The United States is deeply disturbed by the recent violence and regrets the tragic loss of life and injuries suffered among those involved in the incident last night aboard the Gaza-bound ships. We are working to ascertain the facts. We expect a credible and transparent investigation and strongly urge the Israeli government to investigate the incident fully.As I stated in the Chamber in December 2008, when we were confronted by a similar situation, mechanisms exist for the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza by member states and groups that want to do so. These non-provocative and non-confrontational mechanisms should be the ones used for the benefit of all those in Gaza. Direct delivery by sea is neither appropriate nor responsible, and certainly not effective, under the circumstances.
The United States remains deeply concerned by the suffering of civilians in Gaza, and the deterioration of the situation there, including the humanitarian and human rights situation. We continue to believe the situation is unsustainable...
The rest is inconsequential babble about the peace process that Bibi could give a shit about.
Definitely a roll-over. Did not mention the piratical nature of the attack, did not condemn the Israelis for either violating their RoE or for having ridiculous RoE to begin with, and did not acknowledge any of the vital materiel that the Israelis are not letting through.
This might just be State boilerplate awaiting a real White House response, but I don't believe so. The lesson is clear. Netanyahu can now act however he chooses, confident that Barry will have his back. No matter what he does.
Andrew Sullivan isn't exactly an Israel-hater, but here he is on the footage of activists trying to fight off the commandos:
They are engaging in self-defense. More to the point: they are civilians confronting one of the best militaries in the world. They killed no soldiers; their weapons were improvised; the death toll in the fight is now deemed to be up to 19 - all civilians. It staggers me to read defenses of what the Israelis have done. They attacked a civilian flotilla in international waters breaking no law. When they met fierce if asymmetric resistance, they opened fire. And we are now being asked to regard the Israelis as the victims.
Seriously.
This is like a mini-Gaza all over again. The Israelis don't seem to grasp that Western militaries don't get to murder large numbers of civilians because they don't like them, or because they could, on a far tinier scale, hurt Israelis. And you sure don't have a right to kill them because they resist having their ship commandeered, in international waters. The Israelis seem to be making decisions as if they can get away with anything. It's time the US reminded them in ways they cannot mistake that they cannot.
I'm still very, very skeptical that the U.S. will do a damned thing. I'd like to be wrong, but I don't expect to be.
And, yes, Sullivan is right. Since the blockade has not been accepted under international law—nor could it be, considering that Gaza is in fact under Israeli control and not an enemy state—Israel had no right to attack those ships. Israel has always maintained that acts of violence are only illegal under international law if they are aggressive in nature. They maintain that defensive violence and territorial acquisition is legitimate, in order to justify the settlements in occupied lands.
Well, that's what's happened here: defense. Even if the activists had fired on the descending commandos, they still would have had the right of it, because it was the commandos who are the aggressors. They didn't, of course, and apparently there is footage out there of the Israelis firing long before their first commando hit the deck of the Mavi Marmara. But it's still important to be clear about the irrelevance of the "debate".
Well, according to Fox (no link. Ever.) it looks like Bibi's doubling down. He's saying that the attack was entirely "self-defense", that the activists were all Al Qaeda stooges, and that the military has his "full backing". He probably has to, since the "they had sticks! STICKS!" line just isn't going to cut it, not when people bring up the problem of this being pretty naked high-seas piracy.
(If not an act of war against Turkey.)
But he must be really confident that Obama's toeing the Israeli line. He's pretty much left Obama twisting in the breeze. Either Barry backs Bibi to the hilt and loses the entire Muslim world and any hope of positive influence in the middle east, as well as any lingering remnants of his mystique as a peacemaker and fair broker—or he criticizes Israel and the apologist wing in the United States goes insane. He can't stay on the fence, either, since both sides will claim that it confirms their worst instincts about the man.
All this as oil continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico, too. Obama isn't even really responsible for that, that's entirely the result of Republican ideology, policies and practices, but he's being forced to wear this. He did not need this, and would be entirely justified in telling Netanyahu to shove it. But I suspect that he won't.
Forget the whole "they came at us with knives, so we gunned them down" defense that Israel is putting forward for their attacks on the Gaza relief flotilla.
They attacked the flotilla in international waters. You do NOT do that. It is just about as illegal as anything can be in international waters. It is pretty much an act of war. It's also blatantly stupid besides, since it means that your civilian ships are now fair game.
That all this was pulled to stop humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza is just insane.
Edit: There appears to be a video of the beginning of the attack, and it appears to show the commandos firing first. And what the hell is going on with twitter? They seem to be blocking hashtags about the incident. They were all over Iran.
The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not new. The ideologically charged, grass-roots activists flexing their muscle in this week’s primary showdowns are the same breed as primary voters who four years ago stripped the Democratic nomination away from Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who later won as an independent.
What’s now clear, in a way that wasn’t before, is that these results reflect a genuine national phenomenon, not simply isolated spasms in response to single issues or local circumstances.
This is a stark and potentially durable change in politics. The old structures that protected incumbent power are weakening. New structures, from partisan news outlets to online social networks, are giving anti-establishment politicians access to two essential elements of effective campaigns: publicity and financial support.
In effect, the anti-institutional forces that coalesced in recent years now look like an institutional force of their own.
All I have to say is: Good. Been pointing out for years now that the activist wings are more powerful than they know, or that D.C. will admit. Well, now they know. And so does D.C.
Well, looks like it's abundantly clear what's going on right now. Sestak beat Specter in Pennsylvania, Rand won in Kentucky, and Arkansas' Democratic primary is going to a runoff.
Why? Simple. People wanted a change and didn't get it. I think there is a serious danger that people will misinterpret this as some sort of vindication of the teabaggers. It's not.
It is, instead, an indication that people are pissed off about how betrayed they feel by their own elites. They sense that the people at the top are not looking out for them, but just looking out for themselves. The teabaggers are getting manipulated into being ticked off at the wrong people—the ones who aren't just anti-Dem reactionaries—but it's being motivated by the same basic problem.
And, yes, that problem is the economy. Unemployment is still far too high. Opportunity is still lacking. People are still desperately insecure about their own financial future. And, most importantly, the only people who are benefiting from economic and productivity growth are the wealthiest 1%. That ain't right, and people sense that that ain't right, but they've been so thoroughly indoctrinated to fear and despise "class warfare" that they're casting about for other justifications. So they rage about Obamacare, and about TARP, and about cap-and-trade, and everything else that is so "elitist".
Thing is, they are right. They are being screwed over and betrayed by an elite. They're just being mislead as to who that elite is. They're angry at an elite, but it's not the right elite. So it doesn't accomplish anything.
In the meantime, though, they're still ticked, and so incumbents (an elite) are still going to take it on the chin. Bad news for the Dems; but then again, they've richly, richly earned this.
All of this analysis would be true if America were using its drones to launch unprovoked attacks against targets in Pakistan. But it is not. These attacks are provoked. And who is doing the provoking? Jihadists, who, for all the obvious reasons, want us to believe that it is our actions that cause the violence they inflict on us. Ask yourself this question: Did American drone attacks in Pakistan cause 9/11? Or the attack on the U.S.S. Cole? Or the embassy bombings in Africa?
No. Really. HOW? How is it possible?
It is the most trivially obvious thing in the world to realize that people are going to pay one hell of a lot more attention to attacks on their friends and family than they are to attacks that happened almost a decade ago and almost a world away, and they are sure as hell not going to pay much attention to this sort of reasoning when the attacks are being made on people who were not directly connected with either the Cole or 9/11 bombings? Yes, they might be jihadists—though predators aren't exactly the most accurate platform in America's arsenal so there's a good chance that many might not be—but they are not going to agree with Goldberg's reasoning, any more than Goldberg would believe that blowing up a building in DC is acceptable because of what America got up to in, say, El Salvador.
Look, idiot, this is absurdly simple. The whole "predator attacks cause more retaliatory attacks" idea is based on the notion that they don't care whether or not you think your actions are justified. It's not a normative argument, it's a factual argument: bombs drop, they get mad, they "respond". The fact that the bombing is a response to something that they did does not mean that they aren't responding in turn to what you did. That's what escalation IS: response building on response building on response. Nobody gives a shit about "he started it!"
That's why one has to be thoughtful about any sort of military response to terrorism: even if it is justified, it's going to carry consequences, and you have to recognize and understand those consequences before making those decisions. Saying "he started it!" is what a CHILD does.
(Not that it's surprising to see someone from the Atlantic acting like a child. They provide a platform for Jane Galt, after all.)
The truly hilarious part of the story is here:
"No terrorism group has the word 'terrorism' in its name. They see themselves as reluctant fighters, always retaliating, never initiating."
Well, nobody should say that terrorists never learn. Looks like they learned that little trick reeeeal well.
I'd been reading Michael Geist's pieces on the new Canadian copyright bill—which looks to be following the DMCA model—and I had a thought about the debate.
The debate over copyright is as much about information asymmetry as anything else.
Information asymmetry, in economics, is the idea that a purchaser and seller have inequal amounts of information about the value of a good. A used-car seller knows more than the buyer about the soundness of the vehicle, for example. The buyer might not know whether or not the car is a "lemon", so the price he pays isn't necessarily going to correspond to the actual value of the car. Ditto with everything from home loans to first dates; people don't know everything they need to know. In a lot of cases, the seller is deliberately keeping them from knowing it.
Creative works, especially narrative creative works, are much the same. If you're buying a game, movie, album or book, you aren't generally going to know how good it is until you've already bought it. By then, of course, it's too late; you can't get your money back at the theatre for a movie you hated, and you can't get a refund on a terrible game. If it's good, then great! But if it's bad, you're stuck.
In turn, the presumption that animates enforcement copyright law is that if you could view a work for free, you wouldn't pay for it. Remember, it's not theft per se; nobody is deprived of the use of a good, just the ability to control who can gain access to the work. You don't pay, you don't watch. (Or listen. Or play. Or whatever.)
Since these creative products are information, then, that means consumers are inevitably and inescapably operating at an information deficit. They don't know that the movie is worth anything to them until after they've seen it—but by then they have already seen it! And if they've seen it, why on earth would they pay for it? The whole industry depends on information asymmetry to work. People can never pay what something is worth to them. They're always at risk of being suckered. Always.
Then again, perhaps it is the presumption that is wrong. Perhaps consumers would, if prompted, pay what they think that something is worth. Homo Economicus wouldn't, since he wouldn't part with a dime he didn't have to if he didn't have a gun to his head. But real people don't think that way.
It makes me wonder. If you took away the barriers, would people pay what something is worth? Is the presumption wrong? Or will consumers always be on the edge of getting suckered?
Thinking about BP and the Gulf: in this old interview, Milton Friedman says that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.
Interviewer: So tort law takes care of a lot of this ..
In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is “not where we need to be right now” she said.
And don’t say that we just need better politicians. If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.
The problem with libertarianism (well, one of them) is that economic power almost always translates into political power. That political power gets exploited to build greater economic power, which translates into more political power, ad nauseum.
The only way you can prevent that is to use political power to prevent it. That gets harder and harder over time, as economic power gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. And it requires loci of political power that are separate from those of economic power. That's what democracy is supposed to do.
(It isn't, of course. Economic power has been translated into political power, so much so that most people believe that their votes can't really change a damned thing. BP will probably skate on this. But that's the general idea.)
So Obama's moving the court to the right, replacing Kennedy with the "ideological cipher" that supports giving the executive branch carte blanche.
Ah, well, not much to be done about it now. As Greenwald said:
Our politics is nothing if not tribal, and the duty of Every Good Democrat is now to favor Kagan's confirmation. Conservatives refused to succumb to those rules and ended up with Sam Alito instead of Harriet Miers, but they had a much different relationship to George Bush than progressives have to Obama (i.e., conservatives -- as they proved several times late in Bush's second term [Miers, immigration, Dubai Ports] -- were willing to oppose their leader whey they disagreed). The White House knows that progressives will never try to oppose any important Obama initiative, and even if they were inclined, they lack the power to do so (largely because unconditional support guarantees impotence).
Not much to add to that. Conservatives oppose, and get their wish. Progressives acquiesce, and get trampled. You'd think the latter would have figured it out by now. But if they had, they'd probably still be calling themselves "liberals".
It's too soon to predict exactly how the British House of Commons is going to turn out. It's quite likely that it will be a "hung parliament" however, where nobody has a majority but one party (the conservatives, likely) have a plurality.
Considering this is the case in Canada as well, and has been for a while, it does raise the question about whether or not this will become the rule of thumb for Westminster systems in general. It also suggests that the main argument for FPTP systems—that they generate stable two-party systems with clear winners—simply does not apply anymore.
At best, you can hope for stable coalitions, and you're as likely to get that from a proportional system. Considering there is literally nothing else that justifies FPTP, the lesson is clear.
Not exactly the greatest of surprises. He was going to get (as Mike Allen put it) "shellacked" by the hard right.
I agree with Allen that this probably isn't going to help him. Incumbents are going to be under fire in November; an incumbent without the benefit of party identification is only going to be that much worse off. It was inevitable—Republican primaries actually mean something—but he's still not in good shape. He might lose the seat, and the Dems might win it.
In the long run, though, this only benefits the conservatives in the Republican party. They've demonstrated their power. They've pushed the party to the right, and they've made the politicos that much more worried about them. When the Republicans regain control, that's going to ensure that conservatives get much more of a say than they would otherwise.
For progressives this should prove...instructive. If they're willing to learn the lesson.
Yes, it is disturbing. Very much so. SO much so that it was pulled from YouTube. (You can see it on Vimeo.) But, like the Wikileaks video, it's the kind of disturbing that is worthwhile. The kind that is necessary. If you are an adult and willing to deal with shocking content, I'd recommend you see it. You aren't going to like it, but you'll have appreciated seeing it.
Pretty much anybody with a clue (and, who, especially, knows anything about the UK's cultural idiosyncrasies of prejudice) will know instantly what sort of allegory is going on here. It's about showing how minor prejudices can become major ones, and about how the sort of prejudices that you cavalierly ignore or explain away—because you don't identify with the victims—can be brought to vivid life when they're people that you can identify with.
(If nothing else, I'm never going to see certain episodes of South Park the same way again.)
Emails have been released that show that Goldman, contra their assertions, made a whole bunch of money by shorting in the face of the banking collapse.
In a July 25 email that year, Gary Cohn, the firm's chief operating officer, wrote Viniar to update him on the firm's mortgage market activities. The firm lost about $322 million on residential mortgages -- but it made $373 million on its bets against the market, bets that increased in value as the market tanked.
About 25 minutes later, Viniar wrote back, "Tells you what might be happening to people who don't have the big short." The firm made $51 million that day.
"There it is, in their own words: Goldman Sachs taking 'the big short' against the mortgage market," subcommittee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in a statement accompanying the release of the internal emails.
"Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs were not simply market-makers, they were self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis," Levin said. "They bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got the credit rating agencies to label them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold and profiting at the expense of their clients."
Levin's panel points out that in the firm's 2009 annual report, Goldman Sachs stated that the firm "did not generate enormous net revenues by betting against residential related products."
"These e-mails show that, in fact, Goldman made a lot of money by betting against the mortgage market," Levin said.
Whoopsie. Pretty sure that out-and-out falsehood in your annual reports ain't gonna do much for your reputation.
Still interested in seeing where this goes. The real story isn't so much the revelations coming out now. We knew all this stuff, it is simply being (finally) proven beyond doubt. The real story is how the hell Washington handles it, since they're absolutely choked with both GS alumni and people who are beholden to GS alumni. The public knows that this thing is going on, and this situation is pretty easy to understand: "GS helped create a bad investment and then bet against it" is not going to be too tricky for even the most low-info voter to grasp.
They're already angry at the "big banks", and this will crystallize their anger. The only question is who to be angry at: and if the Dems (or the Republicans!) don't work damned hard to distance themselves and be seen to punish the bastards, they'll be punished themselves.
Maybe yes, maybe no. The Sun (care of the BBC) has them polling ahead of the other two parties following Nick Clegg's victory in the PM debate. People are tired of both Labour and the Tories, and are taking a fresh look at Clegg's crew. But Britain's first-past-the-post system means that it doesn't necessarily matter: the LibDems would have to crush the other parties to win a majority. They aren't crushing. Yet.
It's starting to feel like it might happen, though. The other parties are so tired, and the whole business is so tawdry, that a lot of Brits can be forgiven for wanting a change or three. Certainly a Labour/LibDem coalition is possible, and that could make a lot of big differences. But it's still early days, of course. Who knows what will happen next week.
(Makes one wonder about America, too. England has a third party, and they're doing pretty well. America's system isn't that much different...)
Found a good response to Ebert's latest at Gamasutra.
Thing is, I don't think that it matters all that much. Ebert's writings on this are notorious mostly because they're novel. Most people, if they think about it at all, wouldn't have too much trouble with the idea that games are art. The objections appear to come mostly from those who are defending other forms from being "sullied" by games. Since most people under the age of 30 don't see games as "sullying" anything, I doubt that that perspective will endure.
What's disappointing about Ebert's latest whinge about people daring to define computer and video games as "art" isn't so much that he tortures the definition of "art". (Though he does)
No, it's that he tortures the definition of at least two genuinely creative works in doing so: Flower and Braid. For Flower, he just moans about how he doesn't know anything about the game, and therefore it cannot be "art". But for Braid, well...
Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.
Yes, in Chess, that would be "taking back a move". Braid isn't Chess. The two aren't even really comparable. Various forms of time manipulation are the entire point of the experience; they ARE the "discipline of the game". There is far more to Braid than "taking back a move", and it takes only a cursory examination of the game to reveal the sort of life experiences, emotions, and frustrations that the creator is drawing allegories to.
Ebert isn't even just ignorant here, though: he's being willfully ignorant. He's not only utterly dismissive in a situation where it isn't warranted, but he's clearly not interested in even paying attention to the counter-argument. He talks about how he enjoys the advantage of "response after consideration", but betrays not the slightest moment of consideration in the first place. Anybody who had ever even heard of the Sims, for example, wouldn't claim that all games are winnable; yet Ebert does it over, and over, and over again, since victory conditions apparently (somehow) deny a game the status of "art".
(No, he never explained that one, either.)
It's not surprising. He's practically built his entire critical reputation on this fight these days. For reasons which baffle me, he has spent more time, energy, and devotion on tearing down games than he has building up film. One wonders why he is so devoted to it, but whatever the reason, he simply cannot be convinced otherwise at this point. He simply has too much at stake, and never did have the temperament to suffer a demeaning climbdown on the subject. Nobody who was trying to engage the subject fairly would make the sorts of rash dismissals that he does on a regular basis. He doesn't appear to want to engage it fairly, because it allows for the possibility that he may be wrong.
In any case, here's the TED talk he was responding to:
I disagree with this in one key respect: I do think that Chess is a work of art. Otherwise, it's excellent stuff. I can see why Ebert was compelled to respond. I'm just disappointed that he made such a hash of it.
Edit: Just as an added point: Ebert really, really mixes up the question of whether something is GOOD art with the question of whether it is art AT ALL. By any logically consistent definition, even bad art is art; bad art contains within it the possibility that it could have been good.
It is also unfortunate that Ebert seems unwilling to fairly engage the question of interactivity and involvement. Winning conditions do not determine games. As I noted above, many of the most popular games (The Sims, Spore, and the multitudes of "massive multiplayer" games) have no victory conditions at all. They cannot be won. If that means they are not "games" as Ebert understands them, then that shows how limited his conceptions are, not ours.
What defines these games is, instead, direct engagement. You cannot separate that out: that would be like taking the gutters out of a comic, or editing from a filmmaker. It is what defines the form. It's what makes games like Flower and Braid unique. It's also what makes Chess unique: a Chess set is inert until somebody sits down to engage it. You cannot sit outside of the experience: you must become a part of it. And, as anybody who has played Braid can attest, becoming part of that experience will affect how you perceive yourself and the choices you have made in life. That's the point. That's the art. The "victory conditions" are in its service, not the other way around.
Accusations that Goldman defrauded customers who bought investments tied to risky subprime mortgages have only just begun to reverberate through the financial world.
The civil lawsuit that the Securities and Exchange Commission filed against Goldman on Friday seemed to confirm many Americans’ worst suspicions about Wall Street: that the game is rigged, the odds stacked in the banks’ favor. It is the first big case — but probably not the last, legal experts said — to delve into a Wall Street firm’s role in the mortgage fiasco.
It is a particularly sensitive time for Wall Street. Washington policy makers are hotly debating a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations, and the news could embolden those seeking to rein in the banks. President Obama on Saturday stepped up pressure for financial reform by accusing Republicans of “cynical and deceptive” attacks on the measure.
The S.E.C.’s action could also hit Wall Street where it really hurts: the wallet. It could prompt dozens of investor claims against Goldman and other Wall Street titans that devised and sold toxic mortgage investments. On Saturday, several European banks that lost money in the deal said they were reviewing the matter. They could try to recoup the money from Goldman.
And it raises new questions about Goldman, the bank at the center of more concentric circles of economic and political power than any other on Wall Street.
Come to think of it, this is somewhat surprising. It had looked like GS and the rest of them were going to get away with all of it. Sure, Matt Taibbi has been shooting holes in GS like an expert marksman, but their influence still dwarfs his.
At least, it did. They are in a fair spot of trouble:
On Friday, Goldman’s stock took a beating, falling 13 percent and wiping out more than $10 billion of the company’s market value. It was a possible sign that investors fear that the S.E.C. complaint will damage Goldman’s reputation and its ability to keep its hands on so many sides of a trade — a practice that is immensely profitable for the firm.
It is unclear whether the S.E.C. can prevail against Goldman. The bank has long maintained that it puts its clients first and, in a letter in its latest annual report, it reiterated that position. Goldman said it never “bet against our clients” in its trades but rather was trying to hedge against other trading positions.
The transaction cited in the S.E.C. complaint cost investors just over $1 billion, relatively small by Wall Street standards.
Still, Wall Street analysts said Goldman and other banks, having navigated the financial crisis, might now face a new kind of risk: angry investors. Most major Wall Street banks also created collateralized debt obligations, which are at the heart of the Goldman case. C.D.O.’s, which are essentially bundles of securities backed by mortgages or other debt securities, turned out to be among the most toxic investments ever devised.
“Any investor who bought these C.D.O.’s and lost a significant amount of money is probably looking at their investment and wanting to know: what were the details behind the sale?” said William Tanona, an analyst at Collins Stewart. “Will they contact the S.E.C. and say, ‘Here’s the transaction we participated in, and we’d love to know who is on the other side of it?’ ”
That's it in a nutshell. The SEC's actions may amount to nothing. They will probably amount to nothing. It doesn't matter. This will open the floodgates, and everybody who even suspects that they were taken advantage of will be baying for GS's blood: both in America, and around the world.
The sweetest piece of this whole thing? They're being treated like gangsters:
The S.E.C. complaint named just one Goldman employee: Fabrice Tourre, a vice president in the bank’s mortgage operation who worked on the questionable transaction.
But securities lawyers say Mr. Tourre appears to be a small fish. Federal investigators may try to gain his cooperation and extend their investigation to other Goldman employees. On Friday, Mr. Tourre’s lawyer did not provide a comment on the complaint.
A big question is how far up this might go. The S.E.C. said the deal in its complaint had been approved by a panel at Goldman, the Mortgage Capital Committee.
“It’s typical that they’d start with someone lower down on the chain and try to exert pressure on that person,” said Bradley D. Simon of Simon & Partners, a white-collar defense lawyer in New York. “Is it really conceivable that no one else was involved in this?"
This is what you do to drug dealers. You hit a small fish and roll your way up by getting them to cooperate. That they're using the same technique on GS speaks volumes of exactly how trustworthy, how honest, how law-abiding they think that GS isn't.
But all of this raises a question: how did the SEC even get the go-ahead to do this in the first place? It's inconceivable that they made this decision in a vacuum. GS alumni and allies are in every branch of the Obama administration. The SEC head had to know that; he had to know that this would need the go-ahead from the administration. He must have got it. But, in a million years, I never would have thought he would have got it.
First bit of good news in a while. First time in ages that I've actually been optimistic about something. It may pass, but it's a nice change, isn't it?
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday charged Goldman Sachs & Co. (GS 160.70, -23.57, -12.79%) and one of its vice presidents for defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product related to subprime mortgages. The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a collateralized debt obligation that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities. However, it failed to disclose the role that a major hedge fund, Paulson & Co., played in the portfolio selection process as well as the fact that the hedge fund had taken a short position against the CDO. "Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party," said Robert Khuzami, director of the division of enforcement, in a statement.
So they let a short-seller dictate what they put in a CDO, so as to cash in when the thing tanked.
And they wonder why people now think of Goldman Sachs as a particularly gooey type of pond scum.
You don't need me to tell you what happened. I'm sure, by now, that you know that Poland has lost much of its leadership in a plane crash. Not all; the Prime Minister and many others are still fine. But the President is gone, among many others.
I'm concerned, however, over whether the tragedy will be compounded by regional instability. All signs point to the crash being nothing but an unfortunate accident. But Russia is already suspected of foul deeds by its neighbours, and the President of Poland was a notable pro-Western figure in the country. Russia has, by all accounts, been careful and respectful. But already one Polish MP is blaming Russia for the crash. The man is a notorious crank, but I suspect there will be others.
