So, Who Is Brooksley Born?

how can this economic fraud we are living through be understood? one could follow the wiki tree of pages associated with the notion of 'swaptions'.

let's see...start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaption or here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate_swap or perhaps here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_%28finance%29 or, maybe better, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_%28finance%29, and you get the idea...right? no?

well perhaps there's an easier way.

we could look at the people who sold us this fraud and one of the people who stood up to them. you don't have to read any 'great books'. just watch two videos:

Michael Greenberger on credit rating agencies: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293308-7 (which led to my question)

and

a frontline presentation, 'the warning': http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid (which cleared up my question-big time).

so, who is Brooksley Born?

someone who makes a liar out of all the pols and goldman suchs execs currently running around saying 'there's no way we could have seen this coming...'! it seems brooksley did and was put down hard for trying to act on what she saw by Alan Greenspan, Timothy Franz Geithner, and Lawrence Henry (the Hitman) Summers! funny, how the geith and hitman summers are still around.

now i'm not a conspiracy theorist, but i am seeing a reagan-clinton-bush-obama conservative continuum. and while the political party in the WH might change, the Fall St. crowd continues to party on (unregulated). its pretty obvious that the conservatives have gotten all they ever wanted economically: a vast gap in wealth, virtually no taxes for the rich, unregulated fraud markets, a never ending war generating huge profits, and taxpayer bailout bonuses to boot! (you see, despite what your mom might have taught you, crime does pay!)

so, as we fall, let us remember: Ayn Rand, the sophist soul of 20th century laissez-faire conservative economic BS and Brooksley Born, who could have started the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on the path to undoing what Rand's influence ultimately brought us to. perhaps, if we somehow get smarter, we'll allow Born to regulate Rand!

-end of line-

Blood On the Border

My god, but are the repubs ever so stupid!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36885852/ns/us_news-life

did they really think that non-stupid americans would just quietly watch this racist law come into play? well they have really put a foot in some hole! thank you reeepubs, your stupidity should keep dems in power for a long time to come--if only, we get a dem president that can lead his base to louder and louder protests of the racism so fundamental to GOP! perhaps though, the problem runs deeper...

the problem with a lot of law (particularly that which i deal with on a daily basis) is that it never defines key terms in a rigorous manner, like say, in mathematics. in the case of the az law, they don't define what it is to 'look like' you are an illegal immigrant! and yet, the law demands that the cops stop you to check your papers (pleeze!) if you don't look legal! how stupid can az law makers be??????

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/apr/21/sue-lowden-lowdencare-chickens-nevada


(opps...that's the nevada chicken lady! but, she'd serve just as well in az.)

well...arizonans will find out very soon. i'm predicting that people will be killed over such interrogations. the cops will kill innocent hispanics who should have never been stopped. bad guys from the mex will kill cops! (see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36884616/ns/us_news-life/) hysteria will ensue and the whole mexus border will end up like nuevo laredo.

of course, this has all happened before:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-04-1930s-deportees-cover_x.htm


http://calstate.fullerton.edu/news/2005/valenciana.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation ("the U.S. government began an active drive against immigrants living illegally in the country"--note, this is what the conservatives are calling for)

http://www.coh.arizona.edu/divergencias/current_ed/currentart/envisioningvictims.pdf

Drill Baby Drill Me Now Sarah!

well amerika, i guess you got what you were screaming for:
http://videos.al.com/mobile-press-register/2010/04/coast_guard_video_shows_part_o.html

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/drill-baby-drill-champion_n_558014.html and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36800673/ns/us_news-environment/)

how do you like your drilling now? want to see this BP mess in ANWR as well? i'll bet most of the GOP can't find ANWR on a map with it spelled out for them. can sarah louise?

the death of the northern gulf will be a lasting tribute to sarah palin and the rest of the GOP. or is it GUNK? or crap?

repubs stink as bad as a black tide at noon in mississippi. fools and this weak president who wants to flirt with the fools, are the cause of this crap!

obama should never even have dreamed of opening up more of the shelf to these crapitalist oilyGOPs. what was he thinking? was he thinking the same thing most ignorant amerikans think: that the oil drilled off our continental shelf is 'our oil'? are they all so ignorant that they don't know that oil will be sold on the spot market just like any other commodity and then shipped off to anywhere there's the money to purchase it? and, that they'll never see one red commie cent of the proceeds from those sales. sarah and her army are one sorry lot of losers. (drill baby drill!)

i hope obama has learned his lesson (yet again)! play with GOP and you'll get burned. GOP is bad for you!! GOP will make you sick if you eat it up! GOP will make you sick when it get's in your ears! GOP will blind you (to reality--the EARTH is our ONLY home. destroy it and we all get our darwin awards!). GOP makes you sick coming out of your mouth! (drill, baby, drilll!)

i'll predict that this is going to be much worse than the Exxon Valdez.
its going to 'smoke out' the fisheries all along the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana. it could even cause a new economic downturn within the economic theft caused by GOP deregulation of the bankers!

now, the one thing i don't want see is booby jindal and haley barbour (hey, wasn't he lex luthar's sidekick in superman?) come running to the government, they hate, for help.

hey booby, hailey: suck it up! enjoy! its as black as TEA! and yall do like tea, don't cha?

oh, and speaking of tea, or more accurately: TEA BAGGERS! are you tea bagging oilers happy now? you got something that looks like tea in your ocean. you always wanted that, didn't you? well, you got it! how's it taste? like crow? gulp it down. enjoy. and remember: DRILL BABY DRILL!

Pro-Life

i'm ultra liberal and as 'pro-life' as anyone! i have a very simple pro-life teaching:

an embryo ain't a fetus and

a fetus ain't a child!

the corollary to this is:

what's IN a woman's body IS PART of her body and what a woman decides to do with her body is no body else's business but her own!


THE LIFE OF THE WOMAN COMES FIRST!

all else is of secondary importance.

end-of-line

The Southern Republican Leadership Conference

if you are listening to The Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) right now (as i am), then you might see what a threat to this country the GOP and the tea baggers are! did you hear mike pence's
vitriolic christian country rant? the distortion of the truth and the attack on obama? this guy came very close to calling for insurrection! hmmm...reminds me of someone else (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY&feature=related). note the 'health care' component of this rant against your 'hard core commie'!

dear readers, we live in interesting times. amerika is as close to coming apart now as it was in the sixties. except, in the sixties, it was people fighting for their civil rights to equal accommodation, education, housing, employment, and opportunity (http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h2876.html). they were opposed! who were they opposed by? white southern 'christian' conservatives who called them 'commies' because they wanted basic civil rights! now, if these people would resort to violence and bombing (as they did--http://www.history.com/topics/birmingham-church-bombing) to keep blacks from obtaining the ideal this country is founded upon (100 years after the end of the civil war!!), then think of what they will do if they come back to full power. a contract on their fellow amerikans?

now, i hear the howling of this mob and they are no different now from what they were in the 1960s (although their party affiliation has changed from dem to repub and they have a few blacks--'the bumble bee flies because he believes he can fly'--sucking up to their white masters). don't ever be fooled, the reason they want 'limited government' is so they can go back to doing what they want to. and one of the things that they want to do is restore 'normality' (i.e., the way things were before world war II) (e.g., http://www.slate.com/id/2085277/). i'll bet the old, poor, blacks, and hispanics are really looking forward to that!

no, no...the southern republican leadership is just rabble scum (southern conservative unrepentant morons). if the mob (http://nymag.com/news/politics/63662/) comes to power (AGAIN!!), then the country comes to an end (AGAIN?).

end of line!

Tea Baggers Are the Kraker Klown Koalition (KKK)

well, gentle reader, we have seen it all today. the tea bagging party is the rabid racist wing of the republican party (from now on called the white conservative people's party or WCPP on this blog). they have called black members of congress the N word and called Barney Frank the Q word (and probably worse). it is not really ironic to see that racism has reared its ugly nazi head again while we have our first black president. the reason is obvious: right wing radio commentators and politicians are racist (no matter what they say) and their followers (not being as educated or sophisticated as their leaders) cannot help but expressing their true feelings. it's now all out for all to see. whatever the future holds, we now know exactly where these people are coming from. make no mistake about it. tea baggers are scum. the wcpp is a scum party. so, who're we gonna call? scum busters!

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

It's Sunday, Bloody Sunday and There Will Be Blood! Amerika is completely polarized! Amerika is completely paralyzed because Amerika divided into two parties: The White Conservative People's Party (WCPP) vs. the Liberal-Progressive People's Party (LPPP). There is no center. Independents are screwed. They have no party to run to, only a Left-Right choice. But, make no mistake about it, this is not a ‘choice’, THIS IS WAR!!!!!

The WCPP is a party of cynical rich white people who manipulate the formerly middle class and poor white people into voting against their own interest out of fear (as we’ve recently seen with the publication of their power point presentation for contributors). Fear of black people, fear of Hispanics, fear of working people (oh...fear of some of themselves), fear of everything not traditional white Christian conservative and comfortable. What immorality, what bullocks the WCPP has! The LPPP is completely the opposite: loose, undisciplined, weak, moral, basically good, ‘big-tent’, not too bright. Too bad for them, up against the WCPP, they need all the smarts they can muster.

Well, on this Sunday the battle lines are, again, drawn. There is no place for the stinking fear of cowards. All must take a side and the right side must act to bring down the corporations of death: the Amerikan 'health insurance corporations'. The very idea of corporations (which have every interest in you consuming their junk to the max and then dying as quickly as possible so they can sell you the maximum amount of fix'er up medicine in the last 24 hours of your life before stuffing you into a $10,000 box) insuring your health is idiocy! But most Amerikans buy it!!

No, no, no: you have only two choices in Amerika: government by CORPORATIONS or government by an elected GOVERNMENT. I submit to you that corporations are not democracies, they are not your friend, they are little authoritarian regimes where owners and boards call all of the shots and the worker is nothing because they can always find more workers. Owners and their executives and supervisory minions treat the workers like merde because: (1) they can, (2) the owners tell them to, and (3) they like it! Craptialism at its best! Now, if you want to live under authoritarianism, then move to N. Korea or China, but in AmeriCa we’re going to keep these corporations firmly under the control of BIG GOVERNMENT which is the only thing that guarantees the rights of minorities and workers (as well as pursuing BIG SCIENCE, like manned spaceflight)!

Today, if it must be, let there be blood on the House floor! And, let it be the blood of the obstructionist conservative WCPP PIG (Profit Is GOD) types! If there is a GOD, then it is beseeched to let the morals and logic of the LPPP prevail over the ignorance and fear mongering of the WCPP! Let health care become a RIGHT for all AmeriCans and let all PIG types go straight to where they’ll get a good all round (well done) tan forever.

Good soldiers of the Left: now is time to stand up and fight! Although, half of the people we fight for aren't worth a spit, they are still people and we must always remember (even if they don't): we are our brother's keeper (even though he may need to get slapped upside the head--for his own good--from time to time). And now is the time!

Let's get it together and ram this bill right up that most sensitive orifice from which the WCPP speaks most often!

Ooouch...more later!!!!!!!!