Isn't This Really Our Ultimate Choice?

As the world gets more an more twisted, it is starting to hurt all over. We always knew it would when we hit the boundary. Now in our culture wars, we have a big choice to make. And there will be no going back. The patriarchy is already going forward with their plan because they don't think sustainability can organize without compulsion. And they believe in their compulsory promises of 110% success rates. Yes, even after the list of failures making 110% impossible -- well at least for everyone.

So if your choice is in favor of faith in eco-balanced biotic environment, what choices must you make to ensure the likely success of that reality?

Similarly, if you think our best chance of survival is a self-consuming cybertransport sailing across the dimension of air as a ancestors did sea, looking for yet another promised land, let's see once and for all the detailed plan of how this is going to work and for how long. Let us judge for ourselves whether such a future is better than the historical divine or magical garden of earthly delights.

If enough of us believe in either option, let us evaluate and democratically debate the required social contract to ensure its success. Just giving one side all the money and means of production while the rest of the biotic world becomes disposable inputs is not credible in insuring success. You can't call an engineered solution to be divine inspiration or the invisible hand of a benevolent dictator. Similarly, the idea that we can let biology run lassez-faire unbalanced by empathetic compassion is humanistically devoid.

The world is not ending, a reality is ending. And we just don't know which one. My personal opinion is that we are juggling too many perceptions of reality that something has to give. This is a new day. This is the end of the culture wars. We will be on the same page.

This is a precipice - a tipping point - a commitment.

The feminine Mother Earth and God's creation versus the self-consuming engineered creation of what at best could be considered a life raft and at worst a pirate ship. I think given that choice, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Lincoln, Gandhi, and a host of angels would make the same choice. The would also lament that after thousands of years of sacrifice by others, we couldn't keep from getting to this point. It is as if all of history was a struggle to avoid the big plastic inevitable, while living as comfortably as possible. I wonder what they did wrong. Why didn't they sell out? Why did they think they could trust us? We showed them, haven't we?

I know there is one thing most of them would agree on, that we need to avoid violence in making this choice. And most would probably also agree that the choice should be a democratic process, if not a striving for traditional unanimity.

And the patriarchs keep marching forward, because they are scared too.

Yu Na

If you have not heard of her before, think of Michael Jordan in his first NCAA tournament. (Except she won the MVP.)

BTW, Nike has heard of her.

London's Burning (April Fools)

So after the Battle in Seattle, the Tussle in Turin, and a decade of lies, the calm and quaint British capital is hosting the new international meeting of global leaders, or at least the important ones, on April Fools Day.

So what should be expected? This website is suggesting the visitors will be served more than tea and crumpets. they are planning a party at the Bank of England where they invite the public to feast on Bankers' Brains!



This is the schedule:

On April 1st, the G20 are coming to London to face up to economic crisis and political meltdown
Lost your home? Lost your job? Lost your savings or your pension? This party is for you!

At 12 noon, April 1st the Bank of England.

Capitalism has been heating up our world for years, melting the icecaps, burning up the rainforests, pushing the planet to tipping point. Now we're going to put the heat on them. At the London Summit , the G20 ministers are trying to get away with the biggest April Fools trick of all time. Their tax-dodging, bonus-guzzling, pension-pinching, unregulated free market world's in meltdown, and those fools think we're going to bail them out. They've gotta be joking!

We can't pay, we won't pay and we are taking to the streets
Many, many imaginative actions will be taking place across London on April 1st. One major focus will be four separate carnival parades culminating in direct action against the financial follies in the City of London among them carbon trading.

Full circle back to 1649? 'A very English revolution!'
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will lead themed processions starting at 11 a.m. from the following rail stations:

Moorgate
Red horse against War;
Liverpool St
Green horse against Climate chaos
London Bridge
Silver horse against Financial crimes
Cannon Street
Black horse against land enclosures and borders in honour of the 360th full circle anniversary of the Diggers
At 12 noon, April 1st, we're going to reclaim the City, thrusting into the very belly of the beast: the Bank of England.

Early a.m. April 2nd, we're going to bang on their hotel doors, @ the Excel Centre, Canning town to deliver our message of a world beyond capitalism.

I doubt bankers' brains taste all that good, but I think people are getting angry and many in the upper MBA classes do not know the pain except from an intellectual perspective. There's a hard rain going to fall and wash the trash off the sidewalk.

Big Big DOG

When I have a dog, I want it to go "woof woof" and mean it.

And then I went fishing...

Zombie MBAs (Part 2)

The Financial Times has a good column on MBA grads, discussing the role and quality of leadership training the schools espouse. It is a good read.

There was a time when management was just management, the science of providing organisational support for innovators and salespeople to win customers and revenue.

Managers tracked resources, physical, financial and human, and tried to improve efficiency. Occasionally they made an acquisition or pushed into new markets, and this was strategy.

But somewhere along the line management morphed into the sexier-sounding "leadership". Managers were globe-trotting executives - catalysts for change. They had a business press eager to turn them into icons, to photograph them in their penthouses, preening over their empires as if they, rather than their shareholders, owned them.

Business schools were eagerly complicit in this super-sizing of management. They no longer educated mere MBAs. They were churning out "future leaders".

If Waterloo was won, as the Duke of Wellington claimed, "on the playing fields of Eton", then the triumphs and disasters of our recent global economic history had their roots in the classrooms and cafeterias of Harvard , Wharton , Stanford, Insead and other leading schools.

It is not a legacy any of these schools may wish to boast of at the moment. In fact, it may be time for all of them to cool it with leadership and return to more modest goals and language. To recognise the truth that it makes no more sense for a business school to claim it teaches leadership than for a school of Byzantine studies to make the same claim.

What business schools can teach is organisational behaviour. They can teach compensation systems and recruitment processes. They can offer classes on cash and non-cash incentives, on training, promotion and the value of a corporate culture. They can offer frameworks for negotiations, strategy decisions and implementing change. But when they bundle this up and call it leadership, they risk leaving their students with the faulty impression that they are now qualified, if not obliged, to go into the world and lead. It breeds the arrogance for which MBAs are mocked.

Not all MBAs can be leaders, nor need they be. Every business needs followers: people who are good at what they do, who are able to implement the plans laid out by leaders.

Great leaders tend to be those who can synthesise, simplify and persuade. They provide clarity so that those below them can do their best to achieve a common goal. But leadership should not be the brass ring at the climax of every business career. It is a function, like finance or marketing, at which certain people excel and others do not, and should be treated as such.

Every MBA course must be re-evaluating what it does these days. The rise of the MBA almost exactly mirrors the rise of the economic system that is now in the hospital emergency room.

Leading business schools have tried to distance themselves from the fiasco, offering prescriptions to cure the illness without ascribing blame for its cause. Anyway, it's just a few bad apples, they say. Nonsense. Business schools cannot trumpet their role in educating business leaders, then go quiet when their alumni are caught captaining the Titanic and manoeuvring the iceberg. Their alumni were derivative traders and regulators, collateralised debt obligation salesmen and corporate raiders. They were in this up to their necks, partly because there was no one higher up the ladder to stop them. They were leaders, so they led.

The recent officer class of global capitalism has been the MBA class. But it was a case of lions led by donkeys, at least in the financial industry. Honest individuals and businesses came to rely on a system that betrayed them.

Business does not need any more leadership courses - particularly not at the MBA level. It needs people who are competent, entrepreneurial and ethical,tough enough to make a buck yet modest enough to accept that free markets and businesses are simply components of healthy societies - not all that matters.

The Fall of a God

Those damn communists are at it again. This time they are attacking free market economics where we are strongest and most vulnerable. They are going after the symbol of America that is bigger than apple pie, old glory, or the New York Yankees. These guys are gunning for George W. (Washington that is.)

China thinks just because we as a nation have sold ourselves into indentured bondage by issuing trillions in bonds and bad subprime bank assets, that we will actual repay them. (Please, no sniggering - show some respect to the new overlords.) But one of their first items of business is to replace the dollar with a global basket of currencies.

Now I know what you are thinking: how quaint of a socialist notion that a plurality of nations should take precedence over the demands of one. Yes, we Americans have a proven track record of truth and justice, fighting the good fight making the world safe for freedom and democracy. And we have done such a good job creating peace, love, and harmony in this world, that we have nearly bankrupted ourselves. And now, when we are down and wounded, China decides that they can't trust us anymore.

US! Can you believe it? I mean besides police actions in Iraq, Grenada, Panama, Pakistan, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, and Vietnam, we have been a country of model behavior. Well, unless you count our economic policies that have failed to achieve their stated objectives in Haiti, the Palestinian territories, Georgia, Guatemala, Africa, and Wall Street. But overall, we have a pretty good track record of being that shining light, that beacon on the hill.

So what's up China? You are is a nation that we propped up on the back of WalMart and our empty downtowns, and now you are turning on us? We were friends. Remember Nixon? Can't you show a little Christian compassion?

How dare the Chinese take on the U.S. Dollar? Next thing you know, they will be making a movie, comparing the destruction of the Dollar to the time Elijah's God destroyed Ba'al in the first recorded Divine Smackdown. The fall of a post-modern God. Bastards!

Once again, the Marxist (pre)dictum that the capitalist will sell the communists the rope is too close to our collective necks for comfort.



By the way, don't fret over the image of the dollar shrinking. I was talking to an economist recently and he said inflation isn't a bad thing if it is expected. That is a big relief.

There is a God(dess)

Just cancel the Olympics. I don't know how you can get better than this.

Zombies R US(ofA)

As Stephen Colbert used to ask:

George W. Bush - Great President or Greatest President?

On the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Obama tried to inform America why AIG was so pivotal in the Rape of Lady Liberty. He said AIG was just a normal insurance company until, in the search for more and more profits, grafted an investment bank on its back. And that investment bank operation got over involved in derivatives and other risky assets, primarily associated with the subprime mortgage market.

Yesterday I watched a video clip of Barney Frank, where he suggested that we file a shareholder lawsuit against AIG for fraud, as we as a country are the biggest shareholder in AIG.

Then it hit me: we as a country and economy are just like those Zombie Banks that are technically, non-technically, hypothetically, and every other -ally so beyond life support that they are undead. Not even Mary Shelley or all the King's men can bring them back to love and life.

At first I thought such a lawshit against AIG would serve some cathartic need, it is pointless. There is nothing to sue for. Our investments in these banks and financial institutions, call it a bailout or whatever, is dead. There may be marginal money there for operations, but a lawsuit by the United States would be frivolous because there are no assets in priority. What I mean is this: AIG, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, etc etc etc became involved in fraudulent activity years ago. And although Obama said what they did wasn't against the law, he did suggest that these financial institutions did not act in their shareholders' best interest. And they lost trillions.

If you know anything about shareholder lawsuits, a plaintiff attorney only has to find one person (and preferably a few) to file a lawsuit against a corporation along with a request seeking class certification. A class action lawsuit against AIG, BofA, Citibank, Wells Fargo, or General Electric's finance arm would bring any of these companies down. And hard. Now I can think of at least a hundred million people who could serve as lead plaintiff. And I am sure there is a Weil Gottshal, or a Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, or a Bernstein Liebhard & Lifshitz willing to take such a case.

And what is the chance that such a lawsuit would be successful? Would it be that hard to show fraud? The only thing the companies have going for them is that such a massive discovery process would likely bankrupt a plaintiff firm, even one well capitalized. And any such suit would take priority over a suit by the Attorney General's office. So, all the 'good' money we have poured into these bad financial service firms will become attachable assets in such litigation. I mean if Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner couldn't remember to put strings on the money, do you think they protected the money against shareholder lawsuits? (And if they did, what did they know and when did they know it?)

So it appears that we may be at risk of having to bail these companies out again again again. Is this why Obama and the Fed are setting up a shadow banking system? Whether it is a class action lawsuit or a smoking gun or a butterfly flapping its wings in China, we are at big risk.

The only way out is to collectively agree that the zombies are not only bad, but that they can't be rehabilitated without the baptism of bankruptcy for the remission of sins (and obligations). And a truth commission. It is well known that if you are attacked by a zombie, you will become one. And as we are under attack, we must be very careful.

And there is something else too: we need to be able to say what it is that we want and then build it. We are so afraid to sit down and imagine what type of community, nation, or world we want to inhabit. Very few people have been having that discussion, although that seems to be changing. As Terrence McKenna says: "if you can't describe a reality, you can't inhabit it."





As we are on the topic of zombies, what are corporations anyway? Fictitious individuals granted to possiblity of immortality? WTF.

Definition In Exquisite Detail

Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt drew up an index to categorize the discomfort caused by stinging insects. The attack of the bald-faced hornet is "rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door." A paper wasp delivers pain that's "caustic and burning," with a "distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut." The sweat bee, on the other hand, can hurt you in a way that's "light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm." In bringing this to your attention, Gemini, I hope to inspire the rebel in you. Your homework is to create an equally nuanced and precise index of experiences that feel good. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you will be able to call on tremendous reserves of intelligence as you identify the numerous modes of pleasure that are available to you, and define them in exquisite detail.

I have always enjoyed Rob Brezsny's horoscopes. I like the free will part - nothing good can happen without some degree of freedom. Otherwise any pronouncement about the future would be a curse: the rhythm of life would be the great inevitable. In such a reality, the bad guys win. I refuse to accept their depression. We do have a choice. This you know in the part of you that can't be denied.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Water

You would think that after AIG got their latest trillion, the banksters would be getting fat, dumb, and happy. Well, it seems that the commercial real estate market is going to test their resolve. According to that ultra left-wing investment company Apollo Management, the other shoe is about to hit. (given the number of shoes that have been dropping, the beast must be a millipede.)

The Financial Times, you know that pinko newspaper is reporting Apollo's concern that the commercial crap has not even hit the radar:

Leon Black, founder of the firm, said the extra costs of cleaning up the US banking industry could total as much as $2,000bn, putting further strain on the economy. He said the woes of the commercial property had not yet been reflected fully on bank balance sheets.

“You have the black hole of commercial real estate and that hasn’t happened yet,” said Mr Black in a wide-ranging interview on FT.com.

“There you are sitting with $4 trillion of debt and you know not all of it’s bad but a lot of it is diminished and that really hasn’t yet been addressed.”

He warned it would be 12 to 18 months before there are lasting signs of US economic recovery.

If you are interested in this topic, go here to watch his interview.

What is the Past Tense of Twitter?

Flat is the New Up

I was chillin' on the digital leash last night with my Hyde Park GSB homie Bondmaster BK, and he dropped a rap floating around his gim homebase: Flat is the New Up.

He and his korporate krew have made big-bad giving sweet taste of 30 forty 50 cent per. You do that and the burbpunks come begging for more. Please baby baby please.

Now burbsters are hooked, nutting on a derivative jones. Need it, want it, gotta have it. Subpunkhookedsters ain't got rhyme or rhythm, just reason. Can't tell if the George W was a bum, a bridge, or a buck. History slam. Can't tell if it is up. Can't tell if it is down. BYOI. Bring your own "it".

Flatlined. Zombie Power. The End of History is nigh'.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michael Steele's Rap Battle Response
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

Bladerunner

Only God Can Move Mountains

Reading tea leaves in Appalachia has never been one of my hobbies, but they are there to be read. I think the second coming is at hand if the religious right start making sense. LEAF is a fundamentalist Christian Fellowship in Tennessee that has begun an environmental campaign to stop mountain-top removal "in order to preserve God's creation."

If Cows Could Fly...

Outlawing Childhood

I sometimes joke that if I sent my 8 year-old daughter three blocks to the neighborhood grocery store by herself if I would probably get arrested. Yes she would have to cross a major street, but there are traffic signals and crosswalks, but I never ever see kids out walking free. I just chalked it up to living in Los Angeles. (BTW, my neighbor says he nearly has a heart attack each time he sees my daughter playing in our front yard because of all the crazies. But then again, having a heart attacks is his hobby.)

But last night, I was listening to As It Happens from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (to listen, the story is in part one of the link at 14:50 to 27:50). They told the story of Lori Lavarre-Pierce from a small town in Mississippi. Lori was supposed to take her 10 year-old son to soccer practice last week. He asked his mom if he could walk. He had walked the same route the night before with his dad and sister, a route that he had taken many times. He knew the route. Mom said okay and gave him her cell phone. The kid left, and since she had to go to practice to meet a parent, she showed up 15 minutes after practice began. What she didn't know, was that in that period of time that he son walked to practice and she arrived, all hell broke loose.

It seems that people FREAKED OUT!!! A number of people reportedly called 911, and the police went to her home, and then to the soccer field. the first thing the police officer told her was "Do you know that you could have been charged with child endangerment? Your child is too young to walk alone." The kid only made it a few blocks from home before he was intercepted by the police. The police then drove the kid to soccer practice and then went looking for MOM.

Now being a DAD, I can appreciate divine justice, but this can ruin the kid too. The Canadian program did not play gotcha journalism. They followed up with an interview of Dr William Byrd who studies how children lose more and more freedom in each subsequent generation. More importantly, the study shows how such loss of autonomy, specifically the freedom to roam, screws up the kids brain and social development. Basically, kids who do not roam free by age 12 have more difficulty dealing with stress -- and they have much more difficulty connecting with their environment.

And we think AIG was a catastrophe....

Would You Trust This Man With Your _________?

If AIG only lost $100 billion, then why did they get much more than that in a bailout? WTF?

Temple of Wall Street: WWJD?

Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:
Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.
So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.

Matthew 18:32-35

You go Jesus! Throw those muthers out of the Temple of Wall Street

Sunday in East Pakistan with George

THE BIGGEST LOVE

Barb attends the Veil Ceremony inside the temple and is lead into the Celestial Room where Nancy and Cindy wait for her. Realizing this may be the only glimpse she sees of what it will be like to be with her family in the afterlife, Barb breaks down, explaining she's facing a disciplinary hearing the next day.

I am coming out the the closet as a mormon. I was born one and will always be one. Can't do a damned thing about it, and boy have I tried. I have generations of mormon dna exploding in my jeans. Even if I am not tethered to the mothership via a lifeline, mormonism is a reality for me.

I really enjoyed watching the portions of the endowment ceremony on the show last night. I was in awe of the raw primeval purity of the snippet of the endowment ceremony that was actually shown. Last night I saw the entire ceremony in a totally different light. It was a beautiful thing. But to the eyes of someone on the outside, they go: “WOW!, this ain’t any category of religion I have ever seen before” (except for some jews and masons).

Lets ponder this: if Mormons are as unique and different as what was shown in camera, what do you really know about Mormons? How many other cultures are out there that you do not show the least curiosity about? And why do you think so many people are afraid of Mormons? Are you afraid? If so, why? If you saw this episode, you saw as deep as anyone can see without living the life. You observed ground zero of a faith, in living color.

If you are mormon, how do you feel about this being shown? Why are you afraid of having people see it? Jesus said "judge not, lest ye be judged". Are you being judged? Did you judge first or second? If it was a judgement, was it an eye for an eye or the other cheek?

If one can know the truth and the truth can set one free, does this mean all truth? That rabbit hole is calling all Alices. Mormon, Hindu, Jew, Muslim and Iroquois. Some people believe the yogis and zen masters helped dig the rabbit hole. Jesus liked rabbits too.

He Who Dies With The Most Debt Wins

When I was conversing with the demi-gods of economics at the University of Chicago - not the nobel winners, rather the students who coveted being future nobel prize winners, I am reminiscing about the first year of grad school (known as "The First Year). Ken, Shannon and I would sit around the International House bending our mind to the latest theories (and the lack of fleshly pleasure).

Someone had brought up the slogan "he who dies with the most toys wins." I took that and transfigured it into "he who dies with the most debt wins." Everyone got it. Shannon wrote it down and posted it on his dorm door he was so moved.

Debt being the objective was a horribly ironic concept at the time, and know we see what happens when this quantum reality is made flesh (i.e., it is not longer a schroedinger probability).

Oh prophets of doom, open your mind and seek reality and prophesize from the realm of the four-leaf clover instead of the three. You have to be willing to accept leprochans and unicorns in the schroedinger's cat theory of reality.

This is the box you need to think your way out of.........

The Big Uno

I have long argued (personally, not on this blog) that Los Angeles is the Nuevo Jerusalam. As proof I can only offer this canonedrum:

. . . Los Angeles is more one with everything than anywhere else on the earth . . . . . . . . .

...and that isn't saying much.

For Shits and Giggles

Obama: Fire Geithner

American International Group is giving its executives tens of millions of dollars in new bonuses even though it received a taxpayer bailout of more than $170 billion dollars.

AIG is totally bankrupt. We knew that they were financially bankrupt, now we know they are morally bankrupt too.

AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments. The Treasury Department determined that the government did not have the legal authority to block the current payments by the company. AIG declared earlier this month that it had suffered a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has asked that the company scale back future bonus payments where legally possible, an administration official said Saturday.

LEGAL AUTHORITY???

HEY CAPITALISTS!!! These guys are destroying your utopian vision. You had better stand up and fight for your dream otherwise these monopolist guys are going to burn your house down too!

If AIG is "contractually obligated" to pay the "bonuses", then AIG needs to file for bankruptcy. The resulting contractual claims become unsecured liabilities, which have the lowest priority for actually being paid in the restructure - and they will likely not be paid out. These guys are only able to pay themselves out because of the bailout. This is fraud - bonuses for success not earned. But this is a fraud on a pre-Armageddon scale, destroying everything it its path.

Business is a leveraged expansion of society. And there are pitfalls, and consequences for getting it WRONG. And this is way past "getting it wrong." This is such a non-remote possibility that every American kid learned it playing the game Monopoly. "GO STRAIGHT TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200." In fact, playing the Parker Brothers board game, a future monopolist received more ethics training just in getting sent to pretend jail than they ever got in business school.

What did Jesus say about putting new wine in old bottles? This thing is going down. No one trusts it.

Jon Stewart - America's Hero

"For both politicians and journalists, trust is the coin of the realm. Without trust, the system breaks down."
Sally Quinn
Washington Post
November 2, 1998

So what happened? Jon Stewart interviewed Jim Cramer in a forest and it made a sound? Wow!

I am reminded of when Senator Joe McCarthy was rebuking some poor kid for once being part of the lawyers guild which in republican speak meant communist (code: not us). Treason was in the air. A very distinguished elder attorney turned on McCarthy, castrating the beast with the simple words:

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

It changed the world. Ushered in the freedom of thought called the sixties. Well freedom is out of the bag. And just like the israelites, it has taken two generations before we could enter the promised land of freedom. So what are we going to do with it?

One thing I do know is that if our children read about this stage in our saga in the history books, they will think we were being really stupid and cavalier.

Left, Right, Center & Progressive

Just tell the truth!!! Here are four journalist discussing what is going on in the world: China saying they are very worried about the US debt load and the strength of their "investment", Maddoff's relatonship with NASDAQ , Cramer vs. Stewart, & health care. I swear you can almost hear the conservative, Tony Blankly of the Washington Times, cry. This comment on why AIG can't go public with who they payed their bailout money to was odd:

"Everyone is worried that once the default on these derivatives start it will be unstoppable....So we just don't want people being able to calculate who is vulnerable, because then there will be panic calls."

I am glad he is siding with stability versus nationalization.

Blankly then says something very odd when talking about Maddoff's victims versus the unemployed and recently homeless:

"Its not just rich greedy people who are victims, but life's brief fever will be soon over for all classes of victims, so I don't know if we have to have this unseemly fight over who has been more victimized by life. There is probably room enough for everyone in that category. (audible sob.) That's okay."

BTW, China is the BIG STORY. If we don't pay, they will take our houses. And they have the population to fill all the vacancies. Maybe we should wake up.

The Case of the Missing Mortgage Documents

It seems that a lot of banks can't get their hands on the actual original mortgage documents. The problem is that a mortgage document is a bearer instrument that can be bought and sold. If a bank attempting to foreclose can't produce the actual mortgage document, they can't prove they have still own the rights to foreclose on the underlying real assets. See, the bank may have sold the loan to someone else, so that person has the rights. So if Bank 1 forecloses but had sold the note to Bank 2, they are stealing.

Feel bad for the banks? Remember they are the ones who wrote the laws. They wanted to be able to buy, bundle, subdivide, and resell the mortgages. And they made big Big BIG MONEY & PROFITS doing this over the past two decades. Now they need us to ignore their laws so they can foreclose on properties even though they can't locate the original mortgages. Remember, the mortgages are fungible as cash. I think they are classified under M3, the part of the money supply the Bush Administration decided that after 11/10/2005 they didn't need to track any more. They claimed the costs to collect M3 data outweighed the benefits the data provided (just like the 92 torture tapes).

But what is the fallout:

Deutsche Bank got a hard shock [in late 2007] when a judge in the state of Ohio in the USA made a ruling that the bank had no legal right to foreclose on 14 homes whose owners had failed to keep current in their monthly mortgage payments. The Judge asked DB to show documents proving legal title to the 14 homes. DB could not. All DB attorneys could show was a document showing only an “intent to convey the rights in the mortgages.” They could not produce the actual mortgage, the heart of Western property rights since the Magna Charta if not longer.... Banks live in the exotic new world of “global securitization”, where banks like DB or Citigroup buy tens of thousands of mortgages from small local lending banks, “bundle” them into Jumbo new securities which then are rated by Moody’s or Standard & Poors or Fitch, and sell them as bonds to pension funds or other banks or private investors who naively believed they were buying bonds rated AAA, the highest, and never realized that their “bundle” of say 1,000 different home mortgages, contained maybe 20% or 200 mortgages rated “sub-prime,” i.e. of dubious credit quality.

Now this same issue came up again in Ohio in 2009. A judge stopped foreclosure on 34 houses because no notes were produced.

And now, according to NPR:

Many mortgages are not held by banks, but by securitized trusts — complicated arrangements that involve many investors and byzantine legal documents. Homeowner advocates say they're finding a surprising number of improper mortgage documents and — in some cases — fraud that can delay foreclosure.

For years, lawyers defending homeowners against foreclosure had just one option: Convince lenders to re-negotiate the terms of their mortgage. Now they're taking their cases to court.

The 'Rocket Docket'
In Fort Myers, Fla., it's been called the "rocket docket" — a special court that hears — and clears — hundreds of foreclosures each day.

An average case takes just two to three minutes. State Circuit Judge James Thompson gets right to the point with homeowner Theresa Weber: "Miss Weber, it appears the bank has done what's necessary to get a judgment of foreclosure. Can you think of any legal reason why one should not take place?"

Like nearly all the other defendants, Weber answers, "No" and she gets what appears to be the standard judgment — 60 days to vacate the premises.

There are few tears in this court, mostly resignation.

In Miami-Dade County, across the state, Ana Fernandez says she thought that would be her fate as well.

Fernandez says she made a big mistake a few years ago when she refinanced her home. The new mortgage started with monthly payments of $1,200, but soon ballooned to $2,600 per month. "There was no way that I could afford paying that mortgage," she says.

Fernandez's home is a modest but recently updated three-bedroom house in Miami Gardens. She's lived here for 24 years.

When Fernandez contacted her lender, Chevy Chase Bank, she says the bank was no help: "They told me the best I could do was [get my payments] up to date and then start paying again, which would still leave me with the $2,600 [monthly payment]."

Fernandez learned firsthand how difficult it can be to convince lenders to negotiate terms that allow borrowers to remain in their homes.

Negotiating To Stay In Homes

When Fernandez's lawyer, Ray Garcia, took the case, he found that Chevy Chase Bank had no proof that it, in fact, owned her loan.

In a hearing, a lawyer representing the bank conceded that he did not have the original mortgage note — something that's required by law. What he did have was a copy.

Chevy Chase Bank bought Fernandez's loan from another institution. And, Garcia says, when he examined the copy, it showed ownership of the loan had never been assigned or transferred to Chevy Chase. In a recent interview in his office, he said: "As we sit here today, they haven't produced a note. They've produced absolutely no record evidence that Chevy Chase has a right to bring this action."

Chevy Chase was recently acquired by Capital One Bank. A Capital One spokeswoman maintains the company has filed the original note, but otherwise had no comment.

Producing The Mortgage Note

The demand that banks seeking foreclosure "produce the note" is a cry that's gotten attention from housing activists and real estate attorneys across the country.

For banks that own and service the loans they originate, finding the original paperwork is rarely a problem. But with loans that have been securitized — parceled with other mortgages and sold to investors — the original mortgage note can be elusive.

Lawyer April Charney, who works with Jacksonville Legal Services in Florida, has become well-known as an expert on defending homeowners against foreclosures. She says asking the bank to produce the paperwork is just the beginning.

She says lawyers who take the time to study the mortgage notes and the securitization agreements will almost always find deficiencies, and sometimes, fraud. "These loans are so tricked up by the Ponzi scheme that became the world of securitization and derivatives, that there is no owner to these loans," she says. "They just totally failed to comply with their contracts."

Charney has a full caseload and she's been working to train a small army of lawyers through seminars across the country.

The new world of securitized mortgages, she says, is layered and nuanced. Some courts, overwhelmed by a growing backlog of foreclosures, can even be hostile to attorneys who want to slow down the process.

But in some cases, it's the judges who are beginning to ask probing questions of plaintiffs seeking foreclosures. In California, federal bankruptcy judge Samuel Bufford has written about some of the new issues courts must consider in foreclosure cases. "One of the problems I see … is I don't seem to have the right parties before the court," he says. "I've taken testimony … and found out that the owner of the mortgage is somebody else who has not shown up in court at all."

A Changing Landscape

It's a still-developing area of law and it's one that could change abruptly with new federal legislation governing foreclosures.

Still, the growing number of legal challenges troubles Talcott Franklin, an attorney in Dallas and an expert on securitized mortgages.

He says mortgage-backed securities are an important part of a healthy housing market. If many of the legal challenges being mounted around the country are successful, he worries, that could undermine a vital financial tool.

"My big fear," Franklin says, "is that we'll get a series of decisions, based on not fully understood facts, which will prevent securitization from going forward in the future."

Franklin doesn't blame homeowners or their lawyers for bringing the challenges. He's more critical of lenders and their attorneys for not doing a better job understanding securitized mortgages and for not taking care of important legal matters before going to court to foreclose on a home.

So why are people just walking away when they could fight it out?

How Money Works (dumbed down 4 kids)

If you ever wondered where money comes from or how it is "created", watch this video.

Why Should You Care About Armenians?

Because when the sewage systems in places like Iceland, Ireland, and Mexico fail, the shit goes everywhere.

From Citizen Economist:

On 3 March 2009 in the space of a few hours the Armenian dram evaporated from about 300 per dollar to about 400 per dollar and 275,000 drams per ounce of gold to approximately 365,000 drams per ounce of gold. This rapid 30% currency poofing is like when the Kazakhstan currency went poof but without the strategic geo-political considerations. Nevertheless, extremely ominous financial troubles stir in Eastern Europe. One knows the conditions are dire when Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan advocates using the Russian ruble as a stable currency.

As fiat currencies represent the common stock of nations; Armenia’s future is ominous. Trend Capital has reported that Ogtay Hagverdiev, of the Azerbaijani Cabinet of Ministers Economy and Finance and Credit Policy Department head, said. ”It will take time to restore the country’s economy. A revolt among the people may begin in the meanwhile.”

The Armenian government may soon default. Rising prices, the effects of inflation, will soon begin. Shortages, a common effect of currency problems, may appear. Civil unrest may follow like in Iceland, Greece and China.

JUNCTION POINTS
Large buildings in urban environments are often constructed in such a way to reduce the effects, such as sound, of the outside. It can be inspiring to sit in perfect silence without any sound to be heard coming from the bustling outside streets. How is this silence possible with the hustle and bustle of a metropolis only a few yards away?

The answer lies in the construction. For example, an inner building can be built within the walls of an existing building with the walls of the inner building connected to the outside building at only a few junction points. This will greatly limit the effects of the hustling and bustling metropolis.

The investor can learn a lesson. The reduction of junction points with businesses, organizations and governments can greatly reduce various risks to one’s capital and their effect on one’s personal life. If the relationship is no longer mutually advantageous then any attachment through junction points should be easily severed.

Defining one’s throughput and then implementing the Theory of Constraints thinking process can be extremely helpful in developing the Four Hour Workweek. This may allow one the freedom to live where, when and how they want. The transitions accompanying the great credit contraction will provide tremendous opportunity for wealth generation and accumulation. Being able to understand the environment will allow one to swim with, not against, the current.

As the great credit contraction grinds on more fiat currency illusions, like the Armenian dram, Kazakhstan tenge or British Pound, will evaporate either wholly or partially. As poet John Greenleaf wrote, “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.”

I am sure many Armenians, Kazaks and British, who had their life savings evaporate, wish they had a last plane account with an institution like GoldMoney where they could have kept their cash balances in a tangible asset because no matter what happens with its fiat currency price the gold or silver is still there. When these currency devaluation events happen, and a golden sword of Damocles hangs over the US Dollar, it is extremely fast.

If These Were EKGs, What Would Be Your Diagnosis?

Are we going to accept indentured servitude going forward? Are these contracts blessed of God and can't be put asunder? Does God have the legal responsibility to enforce the Devil's contracts?

Even Jesus threw the money changers off of the old Wall Street. Why does Judaism require that you can only be indentured for 7 years? Why does Islam prohibit the charging of interest? I think the goal is that they knew, at least when those prohibitions were codified, that non-bounded servitude denies the underlying humanity of the individual and the family.

We have to be careful here. It is easy to run amok and tear everything down in the horde name of justice. But we can't accept injustice either. There is a needle that needs to be threaded. Are you ready kids?

Jon Stewart 4 Oversight Czar!!!

Finally, someone calls these guys on the carpet for the common man!! This is a MUST WATCH!!

Note: There is a problem with the following videos. In the meantime, go to this link.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Slow Down, You Go To Fast

If we are to rediscover meta-economics, then it will be found through a reaffermation of the primacy of nonviolence and beauty.

Woody Tasch
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered

How is this for "radical":

Dante Hesse runs a small organic dairy farm in Ghent, N.Y. Hesse lets his herd of 60 or so cows graze on open pasture. He avoids giving them growth hormones and antibiotics. Hesse says his cows might live a decade or more, and they stay productive longer than the average for more industrial farming.

A couple of days each week, Hesse makes the trip from his Milk Thistle farm to farmers markets in New York City. Even before he finishes setting up his stand, customers start lining up for his milk, at $5 a quart. Hesse says he could sell even more milk — plus butter and cheese — if he could just build a processing plant right in his barn.

For that, he needs to raise about $700,000 — a sum of money that has been hard to come by in the current recession and credit crisis. Hesse has a particularly hard time borrowing money because he has nothing to back up the loan. He rents his barn and his land. He's got no co-signers. Last fall, unable to get a loan through ordinary means, he turned to his customers and asked them for help.

"We feel pretty strongly at this point that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in helping, and the way the economy is now, one argument might be that it's a bad time to be doing something like this," Hesse says. "But I think the inverse is true, that it's actually a good time because people are scared of the stock market, and they know that food is a vital part of survival. And local food is going to become very important in the very near future."

Hesse is offering 6 percent interest for an unsecured loan of $1,000. His business plan taps into a pair of burgeoning movements — the first characterized by an interest in organic, locally grown food; the second by an environmental approach to economics.

That approach is championed by Woody Tasch, a venture capitalist and author of the new book Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money. Tasch argues that money is flying around the globe too fast. He rows hard against mainstream economics, which says growth is good and the marketplace knows best. "I've just had it with all of this so-called 'making-a-killing expertise,' which is actually killing the planet," he says. "I think one of the antidotes is daring to move to the other side of our brain, and kind of put down all that economic and fiduciary nonsense and just act like regular people."

Tasch and his Slow Money Alliance take their name and inspiration from the Slow Food movement, which started 20 ago in Italy. Tasch isn't arguing against all growth. Rather, he's saying that some as yet undefined portion of capital should be steered toward smaller, local farms and businesses that are friendly to the environment. His group aims to raise as much as $100 million this year, then let regional funds start investing in businesses they like.

The idea of investing in a farmer like Hesse, who's got no collateral to back up a loan, might seem overly risky to some. But one customer at the market stops to ask Hesse about the deal.

Josh Goldstein of Brooklyn says he and his wife are interested in lending money to Hesse. They've lost faith in the stock market, and are ready to put their faith instead in a business and product they can see — and taste.

"The milk, first of all, it's like no milk you've ever had," Goldstein says. "We've been looking to invest some money in local green companies. We just thought it looked like a good opportunity — somebody local, somebody we know, somebody we can trust."

For now, Hesse is putting the finishing touches on his plan to seek investments from his customers. He's also hoping he might get the backing of an outfit like the Slow Money Alliance. He knows it might take him a while to get where he's going. In this economy, he's almost got no choice but the slow road.

Stealing Fire

Professor Paul Friedrich, a very distinguished professor of anthrolinguistics emeritus at the University of Chicago, said "Poetry is the precurser to philosophy. If that is the case, what do you make from a poet who calls god on the carpet in submission. And god obeys? Submission is the will to power.

How close can you get to the sun? Can you see the finger of god and live? What do we do with the failures?

"I hate and I love at the same moment."

This poetry attempts to go there. Ladies and Gentlemen, FranK BidArt Part 1.

Why Does It Have to Be So Hard?

Trick question: it's not!

The Plight of Microbes

Nano Technology has come a long way. UCLA and Hebrew Univeristy have developed a motor that is powered by two living beings. It is so much better when they call them motors rather than living microbes that will serve their entire lives as slaves to a nano machine. Don't worry, its okay: their lives have no meaning. We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I think the worst they are going to do to humans is to devolve us to a happy servile class, while the primate kings and queens will be allowed to breed a leadership class. Note that when they try to make sure we have at least an ethical level of happiness, they do have another stated goal:

Researchers hope the findings will help employers better understand what they can do to create more productive workers.

Proponents of Directed Panspermia include famed DNA-explorers Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel.

So is it possible, and I am going out on a limb here, that as our planet is being destroyed, we are trying to develop spore-like nanotechnologies that can be encoded with evolved DNA instructions that can be shot out of a space cannon mounted on a gravity-less space station, on the prayer that they land sometime somewhere on fertile soils? Terrence McKenna argued that this is the case for mushrooms that have an odd, other-worldly chemical structure and life form that allowed them to travel through time and space before landing on this planet. Are mushrooms the fruit of the tree of knowledge that we are forbidden from eating?

Maybe panspermia is the underlying motivation for secret societies and masonic or mormon rituals -- that have the signs and tokens to identify themselves as fellow travelers to each other in the group. It is not for this life but the life in the future in intergalactic population as we master the universe? For example, if we, you or me are shot out of a cannon like Hunter S. Thompson (but in gravityless space), and land on a planet called Beetlejuice and start the cycle of life, are those rituals burned into our DNA - the secret code capable of unfolding into life? Will we have to go through all the stages of evolution at the next planet to get to homosapien, as discussed in Your Inner Fish? And will the practice of those rituals allow us to identify and communicate with one another? Is this why the rituals are usually accompanied with a blood oath, because they can't accept a sub-optimal outcome such as prisoner's dilemma? Will we have the faith of a mustard seed to become a mustard seed on this intergalactic journey? Maybe religious practice is how you fight off the curse of prisoner's dilemma or even a way of meditating on the intergalactic journey that could take a millennium. Who knows?

Am I out of my mind? I really can't tell.