The Chicago School v Soapy Smith
Bret Cahill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith
Nickname unavailable
> Which one was better?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith
a real democrat
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aQVA0.N2XoO8
Warren Winning Means No Sale If You Can’t Explain It (Update1)
By Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- In Elizabeth Warren’s world, credit card
contracts would be so simple a teenager could read and understand them
in four minutes. Loans would be as easy to compare as toasters, and
online credit scores would be free.
“We need a new model: If you can’t explain it, you can’t sell it,”
said Warren, 60, a Harvard University law professor who is head of the
Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program,
in an interview.
The 1966 high school debate champion of Oklahoma may get what she
wants. The House of Representatives will vote in December on her idea.
She suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission in a 2007 article
in the magazine Democracy. President Barack Obama proposed it to
Congress in June as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
Warren won’t discuss whether she may be a candidate to lead the
authority, which would have the power to regulate $13.7 trillion of
debt products. A Warren nomination would tell banks that Obama is
determined to force reduced checking-account fees and limit lender
claims in mortgage advertising, among other measures the industry
opposes, said Thomas Cooley, dean of New York University’s Stern
School of Business.
“She is an ideological crusader,” Cooley said in an interview. “She is
a person who will stir up a lot of trouble.” In a column in Forbes
magazine, Cooley accused her of “waging a self-righteous holy war.”
The criticism doesn’t bother her, Warren said. She learned to shake
things off growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, with three older brothers
“in a family of car parts and fist fights,” she said. “It was get
tough or die, and I decided to get tough.”
Coors Light
The $700 billion bailout hasn’t stopped the “culture of excessive risk-
taking” that led to the financial crisis, Warren said today during an
oversight panel hearing. TARP has “injected an unprecedented level of
pricing distortions and moral hazard into the marketplace,” she said.
Her detractors confuse prairie-born populism with elitism, probably
because of her job, she said in the interview. On the faculty of
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard since 1992, she is the Leo
Gottlieb Professor of Law. Before Harvard, she taught law at five
other universities in four states.
“Those comments are intended to be nasty, not accurate,” said Warren,
who graduated from high school at 16 and said she prefers Coors Light
beer over iced tea. “I think a lot of Americans are not sure which
side Washington is on, the side of banks or the side of the people.”
Freedom of Choice
Warren is a superstar to anyone who has been baffled by financial fine
print, according to Arianna Huffington, editor- in-chief of the
Huffington Post, a news and opinion Web site.
“She’s been courageous in a culture where every other official is
checking to see if what they’re saying is going to affect their
career,” said Huffington, who met Warren when the professor was a
guest on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and Huffington was hosting. “If she
doesn’t get the job, it would really mean that the special interests
have won.”
A measure the House Financial Services Committee approved on Oct. 22
would empower the consumer agency to set limits on checking account
overdraft fees and to ban credit cards with escalating rates and
lending practices it deems predatory. Similar legislation is before
the U.S. Senate Banking Committee.
If such an authority had existed, Americans might not have taken out
the subprime and other mortgages that touched off the recession when
house prices fell, Warren said. Congress is rewriting financial rules
after the 2007-2008 crisis caused $1.67 trillion in writedowns and
losses.
‘Pitchforks and Torches’
The agency’s opponents, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the
American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable,
contend another layer of regulation would bury small community banks
and rob consumers of freedom of choice in making basic financial
decisions.
“It is positively Orwellian that, through this legislation, Democrats
will empower an unelected bureaucrat to tell their fellow citizens
whether or not they can fly on an airplane, take a vacation or
purchase a home,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican on
Warren’s TARP panel, said Oct. 22. He declined through his spokesman,
George Rasley, to be interviewed for this story.
If Congress creates the watchdog, the director should have “a working
knowledge of how financial institutions operate,” said Scott Talbott,
the financial roundtable’s chief lobbyist.
“The time for pitchforks and torches is over,” Talbott said in an
interview. “The focus should be on reforming the system and making it
better.”
Pork Bellies
Warren’s Wall Street experience consisted of a three-month summer
associate position in 1975 at Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, the
financial district’s oldest law firm, according to its Web site. Her
aunt and mother moved to Rockaway, New Jersey, to care for her 4-year-
old daughter while Warren worked at 2 Wall Street. At first, she said
she thought she was being made fun of as a rookie from the sticks.
“I got out my little notebook, and the senior partner started talking
about frozen pork belly futures,” Warren said, recalling an early
meeting. “How dumb do they think I am? I wasn’t going to fall for it
because I am a sophisticated person. It finally occurs to me that he
is serious, and that there is a market for pork bellies.”
At Cadwalader she earned “an astonishing amount of money” that she
used to get braces, she said. By the time she received her degree in
1976 from Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey, she was
expecting her second child, Alex. After Wall Street firms showed no
interest in hiring a pregnant recent graduate, Warren said she worked
from home, writing wills and doing real estate closings for “anyone
who came in the door.”
Trusting FDR
“At Cadwalader, I did a $9 million fifth mortgage on a ship,” she
said. “In private practice, I worked for a couple starting a little
business who had to negotiate some insurance contracts for about
$18,000, but it mattered more to them than that ship mortgage mattered
to anyone.”
Warren said she probably inherited her populism from her grandparents,
who built one-room Indian schools during the Great Depression. While
they didn’t understand the financial world, they knew President
Franklin D. Roosevelt made their money safe by establishing the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., she said.
There was little cash to spare during her childhood, she said. Her
father was a maintenance man and her mother worked part-time taking
catalog orders. Warren didn’t let them know she paid $25 application
fees with baby-sitting money until she won a scholarship to George
Washington University in Washington.
“Then, I could tell them I could go to college,” she said, “and
someone else would pay for it.”
Credit Card Snakes
Warren began at George Washington at 17. At 19, she married
mathematician Jim Warren, who worked at the Johnson Space Center in
Houston, and finished her degree at the University of Houston. They
divorced in 1978. Her second husband, Bruce Mann, is Harvard’s Carl F.
Schipper Professor of Law and author of 2002’s “Republic of Debtors:
Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence” (Harvard University
Press, 358 pages, $29.95).
Warren said she doesn’t know her credit score -- “I assume it’s good”
-- and maintains zero Visa and MasterCard balances.
“Credit cards are like snakes: Handle ‘em long enough and one will
bite you,” she said. “You have to remember what are incomes to banks
are outgoes to families.”
Obama, with whom she attended a campaign event during the presidential
race, read her work before proposing the consumer agency, according to
Warren.
‘Pro-Consumer’
She is the author of nine books, including two with daughter Amelia
Tyagi, 38, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who runs an executive
placement office. Tyagi and her mother wrote “The Two-Income Trap: Why
Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (Basic Books, 255
pages, $26) in 2003 and “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money
Plan” in 2005 (Free Press, 289 pages, $24.95).
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, appointed Warren
to the five-member TARP committee after she impressed him with her
“strong pro-consumer views,” according to Jim Manley, Reid’s
spokesman.
Warren, who began testifying before Congress more than a decade ago,
wasn’t always accepted as a mainstream figure in Washington, said
Representative Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat. He introduced a
bill to create a Financial Product Safety Commission in 2007, and it
went nowhere because consumers’ rights weren’t recognized as
significant, he said.
“It’s now a very serious proposal,” Miller said in an interview. “If
it were not for her, I don’t think it would have gotten this much
support. She knew what was important, what was necessary and what
would help the bill get through.”
Odd Hours
Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee,
called Warren a “great partner” in crafting the legislation. The
Massachusetts Democrat said he speaks with her by phone twice a week.
In her role overseeing the TARP, Warren has been critical of the
administration, accusing the Treasury Department of undervaluing the
stock warrants that were supposed to compensate taxpayers when banks
repay their bailouts. A lack of transparency about how TARP functions
“erodes the very confidence” it was to restore, her committee said in
a report.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner declined to comment for this story
through his spokesman, Andrew Williams.
Named in May as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in
the World, Warren teaches three days a week at Harvard, flying to
Washington and New York for meetings, sometimes stopping just long
enough to charge her laptop.
She keeps a pace few could maintain, Miller said.
Jon Stewart
“My last e-mail from her one Saturday night was after 11 p.m. and the
first one on Sunday morning came before 7 a.m.,” he said. “It made me
think she keeps some odd hours.”
Warren travels to Los Angeles, where her son and daughter live, about
every six weeks. She said she was there to share Halloween with her
grandchildren, Octavia, 8, and Lavinia, 4, dressed as a sheep to
complement Lavinia’s Bo Peep costume.
Her students suggested she be a guest on “The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart” on Comedy Central, she said. She was also interviewed by
Michael Moore for his documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” in
which she makes a one-minute appearance in a segment about TARP.
She’ll “talk to anyone” about consumer protection and her belief that
government should stop bank profits earned at the expense of people
cheated by “tricks and traps,” she said.
Not Obama Country
“I made a decision at the beginning that the experts wrecked this
economy and the public has a right to know what’s going on,” she said.
“It’s our economy on the line and the experts can’t be trusted. I want
everyone to be part of the solution to how we want to change our
economic world. If it’s risky or makes me look stupid to someone, so
be it.”
Warren, whose TARP job paid her $114,733.04 through Sept. 30, has a
high profile the White House should appreciate, said Damon Silvers, an
oversight panel member, in an interview.
“We were out in Colorado at a hearing for rural finance and people
came up to her,” Silvers said. “That wasn’t exactly Obama country out
there, if you know what I mean.”
Warren reflects Obama’s belief in the good that government can do,
said Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital Management LLC in Los
Angeles, who said he met Warren when Huffington brought her to a
dinner at his house.
“We found out over the last eight years what kind of regulation you
get from an administration that doesn’t believe in regulation,” said
Marks, whose firm has about $67 billion in assets under management.
“Now we’ll find out what oversight we will have from people who do.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at
mpit...@bloomberg.net; Bob Ivry in New York at bi...@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: November 19, 2009 16:00 EST
Nickname unavailable
Hoodwinked http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24027.htm
Economic Meltdown -- A Call for Systemic Change
By John Perkins
November 21, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Whenever I hold my
two-year old grandson, Grant, in my arms I wonder what this world will
look like six decades from now, when he is my age. I know that if we
"stay the course" it will be ugly. The current economic meltdown is a
harbinger.
Panama's chief of government, Omar Torrijos, foresaw this meltdown and
understood its implications back in 1978, when I was an economic hit
man (EHM). He and I were standing on the deck of a sailing yacht
docked at Contadora Island, a safe haven where U.S. politicians and
corporate executives enjoyed sex and drugs away from the prying eyes
of the international press. Omar told me that he was not about to be
corrupted by me. He said that his goal was to set his people free from
"Yankee shackles," to make sure his country controlled the canal, and
to help Latin America liberate itself from the very thing I
represented and he referred to as "predatory capitalism."
"You know," he added, "what I'm suggesting will ultimately benefit
your children too." He explained that the system I was promoting where
a few exploited the many was doomed. "The same as the old Spanish
Empire -- it will implode." He took a drag off his Cuban cigar and
exhaled the smoke slowly, like a man blowing a kiss. "Unless you and I
and all our friends fight the predatory capitalists," he warned, "the
global economy will go into shock." He glanced across the water and
then back at me. "No permitas que te engañen," he said ("Don't allow
yourself to be hoodwinked.")
Three decades later, Omar is dead, likely assassinated because he
refused to succumb to our attempts to bring him around, but his words
ring true. For that reason I chose one of them as the title of my
latest book, Hoodwinked.
We have been hoodwinked into believing that a mutant form of
capitalism espoused by Milton Friedman and promoted by President
Reagan and every president since - one that has resulted in a world
where less than 5% of us (in the United States) consume more than 25%
of the resources and nearly half the rest live in poverty - is
acceptable.
In fact, it is an abject failure. The only way China, India, Africa
and Latin America can adopt this model is if they find five more
planets just like ours, except without people.
Most of us understand what my grandson does not--that his life is
threatened by the crises generated during our watch. The question is
not about prevention. It is not about retuning to "normal." Nor is it
about getting rid of capitalism.
The solution lies in replacing Milton Friedman's mantra that "the goal
of business is to maximize profits, regardless of the social and
environmental costs" with a more viable one: "Make profits only within
the context of creating a sustainable, just, and peaceful world," and
to create an economy based on producing things the world truly needs.
There is nothing radical or new about such a goal. For more than a
century after the founding of this country, states granted charters
only to companies that proved they were serving the public interest
and shut down any that reneged. That changed after an1886 Supreme
Court decision that bestowed on corporations the rights granted to
individuals--without the responsibilities required of individuals.
As an EHM, I participated in many of the events that propelled us into
this dangerous territory. As a writer and lecturer, I spent the past
few years touring the United States and visiting China, Iceland,
Bolivia, India, and many other countries, speaking to political and
business leaders, students, teachers, laborers, and all manner of
people. I read books about Obama's economic plans, current schemes for
reforming Wall Street, and other policies. It struck me that most of
the discussions dealt with triage and that while we need to stop the
hemorrhaging, we must also ferret out the virus that caused these
symptoms.
Hoodwinked presents a plan for a long-term cure. During the days
following its November 10, 2009 publication, I spoke about this plan
at the United Nations, on radio and TV programs, and at a conference
attended by 2400 MBA students at Cornell University.
I come away feeling hopeful that we are finally ready to take Omar's
warning to heart and to implement the transformation that will be the
salvation for my grandson's generation.
John Perkins is former chief economist at a major international
consulting firm. His Confessions of an Economic Hit Man spent 70 weeks
the New York Times bestseller list. His website is www.johnperkins.org
Nickname unavailable
they are one in the same.
Bret Cahill
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith
> they are one in the same.
Very soon the Chicago School will just be another footnote in
America's swindler past.
Bret Cahill
Nickname unavailable
we shall see. remember, the austrian school was brought back to life
by the american criminal class, called conservatism. this class
transcends both parties, as well as higher education, austan goldsbee,
lawrence summers.
Bret Cahill
> > > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith
> > > they are one in the same.
>
> > Very soon the Chicago School will just be another footnote in
> > America's swindler past.
>
> > Bret Cahill
>
> we shall see. remember, the austrian school was brought back to life
> by the american criminal class, called conservatism. this class
> transcends both parties, as well as higher education, austan goldsbee,
> lawrence summers.
Krugman may be an exception
He gets 100s of death threats every day.
Bret Cahill
Nickname unavailable
i had high hopes when i saw krugman, stiglitz, roubini, galbraith,
and kuttner standing by obama, after he was elected, i saw rubin,
summers, sperling, goldsbee and other milton friedman clones standing
next to obama. i knew we had been had.