Month: April 2010

Greed Is God

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Taibbit, writing in the Guardian:

Now here’s the really weird thing. Confronted with the evidence of public outrage over these deals, the leaders of Goldman will often appear to be genuinely confused, scratching their heads and staring quizzically into the camera like they don’t know what you’re upset about. It’s not an act. There have been a lot of greedy financiers and banks in history, but what makes Goldman stand out is its truly bizarre cultist/religious belief in the rightness of what it does.

The point was driven home in England last year, when Goldman’s international adviser, sounding exactly like a character in Atlas Shrugged, told an audience at St Paul’s Cathedral that “The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest”. A few weeks later, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein told the Times that he was doing “God’s work”.

Even if he stands to make a buck at it, even your average used-car salesman won’t sell some working father a car with wobbly brakes, then buy life insurance policies on that customer and his kids. But this is done almost as a matter of routine in the financial services industry, where the attitude after the inevitable pileup would be that that family was dumb for getting into the car in the first place. Caveat emptor, dude!

People have to understand this Randian mindset is now ingrained in the American character. You have to live here to see it. There’s a hatred toward “moochers” and “parasites” – the Tea Party movement, which is mainly a bunch of pissed off suburban white people whining about minorities consuming social services, describes the battle as being between “water-carriers” and “water-drinkers”. And regulation of any kind is deeply resisted, even after a disaster as sweeping as the 2008 crash.

This debate is going to be crystallised in the Goldman case. Much of America is going to reflexively insist that Goldman’s only crime was being smarter and better at making money than IKB and ABN-Amro, and that the intrusive, meddling government (in the American narrative, always the bad guy!) should get off Goldman’s Armani-clad back. Another side is going to argue that Goldman winning this case would be a rebuke to the whole idea of civilisation – which, after all, is really just a collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even when we can. It’s an important moment in the history of modern global capitalism: whether or not to move forward into a world of greed without limits.

Yeah, this pretty much describes one of my relatives, the one who genially explained to me that I was a “leech” for being on extended unemployment, claiming that it was people like him and his wife who “carried the weight” for non-productive types like myself. I don’t speak to him anymore. But I don’t kid myself that he’s the only person I know who thinks that way.

Moose In My House

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

I didn’t even know there was a Big Head Todd song called this until today, but it’s appropriate. I fell asleep on the couch and dreamed there were people who dropped in at my house and I was trying not to let them see that my house is infested with ants. (I actually do have an invasion of ants in real life, and I’m trying to get rid of them. It makes me highly anxious.)

They had a baby girl with them, about six months old. And as I look at her pudgy little leg wrapped around the kitchen table leg, I see with horror that there’s two big mice holding paws like cartoon mice and ready to jump on on her leg. I pull her away before they can get to her, but then I see that there’s a fucking moose in my house. He’s stuck inside a storm drain and is trying to get out. He finally wriggles free and then goes running through the house full-tilt, through the front door.

Ugh. Have I mentioned how much I hate having nature in my house?

Just Plain Nuts

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

I can’t decide whether this is a scene from “Catch-22” or “Dr. Strangelove”. Yeah, way to solve the problem, general!

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Thousands of soldiers, their bald eagle shoulder patches lined up row upon row across the grassy field, stood at rigid attention to hear a stern message from their commander.

Brig. Gen. Stephen Townsend addressed the 101st Airborne Division with military brusqueness: Suicides at the post had spiked after soldiers started returning home from war, and this was unacceptable.

“It’s bad for soldiers, it’s bad for families, bad for your units, bad for this division and our Army and our country and it’s got to stop now,” he insisted. “Suicides on Fort Campbell have to stop now.”

It sounded like a typical, military response to a complicated and tragic situation. Authorities believe that 21 soldiers from Fort Campbell killed themselves in 2009, the same year that the Army reported 160 potential suicides, the most since 1980, when it started recording those deaths.

Gotta Get Back

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Although she’d been around for years, Shelby Lynne’s self-titled “Shelby Lynne” won Best New Artist at the Grammys the year after it came out. It was recorded mostly in her living room, with a Casio keyboard and a bunch of musicians sitting in. It’s held up very well:

The Surge for War

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Go read Chris Floyd about the push for us to go to war with Iran:

In other words, the popularly elected leaders of the world’s greatest democracy – champions of liberty, justice and human rights – want to stop ambulances from transporting sick and dying children to the hospital. They want whole families to burn to death, whole city blocks to go up in flames while fuelless fire trucks stand idle. They want deliveries of food and medicine to grind to a halt, setting off spirals of starvation, disease, chaos and vast suffering. They want to see tens of millions of innocent human beings driven into a low and brutal level of subsistence, to languish, diminish – and die – in deprivation and misery. This is what they want to see happen. This is the clear intent of their “diplomatic” strategy.

And why are they doing this? Because – ostensibly because – the government of Iran is pursuing the development of a nuclear energy program in accordance with international treaties and under international supervision. And if the above condign punishment of millions of innocent people does not force the government of Iran to give up this legal, carefully inspected program, then the champions of liberty, justice and human rights have proclaimed their intent to unilaterally attack Iran with all the “options” at their command, up to and including the “option” of immolating multitudes of innocent human beings with nuclear weapons.

Now, the government of Iran is an odious regime. Not nearly as odious as, say, the regime of America’s staunch ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, of course, but odious enough. But as restrictive as it has been to its own citizens, it has not – in the last decade alone – launched and maintained massive wars of aggression and domination that have killed, by direct and collateral hand, more than a million innocent people. The bipartisan champions of liberty, justice and human rights in Washington have done that, and are doing that.

They seek to break Iran not because it is an odious regime, but because it defies the imperial will, and balks the bipartisan imperial agenda to impose domination on the oil lands. If Iran agreed to become an American client state tomorrow, it would not matter in the least how odious its regime might be — as we saw in the long, atrocious decades when America’s pet tyrant, Reza Pahlavi, ruled there. But because Iran has not agreed to this, it is now a target for decimation: by sanctions and the ongoing campaign of American-backed terrorism and covert operation (all of which are themselves acts of war, including most emphatically the sanctions, as noted here recently), or else by direct military action by American war machine or its proxy in Israel.