Lower credit risk means a lower price for protection. Zero implies zero risk. The higher the basis points, the higher the implied risk. When U.S. credit default swaps were first introduced, the price of protection was around two basis points. According to Bloomberg, the price for five-year protection was around 38 basis points (per annum) on Friday. But the price in the over-the-counter market — where this stuff actually trades — was almost double or around 75 basis points.

Since most traders in U.S. credit default swaps don’t think the U.S. will default any time soon, why are they trading U.S. credit default swaps? They are speculating on price movements the way a day trader buys and sells stocks to speculate on stock price movements.

via Janet Tavakoli: Washington Must Ban U.S. Credit Derivatives as Traders Demand Gold.

Another Janet Tavakoli piece, this one about the market for CDS on the United States.

I’d like someone to explain to me how trading a credit default swap on a U.S. Treasury note isn’t gambling. This is purely betting on crowd behavior — after all, nobody really thinks the U.S. will default.

It’s weird enough living in a country where a man can legally own an arsenal of machine guns, but his neighbor growing a pot plant will send a team of DEA agents kicking his door in with a no-knock warrant. But this goes even beyond that. If I go online today to HaveNoLifeAndBetOnSports.com and bet fifty dollars on the Bucks against the Celtics tonight, I’m a criminal. But some gazillionaire firm in New York can legally bet against the United States of America in unlimited amounts in a trade that has nothing to do with anything, but a guess about how many other people will make the same bet.

Jesus, are we a weird country.

When you have agents and hangers-on handing you money and naked women and Escalades from the age of 14 on, it’s bound to swell your head. Some athletes just get a worse case of it than others.

via A Field Guide to Sports Egos | Men’s Journal.

My new Men’s Journal piece is out, and I’m interested to know if anyone thinks I left anyone out of this list of reigning sports narcissists. Obviously there’s no Kobe and I’ve gotten some letters complaining that Steph was left off, but I’m saving Marbury for an athletes-who’ve-gone-insane column.

Anyway, if there are obvious omissions, please let me know. We struggled over this one.

Look at about the 5-minute mark of this video — Janet Tavakoli debating Rick Santelli about predatory lending. You basically have a whole panel of CNBC goons pooh-poohing the idea that predatory lending took place, setting up the inevitable revisionist history that the 2008 crash was caused by individual homeowners borrowing beyond their means.

My favorite part of this comes roughly at the six-minute mark. Tavakoli has just deftly explained how a lot of the predatory practices worked — people with limited financial literacy were presented with long and complicated mortgage deals, and told they would have a fixed payment in perpetuity or a guaranteed re-finance, or were nailed by fraudulent appraisals. Then she mentioned the big one, the fact that investment banks then took all these mortgages and with eyes wide open securitized them and sold them off as worthy investments to suckers on the other end of the chain.

While she’s saying all this stuff, Santelli, who is one of the fathers of the Tea Party movement, is shaking his head furiously, video-scoffing at everything she’s saying. When he finally does get a chance to speak, this is what he says:

Here’s my problem with this. It takes two to tango. You can’t cheat an honest man.

You can’t cheat an honest man? What the fuck does that mean?

This whole scene sort of encapsulates what’s wrong with the Tea Party movement. The movement, and let’s admit this, has some of its roots in legitimate grievances about government waste and some not-entirely-inaccurate observations about what’s left of the American welfare state. Of course what resonates most with the suburban whites who mostly make up the Tea Party are stories about minorities and immigrants using section 8 housing, food stamps, Medicaid, TANF and other programs, with the Obama stimulus being for them a symbol of this ongoing government largess. The heat of the Tea Party movement comes from the racial frustrations that actually exist out there, in the real world outside New York and LA, as urban expansion and immigration increasingly throw white and nonwhite communities together, with white Tea Party types more and more often blowing gaskets over increased crime rates, declining school standards, and mislaid or wasted tax revenue.

That this perception that minorities are the prime or sole consumers of government entitlement programs is absurdly inaccurate — white people, for instance, are overwhelmingly the largest nonelderly recipients of Medicaid, making up 42.8% of the program’s rolls nationwide, compared to 22.2% for blacks and 27.9% for Hispanics — is beside the point. The point is that the Tea Party is built largely on this narrative of “personal responsibility,” where the central demons are unwed black and Hispanic mothers and absent black and Hispanic fathers, who are, let’s face it, not uncommon characters in the American melodrama.

Which is another subject for another time, but let’s just say this: the Tea Party movement contains a lot of people who are far more impressed by what they can see with their own eyes than with what, for instance, they read about. I’ve been to Tea Party events where global warming was dismissed by speakers who, without irony, pointed to the fact that there was snow on the ground outside. And while very few people have ever actually seen a CDO manager or a Countrywide executive, or were aware if it when they saw them, the Tea Party folks sure as hell have seen who their neighbors in foreclosure are.

The Fox/CNBC types have very cannily latched on this narrative to rewrite the history of the financial crisis. They know that Tea Partiers will go for any narrative that puts blame on poor (and especially poor minority) homeowners, because the idea of poor blacks and Hispanics borrowing beyond their means fits seamlessly with their world view. But this is a situation where poor minorities were really incidental to a much larger fraud scheme that culminated in a welfare program — the bank bailouts — that dwarfs the entire “entitlement” infrastructure. But the millions of people who are actually in the Tea Party movement seem to have absolutely no idea that their so-called leaders, the Santellis of their world, are shilling for tax cheats and crooks and welfare bums of the sort they would despise (perhaps even more than their black and Hispanic neighbors), if they could actually see them.

But thanks to people like these CNBC goons, they don’t see them, and probably won’t. The further we get from the crisis, the muddier all of this stuff is going to get.

p.s. I seem to be getting a lot of mail from Ron Paul supporters about this, claiming that I’m overlooking the early Ron Paul tea parties and suppressing his message.  I actually like Ron Paul and have said nothing but nice things about him. I talk to people in his office regularly. But the Ron Paul tea parties and these post Feb-2009 Tea Parties are two different things. Certainly the current Tea Partiers see it that way. While these folks may have lifted some of the Paulian themes, they’re just physically different people. They’re mainstream Palin supporters, and the reason I find them ridiculous is because I was covering these people while the bailouts were happening and remember what was actually on their minds back then. Does anyone remember what the cause of the day was when the AIG bailout took place? It was the uproar from Palin supporters about Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment.

The reason I’ve always respected the Ron Paul people is that, even though I don’t always agree with them, they’re intellectually consistent and motivated by actual policy issues. These Teabagger types on the other hand are just a giant herd of video sheep being jerked around by snickering DC-New York types, who are very skillfully playing on their cultural paranoia and their economic and racial frustrations. When they were told to flip out about Obama’s “lipstick”  comment, they did. When they were told to flip out about the bailouts, they did. I’m not saying that some of these people weren’t frustrated about the bailouts, to the extent that they even knew about them, before Obama got elected. But they did not coalesce into a mass movement against them until part II of the bailout was passed under Obama’s watch, and one should note also that their keynote speaker in Nashville a few weeks ago, Palin, was a bailout supporter.

The Paul people were upset about deficit spending and Fed corruption throughout and ardently opposed Bush’s policies throughout his presidency. These Teabaggers did not. They were the people inside the rope-lines at McCain and Romney and Rudy events, complaining about “those people” consuming social services money, while the Paul people with their protest placards were physically barred from coming near the events. I must have seen that dynamic a dozen times during the campaign. So to all those Paul people, I hear you. I’m not trying to say you weren’t on these issues beforehand. What I’m saying is, this new Tea Party thing, it’s different from your protests, not necessarily because the message is so different, but because of two things. One, it was inspired by major-network media figures. Two, the people at the protests are overwhelmingly different people. They’re dupes; the Paul movement is more like a real grass-roots organization.

MY health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Bust the Health Care Trusts – NYTimes.com.

This is how politics is supposed to work. Well, not really — in reality, you’d like to see your leaders actually lead, i.e. do the right thing first, before being forced into it by circumstance. But we’ll take the latter.

The sequence: Obama and the Dems got whipped in Massachusetts and it suddenly occurred to them that they might want to start doing things that would be popular outside their Rolodex of campaign contributors. A bailout tax was one early idea. They started searching the landscape for outrages they could get on the other side of and found a good one: Anthem Blue Cross in California raising rates by 39 percent.

Suddenly the Obama administration decided to come out against the antitrust exemption for the insurance industry. Like they only just noticed the problem.

The insurance antitrust exemption has been an outrage for over fifty years. The original bill formalizing the industry’s exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, was dreamed up by two Hollywood villains. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran was the inspiration for the “Senator Pat Geary” character in Godfather Part II (”Senator… my final offer is this: nothing” — that guy), while Homer Ferguson was the inspiration for the Lloyd Bridges character in Tucker who whored himself out for the auto makers to get Tucker’s new car struck from the market. These two gigantic assholes teamed up to help the insurance industry avoid the albatross of competitive pricing.

McCarran-Ferguson was supposed to be temporary. Franklin Roosevelt clearly thought so when he signed it into law in 1944, saying that after “a moratorium period,” the antitrust laws “will be applicable in full force and effect to the business of insurance.” The law was supposed to expire in 1947. It didn’t.

As a result, all the evil shit that made for such high drama in Kurt Eichenwald’s book The Informant – about a bunch of agricultural firms who get together to fix prices for an additive called Lysine — that’s actually legal in the insurance business.

This is why insurers (especially insurers with large market shares in small states) are easily able to gouge customers and deny coverage. There’s really no legal mechanism for preventing the firms from getting together and arranging price-fixing and other outrages. In a normal market customers would be able to get better coverage and cheaper rates from a competitor, but insurance is really more like a series of competition-free fiefdoms where the customers can’t go elsewhere for a better deal. State Farm even denied coverage to Trent freaking Lott after Katrina and got away with it because State Farm has Misssissippi by the nads. It’s crazy.

This is, again, another reason Obamacare was such a joke from the start. The White House vision clearly called for “health care reform” without a repeal of McCarran-Ferguson. Which is technically almost impossible, but they tried it.

That didn’t work, naturally, so now they’re finally getting around to doing the obvious. They’ll fail — every attempt to repeal McCarran-Ferguson inevitably does, mysteriously — but at least they’re talking about it. But Jesus, why does this stuff take so long?

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — They are gathering again at a Winter Olympics, now aging cold warriors.

Thirty years ago, they played a game that has been called the greatest upset in Olympic history, a David-vs.-Goliath tale, a political metaphor, a miracle.

That’s how many Americans remember the hockey game played at the Lake Placid Olympics on Feb. 22, 1980, when a group of mostly college kids defeated the mighty team from the Soviet Union, which had dominated the sport for most of the previous two decades.

But what went through the minds of those red-clad players, who watched in stunned disbelief as the Americans celebrated the “Miracle on Ice” at the other end of the rink?

The hawkish features of goalie Vladislav Tretiak turned soft and he smiled slightly as he was reminded of the painful anniversary. But he brushed the memory aside as easily as one of the many thousands of shots he turned away in his Hall of Fame career.

via FOXNews.com – Russians play down ‘Miracle on Ice’ 30 years later.

My old friend Simon in Moscow sent me this and wrote:

AP: “Russians play down ‘Miracle on Ice’ 30 years later.”  What kind of headline and story is that? How about a piece titled “Tatar-Mongols play down the Kulikovo battle 629 years later”?

I’m with him on this. Seriously, can we get over ourselves about the Miracle on Ice? It was great and all, but you hear about it every five minutes in this country. I lived in Russia for 10 years and didn’t even once hear about a bunch of Soviets with hideous mustaches whipping the asses of David Robinson, Danny Manning and Mitch Richmond in basketball in Seoul in ‘88. I heard a lot about the 1972 thing, but that was only in the context of Russians being so amused by how much we whined about getting jobbed by the refs.

I mean really, whatever happened to acting like you’ve been there before? I’m trying to imagine what the citizen of someplace like Liechtenstein or Reunion Island thinks when he sees Americans keeping a 30-year boner over the image of themselves as longshot underdogs who beat the odds.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

7:30 p.m. A Pen Warmed Up in Hell: Matt Taibbi and Charles P. Pierce :

Rolling Stone political columnist Matt Taibbi and author Charles P. Pierce (Idiot America), fresh from The Daily Show and elsewhere.. $25 ($20 for members); call 860-280-3130.

via The Mark Twain House | Calendar.

Just FYI — very honored to be giving a speech with Charles Pierce at the Mark Twain House in Hartford in a few weeks. Thought I’d pass along the details of the event:

On Saturday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m., The Mark Twain House & Museum will present A Pen Warmed Up in Hell Lecture with Matt Taibbi and Charles P. Pierce . Both have been guests on some of today’s hottest current events shows, including Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Rachel Maddow and Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me. WNPR radio personality and Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe will moderate. Tickets are $25 ($20 for members) and can be purchased by calling 860-280-3130…

On Saturday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m., The Mark Twain House & Museum will present A Pen Warmed Up in Hell Lecture with Matt Taibbi and Charles P. Pierce. Both have been guests on some of today’s hottest current events shows, including Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Rachel Maddow and Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me. WNPR radio personality and Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe will moderate. Tickets are $25 ($20 for members) and can be purchased by calling 860-280-3130…

The Mark Twain House & Museum has restored the author’s Hartford, Connecticut, home, where the author and his family lived from 1874 to 1891. Twain wrote his most important works during the years he lived there, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In addition to providing tours of Twain’s restored home, a National Historic Landmark, the institution offers activities and educational programs that illuminate Twain’s literary legacy and provide information about his life and times. The house and museum at 351 Farmington Ave. are open Monday through Saturday, 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., and Sunday, noon-5:30 p.m. For more information, call 860-247-0998 or visit www.marktwainhouse.org. Programs at The Mark Twain House & Museum are made possible in part by support from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism and the Greater Hartford Arts Council.

The Hartford Advocate is the event’s Media Partner. The event is one in the museum’s continuing series of Mark Twain 2010 Centennial Celebration events . The Hartford Financial Group, Inc., is the Mark Twain House & Museum’s Centennial Sponsor.

I’ve never met Charles Pierce but I loved his book, Idiot America, so I’m looking forward to this. And I’m looking forward to seeing Twain’s house — always weird to see where great writers did their work. I used to live near Tolstoy’s Moscow home and remember being freaked out by seeing a page from the story The Kreutzer Sonata still on his desk.

So my new article in Rolling Stone, “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle,” is up and online.

The piece was a lot of fun to write mainly because I got to learn a lot about con men I never knew before. But it was also challenging for a lot of other reasons. For instance, there was a whole section on Quantitative Easing I had to cut — I say this with apologies to Tyler Durden, who walked me through a lot of that stuff — for space reasons and because delving into the incipient U.S. debt problem would likely have made the piece too complicated. Thus though the piece appears to focus exclusively on the banks and how they skimmed their own bailout — which is totally true — there is actually a more subtle story out there about the mutual dependency of our increasingly broke-ass, politically desperate government in Washington and their virtually insolvent partner-banks on Wall Street. I would like to get into that more in the future.

Already I’m getting some criticism in the mail. As I’m still pretty sick right now I can’t really respond to it at length. But one theme that comes back over and over again from some writers is this idea that I ignored what would have happened if the banks had not been bailed out. That would have been an even worse disaster, the theory goes, ergo all this whining about the banks robbing the bailout money is off base.

My feeling on that is similar to what Barry Ritholtz (check out his site if you haven’t), the author of Bailout Nation and one of the guys I spoke with at length for this story, proposed. He said that “we should have gone Swedish on their asses.” The Swedes after a similar bubble burst in 1992 temporarily seized control of insolvent institutions, forced banks to write down losses before they got aid, and gave taxpayers a huge share in the upside of recovery. It was a tough-love approach that really worked and forcefully addressed the moral hazard issue in a way we never touched.

That’s one way we could have proceeded. But whatever we didn’t do, we can be sure that what we did do was exactly wrong. Barry pointed out the classic pronunciation of Victorian economist/journalist Walter Bagehot, who said that in a crisis, a Central Bank should lend freely to solvent institutions against good collateral, at penalty rates. We did exactly the opposite: we lent to insolvent institutions, against shit collateral, at zero percent interest. We told these guys to drink themselves sober. Total crap thinking and totally typical.

Anyway, I’ll get into this more after I return to the living; right now I’m going to go hang a plasma bag from my bedroom lamp and eat the contents of the first prescription bottle I can find in my bathroom.

Thanks to those who sent get well wishes.

Sorry for the lack of posts; I’ve been really sick for days. I hope to be back at it soon.

What are you reading these days? And, are there issues I should be checking out?

Let me know in the comments.

Of course, we thought the same thing when Bay came up for discussion. As it turned out, the Sox dug in their heels on protective language in the event Bay had any injuries to his knees, a stance that ultimately blew up the deal and led to the Sox acquiring, among others, Mike Cameron, Jeremy Hermida and Adrian Beltre for roughly $20 million, about $5 million more than they would have paid Bay this season under the terms of a four-year, $60 million contract. In case you’re wondering, the Sox could have had Bay, Beltre and John Lackey for about $4-$5 million more than they are projected to pay now. [Link]

Non-baseball fans, feel free to ignore this post, but it’s almost spring training time, and… As a Red Sox fan, Tony Massarotti is starting to drive me crazy. He seems like a nice guy, but he’s fixated on the idea that the Sox should buy big bats in free agency, and in order to make that point he keeps saying stuff that isn’t really true. His thing last year was this idea that the Red Sox could have signed Mark Teixeira by being more “aggressive,” when it’s fairly obvious that Teixeira was never going to sign with Boston — New York outbid them by $10 million and would have raised the pot even more if Boston had called. And Teixeira and his wife didn’t want to live in Boston anyway.

Every sportswriter in the country seems to understand this, but Massarotti keeps writing up the Teixeira episode of an example of the Red Sox being cheap and using bad negotiating tactics. My favorite was this idea that the deal might have gotten done if they had given Teixeira and his agent, Scott Boras, a “short window” to accept their offer. Every baseball writer in the country knows there is no such thing as giving Scott Boras a short window to accept a contract offer.

Shit, Scott Boras drags out negotiations even when there’s no competition for his player’s services. Look at him now, still “demanding” a two-year deal for Johnny Damon when the poor sap is like a week away from Spring Training and doesn’t even have a one-year deal from anyone in his pocket. The only way to sign a Scott Boras client is to commit to months and months of excruciating pain and rancor. Signing a Scott Boras client is like talking your parents into giving you a puppy — you have to beg for months on end, constantly, in between meals, from the back seat of the car on road trips, before going to bed at night, in front of their friends at dinner parties, you have to work on them through your grandparents, leave books about dog-rearing around the house, do all your chores early for like a full year, etc. etc.

Do all that, maybe that one day comes when Dad says, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” That’s what signing Mark Teixeira, Matt Holliday or any of these Boras clients is like. The idea that Boras would have coughed up Teixeira last winter because Theo Epstein pulled a “Take it or leave it!” act in November, particularly when he had the first baseman-less Yankees out there, is just… I mean, it’s crazy. Boras would have interpreted a gesture like that as an invitation to begin negotiations.

Anyway, Mazz has been on that theme for a year, and now he’s on to riding the Sox for not re-signing Jason Bay. I too was disappointed to see Bay go, and I’m not sure about the wisdom of signing Mike Cameron in his place. But Mazz’s math is bizarre. Again, he notes that they acquired Mike Cameron, Jeremy Hermida and Adrian Beltre for roughly $20 million, about $5 million more than they would have paid Bay this season under the terms of a four-year, $60 million contract. In case you’re wondering, the Sox could have had Bay, Beltre and John Lackey for about $4-$5 million more than they are projected to pay now.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the only thing that mattered in contract negotiations is how much the players cost in the upcoming year? Doing the math that way, it does sort of work out. On Planet Mazz, the Sox could have had Bay, Beltre and Lackey in 2010 for about $40.5 million, as opposed to the roughly $36.6 million they’re currently spending on Cameron, Beltre, Lackey, and Hermida.

Which makes sense. Except in the Mazz scenario, the actual cost for all those players over the life of their contracts would look like this: $60 million for Bay (he ultimately signed for $66, but let’s just say Mazz is right, and the Sox could have had him for $60 had they pulled the trigger on an extension over the summer) $82.5 million for Lackey, and $14 million for Beltre.

So the total cost of signing Adrian Beltre, Jason Bay and John Lackey would at minimum have been about $156 million. What they spent instead, total, for Lackey, Beltre, Hermida and Cameron was about $115 million, or about $40 million less. Add in the fact that Beltre is severely unlikely to exercise his 2011 option and the overall total is about $45 million less. Add in the fact that Bay ultimately got $66 million from the Mets, and maybe the Sox spent $51 million less on the current package than they would have on Team Mazz.

I’m sure the Red Sox (or most any other team, for that matter) had absolutely no problem paying big money for Jason Bay in 2010. It’s not that they were afraid to pay the extra $3-4 million this year. What they were afraid to pay big money for was the 2013 Jason Bay, an aging DH who can’t hit a breaking ball.  Mazz must know this, right?

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable.

via The End Of Wall Streets Boom – News Markets – Portfolio.com.

Thanks to… well, whoever sent me this. Very interesting piece by Michael Lewis, whose Liar’s Poker was a hilarious book and a great way for people to get introduced to Wall Street.

Lewis in this piece posits that that game is up for Wall Street, that its unsustainable lunacy has finally caught up with it. The premise of the piece is erroneous, I think, in that Wall Street has probably always been unsustainably crazy, not just in recent decades as he seems to imply. If you go back and read Galbraith’s book about the Great Crash you’ll be amazed at how familiar all the stories sound.

Still, a very interesting read. And here’s another, funnier confessional of sorts from a once (and current again) Wall Streeter, my friend Eric Salzman over at MonkeyBusinessBlog. His take on bonus season was hilarious:

Ahh, it’s bonus time on Wall Street.  Time has certainly flown by for me.  It occurred to me that it has been nearly three years since I shaped up for the “big year-end meeting”.  Usually I was sitting across the table from some guy I thought was a complete D-bag (one time it was a female D-bag).  The D-bag would talk and as far as I was concerned he might as well have been Charlie Brown’s teacher.  Remember that from “Peanuts”?

Teacher: Blah blah blah…blah blah blah

Charlie Brown: “Yes mam.”

Teacher: “Blah blah blah bla-bla!”

Charlie Brown: “Yes mam, school is no place for a dog. I’ll bring him home now.”

Teacher: “Blah-blah.”

Until they got to the number.  I would get the number and then I would become the D-bag.  Not to the bossman’s face….except one time.  No, I would wait till I got outside and I would call the missus and start bitching about “how I got screwed…blah blah….”  I didn’t think I was a D-bag back then.  I thought I was an undervalued, unappreciated “asset”.  Now that I look back at it, I know I was beyond a D-bag (last time with that word!) back then.

I usually got handed a check that was bigger than 5 or 10 of my Dad’s yearly paychecks combined and it pissed me off that it wasn’t enough.  Afterall, all Dad did was educate kids.  What did I do?  Looking back on it now I don’t have a freaking clue!  I pushed pieces of paper around, thought about “big thoughts”, explained why one piece of sh*t bond was better or worse than another..etc…etc.  In the end I hated it, which may explain why I got my ass canned in late ‘07.  It was probably written all over my forehead.

I’m actually kind of surprised there aren’t more guys coming out of Wall Street eager to tell the dark/funny story. There’s like no end of guys who come out of Wall Street writing books bragging about how freaking ingenious and rich and, well, implicitly enormously hung they are, but the funny story — we don’t get that so much.

NEW YORK (AP) — John Thain is getting a second chance.

CIT Group Inc. tapped the former Merrill Lynch CEO to become its chairman and chief executive.

Thain brokered Merrill’s sale to Bank of America as the credit crisis peaked in the fall of 2008, but was then pushed out the door after the deal closed as controversy swirled around bonus payments and mounting losses at the investment bank.

via News from The Associated Press.

Man, exactly what do you have to do to become unhirable in this country? Eat Christian babies on CNN?

John Thain is the dope who was buying himself an $87,000 area rug as his company was going bust. He became a symbol for brainless greed on Wall Street just in time to complete a tortured sale of Merrill to Bank of America in which billions in losses were somehow kept hidden from BofA shareholders.

Now he gets another big job, just like every other high-end Wall Street buffoon who wrecks a company in this era. My favorite of course is John Meriwether, the “genius” investor who dreamed up the imploded hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in the late nineties. Meriwether immediately was given another $250 million to play with after LTCM blew up and is now working on his third such venture, a company called JM advisors, which uses LTCM-like investment techniques. Who’s giving guys like this money?

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Emanuel, exasperated upon learning that liberal special-interest groups were planning to run ads against conservative Democrats not supportive of health care reform, blasted the plan as “f—— retarded” over the summer. Naturally, some outrage ensued after Emanuel’s words came to light, with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin taking to her Facebook page to call on President Obama to fire him for what she saw as the equivalent of a racial slur.

Palin, whose son Trig is afflicted with Down syndrome, said she was informed of Emanuel's comment by a fellow parent of a special-needs child and pleaded with the president to “show decency” to the political process by “eliminating” the Chicago native from his inner circle.

In a post titled “Are You Capable of Decency, Rahm Emanuel?,” Palin wrote, “Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the ‘N-word’ or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities — and the people who love them — is unacceptable,” adding, “it’s heartbreaking.”

via Obama chief of staff’s ‘retarded’ insult brings fallout, Palin criticism – Yahoo! News.

One of the more interesting features of modern America is this mania people have for flipping over the usages of certain words. This thing with Rahm Emanuel is a perfect example. His outburst is now going to become a national news story because Sarah Palin took offense at the word “retarded,” as opposed to the reason it should be making news — the notion of Rahm Emanuel, a White House official, telling progressive activist groups not to run ads against Democrats, and those groups actually listening. The latter story is a billion times more shameful and obnoxious, but instead of any furor there, we’re going to have to get another soap opera over somebody using a naughty word.

I think we ought to get it over with once and for all and ask all the people who are interested in banning words to get together and form their inevitable committee on word propriety. I think it would be a great thing if we could just get the list together ahead of time,  along with what the committee feels the appropriate sanction is for each word. “Ho” we know is a fireable word, as is “niggardly,” but what about “snapper”? How about “curry muncher”? What is the appropriate punishment for a “What’s wrong, do you have sand in your vagina?” joke? I mean there are so many unknowns right now, nobody knows where he or she stands.

· We protest against a heavy-fisted form of government that seeks to further regulate private enterprise and hinder future profits (i.e., banking and energy industries…).

via We, the Tea Partiers – The York Daily Record.

The writer goes on to protest cap and trade, which I also think is a bad idea, but not for the same reasons, obviously. But that other line — that is why the Tea Party “movement” is not a movement but a top-down manipulation, a misdirection.

These are people who’ve been gouged for years by the deregulated banking, mortgage lending, and commodities trading business, and when Obama sends down very weak, watered-down regulations to deal with those problems, they howl that he’s against “private enterprise” because that’s what they’ve been told to think by the Glenn Becks of the world.

Did you know that insider trading isn’t even illegal in the commodities trading business? Do you honestly think gas prices were high in 2008 because we weren’t drilling enough in the Gulf of Mexico?

You idiots are being used. Think for yourselves. If the Fox Network believes it so wholeheartedly, how could it possibly be in your interest? They’ll take your ratings, sure, so they can sell you Charmin and $5 footlongs. I mean, Jesus, how can you not see that? If you had real allies that powerful, don’t you think someone would have taken care of you by now?

On balance, Brown described himself as a “fiscal conservative” and a social moderate — talking about how his mother was “on welfare for a time” and what it was like “getting the blocks of cheese and worrying about how we’re going to pay the bills.”

via A ‘Scott Brown Republican’ is pro-choice, anti-tax – On Politics: Covering the US Congress, Governors, and the 2010 Election – USATODAY.com.

Very funny bit in the news today — Scott Brown giving some interviews, turns out he’s pro-choice and that his mother was actually on welfare once. It took Mitch McConnell about nine seconds to apologize for him. Emphasis here is mine:

He’s gonna be an independent voice for Massachusetts. We expect that. Republicans from the northeast are not exactly like Republicans from the south or the west, we understand that. We have a big tent party. And we’re thrilled to have him.

Freaking hilarious. BTW, can’t wait for the big teabagger hoedown in Nashville this weekend. Wouldn’t it be great if they had carnival-style “Purity test” booths around the conference halls?

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Populist Addiction – NYTimes.com.

Normally one would have to be in the grip of a narcissistic psychosis to think that a columnist for the New York Times has written an article for your personal benefit. But after his latest article in the Times, in which he compares the “populism” of people who “blame Goldman Sachs” with exactly the sort of racist elitism I ripped him for last week, I think David Brooks might be trying to talk to me.

I think that’s at least part of what’s going on in his latest column, which is odd. If I were in his position, I probably would have punched me in the nose for the shot I took at him last week, but the response of David Brooks to being called out as a racist weenie is to write a passionate defense of the rich, one that includes the admonition that while blaming the wealthy is easy and feels fun, truly wise men should “tolerate the excesses of traders.”

I don’t want to get into the position of fixating on one guy for personal reasons. Obviously I’ve done too much of that with Brooks already, and I absolutely promise to give that part of it a rest for a good long while after this.

But leaving aside any discussion of Brooks the human being, this latest column of his is something that has to be discussed. The propagandistic argument he makes about the dangers of “populism”  is spelled out here as clearly as you’ll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.

That’s because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.

This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly “balanced” in reality — stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people — become transformed into cool, “objective” news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.

Brooks lays out the crux of his case his case in his first three grafs of his article:

Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.

These two attitudes — populism and elitism — seem different, but they’re really mirror images of one another. They both assume a country fundamentally divided. They both describe politics as a class struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers.

Both attitudes will always be with us, but these days populism is in vogue. The Republicans have their populists. Sarah Palin has been known to divide the country between the real Americans and the cultural elites. And the Democrats have their populists. Since the defeat in Massachusetts, many Democrats have apparently decided that their party has to mimic the rhetoric of John Edwards’s presidential campaign. They’ve taken to dividing the country into two supposedly separate groups — real Americans who live on Main Street and the insidious interests of Wall Street.

Now, there’s bullshit all up and down this lede. The first lie he tells involves describing everyone who is a critic of Wall Street as a populist. It’s sort of a syllogism he’s getting into here:

All people who criticize Wall Street are populists.

All populists think of themselves as enlightened and pure, and are primarily interested in dividing society, the same way racists do.

Therefore, all people who criticize Wall Street are primarily interested in dividing society, just like racists.

This is obnoxious on so many levels it’s almost difficult to know where to start. As for the populism label, let me quote the Alison Porchnik character from Annie Hall (Woody’s first wife, in the movie): “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”

Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery — criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped  push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP — that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and “organizing hatreds.”

He is also saying that by making these criticisms, people like me are by implication making statements about our own moral purity and enlightenment relative to others. He goes on:

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

Second, it absolves voters of responsibility for their problems. Over the past few years, many investment bankers behaved like idiots, but so did average Americans, racking up unprecedented levels of personal debt. With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter.

Stuff like this makes me want to scream. If I’m writing about a bank that took a half-billion worth of mortgages where the average amount of equity in the home was less than 1%, and where 58% of the mortgages had no documentation, and then sold those mortgage-backed securities as investment-grade opportunities to pensions and other suckers — and then bet against the same kind of stuff they were enthusiastically selling to other people — is Brooks seriously suggesting that I also have to point out that the Chinese economy was doing well at the time?

Yeah, okay, the rise of China is a factor in the overall decline of the American economy, but it has nothing to do with the Goldman story, which is a specific crime story about a specific bank. If I’m writing about a gang of car thieves, what, we’re supposed to also mention that the endive crop was weak in that part of the country that year? What the fuck? And this whole business about how criticizing Goldman absolves voters — Jesus, how primitive can you get? Using that logic, criticizing anyone for anything is invalid:

ME: Well, Ike Turner was sort of a dick because he used to get high and punch his wife in the face all the time…

BROOKS: But it’s so easy to say that.

ME: It’s easy to say that a guy who punches his wife in the face is a jerk? (Scratching head) Well… I guess you’re right about that. Would you like me to say it while juggling three chainsaws? Would it be harder to say then, and would you have less of a problem with it?

BROOKS: But by criticizing Ike Turner, you’re absolving all the people who do other bad things. Like purse-snatchers in Central Park, and those kids who keyed my Lexus, and all those baseball players who took steroids! Rafael Palmeiro lied to congress! What about them?

ME: Dude, are you okay? Your pupils look dilated.

BROOKS: You’re absolving Mark McGwire! The single-season home run record is a fraud!

ME: (backing away slowly toward the door) Okay, yeah, sure. Listen, I’ll catch up with you later, okay? I’ve got to return some videotapes.

And so on. The entire argument is literally this nonsensical. If Brooks disagrees with criticism of banks like Goldman, he has a fantastic platform to point out where those criticisms are incorrect. The best platform there is, in fact. But not only does he not go in that direction, he does just the opposite — he concedes that these criticisms are basically true, and chooses instead to argue against the wisdom of making those criticisms, apparently because “bashing the rich” will make them less inclined to “channel opportunity to new groups.” The emphasis in this next excerpt is mine:

So it’s easy to see the seductiveness of populism. Nonetheless, it nearly always fails. The history of populism, going back to William Jennings Bryan, is generally a history of defeat.

That’s because voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country’s problems.

Political populists never get that second point. They can’t seem to grasp that a politics based on punishing the elites won’t produce a better-educated work force, more investment, more innovation or any of the other things required for progress and growth.

In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines. They rejected the zero-sum mentality that is at the heart of populism, the belief that economics is a struggle over finite spoils. Instead, they believed in a united national economy — one interlocking system of labor, trade and investment.

Hamilton championed capital markets and Lincoln championed banks, not because they loved traders and bankers. They did it because they knew a vibrant capitalist economy would maximize opportunity for poor boys like themselves. They were willing to tolerate the excesses of traders because they understood that no institution is more likely to channel opportunity to new groups and new people than vigorous financial markets.

What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive ” rich” feed the needy “poor,” and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

And the really funny thing about Brooks’s take on populists… I mean, I’m a member of the same Yuppie upper class that Brooks belongs to. I can’t speak for the other “populists” that Brooks might be referring to, but in my case for sure, my attitude toward the likes of Lloyd Blankfein and Hank Paulson has nothing to do with class anger.

I don’t hate these guys because they’re rich and went to fancy private schools. Hell, I’m rich and went to a fancy private school. I look at these people as my cultural peers and what angers me about them is that, with many coming from backgrounds similar to mine, these guys chose to go into a life of crime and did so in a way that is going to fuck things up for everyone, rich and poor, for a generation.

Their decision to rig the markets for their own benefit is going to cause other countries to completely lose confidence in the American economy, it will impact the dollar, and ultimately will make all of us involuntary debtors to whichever state we end up having to borrow from to bail these crimes out.

And from my perspective, what makes these guys more compelling as a journalistic subject than, say, the individual homeowner who took on too much debt is a thing that has nothing to do with class, not directly, anyway. It’s that their “excesses” exist in a nexus of political and economic connections that makes them very difficult to police.

We have at least some way of dealing with the average guy who doesn’t pay his debts — in fact our government has shown remarkable efficiency in passing laws like the bankruptcy bill that attack that particular problem, and of course certain banks always have the option of not lending that money (and I won’t even get into the many different ways that the banks themselves bear responsibility for all the easy credit that was handed out in recent years).

But the kinds of things that went on at Goldman and other investment banks, in many cases there are not even laws on the books to deal with these things. In some cases what we’re talking about is the highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government, which is both fascinating from a journalistic point of view and ought to be terrifying from the point of view of any citizen, rich or poor.

And even if I were to accept the Brooksian view of an upper class that must be looked to to fix things and take care of the lower classes and create the needed wealth to help us escape our economic crisis, the whole point is that this upper class he is talking about has abdicated that very responsibility — and, perhaps having reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not worth saving, has taken on a new mission that involves not creating wealth for all but simply absconding with whatever wealth is remaining.

It’s not pessimism or “combative divisiveness” to talk about these problems and insist that they get fixed. On the contrary, it’s a very positive view of what citizenship is to believe that everyone has a real role in fixing his country’s problems, and that when we identify problems, we should try to do something about them because we might actually succeed.

On the other hand, telling oneself that when powerful people “rig the game” one should just tolerate it, because one’s best hope for seeing the situation fixed rests in hoping those same powerful people fix it themselves — I would describe that as pessimism, or something worse than pessimism. The whole point of America is that we are all supposed to be our own masters, never viewing anyone as being by birth or situation inherently better or more capable than ourselves, and so the notion of relying upon some nebulous class of investment bankers to “channel opportunity” from on high strikes me as being un-American.

And besides, the fact that a lot of these guys have made a lot of money recently doesn’t make them “upper class.” They’re the same assholes we all were in high school and college, except that they made some very particular moral choices in adulthood, and became criminals, and have now arranged things so that they’re going to be tough as hell to catch. And when they fall, which a lot of them will… I mean a lot of these guys are ten seconds from losing it all and spending the next ten years working the laundry room at Danbury or pushing shopping carts under the FDR expressway. And they know it. These people aren’t the nobility. They’re people just like us, only stupider and less ashamed of themselves.

That’s not a class story. It’s a crime story, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with China.

Mayor Richard Daley is pitching the idea of one get-out-of-a-ticket-free card per year for drivers who slightly overstay their welcome at Chicago parking meters.

If aldermen go along, drivers would be able to successfully fight one ticket per car each year if the penalty is handed out within five minutes of the meter or pay ticket running out.

It’s part of the mayor’s attempt to placate the public after an unpopular lease of the city’s parking meters led to steep rate hikes and broken machines. Much of the one-time windfall is being used to prop up the city budget.

via Chicago parking meters: Daley offers drivers a break – chicagotribune.com.

Any Chicago residents out there with some strong opinions on the parking meter issue? If so, I’d like to hear from you.

I’m also interested in hearing from people in Nashville or in any other city that is planning to sell off part of its infrastructure to help pay off the budget.

Apologize for the sporadic posting of late. I’m in the middle of a move.

Ankiel will try to rebuild value in Kansas City after slipping to a .231/.285/.387 line for the Cardinals in 2009. The 30-year-old’s maladies included a sore Achilles tendon, a deep shoulder bruise, and a groin strain. The shoulder injury, suffered in May, came from a headfirst collision with a wall and lingered most of the season.

via MLB Rumors – MLBTradeRumors.com.

Apologies to my non-sports-reading readers, but I just spotted this — what the hell is going on in Kansas City? Is Dayton Moore trying to collect every sub-.300 OBP player in baseball?

Last year the Royals drew 457 walks. There are currently about 450 Siberian tigers left in the wild. Anyone want to bet which ends up being more rare in 2010? This isn’t just wishful thinking, but I really think the Tiger is going to bounce back. Yuniesky Betancourt’s batting eye, not so much. Again, apologize for the non-political aside, but this stuff just makes me scratch my head.

Senior administration officials say there is now broad consensus within the White House and the Treasury for the plan advanced by Volcker, who leads an outside economic advisory group for the president. At its heart, Volcker’s plan restricts banks from making speculative investments that do not benefit their customers. He has argued that such speculative activity played a key role in the financial crisis. [Source]

Obviously this is good news, but what I find irritating about it is that the government only starts listening to its voters once the more corrupt option turns out to be untenable. They are making these moves out of necessity now, and that’s great — but it’s too bad they had to drive us right to the edge of the cliff before they thought about backing up.

There are rumors all over the place that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is about gone, and I’ve even heard some gossip indicating that Rahm Emanuel might have to start watching his back. Hey, whatever works. Obama, as is his nature I think, tried to take the fork in the road all year, making nice to his base while actually delivering to his money people, not realizing the two were perpetually in conflict. His failure to make a clear choice, or rather to make the right choice, is what has doomed him everywhere politically.

It will be interesting to see what comes next, whether this is just for show or not.

Turns out that independent voters, a majority of the Bay State electorate and a crucial ingredient in Obama’s historic presidential win 14 months ago, abandoned him in droves. As in last November’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, independents seemed disaffected that they’d voted in 2008 for a more moderate Obama than he turned out to be in 2009.

via Republican Scott Brown’s upset of Martha Coakley in Massachusetts’ historic Senate election | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times.

Well, at least Fred Smerlas will be happy. I’m so proud to be a Massachusetts native!

I should add this, however: we should all be counting our blessings that it isn’t Curt Schilling. I was smelling a narrow Schilling by-election victory, followed by the inevitable unstoppable Palin/Schilling ticket in 2012. It would have been awesome, with altar calls in the White House press room and Tim Lahaye as Treasury Secretary… well, who knows, it might still happen.

A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.
Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.  Some examples:

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.
The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

TRANSLATION: Don’t bother giving any money, it doesn’t do any good. And feeling guilty about not giving money doesn’t do anyone any good either. In fact, you’re probably helping by not doing anything.

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

TRANSLATION: I, David Brooks, am doing my Christian best right here at home. Look, I even used a capital “L” in the word “Lord.” And I wrote that thing about Obama’s Christian Realism a few weeks ago. So I‘m doing my part. Of course I’d volunteer to help, but intellectually I just don’t think volunteering really helps. I mean, there are studies and everything.

Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.
As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.
We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

TRANSLATION: Although it is true that Haiti was just like five minutes ago a victim of a random earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, I’m going to skip right past the fake mourning period and point out that Haitians are a bunch of lazy niggers who can’t keep their dongs in their pants and probably wouldn’t be pancaked under fifty tons of rubble if they had spent a little more time over the years listening to the clarion call of white progress, and learning to use a freaking T-square, instead of singing and dancing and dabbling in not-entirely-Christian religions and making babies all the fucking time. I know I’m supposed to respect other cultures and keep my mouth shut about this stuff, but my penis is only four and a third inches long when fully engorged and so I’m kind of at the end of my patience just generally, especially when it comes to “progress-resistant” cultures.

Fourth, it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.
These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.
It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.
The late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington used to acknowledge that cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major traumas. This earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is whether the outside world continues with the same old, same old.

TRANSLATION: The best thing we can do for the Haitians is let them deal with the earthquake all by themselves and wallow in their own filth and shitty engineering so they can come face to face with how achievement-oriented and middle-class they aren’t. Then when it’s all over we can come in and institute a program making the survivors earn the right to keep their kids by opening their own Checkers’ franchises and completing Associate’s Degrees in marketing at the online University of Phoenix. Maybe then they’ll learn the No Excuses attitude real life demands, so the next time something like this happens they won’t be pulling this “woe is us” act and bawling their fucking eyes out on CNN while begging for fresh water and band-aids and other handouts. Maybe that will happen, or maybe we’ll just keep sending money, fools that we are, so that they can keep making more of those illiterate ambitionless babies we’ll have to pull out of the next disaster wreckage.

p.s. Did I miss anything? Because I think that’s pretty much it. One would have thought a column on the Haitian’s lack of an achievement culture could maybe wait until after the bodies were cold, but… hey, who am I to judge?

p.p.s. I’ve got to put this comment up on the main piece, since so many people seem to have missed my point.

Again, unlike Brooks, I actually lived in the Third World for ten years and I admit it — I’m not exactly in the habit of sending checks to Abkhazian refugees, mainly because I’m not interested in buying some local Russian gangster a new Suzuki Samurai to tool around Sochi in. And I’ve actually seen what happens to the money people think they’re giving to Russian orphanages goes, so no dice there, either.

But you know what? Next time there’s an earthquake in Russia or Georgia, I’m probably going to wait at least until they’re finished pulling the bodies of dead children out of the rubble before I start writing articles blasting a foreign people for being corrupt, lazy drunks with an unsatisfactorily pervasive achievement culture whose child-rearing responsibilities might have to be yanked from them by with-it Whitey for their own good.

An earthquake is nobody’s fault. There’s nothing to do after a deadly earthquake but express remorse and feel sorry. It’s certainly not the time to scoff at all the victim country’s bastard children and put it out there on the Times editorial page that if these goddamned peasants don’t get their act together after a disaster this big, it might just be necessary to start swinging the big stick of Paternalism at them.

I mean, shit, that’s what Brooks is doing here — that last part of the piece is basically a threat, he’s saying that Haiti might have to be FORCED to adopt “middle-class assumptions” and an “achievement ethos” because they’re clearly incapable of Americanizing themselves at a high enough rate of speed to please Brooks. That’s this guy’s immediate reaction to 50,000 people crushed to death in an earthquake. Metaphorically speaking, he’s standing over the rubble and telling the people trapped under there that they need more of a “No Excuses” culture, which is insane on many different levels.

Brooks’s implication that the Haitians wouldn’t have died in such great numbers had they been Americans is the kind of thing that is going to come back to bite us the next time we have a nuclear accident or a hurricane disaster or a 9/11 and we’re looking to the rest of the world for sympathy and understanding. The notion that these deaths aren’t an accident but someone’s fault, among other things someone’s fault because they practice an unhelpful sort of religion, is beyond offensive.

p.p.p.s And yes, Brooks is Jewish. So let’s say he’s doing his Judeo-Christian best. Again, this guy is saying that Haitians got killed in an earthquake because their religion makes them planning-averse. Are we really to believe that Haitians don’t live in earthquake-proof homes because of their religious beliefs? We have millions of Americans who literally believe the rapture is imminent — would Brooks expect them to blow off flood insurance?