Today's Stories

September 20 / 21, 2008

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Dirk Kempthorne's Closet

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Large Hadron Collider Powers Up

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Wasilla Valley PTA?

September 12, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?

Michael Hudson
More Dangerous Than the A-Bomb? The Chicago School's Record of Infamy

Lloyd Miller
Palin and Alaskan Native and Tribal Rights: a Dismal Record

Steve Breyman
Georgia in NATO?

Maria Rivera
Cuba After Gustav and Ike: an Eyewitness Account

Jonathan Cook
Israel and the Dark Arts

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
U.S. Designs on Pakistan

M. Shahid Alam
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities

Robert Weissman
Executive Pay and the "Market Economy"

Tanya Golash-Boza / David Brunsma
Immigration Raids Must Be Stopped

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights

September 11, 2008

Noam Chomsky
Towards a Second Cold War?

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan: You Call This a Good War?

Ron Jacobs
Palinomics: She Ain't No Working Class Hero

Marjorie Cohn
God, Guns and Oil: A Palin Theocracy?

Mike Whitney
Cheney in the Caucasus

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia: a Coup in the Making?

Paul Cantor
The Other 9/11

Peter Morici
The Surging Trade Deficit

Ray McGovern
Iran's Road Less Traveled to Nukes

Linn Washington, Jr.
Screening Mumia: The Suppression of Dissent in America

Website of the Day
Palin (Michael) for President!

September 10, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline

Conn Hallinan
The Return of U.S. Death Squads

Ralph Nader
Who Needs Regulations When You've Got a Golden Parachute?

Peter Morici
Can the Bailout Work?

Joanne Mariner
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Laura Tate Kagel /
Jen Marlowe
The Pending Execution of Troy Davis: a Case for Clemency

Chuck Spinney
Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George

Dave Lindorff
Lazy Thinking and Prejudice

Scott Campbell
Where Now for Oaxaca's Social Movement?

Paul Farmer
Haiti and the Hurricanes

Anne Kilkenny
Letters from Wasilla: the Sarah Palin I Know

Website of the Day
Democrats and Zombies

September 9, 2008

Michael Colby
The Obama Poll Drop

Chellis Glendinning
Retorno a 1968: From Berkeley to Mexico City

Vijay Prashad
Losing Game

Jeffery R. Webber/
George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela From Below

David Michael Green
Country Last

Brian J. Foley
The New Face of Republican Power

John Ross
Mexican Flag Wrap

Pierre M. Sprey /
Winslow T. Wheeler
Joint Strike Fighter: Another Defense Acquisition Disaster

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Long Road to Freedom

Marc Gardner
California's Anti-Homosexual Laws are Alive and Unwell

William S. Lind
The Baltic States and Russia: Toy Armies or Accomodation?

Website of the Day
All Hope Rests with Piper Palin

September 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
An Interview with Michael Hudson on the Worsening Debt Crisis

Tariq Ali
The Godfather as President

Pam Martens
The Man Who Vetted Palin

Bill Quigley
The Weary Road Home: Displaced Poor Continue to Return to New Orleans

Malini Johar Schueller /
Ed White
Not About Me: Obamamania, Racial Porn-fest and Palinama

Robert Jensen
Pop Music and 9/11

Uri Avnery
Lonely Rider

Win McCormack
Palin Family Values

Howard Lisnoff
How Far From a Police State?

Maria C. Khoury
Taybeh Oktoberfest in Palestine

Website of the Day
Scaring Students from Voting in Virginia

September 6 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin and the Good Book

Jeffrey St. Clair
That Dam Senator: A River Ran Through Him

Linn Washington, Jr.
The GOP Excluded Black-Owned Businesses from Contracts at St. Paul Convention

Patrick Cockburn
Did Bush Spies Monitor Iraqi Allies?

Gary Leupp
The September 3 Attack on Pakistan: a Precursor to More War Crimes?

Nancy Kurshan
CHI-town Lowdown: Memories of 1968

William Blum
Has Obama Already Lost?

Michael Winship
The St. Paul Police vs. the Independent Media

Fred Gardner
Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

Nikolas Kozloff
Sarah Palin and the Wal-Mart Moms: the Cultural Packaging of VP Candidates

Wajahat Ali
The Cryptkeeper and His Pitbull: the Past and Future of the GOP

Robert Fantina
Change Agents?

Karyn Strickler
Palin by Comparison: Sarah and the Hillary Voters

David Yearsley
What Their Fanfares Told Us About the Candidates

Richard Rhames
Bad Campaign Moon Rising

James L. Secor
Bandwagon Politics

Missy Beattie
Missy for Vice POTUS

Eric Patton
Baseless in Obamaland

Ben Terrall
Haiti and the Washington Consensus

Thom Rutledge
Mr. Magoo and the Kind Stranger: a Serious Political Problem

Dan Bacher
Arnold and the Manufactured Drought

David Macaray
Is Union Democracy at Risk?

Jane Stillwater
The Admiral's Child: a Psychological Reason for McCain's Flip Flops

Grady Harper
Should Hunting Really be High on Our Priority List?

Poets' Basement
Wolff, Payne and Holt

Website of the Weekend
We'll See Your Sarah Palin and Raise You With Maria McKee

September 5, 2008

Elizabeth Walters
Old Fears, New Worries in Louisiana

Bill Quigley
Gustav's Path of Destruction

Alan Farago
Nothing Means Anything: The Fantasy of John and Sarah

Dave Lindorff
The Things They Left Behind (Including McCain's First Wife)

Ira Glunts
A Lesson Before Lying: How Republicans Solved Sarah Palin's Jewish Problem

Peter Morici
The Big Slump

Deepak Tripathi
Politics, Morality and the GOP: John McCain as John Major?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Energy of a Hurricane

Michael Donnelly
Change. God. POW.: a Summary of McCain's Big Speech

Martha Rosenberg
Free to Good Home, SUVs

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Air War: On Wolves and Bears

September 4, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Real McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Who is Wrecking America?

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republicans, the RNC 9 and the Twin Cities Cops

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Soft Surge

Andy Worthington
Rendered to Egypt for Torture

Osama Dawoud
How I Lost My Fulbright Scholarship

Stephen Lendman
Katrina Redux: the Militarization of New Orleans

Fidel Castro
Hurricane as Nuclear Strike

Website of the Day
Is McCain Palin's Bitch?

September 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Sen. Mike Gravel
Good Luck, Sarah!

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Left and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin, Hunting and the American Psyche

Ralph Nader
Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howard Lisnoff
Forty Years in the Streets (And They're Still Beating Up Journalists)

Steve Early / Cal Winslow
Can SEIU Members Exorcize the Purple Shades of Jackie Presser?

Shepherd Bliss
A Field Report From Slow Food Nation

Bill Quigley
Living in the Car After Gustav

Website of the Day
Growing Up Okie: an Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

September 2, 2008

Marjorie Cohn
Raiding Democracy in St. Paul

Jonathan Cook
Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror

Robert Weitzel
Biden and Israel

Corey D. B. Walker
Where Do We Go From Here?

John Ross
The Kidnapping Boom in Mexico

Eric Walberg
Wag the Dog in Georgia

Judith Scherr
No Day in Court for Ronald Dauphin

Richard Morse
Haiti, 2008

B. R. Gowani
What If the Israel Lobby was the African-American Lobby?

Michael Greenberg
Loofah Day in Cleveland

Website of the Day
Thanks for the Memories!

September 1, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Making a Killing in Iraq: McCain and the Telecoms

C. G. Estabrook
The War Will Go On

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Will a Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?

David Macaray
An Elegy for Labor Day

B. R. Gowani
The Lobby as Juggernaut

Saul Landau
Real Gold Winners

Charles Orloski
Going Down to Hell's Cul-de-Sac

Gloria La Riva
Profit and Disaster in New Orleans

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Factory

August 30 / 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy

Bill Quigley
Gustav is Coming

Jeffrey St. Clair
Valley Boy: The Rise and Fall of Richard Pombo

Andy Worthington
Shining a Light on the Dark Prison

Deepak Tripathi
The Race for the White House: Notes From a European Observer

Stanley Howard
A Prisoner's Tale of Abuse

Dave Lindorff
Troopergate in Alaska

Wajahat Ali
Palin on the Prowl: a Cougar for the PUMAs?

Robert Fantina
McCain and Palin

Josh Schlossberg
A Bias for Life: the Role of the Environmentalist

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Voting

Missy Beattie
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

Howard Lisnoff
Better Cuba Than Florida?

Suzan Mazur
Rethinking Evolution with Stuart Newman

Rev. Jim Rigby
What Would Jesus Ride to the Conventions?

David Yearsely
Katy Perry Meets Mozart

Serge Quadruppani
Italy's Years of Lead

B.R. Gowani
What If the Israeli Lobby Was the Islamic Lobby?

Richard Rhames
Empty Political Calories

Poets' Basement
Holt, Davies, Corsale and Landau

Website of the Day
Return of the Druids

August 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

Brian Cloughley
Resurgent Russia

David Ker Thomson
Jacko and Me: Dispatches From Fifty

Joanne Mariner
A UK Window on CIA Abuses

Neve Gordon
The Ordeal of Sahar Vardi, Refusenik

Chris Genovali
Of Whales and Off-Shore Drilling

Ron Jacobs
What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

Michael Donnelly
Honest Abe in Denver?

August 28, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
The Battle of Chicago

Paul Cantor
Who Killed Victor Jara?

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen
Axis of Evil Defeats Neocons

Andy Worthington
Clearing Out Guantánamo

Ben Terrall
Return to Port-au-Prince

Leonard Peltier
Message to Obama: Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Miasma of Bi-Partisanship

Donna J. Volatile
The Obama Construct

Website of the Day
Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou on the Meaning of Obama

August 27, 2008

Anthony DiMaggio
The Myths of Joe Biden

Jordan Flaherty
Three Years After Katrina

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Avoidance

Melissa Checker
Carbon Offsets, More Harm Than Good?

Bob Sommer
Blaming the Sixties

Cynthia McKinney
How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Flawed Presidency

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Only Good Muslim is the Anti-Muslim

Dave Lindorff
Strip-Search Nation

David Macaray
Labor's Hard Lessons

Website of the Day
Stagnant Income in an Eroding Economy

August 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Big Questions About Iraq

Michael D. Yates
Obama and the Working Class

Paul Craig Roberts
Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicide Report

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Obama's Promised Land?

Huwaida Arraf
Sailing into Gaza

Joseph Grosso
Back to the Future: New York's Housing Crisis

Sheldon Richman
What About the Ossetians?

Binoy Kampmark
Impasse at Singur

Website of the Day
Taser Bait in Denver

August 25, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
US Out of Iraq by "2011"

Bill Quigley
Katrina, the Pain Index

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State

James McEnteer
Death by Paranoia

Uri Avnery
The Devil's Hoof

Will Potter
The State Deparment's Green Scare Wing

Robert Jensen
Technological Fundamentalism

Stephen Lendman
Reinventing the Evil Empire

Wajahat Ali
Biden His Time

Carl Finamore
The Future of Trade Unions in China

Website of the Day
Don't Blow Up the Mountain, Boys

August 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
"Change," "Hope"...Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Salmon with Paul O'Neill: Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River

Patty O'Grady
John McCain in a New Context: Why the Senator is No War Hero

Nicole Colson
Obama and Big Corn

Steve Conn
Obama and the Mining Cartel

Deepak Trapathi
Pakistan in Uncertain Times

Robert Fantina
Once Upon a Time in America: a McCain Administration

Jonathan M. Feldman
Obamanomics: Does the Left Have Anything to Say?

Joshua Frank
Targeting Pelosi (and the War Machine): an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Osama Qashoo
Sailing to Gaza

Howard Lisnoff
The Long Silence: American Jews and the Palestinians

David Michael Green
Sen. McShame and the Wreckage: John McCain Discovers America

Dave Lindorff
Why Not Let the Republicans Deal With This Mess?

Christopher Brauchli
A Banner Month for Passports

Alan Farago
Who Crippled the Government?

Michael Winship
Cash Register Conventions

Richard Rhames
Vlad the Derailer: Can Putin Save America From Itself?

David Rosen
The Culture Wars Are Over: But Culture Warriors Are Still Terrorizing America

Patrick B. Barr
Don't Try to Tame the Lightning Bolt

Jamie Newlin
Western Turf Wars: the Politics of Public Lands Ranching

Poets' Basement
Glendinning, McEnteer and Bonner

Website of the Weekend
Cafe Reconcile, New Orleans

August 22, 2008

Boris Kagarlitsky
Fallout from the Georgian War

Laura Carlsen
Obama and Latin America: Change or Continuity?

Bob Barr
No War for Georgia

Marwan Bishara
From Russia with Love: Putin Hits Georgia, Bloodies Bush

Peter Morici
Is the Fed Still a Central Bank?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Big Heat

Charles Mostoller
The Battle for the Amazon

Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Obama is Not a Muslim: But Would It Be So Terrible If He Were?

Keith Rosenthal
Standing Up to Union-Bashing

John F. Miglio
The Devolution of the Baby Boom Generation

Website of the Day
Fire Sale in the Markets!

August 21, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?

Dave Lindorff Loserville: How Obama Blew It

Ralph Nader
The Problem with Problem Banks

Joanne Mariner
The Military Commissions, So Far

Wajahat Ali
Descent Into Chaos: an Interview with Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban

Ron Jacobs
Georgia and Historical Farce

Rostam Purzal
The Left and Iran

Anthony Papa
Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain Way

August 20, 2008

Michael Neumann
Russia and Georgia: Proportion and Distortion

Ray McGovern
Musharraf Out Like Nixon

Eric Walberg
Georgia's Ossetian Debacle

Fidaa Abed
Blocking a Gazan's Path to San Diego

Daniel Haack
The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit

Mike Whitney
Greenback Surges, Euro Shrivels

Website of the Day
Hands Off South Africa's Centre for Civil Society

August 19, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Deepak Tripathi
A New Age of Torture

Marwan Bishara
The Politics of Evil in the US Elections

Saul Landau
Baseball Diplomacy or Just Baseball?

William S. Lind
Leave Georgia Alone, George

Martha Rosenberg
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders

James Brittain
The Road to Tyranny in Colombia

Pratyush Chandra
Krugman's Great Illusion

David Macaray
AFSCME's Strike Against the University of California

Website of the Day
McCain Plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn

Weekend Edition
September 20 / 21, 2008

That's a Lot of Goldman

Putting Lipstick on an AIG

By LILA RAJIVA

Hockey moms aren’t the only ones wearing Maybelline. Pigs come in cherry gloss too.

Like the porkers at Wall Street lining up with their lips in a pucker behind Washington’s plush behind. Having pigged out at the public trough for years, they now want their sticky little trotters washed down in the righteous waters of the Potomac.

Tarting up comes natural to our Wall Street-walkers. Turns out these great big masters of the universe were really, well, girly men who couldn’t balance their check-books and put out more than they took in... like any working girl.

Lipstick is especially right for Goldman Sachs, which likes to cross-dress as a devout public servant in after-hours and has at least one set of heels working the floor of the Treasury department during any crisis. Yep, I’m pretty sure Hank Paulson would look good in high-gloss plum. You see, lip shtick is just what Hank’s good at. He was out on Monday flapping his lips with the kind of plummy platitudes you’d expect from semantically challenged mental health workers, not from a Treasury Secretary. A Treas. Sec., mind you, who was once a Goldman CEO not above inserting carefully chosen knives into the ribs of colleagues.

“We need to put this behind us,” quoth Hank. “We must move forward.”

“We need to work through this.”

“We need to heal.”

We, of course, need to do nothing. There is no we here. This is a Wall Street crisis. And the usual suspects on Wall Street need to line up, bend over and get caned for their misdeeds. Barring that, they need to take the market’s medicine like men.

Instead, they were out in full therapeutic mode, pouting and whining for a change of their soggy diapers by dear Nanny Washington.

And Nanny obliged.

First there was Fannie and Freddie, the terrible twins, who were taken lovingly into the conservatorship of the state. Translation: they went belly up and the funeral expenses were billed to the tax-payer, though the estate had been sold at private auction a long time before.

Oh, those twins.

Inhaling the swampy fumes of government but croaking from the terra firma of the market. Owned by individuals, backed by the state. The formula of the managed economy - privatized profits and socialized losses.

Created by Congress to expand home ownership by making finance available to a bigger part of the population, the two companies own (or guarantee) around 40 percent of the $8.5 trillion U.S. residential mortgage market. They are the biggest single borrowers in the US, after the federal government. In 2006 they were hit with a $350 million dollar fine, one of the biggest ever assessed by the SEC, as a penalty for accounting malpractice. accounting malpractice. Then Fannie even got caught trying to pull Nanny’s strings to discredit the regulator. Which strings were those? We can only guess.

Quote: “Goldman Sachs was one of several institutions actively involved in the accounting fraud, its contribution being earnings manipulation through the creation of MBS’s - mortgage-backed securities - in Fannie’s portfolio, a strategy remarkably similar to Goldman’s actions on behalf of Enron. Of note also is the fact that in 2005, while the investigation was ongoing, Congress placed Fannie directly under the Federal Reserve, raising the specter of a surreptitious government bail-out outside the public eye, at some point.”

[That’s from an investment report I did on Goldman Sachs in August 2006. The only thing wrong in it was that the government bail-out took place in full view of the public].

That is to say, while Hank blubbers on about how we need more regulation, that’s only now, during bust-time. Way back in bubble-time, Hank’s old firm was busy dabbing rouge on the pork in Fannie’s books and playing hopscotch with regulations.

O tempora, O mores.

Why, back in bubble time, even the former Fed chairman, the all-but-sainted Alan Greenspan was more prescient. He noted that failure to smack down the bratty twins could lead to “systemic risk” in the capital markets.

Of course, he said that after first telling Jane Citizen to go forth and borrow. But that’s because, like the monetary philanthropist he was, Greenspan believed in the widespread giving of ARMs.

As public servant Hank today, so public servant Greenspan back then.

Greenspan too liked dabbing rouge on pork. He relished painting market bottoms with the varnish of cheap money. It made them look plumper and rosier than they really were. Eventually the bottoms looked up and turned into booms, he reminded us.
The rouge worked. Books got beautified. Risky turned risqué.

“The image of Fannie Mae as one of the lowest-risk and 'best in class' institutions was a facade," said James B. Lockhart, the acting director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) when it released its report in May 2006.

In other words Fannie was a pig, even with the lipstick.

Of course, Goldman’s not the only one on Wall Street with a wicked hand for make-up artistry. The ratings agencies haven’t been too bad themselves, with all that triple A gloss they plastered on gangrenous sub-prime debt. What was that about? A little make- over for the corpse before the public viewing?

Truth be told. Goldman got good at putting lipstick on porkers long before they dabbed it on Fannie and Freddie. They were doing it in 1999 in ole Hank’s CEO days. Goldman helped Enron's "smart guys" conduct massive energy futures trading and its leverage, like Enron's, ballooned. [They had their leverage thang going in those days too].

Then, in 1993 Goldman invented a special accounting scheme to perk up Enron's books - "Monthly income preferred shares" (or MIPS) they called it. MIPS let Enron sell fifty-year securities through specially created off-shore companies. To the IRS, Enron described the preferred stock as "debt" and claimed tax deductions on the interest payments. To shareholders, Enron called the same stock "equity" and counted it in the company's capital value. Goldman took home massive underwriting fees from the scheme

In one year, Goldman had helped 17 companies besides Enron sell 2.7 billion MIPS. There was an offering every week, each dodging IRS rules with more and more finesse. Average commission and interest rates on MIPS ran much higher than on normal debt - between 1 and 1.2%. Goldman made tens of millions.

When the IRS, Treasury and the SEC decided to plug the loophole that was costing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Goldman and Merrill Lynch, along with the industry trade group, the Bond Market Association, began big time lobbying. Then Goldman CEO Jon Corzine (later a US senator and NY Jersey governor) made sure the legislation got nipped in the bud and Goldman's little accounting number actually ended up a chart-busting hit on the financial circuit.

So when Hank Paulson rushes to put together a bail-out for Merrill Lynch but brushes Lehman aside, he’s just remembering who he used to jam with in the old days. (Of course, buying up Merrill shares trading at $17 for $29 might not be most people’s idea of a bail-out. But that’s another story).

It could be also that when he’s not actually slitting throats, Hank just likes to lend a helping hand to old Goldmanites, like Merrill’s John Thain (a Goldman COO, CFO and President). You see, our Hank is a helping kind of guy. Like the time he helped Thain help himself to Dick Grasso’s seat at the head of the New York Stock Exchange. Oh, those public servants. Never a moment of rest from the helping.

That’s probably why Hank is helping out A.I.G.

Turns out Maurice (“Hank”) Greenberg, the former chair of A.I.G., is an old friend of John Whitehead, another former Goldman head.

The pranks of these Hanks get to be almost as complex as those derivative deals that melt hedge-funds like marshmallows on a grill. But the short of it seems to be that Greenberg jumped ship at AIG after Eliot Spitzer, crusading heavy of the SEC, came sniffing around in 2005. Improprieties,...bid rigging... hissed Spitzer, turning on the heat. Hank (G.) denied it stoutly, but AIG had to restate some of its numbers. It got so warm that even Hank (P.) who left his roost at Goldman Sachs in 2006 to perch at Treasury could smell the flames.

The operative word here is Treasury. That is to say, in the normal run of things, hookers and pols having always gone together like dill and pickles, a married man's boody calls would provoke no more than a yawn. They certainly wouldn't have come to the attention of the revenue department. But Spitzer’s zeal had aroused the ire of the banking mafia. And thus it was that no sooner did things get really toasty on Wall Street, then along comes an IRS audit that turns up Spitzer's sins of the flesh. And thus the public was regaled with the seedy drama of the Emperor's Club and Eliot. And thus also Wall Street dethroned the hated securities czar and sent him scurrying back to his former life as a mere real estate billionaire.

But now, with Hank (G., not P.) defending AIG as a national treasure fully deserving of taxpayer TLC, you begin to wonder about it all. If AIG was such a treasure, why did Greenberg ever leave? Why did he rail against his successor? And why defend AIG now? Was he thinking about the shares he still has at AIG?

[Maybe he was taking a leaf out of the book of yet another Goldman CEO, Robert Rubin, slated to be Obama's economic point man, a man who's made an art out of jumping ship at the right time (read, Citigroup) leaving his successors to hold the sub-prime bag.

It's a trick Rubin worked at as Secretary of the Treasury in the 1990s, when he (along with St. Alan) was responsible as much as anyone else for blocking regulation of the over the counter derivative trade and for consolidating the banks – misdeeds for which the rest of the financial industry is now paying].

And what about the Starr Foundation, the charity that Greenberg headed, and which Spitzer claimed he also misused? Turns out Spitzer wasn't so wrong. Greenberg seems to have been using public funds to pursue his own agenda. Maybe Starr is another national treasure in the making... Or is national just what comes in after treasure goes out?

You wonder some more.

Just this March, before AIG took ill, Hank (P, not G) came up with a proposal for insurance reform that amounted to an end run by the big insurance players around the state insurance system. Now your wondering becomes positively thunderous.

There is no bigger player than AIG. Yet no private bids were considered. Had they been, AIG would surely have found private buyers. Lehman did.

Instead the Fed bailed it out. Actually, it was the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most important of the 12 federal reserve banks and the one responsible for carrying out the Fed's exchange rate policy, i.e. for buying and selling dollars. It was the same NY Fed which cobbled together the rescue of Bear Stearns. On NY Fed chairman Geithner's board of directors sits another Goldman chief, Stephen Friedman. Geithner also takes unofficial advice from Goldman alums Gerald Corrigan and the aforementioned John Thain. Then, of course, there's the man whose bidding Geithner is bound officially to do, the Treas. Sec. himself, His Holiness Hank, servant of the people.

However you cut it, that's a lot of Goldman.

Which means that however you cut it, the bail-out of the giants of finance is not just a bail out of the economy...or of the banking system....

It's an evisceration of some banks by others.... a cannibalistic binge billed to the tax-payer.

No matter how much rosy gloss gets slathered on it, it's a pig-out at the public trough.

Lila Rajiva is a free-lance journalist and author of "The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media," (Monthly Review Press) and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets. She can be reached at: lrajiva@hotmail.com or through her blog at: www.mindbodypolitic.com

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