With your feet on the air and head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it
Your head will collapse when there's nothing in it
And you'll ask yourself, where is my mind? (Pixies via M.I.A.)
A dozen years ago, a mid-summer blitzing hot Las Vegas evening, Maya was a Golden Nugget blackjack tablemate of mine. She came in and sat with myself and two campaign colleagues. I was surprised this quite striking young woman chose to sit with us three insurance men looking types.
“Why are you downtown?”
“We just played the music festival.”
“What's your band?”
“M.I.A..”
“What do you do with the band?”
“I am M.I.A..”
We played a few more hands bantering on hold or hit, slowest way to lose money, and then,
“Ahh right, you made that song with the Clash sample.”
“Yes,” she lowly replied, as if having been found out.
Right then, my one colleague, who she had sat next to, accidentally tried putting his cigarette out on the back of her hand. If the other two of us had been amused by the shit she was giving our third colleague before, and we were, not even! From contact of the burning tobacco with flesh, the piss taking rose quickly and exponentially the rest of the evening. Hell hath no fury. Far and away the most entertaining couple hours spent in roasting Vegas. Afterwards, I became a great appreciator of many of the great words and sounds M.I.A.’s created.
Listening to this song yesterday made me think of that incident and then remember why I was even in Vegas. Well, a friend was thinking he wanted to be a US Senator from Nevada – completely against my strenuous advice. The way to get elected US Senator in Nevada in 2012 was run against the big banks. Nevada's housing market had collapsed, the majority of people with mortgages were underwater from the great Banking/Wall Street mortgage scam perpetrated over the previous decade.
Now, whatever it is you want to call what's presently happening with the financial/banking system. The best way someone recently described it as “monetary tightening through bank failure.” That's funny. I mean lo and behold, what can you say when Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan is back working again with DC to swallow up one of the country's biggest banks for pennies. Not in anyway implying here that Jamie's previous purchase for pennies of Bear Stearns in spring of '08 is a foreshadowing for this fall.
Jamie's one of the few still around from '08. Biden's still there too, he was in the Senate and elected VP in 2008. In 2013, Jamie cut the deal with Obama DOJ about Morgan’s mortgage crimes — $13 billion. At the time, Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT, maybe the last good reporter they employed, wrote of the nothing Attorney General Holder’s slap on the hand agreement,
“Much of it was the same-old-same-old, a not-very-lively description of a corrupted Wall Street mortgage factory, based largely on some facts that have been in the public domain for years.”
No one went to jail, instead the codification of corruption as a business model, fines simply a low cost of doing business.
I see the Democrats' temperature on Trump is turning up. Now Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan are one of the big reasons, bigger than the Russians even, Trump was elected in 2016. So Democrats you don't want Trump re-elected? Start plans to break up the House of Morgan and the other big banks, revitalizing local banking. Let a hundred flowers bloom. The economic restructuring the country needs to undertake has to take place at the local level, it should be decided there.
One sad thing about US politics is the republic's great anti- big bank tradition beginning with Jefferson, Jackson, then the Populists, and finally the last American politician to stand up to banks, FDR, “I welcome their hatred,” is all gone, paraphrasing Mistah Nixon, “We're all Hamiltonians now.”
Susan at Naked Capitalism was around in '08 too. At that time, she taught me a lot about the MBS' scam. Across history bank scams are all the same, only the bullshit changes. She has a little “whatever” piece on this slow motion rerun, astutely concluding,
“Sadly, the tracks look very well greased for banksters to get even more government support, further increasing an already too favorable risk-return tradeoff for them. And the great unwashed public isn’t complaining. I confess to finding it hard to feel sorry for willing victims.”
With your feet on the air and head on the ground