Song of the Bailing Man
(Or Ubu Roi, King of Wall Street.) Somewhere in New York City a man is bailing a boat. Somehow, perhaps when I wasn't looking one of those Atlantic hurricanes or something like it must have snuck by and whirled into Manhattan - to the very steps of Wall Street
Steven Pearlstein - Financial Rescues Show That Faith in Free Market Is Shaken - washingtonpost.com. Merdre! Now the man's boat is soggy and sinking low, so he bails and as he bails he sings this song: Stormy weather,
it might get better in a week,
or in the wink of an eye.
It's clearing off by Monday,
that's what the weathermen say.
It's good for ducks,
So don't complain,
when the rain comes tapping on the window panes.
David Thomas and the Cleveland band Pere Ubu from their 1982 record, Song of the Bailing Man.
Some thoughts on the matter that come to me. The real lasting danger is that in the stampede to solution to a cascade of overextended loans, we form a colossal statuary out of some new indelible material. Dedicated to mammon engraved in the name of moral hazard. The forces of radical deregulation and laissez faire, rampant, have no objection to moral hazard, or monopoly
globeandmail.com: Days of wine and Porsches over. No objection for others paying for their aggrandizement and greed. The past twenty years of U S Government inclinations towards the economy and the modern corporate entity illustrates no other point. The system that exists has eroded the flood walls that separated banks from savings and loans, from brokerages, and other financial institutions. It has pursued financial instruments that bend assets and risk around in rococo labyrinths until it is not possible to know what lies where unless all is slowly and clinically disentangled. The only genuine principle in play is: that which concentrates wealth is good, that which distributes, or disperses it bad
GLOBAL MARKETS-Stocks rally on plan to end crisis, bonds rise.
I would not want to suggest that wealth disperse along lines of the value of labor in an item or service. That sounds like the talk of unrepentant marxism or worse, a social justice congregationalist. Besides Labor is so very hard to value, and the rod of measure held by those who would have to loose the strings of capital purse on its pay. The former head of the bankrupt Lehmans had received a bonus of $22 million for a recent year. As much as I might make in 740 years, or nearly twenty working lifetimes. He must be one hell-of-a-man
Lehman CEO Fuld's hubris contributed to meltdown. The difference between a Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Lehmans or AIG, between who is bailed out, and who isn't. This seems to lie in the tangle of desperate phone calls and last minute appeals. A measure of favor and connection to the political realm. Or at least it gives that appearance. I have a shallow dichotomy I find useful at times. That the world is full of people who tend to see themselves, and others, as either wolves or sheep, the need government differing and amending between these. The Big Dogs, the leading figures of the corporate and financial worlds, see themselves as able to arrange their games and affairs suitably on their own. With only such rules and laws as they maintain among themselves. They believe they do not need government and make no real attempt to live inside it. They have created the material world and all its value, and it belongs to them. They take as they see fit. The world of the governed, the world of governments they leave to those who they believe need order, stricture, confinement. But when the rains come and the shadows of real wolves are seen on the edge of the forrest, they run for cover as quickly as anyone.
In only partial tangent. I find it difficult to come to terms with this Melamine Disconnect. The use of this plastic melamine to boost apparent nutrition measure in food. This is what sickened and killed pet cats and dogs across the US and other countries half a year ago. This was the subject of much news attention here, though possibly not in places where the media is yoked to shoulders of progress and passivity. Now the very same melamine is found widely in formula for infants, not animals but poison in our own children, our own babies
Baby Formula Sickened Many More, China Says - NYTimes.com.
There can only be a view here that the end of the corporate endeavor lies in simply producing and marketing some object for high return. That no moral obligation follows this point. That in fact there is nothing beyond this. That somehow its reality ceases when a product goes out the door and accounts receiving records the transaction. The Market so conceived is short of fully realized, is not part of and certainly does not constitute a ethical system of living. Only madness and destruction lies in attempting to believe so.
11:54:25 PM  ;;
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