Matt Taibbi's article should be required reading for all humans, if not just for this gem:

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

In a searing indictment of Goldman Sachs, Taibbi describes the firm's role in the crash.  He lays out how they've been the principal motivator in every bubble brought on by excessive leveraging since before the Great Depression.  As an account of how Wall Street and Goldman put big fat bows on products they pretty much made up, knew would go bust and were simultaneously betting against, it's pretty indisputable.

As the story goes, every time there's a bubble, more and more money is created out of thin air, and when its over, the brokerage firms and the investment bankers get out with a lovely golden parachute while the everyman has lost his shirt.

In our latest mess, the CDO's, the bundles of sub prime mortgages or instruments based on them etc.-- were packaged and sold to investors by Goldman while eslewhere at the bank, they were shorting those very indexes.  Taibbi recounts an interview with an insider:

I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against -- particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer -- doesn't amount to securities fraud.

"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."

In every defense you read of goldman and its Wall Street brethren in the press, the argument is that these guys are simply really good at what they do.  But these defenders typically don't have a problem with the fact that Goldman, as the piece illustrates, knows more about the products than their customer, and is in a better position to judge them (hence why they essentially bet against them by shorting them and taking out insurance policies to cover their ass.)


Is it securities fraud?  Possibly.  Is it evil?  Seems so.  Should they be allowed to do so anyway because we live in a free-market capitalistic society and they've managed to play by the rules?

To answer this last question, we must consider the fact that regulatory capture, as Taibbi describes, is a clear concern with Goldman.  You can't possibly effectively oversee the bank and its cohorts when the whole treasury department is laced with ex-Goldmanites-- they clearly have an interest in the industry that supersedes their interest in doing what's best for society as a whole.  And isn't that the point of regulation?

Secondly, at one point in the article he refers to "greasing the wheels"-- which is a lot of what finance is all about:

Wall Street is there to yes, perhaps, create money out of thin air, but only so that individuals and businesses can get financing, and everybody can go on doing what they're doing, and getting loans, living well, giving charitably, buying things and keeping people making things so they can keep their jobs, etc.

Madoff created money out of thin air, too.  And he, like the other Wall Street titans now vilified, fattened his own bank account and lived like a Saudi royal.  Goldman Sachs was more honest about it.  And Goldman could more easily change the rules to their advantage via insidious government ties.

There might be a moral threshold at the point where finance stops being about greasing the wheels, and becomes only about lining the pockets of the people turning the cranks, at the expense of everyone else connected to the system.

That's when it time to start cutting off the vampire squid's oxygen supply.

With policies like these, they might as well just keep Guantanamo open.

As TPM is reporting, Obama has once again mimicked the Bush administration on its "War on Terror" policy.  He's now issued an order legalizing the indefinite incarceration of terrorism suspects.

This is exactly what we didn't want.

This is exactly what we were promised would be over following the closing of Guantanamo.

We were led to believe that the closure of Gitmo meant an end to the suspension of habeus corpus, to the crimes of the Military Commissions Act, to throwing people in jail for life without charging them with a thing.

And in a politically expedient move (questionable, considering how much this will anger liberals), the Obama administration has assured us that even if Guantanamo is closed, we can still sit on detainees for eternity, even if we don't know what they've done.  Even if waterboarding them dozens of times yields no critical, or accurate, information.

Perhaps Obama is trying to appease the NIMBY's-- that's Not In My BackYard: the rallying cry for Republicans who caution that putting an end to the abuse and lawlessness at Guantanamo would precipitate an influx of actual terrorists menacingly licking their lips in state prisons across the country, plotting their next attack.  Evil Muslims-- coming to a correctional institute near you!

I say YIMBY.  Yes in my backyard.  Please.  Why not?  Most of these guys, like the adorable uighurs who've been lounging in Bermuda following their release, are pretty harmless, anyway.  We know that a lot of the prisoners accumulated at Gitmo were simply swept up in the Bush White House's racist, post-9/11 fervor.  They were victims of 'wrong place, wrong time syndrome,' people like Moazzam Begg, author of "Enemy Combatant," who happened to have been in a Muslim country when U.S. forces were less than discriminate in determining what a terrorist was.

What's so insidious about this decree is that it purports to support his larger effort to close Gitmo.  Sure, Republicans will be less squeamish if you say that yes, we will shut it down, but we can also still keep doing the same thing to these prisoners until the end of time.  Don't worry, they won't be released into the actual justice system, or even to a military justice system that's remotely fair (see the testimony of former military officers who have spoken out about the lack of fairness in the military court system, especially for so-called 'enemy combatants.'  Military brass apparently advocated convictions no matter what the cost.)

Of course, closing Guantanamo is pointless if they rubber stamp the continued execution of the Cuban prison's biggest sin: the unconstitutional detainment of these people.

Yes in my backyard, Obama.  In my backyard, people are treated equally under the law.  So whether or not someone once trained to be a suicide bomber, or they had lunch with Khalid Sheik Mohammad, or they were simply a British person of Middle Eastern descent who had the misfortune to be captured by American forces, they still deserve a fair trial.

All hail the heroines of Tehran!

Across this great nation, the media rejoice at the stunning bravery of Iranian women who have taken to the streets to protest their faulty election.  In a country where women's rights are viciously curtailed and their voices silenced, these progressive ladies have taken a stand for women everywhere-- challenging a repressive regime that treats them like second-class citizens.

Sure.  But the most excited congratulations these women have received has been from conservative commentators.

Why are pro-Democracy, pro-freedom conservatives so eager to support women's rights in the Middle East while they voice their discomfort with abortion and equal pay laws over here?

It's because the Iranian women aren't slutty enough.

Notice the breathless descriptions of the valiant Tehranian females-- they are the ones with the "loose" head scarves, the ones who dare to reveal more of their bodies.  Surely, such actions can be seen as protest, and daring in a country where girls aren't even allowed to hang out with boys on their own.  But the patriarchy-- ours, not theirs-- only want Iranian women's lib to go so far.  The problem with the burqa and the veil aren't that they relegate women to near-inanimate object status-- it's that they prevent the further objectification of women.

How can you keep a woman safely in the realm of a conquerable sexual item when her whole body is covered?

That's the dilemma for conservatives.  Part of the reason women choose to cover themselves in the Middle East is to protect themselves from men.  Segregated subway cars are seen as a way to shield women from the rapey eyes and hands of men, who can't be trusted.  Part of that is self-fulfilling prophecy:  treating women like delicate flowers whose purity requires safeguarding while treating men like lecherous hounds means that everybody may just play their prescribed roles.

Women shouldn't be discriminated against for not choosing to wrap their bodies in garb many Westerners find excessively modest.  But for conservatives, the women's movement is not about choice.

They feel more comfortable with women who overtly seek acceptance from a man's world by making themselves as sexually appealing to straight men as possible.

And so Neda, the martyr who has inspired the Twitter revolution and tugged on Obama's heartstrings, becomes the symbol for American men everywhere who want Iranian women to have the same opportunities to be hypersexualized (and demonized for it) that Western women do.  The conservatives cloak their distate for the veil in feminism-- but their true motivations lie in an opposing orthodoxy.

Off with the burqa!  Now hike that skirt up.  Loosen your bra straps.  Don't worry if your heels are too high.  We'll call you a whore later.

Kids are dying.

In Peru, they're dying of cancer that's probably caused by lethal amounts of oil and chemical run-off being carelessly strewn throughout the rainforest as Big Oil lays waste to the local ecosystem in search of deeper wells and higher profits.  After leasing much of Peru's portion of the Amazon out to multinational energy companies, Peru's leadership has now had to contend with a spate of protests.  While the world stays glued to Iran's uprising, the indigenous people of the Peruvian rainforest and their supporters have taken to the streets in Lima, demanding an end to the degradation of their environment and to their voicelessness.

Peru's president, Alan Garcia, has opened up the country's inner forests to exploration and exploitation on the heels of a Free Trade Agreement, still waiting to be raitified, with the United States.  Washington has been eager, in both the Bush and Obama White Houses, to push through the free trade pact.

The measure would make it easier for multinationals-- which have plenty of friends in Washington and legions of businesspeople who stand to gain financially from their successes-- to use Peru's natural resources as rapaciously as possible.  The idea is to provide as much cheap product for rich world markets as they can while keeping Wall Street happy with profits that go higher and higher.

The protestors should be commended.  They have encouraged other disaffected groups in Peru, mainly labor contigents, to band together and fight the loss of their jobs, as well.  It's a sight commonly found in France.  But the indigineous peoples' battle is not so simple as a socialist reaction against capitalist logic.

The United States has a history of supporting right-wing dictatorships in order to foster the implementation of free-market policies.  In Chile and in Argentina, thousands have paid the ultimate price for daring to support democracy and freedom in the face of brutal, secretive regimes who learned their scare tactics from the C.I.A.  Pinochet was a terrifying murderer.  But the American laissez-faire enthusiasts saw an opportunity in Chile to open up the economy and increase profits (and inequality) by setting down new economic policies after the political slate was wiped clean by Pinochet's coup.

And poor South America.  Chile may have the strongest economy in the Southern Cone, perhaps because those free-market policies were so unflinchingly put in place.  But they have brought high inequality, too.   Elsewhere on the continent, the laissez-faire devotees haven't produced the wealth they promised;  Bolivia, which also went through economic "shock therapy," remains an extremely impoverished country.

In all these cases, the economists who encourage the uncontaminated execution of free-market policies warn against the danger of embracing socialist attitudes, and the opposition to those policies and governments is always painted as some French-sounding illogical socialism, blind to economic reality.

These economists conveniently ignore the bloodshed and terror that accompanied some of these transitions.

But in Peru, it is more than a socialist myth that these protestors are clinging to.  It is their health, quite literally.  It is their way of life, in that their communities have been disrupted by the pillaging of the area they call their home.  It is a notion of autonomy that they are entitled to as residents of that region.

Making markets "freer" usually means making them freer for corporations.  This case is no different.  Except unlike previous economic upheavals in Latin America, there is little clandestine footwork here.  Everything, from the trade agreement to Chevron's insistence that's there's no way to prove the oil causing cancer is theirs (seriously-- see this BBC reporter's blog), is out in the open.

Amazingly, in the 70's and 80's, the United States (see Henry Kissinger) sought to conceal the economic efforts they were supporting in Latin America.  Conversely, in 2009, the Peru Free Trade Agreement, while inspiring little emotion either way in the general population, is a blunt piece of legislation. 

In the 70's and 80's, we tacitly approved as thousands were "disappeared" in long campaigns to suppress dissent that always seemed to be paired with economic policies that made the rich richer.

Now, we condemn violence, while praising democracy, while staying neutral on protests, while tacitly approving of... the environmental destruction at the hands of Chevron that seems to be paired with an economic policy that's making the rich richer!

Hmm.  It makes me wonder...what might Kissinger think of Obama?

If what Barack's really after is trade liberalization that favors Western conglomerates over local peasants, old Henry might just approve of the bleeding heart liberal's politics.  In fact, Henry's only criticism may be that Obama isn't secretive enough with his maneuvering.

The thing is, Kissinger never understood the fine art of media manipulation-- a skill that, for better or for worse, Obama has in spades.

Good luck to the Amazon.

Obama says "all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted in terms of what might happen" in Hawai'i.  "What might happen" is an incoming missile strike from North Korea on July 4.  Happy independence day!

No one's really scared about the missile strike.  We can intercept it easily.  The larger question is how to deal with North Korea's perpetual need to agitate the international community with its refusal to stop slowly testing its nuclear capabilities or launching creepy satellites into space.

There are two general directions of engagement with so-called rogue states-- ratcheting it up or toning it down.  Like most things, striking the right balance is key.  With North Korea, the Obama administration has continually said they will enforce U.N. sanctions against the impoverished nation, as well as acknowledging that they're tailing a ship that might be headed for Myanmar, loaded with hordes of evil weapons for the evil junta to be evil with.  For Myanmar, and North Korea-- and, to be fair, for Russia, China, and Iran, and all the other nations with companies and industries that profit from all this shadowy trafficking and the production and development of weapons-- the orchestrated drama isn't so much a means to a grander, more nefarious end.  It's more of the simple 9 to 5 of running a country that places itself in opposition to the West.

So with the administration's attitude towards North Korea, we see hints of Obama's understanding that while more nuclear weapons is never a good thing, North Korea's actions seem more designed to agitate for the sake of agitating than to create a new world order.

Iran offers a different lesson in nuclear containment.

Obama has focused on mitigating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a key to alleviating broader tensions within the Middle East, striking a much harsher tone than previous administrations with respect to Israel's Palestine policy.  Hillary Clinton came out forcefully against the nation who Obama once called "our strongest ally" on the campaign trail, telling Israel to immedaitely halt the expansion of settlements in the West Bank.  In a commentary in the New York Post yesterday, James Kirchick lamented the perceived decline of support for Israel within the White House, noting that the American public's declared support has diminished in tandem since Obama took office.

The downward trend in American support for Israel raises interesting questions about the media's effects on public thinking and of the American people's seemingly unwavering trust in their new president.  But it also highlights the fact that a copule years' worth of bad publicity can easily wipe away sympathies for the Jewish state that's been threatened with obliteration by Iran's (now illegitimate) president.  The 2007 incursion into Lebanon, and especially the more recent campaign in Gaza, were enormous PR disasters for Israel.  The Israelis came off as brutal aggressors, elevating the threats they faced from pesky homemade rockets to a near-existential menace.

Iran may just be that existential menace to Israel.

It is generally understood that they have been developing nuclear technologies at Natanz since the late 90's, and they may be a few years away from creating an actual bomb.  Meanwhile, Obama's tone with Iran has been to encourage dialogue with its leaders, as he has also with a less receptive North Korea.  Even while Iranians are dying in the streets, Obama has maintained his distance, refusing to condemn the deaths of civilians there or support the notion that their election was rigged.  On those nukes, he doesn't speak in the same severe, defensive platitudes as Israeli leaders, who say Iran must be stopped at all costs.

So what to do?  Stay softer on Iran, which may have more firepower than North Korea, while we observantly let North Korea traffic weapons to Burma and possibly fire useless missiles at Hawai'i?  Yes.

Why? Because as much as conservatives may opine that Israel's security is more threatened by Iran than by the Palestinians, or Hezbollah, placating the Palestinians, who live in an occupied state, is about more than just appeasement.  Obama is pursuing a policy of non-agitation.

Sure, Iran getting nuclear weapons could be set off a chain reaction that spurs an arms race in the region, even if nobody ends up using them.  But it's the tone that needs to change.  Iran's internal debate is transforming vociferously without any nudging from the United States (although to be fair, the social networking sites given so much credit for aiding in the protests there are all American creations).  The hope is that this nation, along with the other Middle Eastern states will gradually open themselves up, embracing Western values and ideas so that they may more closely adopt a democratic, capitalist system.

So while Israel may be hated across the region, they will become the role model-- the paragon of tolerance and high living standards and diversity-- rather than the enemy.

The challenge is to make our beliefs clear without agitating.

But just to be safe, making sure to dot the I's and cross the T's keeps us from having to worry about pissing anybody off too much with our moral superiority.

Was anyone else insulted by Obama's speech introducing his Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor?  It sounded a lot like some other speeches he's given.

On the campaign trail.

Obama was selling Sotomayor like a politician.  He cracked jokes with that trademark Obama stilted humor, offering anodyne anecdotes from her biography as evidence of her readiness for the highest court.  She decided the case that saved baseball!  As if any single court decision has the power to save or destroy the sport.  But Americans love baseball, so let's sell her on that!  We were also reminded that she became interested in doling out justice after reading Nancy Drew books as a young girl.

As if.  Yeah, Obama selected her because she reads kid's detective books.

Where was the discussion-- or the mention-- or her judicial philosophies, of her legal perspective?  Obama-the-law-professor must have more insightful commentary to provide on Sotomayor outside offering kooky details from her biography.   His unwillingness to even acknolwedge a deeper intellectual basis for his reasoning seems rather condescending. 

What he didn't say was 'I picked Ms. Sotomayor because she believes, as I do, that the consitution is a living document.'  Obama has talked before about how he eschews looking at law in the abstract.  He prefers to examine the real-life consequences of jurisprudence in every situation.  Ms. Sotomayor understands this.  It's why she made her comments about the bench being "where policy is made"-- comments now billed as her first YouTube controversy.

This woman seems to understand that court decisions have wide ranging policy implications.  Law does not exist within in a vacuum.  It does not exist solely within a textbook.  It is meant to be updated and revised to reflect society's needs.  The decisions taken by judges affect people's lives, and thankfully, Sotomayor has spoken candidly on this subject, acknowledging that her experiences as a minority and as a woman lend crucial perspective when considering the implications for those people affected by legislation.

Yet Obama, who has penned thoughtful exam questions for his law students at the University of Chicago, mentions none of this in presenting his new choice to the American public.  Instead, he panders.  He offers her biography.  He ignores the weightier intellectual issues at stake.

People call Obama professorial, boring, an explainer-in-chief.  Where was the explaining here?  I got nothing but saccharine campaign trail fluff.  That's demeaning to my intelligence.  And it's insulting.