Tag: History

Tru Dat

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One of the truisms of the financial markets is that economic good times create a lot of fraud, because it tends to forestall probing questions about dodgy investments, and down-turns expose those frauds, because the free and easy money necessary to maintain the facade is no longer there.

This time around, we are going to see an enormous amount of fraud from the same people who cheated everyone before the 2008 collapse, because there were never any meaningful prosecutions:

When Bernie Madoff owned up to a $65bn Ponzi scheme in December 2008, it was not out of guilt. He knew the game was up. Three months earlier Lehman Brothers had imploded. The market meltdown sent clients clamouring to withdraw from his funds, leaving them depleted with many investors still unpaid. American regulators had not spotted the fraud, despite a tip-off years earlier. It was not them that did for Mr Madoff, but recession.

Booms help fraudsters paper over cracks in their accounts, from fictitious investment returns to exaggerated sales. Slowdowns rip the covering off. As Baruch Lev, an accounting professor at New York University, puts it, “In good times everyone looks good, and the market punishes you harshly for not keeping up.” Many big book-cooking scandals of the past 20 years emerged in downturns. A decade before the crisis of 2007-09 the dotcom crash exposed accounting sins at Enron and WorldCom perpetrated in the go-go late 1990s. Both firms went bust soon after. As Warren Buffett, a revered investor, once put it: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” This time, thanks to a pandemic, the water has whooshed away at record speed.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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It turns out that the bible museum founded by the Hobby Lobby family and largely populated with looted Iraqi artifact, was taken to the cleaners by someone who sold it phony fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I am amused.

Have you ever been to the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? The museum is funded by the Green family, the very Christian founders of Hobby Lobby, who wished to dedicate an entire building to the Holy Bible. (Though I’m positive I’ve seen a bunch of pointy ones already serving that purpose). Over the past decade, the family has spent $400 million, money they’ve easily saved up by denying their female employees healthcare, on housing the greatest private collection of holy texts this side of Vatican City.

But like any money spent involving Hobby Lobby, that has mostly been netting them low-quality knockoffs. One of the Museum of the Bible’s most coveted collections has been its fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that draft of the Hebrew Bible so ancient it crumbled into thousands of pieces and is now scattered all over the world like an inappropriate Easter egg hunt. But from 2009 to 2014, the Greens managed to obtain sixteen bits of Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments that experts soon after deigned to be fake as hell. In response, the Greens employed the Art Fraud Insight group to put the nasty rumors to bed and confirm that, yup, those are less likely to be a hallowed scripture of the teachings of God and more likely just a bit of old shoe.

………

Confronted with the idea they’ve spent millions on some ancient Huarache’s with doodling on them, the CEO of the museum decried: “We’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.” But nobody should ever feel bad for the Greens or their vanity museum. The family has had a long history of deliberately not looking too closely at where their artifacts originate, something that cost the Greens $3 million in fines and most of their collection when the government uncovered that they had been using shell companies to smuggle looted Iraqi artifacts into the U.S., knowing full well they might be indirectly funding ISIS in their holy quest to build a shrine to Christianity’s fiction section.

In a just world, they should probably have gone to jail for their looting, but being sold sandals as holy texts is nice.

After the Pandemic, This Gets My Donations

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In what might be the most New York thing ever, a Brooklyn Dodgers fan has successfully completed ayears long search for the plans for Ebbets Field, which he intends to use to construct a ¼ size replica to house a Brooklyn Dodgers museum:

Nobody ever accused Rod Kennedy Jr. of thinking too small.

A Brooklyn Dodgers fan who took a beating in a Pelham, N. Y., schoolyard in the 1950s defending his team’s honor against partisans of the New York Yankees and Giants, he began making his living 35 years later by manufacturing tiny tin replicas of ballparks.

His favorite, naturally, was Ebbets Field, the Dodgers’ longtime home in Flatbush, where he saw Sandy Koufax pitch as a rookie in 1955 and where, he said, his “nervy” mother once slipped into the team’s locker room — “a room of half-naked men” — to collect autographs.

Dissatisfied with recapturing Brooklyn’s past in miniature, however, Mr. Kennedy soon enlarged his ambitions by many orders of magnitude, embarking on a quixotic quest to build a one-quarter-scale replica of Ebbets Field to house a Dodgers museum. To further his aim, he teamed up with Marty Adler, who ran the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, which had no home.

This is beautiful.  I hope that they succeed.

109th Anniversary

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Normally, there is a gathering commemorating the disaster, but the lock-down in New York City has meant that there will be no gathering to remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire this year:

“Today, we mark the 109th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a catastrophic event in which 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, were killed as a direct result of abhorrent working conditions and woefully insufficient workplace safety standards. The loss of life was both tragic and avoidable, and sent shockwaves through our city and nation. Outraged Americans demanded that these workers’ deaths not be in vain, and the public outcry that followed brought a renewed sense of urgency to the labor movement and to the fight for stronger workplace protections and fire safety laws,”

—Workers United Secretary-Treasurer Edgar Romney & New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO President Vincent Alvarez, Mar 25, 2020

Normally, we gather at the site of the blaze to mark the anniversary of the Triangle Fire. We assemble at the corner of Washington and Greene Streets to watch the fire truck ladder rise to the 6th floor, which was as far as it could reach in 1911, as workers burned alive or leapt to their deaths from the factory floors above. This year, we express our solidarity by marking the occasion at home, each doing our part to flatten the wave of infections that threatens to overwhelm or city and our country. Even as we stand apart, we stand together.

146 people died, mostly young women working at the factory.

The doors were locked so they could not get out, and the fire truck ladders could not reach their floors, and many of them jumped to their deaths.

For the Love of God Why????

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This is what you think it is.


With ePaper on the back

Yes, someone has actually made a working open source rotary dial cell phone:

Why a rotary cellphone? Because in a finicky, annoying, touchscreen world of hyperconnected people using phones they have no control over or understanding of, I wanted something that would be entirely mine, personal, and absolutely tactile, while also giving me an excuse for not texting.

The point isn’t to be anachronistic. It’s to show that it’s possible to have a perfectly usable phone that goes as far from having a touchscreen as I can imagine, and which in some ways may actually be more functional. More functional how?

  • Real, removable antenna with an SMA connector. Receptions is excellent, and if I really want to I could always attach a directional antenna.
  • When I want a phone I don’t have to navigate through menus to get to the phone “application”. That’s bullsh%$.
  • If I want to call my husband, I can do so by pressing a single dedicated physical key which is dedicated to him. No menus. The point isn’t to use the rotary dial every single time I want to make a call, which would get tiresome for daily use. The people I call most often are stored, and if I have to dial a new number or do something like set the volume, then I can use the fun and satisfying-to-use rotary dial.
  • Nearly instantaneous, high resolution display of signal strength and battery level. No signal metering lag, and my LED bargraph gives 10 increments of resolution instead of just 4.
  • The ePaper display is bistatic, meaning it doesn’t take any energy to display a fixed message.
  • When I want to change something about the phone’s behavior, I just do it.
  • The power switch is an actual slide switch. No holding down a stupid button to make it turn off and not being sure it really is turning off or what.

So it’s not just a show-and-tell piece… My intent is to use it as my primary phone. It fits in a pocket; It’s reasonably compact; calling the people I most often call is faster than with my old phone, and the battery lasts almost 24 hours.

(%$ mine)

I’m not sure if this is brilliant, or demented, or both.

Bloomberg Should Just Drop the N-Word and Be Done with It

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�� New Podcast! “Episode 807 | Bloomberg’s Racist, Classist Past | What Happened To Pete? | Moderates for Bernie” on @Spreaker #biden_ad #bloomberg #notmeus #wallstreetpete https://t.co/FSNJj87h1s

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020

Because the NY Times NEVER Links to the folks who break the stories

Michal Bloomberg has now disavowed the stop and frisk policies that he evangelized for when he was Mayor of New York.

I am inclined to believe that his change of heart was not sincere, particularly since we now have him tape saying that most of the crime in a city comes from young black men.

Unbelievably racist, though still better than Pete Buttigieg:

A recording of Michael R. Bloomberg in 2015 offering an unflinching defense of stop-and-frisk policing circulated widely on social media Tuesday, signaling that the former New York City mayor is about to face more intensive scrutiny as he rises in the polls as a Democratic presidential candidate.

While Mr. Bloomberg apologized for his administration’s law-enforcement tactics in November just before he entered the race, he had previously spent years insisting that the policy was justified and effective, showing no indication that he had developed serious misgivings about stop and frisk. The policing tactic was used disproportionately against black and Latino people across New York City for years.

He offered a particularly blunt defense at the Aspen Institute in 2015: The Aspen Times reported then that Mr. Bloomberg said that crimes were committed overwhelmingly by young, male minorities, and that it made sense to deploy police in minority neighborhoods to “throw them up against the wall and frisk them” as a deterrent against carrying firearms.

An audio clip of those comments was posted on Twitter Monday by Benjamin Dixon, a progressive podcaster, who highlighted it with the hashtag #BloombergIsARacist.

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Mr. Bloomberg said in the recording. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.”

If the Democratic Party Presidential nominee is a racist, it will depress the minority vote at all levels.

Any political official who thinks that the Democrats can win the Presidency and pick up seats when the top of the ticket is a racist needs to change his career to the food service industry.

Tweet of the Day

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Particularly since today is the MLK holiday:

Preserving the tweet that got @jaboukie insta banned, for future generations pic.twitter.com/7rPEQYCg2o

— 🌷 (@_flowerguardian) January 20, 2020

This is the best comment I’ve seen about the FBI’s statement about Martin Luther King today ignoring the fact that J. Edgar Hoover had a literally murderous vendetta against him.

Macron Caves

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Emmanuel Macron was elected in France because he was seen as a change from a system that delivered nothing for the the ordinary Frenchman while serving the transnational banks and corporations.

To the horror of the voters, Macron is even more the minion of a bloated and corrupt financial sector than were his predecessors.

So he has proposed increases in taxes on ordinary people, more austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, and, finally, a roll-back of pension rights.

Now, following massive protests,  Macron has abandoned his plans to change pensions:

With tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators once again coursing through the streets of Paris and other cities and clouds of tear gas and smashed store windows punctuating the urban landscape, the French government made a major concession on Saturday to unions protesting its pension reform plan.

It agreed to scrap, for now at least, a proposal to raise the full-benefits retirement age from 62 to 64. Unlike in the United States, the French government plays a huge role in the retirement plans of individuals in France, both as a source of funds and as overseer and guarantor of the pension system.

The raised age had infuriated moderate unions that the government of President Emmanuel Macron badly needs on its side. Mr. Macron has insisted the French need to work longer to strengthen a generous retirement system that is one of the world’s most generous but may be heading toward a $19 billion deficit.

On Saturday, with a crippling transport strike already in its sixth week, Mr. Macron’s government backed down, announcing that it would “withdraw” the new age limit, and put off decisions on financing the system until it gets a report on the money problem “between now and the end of April.”

Macron’s definition of meaningful reform is robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

The argument is that, in the long run, everyone benefits, but in the long term, as Keynes observed, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Europe does seem to dedicated to repeating the failures that led to the rise of Fascism and World War II.

Making Mike Bloomberg Look Like Jesse Jackson

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“It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, the people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing…”

–#MayorPete appearing on a childrens’ public television show in 2014#PeteButtigieg #PeteForAmerica #Pete2020 #PeteButtigieg #PetebuttigiegisalyingMF pic.twitter.com/ZUZNLf67wb

— Resist Programming 🛰 (@RzstProgramming) December 29, 2019

In all his racist glory

Between firing his police chief when he uncovered racism in the ranks, allowing the already lily white South Bend PD lose about half of its black officers during his tenure, and taking black people’s homes and giving them to white developers, it was already pretty clear that Pete Buttigieg has been promulgating racist policies that far exceed what Mike “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg could imagine in a fever dream.

The question has always been whether this is just clueless, cowardice, or a deliberate attempt to use hostility to minorities as a political tactic.

Well now the man who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in history is saying that, “The people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing.”

This can only be deliberate pandering to racists.

Even I know, and I was not a history major, that Thomas Jefferson actually put condemnations of slavery and the slave trade in the first drafts of the constitution.

Whether he is a racist in his heart, like Jesse Helms, or merely a political opportunist who has chosen racism as a political ploy, like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, it does not matter.

Pete Buttigieg is a racist politician, even if he is not a racist man: (Though he might be personally racist as well)

Once again, South Bend, Ind. mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg finds himself under the microscope and under fire for recently unearthed video of him saying something trash.

………

Well, now Buttigieg is up against it again; this time for an old clip from his appearance on a children’s public television show in 2014.

“Similarly, the amendment process—they were wise enough to realize that they didn’t have all of the answers and that some things would change. A good example of this is something like slavery—or civil rights. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, but the people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing and did not respect civil rights.”

Oh Jesus Christ, Pete.

First of all, if they “did not respect civil rights” I think it’s safe to say that they knew when they were doing a bad thing, they just didn’t care.

In fact, writer Aleia Woods of NewsOne did a fine job of pointing out a direct refutation of this Buttigieg’s statement by one of the framers himself. [This is in addition to my aforementioned example of Thomas Jefferson]

In fact, James Madison, one of the “people who wrote the Constitution” and owned as many as 118 slaves, according to White House History, admitted to knowing just how immoral and barbaric slavery was. He referred to slavery as a “dreadful calamity” in a private letter written to Frances Wright in 1825.

“The magnitude of this evil among us is so deeply felt, and so universally acknowledged, that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it,” he wrote, according to the Founders Archive.

This man is a moral and political disaster.

I Went to the National Civil Rights Museum Today

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It’s at the Lorraine Motel building, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

It’s a good museum, and you should go.

I am a profoundly weird person though, becuse the thing that effected me the most was just walking in, having to empty my pockets, and walk through a metal detector.

At a memorial to one of the most prominent proponents of non-violence in American history, they have to have a metal detector, and a wand, to prevent some James Earl Ray wannabe from shooting up the place.

If this doesn’t outrage you, you are seriously dense.

I Want this Book

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A cache of ancient Jewish recipes dating back to the inquisition has been found in Miami.

It has been published, and I want a copy:

A few years ago, Genie Milgrom came across a treasure trove of old recipes stashed away in her elderly mother’s kitchen drawers. There were hundreds of them — some in tattered notebooks, others scribbled on crumbling scraps of paper.

Upon closer examination, it became apparent to Milgrom that these were the handwritten notations of generations of women in her family. The recipes had traveled as an intact, ever-growing collection from Spain to Portugal to Cuba to the United States, reflecting not only the lives of Milgrom’s ancestors, but also the hidden heritage they had for the most part unknowingly safeguarded since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Milgrom, who grew up devoutly Roman Catholic in Havana and Miami, has Crypto-Jewish roots. Her ancestors were Jews who practiced Judaism in secret while outwardly living as Christians to avoid being expelled, tortured, or killed by the Church. They were Crypto-Jews until the late 17th century, and lived as Catholics from then on. Through a decade-long, intense genealogical search, Milgrom discovered that she has an unbroken Jewish maternal lineage going back 22 generations to 1405 pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal.

Her new kosher cookbook, “Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers: Unique Recipes and Stories from the Times of the Crypto-Jews during the Spanish Inquisition,” is a tribute to those female relatives who repressed or forgot their Jewish identity over hundreds of years, but managed to preserve vestiges of it through their food.

This is is awesome.

Get Your Archeology Geek On

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Archeologist have unearthed a remarkable Mycenaean royal tomb:

Archaeologists recently discovered two magnificent 3,500-year-old royal tombs in the shadow of the palace of the legendary King Nestor of Pylos. It’s not clear exactly who the tombs’ owners were, but their contents—gold and bronze, amber from the Baltic, amethyst from Egypt, and carnelian from the Arabian Peninsula and India—suggest wealth, power, and far-flung trade connections in the Bronze Age world. And the images engraved on many of those artifacts may eventually help us better understand the Mycenaean culture that preceded classical Greece.

Tombs fit for royalty

The larger tomb is 12m (36 feet) wide and 4.5 meters (15 feet) deep, and stone walls would once have stood that height again above ground. Domes once covered the underground chambers, but the roofs and upper walls have long since collapsed, burying the tombs beneath thousands of melon-sized stones and a tangle of grape vines. University of Cincinnati archaeologists Jack Davis, Sharon Stocker, and their colleagues had to clear away vegetation and then remove the stones by hand.

“It was like going back to the Mycenaean period,” Stocker said. “They had placed them by hand in the walls of the tomb, and we were taking them out by hand. It was a lot of work.”

Beneath the rubble, gold leaf litters the burial pits’ floors in gleaming flakes; once, it lined the walls and floors of the chambers. The tombs don’t appear to have contained the remains of the their occupants (there’s some evidence that the tombs were disturbed in the distant past), but they were interred with jewelry and other opulent artifacts of gold, bronze, and gemstones, as well as a commanding view of the Mediterranean Sea.

Kewl!

An Interesting Historical Data Point

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When we look at the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, they all started with the troika of privatization, tax cuts for the rich and businesses, and shredding the social safety net.

This is quite literally the neoliberal consensus:

It’s time to talk about the Banality of Evil. The Nazis didn’t start with genocide. Heck, they didn’t even start with the Nuremberg Laws. Our education system and popular media focus on the most horrific, the most dramatic, and the most apparent aspects of Fascism. However, Fascism begins in a much less dramatic fashion. In the beginning,Fascism is banal, and to many of us, it is oddly familiar.

 Before the rise of Fascism, both Italy and Germany had a robust social safety net and public services. In Italy, the trains were nationalized, and they ran on time while serving rural villages in 1861. The telecom industry was nationalized in 1901. Phone lines and public telephone services were universally available. In 1908, the life insurance industry was nationalized. For the first time, even poor Italians could ensure that their family could be taken care of if they died a premature death.

Between 1919 and 1921, Italy went through a time of worker liberation that has been dubbed as Bienno Rosso. Italian workers had formed factory co-ops where they shared the profits. Large landlords were replaced by cooperative farming. Workers received many concessions: higher wages, fewer hours, and safer workplace conditions.

………

 Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister in October 1922. Nazis rose to power in 1933 in Germany. Mussolini convened a meeting of his cabinet and immediately decided to privatize all the public enterprises. On December 3, 1922, they passed a law where they promised to reduce the size and function of the government, reform tax laws and also reduce spending. This was followed by mass privatization. He privatized the post office, railroads, telephone companies, and even the state life insurance companies. Afterward, the two firms that had lobbied the hardest: Assicurazioni Generali (AG) and Adriatica di Sicurtà (AS), became a de-facto oligopoly. They became for-profit enterprises. The premiums increased, and poor people had their coverage removed.

 In January 1923, Mussolini eliminated rent-control laws. His reasoning ought to be familiar since that is the same reasoning used in many contemporary editorials against rent control laws. He claimed rent control laws prevent landlords from building new housing. When tenants protested, he eliminated tenants’ unions. As a result, rent prices increased wildly in Rome, and many families became homeless. Some went to live in caves.


 Once more, these policies allowed landlords to increase their profit and holdings while they severely hurt the poor.

 ………

 Hitler’s economic policy was Mussolini’s policy on steroids. In the 1920s, the NSDAP was a minor party. In the 1932 elections, the Nazi Party did not have an outright majority. According to the Nuremberg Trial transcripts, on January 4, 1933, bankers and industrialists had a secret backroom deal with with then Chancellor Hindenberg to make Hitler the Chancellor of Germany in a coalition.

In 1934, Nazis outlined their plan to revitalize the German economy. It involved reprivatization of significant industries: railways, public works project, construction, steel, and banking. On top of that, Hitler guaranteed profits for the private sector, and so, many American industrialists and bankers gleefully flocked to Germany to invest.

The Nazis had a thorough plan for deregulation. The Nazi’s economist, stated,” The first thing German business needs is peace and quiet. It must have a feeling of absolute legal security and must know that work and its return are guaranteed. The interferences In a business which occurred at first, perhaps as a result of too much zeal, have become intolerable.”

………

 Fascism isn’t the merger of corporations and government that is too vague, and too easy to confuse. Fascism is government functions being replaced by private corporations. Fascism is when the public good is replaced by private profit.

(emphasis mine)

If you have ever wondered why the US foreign policy (and its proxies like the IMF) seems to favor entities who could be reasonably described as fascist, this provides some valuable context.

Hearts and Minds

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The Washington Post has gotten its hands on internal documents that show that the US state security apparatus has been lying about progress in Afghanistan for most of the war.

Gee, that does not sound like the Vietnam war at all.

We are doing the same thing that we did in Vietnam because we learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam.

The lesson that was “learned” was that we “lost” because the American public stopped supporting the war, which makes counter-insurgency primarily an exercise in PR.

It’s a convenient explanation, because it means that there is no accountability for Pentagon officials or members of the military, the American public failed them.

It’s also complete bullsh%$.

The war was lost because the NLF (Viet Cong) and the the NVA beat the US military.

They defined the terms of engagement, and in so doing, they played to their strengths and our weaknesses, just like the Taliban is now.

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, “They have forgotten nothing, and they have learned nothing.”

There needs to be a thorough and independent investigation of how we were defeated in Vietnam Afghanistan, and those who made a dogs breakfast of it need to be called out.

It’s called accountability, and it is all too rare for general officers in the US military.

Keynes Noted This 80 Years Ago

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John Maynard Keynes wrote about the dangers of destructive speculative capital flows, and now even the IMF is beginning to warm to capital controls:

Advanced economies have delivered a decade of woeful economic growth since the global financial crisis. The last thing the world needs is for emerging economies to be dragged down, too.

Such thinking is taking hold in some parts of Washington, where the IMF is rethinking the once rigidly “neoliberal” advice — stressing open markets and free-floating currencies — that it doles out to economies great and small.

David Lipton, first deputy managing director of the IMF, says one of its primary concerns is that low inflation in the developed world may, through capital flows, be “spreading in an undesirable way to emerging countries and causing them to stagnate”.

“Many of these countries are concerned about how spillovers from advanced world policies cause them to lose some degree of control over their domestic economies.” He questioned whether policies such as currency intervention could be used to “offset this transmission mechanism”.

………

Developing countries run the risk of becoming overindebted as a result of capital inflows reducing borrowing costs. For some such countries, she said, the IMF’s preliminary modelling suggested “capital controls are the appropriate instrument to tackle this overborrowing problem, and they should be imposed as prudential policy in normal times before debt limit shocks strike”.

The use of the phrase “in normal times” suggests that, for some countries at least, the IMF is moving towards endorsing capital controls on a semi-permanent basis, not just in an emergency.

………

One EM economist at a leading bank, who backs the rethink but asked for anonymity given the sensitivity around the subject, said that for decades the IMF “has been guilty of capital account fundamentalism”.

It only took them 74 years for them to get a clue about this sh%$.

One wonders just how many people died before they got a smidgen of a clue.

They’ve Got Tapes. They’ve Always Got Tapes

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It looks like indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has tapes of both Rudolph Giuliani’s and Donald Trump’s efforts to extract an investigation of Hunter Biden from Kiev, and he has turned them over to the House Intelligence Committee for the impeachment investigation:

The House Intelligence Committee is in possession of audio and video recordings and photographs provided to the committee by Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly played a key role in assisting him in his efforts to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

The material submitted to the committee includes audio, video and photos that include Giuliani and Trump. It was unclear what the content depicts and the committees only began accessing the material last week.

“We have subpoenaed Mr. Parnas and Mr. [Igor] Fruman for their records. We would like them to fully comply with those subpoenas,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told CNN Sunday, with a committee spokesperson adding they would not elaborate beyond the chairman’s comments.

An attorney for Parnas, Joseph A. Bondy, also declined to comment, directing ABC News to a statement released earlier in the day Sunday reading in part, “Mr. Parnas has vociferously and publicly asserted his wish to comply with his previously issued subpoena and to provide the House Intelligence Committee with truthful and important information that is in furtherance of justice, not to obstruct it.”

………

However, some of the material sought by congressional investigators is already in possession of federal investigators within the Southern District of New York and thus held up from being turned over, according to sources familiar with the matter.

………

Giuliani’s relationship with Parnas and Fruman is the subject of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York, according to sources. That case will have its next court date early next month.

I rather imagine whatever the SDNY has in their grubby mitts will not be getting to the impeachment inquiry in the near term, since Barr has made it clear that his first, and perhaps only, priority, is to obstruct the Congressional investigation.

Still, the mention of tapes does create a sense of nostalgia in this political child of the Watergate era.

Bill Russell is a Stand Up Guy

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The great Boston Celtics center Bill Russell has refused to acknowledge his induction into the basketball Hall of Fame for decades.

He’s always kept his reasons private, until now.

He has now has finally accepted a HoF ring because the Hall of Fame has finally inducted the player who broke the color barrier in the NBA:

Ask anyone who is the greatest basketball player of all time, and you’ll surely get a diversity of opinions—including Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Magic Johnson and that dude who played for your cousin’s high school in 1987 whose jump shot was wet but he got shot in his layup leg running from the police his senior year in high school after he stole a black-and-white television from Radio Shack, so he never made it to the NBA. But if you ask who was the greatest man who played in the NBA, you’ll only get one name:

William Felton Russell.

The eleven-time NBA champion (no, that’s not a typo) is known as much for his willingness to stand up for what is right as he is for his five NBA MVP awards (no, that’s not a typo). Bill Russell counseled Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown; fought for civil rights his entire career, and financially supported the movement as one of the NBA’s biggest stars. He held Boston Celtic fans accountable for their racism and once convinced his entire organization to forfeit a game because a restaurant wouldn’t serve black customers. Only one other human being (Buddy Jeanette) has won an NBA title as a player while he was the team’s head coach.

Bill Russell did it twice.

But, despite being inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, Russell never acknowledged the honor or accepted his Hall of Fame ring. When asked why he essentially boycotted the ceremony, Russell would only reply that he had his “own personal reasons.” Throughout his post-NBA career, he refrained from referring to himself as a “Hall-of-Famer” and never explained why.

On Thursday, Bill Russell finally accepted his Hall of Fame ring in a private ceremony at his home, but only after he confirmed that Chuck Cooper had been inducted into the Hall of Fame:

In a private ceremony w/my wife & close friends A.Mourning @AnnMeyers @billwalton & others I accepted my #HOF ring. In ‘75 I refused being the 1st black player to go into the @Hoophall I felt others before me should have that honor. Good to see progress; ChuckCooperHOF19 @NBA pic.twitter.com/2FI5U7ThTg

— TheBillRussell (@RealBillRussell) November 15, 2019


So who the hell is Chuck Cooper?

No one would ever argue that Chuck Cooper was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He only averaged 6.7 points per game throughout his career. So, why would Bill Russell boycott the most prestigious honor in his sport because of this unknown guy?

Because Charles “Chuck” Cooper was the first black man drafted into the NBA.

A mensch.