage of Fourth Generation, non-state entities. In effect, we have a reverse Midas touch. Only a defensive grand strategy, where we mind our own business and leave other states to mind theirs, can break us out of this downward spiral.

[...]

These foreign policy failures and military defeats – or even more embarrassing "victories" – become just two of a larger series of crises, including the economic crisis (depression followed by runaway inflation), foreign exchange crisis (collapse of the dollar), political crisis (no one in the Establishment knows what to do, but the Establishment offers the voters no alternative to itself), energy crisis, etc. Together, these discrete crises snowball into a systemic crisis, which is what happens when the outside world demands greater change than the political system permits. At that point, the political system collapses and is replaced by something else. In the old days, it meant a change of dynasty. What might it mean today? My guess is a radical devolution, at the conclusion of which life is once again local.

That would be, on the whole, a happy outcome. But I fear this will be a trip where the journey is not half the fun.



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US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

The Telegraph, 6/12/09:


Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

The US government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature Photo: GETTY

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

[...]




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I just wrote a blurb

for Mathias Svalina's excellent, upcoming book, Destruction Myth, but I had to decline praising the chapbook of a very talented, yet not quite there young poet. My email to him:

I'm going to hold off giving you a blurb until you have a full-length mns. When I blurb, I tend to gush, and I don't think it's quite time yet. I think you're rushing a bit, and I understand the benefits of being impatient, as I'm exactly the same way. Complacent people accomplish nothing. But you're just out of school, man! Believe me, I'm behind you all the way, and there are brilliant moments in these poems, but there are also passages where you sound overly measured, where you could be a bit fiercer and wilder or, to put it another way, more reckless and confident. These traits will likely come, but you must give yourself time to accumulate more battle scars. Hey, I think it's great you're getting this chap out, but you'll have many more publications in the future, so you're in excellent shape, OK?

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Die, already

My New York Times piece elicited some interesting responses in the forum at Life After The Oil Crash, my very favorite website:


"Another good reason to initiate or attend your local Doomer Meet Up!"


"I recently did and it was so invigorating. Wonderful conversation over drinks like we've known each other for years! It did a lot for me mentally."


"The first half of this article describes some slumlord (Lowry) who has burglars breaking into his properties and who needs a gun for protection. This was during the relatively prosperous decade of the 80s. What does he expect Philly to be like during a full scale doom scenario? The economic and social structures of our major urban centers will not function under real doom scenarios. They will become concentration camps ruled by military commanders. Your only rights will be a daily bowl of gruel and a bullet in the head if you don't like it. Good luck !"


"It'll be Night of the Living Dead. All you have to do, for phase one anyway, is board yourself into your basement well enough with water, food, and ammo. If you have enough to last two months, hopefully most of the zombie hordes will have starved to death or become weak enough to be unable to fight.

Then you start phase two...long walk to the woods."



........................................................................

I did not suggest that Philadelphia was the ideal sized city to survive our Great Unraveling, but I would rather be here than in the suburbs or another, more car-centric city, which is to say, most of our metropolises.

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68 years old, served 8 years in the Marines, beat up daughter's boyfriend for abusing her, used to race motorcycles, has been to England once, has colon cancer, hasn't had a drink in 15 years, knew my friend Jerome Robinson, slept at the Wheels of Soul clubhouse once because he was too drunk to leave, thinks the economy will get better because Obama will take care of it.




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Top Chinese banker Guo Shuqing calls for wider use of yuan

The Telegraph, 6/8/09:

The head of China's second-largest bank has said the United States government should start issuing bonds in yuan, rather than dollars, in the latest indication of the increasing importance of the Chinese currency.

[...]





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Geithner Lifts Ass For Chinese Masters

The Exiled, 6/1/09:


Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is in China today, doing whatever it takes–no matter how shameless and sordid– to make sure that the Chinese don’t pull out of American bonds, which are tanking in value thanks to Geithner’s multi-trillion-dollar gift to Wall Street. The Chinese are not happy, and since the Chinese loaned America all the money it’s now blowing, they call the shots.

The Tim Geithner lifting ass today in China sounds a lot different from the Tim Geithner who recently played the role of alpha Chinaman Dominator when he was trying to impress the wannabe macho men in Congress. The Treasury Secretary’s old self was captured perfectly in a NY Times article headlined “Geithner Hints At Harder Line on China Trade.”

January 23, 2009
Geithner Hints at Harder Line on China Trade
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Timothy F. Geithner, who moved closer to confirmation as Treasury secretary on Thursday, told senators that President Obama believed China was “manipulating” its currency, suggesting a more confrontational stance toward that country than under the Bush administration.

“Hard.” Uh-huh-huh. He said “hard.” Uh-huh-huh-huh.

[...]






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Richard Heinberg on power down

This is an old speech, from December of 2006, but as relevant as ever. If you're not familiar with the issue of peak oil and how it is the primary cause of our systemic breakdown, meaning all this chatter about economic recovery is just so much deceitful or naive nonsense, then watch this succinctly brilliant video:

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I was in Wilmington, DE

today. Saw Jill Biden at the train station, waiting for an Amtrak to DC. No, that's not her below:

[More]







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Bob Herdelin

I had a few beers at his bar today. Bob was a basketball star at LaSalle. A rebounding machine at 6-4, he was nevertheless kicked out of school his junior year for "off-campus problems." He would have been drafted by an NBA team but his fear of flying relegated him to a few years in the Eastern League. He last made the news in October when, 76-years-old, he tackled a 23-year-old mugger and had the man in a head lock before the cops could arrive. Details:

Furnishing civil service with a smile

Daily Times, October 24, 2008— A self-proclaimed bounty hunter captured a suspected wanted for a vicious assault last month in the Gallery Mall in Center City.

He plans on donating the $5,000 reward to the Upper Darby Police Athletic League.

Bob Herdelin, the owner of Cheers Lounge, 6840 Market St., single-handedly captured Jason Morgan, 23, suspected in the Sept. 10 attack against an 84-year-old man in the shopping mecca at Ninth and Market streets, Philadelphia.

[...]

“This guy’s on the U.S. Marshals Most- Wanted List and he comes in my bar selling perfume and stuff,” Herdelin said. “I knew it was only a matter of time before I would get him. I had the wanted poster and showed my barmaids to be on the lookout for him.

“He was here Wednesday and the bar maid banged on my door saying, ‘He’s here.’ I dialed 911 and the dispatcher was asking me a lot of questions and I just said send the police because he may have a gun. My bar maid (Thembi Sessoms, of Philadelphia) and cook (Stacy McCollum of West Chester) followed him west on Market Street. He went into the Aquarius Restaurant and then into another store.

“They said he’s in there so I went in. He saw me and knew I was coming after him. He took a swing at me, but I body- slammed him to the ground.”

That’s when SEPTA and about 15 Upper Darby police officers arrived and handcuffed Morgan on charges of robbery, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment.

“This was (allegedly) one of five guys who knocked down the 84-year-old man,” Herdelin said. “It was an atrocious assault and this is the one marshals were really after.”

[...]

Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood recalled Herdelin coming into his office a couple of weeks ago with the wanted poster for Jason Morgan.

“He said, ‘This guy comes in my bar every couple of weeks,’” Chitwood said. “‘The next time I see him, I’m going to grab him and sit on him and any reward I get I’m going to donate to Upper Darby PAL.’

[...]

“Herdelin has done everything humanly possible to keep that area clean. He has posted ‘no loitering’ and ‘no trespassing’ signs and calls police all the time if he suspects any drug dealing or illegal activity. It’s a rough business in a rough location."

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Get Together, Slim Down

My New York Times post is up a couple of days early:

PHILADELPHIA — Before American steel mills went silent, Lowry Graham’s dad labored in one for four decades. A high school graduate, he was more educated than most of his co-workers. He liked his job, became a foreman and was proud of it.

It was a dirty, backbreaking and sometimes lethal occupation. At the start of World War II, steel workers had to go on strike to demand, among other concessions, a 10-minute lunch break and a room to shower and change at the end of the day.

[...]





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