What is a proper disposition towards life? It is to accept God as a loving father, who is full of tenderness and forgiveness for us, despite our willful blunders and hardened hearts. He yearns for us, as a father and mother yearn for the return of their most beloved child. It is to accept that we are not lost, we are not abandoned. We are wandering like a wayward child, full of our own headstrong delusions. And our father waits expectantly, calling out for us through the darkness. Jesse, 2018
Und das große Feuer in Soho
sieben Kinder und ein Greis -
in der Menge Mackie Messer, den
man nicht fragt und der nichts weiss.
Und die minderjährige Witwe
deren Namen jeder weiss
wachte auf und war geschändet -
Mackie, welches war dein Preis?
Kurt Weill, Bertholdt Brecht, Die Moritat von Mackier Messer, 1928
Here is an example of the consequences of the failure to reform the outsized and kleptocratic financial system after bailing it out, even years after the latest financial crises.
The former Greek government was certainly more compliant to Western banks and political suggestions. It was the introduction of a 'reform government' in Syriza that rustled the feathers of the international kleptocrats and their organizations. But we have heard all this before, many times, from investigative reporters and whistle-blowers such as John Perkins, on the 'economic hitmen.' I would like to see Europe and Asia begin to take stronger measures to prohibit these banking cartels with long records of banking violations and market rigging from doing business in their regions and with any of their official financial instruments. The US apparently does not have the political will to reform its banking system. How much damage will they stand by and permit these sorts to visit on their people, who always seem to be picking up the pieces, through austerity and privatizations of their national assets. Will these new trade agreements even allow them to exercise their national sovereignty to protect their people from fraudulent financial practices and price gouging in the future? The apologists for white collar criminality like to say, 'don't hate the player hate the game.' But the only way to make the game honest again is to have these bent players take responsibility for their actions, and for the judges to start handing out red cards to any repeat offenders. That would be more statesmanlike than visiting harsh punishments, and austerity, and slanders on their victims.
Wall Street On Parade Goldman Sachs Doesn’t Have Clean Hands in Greece Crisis
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
June 30, 2015
Are Goldman Sachs executives Lloyd Blankfein, Gary Cohn and Addy Loudiadis losing any sleep over elderly pensioners waiting outside shuttered banks in Greece, desperately trying to obtain their pension checks to pay their rent and buy food? Are these Goldman honchos feeling a small pang of conscience over the humiliation by creditors of this once proud country?
Perhaps Blankfein, who famously espoused that he’s “doing God’s work” might shed a tear or two for the small child clinging to her elderly Grandmother’s hand as she searches in Athens for an ATM that will give her $66 from her bank account – the maximum allowed per day under the newly imposed capital controls.
According to investigative reports that appeared in Der Spiegel, the New York Times, BBC, and Bloomberg News from 2010 through 2012, Blankfein, now Goldman Sachs CEO, Cohn, now President and COO, and Loudiadis, a Managing Director, all played a role in structuring complex derivative deals with Greece which accomplished two things: they allowed Greece to hide the true extent of its debt and they ended up almost doubling the amount of debt Greece owed under the dubious derivative deals.
A February 2012 BBC documentary on the Goldman Sachs deal provides a layman’s view of the dirty underbelly of the deal, calling it “a toxic import” from America that is “hastening” the downfall of Greece...
For the unschooled to the ways of Wall Street, one might jump to the conclusion that Greece and its finance officials were knowing participants in the deal. That would be a reasonable assumption were it not for counties and cities and school districts across America that were similarly fleeced and hoodwinked by investment banks on Wall Street.
In March 2010, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) released a study showing that from 2006 through early 2008, Wall Street banks are estimated to have collected as much as $28 billion in termination fees from state and local governments who were desperate to exit abusive derivative deals. That amount does not include the ongoing outsized interest payments that were, and still are being paid in some cases. Experts believe that billions of these abusive derivative deals may still remain unacknowledged by embarrassed municipalities.
Back in 2010 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel first heard of these derivative deals to hide sovereign debt among European Union partners, she had this to say: “It’s a scandal if it turned out that the same banks that brought us to the brink of the abyss helped to fake the statistics.”
"The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life."
Rabindranath Tagore
"Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."
1. Financial Institutions should not be allowed to cheat people through confusing and complex products, or just plain lying about credit cards and mortgages.
2. Financial Institutions should not be allowed to use taxpayers to pick up their risks through deposits or bailouts.
We know what needs to be done. Big financial institutions are flexing their political power to keep us from doing it, and to undermine what has already been attempted.
Auto loans now look like the pre-crisis mortgage market because they were exempted by Congress from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight.
Department of Justice relies on deferred prosecutions and does not take repeat offending institutions to trial, and the SEC is even worse. They are abusing a system that was designed for low level non-violent offenders.
It is time to end the slap on the wrist culture at DOJ and SEC. Fines should be equal, at a minimum, to every dime of profits gained, and there should be an independent judicial review of these deals.
It is time for the Fed to make enforcement a top priority. Big financial institutions have every incentive to commit large financial offenses, and that is what they do. They rig global markets, and launder criminal funds and help the very wealthy to engage in tax cheating.
Dodd-Frank did not end 'too big to fail.' We need to stop talking about it and break up the Big Banks now, and force them to face the consequences of their own investment decisions. Too much of a technocratic approach is undermined over time, favoring a few well-connected, lawyered-up firms over time. What is needed is a structural approach, not a heavier layer of regulation. We need a new Glass-Steagall Law.
Congress must be able to limit the Fed's emergency lending of subsidized loans to global financial institutions without oversight.
Reforming the tax laws is critical to effective reform. Corporations are incented for short term thinking and using stock buybacks to manipulate price performance. The tax code incents Banks to engage in higher leverage and lower capitalization.
High Frequency Traders introduce more volatility without adding value. A targeted financial transaction tax would curb this without affecting mom and pop investors.
The shadow banking system is unregulated and open to serious short term financial risk before the next Lehman or Bear Stearns starts another financial crisis.
The system is rigged, and those that rigged it want to keep it that way.
“Now what is it moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially touching.
...there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power, who have weapons neither of offence nor defence, that none but very hardened persons can endure the thought of it.
Now this was just our Saviour's case: He had laid aside His glory, He had disbanded His legions of Angels, He came on earth without arms, except the arms of truth, meekness, and righteousness, and committed Himself to the world in perfect innocence and sinlessness, and in utter helplessness, as the Lamb of God."
John Henry Newman
'Truly, I say to you, as you have done to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done so to me.’
There was intraday commentary about the Non-Farm Payrolls Report here.
US markets will be closed tomorrow in observance of the 4th of July holiday weekend.
The rest of the world will have to try to carry on without our guidance.
There was intraday commentary about the Non-Farm Payrolls Report here.
Today's economic news was marked by stagnant wages, the lowest labor participation rate in 37 years, increased new unemployment claims and higher continuing unemployment, and a highly distorted unemployment percentage which is the product of callous ignorance and willful misdirection.
For the Fed Vice-Chair to have celebrated the achievement of 'US full employment' from their misguided monetary policy at long last earlier this week is aloof to the point of the tragic.
And it is a fine example of what is wrong with a privileged elite that has come to listen, to see, and to serve only themselves. And they are doing all of it for themselves exceptionally well.
We are called to a different task, to be something different, someone new.
Stocks were edgy today ahead of the long holiday weekend and the Greek referendum.
This is why nice, neat theories of perfectly rational economic behavior fall apart quickly in reality.
This is why regulation is necessary. Because there is a tendency in some people to break the rules, and to bend them over time to serve their disordered minds and appetites.
This is why there must be checks and balances on power. Especially when that power appeals to noble symbols as a cover for their excessive misdeeds and complex secrecy.
We have seen entire sections of corporate organizations bent to the will of persuasive psychopathy. And even when they fail, they will rise up to find a new place to obtain what they need, without shame or remorse, or even a genuine understanding of why they have failed, although they may get better at the execution of their schemes. They will blame everyone else for being unworthy of them.
And sometimes an entire culture can take on the character of the psychopath, especially under periods of intense or protracted stress, when they surrender their wills to the powerful wills of a few. And they will project their increasing deformity on to others, even as they descend steadily into the abyss.
They maintain an emotional detachment, a kind of moral high ground in their own minds, by rationalizing the consequences of their increasingly monstrous behavior and excess by pointing out the failings of others. 'I did not make them believe my lies. They believed because they are inferior. They did not stop me, so they deserved it. '
If they ever speak frankly about their view of things amongst their confidants, the normal person would be stunned by their distorted world view, often writing off large segments of the population as unworthy and disposable, for the most part because they impede their desires, although they will often ascribe it to some irreparable defect in these others, making them unworthy of life.
The high performing psychopath gravitates towards positions of power, saying or doing whatever it takes to get the ability to satisfy their own desires which are insatiable, because they are caught in the hell of being unable to love and feel genuine love in return. They are a black hole of desires and needs.
And psychopaths breed sociopaths, imitators who are able to extinguish their own empathy and remorse through ideology and excess including violence, sex, and drugs.
What would you do to protect your children from people like this? Throughout history people have banded together in order to establish and maintain the rule of law.
This is why romantic notions about markets without law and transparent regulation are so harmful. They turn the power of the markets over to the least scrupulous and self-controlled in a society. This is why any social system without checks and balances, without transparency and restraints, will eventually deteriorate into a dysfunctional system of self-interest and looting.
People are not perfectly rational angels. It is hard to believe that one must say that to an adult audience, but ideology and conditioning can make people blind.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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