Paris Tonight, 13 November 2015 (update)

Dear God.

Tonight in Paris, there is blood and pain and sorrow all because of men with rage and murderous intent.

From the BBC:

At least 100 people are reported to have died at the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris.
Gunmen took many hostages there before being overpowered by police.
Others died in a reported suicide blast near the Stade de France and gun attacks on city centre restaurants. Five attackers are reported killed.
Paris residents have been asked to stay indoors and about 1,500 military personnel are being deployed across the city.

The people getting killed are not soldiers, are not fanatics, are not evildoers or cardboard cutouts. They were going out on the town on a Friday night to enjoy the company of families and friends, and Dear God so many of them are dead now.

From Banksy: pardon me, this actually came from artist Jean Jullien.

Peace For Paris

Fool me Thirty-Seven Times, It's Still SHAME ON YOU, You Crooked Bastards

Pretty much link to Digby about the Foreclosure Crisis (Part Thirty-Seven, Or Didn't We Just Have a Problem With Banks Just Two Years Ago?):

...So I'm listening to Andrea Mitchell and Jim Cramer explain the Foreclosure Fraud Crisis as they wail and rend their garments about how terrible it will be for just everyone if these poor banks are held responsible for this problem because the whole economy will implode.

That's nonsense. People should go to directly jail at this point, do not pass go. The real estate market is still officially fucked and while everyone wants it to "find its bottom" coddling the big financial institutions and their crooked subsidiaries and contractors has not worked all that well for average Americans at any point in this ongoing crisis (or for Democrats for that matter.) The only people who are benefiting from the capitulation to the Big Money Boyz's threats and hoary predictions on this one are the Big Money Boyz and the GOP. The economy still sucks and will continue to suck until the incentives for this criminal behavior and self-destructive malfeasance are stopped...

Even those with good motives among the powers-that-be (and there's reason to be suspicious about many of them) continue to believe they can finesse this problem with band-aids or superficial remedies to keep the rubes quiet until the invisible hand fixes everything. They are petrified in the meantime that unless they give the oligarchs what they want, they will pull the plug and then where will we be?

This is magical thinking. There is not going to be any easy way out of this. The invisible hand may be working but it often works on a very, very long timeline and many bad things can happen to a society while it does its thing. Meanwhile, every incantation and folk medicine they've applied to this problem has resulted in another round of infection. It's time to open up the wound and completely clean it out. The patient will heal much faster and it's far less likely to die in the meantime...

...As I wrote yesterday, these banks are once again holding the country hostage with their threats that if anything should be done about their criminality they'll blow up the whole damned place. Well, they already are ---- in slow motion. If we want to find a "bottom" to this market, they need to institute a serious cram-down program to help real people work out these messed up mortgages instead of allowing the banks fix their balance sheets through fraud and the market to stabilize by throwing people into the streets. It's not working.

And everybody needs to stop worrying about the moral hazard of letting average people off the hook for their mortgages and worry a little bit more about the moral hazard of continually allowing these huge financial institutions to get away with murder...

This is the result of decades of failing to hold people accountable for their actions... the slow, inexorable end to oversight... the unwillingness by those in a position to stop the reckless and criminal all because of the glorified concept of "Free-market"... the foolishness of those who pursued their greed and ambitions without recognizing the damage done the last time we let this happen, and their open disdain of the New Deal policies put in place to make sure those damaging acts never happened again.

That saying "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me" is only partially correct.  We've been fooled, again and again by The Geniuses Of Capitalism, the CEOs and Financial "Wizards" of Wall Street, into thinking that they held all the answers and had all the skills to make everyone and everything better by their guiding hands.  But we're not the ones who committed the crimes and fooled the people day in and day out: that's still THEIR fault and those CEOs and banking "wizards" need to answer for their crimes.  We're only to blame if we let them go.  AGAIN.

One Year After The Almost-Fall of Wall St.

For the seven of you reading this blog, you might recall about this time last year I issued a rant about the evils of unregulated capitalism and greed that nearly destroyed our nation's (and our planet's) economy.

It does not please me to note that one year later nothing much has changed.

Many of the players - the financial institutions, the ratings agencies, the captains of banking - are still where they are, unpunished and unrepentant. Any criminal investigations that might be ongoing are off-the-radar if they are happening at all.

Meanwhile, unemployment is at 10 percent, the highest since the 1981-82 recession, threatening to reach Depression-era levels. And that's the OFFICIAL number: the unofficial numbers really are at Depression-era levels and getting worse. So while the upper echelons of our economy had been stabilized by Obama's stimulus package earlier this year, NOTHING HAS HAPPENED TO HELP THOSE OF US (pretty much the 99.95 percent that AREN'T billionaires) WHO REALLY NEED THAT HELP.

With regards to what Obama is doing, to what he CAN do, to what Congress should do... That will be for another post as soon as I can get some thoughts straightened out about that.

Interesting to note that the unemployment numbers would be a huge weapon against the Democrats right about now, but the Republicans are in no position to use it (I've heard a few GOP politicians bring it up, but outside of that, almost nothing on the Intertubes or FOX Not-News of note). Also reason for that other post...

Andrew Sullivan Thinks it's Petty to Punish Wilson

Let us not look at the rebuke of Rep. Joe (if that IS his real name) Wilson in terms of politics, but in terms of his actual behavior.

He acted rudely during a formal presentation. Let us not consider the location - Congress - as a place of political discourse and instead consider it as a workplace, or a school auditorium.

If a teenager disrupted or acted rudely during a formal presentation, the school administration has to punish him. Not because it is petty but because the school can't function if students are allowed to disrupt events in any way.

If an employee disrupted or acted rudely during a formal orientation or meeting, the upper management has to discipline that employee, because again the workplace can't function if disruptions like that are allowed. Personal experience bears this out: a low-level employee at my previous workplace made snarky and uncalled-for remarks about a guest speaker during an annual orientation, and that employee wasn't an employee two weeks later because of it. It wasn't pettiness: it was necessary.

If a Congressman acts the way Rep. Wilson does, and is not rebuked or punished, then not only will that Congressman continue to act that way we will have more and more Congressmen acting that way. And yes let's please consider the worse-case scenario that unpunished behavior will get worse (when shall we start seeing congressmen carrying canes, hint hint). And please also consider Wilson's behavior since then. His apology to Obama afterward is turning out to be weak tea: Wilson is selling t-shirts now promoting his 'stand' against Obama, for God's sake. That 'apology' of his now reeks of insincereness.

If you think that Wilson getting rebuked is partisan politics, then you're thinking exactly like Wilson and his fellow far-right GOP hacks: that it's all politics, that it's all fair game, that punishments are a ticket to martyrdom. You're not thinking like a manager of a workplace, or a high school principal who has to say "This is it, this is the line of common decency and acceptable behavior. This line, and no crossing it."

We've lost all common sense regarding acceptable public behavior. Is Congress not allowed to try and reset the guidelines again?

I'm at that point I want to see it fall to Zero

The last few days, watching the stock market completely collapse, knowing full well I am watching the doom of my own nation, and the whole global market... it brings out the anarchist in me, the part of me that wants to build a bonfire and dance around it like a tribal shaman-warrior summoning up the gods of destruction.

It's because a part of me is sick of the scam, the con job the financial elites all tricked us with over the past 30 years, always crying out "Deregulate and let the free markets save us!" "Cut all taxes and the wealth will trickle down!" "Greenspan knows what he's doing!" Yeah, choke on it.

It's because I really do genuinely want to see this all collapse down to zero while George W. Bush is still in office, so this albatross gets wrung around his neck as his ultimate legacy (I wonder which part of his library think tank is gonna contain a memorial to the 2008 financial meltdown).

It's because when it happens, I want to travel to what's left of the place. Whatever ruins the city of New York becomes, I want to hobble over the debris and stand in front of Wall Street, stand upon the piles of fallen jumpers, and shout to any survivors "ARE YOU GETTING IT? ARE YOU LEARNING YET YOU GREEDY BASTARDS? ARE YOU LEARNING WHY WE NEEDED REGULATIONS AND LAWS TO PREVENT YOU FROM DOING THIS TO YOURSELVES AND TO EVERYONE ELSE? ARE YOU FIGURING OUT THAT GREED IS THE ENEMY OF ALL FINANCE? THIS IS ALL ON YOU! ALL ON YOU! VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS MY ASS! NOW DIE!"

And then I will walk home and try to find a job, which will be very hard to do with the entire economy wiped out. To all you Bush-worshiping neocon greedheads, welcome to the reality-based world. I hope to see you all (well except for the ones in jail for war crimes violations) on the unemployment lines too. So I can punch you in the face and get away with it, 'cause no jury will convict me.