Unvarnished

Eight minutes? that’s 0.15 billable hours. Just tell me what he said.

The Fed and the “investment banks” are criminal enterprises. Our financial system rigged casino needs to collapse.

I just hope that somehow lightning strikes and we get to see that smug fuck Geithner perp-walked.

Hey who was running the show during the time frames as described by the prof?

G… oh… Peeeeeeee… and blue dog Demrats.

So, guys how’d that fiscal responsibility thing work out for yah?

@ManchuCandidate: He said as much, but not plainly enough for my taste. Still, he laid it out as well as Simon Johnson, and he did it in front of a House subcommittee.

@ManchuCandidate: Not just the Blue Dogs. The Demrats on the whole are fully complicit in this massive con.

@SanFranLefty: He said they committed fraud. They being the banks and the regulators. And he said, did we learn nothing from Enron?

Apparently so.

Denton Empire TJ: Brand W Daddy Pareene leaving Gawker for Salon

Yeah! Yeah! This guy established a center for research in fraud and economics at U of Texas at Austin after he left government. Bill Black is too modest. He put fucking people way in the 80s and 90s, lots of them and recovered tens of millions with phone calls during the S&L meltdown – phone calls to guys who they knew were dirty. He shows up every tens years or so and tells irrefutable truths. Guy’s a fucking hero. He should be running Treasury.

@SanFranLefty: When will the Pulitzer committee give the first prize for excellence in blogging? (Yes, I nominate Nojo.)

@FlyingChainSaw: So he’s the one I have to thank for not being targeted by many Nigerians in the last few years?

Oops! Wells Fargo has it all over those hapless Nigerians!

@FlyingChainSaw:
“He should be running Treasury.”

Him or Elizabeth Warren.

@Pedonator: The kind of fraud Black studies, really an economic discipline he pioneered, was the kind of fraud perpetrated by managers and executives of financial institution, something he terms ‘control’ fraud, an expression he either coined or gave new and insightful meaning during the 1980s when it was clear bank executives were leveraging their control of their institutions to either assist in or initiate frauds on their own banks or their customers. When the Nolan Act when down in California deregulated state chartered thrifts (inspiring similar legislation around the US, notably Texas) and Garn-St Germaine threw nationally chartered S&Ls to the wolves it was Black and, weirdly, a former Reagan PR man who was handed the leadership of the Office of Thrift Supervision where he was expected to toe the deregulatory line named Ed Gray, were nearly alone and absolutely prescient about the criminal melt-down at hand. Yes, it was a half trillion dollar meltdown. But if it hadn’t been for Black’s irrefutable reason and obvious good faith, it would have been a trillion and a half. He should have his own TV show. I’d buy the DVDs and transcripts. The scams Goldman and Lehman ran were just the ultimate progression of this kind of criminality to tooling financial products de novo with criminal intent and using them to defraud other banks, central banks and, by extension, nation states. This guy is great. Really, the US hasn’t been exposed as a financial crime harbor to this degree since Maryland and Virginia defaulted on their bonds after the Civil War.

@FlyingChainSaw: Sounds like you are a practitioner, or at least a student, of the Dark Arts. Not that I had any question about that before.

Reassure me: because I’m of the opinion that the oligarchs have thrown fate to the winds and now don’t worry a bit about the flagrancy with which they violate the social contract. I believe they know this is the endgame and they’re just out to suck every last drop of blood from the consumer populace that makes the game possible.

Preparing us for the neo-feudal future where not only will we not have flying jetpacks, but most of us will find ourselves toiling over the dissipated soil in search of fertility. And handing over the most choice organic produce we’re able to coax out of the ground to the overlords, for their debauched orgies and sinfully wasteful mockery of our hard labor.

This speech is a speed bump on the road back to Business As Usual-ville.

@Original Andrew: I fear you are correct sir.

Related:

Poll shows: 20% of Republican voters are completely fucktarded

OK, the real headline is that 20% of Republican voters polled were against regulating “large banks and financial institutions”, but for regulating “Wall Street”. But that’s way too long.

@al2o3cr:
Since these are the same fucktards who screech “Hands off my Medicare, Obama!!!” while sitting in their SSI-purchased wheelchairs to accommodate their fat-asses, I’m not surprised.

On another note, will you please send me a message at sanfranlefty@www.stinque.com? I need to pass a note to you behind class. Thx.

@Original Andrew: Kind of like Hopey’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

@al2o3cr: Just goes to show how fucktarded is the average pickinick-basket cargo-cult-obsessed US American when it comes to politics or, more generally, current events.

@Pedonator: Excellence in Covering Up the Fact He Doesn’t Have a Fucking Clue What to Post So He’ll Repackage a Lawrence Welk Video That Should Have Run the Day Before.

@nojo: No, you’re better than that. You’re worthy. Everyone calls it in once in a while.

@Pedonator: Finding an appropriate thematic excuse to run a day-late video is an achievement. Look what Ella did when she forgot the words to How High the Moon.

Look at the Emporer’s wonderful new clothes.@Pedonator: The Oligarchs have achieved creating a populace so ignorant, so addicted to a 24-7 stream of media idiocy, so un-informed, because the oligarchs now control the media utterly, that the Oligarchs know that the masses will swallow whatever fucking lies they spew. They are not being reckless, they are reaping the rewards of their work in manipulating with propaganda and the massive propagation of the consumerist value system, manipulating their control over information, creating a vast propaganda machine that provides all the content of all the mass media, repeating their lies over and over, for an ignorant, shallow, selfish, mass culture.

The Oligarchs are not throwing caution to the wind in an awareness of the collapse they are causing and desire to reap profits while they can.

They just truly believe that it will go on forever. Thats their mindset. You cannot sell bundled fraudulent mortgages, in order to make your profit today, you cannot do that, you cannot engage in that business, if you are the sort to ever, ever, think about tomorrow, and the consequences of your actions.

They, the Oligarchs, are engaged in an orgy of stealing at this particular point in time, not because they have any long-term plan or vision, like, “hey, this house of cards will collapse soon, lets cash in now.” No, thats not their mindset, their mindset is simply “profit today, there is no tomorrow.” They are engaged in an outragelously obvious orgy of stealing right now, simply because THEY CAN. Same reason a dog licks its balls, because it can. They will always steal, always, with no thought for tomorrow, if they can get away with it, and ever since Reagan, basically, they have been able to get away with it.

@FlyingChainSaw: I worked on ton of FHLBB litigation as a paralegal, and you’re so right. People have totally forgotten had bad that was and how much, much worse it would have been without Bill Black.

@SanFranLefty: .15 billable hours? When I worked for Satan, Mephistopheles & Beelzebub LLC in Hell-Lay (not where I did the FHLBB work) 8 minutes was .25 billable hours, because that was our minimum billable unit. Reading e-mails from various clients while drinking your first cup of coffee could get you up to three hours billed easily, before the day even got started.

ADD: You got a stinque.com e-mail? Smell you, Nancy Drew! ;->

@Promnight: The Oligarchs are Stupid? And they will feast upon their hunting grounds until all the bison are decimated? Ok, maybe…but for whatever perverse reason, I prefer to think that they know what they are doing, milking us cows until our udders are dry. Your scenario is even scarier — that they would think there is no end to this, no limits, no final reckoning.

I must believe that these Ivy-League-trained masters of the universe understand basic physics, chemistry and biology. Therefore, it is much simpler to believe they are just Evil.

@Mistress Cynica: Our minimum billable hour is 0.10 hour. Six minutes. It’s a little silly. When I’m good at tracking it, I rack it up left and right. And it’s not as suspicious or questionable as the .25 minimum.

Much like seven or nine years of food service industry work allows me to calculate 15, 17, or 18% of a bill in a second, I somehow can parse an hour down (rounded up) to the nearest 0.10, 0.15, and so on..

@Mistress Cynica: Thrift ligitation? Be still my heart! A lot more people should have still ended up behind bars. Remember talking to an RTC lawyer who finally gave up on referrals to Justice that went nowhere in the very early 90s. Again, the gangsters were able to loot the place and make a getaway before a Democratic administration appeared although it was clear the neofascist Clinton didn’t have the stomach for going after them. The RTC lawyer was adept at getting settlements but for the real stand-up assholes, he had to make referrals and none were picked up as a case. Last I heard, he was in private practice in St Louis. Black is such a good guy and such a towering authority in this space, he should be interviewed on TV news twice a day. You see all manner of complete fucking poseurs and no nothings talking about this stuff but rarely does anyone get to enjoy the wisdom of Mr Black in reports about Wall Street’s latest loot-the-world-to-oblivion scheme.

@FlyingChainSaw: Loot the world to oblivion scheme is exactly correct. The looters, meanwhile, buy real estate all over the world, especially atop massive aquifers in Paraguay and such as. They transfer fictional wealth into real wealth, while pensi0ners suffer without health-care because it’s just not fiscally responsible to honor contracts entered into during more prosperous, hopeful times.

This is the “free” market at work. Suck the free market, bitches. Hope the free market keeps you warm when you’re old and failing fast and nobody is there to change your adult diapers to keep your bedsheets dry.

Pouring myself another glass of wine, thx to Pedo, ChainSaw, et al. Not that I wouldn’t be pouring it already.

@SanFranLefty: I’m out of wine, already onto the vodka. It’s just that necessary.

@Pedonator: Oy, honey, out of wine on a Wednesday night?!? Don’t you go to BevMo or CostCo on Sundays? :)

My solution is I *start* with the vodka and work down to the wine.

@FlyingChainSaw: Yes, indeed. S&L hell, I liked to call it. It was fun to go into the failing thrift with the Feds. They would come in, tell everyone to step away from their desks, escort them from the premises, and then the paralegals start cataloguing all the files. And yes, we came across totally criminal shit that no one ever went to jail for. At worst, loss of country club privileges.

@SanFranLefty: We’ll be lucky if the half case of wine I bought last weekend lasts us until Friday. Gin and beer have also been consumed.

@SanFranLefty: Still trying to find that perfect combination / sequence of alcohols. I’m a searcher.

@Mistress Cynica: Loss of country club privileges? But whatever for? A little FBI investigation shouldn’t cast one into social hell…

@Mistress Cynica: Half case of wine? That’s called Saturday and Sunday afternoons!

@SanFranLefty et al: Five-minute increments. Easier to calculate the tab that way.

how about the guy that’s peering over billy’s right shoulder. he appears, he disappears. i could barely pay attention, i wanted to play whack-a-mole so bad.

and NOJ, posting the 4/20 story a day late is so stoner!
it is right, it is appropriate, it is fittin’ and even admirable.

this is one of the strangest things i’ve ever seen.
brought to you by SEARS…where america shops!!!

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_SPM223900328P

@baked: That is strange indeed, who is it for? All that trouble, and no holes, too.

@baked: I’m loving this. I must seem to quote in whole.

Girlfriend Pillow Do your wife?s business trips make you unease at bed time? Perhaps the fact that you don?t have her around to shares your dreams makes it harder for you to fall sleep. This comfortable pillow recreates the comfort of having your beloved partner. Thinking about the fact of sleeping alone produce a isolated feeling, especially if you are used to have a soft and comfortable arm or maybe you are enjoy a better sleep when you locate your neck in your girlfriend or wife’s breast. This hug pillow has an extension that replicates the soft arm of your partner and also adds a breast-like sensation on the pillow, giving all the contour of your love one. Your days of uncomfortable nights are over. Whether your wife is away working or you broke up with your girlfriend, this hug pillow will maintain the comfort of your sleep. The Girlfriend Pillow imitates the contour of your loved one at your side while you sleep.

There now, isn’t that special? My days of uncomfortable nights are over. Do they make this with a dick?

I will now go hiking with pack.

@Benedick:
you know, you just might have a career in writing…….

should we write sears and inquire about the one with a dick?

@Promnight:
paul mcCartney?

@baked: That thing is horrifically excellent. Nice find!

@baked:
that is creepy and pathetic.

@FLIPPIN and HOWDY
i’m going to hell for the mcCartney crack, have my ticket and everything.

@baked: Darling, you’re driving the bus.

heeheehee
then we’ll have to leave from here, where i have driving privileges.
me no can drivey in usamerica. a sound decision on the part of the DMV.

i’m going to the garden to marvel. why one needs a god better than that i don’t know. i’ll explain it all to satan.

@Pedonator: FCS is Warren Buffet IRL.

@Benedick: Good news, darling! The boyfriend pillow is also available. Selling points:

You will love how comfy and warm this body pillow is and you will like the way that he contours you and holds you all through the night without snoring or saying a word (Almost as if he knows exactly what you want!)
* Perfect sleeping companion for lonely people
* Feel the embrace of a real man without the snoring, smell, tossing or turning

The really sad/hilarious 5-star review:
The boyfriend pillow is by far the best $40 I have every spent.
When I have a rough day or I’m feeling blue, just knowing I get to come home each night to my boyfriend pillow lifts my spirits more then chocolate covered bacon.
Every night I slip into my feetie pajamas and pour myself & Ralphy a glass of wine and snuggle up to reruns of Full House.
I didn’t just purchase a pillow, I purchased a partner.
Blue crew took on a whole new meeting when I bought by blue blazered boyfriend.
Thanks Sears!

@Mistress Cynica: At least the boyfriend pillow is ambidexterous. It seems like they should make a girlfriend version with detachable bewbies, so you can choose which side of the bed “she” sleeps on.

OFSM, I am so getting one of those boyfriend pillows. Mr. Pedo and doggy will just have to scooch over a bit more.

But…@Mistress Cynica: without the snoring, smell I can do without the snoring, but the smell? To quote Billie Holiday, Oh No They Can’t Take That Away From Me.

@baked: should we write sears and inquire about the one with a dick? No no no! There’s a business opportunity here. Just like Apple creates ancillary markets for attachments and accessories for all their i-Crap.

@flippin eck: Wait — the boyfriend pillow is bi? I’m not sure that works for me…well, I guess it’s ok as long as he practices safe snuggling.

@Mistress Cynica:
talk about low expectations!
“i didn’t just purchase a pillow, i purchased a PARTNER”
dear god.

@baked and Mistress Cynica: But do you wake up with a boner poking you in the back?

@SanFranLefty:

yes…oh you mean the Silent Partner?
pedo and i are working on it.

You gals may not believe this, but la madera por la mañana really is out of our control.