I read it in The Rolling Stone

Seems like practically all the big dogs in the economics part of the Obama admin are Goldman Sachs alums, and it looks like many regard GS in the same way Dick Cheney saw halliburton. Matt Taibbi, writing on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. …

Read all of the story here, and then contemplate this, from Sunday's NYT:

Up and down Wall Street, analysts and traders are buzzing that Goldman, which only recently paid back its government bailout money, will report blowout profits from trading on Tuesday.

Read the rest of that here. Are we Americans so befuddled and discouraged that we will accept anything from the banksters and big-money guys? Is there nothing that will trigger righteous anger? What does it take to get an uprising rolling?
The class war must be over, and the rich won it going away. I still think among all these billions of bail-out bucks floating around, there should be a billion for a special prosecutor to look into financial operations that led us here. I want to see footage of the eviscerated, emasculated corpses of bankers dangling from the light standards of Wall Street.

Palin pales

We had a dear friend down for an overnighter Friday. Had a fine time eating and drinking wine and talking about this and that. She used to live in Wasilla, Alaska, and has some pungent things to say about fleeing-Gov. Sarah Palin. More interesting yet for public consumption is an editorial that ran Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, no bunch on lib softies, on why Palin shouldn't even think it:

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

Given that array of impending miseries, would we want a half-bright narcissist running things? Sarah's life trajectory traces that of a lot of people in this world, but it doesn't qualify her for high office. Read the entire editorial here.

Border catch-up

Of late I've neglected the action to our south, but things are still happening apace. Charles Bowden, a man with considerable insight into how things operate in Mexico, has written a jarring piece for Mother Jones about the experiences of a Mexican reporter who has applied for asylum in the U.S. after having given offense to the army in Mexico. He stands in mortal danger for having done so.

To gain political asylum, applicants must prove they have been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution because of their political opinion or an "immutable characteristic" such as race, religion, or nationality. When it comes to people fleeing Mexico, the United States has quibbled with claims of immutability, telling Mexican cops running from the cartels that they should just stop being a cop, move to another part of Mexico, become a plumber. But (the reporter) can't hide from the Army. Those three stories he filed in 2005, the opinions therein, they created an immutable impression on the Army. After that he apologized. He ceased writing anything bad about the Army even when he witnessed them killing people in his town in February 2008. None of this helped. When the Army swept the area again a few months later, they came after him.
(The reporter's American lawyer) says, "The concept of revenge is part of the Mexican political system. Emilio has insulted the institution and it has an incredible memory. The only thing worse he could do, he has done also—to leave the country and denounce it from the US side of the border."

Read all the story here.
A couple years back, Newspaper Tree in El Paso wrote up a guy named Géminis Ochoa who was a leader of the street vendors scuffling in Ciudad Juarez:

When Géminis got to Juárez, he didn't have a cent to his name. He started selling newspapers on the street, specifically the afternoon paper “El Mexicano,” in order to eat. While doing this, he got to know many street vendors Downtown, and became fed up with seeing how the cops constantly abused them, confiscating their merchandise, extorting money from them, and even beating them from time to time.
Thinking that if they were organized they wouldn't be so abused, Géminis started recruiting some of the street vendors to create a union

.
The whole of that fascinating story here.
And, then, from the July 1 edition of the World's Worst Newspaper, passing mention of Ochoa's fate:
The killing continued Tuesday, including the fatal shooting of Geminis Ochoa, a leader of downtown street vendors during riots years ago, Juárez media reported.
They don't believe in letting guys like Ochoa gain too much traction in Mexico, as they can upset the proper order of things. Read all the EPTimes story here.
Things are hot outside of the big city of Wazoo. From the LATimes on killing out in the hinterlands of Chihuahua:

Anti-crime activists today decried the slaying of a protest leader in northern Mexico who went public after his brother was kidnapped in May.
Benjamin LeBaron, 32, and a brother-in-law were shot to death Tuesday after they were seized by gunmen in Galeana, a farming town in the border state of Chihuahua.

Read all of that one here.
i know some nice people who are ranchers down that direction. The big-time media would do well to pay more attention to things going on across the street while they're getting all exercised about the Uighurs in western China.

A better class of scam spam

I was pleased to receive the following scam note, as it reassures me that a better grade of person is going into scamming these days.

The Scottish Investment Trust PLC
6 Albyn Place
Edinburgh EH2 4NL,
United Kingdom.

Dear Friend,
I am Mr. John Kennedy, the Fund Manager of Scottish Investment International. The World Largest Fund Management Company with over £1.2Trillion Capital Investment Fund.
Nevertheless, as The Scottish Fund Manager, I handle all our Investor's Direct Capital Funds. As a routine, every investor gets the percentage profit or dividend from the total cash he or she invested into the company annually. Last year it was announced that the profit margin was 20% after calculating carefully I found out that the profit margin was 21.1% that is an excess of 1.2% on each investor so I secretly extracted 1.2% Excess Maximum Return Capital Profit (EMRCP) per annum on each of the Investor's Marginal Capital Fund. As an expert, I have made over £45, 745, 000. 00 from the Investor's EMRCP and hereby looking for someone to trust who will stand as an Investor to receive the fund as Annual Investment Proceeds from Scottish Marginal Capital Fund.
All confirmable documents to back up the claims will be made available to you prior to your acceptance.
Meanwhile, I have worked out the modalities and technicalities whereby the funds can be claimed in any of our 6 clearing Houses without any hitches. Our sharing ratio will be 70-30. If you are interested, you should send your direct phone number so we could discuss more on phone as regard the transaction.

Best Regards,

Mr. John Kennedy
Fund Manager Scottish Investment Trust Plc
www.sit.co.uk
http://www.sit.co.uk/about/key_personnel/manager/

Isn't that an improvement from African names writing from Hotmail addresses?

The Glorious Fourth

One of my favorite observances. Wife said we should read something special as homage to the day, but we couldn't think of what it would be, beyond the Declaration of Independence itself. The signers stand yet as exemplars of moral courage, willing to risk all for an ideal. Bet nobody there checked a poll before signing on. We are lucky to live in a political system that sorta descends from such vision. Not sure what they'd make of Goldman Sachs, et al., though.
We're off this evening to eat shrimp in the country with Mike the Pirate and his crew. That should put a fine cap on the day. A happy Fourth to all.
End note: And for a grand finale, after eating shrimp and drinking white wine, we went out to Swan Point with a 6th-grade boy and shot off fireworks. Who could ask for anything more? How long's it been since you held a roman candle?

Dark Friday & light

We had a power outage of several hours duration this afternoon and early evening. Electric company told a neighbor that it ran as far as Edna and left 1,000 customers without power. We sat out front and enjoyed such breeze as we had off the bay, even ate our dinner out on the front sidewalk. It wasn't as hot as it could have been, but still it was nice to get the power back on and the AC ginning again. It is only air conditioning that permits comfortable living here six months of the year. Older houses are built to catch prevailing breezes, but new ones are built to be air conditioned.
On a bizarre note, Sarah Palin is resigning as governor of Alaska. I watch that silly, vain, and vapid woman and feel that she believes she can be president of this country. It's sorta sweet that the 'Yes-I-can' philosophy has so triumphed, but I don't think so. She will be an embarrassment to the Rs, unless her intentions are to lead Alaska in an independence movement. She should nurse no ambition larger than to be the leading real-estate broker in Wasilla, Alaska, and an esteemed member of her church. Anything beyond that is beyond her.

The second wave ashore

D-Day slipped past quietly a few weeks ago. People are a little more aware of it since the Tom Hanks movie, but it doesn't loom as it did when I was a kid and everybody's daddy was a WWII vet. Maybe forty years ago when life still ran in Technicolor instead of grays and muted pastels, I used to hang around some with a D-Day veteran. I see no harm in writing his name, as I doubt much of anyone remembers him today. Henry Page was a rangy, ropy kind of guy, maybe 5'10" and 165 or so. If I characterize him as you would a fighter, it's because I think he'd done some boxing. He would occasionally get into scuffles if he had a drop taken, and he would a drop take. People were a little wary of him, but I always liked him. Henry was a lantern-jawed guy with snaggly teeth and looked like an Amerind, but not a Southwestern tribe … maybe a Sioux or someone from up north. What he was was an Hispano from up in New Mexico, gringo name notwithstanding. Everyone called him Kiki, short for Enrique. We were printers and union brothers together on the El Paso Times. I gambled and drank with Henry, got into that foolishness that happens when you're young and frisky.
Henry was a terrible gambler, the kind of guy who'd play a 29-to-one horse in the last race because he needed 60 bucks to get even on the day, or who'd draw to an inside straight or take two cards to a flush. He always said, "I went ashore in the second wave on D-Day, and I figure it's all gravy since then. Why not take a chance?" He hit those longshots about as often as you'd expect, but when he did, it was to him some sort of celestial payback for the second-wave experience.
I wandered off into the bigger world and lost of track of Henry, and then maybe 20 or 25 years later slipped back onto old stomping grounds and asked a friend about Henry. He told me that a few years before, Henry had been sitting at the dinner table and his daughter had said, "Why don't you just go away and leave us alone." Henry had driven out onto a country road there in Anthony and blown his brains out with a pistol.