More Evidence Of Goldman Sachs' Blood Funnel

I saw Bill Maher offer Matt Taibbi some pushback last night about his Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs. Maher wasn't willing to believe that Goldman has been uniquely positioned to profit from the breakdown of the financial system and the various bubbles created. Maher offered the predictable "why just Goldman" response, and Taibbi decided to talk about the many Goldman officials in high positions in the government. He could have just pointed to this story that leaped from Zero Hedge to the New York Times yesterday.

It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market, peek at investors’ orders and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices.

It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets [...]

Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.

And when a former Goldman Sachs programmer was accused this month of stealing secret computer codes — software that a federal prosecutor said could “manipulate markets in unfair ways” — it only added to the mystery. Goldman acknowledges that it profits from high-frequency trading, but disputes that it has an unfair advantage.

Yet high-frequency specialists clearly have an edge over typical traders, let alone ordinary investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission says it is examining certain aspects of the strategy.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

They literally place their super-fast computers physically close to the machines that govern NYSE trades, to get the jump on competitors and make enough pennies off of the brief ups and downs of stocks to rake in mounds of cash. And in some cases, investors can buy access to buy and sell order information on certain exchanges that can be used to make these quick orders. When Chuck Schumer is calling for an investigation of Wall Street, you know something has gone horribly wrong.

No, Goldman Sachs is not the only organization profiting from this scheme, or any of the numerous others. But their name keeps surfacing among those that are, in pretty much every case. I don't know how much evidence it takes to understand their role in all of this. Taibbi may not have gotten every single solitary thing right in his very long piece, but he got enough right to make some very powerful people nervous. And rightly so.

We need to go further in determining what caused this financial crisis and what pitfalls remain. The new iteration of the Pecora Commission, a Depression-era panel that uncovered the origins of that crisis, can lead the way.

We, the undersigned, call on you to fulfill the responsibilities of your position by joining together in non-partisan cooperation to investigate the origins of the financial crisis in ways that lead to a full understanding of the institutions, people and practices that are responsible for our economic collapse.

In particular, we encourage the adoption of three guidelines that history has taught us are essential to an effective inquiry:

Appoint a single investigator. This individual must have a proven record of exposing fraudulent elites and institutions, and must provide a professional, non-political spirit to the investigation.

Afford no special treatment. No one is off-limits or gets special protection in the investigation.

Provide the tools to do the job. The investigator must be given ample budget and time, full subpoena authority, and the ability to hire and fire staff.

These principles were applied in the 1930s when Congress launched a formal inquiry into the causes of the Great Depression. That commission - led by Ferdinand Pecora - was willing to reach into the highest levels of Wall Street and finance to determine the causes of the economic collapse of 1929. The courage with which the commission greeted its task - and the revelations that courage ensured - inspired the sweeping banking and financial reforms that were the bedrock of our financial system for decades.

Building a new financial foundation requires us to begin on solid ground - the truth. It is only by illuminating the mistakes of the past that we will be able to meet the great challenges of the future.

And they can start by photocopying Matt Taibbi's notes.

Mainstreaming Hate

Amanda Marcotte's Religious review laments that the filmmakers opted for a caricature view of Islam instead of teasing out the internal contradictions common to all religions. It would be better if liberals set an example here. We know how the other side reacts - using "mosques" as a stand-in for "sleeper cells" and trying to frighten real Murcans with tales of the Mooslims coming to take over the gummint and force burqas on our wife and kids. John McCain's boilerplate salute to the Feast of Eid is another example.

But if we don't preach tolerance and associate all Muslims with murderers, then we incite more stuff like this:

A 10-year-old girl sprayed in the face with a chemical Friday, Sept. 26, while at a local Islamic mosque was not the victim of a hate crime, police Chief Richard Biehl said.

The girl was watching children whose parents and relatives had gathered at the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, 26 Josie St., to celebrate Ramadan when she noticed two men standing outside a basement window about 9:40 p.m., according to police.

One of the men then sprayed something through the open window and into the girl's face from a white can with a red top, according to a police report. The girl said she immediately felt burning on her face and felt "sick to her stomach," the report stated.

Other children and a woman in the room felt affects from the chemical and the mosque was evacuated.

Right, it wasn't a hate crime at all.

There's a lot worse out there, like this needlessly provocative "Obsession" DVD showing up in people's newspapers. But someone has to set an example. I appreciate Bill Maher's work to demystify religion but lazy demonization is going to lead to the mainstreaming of hate. It's going to be bad enough in an Obama Administration to get through all the crap thrown at "the other."

Acceptable v. Unacceptable

When you read this story, you have to play back in your mind the vision of Brian Ross getting the release of Hillary Clinton's personal First Lady schedule, flipping through his heavily dog-eared copy of the Starr Report, and studiously matching up dates. All the while approving the clip art of the semen-stained dress and Lewinsky, making sure it all fit in the frame, etc.

You could bust a guy for sexual deviancy just for the work it took to produce this swill.

Hillary Was in White House on "Stained Blue Dress" Day

Schedules Reviewed by ABC Show Hillary May Have Been in the White House When the Fateful Act Was Committed

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives....

The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky's infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House....

This is somehow a perfectly acceptable news item, possibly even acceptable enough for a broadcast story too. And yet coffins of American bodies coming home from an unnecessary war based on deception is too "offensive" for tender eyes.

I'll give you another example. Bill Maher said this about McCain on Hardball today:

you know, we are one terrorist attack away from john mccain i'm sure rising in the polls by ten points. because people think, oh, yeah, he is tougher. he is not tougher about the war. he's dumber about the war. he's dumb about the war because he thinks by keeping troops in the heart of the muslim world that's going to help the war on terror. that's exactly what started the war on terror. that's why bin laden was so angry at the u.s. because we had tloops in saudi arabia. we pulled them out after 9/11, by the way. of course we go right back in and plant them in the heart of the muslim world and build pizza huts. that is why young muslim men want to come here and blow themselves up and kill us. it is not about what happens in iraq. we need to get out of iraq not build bases there.

This is very true. But what of course is so ridiculous is that this is one of the quotes that, when broadly defined, got Rev. Wright in trouble. When it comes down to it, there's not much daylight between "We caused 9/11" and "bin Laden was angry at us about having bases in Saudi Arabia." I think Maher's analysis is correct, but it shouldn't be lost that he's allowed to say it.

The larger point about all this is how conservatives and in particular the media define acceptable discourse, and what will provoke outrage, or barely a twitter. When Janet Jackson shows a covered nipple, the world comes to an end. I saw about 20 minutes of Eliot Spitzer's prostitute's Girls Gone Wild video, played on an endless loop in the middle of the day today, and then we have this really putrid Brian Ross "investigative news article" literally peeping into someone else's bedroom. When Christian conservatives rewrite the words to "God Bless America" and sing it in front of Republican Presidential candidates, nobody in the media considers that to be a "problem" for the GOP because white religious nuts are SUPPOSED to be crazy, and therefore accepted. Black religious figures, on the other hand, when they step outside the bounds as defined in the media by, I don't know, "Sister Act," represent a threat to the Republic.



Now, Janet Folger, who put together that Values Voter Presidential Debate, where "Why should God Bless America" was sung from the stage, has endorsed John McCain. It's as easy to make the guilt-by-association argument with respect to him as it has been to Obama or Clinton's litany of associates. But nobody does.

This is about defining the discourse. And if it hurts Democrats, or anyone who seeks to challenge the status quo, for the most part the videotape rolls. If not it gets locked up. Funny how that works.

...And You Will Know Him By The Trail Of Dead (Bills)

I saw Bill Maher on Friday in an interview with former Mexican President Vicente Fox, lamenting that Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't be able to face off as Presidential candidates due to Constitutional violations. "Isn't that sad," he said. For all his conceits as a free thinker, Maher represents a kind of baseline Hollywood groupthink when it comes to Arnold, reading the headlines and the magazine covers but never bothering to uncover the whole story. That story can be easily divined from this weekend's veto massacre. In addition to stopping the California DREAM Act, he vetoed needed legislation for the state's migrant farm workers, allowing them to organize through a "card check" system. He even disabled a bill that would have added a sunset clause to the card check system, making it ever harder for them to organize and support themselves and their families. Here's another bill that went down the drain:

On Saturday, another bill was vetoed, AB 377, by Assemblymember Juan Arambula (D-Fresno). It would have required an employer who is a farm labor contractor to disclose in the itemized statement furnished to employees up to five names and addresses of the legal entities that secured the employer's services.

According to the sponsor of the bill, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation more than 40,000 California farms grow fruits and vegetables on almost four million acres in this state, so it is not surprising that a 2006 survey of Central Valley farm workers found that 70% could not identify the name of the farm they were working on.

The same survey found that 56% had not been paid the minimum wage when working on a piece rate; 31% had not been paid all the overtime they were owed; and that 42% had unexplained deductions made from their pay. Between 60% and 80% of harvest work is done by labor contractors. Without being able to readily identify the farm who hired the contractor, enforcement actions against the contractor are unlikely to either make the worker whole for wages owed or to have any deterrent effect at all against a grower who shares legal responsibility for the contractor's labor law violations.

So while Governor Schwarzenegger told the hundreds of farm workers who were at the Capitol in September that he was supportive of their goals, in the end, he vetoed these bills and sided with agribusiness.

Indeed, this is part of a persistent pattern by the Governor to make life harder for working families while protecting the corporate interests that helped get him elected. Far from a governor of the people, he is simply a corporatist who has the backs of the elite. Because we don't have a functioning political press, this contempt for the average Californian will probably not make it too far off the blogs and insider political circles. But they have real-world consequences that people will only discover when they are put in the situation that legislation could have covered, and they aren't likely to connect the dots. A sampling of the pro-worker legislation that was vetoed:

• SB 549 (Corbett)-this bill would have protected the job of a worker taking time off to attend to the funeral of a family member.

• SB 727 (Kuehl)-this bill provided that employees covered by family temporary disability insurance (FTDI) could take the leave to care for a grandparent, siblings, grandchildren and parent-in-law.

• AB 537 (Swanson)-this bill expanded the definition of family under the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) to allow eligible workers to take job-protected leave to care for a seriously ill adult child, sibling, grandchild, or parent in law.

• AB 435 (Brownley)-this bill would have addressed harsh limitation periods on bringing certain wage discrimination claims. These claims are frequently brought by working women who have been underpaid relative to their male counterparts, and many of these women are struggling to raise kids in single parent situations.

• AB 1636 (Mendoza)-this bill would have expedited a job retraining voucher to disabled workers unable to return to their former jobs; workers such as these are struggling to adapt to replace the income needed for the family to survive.

• SB 936 (Perata)-this bill would have increased the benefits paid to permanently disabled workers over a 3 year period. Since 2004 these workers have seen their benefits slashed by 50% or more according to studies by University of California researchers. At the same time, insurer profits have exceeded all benefits paid to or on behalf of disabled workers; it’s a concept that is clearly not family-friendly. The families and kids of disabled workers suffer as they struggle to keep pace with the financial devastation of injuries.

AB 435 is the state version of the Lily Ledbetter Pay Act, attempting to remedy a horrible Supreme Court decision from earlier in the year. So Arnold is putting himself squarely in the position of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Smuel Alito. This is our post-partisan "leader."

Furthermore, he vetoed meaningful health care reform in AB 8, and put forth flawed legislation of his own that has no chance of coming out of the legislature, partially financed by the stupid, shortsighted practice of leasing the lottery to private interests.

I'd like to say that there's an "on the other hand," a couple bills Arnold allowed through that provide aid or comfort to the working class. But on these issues, he comes down squarely on the side of his corporate buddies. It feels like spitting into the wind to keep noting this. Maybe someday Bill Maher won't have a big-time TV show, he'll be working for his own retirement, and he'll realize that he's been screwed by this Administration. But I wouldn't bet on it.