more island top...

Granted, I could really use some better lighting in the shop. The flash is also terrible. But these are all of the bottom side. The other side is superior.

Weighs approximately 200 lbs, measures 60"x36"x2". 100% end grain ambrosia/spalted maple. There is a small sink going in the middle.

The wood comes largely from the same tree, a rock/sugar maple with unusually dynamic and consistent spalting, each board selected from Peter Tennant's extraordinary yard at Bee Tree Hardwoods.

I can build more of these. Very likely priced well below those of *anybody* else. My overhead is still relatively small, and patience long. From choosing and milling lumber to design, construction and careful finishing, I do all the work myself.

better blogs than this

The Existence Machine writes a beautiful post on translation.

This Space reads my mind (and goes on to say more than I could) on the latest William Deresiewicz, current bathroom-reading.

To add to the chorus on Terry Eagleton...

Indeed...was there ever a "windily pompous, pudgily superior type" crank more in dire need of being yanked from the ivory tower and placed in some menial capacity among his beloved proletariat for his own intellectual and spiritual sake?

But, let's face it, also possibly for ours, because in a more perfect world arguments like those of Dawkins surely deserve to be elevated. Productively. Not by mere sneering and blowing snot and sand on the entire discourse.

Matt Taibbi (via sbttp) is predictably, humorously, perhaps unnecessarily cruel, refers to Terry as

....physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children....If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class...Like almost all great defenders of religion, Eagleton specializes in putting bunches of words together in ways that sound like linear arguments, but actually make no sense whatsoever....

A shame, because the argument Teagleton is trying (failing, miserably) to make deserves a better spokesman. Surely there is someone out there better suited in temperament and tone to use Dawkin's appeal as a starting point to begin a more popular conversation on the concept of God (a word Teagleton seems increasingly to neglect, in the sorry tradition of all chronic and intellectually lazy polemicists). Ideally it would be someone who has not only read, say, Derrida, but still has an ear for her audience and is capable of maintaining the patience (and humility!) of an actual philosopher.

More reviews here.

show some courage, Obama!

• Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

• Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

• Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

• For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

• For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).

• Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

• Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

• To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

...60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

From here.

Elsewhere thorough and depressing reports on the FBI's failure to prevent the entirely avoidable death of Dr. George Tiller. Why Obama hasn't yet reinstalled the Clinton-era, abortion-rights hotline is an outrage. Surely that would seem like the kind of specific thing an effective netroots could actually succeed at lobbying for, were they interested in more than cheer-leading and the seductive fantasy of playing inside baseball, Markos Moulitsas.

Update: Ok so there was this buried bit by Hunter. Why not a full campaign to hammer the hotline number issue? It seems such a little thing, with such enormous potential remedial impact.

Update II: Fuck. Goddamn fuck.

DFW

Good reading on David Foster Wallace (via The Decline).

oiling...

I can build more of these, among other things...
GreenRiverWoods.etsy.com

End grain island top

Ambrosia spalted maple, 60"x 36"x 2" solid end grain. Still in progress...

cherry wine bottle rack

For those without the news

Recap of the week, funny and short.

Torture under Obama's watch

Just Despicable.

end grains

Reclaimed mahogany, cherry, hickory, oak and walnut. $85.


Birch, $40.


Solid hickory, $80.


Reclaimed ash, Brazilian cherry and mahogany accents, cherry legs. $45.

GreenRiverWoods.Etsy.Com.

A small set of reclaimed ambrosia maple blocks (and soon table) in this little gallery as well. (Update: already sold).

in a nutshell

Branko Milanovic:

The real cause of the crisis lies in huge inequalities in income distribution which generated much larger investable funds than could be profitably employed. The political problem of insufficient economic growth of the middle class was then “solved” by opening the floodgates of the cheap credit. And the opening of the credit floodgates, to placate the middle class, was needed because in a democratic system, an excessively unequal model of development cannot coexist with political stability.

–courtesy of i cite. Good to see articles reiterating stuff we learned from "The Giant Pool of Money", stuff that obviously needs to be reiterated, while simultaneously talking more directly and forcefully about income inequality as perhaps the most fundamental cause of instability. Shocking.

Reasonable sentiments also noted in the words of AWP.

Spitzer

The man should obviously replace Geithner or Summers:

David Simon on new and old media alike: "A plague on both their houses"

Hear, hear.

Huffington responds.

IT far more thoughtful, yet.

Afghanistan, Obama's Vietnam?

Disturbing questions.

Let's hope McNamara's old ethical disorder hasn't adapted to become contagious.

the dirty 12 - "owned" by banks in Congress

Even if there wasn't an exclusive Chapter 11 welfare trough for the criminally incompetent, and a global-economy-devastating pandemic of foreclosures on what used to be the American middle class, this would be just appalling:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The online contact information for the democratic sell-out senators who deserve all the anger a spoiled and complacent country could possibly muster:

Max Baucus (Mont.),
http://baucus.senate.gov/contact/emailForm.cfm?subj=issue
Michael Bennet (Colo.),
http://bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=TransitionalSiteEmailSenatorBennet
Robert Byrd (W.Va.),
http://byrd.senate.gov//contacts/index.cfm?ID=54
Byron Dorgan (N.D.),
e-mail: senator@dorgan.senate.gov
Tim Johnson (S.D.),
http://johnson.senate.gov/contact/
Mary Landrieu (La.),
http://landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
Blanche Lincoln (Ark.),
http://lincoln.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm
Ben Nelson (Neb.),
http://bennelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm
Mark Pryor (Ark.),
http://pryor.senate.gov/contact/
Jon Tester (Mont.),
http://tester.senate.gov/Contact/
Tom Carper (Del.),
http://carper.senate.gov/contact/
Arlen Specter (Penn, a Dem in name only),
http://specter.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=contact.contactform

Geithner: a man firmly wedged in the pocket of criminally-bloated finance

At least Geithner's fundamentalist bank-cartel-centric ideology is out in the open now so, like, the holding Obama to account for the incongruity between his ideological rhetoric and ideological actions can begin, right?

Geithner proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary.

The proposal quickly died amid protests that it was politically untenable because it could put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

“People thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of out there,’ ” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, who heard about the idea afterward. Mr. Geithner says, “I don’t remember a serious discussion on that proposal then.”

But in the 10 months since then, the government has in many ways embraced his blue-sky prescription....(today's NY Times)

Things must really be that bad.

whatever's "left" of political prudence

Robert Kuttner reads the signs and is rightly skeptical of Obama's will to enduring change:

When Lyndon Johnson advised his aides, just days after President Kennedy was assassinated, that he intended to use his presidency to enact landmark civil rights laws, he was warned that it was far too early to risk the nation's support on something so controversial. "Hell," Johnson replied, "What's the presidency for?"

Barack Obama, after nearly a hundred days[...]has yet to decide what his presidency is for.

Read the whole thing.

let the justice department deal with them

Frank Rich making the convincing case:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Update: Or, prepare to be disappointed.

"The banks need a permanent solution"

"Temporary nationalization" may be the new "market-friendly" solution, but some insane and probably communist critics wager we've been fucked by market-gaming long enough to deserve something that actually lasts...

Hickory

...difficult to work with, always dynamic.

Indeed

Hunter:

Knowing that torture was condoned in our names is an abominable thing. This parlor game of moving forward, not backward, of letting bygones be bygones, admitting error, and just getting the hell on with our days is just as dismal, because this, finally, internalizes the message that we citizens, our government, and other nations will take from this sorry affair, which is that while we begrudgingly acquiesce to stopping, we will, even now, refuse to recognize the act itself as truly criminal.


There is absolutely no pride to be gained in no longer torturing, but blocking justice in those instances in which we have. It is no act of courage; it is no enlightened position. It is merely the easiest path, and the one followed in nearly every instance by nations proven to have committed foul acts. Sorry, but we're not about to do anything about it. We'll stop, but in exchange for stopping we expect the episode to be forgotten. What would count as a war crime for you other countries counts for us as an internal matter, and we consider it closed.

I do not feel like begging. After years of railing against the practice (to be largely ignored, because in those days the majority of voices presumed torture to have positive effects, and therefore be justified), after years of government denial that any such thing was happening (in spite of clear and demonstrable evidence that it did), the last thing in the world that I feel like doing is once again begging, at long last, and to the supposed reasonable people that replaced the last reasonable people, that we actually follow our own goddamn laws, or treat crimes by our powerful with the same grave manner as we do crimes by anyone else in the nation.

I am fucking sick of it...

We all are. The question is are you, Mr. Attorney General?

Update: Nicolaus Mills on the most crucial and obvious:

...if we don’t at least deal with the collective failures that occurred in the Bush Justice Department immediately following 9/11, we are setting ourselves up for a time when a future administration will see no risk in again sanctioning torture. This is a problem that the Obama administration cannot duck—no matter how much it would like to.

ambrosia maple, live edge

vote out Larry Summers

Naomi Klein on how and why, in the WaPo.

Neo-McArthyite Republican Freaks

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

[...]

Most Americans today hold views that can generally be defined as populist while only seven percent (7%) share the elitist views of the Political Class.

Tough news for hysterical Spencer Bachus.

Proud of my Vermont

...clearly leading the nation

...in global warming:

Obama's "flawed bank-centric cosmology"

Huffington brilliant as always:

...Worse, as the fundamental flaw in the administration's cosmology becomes more and more evident, the economic team around the president is closing ranks. Even David Axelrod, once the administration's champion of a more skeptical view of a bank-centric universe, appears to be peering through the Geithner-Summers telescope.

Back in February, he crossed swords with Geithner, arguing for executive pay caps. But there he was on Sunday, whiffing on a pro-populist softball offered up by Fox News' Chris Wallace, who asked: "When taxpayers are putting up most of the money and taking more of the risk, why would the Obama administration allow some of these executives to get even richer?"

Axelrod's answer? "On some of these programs, we're asking financial companies to come in and help solve this problem by providing more lending, by buying up toxic assets and so on. We don't want to create disincentives and undermine the program."

"Asking" them? Aren't we, in fact, bribing them with massive capital infusions and loan guarantees? That's what being surrounded by a group of modern day Ptolemys will do to a person.[...]

There is an enormous human cost to this bank-centric dogma. Unemployment, already at levels not seen since 1983, is skyrocketing. In many places in the country, it's approaching 20 percent (and in Detroit it's 22 percent).

Writing about the "grand book" that is the universe, Galileo declared that it "cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written... without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth."

That's where we find ourselves today, wandering about in a dark financial labyrinth -- being led by good men blinded by an obsolete view of the world.

29 years old

Incidentally Columbia University Press is having a big sale on some very enticing cloth-bound volumes. Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and Levinas, in particular...should anybody out there not be broke and also strongly desire to send a birthday greeting...Exchanges and used copies always welcome too.

Life goes on

Long Sunday is about to disappear forever from the Internets, victim of other priorities, waning enthusiasms and participation, reluctant credit cards. Or maybe she just grew too old, accrued too many regrets after speaking too much or too soon, and senile. It all happened so fast. There were some profoundly positive moments. And persistent critique. She will be missed.

The end of financial capitalism: "too big to save"

Descriptions and prescriptions again from OpenDemocracy:

By way of illustration: the global value of financial assets (which means: debt) in the whole world by September 2008 - as the crisis was exploding with the collapse of Lehman Brothers - was $160 trillion: three-and-a-half times larger than the value of global GDP. The financial system cannot be rescued by pumping in the money available.

Whether those two things really follow I'm not sure. Meanwhile...

G20–the birth of better institutions?

David Hayes writes for OpenDemocracy:

The question of exactly who and what the G20 is, has yet to be resolved (the 3,070-word communiqué uses the word "we" ninety times). Perhaps - as Claude Sautet said in another context - being together will become enough to answer it. That has worked for the G7/G8, after all; but doesn't such very lack of definition suit less-than-accountable power all too well?

The shift from in-itself to for-itself may yet happen. Everything seems open in these deeply uncertain times - including the future of a new body that in its early incarnation more fairly reflects the shifting economic and geopolitical power-balances in the world. If a trend towards its institutionalisation develops, the implications for its older and more established siblings (the G7/G8, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and World Trade Organisation) might also be profound. The United Nations too - which hosts an emergency summit of its own in June 2009, but which has been missing in action in many of the global deliberations - needs to find its voice.

A grouping that emerged in ad-hoc fashion from a crisis which has wrecked the lives of millions and threatens even greater damage, whose character is less than defined and whose final form is unclear, is in an odd position: it has neither the credibility that comes from substantive achievement nor yet the taint of failure and disappointed expectations. The diversity of the G20 is an additional complicating factor here for those who would anathematise it with the vehemence they might attach to the G8 or the IMF; a group that includes the governments of (say) Brazil, South Africa and India is by that very fact significantly different from one run by rich, white, western elites.

Update: At the conclusion Robert Kuttner takes his analysis several steps further:

...But for the most part, the fate of the European center-left has been to preside over slightly less awful center-right policies and then to suffer retribution at the polls.

With European parliamentary elections coming up in June, and even nominally center-left governments more solicitous of banks than of ordinary people, it's not at all clear that progressive parties will benefit from what should be the greatest embarrassment of capitalism since the 1930s, or that the politics and regulation of capitalism will be transformed.

The Brussels meetings produced a brave communiqué, calling for a Global New Deal, built on sustainable development, the harnessing of private finance, and broad social justice. The meetings opened with a stirring speech by Bill Clinton, who managed to sound more progressive than he ever did in office. I found myself thinking: If only this man had been president[...]

This Group of 20 meeting was notable only because the club of seven leading democracies plus Russia ("the G-8") was expanded to include emerging world powers such as India, China, and Brazil. The most important third world nations never embraced financial market fundamentalism, and they are a salutary counterweight.

But the 2009 summit, whose extensive press clippings will soon be fishwrap, succeeded mainly because it managed not to fail. Michelle Obama dominated European television for a week. Her husband was hailed as a diplomatic genius for mediating a minor dust-up between French President Sarkozy (who was threatening to take his boule and go home because of the summit's tepid acceptance of an OECD blacklist of forbidden tax-havens) and Chinese President Hu Jin-tao (who insisted that the communiqué not give any role to the OECD, which excludes China.) Obama solved the spat with an indirect reference to the OECD list, and persuaded the two grown men to shake hands like adults. In this age of diminished expectations, that feat passes for statecraft.

But the Europeans did not get the Americans to commit to the details of tougher financial regulation. Nor did the Americans get the Europeans to agree to more economic stimulus spending. Instead, the two camps punted the ball to two international organizations of dubious provenance. (read the whole thing)

Tied to the w(h)ipping post

In case you're wondering that's my nephew on the left, doing the Duane Allman.



Not sure what happens at the end of this one. Apparently the action got a little too hot in front for filming. Wasn't college fun.

Basic truths of the economic situation, cont.

In case you missed them:

Simon Johnson: The Quiet Coup (excerpt):

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent...

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand....

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.

At the root of the banks’ problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don’t want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren’t enough to make them healthy (again, they can’t reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don’t lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won’t pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5trillion (or 10percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting...

Matt Taibbi: The Big Takeover (excerpt):

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers...

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

We'll see what Obama's team can accomplish while demurring on these fundamental problems. (We'll have to "hope" there might still be something of an institution left then even capable of Finance Industry-busting.)

UPDATE: And Thomas Geoghegan's article in this month's Harper's also essential reading (login: mchristie password: christie). He lays out the decades-long history of the financial sector's devastating rise to dominance, at the expense of manufacturing and labor, the middle class, wages, economic sustainability, something more like democracy, etc. He makes points Michael Moore would do well to understand a little better:

When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn't innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs. All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.

Which is why the middle class is shrinking. Basically, we're all waiters now; we're bowing and scraping and working for the banks. Look closely at any American, and it's even odds that he or she, directly or indirectly, is somehow employed by the "financial services sector," which covers insurance and real estate and financial instruments of any kind. As brokers, lawyers, loan collectors, loan consolidators, secretaries at big investment firms, chauffeurs of private limousines, or even the high-tech types who exist solely to service banks–all of us, millions of us, are part of it, living off it in some way, as three generations ago we lived off manufacturing.

[...]

...here's the Plan.
First, we have to pass a new type of law against usury that accepts the world in which we all live now[...]let's cap interest at 9 percent, then let a federal agency give exemptions[...]
Second, we should have state-owned banks[...]
Third, we should have at least one or two "public guardians" as directors at the banks and other financial firms we have bailed out with $700 billion in taxes and all the money the Fed has printed[...]
Fourth, we should require the banks we bail out to cancel an appropriate amount of consumer debt–especially in the instances where people would have paid back the principal by now had the interest rate been more reasonable[...]
Finally, we should think about ways to "inject equity" directly into the accounts of working people rather than into banks. The best way to do this is to announce a plan to raise the gross replacement rate of Social Security from 44 percent to something closer to 65 percent, which is still short of the rate in may European social democracies. We can afford this as much as or more than they can[...]

Geithner/Paulson plan

Krugman has my vote, in this roundtable on the Geithner (Paulson) plan... but what do I know, apparently this sort of nausea-inducing repetition is necessary for the political process.

On another, more historical note, I know an older guy whose bumper sticker for years read–in letters large enough to read for half a mile––"IMPEACH THE LYING TREASONOUS LOUTS!" I wonder if he is still interested.

Department of Shredded Pieces of Paper Money

Good intentions, honest platitudes and vague reassurances about "responsibility" in every global media aside, one begins to wonder if Obama is more in love with himself, à la Bill Clinton, than he has a mature clue about the realistic consequences of this gigantic new holding company the taxpayers are now funding. In fairness it seems nobody much does. However as Bernie Sanders gently puts it, Obama needs someone from outside Wall Street giving him advice (titanic understatement of calling this "not easy" uncomfortably noted). Sanders' ideas of where to start are also pretty good.

That calling screaming for a regulatory counter-balance to Wall Street's newly gifted power, if not an alternative structure altogether, should be the position of the net roots seems to me inescapably clear. There's a delusion of grandeur at work when progressive blogs and talk shows are still stuck in damage-control mode for a President with 70% approval, gloating at how unnecessary and easy taking down the Republican "opposition" is these days (while the real conglomerate crooks are still robbing every honest worker blind, needless to say with historically eager help from both corporate Democrat and Republican). As Matt Taibbi characteristically points out in his essential exposé, the only people deemed capable of understanding let alone managing this new thing are the professional gambling class, which fact in itself amounts to an enormous power grab.* And if it wasn't easy to regulate these independent casinos before, how exactly mushing up their weirdly animated corpses and mixing them with other business ventures dead and half-alive and re-selling unidentifiable, over-valued limbs to the taxpayer helps the situation is beyond me (and probably Obama, unless he gets some truly open-minded help).


* The myth of the impossibly complex nature of these financial giants' operations is an unfortunate piece of propaganda. Obviously the power of Taibbi's account lies in its potential to render public anger more focused and into something less easily dismissed (for instance, with vague reassurances about a new "era of responsibility.") Given the circumstances, blanket blame is profoundly somewhat unjust and questionably helpful. The "bonus" non-issue is downright ridiculous (as the saying goes, "3 trillion dollars is a budget problem, 200 million is a scandal.") I actually think the author of today's NY Times Op-Ed has a valid point, tone-deafness aside (yes, his whining smacks of self-entitlement, he has no sense of real world incomes–honestly what did you expect?). Those "conspicuously unscathed" operators of the casino within the casino who really wrecked the economy (granted, as they were enabled) may amount to only four hundred recently and luxuriously retired dickheads at every conglomerate, but those are the names, along with Bill Clinton/Sandy Weill and especially Larry Summers, that Cuomo and everyone should be calling for, were they interested in something more meaningful than cheap blanket populism, especially as said lynch mob anger blurs itself into irrelevance and helps those who wish to obscure the real stakes. In this regard Time Magazine actually gets a few right. (Not that a little seething resentment of the self-entitled rich in this country isn't long overdue!)

nb. It is entirely possible I am a death-wish Democrat who just doesn't understand politics. Either that or I'm for a political discourse concerned enough for truth and healthy enough to require self-criticism.

not change enough, yet...

Huffington tears into Geithner: "Axelrod was right. And his loss has already cost the young Obama administration a lot."

...

Leonard Cohen's first U.S. concert in 15 years available on NPR (via).

in my abundant spare time...

...So now the basement remodel is finally complete (incl. all new plumbing, electric and altogether too much crawlspace/structural rebuild & insulation, along with the usual drywall, durock & tiling, trimming out, re-leveling, cabinets, appliances & fixtures, built-ins, floor reconditioning, some new hardwood T&G, doors, custom thresholds and endless texturing and paint), maybe there will be time for reading again (or at least little projects for real people, like these), after work.

hickory end-grain chopping block, shipped to New York


hickory edge-grain carving board, shipped to New York




hickory face-grain cheese platter and maple end-grain chop block, shipped to California



reclaimed cedar, hickory, and oak table top, shipped to California

clever-clogs

Jonathan Wolff on the distinction between clever-clog and true scholar (via bookforum).

We Live in "The Borrowed Times"

...so sayeth The Nation's epoch-naming contest judges. I kind of liked "The New Steal."

Update: Huffpo.

Suleiman Baraka

A Palestinian Astrophysicist who used to lecture Palestinian children, and all children, to look beyond the Helicopters, F-16s, for planets "and hope," tells of his son's death

Are you listening? Another interesting take here, though sometimes forgetting how important it is to qualify statements: down to three rockets a month is no solution, but it sure does seem like a potential step toward creating the conditions to negotiate/force a more equal peace (only ever if Israel is genuinely willing). In the end the occupation, and most specifically its relation to the Israeli economy, obviously must be addressed. Sadly, not even Jimmy Carter talks about it.

Bushisms

The BBC already waxes nostalgic. (Digby waxes actual historical.)

Israel's Will to Violence

In which we could sure be talking more about the economy, stupid pundits. After all, the prime motivating factor of this latest slaughter is surely the desire to demonstrate to Israel's new shareholders that the fourth largest arms dealer in the world is capable of better innovation and "success" than in its last performance. Where's Naomi Klein these days?

Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion—an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror.”

Obama's idiotic economic austerity?

Is this [link fixed] really all we worked so hard for? "Like worrying about watering the plants while the house burns," in the words of one of Amy's guests. Of course some remain more optimistic, with reason.

from the department of too little too late

If his cabinet picks are any measure, Obama's sure going to need lots of netroots pressure. (Poor environmental movement, we hardly even knew you!)

thankyouforthrowingyourshoe.com

The reconstruction of Iraq is now officially "a 100 billion dollar failure."



42 pages and growing...

Happy Birthday Tom

image via

Credo

I just switched phone companies from the criminal, spying-and-Republican-subsidizing Verizon to the ACLU-and-Doctors-Without-Borders-funding CREDO MOBILE and they reimbursed up to $200 of my early termination contract fees (up to four phones per person). Credo uses, that is simply leases Sprint's network, which works fine enough, and in my opinion the only reason everybody who just voted for Obama doesn't switch to CREDO MOBILE is because Working Assets simply lacks the funding (or more likely the gall to spend any of that 60 million on themselves) to get the word out there that CREDO MOBILE is the only cell phone service worth a shit. They'll never ever spy on you. Their service is great. Their phones are cool. Their rates are competitive. Your money goes good places.

And, they give you free ice cream all the time, Ben & Jerry's coupons (7 pints and counting, and I just signed up a week ago). Go do it now, people! Keep your number and let them reimburse your early termination fees!

upon watching BHL pose as an intellectual on Charlie Rose last night

...reminded me of this:

Did Bernard-Henri Lévy comprehend that "the American left" and "the Charlie Rose television program" are, in fact, distinct entities? Might there be aspects of social and political life that do not impinge upon the consciousness of Sharon Stone or Warren Beatty (who, to judge by American Vertigo, are among the American left's most important figures)? Can a thing be, and yet not be, well publicized?

I frame these questions with all due seriousness, for they touch on something one must always keep in mind while reading Lévy's work--his new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House, $25), most emphatically included. For BHL (as he is known in France and, increasingly, the United States) is not simply another pundit. He brings to current affairs a certain philosophical method, which he succinctly unpacked not many years ago in his book War, Evil, and the End of History. There Lévy explained that he found it impossible to recognize as valid any political movement "about which I could not have the feeling, even if illusory, that it began, ended, and found its reasoning in me alone." And so while "the American left" may or may not exist, what Charlie Rose so lovingly calls "this table" certainly does--for BHL has sat at it. Hence certain rigorous deductions are possible....