Hard to Be Soft, Tough to Be Tender
Noble-prize winning economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen believe we need another metric other than G.D.P. (gross domestic product) which measures sustainable growth with an eye towards human welfare. Toronto-based band Metric (sounds like the Pixies):



Inglourious Basterd (...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead) HUGO STIGLITZ (no relation):



My grandfather Siegfried passed away recently at the age of 94. He was first generation German-American and had lived through the Great Depression. He was drafted into the US Army in November of 1942, served in the South Pacific, receiving a battlefield commission.

His mother had come to America by boat and had five sisters who remained in Germany. They all lived into their 90s or 100s. (Two of his cousins were sent to the Eastern Front and were never heard from again.) His father was a construction worker in New York City and was crushed to death by some girders while on the job. His mother took my grandfather and his sister to Duluth, Minnesota and became a podiatrist. She never remarried.

Before the war, he played football in college. They wore leather helmets without a facemask. After the war, he and my grandmother moved to the Chicago suburbs. They were the last ones on the block to purchase a television, because he believed it was a passing fad. He was a cheery, honest man with a good sense of humor.

When I was a kid he nicknamed me "Petrovich" whether because in his eyes I had Communist tendencies or a Russian soul, I never found out. But it was flattering that I was the only grandchild he nicknamed and it always heartwarming the way he'd call it out as if he was surprised to see me - "Petrovitch!" - whenever we met.

This new derby movie directed by Drew Barrymore looks like it could be good. Ellen Page stars as Babe Ruthless and Barrymore's character is Smashly Simpson (does she not like Ashly or are they friends?). Kristin Wiig is Maggie Mayhem, Eve is Rosa Sparks, Zoe Bell is Bloody Holly, Ari Graynor is Eva Destruction, Juliette Lewis is Iron Maven, and looks like Andrew Wilson (brother of Luke and Owen) is the underdogs' coach. There's also the Manson sisters and Jaba the Slut.

Hate, Love, Chores: Lorrie Moore’s Midwest Chronicle by Motoko Rich

Last Year’s Role Model
by Lorrie Moore

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? by Paul Krugman

Lehman Had to Die So Global Finance Could Live by Joe Nocera

Martin Wolf interviews Nouriel Roubini

And though the news was rather sad, well I just had to laugh




Michiko Kakutani's review of "A Gate at the Stairs."

"Eyes Wide Open" by Jonathan Lethem

From "In Fed We Trust," by David Wessel

Barney Frank, the congressman from Massachusetts, proposed declaring Monday, September 15, to be Free Market Day. On Sunday, the Fed and the Treasury let Lehman fail; on Tuesday, they took over AIG. "The national commitment to the free market lasted one day," Frank said. "It was Monday."

Article on Barney Frank in the Boston Globe.

Frank on Planet Money.

Obamacare: It's People!



Rick Perlstein's In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

(via Krugman)

Along with the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam and John Waters, one of favorite moviemakers is John Carpenter. He made Escape from New York, The Thing, They Live and Big Trouble in Little China, which the Onion features in its "Better Late Than Never?" section.

Also Quentin Tarantino is good, and his new movie Inglourious Basterds is his best since Pulp Fiction.

"That's what we like about you, Mulder. Your ideas are even weirder than ours."

John Fitzgerald Byers (Bruce Harwood) was once a public relations worker for the FCC. He was a conservative dresser with a neatly trimmed beard, a stark contrast to his grungier comrades. He had at least some working knowledge of medicine, genetics and chemistry and is known for the famous line, "That's what we like about you, Mulder. Your ideas are even weirder than ours." He was born on November 22, 1963, the same day that President Kennedy died. His parents named him after the fallen president. His name would have been Bertram otherwise. Byers was the most "normal" of the three, and while Frohike and Langly were seemingly born angry misfits, Byers dreamed of a quiet, uneventful, suburban life. Byers' father was a high-ranking government official, but they never saw eye to eye and when Byers' father appears in The Lone Gunmen pilot, the two hadn't spoken for some time.

Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood) was a former '60s radical and the oldest of the three. Though a skilled computer hacker, Frohike was primarily the photography specialist for the newsletter. Frohike had a lascivious attitude toward women. However, he had a more purely romantic attitude towards Dana Scully; when she was gravely ill in the episode 'One Breath', Frohike appeared at the hospital in a tailored suit carrying a bouquet. His unique sense of fashion made him stand out: leather jackets, furry vests, combat boots, fingerless gloves, etc. Frohike considered himself the "action man" of the trio and would often be seen doing very intense stunts (many rigged to look more impressive than they really were). Despite his childish scraps with Langly and others, Frohike's age and experience gave him a kind of quiet wisdom that occasionally surfaced when he consoled his friends about the sorry nature of their lives. In The Lone Gunmen episode "Tango de los Pistoleros," Frohike was revealed to be a former tango champion who danced under the stage name "El Lobo."

Richard Langly (Dean Haglund) was the most confrontational and socially immature of the three. He was a big fan of The Ramones and enjoyed critiquing the scientific inaccuracies of the short-lived sci-fi series Earth 2, and he had a long-running competition with Frohike over who was a better computer hacker. He also had "a philosophical aversion to having his image bounced off a satellite." His nickname was "Ringo". Langly was a Dungeons and Dragons player (as 'Lord Manhammer') and enjoyed violent videogames like Quake.

Happy Birthdays to India and Julia Child (if she was still around).

Solitary Crow On Fence Post Portending Doom, Analysts Warn














The wingèd harbinger of our own condemnation.

Run Crying to Mama

The funniest moment for me during the Great Panic was when the freewheeling global investment banks reverted to regular national banks.

Adding to questions about Mr. Paulson’s role, critics say, is the fact that Goldman Sachs was among a group of banks that received substantial government assistance during the turmoil. Goldman not only received $13 billion in taxpayer money as a result of the A.I.G. bailout, but also was given permission at the height of the crisis to convert from an investment firm to a national bank, giving it easier access to federal financing in the event it came under greater financial pressure.

As did the other big investment banks who years before had successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to repeal the "archaic"Glass Stegall Act.

Lollapalooza yesterday had Gomez, Coheed & Cambria and Tool. (Unfortunately the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played at the same time as Tool.)





Tonight there's a show at a small venue with Josh Homme of the the Queens of the Stone Age, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones. It sold out quickly. In 1999 a friend got us tickets to a Halloween show at the same place with the Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age which was amazing. After the Queens played two guys dressed as Teletubbies came out on stage and took off their heads. One had a mask of Al Gore on, the other had a mask of Bush. Grohl ran around in the crowd which was crazy.

When I was in college I was lucky enough to attend the original Lollapalooza which had the Rollins Band, the Butthole Surfers, Nine Inch Nales, Ice-T and Body Count, Jane's Addiction, Living Color, and Siouxsie and the Banshies. 1996 was great too with Soundgarden, the Ramones, Rancid, and the Wu-Tang Clan.

Sometimes William Safire's On Language column makes me laugh:

The geezersphere will remember the previous vogue use of model to describe the willowy women on whom clothes designers draped their creations. That word’s meaning was later applied by captious caption writers to any attractive female in a tabloid’s photos. (I had a date once in the 1950s with the model Nancy Berg, who along with the cover girls Suzy Parker and her sister Dorian Leigh broke the $100-an-hour modeling fee. In that era, those were the models to follow, blazing the trail for today’s supermodels.)

In hindsight, if Obama gets decent health care reform, forgoing the Swedish model of banking reform may be seen smart polically for it placated the deficit hawks who are suspicious of government. If not, it will be seen as a risky move, things could have easily turned out worse, which allowed the banking sector to remain in bad shape and hurt the economic outlook more than necessary.

The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi

Taibbi mentions Time magazine's Dewey Defeats Truman cover:

It became almost a national cliche that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy - a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD.

Interesting that Time takes the time to critcize the piece:

"The [Rolling Stone] article makes a very compelling case against Goldman Sachs, but I think the problems it identifies are pervasive in financial firms and corporate America in general," says Nell Minow, who is the co-founder of the Corporate Library, a research firm that tracks corporate-governance issues. "We need to launch substantive financial reform rather than weighing the faults of one firm versus another." Minow's point is this: spend too much time on Goldman and you miss the fact of how broadly the financial system and the regulations that are supposed to keep profiteers in check failed us. And she's right.

Taibbi responds:

I had to read that passage several times to even begin to grasp its ostensible meaning. Apparently this is the best argument that Time could come up with to discredit this article, that the rhetorical technique of using a specific example of a specific bank like Goldman to tell a broader story about Wall Street in general distracts readers from the "more important" issue of how government regulators... failed to stop banks like Goldman! I mean, really, how’s that for circular thinking? This is silly stuff even by Time magazine’s standards.

I’ve been shocked by how many grown adult people seem to have swallowed this argument, that the argument against Goldman's behavior during the bubbles of recent decades is invalid because "everyone was doing it" - and other banks, like for instance Morgan Stanley, were "just as bad" as Goldman was.

Two things about that. One, it isn't true, not really. By any reasonable measure Goldman is and has been the baddest guy on the block for a long time. When it comes to government influence, no other Wall Street company even comes close. And while maybe one might have made an argument that other players were more damaging to society before the crisis of last year, there's simply no question now, after the bailouts and especially after the AIG fiasco, that Goldman now reigns supreme in the area of insider advantage. To pick any other bank to tell the story of the rapidly growing influence of Wall Street on politics and the blurring of public and private roles would be a glaring journalistic oversight, and surely even Goldman’s biggest supporters would admit this.

Two, even if it is true that "everyone else was doing it": so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes - and the response isn't "You're wrong," or "We didn't do that shit, not us," but "Well, Morgan did the same stuff," and "Why aren't you writing about Morgan?"

Why didn't we write about Morgan? Because we didn't. Because it's your turn, you assholes. Maybe later someone will tell the story of the other banks, but for now, while most ordinary people are only just learning about the workings of the financial innovation era that blew up in their faces last year, the top dog in that universe is going to be first in line to get the special treatment. That might be inconvenient for Goldman, but it doesn’t make the things I or anyone else say about them untrue.

Normally I don't care so much when people criticize my work. It goes with the territory. But in this case, the response of a bank like Goldman and Goldman's supporters is characteristic of the subject matter in a way that is important to point out, even after the fact of publication. These are powerful people who know how to play the public relations game, have all the appropriate contacts, and have a playbook that they follow to discredit their critics. Whether it's me now or the next guy who takes them on, they're going to come back with some kind of charge, be it "Everyone was doing it," or "We're just smarter than the other guys, you can't blame us for that," or "The real culprits are the ineffective regulators," something.

As much as I agree with Taibbi, I don't blame Obama for bringing on Geithner and Larry Summers in the midst of a crisis. They know the ropes and have been doing and saying the right things since the crisis hit. And ultimately Obama is in charge. That's politics: Goldman and Wall Street will try to mitigate the backlash - and they have plenty of cash and influence in their arsenal - but at the end of the day, they're "too big to fail" and essential to the economy. It's a dance with the devil.

And it should be noted Goldman Sachs tends to lean towards the Democrats and Taibbi is libertarian in a vaguely conservative manner. He fails to mention the Republican's raison d'etre: less government, less regulation, and a jihad against campaign finance reform. It was the conservative policy agenda that enabled the collapse. At least Taibbi didn't blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And he is quite correct to highlight the Clintonoid's culpability:

A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated - and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn't exactly what Goldman had in mind. "The banks go crazy - they want it stopped," says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped."

Clinton's reigning economic foursome - "especially Rubin," according to Greenberger - called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 1l,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

Hitchens on Iran and Iraq.

Krugman on Charlie Rose

Transformers: ROTF
How Michael Bay met Obama.



Michael Bay finally made an art movie by Charlie Jane Anders.

(via Yglesias).

You know when the apolitical jocks start showing solidarity it's serious business.

(via Andrew Sullivan who is overdue for a mental health break.)

Satrapi-Makhmalbaf Joint Conference EU Parliament Brussels

Invited by European Green Party Deputy Daniel Cohn Bendit (Iconic Former Student Leader of France's May 68 Revolution) , Iranian Filmmakers Marjane Satrapi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf demand foreign governments Not to recognize the government of so-called President Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.