Musk, The Rent Seeker, Posing as Visionary - streetwiseprofessor.com

Musk, The Rent Seeker, Posing as Visionary - streetwiseprofessor.com

"It was about the fact that all of his companies were heavily dependent
on government subsidies and support.  This support socialized the
potential losses, and allowed Musk (and other major investors, notably
Goldman) to capture the upside.  My point was if his products and
business models were so great, he could succeed on his own, by
attracting private capital."

"...SpaceX, his  space launch venture.  Inevitably, this company is
dependent on government contracts, given that a very large fraction of
space launches carry government payloads.  This is something different
from Solar City and Tesla, where the government is providing subsidies
but not receiving any product or service in return.  But still, it means
that Musk depends crucially on cultivating government support.
 Government contracting-especially big ticket contracting-is hardly a
pristine activity.  A firm does not succeed or fail at it primarily on
the basis of the superiority of its product, but instead on the basis of
its ability to influence politicians and bureaucrats.  And a lack of
scruple is often a feature not a bug in that regard.
SpaceX
was  looking for a commercial launch site, and  seeking state subsidies
in order to build it.  The company has been playing states off against
one another, looking for tax benefits."

"Cynically, Musk focused on one of the poorest parts of the
state-Brownsville-and dangled the prospect of a mere 600 jobs, in
exchange for  $20 million dollars or so in tax benefits.  Some of which
will come from the taxpayers of that very poor community.  And sadly,
the state legislature has succumbed."

"

The poorest people in Brownsville will not benefit the slightest from
the SpaceX venture.  But he and his lobbyist successfully importuned
the state and county to take taxpayer money and give it to SpaceX by
invoking their poverty.  It was utterly cynical for a billionaire to
extract tens of millions from Texas taxpayers in the name of the poor
Mexican Americans of Brownsville.


I know this is the way the game is played.  And that’s the problem:
the game is cynical and wrong.  It is mere rent seeking.  Musk is
particularly appalling because he is a rent seeker posing as a
technological visionary.  His businesses all depend on extracting rents
from the government, which he pockets.


But he has a cult of personality that portrays him as some towering visionary genius."

Credit Suisse Admits Guilt in Settling With S.E.C. - NYTimes.com

Credit Suisse Admits Guilt in Settling With S.E.C. - NYTimes.com

"Credit Suisse on Friday became the latest big bank to admit wrongdoing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, striking a deal over its failure to comply with a cardinal rule of the financial industry.

The bank, based in Zurich, was accused of
advising clients in the United States without first registering at the
S.E.C. Credit Suisse paid $196 million to settle with the federal
agency, which requires banks and other firms that offer investment
advice to comply with basic registration rules.

“The broker-dealer and investment adviser
registration provisions are core protections for investors,” Andrew J.
Ceresney, director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, said in a
statement.

While the penalty is significant, the
admission of wrongdoing underscored the importance of the case. It is
the fifth such admission since the S.E.C. — in an important reversal —
modified its longstanding policy of letting defendants settle without
“admitting or denying” wrongdoing."

Fed knew about Libor rigging in 2008 - Telegraph

Fed knew about Libor rigging in 2008 - Telegraph

"

The US Federal Reserve knew about Libor rigging three years before the
financial scandal exploded but did not take any firm action, documents have
revealed.

According to newly published transcripts of the central bank’s meetings in the
run-up to and immediate aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a
senior Fed official first flagged the issue at a policy meeting in April
2008.

William Dudley expressed fears that banks were being dishonest in the way they
were calculating the London interbank offered rate – a global benchmark
interest rate used as the basis for trillions of pounds of loans and
financial contracts.

“There is considerable evidence that the official Libor fixing understates the
rates paid by many banks for funding,” he said.

He added that a newspaper report, which lifted the lid on some degree of
manipulation, appeared to have triggered “an outbreak of veracity among at
least some” bankers, who started reporting accurately the interest rates
they offer each other, which are used to calculate Libor.


Three years after his remarks, it emerged that traders at more than a dozen
banks, including Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, had routinely
been trying to fix the official Libor rate in order to boost their own
bonuses and profits.




The scandal impacted the finances of tens of millions of ordinary households
and businesses, and dealt a devastating blow to the banking industry.
Financial institutions have paid more than $5bn (£3bn) in fines to settle
the matter with regulators in the US, UK and the European Union. A dozen
individuals have been criminally charged, and many others lost their jobs –
including Barclays’ chief executive Bob Diamond and chairman Marcus Agius,
who both resigned over the issue.




The transcript of the Fed’s April 2008 meeting raises questions about why the
central bank did not move to properly tackle the scandal. There was no
official regulator for Libor at the time, and officials at the US Federal
Reserve tried to blame British authorities for allowing the benchmark
interest rate to get out of control in the first place."

Get Off the (Google) Bus · LRB

A look at the Google bus blockade in SFO -

Get Off the Bus · LRB 20 February 2014 - Rebecca Solnit

"One of the curious things about the crisis in San Francisco –
precipitated by a huge influx of well-paid tech workers driving up
housing costs and causing evictions, gentrification and cultural change –
is that they seem unable to understand why many locals don’t love them.
They’re convinced that they are members of the tribe. Their confusion
may issue from Silicon Valley’s own favourite stories about itself.
These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is
described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed
as agents of the counterculture.

That may actually have been the
case, briefly, in the popular tech Genesis story according to which
Apple emerged from a garage somewhere at the south end of the San
Francisco Peninsula, not yet known as Silicon Valley. But Google set
itself up with the help of a $4.5 million dollar government subsidy, and
Apple became a giant corporation that begat multimillion-dollar
advertising campaigns and overseas sweatshops and the rest that you
already know. Facebook, Google, eBay and Yahoo (though not Apple) belong
to the conservative anti-environmental political action committee Alec
(the American Legislative Exchange Council).

The story Silicon
Valley less often tells about itself has to do with dollar signs and
weapons systems. The industry came out of military contracting, and its
alliance with the Pentagon has never ended. The valley’s first major
firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its
co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the
Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a
paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial
law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in the
decades since: weapons contractors United Technologies and Lockheed
Martin, as well as sundry makers of drone, satellite and spying
equipment and military robotics. Silicon Valley made technology for the
military, and the military sponsored research that benefited Silicon
Valley. The first supercomputer, made by New York’s Remington Rand, was
for nuclear weapons research at the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.

The internet itself, people sometimes
remember, was created by the military, and publicly funded research has
done a lot to make the hardware, the software and the vast private
fortunes possible. Which you wouldn’t know from the hyperlibertarian
language of the tech world’s kings. Even the mildest of them, Bill
Gates, said in 1998: ‘There isn’t an industry in America that is more
creative, more alive and more competitive. And the amazing thing is that
all this happened without any government involvement.’ The current
lords talk of various kinds of secession, quite literally at the
Seasteading Institute, an organisation that’s looking into building
artificial islands outside all national laws and regulations. And taxes.
Let someone else subsidise all that research."

...

"

So there’s a disconnect in values and goals: Silicon Valley workers
seem to want to inhabit the anti-war, social-justice, mutual-aid heart
of San Francisco (and the Bay Area). To do so they often displace San
Franciscans from their homes. One often hears objections: it isn’t the
tech workers coming here who are carrying out the evictions. But they
are moving into homes from which people have been evicted. Ivory
collectors in China aren’t shooting elephants in Africa, but the
elephants are being shot for them. Native sons and daughters also work
in the industry, and many of the newcomers may be compassionate,
progressive people, but I have seen few signs of resistance, refusal to
participate, or even chagrin about their impact from within their ranks.

2013
may be the year San Francisco turned on Silicon Valley and may be the
year the world did too. Edward Snowden’s revelations began to flow in
June: Silicon Valley was sharing our private data with the National
Security Agency. Many statements were made about how reluctantly it was
done, how outraged the executives were, but all the relevant companies –
Yahoo, Google, Facebook – complied without telling us. These days it
appears that the NSA is not their enemy so much as their rival; Facebook
and Google are themselves apparently harvesting far more data from us
than the US government. Last year, Facebook’s chief security officer
went to work for the NSA, and the New York Times said the move

underscores
the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency
and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt
for ways to collect, analyse and exploit large pools of data about
millions of Americans. The only difference is that the NSA does it for
intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The
corporations doing this are not the counterculture, or the underground
or bohemia, only the avant-garde of an Orwellian future.

City of
Refuge, a church serving people of colour and queer people, left San
Francisco, a city that has long considered itself a refuge, last
September and moved to Oakland. ‘It became clear,’ its pastor said,
‘what the neighbourhood was saying to us: This is not a haven for social
services.’ The current boom is dislodging bookstores, bars, Latino
businesses, black businesses, environmental and social-services groups,
as well as longtime residents, many of them disabled and elderly. Mary
Elizabeth Phillips, who arrived in San Francisco after getting married
in 1937, will be 98 when she is driven out of her home of more than half
a century.

In many other places eviction means you go and find a
comparable place to live: in San Francisco that’s impossible for anyone
who’s been here a while and is paying less than the market rate. Money
isn’t the only issue: even people who can pay huge sums can’t find
anything to rent, because the competition is so fierce. Jonathan Klein, a
travel-agency owner in his sixties living with Aids, jumped off the
Golden Gate Bridge last year after being driven out of his home, with
his business in the Castro facing eviction. ‘EVICTION = DEATH’, a sign at the memorial said, echoing the old ‘SILENCE = DEATH’ slogan of the Aids-activist era.

When
it comes to buying a home, your income needs to be nearly one and a
half times higher in San Francisco than in the next most expensive city
in the US. What began as vague anxiety a couple of years ago has turned
into fear, rage and grief. It has also driven people to develop
strategies aimed at changing the local and statewide laws that permit
the evictions.

When a Google bus was surrounded on 9 December, it made the news all
over the English-speaking world. Though what the blockaders wanted
wasn’t so easily heard. They were attacked as people who don’t like
carpools, by people who don’t get that the buses compete with public
transport and that their passengers displace economically vulnerable San
Franciscans. It’s as though death came riding in on a pale horse and
someone said: ‘What? You don’t like horses?’ Many of the displaced then
become commuters but they don’t have luxury coaches pulling up in their
neighbourhoods to take them to their jobs and schools in San Francisco:
they drive, or patch together routes on public transport, or sink into
oblivion and exile. So the Google bus and the Apple bus don’t reduce
commuting’s impact. They just transfer it to poorer people.

San
Francisco was excoriated again and again by lovers of development and
the free market for not being dense enough, on the grounds that if we
just built and built and built, everyone would be happily housed. ‘Let
San Francisco have the same housing density as Tokyo & Taipei, both
earthquake zones, then watch rental costs crater,’ a tech worker
tweeted. (His feed also features photographs of a toy mule, the mascot
of the company he works for, and occasional outbursts aimed at Edward
Snowden.) Another day he insisted with the blithe confidence Silicon
Valley seems to beget (as well as the oversimplification Twitter more or
less requires): ‘Higher minimum wage and looser, pro-development zoning
laws, housing problem in San Francisco goes away. Simple as that.’
(Minimum wage would have to be more than $50 an hour for someone to be
able to buy a house in San Francisco, or to ensure that a $3200 a month
rent accounted for no more than a third of their pre-tax income.)

San
Francisco is already the second densest major metropolitan area in the
US, but this isn’t mentioned much, nor is the fact that the densest, New
York, is also unaffordable and becoming more so even in its outer
boroughs, despite a building boom. Meanwhile San Francisco developers
are building 48,000 more units of housing in the few cracks and
interstices not already filled in, mostly upscale condominiums far out
of most people’s reach, and most of which won’t be available in time to
prevent the next round of evictions.

How do you diagnose what is
wrong with San Francisco now? People bandy about the word
‘gentrification’, a term usually used for neighbourhoods rather than
whole cities. You could say that San Francisco, like New York and other
US metropolises, is suffering the reversal of postwar white flight:
affluent people, many of them white, decided in the past few decades
that cities were nice places to live after all, and started to return,
pushing poorer people, many of them non-white, to the margins.

You
can also see the explosion as a variation on the new economic divide,
in which the few have more and more and the many have less and less: a
return to 19th-century social arrangements. (It gets forgotten that the
more generous arrangements of the 20th century, in much of Europe and
North America, were made in part to sedate insurrectionary fury from
below.) It’s the issue to which Occupy Wall Street drew our attention."

...

"

On the afternoon of 21 January, the city’s Municipal Transportation
Agency held a meeting to discuss putting in place a pilot programme to
study the impact of the buses and limit them to two hundred bus stops in
the city. As the San Francisco writer Anisse Gross has pointed out, if
you evade your fare on a bus, you get fined $110; if you pull a car in
at a bus stop, you get fined $271; if you just pay your fare it’s $2 per
person. But if you’re the Google bus you will now pay $1 to use the
public bus stop. This pissed off a lot of people at the hearing. Not
everyone, though. Google had dispatched some of its employees to
testify.

The corporation’s memo to the passengers had been leaked
the previous day. The memo encouraged them to go to the hearing on
company time and told them what to say:

If you do
choose to speak in favour of the proposal we thought you might
appreciate some guidance on what to say. Feel free to add your own style
and opinion:

My shuttle empowers my colleagues and I to reduce our carbon emissions by removing cars from the road.

If the shuttle programme didn’t exist, I would continue to live in San Francisco and drive to work on the peninsula.

I am a shuttle rider, SF resident, and I volunteer at …

The
idea of the memo was to make it seem that the luxury buses are
reducing, not increasing Silicon Valley’s impact on San Francisco. ‘It’s
not a luxury,’ one Google worker said of the bus: ‘It’s just a thing on
wheels that gets us to work.’ But a new study concludes that if the
buses weren’t available, half the workers wouldn’t drive their own cars
from San Francisco to Silicon Valley; nearly a third wouldn’t be willing
to live here and commute there at all.

There’s a new job category in San Francisco, though it’s probably a low-paying one: private security guard for the Google bus."

All the President’s Middlemen | The Nation

All the President’s Middlemen | The Nation

"Health-care isn’t the first boon that President Obama tried to give
us through a public-private partnership. When he took office, more than
25 percent of US home mortgages were underwater—meaning that people owed
more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them.
The president offered those homeowners debt relief through banks. Now
he’s offering healthcare through insurance companies.


In both cases, the administration shied away from direct government
aid. Instead, it subsidized private companies to serve the people. To
get your government-subsidized mortgage modification, you applied at
your bank; to get your government-mandated health coverage, you buy
private insurance.

Let a Hundred Middlemen Bloom

In other countries with national health plans, a variety of
independent healthcare providers—hospitals, doctors and clinics, among
others—deliver medical care, while the government doles out the
compensation. They let a hundred healthcare providers bloom, but there’s
only a single payer. If the US moved to single-payer healthcare, however, what would happen to the private health insurance business?


In the 1990s, the conservative Heritage Foundation floated the idea
of extending health coverage to more Americans via government exchanges
or “connectors”
that would funnel individual buyers to competing, for-profit health
insurance companies. In other words, let a hundred middlemen bloom.


On the face of it, such a plan would seem expensive, since it means
supporting two bureaucracies, one of which would be obliged to take
profits for investors. Meanwhile, doctors would still have the expense
of trying to collect from multiple insurers with reasons to stall. But
the Heritage plan
had one great advantage. Since Harry Truman, American presidents have
tried unsuccessfully to get us national healthcare. The exchange system,
however awkward it might be, pacified the insurance companies, which
had previously spent millions of dollars to defeat other plans for
“socialized medicine.” With the support of those companies for a program
that not only kept them in the picture but also promised to deliver
millions of new, subsidized customers, Obama gave us a national
healthcare law.


The danger is that it essentially makes insurance companies our
medical receptionists, a profit-making face that greets sick people
whenever they try to use their government healthcare. That gives private
companies a lot of power to make the government look bad.


That’s why it’s important to understand how banks used Obama’s
mortgage subsidy program to sabotage debt relief and discredit
government. If we grasp how they pulled that off, we may be able to
protect the present health plan and someday even get genuine
single-payer healthcare out of it. So here’s the story.


The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) offered banks
government incentives—cash bonuses—to lower the principal or interest on
underwater mortgages. Of course, health insurance companies don’t
actually provide healthcare, but banks did provide the underwater
mortgages, so, however ill-advised or fraudulent they were, those
institutions obviously had a role in negotiating their modification. The
HAMP partnership was structured so that the government’s role was to
provide cash incentives to banks, while participating banks would be
required to accept and process the applications of those who were eager
to modify their onerous mortgages. Whether they granted a modification
was, however, strictly up to them."

...

Exclusive: The Rags-To-Riches Tale Of How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp Into Facebook's New $19 Billion Baby - Forbes

Interesting background of the WhatsApp founder. Very interesting that Koum signed the Facebook deal at Socia Sevices offices in Mountain View. Can we say that WhatsApp would not have existed without the social net? 

The Rags-To-Riches Tale Of How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp Into Facebook's New $19 Billion Baby - Forbes

More Americans Now View Afghanistan War as a Mistake - Gallup poll

More Americans Now View Afghanistan War as a Mistake

"For the first time since the U.S. initially became involved in Afghanistan in 2001, Americans are as likely to say U.S. military involvement there was a mistake as to say it was not."

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet

I am not sure how this stuff does not cause outrage of americans?

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

"Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs
own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal,
natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They
likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a
whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society
in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc,
copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent
high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but
abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in
recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that
Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a
national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of
ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public
wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much
influence over the state energy grid.


There are more eclectic interests, too. After 9/11, we found it
worrisome when foreigners started to get into the business of running
ports, but there's been little controversy as banks have done the same,
or even started dabbling in other activities with national-security
implications – Goldman Sachs, for instance, is apparently now in the
uranium business, a piece of news that attracted few headlines.

But banks aren't just buying stuff, they're buying whole industrial
processes. They're buying oil that's still in the ground, the tankers
that move it across the sea, the refineries that turn it into fuel, and
the pipelines that bring it to your home. Then, just for kicks, they're
also betting on the timing and efficiency of these same industrial
processes in the financial markets – buying and selling oil stocks on
the stock exchange, oil futures on the futures market, swaps on the
swaps market, etc.


Allowing one company to control the supply of crucial physical
commodities, and also trade in the financial products that might be
related to those markets, is an open invitation to commit mass
manipulation. It's something akin to letting casino owners who take book
on NFL games during the week also coach all the teams on Sundays.


The situation has opened a Pandora's box of horrifying new corruption
possibilities, but it's been hard for the public to notice, since
regulators have struggled to put even the slightest dent in Wall
Street's older, more familiar scams. In just the past few years we've
seen an explosion of scandals – from the multitrillion-dollar Libor saga
(major international banks gaming world interest rates), to the more
recent foreign-currency-exchange fiasco (many of the same banks
suspected of rigging prices in the $5.3-trillion-a-day currency
markets), to lesser scandals involving manipulation of interest-rate
swaps, and gold and silver prices.


But those are purely financial schemes. In these new, even scarier
kinds of manipulations, banks that own whole chains of physical business
interests have been caught rigging prices in those industries. For
instance, in just the past two years, fines in excess of $400 million
have been levied against both JPMorgan Chase and Barclays for allegedly
manipulating the delivery of electricity in several states, including
California. In the case of Barclays, which is contesting the fine,
regulators claim prices were manipulated to help the bank win financial
bets it had made on those same energy markets.


And last summer, The New York Times described how Goldman
Sachs was caught systematically delaying the delivery of metals out of a
network of warehouses it owned in order to jack up rents and
artificially boost prices.


You might not have been surprised that Goldman got caught scamming
the world again, but it was certainly news to a lot of people that an
investment bank with no industrial expertise, just five years removed
from a federal bailout, stores and controls enough of America's aluminum
supply to affect world prices."

"Do we even have a regulatory structure in place to look out for these
new forms of manipulation? (Answer: We don't.) And given that the
banking sector that came so close to ruining the world economy five
years ago has now vastly expanded its footprint, who's in charge of
preventing the next crash?"

Morgan Stanley to pay $1.25 billion to resolve mortgage lawsuit

Morgan Stanley to pay $1.25 billion to resolve mortgage lawsuit | Reuters

"Morgan Stanley said it would pay $1.25 billion to the U.S. regulator
for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to settle a lawsuit related to the sale
of mortgage-backed securities.


The Wall Street bank will add
$150 million to its legal reserves as a result of the settlement with
the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Morgan Stanley disclosed in a
regulatory filing on Tuesday"

"The FHFA in January said it had recouped
nearly $8 billion through settlements with financial institutions it
sued in 2011 over allegedly false and misleading statements relating to
some $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie and
Freddie.

The housing authority commenced lawsuits against 18 financial institutions in 2011.

Last December, Deutsche Bank said it would pay $1.9 billion to settle claims, while Citigroup paid $250 million."

JPMorgan to pay $614 mln in U.S. mortgage fraud case

JPMorgan to pay $614 mln in U.S. mortgage fraud case | Reuters

"JPMorgan Chase & Co
settled the latest in a string of legal claims on Tuesday when
it agreed to pay $614 million to the U.S. government and
admitted that it defrauded federal agencies by underwriting
sub-standard mortgage loans.

JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, said as part of
the settlement that for more than a decade it approved thousands
of insured loans that were not eligible for insurance by the
Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Veterans
Affairs, according to court papers.

As a consequence, "both the FHA and the VA incurred
substantial losses when unqualified loans failed and caused the
FHA and VA to cover the associated losses," the U.S. Justice
Department said in a statement.

JPMorgan is one of several banks that has faced similar
allegations. Citigroup Inc and Deutsche Bank AG
have also reached settlements, while the Justice Department is
seeking $2.1 billion in penalties from Bank of America Corp
after a jury found the bank liable for fraud over
mortgages sold by its Countrywide unit.

Last year, JPMorgan agreed to about $20 billion in
settlements in its drive to clear up legal claims. The deals
covered claims over other mortgage issues, as well as
derivatives and power trading."

Net worth of billionaire community up 12-fold in 15 yrs in India: IMF

Net worth of billionaire community up 12-fold in 15 yrs in India: IMF - Hindustan Times:

"Citing countries like the US and India, the two largest democratic countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Christen Lagarde has said that income inequality is increasing dangerously globally.

"In India, the net worth of the billionaire community increased twelve-fold in 15 years, enough to eliminate absolute poverty in this country twice over," said Lagarde delivering the Richard Dimbleby Lecture in London, according to the copy of the speech made available by the IMF."

Losing the Propaganda War - NYTimes.com

Israel losing the Propaganda War - NYTimes.com

"The
“apartheid wall,” “apartheid roads,” colonization, administrative
arrests, travel restrictions, land confiscations and house demolitions
are the clay apartheid comparisons are made of, and cannot be hidden or
denied, for as long as Israel continues with the status quo.

Military
occupation comes with checkpoints, antiterrorist barriers, military
courts, armed soldiers and tanks. That’s the reality, no matter what
your politics, and just the ammunition the Palestinians and their
supporters need in their new war."

"..
Israel is doing almost everything it can to help its opponents achieve
their goal. Instead of focusing on peace talks, Israel continuously
signals its intention to build more settlement housing, most recently on
Jan. 10, when plans for 1,400 new homes in East Jerusalem and the West
Bank were announced. Instead of welcoming Eritrean and Sudanese refugees
seeking asylum — the way that a former Likud Party prime minister,
Menachem Begin, did in 1977 with the Vietnamese boat people, saying they
reminded him of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust — Israel is
confining today’s asylum-seekers to a camp in the desert, providing
reams of footage to those who want to prove Israel is a racist society.

And
it didn’t help when, on Dec. 15, a ministerial committee approved a
bill that would impose heavy, punitive taxes on groups like B’Tselem,
which tracks alleged human rights violations in the occupied
territories, and Adalah, the legal center for minority rights in Israel."

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz:



Came across this blog - some of it resonates so well -



"Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling."

"The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them."

"When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way."

"The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have."

Why Do Some Americans Speak So Confidently When They Have No Clue What They're Talking About? | Alternet

Why Do Some Americans Speak So Confidently When They Have No Clue What They're Talking About? | Alternet:

"The Harvard Business School information session on how to be a good class participant instructs, “Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only 55 percent, say it as if you believe it 100 percent,” Susan Cain reported in her bestselling book Quiet. At HBS, Cain noticed, “If a student talks often and forcefully, then he’s a player; if he doesn’t, he’s on the margins.”

Cain observed that the men at HBS “look like people who expect to be in charge.... I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination — whether or not he knew the way.”

HBS alumni include George W. Bush, class of 1975, as well as:

• Jamie Dimon, 1982, CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase
• Grover Norquist, 1981, president of Americans for Tax Reform
• Henry Paulson, 1970, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, former CEO of Goldman Sachs
• Mitt Romney, 1975, former governor of Massachusetts, co-founder of Bain Capital
• Jeffrey Skilling, 1979, former CEO of Enron, convicted of securities fraud and insider trading

People with great power over our lives, in government, business, medicine, and elsewhere, who don’t know what they are talking about are scary. Even more scary are people in authority who don’t know what they’re talking about but who have spent a lifetime perfecting how to appear like they do. Complete conviction and total certainty are sources of great power, especially over vulnerable and uncertain people. And so the pretense of conviction and certainty can be quite damaging.

Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and former hedge-fund manager, received his BA from Harvard and his JD from Harvard Law School. In 2007, Market Watch quoted Cramer: “What's important when you are in that hedge-fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful because the truth is so against your view, that it’s important to create a new truth, to develop a fiction.”

Some Harvard graduates have famously rebelled against bullshit training, as Harvard alumni also include Henry David Thoreau and David Halberstam. Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest, with its ironic and mocking title, takes down pseudo-certain Harvard (and other Ivy League-educated) presidential advisers who convinced American leaders and the American public that the Vietnam War was a great idea. To be fair to Harvard alumni, some of America’s most famous pseudo-certain government officials did not attend Harvard, including Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton) and Alan Greenspan (New York University)."

The new face of food stamps: working-age Americans

The new face of food stamps: working-age Americans

"In a first, working-age people now make up
the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps - a switch from
a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main
recipients."

"Economists say having a job may no longer be enough for self-sufficiency in today's economy.

"A
low-wage job supplemented with food stamps is becoming more common for
the working poor," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality.
"Many of the U.S. jobs now being created are low- or minimum-wage -
part-time or in areas such as retail or fast food - which means food
stamp use will stay high for some time, even after unemployment
improves.""

 

Bayer Pharmaceutical CEO: Cancer drug only ‘for western patients who can afford it’ | The Raw Story

Bayer Pharmaceutical CEO: Cancer drug only ‘for western patients who can afford it’ | The Raw Story

"In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers said that his company’s new cancer drug, Nexavar, isn’t “for Indians,” but “for western patients who can afford it.”


The drug, which is particularly effective on late-stage kidney and liver cancer, costs approximately $69,000
per year in India, so in March 2012 an Indian court granted a license
to an Indian company to produce to the drug at a 97 percent discount.


Bayer sued Natco Pharma Ltd., but in March of last year, the High
Court in Mumbai denied its appeal. Bayer CEO called the compulsory
license issued by the Indian court “essentially theft,” then said “[w]e did not develop this medicine for Indians…[w]e developed it for western patients who can afford it.”


Nexavar costs approximately $96,000 per year in the United States, but Bayer assures “western patients” that they can have access to the drug for a $100 copay."

Less than a fifth of registered US voters say most in Congress deserve re-election

Record Low Say Own Representative Deserves Re-Election:



"The enduring unpopularity of Congress appears to have seeped into the nation's 435 congressional districts, as a record-low percentage of registered voters, 46%, now say the U.S. representative in their own congressional district deserves re-election. Equally historic, the share of voters saying most members of Congress deserve re-election has fallen to 17%, a new nadir.

"The 17% of voters who now say most of Congress deserves re-election is well below the roughly 40% threshold that has historically been associated with major electoral turnover. With this in mind, Congress could be in for a major shake-up. Judging by net seats lost in an election as a percentage of the overall number of seats, 2010, 1994, and 2006 register as the top three recent elections. All of these years had election-year averages of 41% or fewer voters saying most of Congress deserved re-election, with the Republican-wave election of 2010 registering the lowest, 30% -- still 13 percentage points higher than the current reading.

"Consistent with abysmally low congressional approval ratings and widespreaddissatisfaction with the nation's system of government, the proportion of registered voters saying Congress deserves re-election has hit an all-time low of 17%. While Congress as an institution is no stranger to voter disenchantment, American voters are usually more charitable in their assessments of their own representatives in the national legislature. But even this has fallen to a new trough.

Typically, results like these have presaged significant turnover in Congress, such as in 1994, 2006, and 2010. So Congress could be headed for a major shake-up in its membership this fall.

However, unlike those three years, when one party controlled both houses of Congress, the beneficiary of the anti-incumbent sentiment is not clear in the current situation, in which one party controls the House and the other, the Senate. Partisans on both sides of the aisle are displeased with Congress. But with so few voters saying they are willing to re-elect their own representative, it suggests that many officeholders will be vulnerable, if not in the general election, then perhaps in the host of competitive primaries soon to take place."

74% Believe U.S. Still in Recession -

74% Believe U.S. Still in Recession



"Seventy-four percent of Americans believe that the nation is still in
a recession, which may be a sign that the lower and middle classes are
still anxious about unemployment, the value of their homes and stagnant
wages.


In a new Fox News poll,
when asked “For you and your family, does it feel like the recession is
over, or does it feel like the country is still in a recession?”
only 22% said they believed the downturn had ended. The 74% is better
than the 86% from the poll in September 2010, but only barely, if the
“improvements” in gross domestic product and unemployment rates are
taken into account.


The results are troubling if people’s beliefs affect their behavior.
It has been assumed that as unemployment fells and home prices made a
modest recovery, Americans would become more likely to be aggressive
consumers. But recent data tell otherwise. Holiday sales were poor by
most measures. There is little sign that the median household income of
Americans has moved much above the $51,000 that the Census Bureau reported for 2012, and in real dollars this is down from a decade ago. A recent Pew study found that:

But starting in the mid- to late 1970s, the uppermost
tier’s income share began rising dramatically, while that of the bottom
90% started to fall. The top 1% took heavy hits from the dot-com crash
and the Great Recession but recovered fairly quickly: according to
Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, preliminary
estimates for 2012 (which will be updated next month) have that group
receiving nearly 22.5% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s
share is below 50% for the first time ever (49.6%, to be precise)."

Many Baby Boomers Reluctant to Retire

Many Baby Boomers Reluctant to Retire- Gallup

Concerns about money likely play a significant role in explaining why
so many baby boomers see themselves working longer. Even before the
2008-2009 recession, financial advisers were warning that some baby
boomers were carrying too much debt, saving too little, and relying too
heavily on Social Security to retire comfortably. And then came the
economic collapse -- a perfect storm of layoffs, pension and stock
losses, and plummeting home values -- which was particularly ill-timed
for boomers who might otherwise have been in financial shape to retire
on schedule with the start of their Social Security benefits.


Gallup finds that baby boomers who strongly agree that they currently
"have enough money to do everything [they] want to do" expect to retire
at age 66. Boomers who strongly disagree with this statement predict
they will retire significantly later, at age 73.

24/7 Wall St. » Blog Archive Why The ’100 Best Companies’ To Work List Is Useless «

24/7 Wall St. » Why The ’100 Best Companies’ To Work List Is Useless «

"24/7 Wall St. spent six weeks looking at Great Place and its practices
both inside and outside the US. and found them to be lacking.

Unlike polls such as those done by Gallup, “Best Companies” is not
scientific, not by a long shot.  Companies interested in being on the
list must apply to the Institute, which despite its academic-sounding
name is a for-profit institution.  To be eligible, companies must meet a
list of criteria including having 1,000 or more U.S. employees and
having been in operation for seven years.  The 100 “Best” are only the best of the 311 that applied, one large national polling firm which does not compete with Great Place, told 24/7 Wall St.  In addition, Fortune tells the winners 24 hours before the list is published while the Institute informs the losers at the same time."

"Great Place does not disclose anywhere which publications actually make
money on these listings through advertising or a share in consulting
fees. All parties 24/7 interviewed said Fortune does not. The marketing
benefits for Fortune are many. Great Place in the US offers a Best
Companies Executive Strategies Network. The forum is only open to firms
that have been on one of the Fortune lists for the past
three years. Membership fees are $7,500 per year for one person. Member
companies include American Express (NYSE: AXP), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:
GS), and KMPG."

The World's 85 Richest Now Worth as Much as 3.5 Billion Poorest - Oxfam

The World's 85 Richest Now Worth as Much as 3.5 Billion Poorest - Oxfam

"The poorest half of the world’s population—that’s 3.5 billion people—control as much wealth as the richest 85 individuals.


On the eve of World Economic Forum, when the global elite gather in
Davos, Switzerland, to forecast international trends, Oxfam has released
a new report, “Working for the Few,” (PDF) documenting yawning global wealth disparities. Other findings:


•The world’s richest 1 percent control nearly 50 percent of global wealth.

•In 24 out of 26 countries studied, the richest 1 percent has increased their share of national wealth since 1980.

•Only three in 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has not increased over the past three decades.

•In the U.S., 95 percent of post-financial crash wealth generated (i.e.,
since 2009) went into the bank accounts of the richest 1 percent.

•Nine in 10 people in the United States control less wealth in real terms than they did before the financial crash."

Robert Reich - Fear is Why Workers in Red States Vote Against Their Economic Self-Interest

Robert Reich - Fear is Why Workers in Red States Vote Against Their Economic Self-Interest
"Last week’s massive spill of the toxic chemical MCHM into West Virginia’s Elk River illustrates another benefit to the business class of high unemployment, economic insecurity, and a safety-net shot through with holes. Not only are employees eager to accept whatever job they can get. They are also also unwilling to demand healthy and safe environments.  
The spill was the region’s third major chemical accident in five years, coming after two investigations by the federal Chemical Safety Board in the Kanawha Valley, also known as “Chemical Valley,” and repeated recommendations from federal regulators and environmental advocates that the state embrace tougher rules to better safeguard chemicals. 
No action was ever taken. State and local officials turned a deaf ear. The storage tank that leaked, owned by Freedom Industries, hadn’t been inspected for decades. 
But nobody complained. 
Not even now, with the toxins moving down river toward Cincinnati, can the residents of Charleston and the surrounding area be sure their drinking water is safe — partly because the government’s calculation for safe levels is based on a single study by the manufacturer of the toxic chemical, which was never published, and partly because the West Virginia American Water Company, which supplies the drinking water, is a for-profit corporation that may not want to highlight any lingering danger.  "
"The wages of production workers have been dropping for thirty years, adjusted for inflation, and their economic security has disappeared. Companies can and do shut down, sometimes literally overnight. A smaller share of working-age Americans hold jobs today than at any time in more than three decades. 
People are so desperate for jobs they don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want rules and regulations enforced that might cost them their livelihoods. For them, a job is precious — sometimes even more precious than a safe workplace or safe drinking water. 
This is especially true in poorer regions of the country like West Virginia and through much of the South and rural America — so-called “red” states where the old working class has been voting Republican. Guns, abortion, and race are part of the explanation. But don’t overlook economic anxieties that translate into a willingness to vote for whatever it is that industry wants. "

Chart of the Day - Home prices testing support

Inflation adjusted home prices :
"For some perspective on the all-important US real estate market, today's chart illustrates the inflation-adjusted median price of a single-family home in the United States over the past 44 years. There are a few points of interest. Not only did housing prices increase at a rapid rate from 1991 to 2005, the rate at which housing prices increased -- increased. All those gains and then some were given back during the following 6.5 years. Over the past two years, however, the median price of a single-family home has trended significantly higher. More recently, the inflation-adjusted price of the median single-family home has declined and is now testing support of its two-year upward sloping trend channel."



'via Blog this'

Amazon Employees Reject Forming Company’s First Union in U.S. - Businessweek

Amazon Employees Reject Forming Company’s First Union in U.S. - Businessweek:
“That number is a clear reflection that the tactics Amazon and their law firm employed were very effective,” Carr said. “Under the intense pressures these workers faced on the shop floor, it was an uphill battle all the way.”

More Americans Worse Off Financially Than a Year Ago

More Americans Worse Off Financially Than a Year Ago- Gallup:

"More Americans, 42%, say they are financially worse off now than they were a year ago, reversing the lower levels found over the past two years. Just more than a third of Americans say their financial situation has improved from a year ago.
These results come from Gallup's annual "Mood of the Nation" poll, conducted Jan. 5-8. Gallup has found that Americans' economic confidence, self-reported consumer spending, and perceptions of job creation improved in 2013. Despite Americans' more positive views of the overall U.S. economy in 2013, nearly two-thirds believe their personal financial situation deteriorated or was stable over the past year."

Interest Rates Are Manipulated | The Big Picture

Interest Rates Are Manipulated | The Big Picture:

Nice collection of the Manipulations in the blog ...

"

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was ordered to pay $50 million by a federal judge in Connecticut over claims that it rigged the London interbank offered rate.

..."

"To put the Libor interest rate scandal in perspective:

• The big banks have conspired for years to rig interest rates … upon which $800 trillion in assets are pegged

• This was the largest insider trading scandal ever … and the largest financial scam in world history

• Local governments got ripped off bigtime by the Libor manipulation

• Even though RBS and a handful of other banks have been fined for interest rate manipulation, Libor is stillbeing manipulated.  No wonder … the fines are pocket change – the cost of doing business – for the big banks

Indeed, the experts say that big banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are thrown in jail for fraud.

Why? Because the system is rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”.  As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted years ago:

“The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.

The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”

Experts also say that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really stabilize.

But the government is doing the exact opposite.  Indeed, the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also arguablyone of the main causes of the double dip in housing.)

Indeed, the government doesn’t even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements.

Because of this failure to prosecute, it’s not just interest rates. As shown below, big banks have manipulatedvirtually every market – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.

And they will keep on doing so until the Department of Justice grows a pair.

Currency Markets Are Rigged

Currency markets are massively rigged. And see this and this.

Derivatives Are Manipulated

The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.

Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed: through gamed self-reporting.

Oil Prices Are Manipulated

Oil prices are manipulated as well.

Gold and Silver Are Manipulated

Gold and silver prices are “fixed” in the same way as interest rates and derivatives – in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.

Bloomberg reports:

It is the participating banks themselves that administer the gold and silver benchmarks.

So are prices being manipulated? Let’s take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the London evening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.

For both commodities there were, on average, no comparable price changes at any other time of the day. These patterns are consistent with manipulation in both markets.

Energy Markets Are Manipulated

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.

Commodities Are Manipulated

The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.

The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.

And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers ofmany billions of dollars each year.

Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading

Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities. And seethis.

Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways

The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:

• Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

• Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here and here

• Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

• Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)

• Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car

• Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure

• Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this

• Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this

• Participating in various Ponzi schemes

• Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees

• Cooking their books (and see this)

• Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail."