Dexia and the Second Bailout: No lessons learned

OK, the time has come for some real riots. I mean, after learning of Dexia recently and reading this article in the NY Times this weekend, my stomach actually hurts.

This is the 2nd bailout for Dexia in 3 years and this one is the equivalent of another AIG, not only in scale but in principal, where the government IE; taxpayers, are literally being called upon not to protect their savings in a regulated financial institution, what their tax dollars should be doing when needed (and the financial institution be allowed to fail), but to make counter parties in unregulated derivatives whole!!! The same old names come up, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Commerzbank etc. as taxpayers are put on the hook for another 90 Billion Euros on top of the massive bailout that took place in 2008 of the same bank during the original financial crises.

I am sick, I am nauseous, I am bleeding inside, I want to Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Washington, DC, Occupy Belgium, Occupy France, Occupy the planet until these kinds of "deals" are stopped.

These are the actions of our governments that got the Occupy movement started and it is high time we find a way to put an end to them now.

The Pension Fund Mess and the Media's Lousy Reporting

I read this article today in the NY Times. The Little State With a Big Mess

It was another lousy, shallow, baseless bleed heart about a politician having to deal with bankrupt pensions... So I wrote these few words in response to the author and share here.

Hello Ms. Walsh,

I have read quite a number of articles about the financial mess many states, cities and municipalities are in over the past few years. What I have not read until now, with the exception of the occasional town or municipality that engages in outright fraud, is any decent reporting of the mechanisms that have lead to the financial mess they are in.

I never read about the move of states, cities and municipalities to dramatically increase the salaries of officials in government and government funded organizations like education institutions in the late 1990's to "compete" with the "dotcom" induced high flying salaries paid during that era's economic bubble. I have not read about how, unlike industry, when this bubble burst governments did not ratchet down those exuberant salaries and maintain them to this day. I have not read about how governments wasted or spent unwisely the billions of dollars doled out by the Federal Government after 9/11 to "upgrade" police and other emergency services leaving higher long term costs burdens to the local governments after a short term shot in the arm by the Federal Gov. I have not read about the tremendous waste of opportunity by state, city and local governments to bank the exorbitant amount of money they were taking in during the first decade of this century while the real estate bubble was in full steam and how they unwisely spent it, often on frivolous items and higher salaries while allowing their infrastructures to fail and pensions to go unfunded. I have not read about the dramatic shift in public pension funds during this same bubble to feed tens of billions of dollars into the unregulated hedge fund industries as Wall street ran out of suckers and reached out to pension funds and their low salary incompetent managers as easy takers to fuel the casino going on in the global debt markets. I have not read enough about how many of these local governments became little AIG's by being coaxed into short term funding obligations with long term insurance against rising interest rates which not only did not materialize but "cost" money when these government entities had to pony up money to meet calls against their worthless contracts and how this plays into their financial woes.

In essence, I have not read anything anywhere about the reason America's incompetent governments at every level from county, municipality, city and state (and federal) seem to know nothing about basic economics of running a government, how our education system fails to teach anything about our economic system and how this plays into the ignorance of our electorate and governments alike. I have read nothing about how the financial mess so many governments are in got to where it is in the first place and how much of that reason is directly related to their pension funds investment decisions. I have not read how the financial meltdown on Wall Street as a whole has affected the returns on the pension funds and how many of the pension funds were duped into worthless investments during the Wall Street bubble. I have not read anything about how perhaps our Federal government should have been more interested in securing the savings of Americans and the soundness of their pensions instead of bailing out the Casino operators on Wall Street who already banked nearly $3.5 trillion of profits from the debt induced bubble that took place from the early part of the century till the collapse in 2008.

All I read about is what you and others in your industry have written here, politicians speaking to angry pensioners (um, that is American Citizens who have done an honest days work all their lives while living in modest means) about how they are going to have to take the hit from what? Maybe from all of the things I mention above that are NEVER spoken about on these pages or any other pages in any cohesive way that lays out the reality that at the end of the day; the average working Joe is constantly getting reamed in this global, finance driven economy run by people with an 19th century mindset at best; that all money is for the taking, no matter how you do it; that we still live in an barbaric economic reality and all the attempts by all the people over the last century and a half to make sure working people are respected like the decent human beings they are, are moot when casino economics and corrupt national governments are capable of taking it all away inside of a few years.

How about getting a little creative and insightful next time, it is about time!

Open Explanation: Occupy Wall Street

I wrote this letter to Timothy Lavin of Bloomberg after reading this article by Amity Shlaes. It combines two recent ideas of mine in one letter to try and open a dialog on my take of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.

Hello Timothy,

As editor of the opinion column at Bloomberg I would like you to think about the Wall Street protesters from a couple angles and perhaps seek understanding of what is going on from these perspectives.

1) From the economic perspective, that the free economic system has at some point over the last 30 years reached a point of diminished returns to the population it "serves". All advanced industrial economies are facing the same "problem" whereas corporate entities have gone through a mass consolidation, using their capital to consolidate verses investment in new productive output. This consolidation has resulted in mega corporate entities that maximize profit by reducing competition and stifling innovation. I would estimate that nearly 70% of consumer dollars are spent on goods and services at companies that operate as oligopolies in their respective industries where two or three (perhaps 4-5 in some areas) companies control any particular industry per geographic area including production, distribution and sales channels. The consolidation of industries has also concentrated wealth in the hands of fewer companies and people and this wealth is not being put to productive use.

The last decade of this wealth concentration played out in the financial industry whereas the money concentrated in the hands of the few was and is being put to "work" in speculative gain through financial instruments. The proliferation of unregulated pools of money like hedge funds and speculative private equity companies provides a real tangible look at what happens when such concentration of wealth proliferates. Unfortunately so much money has flowed into these non productive uses of capital, real investment has all but ceased to exist in mature economies. Unfortunately as well, is the reality that when these speculative uses of capital go haywire in the hands of people who over leveraged their balance sheets, massive amounts of money is "lost" or better put transferred from the "real" savings of the citizens when regulated financial institutions leverage these savings to offer credit to unregulated institutions that imploded due to overly leveraged balanced sheets and speculative practices.

The bail out of regulated financial institutions (and the conversion of speculative financial to regulated financial institutions) so they to could get "bailed out" was nothing short of the largest transfer of "wealth", the savings of the American people (and citizens of other developed nations), to the speculative, unregulated markets, the world has ever seen. The "real" savings that were "lost" were replaced by sovereign debt, basically the people have had their own money "replaced" after the regulated financial institutions had transferred it to the speculative unregulated markets, and been give a big IOU. All people of the advanced industrial world are now paying interest indirectly on their own money that was essentially "stolen" from them through the process of regulated financial institutions lending it to speculators who took pools of capital from the corporate elite and gambled a reckless way by "creating" financial instruments based on real assets and liabilities valued at over 50 times the true underlying assets / liabilities. When this system of reckless gambling failed and the underlying capital that existed was wiped out then replaced on the backs of taxpaying citizens we (the Occupy Wall Street crowd) have the impression, correctly so, that the government is working on behalf of the wealthy and corporations, not it's citizens.

All this evolution in economic activity derives its origins from the premise that "capital" simply found no more productive uses in the advanced nations where it was created and hence it found it's way to speculative uses instead of productive uses. My guess of the point where our vastly unregulated free market system reached a diminished point of returns to the population it "serves" was somewhere in the late 1970's, about the same time that real incomes stagnated in the US and have remained fairly constant or declined since (with the small exception of the latter 1990's when capital was invested in productive use due to the opportunities created by the evolution of the Internet / networks). Any productive use of capital from that point forward was transferred overseas to "developing" economies where production is cheaper and growth in those economies from a basic level of need still attainable, where all basic level of material needs had been satisfied in the advanced economies. (Note: China is currently doing both productive investment and speculation on such an tremendous scale their implosion in the next 12-18 months will rock the globe.)

Europe manages to slow this migration of capital somewhat through stiffer regulation and a later stage of development due to the destruction of WWII. However over that past 15 years or so they have increasingly modeled their economies after the freer economic model of the US and the EU and common currency has escalated that trend. Japan and German and a few island nations are somewhat exceptions in that both nations continued to invest in productive output as they lead in the manufacture of advanced industrial products and machine tools that make production possible elsewhere.

2) The second area is more directly related to the people who are involved in the protest movement. This is the first generation of people to grow up with computers and the Internet in their homes. It only takes 10% of this population of young people, who found the Internet to be an enlightening source of information to create a major national movement. These young people, many of who have completely lost faith in the institutional framework of our political and economic system, have "self educated" via the Internet and have learned to shun the institutional "learning" that is propagated in our public school system, a system that has failed to keep pace with the leaning abilities of our young people and failed to keep pace with the evolution of our economic / political system at hand, instead continuing to focus on the social cohesion aspects of learning that has propagated in our public education since the early to mid 20th Century.

These young people see public education for what it is and seek to acquire "real" knowledge through understanding the world around them as it exist today. They can easily find information on everything from ecology, environment, politics, war, economy, power, industrial processes, history, current events, governments, foreign policy etc. from their home and increasingly share that information with others and through that process develop deeper and more comprehensive understandings of the world around them. Each person is free to focus on the aspects of learning that interest them most and share and communicate with like minded people. All of them ultimately share common goals, though in different areas, that changes need to be made for the common good. You will see issues all over the map, from industrial food process and it's effects on human populations and the lack of regulation and tainted "research" spewed out by universities funded by the companies that exercise such practices to global economic theft and manipulation by pools of capital that seek to turn every resource on the planet into a speculative instrument and exploit these instruments with abandon while answering to no legitimate governmental organization from where these pools of capital originate.

The failure of established institutions to recognize what is going on with these young people is to their detriment. This movement is global. Whether it is 5%, 10% or 15% of the population of young people all over the world that are involved in this movement, have educated themselves and are impassioned to change the world around them is irrelevant. The fact is that this change is coming and failure to recognize it for what it is is dangerous and irresponsible. When one educates themselves, there is a different dynamic that takes place. They feel empowered by their knowledge. This is very different than the indoctrination education received at public schools and higher learning institutions. You have to understand this or you will fail to understand what is going on.

In addition, when one looks at the issues / demands / concerns of these people, they are reasonable, attainable and achievable while protecting a capitalist system of economy and democratic form of government. The establishment will still have it's place and the institutions that exist today will continue to exist. There is no call for their destruction. There is a call for their humanization. This must be recognized. The greed with abandon, reckless capitalistic tendencies of corporations constantly seeking advantage by cheating, deregulation, theft and outright fraud will have to end. Yes, capitalism is ugly, human evolution is ugly, existing on a harsh planet can be ugly, but we humans have not choice, we pick what works best for us and so far capitalism and democracy have served better than any other alternative till now. Yet, in the 21'st century, the practices that have lead to consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the few by corporate entities that seek to operate irrespective of the well being of the people they serve, the environment they exploit or the policies they extol to their own benefit must change sooner rather than later.

To point a finger at these young people and attempt to understand what they are trying to achieve through any other lens is to fail. The establishment will try to resist change, protect their advantage, protect their profits etc. but until they understand profit is still possible even giving ALL of the demands of these young people, they will fail to get the point and do more harm then good trying to resist them.

Sincerely,

Worth Reading

This article, posted on AlJezeera, is an excerpt from a recent essay by Noam Chomsky and is worth reading in it's entirety.

The tail end of the article which applies directly to the state of politics in the US is most powerful and is quoted here:

Privatising the planet

While Grand Area doctrine still prevails, the capacity to implement it has declined. The peak of US power was after World War II, when it had literally half the world's wealth. But that naturally declined, as other industrial economies recovered from the devastation of the war and decolonisation took its agonising course. By the early 1970s, the US share of global wealth had declined to about 25 per cent, and the industrial world had become tripolar: North America, Europe, and East Asia (then Japan-based).

There was also a sharp change in the US economy in the 1970s, towards financialisation and export of production. A variety of factors converged to create a vicious cycle of radical concentration of wealth, primarily in the top fraction of 1 per cent of the population - mostly CEOs, hedge-fund managers, and the like. That leads to the concentration of political power, hence state policies to increase economic concentration: fiscal policies, rules of corporate governance, deregulation, and much more. Meanwhile the costs of electoral campaigns skyrocketed, driving the parties into the pockets of concentrated capital, increasingly financial: the Republicans reflexively, the Democrats - by now what used to be moderate Republicans - not far behind.

Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2bn, mostly in corporate funding. Small wonder that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is angry and frustrated, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails, that doesn't matter.

While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s.

None of this is problematic for the very wealthy, who benefit from a government insurance policy called "too big to fail." The banks and investment firms can make risky transactions, with rich rewards, and when the system inevitably crashes, they can run to the nanny state for a taxpayer bailout, clutching their copies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

That has been the regular process since the Reagan years, each crisis more extreme than the last - for the public population, that is. Right now, real unemployment is at Depression levels for much of the population, while Goldman Sachs, one of the main architects of the current crisis, is richer than ever. It has just quietly announced $17.5bn in compensation for last year, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6m bonus while his base salary more than triples.

It wouldn't do to focus attention on such facts as these. Accordingly, propaganda must seek to blame others, in the past few months, public sector workers, their fat salaries, exorbitant pensions, and so on: all fantasy, on the model of Reaganite imagery of black mothers being driven in their limousines to pick up welfare checks - and other models that need not be mentioned. We all must tighten our belts; almost all, that is.

Teachers are a particularly good target, as part of the deliberate effort to destroy the public education system from kindergarten through the universities by privatisation - again, good for the wealthy, but a disaster for the population, as well as the long-term health of the economy, but that is one of the externalities that is put to the side insofar as market principles prevail.

Another fine target, always, is immigrants. That has been true throughout US history, even more so at times of economic crisis, exacerbated now by a sense that our country is being taken away from us: the white population will soon become a minority. One can understand the anger of aggrieved individuals, but the cruelty of the policy is shocking.

Targeting immigrants

Who are the immigrants targeted? In Eastern Massachusetts, where I live, many are Mayans fleeing genocide in the Guatemalan highlands carried out by Reagan's favourite killers. Others are Mexican victims of Clinton's NAFTA, one of those rare government agreements that managed to harm working people in all three of the participating countries. As NAFTA was rammed through Congress over popular objection in 1994, Clinton also initiated the militarisation of the US-Mexican border, previously fairly open. It was understood that Mexican campesinos cannot compete with highly subsidised US agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses would not survive competition with US multinationals, which must be granted "national treatment" under the mislabeled free trade agreements, a privilege granted only to corporate persons, not those of flesh and blood. Not surprisingly, these measures led to a flood of desperate refugees, and to rising anti-immigrant hysteria by the victims of state-corporate policies at home.

Much the same appears to be happening in Europe, where racism is probably more rampant than in the US One can only watch with wonder as Italy complains about the flow of refugees from Libya, the scene of the first post-World War I genocide, in the now-liberated East, at the hands of Italy's Fascist government. Or when France, still today the main protector of the brutal dictatorships in its former colonies, manages to overlook its hideous atrocities in Africa, while French President Nicolas Sarkozy warns grimly of the "flood of immigrants" and Marine Le Pen objects that he is doing nothing to prevent it. I need not mention Belgium, which may win the prize for what Adam Smith called "the savage injustice of the Europeans."

The rise of neo-fascist parties in much of Europe would be a frightening phenomenon even if we were not to recall what happened on the continent in the recent past. Just imagine the reaction if Jews were being expelled from France to misery and oppression, and then witness the non-reaction when that is happening to Roma, also victims of the Holocaust and Europe's most brutalised population.

In Hungary, the neo-fascist party Jobbik gained 17 per cent of the vote in national elections, perhaps unsurprising when three-quarters of the population feels that they are worse off than under Communist rule. We might be relieved that in Austria the ultra-right Jörg Haider won only 10 per cent of the vote in 2008 - were it not for the fact that the new Freedom Party, outflanking him from the far right, won more than 17 per cent. It is chilling to recall that, in 1928, the Nazis won less than 3 per cent of the vote in Germany.

In England the British National Party and the English Defence League, on the ultra-racist right, are major forces. (What is happening in Holland you know all too well.) In Germany, Thilo Sarrazin's lament that immigrants are destroying the country was a runaway best-seller, while Chancellor Angela Merkel, though condemning the book, declared that multiculturalism had "utterly failed": the Turks imported to do the dirty work in Germany are failing to become blond and blue-eyed, true Aryans.

Those with a sense of irony may recall that Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, warned that the newly liberated colonies should be wary of allowing Germans to immigrate, because they were too swarthy; Swedes as well. Into the twentieth century, ludicrous myths of Anglo-Saxon purity were common in the US, including among presidents and other leading figures. Racism in the literary culture has been a rank obscenity; far worse in practice, needless to say. It is much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.

I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don't, someone else will.

This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at the new Congress in the US, propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; for example, the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.

If such things were happening in some small and remote country, we might laugh. Not when they are happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And before we laugh, we might also bear in mind that the current economic crisis is traceable in no small measure to the fanatic faith in such dogmas as the efficient market hypothesis, and in general to what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 15 years ago, called the "religion" that markets know best - which prevented the central bank and the economics profession from taking notice of an $8tn housing bubble that had no basis at all in economic fundamentals, and that devastated the economy when it burst.

All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muashar doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

OccupyWallStreet

Ok, I am totally committed to the OccupyWallStreet movement in all of it's forms. I took a bus to NYC on 18 September to experience it first hand. I had to return home on the 19th but if I could right now, I would be living in Zuccotti Park. This movement is the BEST thing that has happened from a political action standpoint IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!! And I am over 40.

I watched this nation oligopolize itself just in my lifetime. I have my degree in economics and I ran a business for 15 years, dealing with the reality of a shrinking availability of everything from a smaller number of suppliers in every industry around me, every industry!

But I have to laugh and I mean just laugh my head off when I watch a video like this: http://bit.ly/nr8vZx

Only in America can you hear a woman the size of three repeatedly use words like "austere" or "squeezing" or complain about not getting a meal, or the "meds" that are likely needed due to the obesity of the woman talking etc. America is one big dichotomy! It is like no other place on the planet.

We have near 40% of our population clinically "obese" and completely unaware of the industrial processes that bring them the lowest grade, highest toxicity "food" in the industrial world. We have near pandemics on health issues associated with the food consumed in this country and it's effects on the increasing sized population.

Us people that live in the cities that are also chosen as places to live by the global elite know that we are becoming a "police state" in every definition of the world. Those of you who are living elsewhere, good luck, buy guns because if the elites nor their capital are there, the "state" that is there to protect you will be bankrupt and unable to provide basic protection from the hoards of ignorant bible bouncing self immolation idiots that have the biggest influence in the second and third tiers (worlds) of American life.

Yes, I could go on, but don't listen to me rant, just stay on top of Occupy Wall Street and get your education there. I just rant from time to time. And it has been a while. But Occupy Wall Street has gotten my blood flowing again and I intend to go back to posting my ideas and thoughts instead of just tucking them away thinking it really does not matter. Maybe it does after all.

Best!

Your Data

I remember when google.com launched. I ran a business and was on the road during the day. Listening to NPR I remember the intellectual elites all babbling at the mouth about this great new search engine. I tried it. It was good. I did not become a "google clone" however but stuck with my current variety of web search / email services.

I remember about a year or so later when all those intellectual elites learned that google had kept all of their search records tucked away and was using that data for whatever purposes they felt necessary. They were up in arms. Lawsuits, congressional inquiries, you name it. How stupid the intellectual elites really are.

Now of course we know that google uses EVERY bit, byte, stream of data, conversation, global document that is publicly available to run it's business and record, disseminate, parse and use to its financial advantage. That is what a business does. How else could they be the largest search engine and not charge it's users for the privilege?

But what many don't know is how the "security apparatus" here in America is increasingly looking to the googles and facebooks out there to operate their increasingly police state tactics. This article is interesting, not because of the fact that any idiot knows any decent investigative officer or federal investigative agency would use the resources of these monster networks, but that they are increasingly requesting that these network owners do exactly opposite what the intellectual elites have requested: They want the owners to capture MORE information from their users and keep that information LONGER and allow more access to that data from the security apparatus, not only in the US but in other nations as well.

Here is the article: http://on.msnbc.com/rgEeMi

Enjoy.

PS; this site is owned by google as is youtube and many other sites you may not realize... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google