More corporate welfare

Markets rebounded yesterday. Spring, it seemed, had come early. Bank of America was riding to the rescue of the embattled mortgage lender American Century, and the bathroom attendant at the Fed Bernanke, wringing hands of great worry, is promising steep cuts in the prime rate for the incompetent banking industry. If Bernanke's words pumped up a sagging capitalist morale, for those with a long memory, he is proposing a tried and true remedy for banks and lenders in deep trouble by throwing away easy money good or bad. Americans have poor capacity for history but think of the S&L scandals in which a Bush uncle and a Bush son were up to their necks in. And then ten years ago the rescue of a failed hedge funds which came on the heels of the Asian downturn. So once again ratepayers, the little men and women whom the banks rip off with endless fees and charges, have to pull belts tighter to bail out the fat cats, coupon clippers, and the whole sorry, smelly capitalists who are greedy and what's more incompetent and should be behind prison walls instead of living high on the hog on say Park Avenue or Greenwich, Connecticut. We should feel no pain for this gang of theives who sit on very fat wallets. John Thain fresh from the NYSE/Euronext and formerly of Goldman Sachs, now ceo of Merrill Lynch is saying his old white shoe firm is going to write down us$15bn of bad subprime debts. Boo hoo...and that is just the beginning of bigger write downs for all investment banking houses whose greed is as depthless as universe. Had the feckle Congress had a strong spine, it would re enact legislation which would keep the banks from slipping from one side of the banking wall to the other...as the now dead Glass Segal [sic] act did during the FDR run in the White House. Like it or not, the US is sliding more and more into recession, and sterner measures are called for, ones that will put the kabosche[sic] on the greedy banking industry for starters. The housing bubbles won't chasten them, only strong laws and political will and an enlightened electorate can box the rotting fish who run this country into the trash heap where they deserved belong.

It's recession, stupid!

Goldman Sachs is not a sounding board for the investment banking community in shouting loud and clear that the US is in recession. Of course they're calling for steep cuts in the prime interest rate to allow the dykes to open for liquidity. But these very fools have done much harm in throwing the country and perhaps the world into recession. The housing bubble. Goldman Sachs & co have greedily sliced and diced and sold off cleaver financial instruments to the greedy who saw nothing about cheap money, exploitation of the poor who couldn't sustain high fees, on the mirage of an ever expanding housing markets where the conflated houses would quadruple in value. No more. The mirage is a desert of debt and foreclosures and oases of liquidity long dried up. There is no easy to capital to seek safe tax or investment havens. The timing was bad for these bloodsuckers who are flailing in a volitile sea of low tides as they wallow in the mud of despair.
The financiers will simply have to lump it. Asian banks and sovereign funds may come to the rescue at a price but oh what a price! A loss of cock of the walk in the world. There is no pity for the small guys and gals who will be thrown out of work or picked up at lower earning power or the blight these turds who invented cdo's & the like...or have cut their la la land living style and only breath the rarefied air of wealth and power as others income have sunk or remained stagnant. They are looking only for their survival...and will sink with ther titanic of subprime debt with lifebelts for their usual, rotten class. In the meantime, like Lampedusa's Prince of Salinas, they will sell a good part of themselves to remain comfortable in the dung heap of finance capital with all the immondice of the world which they call home. Let them all go to hell...let them live in the deepest circle of Dante's Inferno. In other days as Sacha Guity's 'Si Versailles m'etait conte' sang through the voice of Edith Piaf, they like the Bourbons of old...would be ... like 'les artrisocrats, on les pendra!'. They would like Mussoline be strung upside down on a lamp light with genitalia stuffed in their greedy mouths!

Lockdown in Ramallah

George Bush visited Palestinian president Mohammed Abbas in Ramallah. So tight was security, it was as though the city were locked down in a prison during a riot. No one could open windows; no one could stand on balconies for a glimpse of heavily protected mini mouse Bush. 18Brumaire is tempted to say that Ramallah was a field as though cleared for war.
Blockhead Bush was in true form, and ever the optimist. His aging bones told him that before the end of his presidency, he would live to see a peace accord between Israel and Palestine, and sotto voce, if the Palestinians acquiesed to Israeli demands.
Dummy Bush has that gift, be it from God?, that he sees in the hearts and minds of men. Look at his feeling on Vladimir Putin into whose eyes dyslexic Bush read good things. And look at the bad blood Bush has with Putin today. See how bubblehead Bush pumped up the reputation of the tin horn general Mushareff of Pakistan, and see what the mess his old friend Pervez has made of fighting Islamic terrorists. The record of good intentions paving Bush's road to hell, is there for everyone to see.
Herr Bush didn't skip a beat in warning Iran for its adverturesome taunting of American warships. Teheran may play with fire but this week more classified documents have come out in Washington about how Lydon Baines Johnson's White House cooked the books on the incursion in the Bay of Tonkin, thereby allowing the US to pursue a non declared and losing war in Vietnam. Doltish Bush fabricated a war in Iraq, so the odds are more than even that he might prove more foolhardy than ever in making a strike against Iran?
As for his predictions on a peace treaty between Tel Aviv and Ramallah, it would be a victors peace, the more especially the Palestinians are deeply divied, and Bush and Omert will not deal with Hamas, nor will they pull up illegal settlements in what the Israeli call Judea and Sumaria...what a piece of historical hokey!. In Abbas, they've a strawman. Had he any guts, he would send the lying and hawkish pair packing. After 40 years, and in spite of Israel carving up occupied Palestine, Tel Aviv has not quenched the age old thirst for Palestinian independence nor the creation of a national homeland.

Polls, Polls, and glitter and glamour

Senator Hillary Clinton's striking comeback in the New Hampshire primary has proven the pollsters wrong. Senator Barak Obama did not trounce her by a double digit per centage; she beat him by 3 per cent. Obama has the gift of gab, and he has enthused America's young who hardly vote. He won the Iowa causus on the merits of his own talents and the eagerness of his youthful supporters. And his win in Iowa, the pollsters hailed as the coming of the new Jerusalem in American politics. Maybe? But pollsters, newscasters, and talking heads work for big outfits who hop from one event to another to sell newspapers or boost or maintain ratings or are every ready to drop pearls of banality for a fee at a drop of the hat. So they found fool's gold in the Iowa primary, and projected their fancy into another win for Mr. Obama, which proved wrong. As those who still read Freund, projection is a sign of flummery, and this in New Hampshire turned out to be the case. Only one poll, a small university poll, had days before the money on Mrs. Clinton, and they predicted that she would nose out Mr. Obama by 3 per centage points. Which she indeed did! They overlooked the Clinton campaigns strengths, and yes experience and hard work in the political arena, and swallowed the false bait of youth and change. Afterwards they sat before tthe cameras and talked up a storm of what went wrong, and the newspapers flowed purple in stilted prose as to how and why Mrs Clinton pulled the rabbit out of the hat in New Hampshire. The press doesn't like Mrs. Clinton, nor do the talking heads on the whole. Like the Roosevelts and the Kennedys before them, they represent a challenge to the old boys and girls circles of privilege and money and the status quo. These fatuous fools have shown themselves incompetent, and the voters in New Hampshire who see the standing of living of theirs sinking and the country they thought they knew, sold to the highest bidder and awash in corruption and incompetence, know who is on their side. And that's partly why Mrs. Clinton rose victorious like a roc out the ashes of Iowa, and triumphed in New Hampshire. Will pollsters and punsters and pundits and journalists learn the right lesson? Maybe yes? Maybe no? Let 18Brumaire quote the great Roman orator Cicero: 'Not to know what has been transaction in former times is to be always as a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge'. And so it has in the pre New Hampshire primary pollsters' projections!

Bush a false prophet

George W Bush is in the holy land, says he, to hasten the creation of a Palestinian state, further the benefits of democracy, and come as a prophet of healing and understanding. Is he serious? Do not believe a word, he says. Look at his actions. As 18Brumaire says, the Israeli dog is waging the Bush mutt. Bush was greet at his arrival at Lod aeroport by the arch Zionist and faux peace maker, Shimon Peres, a hanger on from the old men who created the state of Israel, and who is a chief architect into throwing Palestinians out of the lands on the West Bank.
Bush's road map has come to a cul de sac, for the simple and obvious reason that he puts Israel's demands first and sees the demands of the Palestinians as marginal unless they bend to the will of Tel Aviv.
Mini mouse Bush's actions are so obvious that only his allies and clients can sang hosannahs of praise of their vacuity and emptiness; for they hardly mask Israel's surrogate role as Washington's kapo in the region. The Arab monarchs and presidents who welcome Bush cling to him the more to keep the groundswell of opposition of their own people from toppling them. But the winds of change are blowing and the answer is in the wind, and the day of reckoning is almost upon them.

Mentally challenged Hank Paulson

As CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson proved himself, but as Secretary of the Treasury, he displays symptoms of being mentally challenged. As signs of deep recession become more and obvious, and the dow jones drops double digits and the meltdown in the housing market seems endemic, and the tide of unemployment rises, he is slow to wake up from his Rip Van Winkle sleep to do anything about it. How can he? Wedded as he is the philosophy of the market regulates itself, and believing in the silliness of the sainted Ronald Reagan that the government is an onerous load on our backs, how can he do anything but put off the problems to the Greek Kalends. How can he? His wealth and class loyalties have so distanced him from the suffering of the ordinary American, he is incapable of coming up with anything but bandaids to yawning wounds in the US economy. Had he an ounce of intelligence, he would set to work calling for funding public works---America's infrastructure is if not collapsing,in serious need of repair; in dealing with the ballooning debt as he pursues Bush's guns for butter economy; in improving the country's education; in debt relief for homeowners...he has found a way to relieve the debt of his fellow big bankers, who like Goldman Sachs have pulled the biggest ponzi scheme in coming up with financial instruments which they salami sliced globally for big, fat returns, rosy bottom lines, and indecent bonuses. Paulson is the wrong man for this task; in fact, no one in mini mouse Bush's government has the brains to try to turn the economy around so attached are they to a Bourbon ideology. Paul O'Neill understood but Bush threw him out on the street, and did much to tar and feather his reputation. Throw the bum out of his job!

Youth the conscience of the nation

Eight years of Bush's mean government for the rich, have awaken sleepy student America. They have become energised by the primaries and by some of the more charismatic candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties for the White House. They are articulate but vague as to what they think the US needs other than change and a breath of fresh air, or a big broom to sweep out the special interests on K street and the congress. Compared to the students of the 1960's be they in the US or France or Japan or elsewhere, these American students do match up well. They have less learning and have been feed on the pap of factionalism which the post modernists and post colonialists served up in the universities.
Change will come for that is the law of life, but like babies these students will have to learn to crawl, then walk and talk and try to make up for the years of the blight on the American mind. Speaking of blight has anyone read the broadsheets and the crap in American journalism or the stilted wooden language on the airwaves which the mini mouse Bush's henchmen are giving away to the greedy few multi billion dollar corporation who are dumbing down the American electorate. A tale of caution in the mind control which has seized the land can be found in Per Wahloo's '33 floor'. Look for it if it is in print!

Rockets over Israel

Days before mini mouse Bush's junket to Israel and Palestine's west bank territories, with its sprawling illegal Israeli settlements and crisscrossed with roads and checkpoints, to keep Palestinians in their place and confined to bantustans, two Katusha rockets fired from Lebanon fell on a northern Israeli town causing some property damage. The Israeli authorities have no idea, nor see any reason as to who launched them, nor why at this moment. Well, Henny Penny the sky has not fallen on Tel Aviv's head. Prime minister Olmert won't dare say in public that the rockets came from Hazbullah territory in southern Lebanon, the more especially since his war in Lebanon broke its teeth partly on a resounding defeat by Hasbullah, and that a recent Israeli government report judged Olmert's preemptive war a serious failure and a damage to Tel Aviv's agressive war policy towards its neighbours.
The rockets fell on north Israel as a warning to Israel, for its over the top war against the legally elected Hamas government in the Gaza strip. Its murderous policy and its onerous measures to cower the Gazans through tried and true means practised by the British against the Boers, the Spanish against the Cubans, and the Nazis against the Jews in ghettos and later concentration camps, and other captive populations in the lands Hitler deemed necessary for his policy of Lebensraum for settlement of his Aryan Germans. The idea of Lebensraum is ever present in Israeli settlement in the occupied territories -- and some in Israel think that Sharon made a monumental mistake in pulling out the Gaza strip. The Israeli ideology is based on the bible which is not sound on imperial expansion, but will do to deprive the Palestinians of their rightful homeland.
So rockets fell from Lebanon on Israel as a warning and as a means to give breathing spell to the Palestinians in Gaza whom the Israeli authorities are depriving of food, water, electricity, and the like, and where the Tsuhal come and go as they please killing and maining the civilian population.
Still, one thing is certain, the Israeli in more than 40 years occupation have not quelled the spirit of resistance against its racist and colonial occupation. And the fight continues.

Deborah Kerr

The Sunday magazine edition of the grey old lady, 'the New York Times' at year's end publishes short obits on famous people who died in 2007. Deborah Kerr's name was conspicously absent. She had a long and distinguished career in film; won an Oscar, and got an honorary one years before she died. She is remembered more notably for her scene on the beach with Burt Lanchaster in 'From here to eternity'. Yet she was not a sex symbol but a seasoned actress. This was brought home to 18Brumaire when he saw at the Museum of Modern Art 'the Innocents' based on Henry James' 'Turn of the Screw'. Kerr turns in a strong and stirring performance. Yet at the time the film came out in 1961, the film reviewers save one or two, shot it down, as too Freudian; as too influenced by the great American writer of belles lettres, Edmund Wilson. To today's public the film may seem quaint but it is suggested you see it for the work well done by Kerr. Truman Capote had a hand in the script as did John Mortimer who supplied additional dialogue. If you want to see another side of Kerr, do grab 'Night of the Iguana' with the strong cast of Ava Gardner and Richard Burton. And then there is that haunting and enchanting film based on Rumer Godden's 'Black Narcissus', set in the high mountains of India which offers the film goer the same frisson but in a different way that he or she would have in seeing 'the Innocents'.
To a great lady of the silver screen who has left us, 18Brumaire vous salue!

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, well, it must be a recession

No one among the candidates is talking about recession, nor about the subprime meltdown in a serious way. Where are the position papers? Recent unemployment figures are proof that the US is sinking deeper in recession no matter what the hand tailored suited economists and bankers say on the BBC or CNN or NPR or any other network. And what about the sinking dollar? And the jobs?
The only sensible talk 18Brumaire has heard so far is letting the whopping taxcut that Bush and his toilet bowl cleaner at the Fed Greenspan allowed for the rich, die on the vine. And the taxes forgiven return to the public coffers. Calpers the California teachers union which has billions to invest has put hedgefunds on warning that they are loathe to pay high fees which buoy up fat pay packets for incompetent senior managers. It's about time that the elite get their financial wings cut, and the Democrats set forth a programme to narrow the growing income gap between the ordinary worker and the ceo...340 per cent separates them in pay!
This country is ready for change, everyone says so. But no one has a clear idea. Unless there is a groundswell from below and a meeting of the minds with the electoral base, we're going to get the same old, same old baloney.