Raja's blog

Trolling for Assassins

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:08:52 -0800

Rachel Maddow had Frank Schaeffer on again. The rhetoric from the far right has become more "incite"-full.

Video after the jump.

Via DU: Frank Schaeffer warns against fundamentalist christians wanting to harm President Obama

MADDOW: "'Let his days be few and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.' This is such strong language in secular terms about President Obama. Can you tell me if this means something less threatening to people hearing this in a Biblical context?"

SCHAEFFER: "No, actually it means something more threatening.

I think that the situation that I find genuinely frightening right now is that you have a ramping up of biblical language, language from the anti-abortion movement, for instance, death panels, and this sort of thing, and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler, as they have already called him, as something foreign to our shores -we're reminded of that, he was 'born in Kenya' - as Brown, as Black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin's 'not a real American.'

But now, it turns out, that he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, unjust rulers, to which all these Biblical allusions are directed, who should be slaughtered, if not by God, then by just men.

[...]

Really, this is trawling for assassins. And this is serious business. It's un-American, it's unpatriotic, and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far-right, have coalesced into a group that truly wants American revolution, and if it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. This is not funny stuff any more. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe. It only takes one."

Biblical anti-Obama slogan: Use of Psalm 109:8 funny or sinister?

Psalms 109:8 says, 'Let his days be few; and let another take his office.' The citation is being passed around the Internet as a rallying cry against President Obama.

Christian Science Monitor, By Tracey D. Samuelson, November 16

There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

A nice sentiment?

Maybe not.

The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

On the other hand, Threats Against Obama Drop to Normal Levels

Newsweek "Declassified" Blog, By Mark Hosenball, November 9

The mass shooting at Fort Hood by an Army doctor with an Islamic background has raised new anxiety about terrorism and threats to government personnel and installations. But the people assigned to protect President Barack Obama say that in recent months, the number of threats against him has decreased significantly. In a book about the U.S. Secret Service published earlier this year, author Ronald Kessler reported that after Obama took office, threats against the president rose by 400 percent from a rate of around 3,000 per year during the tenure of George W. Bush. According to one widely circulated elaboration on Kessler’s reporting published in August by London’s Daily Telegraph, this means that Obama has been facing 30 death threats each day. In March, Secret Service chief Mark Sullivan told a House Appropriations subcommittee that threats to individuals protected by the Secret Service “remain at high levels.”

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told NEWSWEEK that those figures are now out of date. According to Donovan, there were “substantial spikes” in the rate of threats the service received against Obama before and after last year’s presidential election, and then again before and after Obama’s inauguration last January. Over succeeding months, however, the rate of threats has dropped substantially, Donovan said—so substantially that while the average number of threats received is running at about the same level as it did during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, on some recent days the rate of threats received against Obama has actually been lower than the rate during the reigns of Clinton and W.

Donovan said that it was almost unprecedented for the Secret Service to discuss threat levels in such detail, but said the agency is going public because it is concerned that outdated information continues to circulate regarding a tidal wave of Obama-related threats. For his part, Kessler told NEWSWEEK in an e-mail that while “threats go up and down … the 400 percent increase is correct on average” and added that the Secret Service has been “covering up its deficiencies and dissembling to the media in the face of increased threats against the president.”

US finally wise to Pyongyang's ways

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:39:58 -0800

Asia Times, By Andrei Lankov, November 12

SEOUL - In the past few weeks, North Korean watchers have been confronted with a sight they do not see frequently: Americans outsmarting North Koreans.

Usually, the opposite is the case. North Korea might be a failing state, balancing on the verge of famine, but when it comes to diplomatic games, North Korean politicians are second to none.

They have studied the dangerous art of manipulating great powers since the 1960s, when they played Russians and Chinese against one another. They perfected their skills in the 1990s, when they managed to manipulate the US, South Korea and China into providing large amounts of food and energy aid while giving essentially nothing in return.

This was a remarkable achievement, and it seemed that the North Koreans would always have the upper hand when confronting Washington. However, this time things are different. North Korea's attempts to use tried-and-tested methods have backfired.

[...]

So, for a while, things seemingly worked in the usual way. However, by October, North Korean diplomats made an unpleasant discovery: the Americans, while smiling broadly and expressing their willingness to talk, were in no hurry to start actual negotiations, let alone shower North Korea with money.

Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, special representative for North Korea policy, is much-waited in North Korea, but he has not visited Pyongyang yet (and, in a telling gesture, did not even retire from his academic job). One can also expect that once negotiations finally begin, the North Koreans will make another unpleasant discovery: it is now far more difficult to squeeze concessions and money from the US.

There are at least two reasons for this change in mood. First, Americans are learning from their experience. This time, they have a much better understanding of both North Korean methods and the likely outcome of negotiations. When in 1993-94 the North Koreans drove tensions high, many people really expected a war and there was even talk about a preemptive strike.

[...]

However, this is an old story by now. It seems that after the second nuclear test in May and all associated statements, virtually nobody in the US government still clings to the belief that denuclearization of North Korea is possible. In other words, the Americans have come to realize the obvious: North Korea will stay nuclear.

The New Dust Bowl

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:54:57 -0800

In the 1930s, Okies saw California's Central Valley as a Garden of Eden. Now it's dying of thirst.

Mother Jones, By Josh Harkinson, November/December Issue

When I meet Javier Vaca on a dusty strip of blacktop, he's been walking for three days. The skinny 18-year-old is being carried along in a procession of 7,000 farmworkers and farmers as it crosses California's Central Valley, his baggy jeans and hoodie standing out amid the work boots and button-downs. He's been told only one thing that matters: Marching 50 miles might earn him a job.

"I don't want to jack nobody," Vaca says, as though the thought had crossed his mind. When the housing boom imploded last year, he lost a $14-an-hour construction job, a job that had allowed this son of farmworkers to drop out of high school, buy a car, and rent an apartment for his young wife and baby in Fresno. It took him a month to find more work, this time picking peaches at less than half his previous wage. Then the worst drought in more than a decade hit, a court order to protect an endangered fish cut off water to the valley's farmers, and an area larger than Los Angeles went fallow. Vaca now works one day a week while his family survives on welfare and food stamps. "It's hard, man," he says. "Everybody's broke."

The spring morning chill becomes a broil as Vaca and his fellow marchers slowly follow a two-lane road through parched hills. A man squatting next to an ice chest on the median doles out carne asada burritos. "I'm hungry," Vaca says with a wan smile as he stuffs one into his pants pocket and bites into another. He passes an ATV draped in an American flag, where Sharon Wakefield, an almond farmer, is resting her feet. She says she believes that the Mexicans and Central Americans who have joined the California March for Water are basically no different from her mother, who fled Oklahoma during the Great Depression to earn a pittance harvesting hay and cotton in the valley. Except this time, the state has even less to offer them: "We've got no water, no food, no future," she says.

The Central Valley, the thin, fertile band running down the middle of California, has long boasted the world's richest agricultural economy, reliably producing more than a quarter of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables. But it's done so in defiance of ecological reality. The 70-year-old irrigation system that has pumped water into the otherwise arid valley is proving increasingly vulnerable to shifting weather patterns. It now appears that waterwise, 20th century California was an anomaly, a relatively wet period in the midst of a historical cycle of severe drought. And the changing climate will only magnify the problem: By the end of the century, scientists predict, Central California could experience temperatures rivaling Death Valley's and face the loss of 90 percent of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the region's main water source. "Business as usual won't work in the future," says Eike Luedeling, an expert in plant sciences at the University of California-Davis, whose research shows that higher temperatures will likely decimate the state's $10 billion fruit and nut industry. "Especially for tree crops, adapting will require huge investments that probably a lot of small guys can't make anymore."

The 40 million children who just didn't exist

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:02:31 -0800

One charity's campaign to register the births of all children in the developing world is transforming millions of young lives.

The Independent, By Nina Lakhani, November 15

This is a story about a project which found 40 million children who didn't officially exist. A campaign that, over four years and across three continents and 32 countries, has helped to protect hundreds of thousands of children in danger of being trafficked, and girls as young as 12 being forced into illegal marriages – and it is now also saving untold numbers of unborn girls from being aborted because they are the "wrong sex". It is that very rare thing: a global good news story.

It is a mission to give millions of children in the developing world something that is taken for granted in Britain: the registration of their birth and, with it, an official existence. Before the campaign – mounted by the international children's charity Plan – there were parts of the world where registration was rare. In Cambodia, for instance, as late as 2005 96 per cent of the population went unregistered. Without registration, there can be no birth certificate, no identity card, no passport, no proof of age or parentage. Thus, millions are at increased risk of being press-ganged as child soldiers or prostitutes, of not being returned to their families if liberated, of having only limited access to healthcare and education, and being deprived of their legal rights.

The problem, Plan realised some years ago, was a cause of immense human misery, and so it launched the Count Every Child scheme. Its ambition was the registration at birth of every baby in the world. In a report published tomorrow, Plan tells the remarkable story of how it registered 40m citizens. In some countries, it has transformed registration rates, and pressured governments to waive the costs of logging a birth. The result is that a further 153 million people are now eligible for free registration.

Using the Web to adjust the color on TV

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:01:00 -0800

Minorities find a warm reception through online channels

Washington Post, By DeNeen L. Brown, November 15

A black superwoman appears on your laptop in shimmering blue tights, green socks and a midnight blue cape. Her hair in Afro puffs, she is sitting on a promenade bench. She looks worried and a bit worn out. Her makeup is smeared, probably from crying.

She tells us she has just caught her boyfriend with a "second-rate superhero." The nerve of him.

The woman, who identifies herself as Fantastica, climbs a railing on a ledge several stories aboveground.

She holds tight to the rail behind her, breathes deeply, then announces dramatically: "Death over dishonor." And lets go.

You shout at your computer: Girl, don't go out like that over a man.

'I will only wear pants'

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:56:07 -0800

Defiant 'trouser lady' continues to fight decency laws

Washington Post, By Stephanie McCrummen, November 14

KHARTOUM, SUDAN -- A few months after she was arrested for wearing pants, Lubna Hussein was lounging around her home in a shady, upper-class neighborhood in this capital along the Nile River. It was a hot afternoon, but the 34-year-old Sudanese journalist was wearing thick jeans adorned with sequins and embroidered flowers.

"Since all this happened, I will only wear pants," she said in the calmly defiant manner that led to her fleeting global celebrity as "the trouser lady," and a less-publicized backlash that has included anonymous death threats and newspaper columns calling her a prostitute. "If you have something to fight for, you can lose your life."

In July, Hussein attempted to shame Sudan's Islamist ruling party by inviting reporters to view her public flogging, a punishment under Islamic law that is sometimes applied here -- by leather whip or bamboo cane of the sort used on camels -- to women deemed to have violated decency laws.

As news spread, her court date drew crowds of women and men protesting in solidarity, and she received support from the likes of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sudanese women started Web sites such as iamlubna.com, and some compared her to Rosa Parks, the American civil rights icon who challenged segregation laws.

Then, the campaign fizzled. Eager to dispense with the negative publicity, a judge sentenced Hussein to jail instead of flogging. She was released days later, and the attention surrounding her case settled into discussions among women about their experiences with Khartoum's vaguely worded decency laws, and the politics of keeping public order.

Previous Agonist Thread: Interesting Saudi op-ed narrative on the bozos in Riyadh trying to pick up girls

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:44:17 -0800

New York Times, By Paul Krugman, November 9

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:30:26 -0800

New York Times, By Benedict Carey, November 9

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.

Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

[...]

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

[Another Scientist opines...]

“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.

Deal in Senate on Protecting News Sources

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:47:08 -0800

New York Times, By Charlie Savage. October 30

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, leading Senate Democrats and a coalition of news organizations have reached tentative agreement on legislation providing greater protections against the fining or imprisonment of reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the deal, made public Friday, federal judges could quash subpoenas demanding testimony or information from reporters if the judges determined that the public interest in news gathering outweighed the need to uncover the source of a leak, including, in some circumstances, unauthorized disclosure of classified government information.

Protection under the so-called shield law would also be extended to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news.

A version of shield legislation was approved by the House in March. But a similar bill has stalled in the Senate, and its prospects appeared to dim significantly in September when the administration, responding to apprehension expressed by intelligence agencies and prosecutors, took a harder line with regard to cases in which the government could claim national security concerns.

With the new agreement, however, the White House has now moderated that position.

“We expect this proposal to move forward with bipartisan support, and the president looks forward to signing it into law,” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, who noted that the Obama administration was “the first administration in history to support media shield legislation.”

h/t On The Media: Shields Up, November 6
h/t Nieman Journalism Lab: Did newspapers and bloggers frame the shield law debate differently?, By CW Anderson, November 2

Fork whets Pasadena's artistic appetite

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:34:45 -0800

The 18-foot-tall utensil was stealthily erected as a birthday present. Now the city is considering keeping it as a piece of street art.

Los Angeles Times, By Nicole Santa Cruz, November 7

Pasadena has a fork in the road. And it's 18 feet tall.

Where south St. John and south Pasadena avenues divide, there's a towering wooden silver fork in the traffic median. The utensil has a black steel skeleton and is rooted in 2 1/2 feet of concrete.

The art was originally intended as a surprise for Bob Stane of Altadena, who celebrated his 75th birthday Oct. 29. But Caltrans, which owns the median, and Pasadena, which maintains the land, are deciding whether to keep it up for a while as an impromptu piece of street art.

"It was just the best birthday present I've ever had," said Stane, who owns the Coffee Gallery Backstage, a coffeehouse and showroom in Altadena, with the fork's artist, Ken Marshall. "It was the only time I've ever been surprised for my birthday."

The fork was finished about 9:50 a.m. on Halloween after friends worked to erect it clad in fake Caltrans uniforms and hard hats. Friends surprised Stane 10 minutes later with the utensil and chocolate cake.

[...]

"To my knowledge, there hasn't ever been a mystery piece of public art just popping up in the city," said DeWolfe, who has been with the city for 20 years.

Italians outraged as European court rules against crucifixes

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:27:47 -0800

After a European court rules against crucifixes in Italian schoolrooms, Italians from across the political spectrum decry an assault on the country's Roman Catholic identity.

Christian Science Monitor, By Nick Squires, November 3

Rome - Italians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after a European court ruled that displaying crucifixes in the country's schools violated the principle of secular education.

Italy's education minister condemned the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the Christian cross was a symbol of the country's Roman Catholic religion and cultural identity.

Mariastella Gelmini, a member of the conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, argued that "no one, and certainly not an ideological European court, will succeed in erasing our identity," said

Other ministers said they were appalled by the ruling, calling it "absurd," "shameful" and "offensive."

The Human Body Is Built for Distance

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:46:33 -0700

New York Times, By Tara Parker-Pope, October 26

Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?

The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.

Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish line, an increase of 20 percent from the beginning of the decade, Running USA says. Next week about 40,000 people will take part in the New York City Marathon. Injury rates have also climbed, with some studies reporting that 90 percent of those who train for the 26.2-mile race sustain injuries in the process.

But now a best-selling book has reframed the debate about the wisdom of distance running. In “Born to Run” (Knopf), Christopher McDougall, an avid runner who had been vexed by injuries, explores the world of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, a tribe known for running extraordinary distances in nothing but thin-soled sandals.

[...]

The scientific evidence supports the notion that humans evolved to be runners. In a 2007 paper in the journal Sports Medicine, Daniel E. Lieberman, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, and Dennis M. Bramble, a biologist at the University of Utah, wrote that several characteristics unique to humans suggested endurance running played an important role in our evolution.

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

[...]

And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”

[...]

What’s the solution? Slower, easier training over a long period would most likely help; so would brief walk breaks, which mimic the behavior of the persistence hunter. And running on a variety of surfaces and in simpler shoes with less cushioning can restore natural running form.

Mr. McDougall says that while researching his book, he corrected his form and stopped using thickly cushioned shoes. He has run without injury for three years.

Does Military Service Turn Young Men Into Sexual Predators?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:11:47 -0700

TruthDig/Alternet, By Penny Coleman, October 23

Every day, for four years as a West Point cadet, Tara Krause lived and worked alongside the men who had gang-raped her.

Still, she managed to graduate in 1982. She served as a field artillery officer during the Cold War and was attached to the 518th Military Intelligence Brigade during the Gulf War. In what she calls "an act of incredible self-destruction," she married a three-tour Vietnam vet in 1985 and, for the next eight years, lived "the private hell of his PTSD."

"Suicidal behavior, violence and degradation were common threads of daily life," she told me. She survived only because when he put his gun to her head one day, it finally gave her the courage to flee. "Like Lot’s wife," she says, she struggles not to look back.

It’s been almost 30 years since the rape, and Krause says she still "dance(s) the crushing daily struggle" of her own PTSD: "The nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, cold sweats, suicidal thoughts, zoning out, numbing all emotion and desperately avoiding triggers (reminders)—I have become a prisoner in my own home."

[...]

For all the work she has done to heal her own injuries, she still has no answer for the question: "How do you get a group of Southern white teenagers, all of whom were Eagle Scouts, class presidents, scholars and athletes, to be capable of raping a classmate?"

The question deserves an answer, and not a simplistic one. A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the Gulf War found that almost 8 in 10 had been sexually harassed during their military service, and 30 percent had been raped.

Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to grievances like Krause’s with silence, or denial, or by blaming "a few bad apples." But when individual soldiers take the blame, the system gets off the hook.

And it can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread—for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators.

So it seems reasonable to ask whether perhaps there is something about military culture or training or experience that can be identified as causative, and then, perhaps, changed.

The correlation is difficult to dismiss. The majority of veterans behind bars today are there for a very specific type of crime: violence against women and children. That fact has held true since the first Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) surveys of veteran populations in the nation’s prisons in 1981, and there is evidence that those surveys only identified a much older problem.

How The Federal Reserve Bailed Out The World

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:16:10 -0700

Zero Hedge, By Tyler Durden, October 19

When the financial system almost imploded in the fall of 2008, one of the primary responses by the Federal Reserve was the issuance of an unprecedented amount of FX liquidity lines in the form of swaps to foreign Central Banks. The number went from practically zero to a peak of $582 billion on December 10, 2008. The number of swaps outstanding was almost directly inversely correlated with the value of the dollar (much more on that shortly). A graphic representation of this can be seen below:

[...]

And while Bernanke was not very interested in getting caught up in providing actual explanations, the Bank of International Settlements just released a major paper titled "The US dollar shortage in global banking and the international policy response [PDF]" which goes on to demonstrate just how it happened that Fed chief Ben Bernanke in essence bailed out the entire developed world, which was facing an unprecedented dollar shortage crisis due to the sudden implosion of FX swap lines and other mechanisms which until that point were critical in maintaining the dollar funding shortfall for virtually every foreign Central Bank.

[...]

Why is this critical? We are now back at a time when the only gains in the stock market are at the expense of dollar destruction, with a concomittant funding for dollar denominated assets. In one short year since the collapse of Lehman we have gone back to the same dollar funding risk exposure as was on the books in these days before Dick Fuld's empire unravelled. While whether or not the Federal Reserve stepped beyond its bounds in practically bailing out not just Goldman Sachs, but as this paper has proven, virtually the entire world, is not up to us to decide. However, a critical topic is: have we learned anything from the implications of an unprecedented dollar funding gap, which is likely back to record levels once again? What is obvious is that the Fed's current policy of a weak dollar, contrary to its repeated lies otherwise, is simply enhancing the dollar funding moral hazard: and the breaking point will come sooner or later with disastrous consequences.

As the H.4.1 discloses weekly, the Fed's liquidity swaps are now back to almost zero. This means that foreign Central Banks believe they have the FX swap and dollar maturity situation under control. They thought the same before Lehman blew up. And they were wrong. As the DXY continues tumbling ever lower to fresh 2009 lows, the trade de jour is once again the dollar funding one, although unlike before when the Yen was the carry currency of choice, this time it is the dollar itself, positioning banks for the double whammy of not just a dollar funding shock, but one coupled with a potential massive and historic short squeeze. If and when an exogenous event occurs, not even $6.5 trillion in Fed swap lines will be sufficient to bail out the world economy. It is time someone in Congress asks the Chairman all the pertinent questions that evolve from this analysis and how he is prepared to handle its next, much more vicious, and likely terminal, iteration.

Wall Street's Naked Swindle

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:03:11 -0700

A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

Rolling Stone, By Matt Taibbi, October 14

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

[...]

What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims — and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. And in the forensic footprint left by those kills, we can see for the first time exactly how the scam worked — and how completely even the government regulators who are supposed to protect us have given up trying to stop it.

[...]

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

The nation's largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting can take place on a systematic level for years without being stopped, even after it begins to affect the modern-day equivalents of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. What 10 years ago was a cheap stock-fraud scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn has become a major profit center for Wall Street. Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them.