Spot on Douglas!

Sad, because, unless one is actually insured, one would virtually have to have lucky investments in the industry just to afford their “services.”

y’know . . . . . in the day, shares of brawndo or starbucks will be mandatory more or less to keep one’s tattoo liquid. When or if they ever figure out it’s not what plants crave, the great monarchies and their dashing monopolists will have left the building. these are still heady days for the thirst mutilators and their affectionate plants. their stock has been greasy kid stuff for decades. i wonder which sector will bottom out first – banks, insurers or military industrials?

I have to admit i drank some at a semi-formal sporting event in which i was playing. I don’t really know what happened, but i was very conscious of my electrolytes for brief moments. I think that improved my game until i became aware and remarked upon it laughingly. Then i think my game suffered a bit. Since then have only sipped at the fountain of mutilation when toilet water was the only other option.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04

Having recently read Douglas’ book (and sent copies to friends), I’m convinced that limits on executive pay is a sideshow, really. Even being angry at Goldman misses the point: They’re just doing what we’ve asked them to do in the system we’ve created, which is make money. If it’s money on money that creates nothing of value, that’s fine too. Because we can buy their stock and share in their Ponzi-like theft and aggregation of wealth.

I love that we’re always talking about the “bets” that various Wall Street institutions make. Pretty much sums up the absurdity of the economic system we have. It’s Vegas with spreadsheets and monthly statements.

The “pay czar” is just rearranging the pillows on the deck chairs that still others are rearranging, for lack of a better metaphor (inside a metaphor). That, and the ever-weakening effort to tighten regulations, will make little difference. The whole corporatist system is what needs to change.

My hunch is that President Obama, who just raised $2 million at a $30,000 PER COUPLE fundraiser on Wall Street this week, is not the man to bring about substantial, structural change. He doesn’t get it. (He should read Life, Inc., of course. That would help.)

Heard you on FMU in Hackensack.

There’s no question that Wall Street runs Congress, and Goldman runs especially the Democrat Party. Their tentacles are deep.

It’s not that Obama doesn’t get it – it’s that he’s in on it, he’s run by a cabal of jackals Emmanuel, Axelrod and Orszag and Summers who don’t serve the American people.

It’s quite a stark situation.

Now Goldman is are hoping to make another big killing selling derivatives on Crap and Trade travesty that this cabal of jackals is promulgating.

True enough Bill.

I read the same sentiment a lot. To think and understand it clearly is to realise that the days of the DOW averaging ~ 10% a year are over. The whole industry should be interested in engineering a system that (o goody) performs 1 or 2 percentage points above growth. This will be terribly simple and will probably require they lay off 75% of their spreadsheet slaves and slavers, but there will be more time for whatever else they do with their money.

What the heck, just legalise cocaine and they will all find jobs without skipping a beat.

-mason

Sorry to comment so late, but this little blog should be published in the national financial media. I’m now a reader. Keep it up.
Gerry

Thanks. I suppose this *is* the national financial media – or at least a tiny aspect of it. Just not the paid kind.

All humour aside, isn’t it absurd there was so much talk of “moral hazard” when it was being decided to bail AIG?

“Insurance” has always been a difficult concept for me. In ways, it *is* a giant aspect of the game rather than just another player.

Introduce our representatives and our politicians and their appointed governors and cabinets: i begin to wonder where it all really ends or begins. Increasingly, the media i read and listen to points curiously to the clusterf. (Yes Clus-terf: “The phenomena, geography or field associated with or defining an event, a situation, a state of affairs.”)

Combine this with the recent broadcast of The Prisoner and i am increasingly bewildered! Just watching the adverts between segments had been especially disturbing.

All humours restored, for the moment, i realise these products would be available from the village commissary except victory gin and cigarettes.

Is oily gin really so much worse for me? Will the hangovers be worse? I’ve heard the mermaids singing and of the mermen who play basketball with Barak. Who smokes with him, i wonder?

Then there is the age old question: who or what really are the “Security Risks?” Is it me? Have i “lingered in the chambers of the sea” and been found malingering, “stretched on the floor” or “pinned wriggling on the wall?”
Dare i trace or circumscribe my pends curious topography?

- H Styrax

Mr. Styrax

1

Mr. Hecatomb Styrax, the owner of a large estate
and of large muscles,
A “blue” and a climber of mountains, has married
at the age of 28,
He being at that age a virgin,
The term “virgo” being made male in mediaeval latinity;
His ineptitudes
Having driven his wife from one religious excess to another.
She has abandoned the vicar
For he was lacking in vehemence;
She is now the high-priestess
Of a modern and ethical cult,
And even now, Mr. Styrax
Does not believe in aesthetics.

2

His brother has taken to gipsies,
But the son-in-law of Mr. H. Styrax
Objects to perfumed cigarettes.
In the parlance of Niccolo Machiavelli:
“Thus things proceed in their circle”;
And thus the empire is maintained.

Ezra Pound
MOEURS CONTEMPORAINES
From Quia Pauper Amavi
Egoist Press (London)
1919
(first published, Little Review, 19`8)