Taibbi - Chasjo Mitch on Diigo

20 Dec 09

In the end it was pretty clear to me anyway that “left” was basically a shorthand term for “pointy-headed weenie dissident.” Except for his stance on the war, Dean’s policies were much less traditionally “liberal” than, say, those of John Kerry — but Kerry made up for it by being much more full of shit than Dean.
n the end it was pretty clear to me anyway that “left” was basically a shorthand term for “pointy-headed weenie dissident.” Except for his stance on the war, Dean’s policies were much less traditionally “liberal” than, say, those of John Kerry — but Kerry made up for it by being much more full of shit than Dean.
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- Getting back to the present, even though Andrew Sullivan is a Republican, it’s not hard to see why Sarah Palin lumps him in with the left. Sullivan is gay, has probably been to a non-Christian bookstore more than once in the past six months, uses multi-syllabic words, is a member of the media and, most importantly, hates Sarah Palin.

PhRMA Hack: Campaign Promises Are Just That - Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True/Slant

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Taibbi health care drugs

But now that he’s president and is taking money from the pharmaceutical lobby (PhRMA) to help get his bullshit health care bill passed, his administration is backtracking. His FDA chief Margaret Hamburg is pulling out the old safety canard. The CBO has estimated that a bill sponsored by Byron Dorgan to allow drug re-importation would save the government $19 billion over 10 years, and save consumers $80 billion.
There’s no legitimate reason to bar re-importation, except one: to preserve a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry and, by extension, preserve the flow of campaign contributions to the Democratic Party. That is why President Obama is now opposing the sensible measures he endorsed as a candidate.
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- They really think that expediency is a defensible ideology and they are legitimately flabbergasted when people expect that a president follow through on his campaign promises. Apparently we are supposed to assume that a political candidate always lies and just accept that, and those of us who do not are “naive.”
- There are a lot of people in DC who are drinking the same Kool-Aid this dingbat from PhRMA has been drinking. You know the disease has reached an advanced stage when they start saying this stuff out loud.

Defense Bill Raids Personnel Funds to Pay For Weapons - Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True/Slant

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Taibbi war

What most people don’t understand about earmarks is that they are not achieved by simply adding to the top number for the whole federal budget. Earmarks have to come out of the approved number for that particular appropriations bill. So if you want a highway earmark, the money has to come out of some other highway program.
In the defense bill, it usually works like this: Congress sticks in a few extra airplanes or ships as a handout to this or that member, usually in exchange for his vote somewhere else on some other issue. To pay for those earmarks, the favored targets for cutting are usually two parts of the defense bill: Personnel (i.e. military pay) and Operations and Maintenance (which includes such things as body armor, equipment, food, training, and fuel). Those of you who wondered over the years how it could be that soldiers in Iraq could somehow be left without body armor, well, here’s your explanation. They usually took the armor off those kids in order to pay off some congressman with an extra helicopter or two.

Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen | PBS

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health care Taibbi

Truth is, our capitol's being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.

03 Dec 09

Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post

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Taibbi bail out

25 Nov 09

21 Nov 09

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – Goldman Does God’s Work, Only Not That Well - True/Slant

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Taibbi goldman bail out

In fact, in 2008, the firm’s prop trading was on par with some of the worst performers on Wall Street. Which begs the question: just how has Goldman managed to transform itself into a behemoth that over the past 6 months has had only three trading days of losses?
In fact, in 2008, the firm’s prop trading was on par with some of the worst performers on Wall Street. Which begs the question: just how has Goldman managed to transform itself into a behemoth that over the past 6 months has had only three trading days of losses?
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- The answer is simple: with no Lehman and no Bear to curb its tentacular dominance of all aspects of the Fixed Income market, Goldman can now rely almost exclusively on its monopolist agency position vis-a-vis mutual, pension, and hedge funds who are desperate to maintain a good relationship and an open dialog with the firm which rewards its best clients with market moving information ahead of all others peasants.
- They’ve come from two basic sources: one, government subsidy, and two, depleted competition, which allows the bank to charge outrageous rates to clients for services they used to have to price against competition from Lehman and Bear.
- Goldman makes all its money gouging its clients, who either don’t know any better or are reluctant to get on the wrong side of the bank, for obvious reasons.
- not only Goldman but all the banks have made mountains of money this year by borrowing cheap from the government and lending dear to the rest of the world is also manifestly obvious
- The more I think about it, though, the more I think that this must be some sort of clever p.r. strategy. I’m actually almost desperate to believe that this is a conscious strategy on Goldman’s part because if this really is what it looks like — if these people really are that blind and stupid — then that makes their exalted, entrenched position as mega-oligarchs endlessly lording over us truly horrifying, in a the-universe-is-random, black-comedy sort of way.

16 Oct 09

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – Michael Moore’s Problems Are Our Fault - True/Slant

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Taibbi michael moore

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True/Slant

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Taibbi michael moore

The American empire may be in decline, but I’m beginning to think we’re still at the forefront of technological innovation in some areas. Not only did we invent lots of great new financial products that almost destroyed the universe, but we seem to have developed a new social phenomenon as well — the anti-cult of personality.
It’s sort of the same, only in reverse, with all of this anti-Obama stuff. There are plenty of rational reasons to disapprove of the Obama administration. There are plenty of curious policy decisions in his history already and he has already drawn plenty of real ideological lines in the sand that people looking to whine about something could whine about, if they so chose. continue »
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- I found most of the content of Moore’s movie horrifying. It was also striking to me that the theme he is addressing here, i.e. the rapid peasant-ization of most of the country, is basically a taboo subject for every other major media outlet in the country.
- What we call a “good movie” is usually also escapism, and sometimes even also a nostalgic remake, it just happens to be well-done and expertly directed, with great production values and acting performances (I haven’t seen it yet. but I assume Where the Wild Things Are will fall into this category).
- But we’re living in a time of extreme crisis almost nothing on TV or in the movies is designed to get us thinking about how to fix our problems. If anything, most of the stuff on TV is designed to jack up our anxiety level without offering any solutions except the short-term fixes of buying and eating
- At least Michael Moore is getting us talking about the right topics. And while I get that the right way to start a revolution is not to wildly misinterpret the nature of capitalism in a coffeeshop conversation with Wallace Shawn (whose line about the grabber product was the funniest thing in the movie, by the way), well, it’s not really Michael Moore’s job to start a revolution. He probably thinks it is — and this is that “Atlas” complex fellow True/Slant writer Joseph Childers is talking about — but that’s only because nobody else out there, in the major media at least, is doing a freaking thing.

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – The Anti-Cult of Personality - True/Slant

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Taibbi Obama

The American empire may be in decline, but I’m beginning to think we’re still at the forefront of technological innovation in some areas. Not only did we invent lots of great new financial products that almost destroyed the universe, but we seem to have developed a new social phenomenon as well — the anti-cult of personality.
It’s sort of the same, only in reverse, with all of this anti-Obama stuff. There are plenty of rational reasons to disapprove of the Obama administration. There are plenty of curious policy decisions in his history already and he has already drawn plenty of real ideological lines in the sand that people looking to whine about something could whine about, if they so chose.

But instead of that, the opponents of Barack Obama seem determined to make a villain out of him almost solely on the basis of his completely innocent and irrelevant behaviors.
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- Instead of bitching at him for things like giving away billions of dollars via his Public-Private Investment Program — a natural rallying cry for conservatives, you would think — they’re constantly getting on his balls about stuff that has no relevance to anything at all, much less the conservative-liberal divide.
- This Peretz piece in the New Republic is one of the weirdest examples I’ve seen yet. Peretz blithely recounts the episode in which Obama traveled to Copenhagen to pimp Chicago’s Olympic bid, recounts the humiliating decision by the IOC to stiff Chicago first of all, then jumps in a bizarre non sequitur to the above conclusion that Obama must be a “clinical narcissist,” I guess for going to Copenhagen at all.
  
  Then he finishes with this passage, which is weird even by the already sky-high weirdness standards of our leading pundits:
  
  Chicago will survive its disappointments and Obama will, as well. It is the other stage sets on which the president struts–like he strutted in Cairo and at the United Nations–that concern me.
  
  I know that the president believes himself a good man. My nervy query to him is: “Does he believe America to be a good country?”
- The really weird part about this stuff, and similar Alex Jonesian non-controversies like the birth-certificate issue, is — what kind of person worries about stuff like this? Are there people out there who really believe that this milquetoast Democratic Party bureaucrat is going to turn Head Start into the Komsomol? And let’s just say Obama was born in Africa. He wasn’t, but let’s just say. Who gives a fuck? Are there not enough real problems out there for people to worry about?
- It allows people to transfer real anxiety and fear and anger over real problems into this fictional arena where the only thing to worry about is the presidency of this evil black Wizard of Oz-like figure who lies about his birthplace and has secret plans to institute a clearly-will-never-happen program of national servitude.If you’re in that place mentally, you might as well be playing Dungeons and Dragons. There’s no way thoughts like this can ever feel completely real, which maybe is the idea.
- Maybe if you spend enough time dwelling on these imagined terrors, like the creation of Obama-friendly “civilian security squads” (the Obama-Stasi!), you might eventually forget for a few minutes that you owe $89,000 in credit card debt. Is that what’s going on here?
  
  Or maybe this is over-thinking all of this, and maybe Marty Peretz is just getting old and losing it. Either way, it’s weird stuff. Even by American standards.

15 Oct 09

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – On the Nobel Prize for Occasional Peace - True/Slant

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Taibbi Nobel Obama

Like most awards the Prize has evolved into a kind of maraschino cherry for hardcore careerists to place atop their resumes, a reward not for dissidence but on the contrary for gamely upholding the values of Western society as it perceives itself, for putting a good face on things (in Obama’s place, literally so).
Our Western society quite openly embraces war as a means of solving problems and for quite some time now has fashioned its entire social and economic structure around the preparation for war.
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- And when a fringe presidential candidate named Dennis Kucinich announced plans to create a “Department of Peace,” he was almost literally laughed off the campaign trail.
- And indeed, there are times when we actually do turn to peace and diplomacy to solve our problems. Usually this is because all other avenues of action have been exhausted first, or because it just happens to be the right logistical move at that particular moment.
- Moreover the plan to gain permanent access to Iraqi oil reserves through the establishment of a friendly “democratic” regime with (let’s say) a “flexible” attitude toward foreign investment is turning out to be problematic at best.
- So eventually someone will make the decision that this whole Iraq war thing is stupid, benefits no one, not even politically in the short term, and moves will be made to wrap up this idiotic business and bring everyone home. At which point someone making this dreary logistical decision will get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and that someone will probably win it, allowing us all to bask in the glow of our “peace-loving” values which prevailed in the end over hate and violence.
- More likely the Obama critics who believe that Obama won this award for not being George Bush are right as well. The problem the international community had with Bush wasn’t that he believed in war and the use of force, it was that he believed in the unilateral use of these things. Bush did not believe in the use of force as an expression of a whole society’s values, he believed in it as an expression of his own machismo.
- They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies.
  
  You see the difference? The Nobel committee sure did!

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly? - True/Slant

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Taibbi bail out banks

It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.
In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.
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- No one mentions here that this is a carrot-and-stick story — the stick being that ordinary people have been robbed of the interest they should be getting in CDs and ordinary bank savings accounts by the various bailout programs and lending guarantees, which have brought the cost of capital down to nothing for the big banks, and punished those people who have been doing the right thing all along by saving. The Fed lends its money to Goldman Sachs and BOFA for free, why does anyone have to pay Grandma a high rate for her CD or her bank savings?
- What’s so tiresome about all of this is that no one reports this stuff as a political story. This is politics at its most basic. The Dow is going up, sure, but what does that mean, if the rest of the economy still sucks?

24 Sep 09

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – Will Obama listen to ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker’s warnings? - True/Slant

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Taibbi economics volker

There is a larger story to be done about how Obama did a bit of a bait-and-switch, hiring progressives to run his campaign and jettisoning them once he got into office. I hear about this phenomenon from different corners of the policymaking universe, from health care to defense and intelligence spending. But my sense is that the switch was most violent in the realm of economic policy, which means stuff like this bears particular attention. Will Obama act on Volcker’s recommendations? We should probably wait and see, but I’m not holding my breath.

Matt Taibbi - Taibblog – Waking up to discover the mortgage market was a giant criminal enterprise - True/Slant

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bail out Taibbi

The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages.
The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS.
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- Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound.
- This is a potentially gigantic story. It seems that a court has ruled that about half of the mortgage market has been run as a criminal enterprise for years, which would invalidate any potential forelosure proceedings for about, oh, 60 million mortgages.
- I can’t get into this too much, but suffice to say the lenders and the banks were extremely sloppy about their paperwork (at best — there is a fraud angle as well) and jammed up the system with missing and/or mismarked mortgage notes. Since a sale isn’t legal unless there’s full transfer of the physical note, a lot of the sales of mortgage-backed securities were not entirely legal, since the actual notes were often not transferred.
- Nothing like waking up in the morning and finding out a whole sector of the economy is completely screwed. Are these good times or what?

08 Sep 09

Sick and Wrong : Rolling Stone

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health care Taibbi

Let's start with the obvious: America has
not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the
developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the
American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and
illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to
dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and
leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans,
forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and
systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of
catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses
to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy
insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to
patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who
enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive
illnesses.
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- The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and
  lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old
  anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good
  news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get
  fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet
  another failed system: the political entity known as the United
  States of America.

05 Sep 09

The scariest thing about Sarah Palin isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America | The Smirking Chimp

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Taibbi palin McCain

Inside The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone

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