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99% of attorneys know nothing except what they needed to learn to pass the bar exam, and they immediately forgot that too once the test was over. The reason we keep electing them to political office is that with their egos so overblown they think they are the only capable persons, so they keep presenting themselves where a normal person might be inhibited by a more realistic assessment of his own capabilities.
This is why a nation run by lawyers is bound to find itself in perpetual difficulty as legislators spend 50% of their time getting things wrong and the other 50% trying to conceal their ignorance.
Take the current economic climate. The mortgage-backed derivatives have been eating their way through the banking system for years like tooth decay, but they have never been investigated by any legislative body in this country because the politicians are so bamboozled by the structured finance of the situation thay they don’t know where to begin. You think a couple of bozos like Barney Frank, who is a clown, or Charles Rangel, who ostensibly can’t figure out his own personal income tax have the expertise to investigate off-balance sheet credit default swaps?
It’s obvious that if Conrad Black and Dennis Koslowski can be prosecuted and sentenced for what in retrospect were simple crimes of embezzlement, then there is a whole gang of people who ought to stand trial for an unprecedented looting of the world banking system. But it would require a courtroom the size of Yankee Stadium to hold all the defendants, instead of just the few dozen that the Italians are used to trying at one of their mafia extravaganzas. You would have to elist an army of prosecutors to prepare cases against the world financial elite – CEOs, analysts, rating agencies, brokers, accountants, traders – all on trial for conspiracy, negligence, fraud, unjust enrichment, grand larceny, filing of false instruments, wire and securities fraud, embezzlement, blah blah blah the list of charges is endless.
Who’s going to try the case? Attorneys who don’t know spit about finance, never mind assembling evidence and exhibits and explaining freakin cross-border derivative hedge swaps to a jury of used car salesmen and retired nurses. Heard by political hack judges who are so nuts that their eyes are rolling around in their heads like freakin pinballs. You would need a super-prosecutor to determine a prosecution strategy based on a monstrous racketeering conspiracy comprised of mortgage brokers writing worthless mortgages and then selling them through clearing houses to crooked banks who package bad ones with good ones into derivative instruments and then pay off the external auditors to look the other way, and the rating agencies to bestow upon these dogs a AAA rating, unloading them back-and-forth on each other like a Three Stooges comedy movie. I’ll buy yours if you’ll buy mine. And then the geniuses who sell insurance to you in case these priceless articles of wealth should happen for whatever reason to fail. And then they fail and the insurance companies don't have enough reserves to cover the losses.
Omigoddd! And then the hapless suckers who walk in off the street to the investment storefront on Harding Avenue in Surfside, Florida, to invest their retirement savings:
“Blah blah blah it’s got a triple A rating from Moody’s and it pays 10%!”
“Wow, 10%!”
“Yeah, and it’s no-risk.”
“I’ll just put my whole savings in it.”
The nightmare for Republicans is that this threadbare piece of garbage unraveled one month before the election. They are reacting like a skunk caught in the headlights. Just like 9/11, Katrina and Iraq (oh, yeah, I forgot: the surge is working – suuuurrrre it is!) they have been caught behaving like barnyard animals, the only difference being that this time the election is so near that they will not have time to massage it out of the people’s minds. Obama, who has already blown a huge natural advantage in the form of the Republicans’ past record, would have to be a total moron to blow his current big advantage in terms of the whole population losing its shirt the day before they are scheduled to go to the polls. I’m not discounting the fact that he could still blow it, but if he would now get up and promise to go after the crooks who looted the banking system, he would appease the American people’s appetite for administering punishment and guarantee himself the election.
All this is going on with such velocity, everybody seems to have forgotten the Republicans’ big campaign for privatizing Social Security. Remember that little gem? Where do you suppose all that money would have gone to right now, if they had been able to get away with that? Well, I’ll tell you where: right into the big black hole where all the other stolen money went.
Incidentally, where’s my freakin bailout? My bartender wants to get paid. My girlfriend is hocking me. She heard that Conrad Black’s wife was nagging him for a helicopter and now she wants one too. “The Kravitzes have a helicopter. How come we don’t have one?”
You know why Black’s wife wanted a helicopter? This is beautiful – SO THEY COULD FLY FREAKIN HENRY KISSINGER TO THE AIRPORT! Kissinger knows plenty about helicopters. When he was working for that prick Nixon and he engineered all those fascist coups d’etat in Latin America (no wonder they are having a hard time appreciating our better qualities down there), the dictatorships’ favorite weapon of choice for getting rid of radicals was to take them on a little moonlight helicopter ride and drop them in the ocean. If I was Henry Kissinger, I wouldn’t go NEAR a freakin helicopter because you never know if God has a sense of humor.
Anyway, Black couldn’t steal enough money to afford to buy his wife a freakin helicopter, but his consolation prize was that when he went to jail they took him in a helicopter. That should be some consolation
Let’s get on the backs of these thieving pricks! “I promise you that if I am elected President, my administration will go after the thieves and swindlers who cheated the American people out of their hard-earned retirement income, and I will aggressively prosecute these criminals and make sure they go to jail.”
Now you’re talking! I’d vote for that!
While we’re at it, don’t forget that in China they shoot these guys for economic sabotage, and they force their families to pay for the bullet. Now, I’m not advocating that, but how about a nice horsewhipping and tar-and-feathering.
Compare that with McCain. “The fundamentals of the economy are sound.” That’s the only drunken line he knows, one that he’s been repeating for 25 years. Next to this dork, even a hysterical, screaming shrew like Sarah Palin looks refreshing.
People are going to put Obama in for the simple reason that, who wants to wake up the week after the election with banks still collapsing all around their ears and the prospect of four more years of McCain and Palin running the economy? How would you feature a thing like that, my friend?
Spitzer had the right idea when he declared war on Wall Street. He was right. What he had in common with Giuliani was that they both grew up in a mob environment, with a gang of thieves at the dinner table every Sunday, Giuliani with the actual mafia and Spitzer with real estate and investment thieves. That made them good prosecutors, because they knew exactly which rocks to look under.
Andrew Cuomo has been having some luck at making some of these banks pay back some of the money they stole, but as far as I know he hasn’t tried any criminal prosecutions. It may be like the Kennedy assassination, where the general knowledge of a conspiracy was there, but not the political will to go after specific personalities.
But it would be a peachy thing to at least get a few of these guys, stage a show trial and then tar and feather them. In a couple of years’ time, when the true impact of this mess starts to set in and people are really suffering, a couple of butt lashings might brighten up an otherwise dreary economic environment.
I remember back when I was in the accessory business, in the midst of a booming economy, I was commiserating with this old guy, Jack Callari, about how difficult it was to recruit decent employees who were capable of putting in a day’s work. He told me “I hate to say it, but maybe what we need is a good depression.” He didn’t mean it as a joke, either. I can’t say I was horrified at his remark, but I didn’t consider that he might have a point, either. Years later I have rather moved over to his position, and it isn’t just the shit work habits of the iPod generation, for whom work as I have known it is a totally alien concept. The attitude that if you just sit totally immobile things will work themselves out has totally permeated society.
That’s what happened with the freakin CDO’s. The only banking house that bothered to do its own due diligence on the securities, as opposed to accepting the S&P, Moody’s, Fitch AAA ratings, Goldman Sachs, immediately got out of them and has been announcing profits every quarter that the other banks have been tanking. To paraphrase what a prominent Republican legislator remarked while on a “fact-finding” tour of the slums of the orient, maybe what Wall Street needs is a good hurricane.
Maybe, now, with the election just weeks away, that the Bush administration has decided to become the clearing house for all the worthless garbage that has been made possible by its own supreme idiocy, spending hundreds of billions and trillions of tax dollars to get a bunch of rich thieves off the hook, while down in criminal court pickpockets and prostitutes are getting sent up to do hard time for plying their trade. And I’m not advocatingsetting those petty miscreants free. Rather the opposite, in fact, the same rich thieves who have been getting huge tax breaks for years, thereby effectively shifting the wealth upstairs, maybe this will cause some economic theorists to rethink the concept of unregulated capitalism. I think this mess reveals rather conclusively that when you construct a structure on an ad hoc basis, without any kind of architectural design or regulatory oversight, what you ultimately end up with is a collapsed ruin. Maybe all these hedges, swaps, and arcane financial transactions never served any useful purpose except to steal and conceal various sources of unjust enrichment.
I’m not advocating reform of the existing system. There is not enough left for that. What I am contemplating is a total rethinking of the entire concept of the production and transfer of wealth. McCain wanted to give a big prize to whomever could develop an effective car battery. Well, maybe a prize should be offered for putting in order the economic Rubik’s cube.
If this stinking putrescence of an economy has any beneficial side effects, maybe it will be to fundamentally discredit the kind of Darwinian capitalism that has been all the rage for the last couple of hundred years, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, whose insistence that abject greed and primitive self-interest are the only efficient ways to produce and distribute wealth.
I’m not so much advocating a command economy as a Social Democratic consensus economy, where social partners in the form of interest groups representing all the multifarious aspects of society would be able to come to a consensus of priorities and prerogatives under the aegis of elected referees. Is this perfectly clear?
At the very least, now that the Anglo-Saxon model of unbridled self-interest has been determined to be a bust, a beautiful end result of it, like a rose springing from a pile of manure, would be to stop anclicizing the other commercial languages of the world, so that future generations will not have to be offended by bastard terms like “le cash-flow technique.”
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