How Wall Street Makes Billions Kiting YOUR Cash

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:

So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself? “Pretty much.”

It's OUR cash. YOUR cash. We own the treasury and WE print the paper. This is no different than if I loaned you 20 bucks for lunch and when we get back to the office you said, "Now just give me another $0.60 and I'll give you your $20 back." Do the same thing with a billion and you pocket $30,000,000.00 for nothing more than taking my own money from my left hand and passing it back to the right.

Complete System #FAIL.

What Would You Do for House Payments of $50?

Anything! You shout with palpitating anticipation of scoring The Deal of the Millennium.

Oh, wait; actually, we'd do anything but move there.

But, but, but ... if CAPITALISM is omnipotent and MARKETS are omniscient, that place should be overwhelmed with buyers right now. And look, look, look, we have CURVES and GRAPHS that *PROVE* that Invisible Make Believe Theoretical Real Equilibrium-Claus is just about to slide down the chimney with toys and make-busy fake jobs for all the good little wage slave boys and girls.

We'll be back to the Normal That Caused All This in no time! Just tap your heals three times and join the rest of us in the BOTTOM 90% of Americans who work two jobs for just enough money to pay rent -- just like our Share Cropper great grandparents -- and repeat:

"There's no place called home. There's no place called home. There's no place called home."

Concerto for Squealing Piggies and Harried Hoarders in “F” Major

Big man, pig man, ha ha, charade you are
You well heeled big wheel, ha ha, charade you are
And when your hand is on your heart …
You're nearly a good laugh
Almost a joker
With your head down in the pig pen
Sayin’ "keep on diggy’in"
Pig stain on your fat chin
What do you hope to find?
When you're down in the pig mine
You're nearly a laugh
You're nearly a laugh
But you're really a cry …

-- Roger Waters, on Animals

We can be confident that we’re making progress when the turrets of the Grand Old Pedantic party are reduced to loading up histrionic emotional pejoratives as their last bastion of defense:

“The assumption that the pursuit of self-interest within the rules and conventions of society will also promote the public interest may be succeeded by a mushy collectivist pseudo-altruism, in which jealousy and envy are given a free ride …”

Right. It’s jealousy and envy, not empirical observation of Unsustainable Resource Skews which are functionally equivalent to massive blood clots lodged throughout the global economic circulatory system. Note to the non-empirically minded: if you clot up 42% of your vital bodily fluids, into any 1% of your body; or, if you clot up nearly 70% of any resource into 5% of any system; that, my friend, is unsustainable unto immediate herky-jerky death.

I don’t know how that makes you feel, emotionally, but any presiding physician’s recorded Time of Death is just another cold, analytical statistic.

After all, if I might mirror an astonishingly articulate miscarriage of fact by our good friends at FT, “There is a risk that empirically dubious but emotionally attractive interpretations, which enshrine wild west, every man for himself, bar room brawl capitalism; and which call for a rapid return to the failed status quo, could gain ground.” Which is merely to say:

First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they attack us, then they copy us, then we win. Same as it ever was.

“Victims of your own success, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Unsustainable Resource Skews.”

Debunking the Devil Formerly Known as Godless Socialism

From an extraordinarily timely NYT article:

Such things are easy for an American to ridicule; you don’t have to be a Fox News commentator to sneer at what, in the midst of a global financial crisis, seems like [OMG!] Socialism Gone Wild.

But there’s more to it.

This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these [seemingly] polar-opposite value systems coexist?

Thank you for the referral, Georges!

It's Time To Nationalize Everything

From the lucid keyboard of CNBC's Cliff Mason:

Now some people may object that governments don't do a good job running private companies. In general, I'm sure that's true, but we could hardly do a worse job than private sector's already done. If the state is going to bail out these companies, the state should be the entity that reaps the rewards, not existing shareholders.

We gave free enterprise a shot, now it's time try a different solution.

What is American Market Socialism?

American Market Socialism is not some central mandate from on high in the authoritarian sense of dystopian American fiction.

You won't be getting new marching orders. There won't be some formal announcement -- beyond the series of formal announcements you've received over the past several months, which have fully ushered in the new American Market Socialist economy.

There is nothing to fight or oppose here, Marx was wrong, there was no bloody revolution. Yet, Marx was right, The Machine Destroyed Itself. You and I will be building the Sustainable Global Green Society, moving forward.

This is NOT "shiny happy people holding hands." We have PLENTY to differ about; however, what is no longer debatable is the fact that from here forward, the specific details need to be worked out in each and every of our own individual lives.

Thank you 18th to 20th century American Industrial Era Capitalism for the liberating legacy of American Market Socialism; it is Capitalism evolved. Capitalism++.