Barack Obama {Photo: Wikimedia Foundation}

The Norwegian Nobel  Committee¹ has announced the 2009 prize winner US President Barack Obama.

“We would like to enhance, to support what he is trying to do.”

Naomi Klein {Photo: Wikimedia Foundation}

British-Pakistani historian, journalist and activist Tariq Ali was also interviewed on DN! [They tried to reach journalist Jeremy Scahill³, but had technical difficulties.] In his talk at Harvard, Tariq expressed his doubt that US military activity in Pakistan is in the US long term interest. In today’s interview he points out, among other things, that the war in Iraq-Afghanistan goes on apace with an increase in troops in Afghanistan. Tariq pointed out some of the questionable awards in the past.

¹Note that the ‘Nobel Prizes’ are awarded in memory of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and presented by the King of Sweden. My favorite anomaly is the inclusion of the Bank of Sweden Prize, not funded from the Nobel estate, with the Nobel prizes. This does not make Amartya Sen^A the spawn of satan, but it tarnishes his halo a bit. Robert Merton and Myron Sholes who won “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives” [mortgage backed securities anyone?] , on the other hand, clearly are the spawn of satan. We don’t need to make a fuss about the Late Larry Summers’^B hero Milton Friedman, but one has to wonder how someone who gets people fired for wanting to regulate underbacked highly liquid securities can be regarded as a monetarist.

²Naomi, offered her critique of Milton Friedman and his disciple Donald Rumsfeld, in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Basically, Friedman who favored ‘non-interventionist government’ nonetheless thought that the only way to get there is by engineering ’shock and awe’.

³Jeremy is the chronicler of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.”

^ASen has a quality that the Late^B Larry Summers will never be accused of. He is disarmingly charming.

^BFor those who have, for whatever reason, not been following tgbtd, is there life after Harvard?

October 1st is the one-year anniversary of the Wall Street bail out.  The government gave hundred$ of billion$ of dollar$ to save the bank$ and in$urance companies, but where are the jobs?

Thursday, October 1, 2009

4:00 PM Kickoff at the State House

4:30 PM March through Downtown and the Financial District

4:41.39871 Rally at Verizon

5:30 PM Rally at the Hyatt (One Avenue de Lafayette)

Sponsors: (list in formation); Mass AFL-CIO; Greater Boston Labor Council; Mass. Jobs with Justice; IBEW Local 2222; IBEW Local 2313; IBEW Local 2321; IBEW Local 2322; IBEW Local 2323; IBEW Local 2324; IBEW Local 2325; CWA Local 1400; CWA District One; AFA-CWA Council 27; Teamsters Local 122; Operating Engineers Local 877; Utility Workers Local 369; UE Northeast Region; UFCW Local 1445; SEIU Local 509; SEIU Local 1199; Laborers Local 22; HERE Local 26; AFT-Massachusetts; Roofers Local 33; Plumbers Local 12; Sprinkler Fitters Local 550; Painters District Council 35; Boston Carmen’s Union; Professional Fire Fighters of Mass; Elevator Constructors Local 4; SEIU/NAGE 5000; APWU of Mass, Pipefitters Local 537; Mass. Teachers Association; MOSES; Boston Teachers Union, SEIU Local 615, IBEW Local 103; Teamsters Local 25; Mass ACORN; Community Labor United; North Shore Labor Council; Merrimack Valley CLC; Norfolk County Labor Council; Plymouth-Bristol Labor Council; Central MA AFL-CIO; Hampshire-Franklin CLC; Greater Southeastern Mass. CLC; Pioneer Valley CLC; Chelsea Collaborative; Irish Immigration Center; Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending; Boston DSA; Mass Interfaith Cmte for Worker Justice; Lynn Health Task Force; Nat. Jobs for All Coalition; Nat. Lawyers’ Guild; AFSC; Mass Transgender Political Coalition; Centro Presente; Mass COSH; IWW; Union of Minority Neighborhoods; Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries; South East Asian Women’s Resource Group; City Life/Vida Urbana; Jewish Labor Committee; GALLAN; SEIU Local 888; WILD; Brazilian Immigrant Center; UAW MA State CAP Council; AEEF-CWA Local 1300, UFE, BWA, CPA, Metrowest Immigrant Center, La Commindad, UAW State CAP, Boston Building Trades, Mass Building Trades, APWU 100

Logo of Mad As Hell Doctors

They’re mad at the insurance companies, the Congress, and Obama. Rightfully so. They are by no means alone.

Much more, but now I must blog today’s rally for economic justice.

¹Sound familiar? I don’t know who was the first to say it, but it became a fixture of American popular culture with the movie “A Thousand Clowns”.

Report: Bailed-Out Banks Spent $32B in Bonuses in 2008

A new government report shows the nine largest US banks handed out more than $32 billion in bonuses last year while posting more than $81 billion in losses and receiving billions in taxpayer aid. According to the New York Attorney General’s office, nearly 4,800 Wall Street executives and employees were awarded bonuses of at least $1 million. More than 900 of those worked for Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the largest bailout recipients.

This remark from the website of NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo which posted the report was certainly a proper thing for him to do:

THE REPORT WAS PREVIOUSLY TRANSMITTED TO HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN EDOLPHUS TOWNS (D-NY)

Unfortunately, recent revelations about loans Rep. Towns got from mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp, raise questions about its efficacy. But then, leaving the fox to watch the hen house is a Washington tradition.

Grace Ross of MAAPL* addressing crowd at the Statehouse.

Dave Goodman of IBIS Radio(staff) and OpenMediaBoston reports on a rally by a coalition of housing and social justice groups held on Thursday June 12, 2009 – pictures, audio, and resource links. This follows on previous rallies at the Statehouse and Boston City Council as well as joint activity by local organizers and the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School.

*Massachusetts Alliance Against Preditory Lending.

HLS No Layoffs @ Harvard Coimmencement

The No Layoffs Campaign, which argues that laying off low wage workers is not the way to deal with Harvard’s ‘financial woes’, made itself visible at the morning excercises of the Harvard Commencement. A phalanx of new graduates, held up yellow signs with one red letter each spelling out ‘No Layoffs’ . Most likely they are members of the Student Labor Action Movement which has been a cosponsoring group throughout the year. They appeared very briefly on the official internet feed.*

Update:  Graduates shown above were in fact members of SLAM from the Law School.  The No Lay Offs Campaign Blog has more complete report including pictures of the rest of the days activity.

*My experience has been that commerical internet video players block screen capture software. A word picture will have to do for the time being. I suspect that this will survive into the archival footage.

Break Up the Banks Rally at the State House when I broke my camera.

It was a clear sunny day. Perfect for pictures. But since I broke the LCD at the “Break Up the Banks!” Rally, I couldn’t see that my camera was set wrong. The folks for City Life/Vida Urbana[CL/VU] showed up.

Steve Meacham of City Life/Vida Urbana [standing] with Professor Jacqueline Bhabba of Harvard Law School. See my earlier post.

Steve was in good form as he was two weeks ago. Professor Jacqueline was probably back at Harvard grading final exams.² A number of members of the CL/VU Bank Tenants Association told their stories. They were seeking passsage of H.B. 1232 which would require the Banks to keep them as tenants until they actually sell the building.

Grace Ross who ran for Governor on the Green-Rainbow ticket, is leading the lobbying effort for Maapl. She made quite a good picture introducing the hit sensation anti-foreclosure group, ‘The Raging Grannies’.

Representative Gloria Fox came out to greet us. If we could just clone her about 200 times we would have a great legislature.

A number of public officials testified in favor of several iniatives citing the effects of the foreclosure crisis on their communities. Details of this legislation is available on the MAAPL Legislation page. MAAPL asks concerned citizens to contact their State legislators on these issues. It is not too late. The WhereDoIVoteMa website will give you links to your legislators’ home pages.

All of these measures affect a small segment of the people effected by the foreclosure crisis. The Obama plan is also limited. I urged the legislators to pass these bills because we, the homeless, do not really need anymore company in a system that is already taxed beyond the limit. They must pass these bills quickly because there is much more needs doin’ There are so many more in the foreclosure pipeline.

¹This is the offcial name of the state legislature. ‘Court’ is in the name but it is not judiciary.

²Lee Goldstine was there and testified, but he was not representing Harvard i.e. I don’t think Bob Iuliano asked him to go .

Swine flu masked train passengers in Mexico City -April 2009 {Photo: Wikimedia Foundation}

Biologist Robert G. Wallace appeared on Democracy Now! with an analysis of the origin of the “swine flu” based on a

…cutting-edge formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal evolution.

that he presents in his forthcoming Springer¹ published book, “Farming Human Pathogens Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process”.

Robert G., one of three Wallaces who authored the book. thinks that “swine flu” is a misleading monacher.

…pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.

The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.

This quote is from his blog, Farming Pathogens: Disease in a world of our own making. He argues that factory farming, in this case of pigs and poultry, was spread first to East Asia and later to Mexico, by the structural adjustment requirements of loans made by the International Monetary Fund. Wallace calls this the “Nafta Flu” because NAFTA is the local instance structural adjustment that brought us this particular flu which broke out in Mexico. NAFTA was mostly the work of the George H.W. Bush whitehouse, but the Clinton whitehouse signed it.

¹For those on the humanities side of the Two Cultures problem, Springer, formerly Springer-Verlag, has long been one of the leading publishers of establishment science. The Late Larry, who tries to borrow legitimacy for economics from real sciences, will have a hard time dismissing something published by Springer.

[Photo: Courtesy of Direction Home]

What to Do About It?

Some muckahs from the Law School and;

some real people¹ from City Life/Vida Urbana

presented:

I had hoped they would say what I have been saying all along. We need a moratorium on foreclosures and we need to write down the value of these predatory mortgages.  Steve, who you can see above being arrested for Harvard labor, has lead a number of eviction blockades. He provided a very concise [ 10-minute] summary of market failures in real estate.  Melonie was one of the foreclosed upon homeowners. The lawyers represented people in both foreclosure procedings and in post-foreclosure eviction proceedings.  Law student Nicholas Hartigan, said that his hope was to get enough  homeowners resisting foreclosure and eviction to force the banks to change their way of doing business.  This is better than letting the tide of foreclosures go unopposed, but a change in bank policy is more easily undone than legislation. But in the current environment, legislation is also harder to get.

¹Anything but a One Dimensional Man, when Steve Meacham was a tenant organizer in Cambridge, between arrests, he did radical stuff like driving the truck for the food pantry. Walking the walk – it’s a good thing

The Student Labor Action Movement drops a banner at the ‘town meeting’
called by Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith.

It says, “Greed is the New Crimson, No Layoffs”

One questioner asked the Dean, “How did we get where we are now? Did we believe the paper gains in the endowment were real?” It’s a very real question oh so carefully couched in academic terms. My homes I be sayin’ it, “Did the Late Larry Summers and Robert Rubin convince the rest of the Fellows they were real.?” Smith’s particular way of ducking was to say, “Not in my job description.” A dean will only answer a question about the conduct of the Fellows if s/he¹ becomes more afraid of the shellacing from ‘below’ than the shellacing from ‘above’. All the orchestration and control at the event was an attempt to prevent shellac. ² We’ll see.

Tomorrow. Expecting news from Iris Mack. The Larry Summers interest-rate swaps on the new buildings. Y’all come back, hear?

¹Could somebody please show me how to do the non-sexist thing without bludgeoning the lingo?

²So now you know what you’ve gotta do This allow gives you some ‘guidance’ about seeking administrative positions. I refer to the Russ Meyer film Super Vixens which I actually saw after I became an enlightened feminist. I was pretty upset about some of the more graphic scenes of gratuitous violence toward women but there was one line, the one applicable here, that I found funny. I will assume that the Berkosphere censorship code is no stricter than network television and use the BattleStar Galactica word ‘frackin’:

“Always be sure the frackin you get is worth the frackin you take.”

The Medium Sized Picture

The Order was in legislative limbo going into this meeting. I asked them to leave it there for bit. Here’s why. While there has been some activism on this:

This week will probably have better weather.

Second of all, there are lots of other things to look at about the University’s finances before we ask the Cambridge homeowners to forego such little as the PILOT provides.¹ Among them:

Get back the $3+ Million we paid the Late Larry for mismanaging the University.

Get back the $2+ Million we paid the Late Larry since he mismanaged the University.

Get back the $26.5 Million fine the Late Larry paid for, out of the University coffer, for his regrettably still alive crony Andrei Shleifer. Together with legal fees the total is probably more like $30 Million. In case you missed it, the early history of the tawdry affair is chronicled in:

Janine R. Wedel, The Harvard Boys Do Russia, The Nation June 1, 1998

Subsequent revelations are revealed in an article written by Harvard Alumnus David McClintock which appeared in Institutional Investor 1/13/06. Titled, How Harvard Lost Russia, it was passed around the faculty shortly before Summers’ resignation. If you have trouble finding it, bring your Driver’s License to Harvard’s Lamont Library and ask to sign in for Government Documents. Reference staff will help you find it as a network resource. Harvard has a site license. As of this writing there is an open source mirror online.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Smith is due to hold a town meeting with his folks ² today. Hope sombody asks him about this stuff.

The Big Picture

We need to look at the political economy of Harvard in the era of the Summers-Rubin led irrational exuberance or, if you prefer, derivative security feeding frenzy. I need to get ready for the Dean’s town meeting now[See above]. If you aren’t going why not check out Noam’s interview with Amy on Democracy Now! If you are going to the town meeting and haven’t seen the McClintock article, you could take a look.

¹Harvard PILOT 2008 $2,173,492. I don’t know what the total assessed value of all Harvard property is, but I’m pretty sure that if we looked at what Harvard would pay if treated like a normal private business, the PILOT amounts to a small fraction of a penny on the dollar. If you have good numbers on this, by all means e-mail me at: the (dot) guy (dot) by (dot) the (dot) door (at) gmail (dot) com^A,B

²This expository vagueness is the result of desperation. I couldn’t call us ‘constituents’ cause we didn’t vote for him. Nor did we vote for anybody up to and including The Fellows. I can’t call us ’subjects’ without knowing the man. Is there anything majestic about him?

^AYou can comment if you are in the Berkosphere. I apologize for not having my comments open, but with the proliferation of comment-spambots. I can’t keep up with the moderation effort necessary.

^BIf anybody tried to e-mail me with yesterday’s e-address please try again with today’s. Spam was in part to blame.

As Noam says real change “… is never a gift from above. It comes about because of people like you.” The ‘Obama’ bank bailout plan is in yet another revision. It’s architects realize that it is far too little and far too late. Early editions were welfare for Bank Executives – so blatantly so that even the corporate dominated media noticed. Newer editions promise improvement. But of the millions of homeowners in the foreclosure pipeline, only those who almost don’t need help will get any. The plan is still largely to save the financial institutions and ignore the peope.

Earlier I pointed to Dave Korten’s proposal.

Now there is a grassroots and netroots movement around the country.

Demonstrations around the country today Saturday April 11, 2009 starting 11AM Pacific – 2 PM Eastern.¹

In Boston, the demonstration is at the State House. Rain gear is advised.

Logos by Harvard Living Wage Campaign Alum Matt Skomorovsky

¹“the guy by the door” is hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard – close to the Atlantic. Because the corporate offices of the major media are in our time zone there is a substantial ‘Eastern Daylight chauvinism’. In my own modest way, I seek to address this.

Paul Krugman, Laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008 at a press conference at the Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm [Photo Wikimedia Foundation] Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner [Photo: U.S. Government]
  

A zombie idea is an idea that you keep on killing because it’s a bad idea but it just keeps on coming back.

Bank of Sweden Prize winner¹ and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman on today’s Democracy Now! They aired before the formal announcement.

¹‘The Bank of Sweden Prize’ is the correct name for what is popularly and incorrectly called ‘The Nobel Prize in Economics.’ The meaning and purpose of this premeditated mislocution will not comfortable fit in a footnote.

Too often, our responses to past crises have been inadequate or misdirected, promoting economic orthodoxies that we ourselves have not followed and that have condemned the world’s poorest to a deepening crisis of poverty.

Amy segued into an interview with a prominent critic of Neoliberal Globalization, University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. Her introduction:

Ha-Joon Chang, Economist at the University of Cambridge specializing in developmental economics. In 2005, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. He is author of the books Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective and, his latest, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Chang mentioned the Late Larry Summers by name. Tomorrow I’ll tie this together with the Sandel Summers Course at Harvard “Globalization and It’s Critics”. Y’all come back now, hear?

What, exactly, will the $1 Trillion this will end up costing us save? If we give money to the banks to keep them afloat, do people get to stay in their homes? Or do they foreclosed anyway? Do we save the banks and do nothing for the borrowers? Do we save an abstraction, The Economy, and do nothing for the people who are it’s reality?

David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning, appeared on Democracy Now this morning to discuss an alternative economic plan described in his new book, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. Korten argues convincingly that it is possible to have an economy, i.e. a tool of our own creation, which serves the people who compose and create it, rather than the reverse. One of the ingredients, he suggests, is letting banks that deserve to fail, fail. In fact the teaser above the title is, Why Wall Street Can’t Be Fixed and How to Replace It. A video clip of his interview with David Brancaccio on PBS.

Holy Schumpeter’s Ghost, Batman!

If, on the other hand, The Late Larry succeeds in saving the “too big to fail” banks while the “too little to bother with” homeowners undergo ‘creative destruction’ into homelessness, even the Ghost of Schumpeter will rise up and smite him, yet again.

Some thoughts from me, but hopefully not inconsistent with David’s ideas:

$1 Trillion, that’s the projected cost of all the rounds of bailout planned. That would buy 4 million homes at $250,000 a crack. If the gummint, [i.e. "we the people"] just paid the ‘bad’ mortgages and gave people their homes, it would prevent a serious housing crisis from becoming a diaspora. But it would still reward the financial services industry for bad behaviour. How about if we the people, just write down the value of the mortgages to a point where a people can afford them? Coincidentally, they might then be more in line with “economic fundamentals” than the value determined by the “free market” on speculative steroids. We might have to nationalize the banks to do that. Krugman, this year’s Bank of Sweden Prize winner, thinks that would be a good idea.

If we do major write downs of mortgage values, we probably should qualify them by making the homes purchased “limited equity”. That is, a regulation on the price of a future sale of the home. We do not want them to become instruments of speculation in a future housing bubble. Perhaps consideration should be given to the amount of equity a given borrower has acrued. I don’t know the details.

[back after i get my broken nose looked at]
¹See for example, the work of former Harvard Crimson President, Bill McKibben’s, Deep Economy.

²I met Steven Chu when he gave a talk at MIT about energy and Abrupt Climate Change^A. At the beginning of his talk, he mentioned briefly that there is a lot of room to address carbon emission in the area of conservation, but he wasn’t going to talk about it. he was going to talk about controlling carbon emission of energy generation^B. He was then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was going to talking to people seeking careers in science and engineering research, i.e. usable results 10 or more years away. His appointment as Energy Secretary is very luke warm good news. It’s up to us to move his planning horizon in and his strategy towards conservation. His most amazing remark was after the talk. He turned to me with stunning earnestness. “These things are all really about money.” Well, that may be news to someone who worked for Bell Labs at the height of its monopoly [and the height of the Cold War], but if you got your PhD at Harlem’s CCNY, you pretty much know that.

³Obviously, I don’t believe that slinking off to be a hedge fund manager after being busted out of the Harvard Presidency amounts to resurrection. His appointment as Lamont University Professor, smells an awful lot like a deal to placate The Fellows^C. Not resurrection. Not even close.

⁴One bit of good news. His mentor/co-conspirator, Harvard Fellow Robert Rubin, having lined his pockets with a chunk of taxpayer money for misguiding Citigroup, has resigned from Citigroup. But, I did not hear of him giving the money back.

^AAbrupt Climate Change is much more descriptive of what matters to human life than global warming. It is the change of climate too rapidly for human societies to adapt that is the danger. I did not invent this phrase. I stole it from climate scientist Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State university. His talk before the 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, recorded by Maria Gilardin of TUC Radio, is well worth listening to [lowband].

^BAll of us non-Nobel physicists know that energy is not created or generated. It is converted. More accurately, we siphon off the flow of entropy. It is ‘free energy’ that really matters.

^CHow much influence Summers’ mentor/co-conspirator Fellow Robert Rubin had I cannot say with precision. I can only say, “too much.”

A two local groups and a local chapters of a national group met to confront these crises and shut down Citibank in Harvard Square. [Photo Open Media Boston]

Jason Pramas of Open Media Boston reports (in text and video) that Rising Tide Boston, City Life/Vida Urbana, and Rainforest Action Network² joined in non-violent civil disobedience shutting down Citibank in Harvard Square.

¹This wikipedia page is barely adequate. An important concept deserves much better. If you don’t have the stomach to go eye-ball to eye-ball with the ruling class, you can fix the “bioaccumulation” wikipedia page. It won’t make them made at you.

²Their report on the protest. I wanted you to see their home page. I’m green with envy, but trying to be the bigger man. They were on Democracy Now to debate whether “Clean Coal” makes any sense.

… and when I get back from dinner, more on the International Forum on Globalization Teach-In; Confronting the Global Triple Crisis

This video features David Harvey, the Distinguished Professor Anthropology¹, at my alma mater – City University of New York.

I wish I had met him.² His A Brief History of Neoliberalism [University of Chicago Center for International Studies Beyond the Headlines Series. October 26, 2005. Audio ] includes the financial takeover of New York City after the bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.^3,4

So I was part of all this. I knew vaguely what was happening to me, but the clarity of Harvey probably would have helped. I remembered the Penn Central bailout. The most obvious affront to labor was yet to come in 1980. Republican President Richard Nixon authorized $1.5 Billion in loan guarantees to a deeply ailing Chrysler Coporation under CEO Lee Iacocca. Among the justifications was saving American jobs. Iacocca took the ‘fresh capital’ and bought Japanese manufactured robots that ‘controlled labor cost’ i.e. put American autoworkers out of work.

*”Dung Deal” I stole from Freddy’s Brooklyn Roundhouse. “Deja Vu All Over Again” is legendary New York Yankee catcher and later manager, Yogi Berra.

There is a lot of commentary on left that this bailout is bad. There is also significant commentary from the  right that it is bad. I suspect they differ in what they think should be done. Missing from what I have seen so far, is how this bailout will hurt an effective response to the largest single cause of increasing human misery – global climate change. Same cause as class war, but is the “solution” timely?

¹ Professor of Anthropology Maple Raza who, among other things was the vidoeographer during the Spring 2001 occupation of Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall, notes with considerable pride that the Anthropology Department was the most progressive of the faculty. I believe him. Anthropologists have the notion that people were earning a living throughout the world as opposed to just England and that they’ve been doing it for a very long time as opposed to waiting until the 18th century. More recently one Harvard Anthropologist [i.o.u. a link] noticed that subsistence economies are by definition sustainable.

²Once again, I am indebted to Adaner Usmani for acquainting me with David Harvey.

³ I was a graduate student then. There was, as you might expect, a great deal of anxiety associated with this event.

⁴For those interested in Latin America, he makes significant mention of the effect of the “Chicago Boys” on Pinochet’s Chile. His account agrees remarkably well with that in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Protesting the proposed bailout – Wall St. Sept. 25, 2008. [IndyMedia]

More pictures from NYC IndyMedia.

 I lied …there’s a lot to say.

Where to begin? Adaner Usmani has posted this history of U.S. Govt. bailouts from Pro Publica.

…it is difficult to have faith in the policy wherewithal of a government that oversaw the utter mismanagement of the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If any administration can turn this crisis into another depression, it is the Bush administration.

Joseph E Stiglitz ***  “The fruit of hypocrisy,” The Guardian 9/16/08.

I. The discussion of layoffs at the newspapers raised the question of whether bloggers aka citizen journalists can/will fill the gap. Chris Hedges, senior fellow at the Nation Institute is not optimistic:

I could believe that if there was reporting on the internet. You know, most of the bloggers don’t even pick up a phone, much less go out and report a story. Reporting a story, especially doing an investigative piece, is laborious, expensive, time-consuming.

Linda Jue, Director of New Voices in Independent Journalism and the past president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter, on the other hand:

…I am witnessing, actually, in the Bay Area numerous new enterprises starting to come up, being formed actually by journalists, to find new business models that would be—that will sustain very good journalism…

II. The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. Steven Greenhouse, labor reporter for the New York Times, discusses the plight of workers and the role of contemporary unions. He has some interesting remarks about the “Change to Win” coalition of 5 major unions that left the AFL-CIO.

[More when DN! gets the transcript up.]

¹There is brief mention of more bank failures in the headlines. See next post.

Central bankers and government connected economists have been telling us, for quite some time now, “Everything will be OK if you just don’t look down.” Senator Chuck Schumer sent out a letter warning of the shakiness of IndyMac which has now collapsed. Regulators who were supposed to prevent such collapses are blaming Schumer for causing it.

Another thing you’re not supposed to notice, where will all the billion$ pumped into to the banking system to keep it afloat utimately come from. In the case of IndyMac it’s no mystery – the taxpayers. NPR, has been taking the line that it is that shareholders who will pay. They had an expert from the Wall Street Journal espousing this view. But who ultimately underwrites the FDIC? We’ll see how this shakes out.

In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which back half of all of the nations home mortgages, it’s clear that the guarantor is the taxpayer – i.e. you and me.

[Update: July 29, 2008] From DemocracyNow!: 2 More Banks Close as Crisis Widens

In banking news, federal regulators have shut down two banks in California and Nevada. First National Bank of Nevada and the Californian First Heritage Bank were both folded for lacking sufficient capital. The closures come two weeks after the collapse of the California bank IndyMac.

 

Coming to a blog near you real soon now. Highlights:

Talk ain’t always cheap.

Maintenance deferred is maintenance denied.

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in.

What’s up with the endowment?

This one’s easy. Way up! 9% in 10 months. Due largely to commodities! Now before you say oil. Wheat, copper, and other commodities are up too. Of course, that may be passed along cost from higher oil. Then there’s food prices which the World Bank says went up 75% due to biofuel. Then there is the debate about how much of the price rises are due to speculation. And a new unexpected weirdness. I agree with Joe Lieberman on something! Large institutional investors, like Harvard, should not be allowed to speculate in energy and food.

And we save how much by de-unionizing labor?

So what are Allied-Barton and Harvard administrators talking about all this time?

The old contract was supposed to expire on June 30, 2008. Like a week ago. Nothing has been heard. BTW, the guards at Harvard Medical School don’t wear Allied-Barton whites. I shall make further inquiries.

Gotta get on the Red Line. More latta…

Bill McKibben was the first to make me aware that the importance of access to a vast store of low entropy carbon, is often undersold in describing the rise of capitalism. Normally, the Protestant ethic and/or Yankee ingenuity is center stage. The primeval ferns, having slowly but relentlessly done work against the second law of thermodynamics for millions of years, are just stage dressing. Fossil fuels look like lifeless ooze and/or rocks, but it has one essential property due to the action of life – the ability to progress to lower entropy state. This biogeological piggy bank has made a huge contribution to the rise of capitalism. Unfortunately, it has led to enormous as yet unaccounted costs of production.² One of these mega-externalities is the release of Carbon Dioxide and the consequent global warming. The crisis over ownership of low entropy carbon, predicted in the early ’70’s¹, is well upon us. The Carbon Wars of Acquisition are here, but are we facing Carbon Wars of Ejection – social dislocation due to global warming? You might check in with Bill McKibben.

This is Head of the Charles weekend and the Yard is posted with security regulations. Among them that access to the Houses, which includes Adams, will be restricted. I would be remiss, if I did not point out that Harvard’s Law Enforcement Community would like non-Harvard people to be the guest of a Harvard student. There will be other chances to see him. And I will be reporting on my trip to the First Annual:

IFG Teach-in: Confronting the Global Triple Crisis – Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction

¹James Ridgeway, The Last Play: The Struggle to Monopolize the World’s Energy Resources, Mentor/New American Library 1974.

²It has also had deleterious effects on economic theory by encouraging the erroneous assumption that the human econosphere is unbounded. It is potentially unbounded in an astrophysical sense, but there is a very large investment barrier presented by the gravitational well of the earth that makes states outside it effectively inaccessible on a time scale comparable to the global warming crisis.

Also, morning becomes Μήδεια. Some people think she’s a cut up, but she makes me feel young. Code Pink had a card carrrying girlie-man with them. He was wearing a pink hat. I haven’t seen that since I left New York City. I got’s to get me one.