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Pocket Change

It’s funny, and not ha-ha, but so many people (and you’re related to at least a few of them) spend so much time keeping up with stock market numbers, rises and falls in the Dow, the price of gold other such particularly ridiculous prisms through which to see the world that when you hear/read someone talking sensibly about the the absurd way this “system” is treated and treats itself it can be, well, refreshing.

A federal judge angrily blocked Citigroup’s proposed $285 million settlement over the sale of toxic mortgage debt, excoriating the top U.S. market regulator over how it reaches corporate fraud settlements.

…

Rakoff called the Citigroup accord too lenient, noting that the bank was charged only with negligence, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, and could avoid reimbursing investors for more than $700 million of losses. Private investors cannot bring securities claims based on negligence.

“If the allegations of the complaint are true, this is a very good deal for Citigroup; and, even if they are untrue, it is a mild and modest cost of doing business,” the judge wrote.

The judge basically told the SEC and Citigroup to shove it, interrupting one of the very commonplace, move-along, nothing-to-see-here disgraces taking up valuable time in courthouses across the country. The settlement without any admission of guilt is one of the more nefarious innovations to ever come along, allowing companies to pay their way out of crimes, prep the memory hole and begin the process again as soon as possible. It’s all too cozy, and no one seems to notice anymore. There are no business reporters who take the side of anything but corporations and business. It’s amazing but even a judge paying attention realized that the wash was still dirty after this rinse cycle and decided to plop the whole load back in the machine, hopefully this time with some bleach.  They still continue to call the aggrieved parties ‘investors’ as though it’s somehow the ultimate distinction. It’s really just a description of people who deserve to be ruled by corporations.

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Schemes inside of Schemes

On #OWS, plus for when he word-whips Little Tommy Freidman (age 9), Taibbi is a national treasure:

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for people who’ve been foreclosed upon, because it’s they’re own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy.” In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.

Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they’ve scored bailouts. It doesn’t matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the “emerging markets”) or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes.

The LTCM fiasco was particularly egregious, even and especially at the time. Stomach-turning levels of under-believability, as this 1998 article from Harper’s illustrates. And we just carried on.

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Ring of Fire

Some ingredients to the cake and the walk we took to fetch it. All at one low, low price. In the depraved sense of the word:

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

But not an occupation.

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Back at the Front, part MCMLXVI

We diddle about whether there is anything to do anything about, meanwhile Australia (highest per capita carbon emissions) passes a tax on carbon.

The legislation would force about 500 of the biggest polluters to pay for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.

The tax is central to the government’s strategy to combat climate change, but the opposition says it will cause job losses and raise the cost of living.

Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter and one of the biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitters.

“Today is a significant day for Australians and the Australians of the future who want to see a better environment,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard said before the vote.

It can be done and people (and people fromerly known as companies) will adjust. As they will to a tax on trading stocks, bonds and derivatives.

The jobs’ bill filibuster… look into it and you’ll see how completely captured our (odd pronoun choice, more needed) legislators are to the will and wishes of corporate interests. They can’t even discuss voting on a jobs bill, much less a carbon tax.

But Australia did. Maybe they decided to put the sharks back in the water where they belong.

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X Marx the Spot

In the capital of capitalism, where capitalism is doing its greatest damage. You don’t have to be an American apostate to think this, just look around you.

Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.

It’s not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.

Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.

That’s from an article on Marx from the BBC, and that point would indeed be difficult to argue with. But of course, it’s not the end of the story – only an enticement to get you to embrace the system further, until the system begins to destroy everything that brought it about. Including democracy – it will have to kill that. In a capitalism vs. democracy cage match, doesn’t capitalism, to even be defined as true capitalism, doesn’t it have to win? What does this mean?

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Handling the Scandal-ing

You might think throwing money at problems is one one to do it. Turns out: not so much.

Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make sure it stayed that way.

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

The thing is, they really didn’t want any ‘annealing’ effects on company practices to take effect after this or any other scandal. Not interested. There is a disconnect – one of many – between the perception that major corporate entities care about doing business honestly, even making huge money – honestly – and… reality. Which is that they don’t care about it at all. We’re not talking about their advertising and what it says about them. You can do it. But that’s not their game. Murdoch wasn’t interested; and if he had a private moment today, would probably say he still isn’t interested in running his or any company (or country, for that matter) honestly. What would be the point?

Watch this story; it will continue to evolve.

update: Suing his mother?

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Open your art books to page…

A reminder that there are all shades of green, some of them not Eco at all. Via, this little meditation on, faced with school budget cutbacks that always, ALWAYS, get aimed at the art curriculum first, how we should teach art instead of history.

This general scenario matches up with other stories I’ve seen. But why should art be on the chopping block before history class? I believe we romanticize history, making it seem practically and ideally more important than it is. People defend history in the gauzy language of citizenship, with appeals that rarely rise above aphorism. “Those who don’t history are bound to repeat it”. This doesn’t hold up in a practical sense though. There’s a reason the phrase isn’t “those who have history as a significant part of their high school curriculum are bound to repeat it”. Being taught history doesn’t make you better voters unless you remember that history. I’m not going to go down the litany of things that huge percentage of Americans incorrectly believe about history, instead I’ll just give one prominent example. How many hundreds of millions of dollars to we spend each year teaching kids about the Civil War, and still 42% of people don’t know we fought it over slavery?

Sign me up. I would even say (but never write) that we would better off teaching (more) people about art. An example? a survey about the work of JL David will render the history of French Revolution unforgettable. And once you have The Death of Marat or The Tennis Court Oath in your head, along with the stories behind them, you’re only going to want to find out more. Moving through history on the basis of art movements is a more durable sort of engagement. Why the salons of the 1870’s happened or Goya’s dark paintings just doesn’t go away. That knowledge moves and grows into something else. Something we need.

And this is to say nothing of the benefits of people learning printmaking or drawing. It would be like mass producing the keys to critical thinking and problem solving. Then we can finally get back to that Shangra-La where no one locks their doors.

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Woodshed

If you missed Krugman today… well, you shouldn’t miss Krugman today:

These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?

The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.

Sure we can talk about and quote long passages from books about the French Revolution, as I’m so fond of doing about any kinds of books, and draw comparisons between now and the run-up to that ghastly epoch. But I’m not sure how much good it will do (though I think a film about Saint Just would be great right about now).

But the more people with megaphones like Krugman take-on and takedown nonsense like the gospel of Greenspan and all of the other Randian balderdash that has so permeated the air waves, sunk most of the newspapers and razed the public squares, replacing them with parking lots for multi-aisle wish fulfillment, the harder the Greenspans et al will have to fight to maintain the BS level that now floats so effortlessly over us all.

Though there is no one like Krugman, there are plenty of others. I heard Stiglitz on NPR this morning and when Steve Inskeep (?) tried to question him about weren’t the stimulus and tax cuts strategies all just the same anyway and the debt was the most important blah blah blah, Joe was having none of it. And called him on the nonsense right away. Can’t believe they had him on. Listen here.

Anyway, these are important steps out of the cow field and here’s to sustaining them. But… no way around the woodshed.

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More from Less

Nice catch from Klein via Yglesias:

Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is one of the more innovative tax thinkers I know. In particular, I’ve always been partial to his proposal for a progressive consumption tax (pdf). So I ran the plan by him, as well. “The progressive budget proposal is of course an enormous improvement over the bizarre Ryan budget,” he said, “which for all its chest thumping about facing up to the hard choices, does nothing — absolutely nothing — to reduce long-run deficits.” But like Gale and Burman, Frank wanted to see more simplification and reform. In particular, he wanted more attention given to what we tax with an eye toward two-fers: raising more money off of things we want less of. “When we enter congested roadways, or buy heavy vehicles, or drink to excess, or emit CO2 into the air, we impose costs on others,” he says. “Taxing such activities kills two birds with one stone: It generates much needed revenue, and it curtails activities that cause more harm than good. Because these taxes make the economic pie bigger, it makes no sense to object that we can’t afford them.” He recommended this piece (pdf) for more on those ideas.

Emphases from the link. But the key: raising more money off of things we want less of. The whole idea of a two-fer has only yet manifested itself in the heads and hearts of those who want to keep their tax money and penalize the poor, children and the elderly by teaching them some kind of lesson.

But Frank’s is the real way to get to the things that matter, one that also has many corollaries, among them: make sure more people finish school and can go to college, wherever they are from, so that they can get jobs and spend a long productive life of at least intermittent happiness paying taxes. Hello?

Banning certain kids from college is stupid. Not taxing the externalities of energy production, ditto.