The Color of Money

Kanonkop

The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud
November 7, 2005 Submission to the SEC
Madoff Investment Securities, LLC
www.madoff.com

Opening Remarks:

I am the original source for the information presented herein having first presented my rationale, both verbally and in writing to the SEC's Boston office in May, 1999 before any public information doubting Madoff Investment Securities, LLC appeared in the press. There was no whistleblower or insider involved in compiling this report. I used the Mosaic Theory to assemble my set of observations. My observations were collected first-hand by listening to fund of fund investors talk about their investments in a hedge fund run by Madoff Investment Securities, LLC a SEC registered firm. I have also spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivative trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. Of course, no one wants to take undue career risk by sticking their head up and saying the emperor isn't wearing any clothes but....

I am a derivatives expert and have traded or assisted in the trading of several billion $US in options strategies for hedge funds and institutional clients. I have experience managing split-strike options strategies for hedge funds and institutional clients. I have experience managing split-strike conversion products both using index options and using individual stock options, both with and without index puts. Very few people in the world have the mathematical background needed to manage these types of products but I am one of them. I have outlined a detailed set of Red Flags that make me very suspicious that Bernie Madoff's returns aren't real and, if they are real, then they would almost certainly have to be generated by front-running customer order flow from the broker-dealer arm of Madoff Investment Securities, LLC.

Due to the sensitive nature of the case I detail below, its dissemination within the SEC must be limited to those with a need to know. The firm involved is located in the New York Region.

As a result of this case, several careers on Wall Street and in Europe will be ruined. Therefore, I have not signed nor put my name to this report. I request that my name not be released to anyone other than the Branch Chief and Team Leader in the New York Region who are assigned to the case, without my express written permission. The fewer people who know who wrote this report the better. I am worried about the personal safety of myself and my family. Under no circumstances is this report or its contents to be shared with any other regulatory body without my express permission. This report has been written solely for the SEC's internal use.

As far as I know, none of the hedge fund, fund of funds (FOF's) mentioned in my report are engaged in a conspiracy to commit fraud. I believe they are naive men and women with a notable lack of derivatives expertise and possessing little or no qualifying finance ability.

There are 2 possible scenarios that involve fraud by Madoff Securities:

1. Scenario # 1 (Unlikely): I am submitting this case under Section 21A(e) of the 1934 Act in the event that the broker-dealer and ECN depicted is actually providing the stated returns to investors but is earning those returns by front-running customer order flow. Front-running qualifies as insider-trading since it relies upon material, non-public information that is acted upon for the benefit of one party to the detriment of another party. Section 21A9(e) of the 1934 Act allows the SEC to pay up to 10% of the total fines levied for insider-trading. We have obtained approval from the SEC's Office of General Counsel, the Chairman's Office, and the bounty program administrator that the SEC is able and willing to pay Section 21A(e) rewards. This case should qualify if insider-trading is involved.

2. Scenario # 2 (Highly likely) Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi Scheme. In this case there is no SEC reward payment due the whistle-blower so basically I'm turning this case in because it's the right thing to do. Far better that the SEC is proactive in shutting down a Ponzi Scheme of this size rather than reactive.


[...]

Harry Markopolos | Report to the SEC, November 2005


Cape Point

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly | Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry" | And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky | Saving, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken"

This is weird shit man ...

Harry Markopolos's 2005 submission [pdf 1.5 MB] to the SEC is made more remarkable by it being the second time, since an original complaint lodged in 1999, that he alerted the regulatory body to Bernie Madoff's self-admitted $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Madoff was investigated in 1992 for brokering $500million in unregistered securities. ProPublica tells us:

Starting in 1999, Markopolos sent detailed memos to SEC staff outlining his case against Madoff. It had all started, he said, when he was working as a money manager at a rival investment firm. His bosses wanted him to match Madoff’s remarkable returns. But when he tried to replicate Madoff’s supposed strategy (trading a mix of stocks and stock-index options), he found that he couldn’t. And when he asked other derivatives experts, they agreed it was impossible to match Madoff’s legendarily steady returns. From there, he built a massive circumstantial case. He presented it in 1999, again in 2001 (an SEC official told him it appeared to have fallen through the cracks), and then again in 2005.

ProPublica | ‘The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud’

In the wake of Madoff volunteering culpability, SEC chief Christopher Cox has 'apologized' for his organization's signal failure to act on Madoff but, as BusinessWeek points out, Cox's "grave concerns" ring exceedingly hollow:

If you stop and think about it, the SEC failed to do its job at almost every level of the current mess we’re in. Who allowed Wall Street firms to increase their leverage to 30 and 40 times their capital and endanger the entire financial system? Why, the SEC. And who was supposed to be regulating the rating agencies and policing them for conflicts of interest as they signed off on trillions of dollars of toxic mortgage-backed securities? Again, the SEC. When it turned out that Wall Street had rigged the entire $300 billion auction rate securities market, who was then regulator that investigated but did virtually nothing until after it was too late? Right again, the SEC. And when Bear Stearns was running a couple of over-leveraged, mislabeled, highly-risky hedge funds, which regulator’s inspector general said it had failed to act in time? Yep, the SEC. Finally, which agency had an inside view of the risk management procedures at all the big firms but never asked any tought questions? Right again, SEC.

BusinessWeek | Lack of SEC oversight and enforcement at the center of too many messes

Acting specifically on Harry Markopolis's allegations, SEC Staff Attorney Simona Suh, Assistant Regional Director Doria Bachenheimer, and Branch Chief Meaghan Cheung concluded in their Case Closing Recommendation of November 21, 2007:

"The staff found no evidence of fraud."

Read Report to the SEC, November 2005. It is easily comprehended. A substantial, frightening, and highly informed document written in colloquial English, it raises — and details, twenty-five (25) Red Flags. Many of these constitute irreconcilable logical inconsistencies. Others posit that returns in certain circumstances — if valid, would constitute securities fraud or insider trading. At least half the allegations could not be explained away and should have led — several years ago, to Madoff's arrest.

Unless Markopolos is a fraud, there is something terribly wrong at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Either Suh, Bachenheimer, and Cheung were paid or coerced — from within the SEC — into NOT disclosing the nature of Bernie Madoff's scheme or their gross negligence warrants their arrest and conviction. The same applies to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which has direct oversight over securities companies.

Look, I'm not weeping for those who take money from the poor. My brain and labor subsidize them and that hurts. However, there are millions of investors around the world — many of them retired, who are seeing their so-called 'wealth' or 'worth' plummet with the markets (truly the world's greatest Ponzi Scheme by dint of fractional reserve banking).

With investors now having to pay the Treasury to store their notes, investors are better off stashing their cash under their mattresses. Or in large warehouses.

Like it or not, the dollar is the global reserve currency and the SEC wields more than a domestic regulatory power. SEC chairman Christopher Cox, with Paulson, Bernanke, and Lukken, is a member of the Working Group on Financial Markets, i.e. the President's Working Group (PWG) or Plunge Protection Team (PPT).

These people have proved themselves worthy of less trust than even Bernie Madoff. They run, "... basically, a giant Ponzi scheme." Would that we had a Harry Markopolos to blow the whistle on them. For now though, we can but reflect on an earlier BusinessWeek article, Ponzi Nation, and draw our own conclusions.

Mama's in the fact'ry | She ain't got no shoes | Daddy's in the alley | He's lookin' for the fuse | I'm in the streets | With the tombstone blues

Bob Dylan | Tombstone Blues

Note: Paul Krugman pins the tail to the donkey with The Madoff Economy.

"Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?"

Nope, you surely are not.

The First Among Us ...

George W Bush given the respect due him

"This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!" ... "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!"

Muntader al-Zaidi quoted in The New York Times

Durgham al-Zaidi said he had been told his brother, Muntazer, 29, had appeared privately in the high security Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad. "That means my brother was severely beaten and they fear his appearance could trigger anger at the court," he said.

It was not clear whether Mr al-Zaidi had been allowed any legal representation at the hearing.

Although he has not yet been formally charged it is expected he will face trial for "offending the head of a foreign state". But legal experts disagreed on the length of sentence allowed under Iraqi law for the crime. One source said the maximum sentence was two years while another suggested is could be as much as seven.

The Telegraph | Fears for shoe-throwing journalist as he fails to appear in court

The International Herald Tribune named its picture 14bush-hilarious550.jpg. The incident would be merely hilarious had it happened elsewhere and not involved George W. Bush, a war criminal. Whatever happens to the courageous but unfortunate journalist, I guess a second brother, Maythem, puts it best: "I am proud of my brother," he said, "as all Iraqis would be."

The attention-seeking al-Zaidi has been charged with a "barbaric and ignominious act". Which could be considered ironic, given that his complaint is that Bush has caused a million deaths, ethnic cleansing and swiped the bulk of the country's resources. Whereas al-Zaidi threw shoes and called Bush a "dog". It's like if Josef Fritzl's daughter said, "You've been a pig to me Dad," and he replied "Oh how barbaric. I know we've had our differences but there's no need for language like THAT."

The Independent | To George Bush, his critics are just lone difficult schoolboys

Body Parts

Skeletons in the cupboard — The Ghost House, Rondebosch

"The largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the capital markets is the relationship between failed mortgage lenders and investment banks that securitized the risky overpriced loans and sold these packages to other investors—a Ponzi scheme by every definition applied to Madoff." ... "These and other related deeds led to the largest global credit meltdown in the history of the world."

Janet Takavoli quoted in BusinessWeek | Ponzi Nation

Watching the Dow leap from a 3:40 low of 8,469 to close at 8,564 in thin trading yesterday, I felt indifferent. The machinations of traders, when all is said and done, merely contribute to a larger thesis, i.e. the moral failure and inevitable collapse of Western Capitalism. Bernard Madoff, referred to by Janet Takavoli above, is but one case among many (see Tom Petters, Marc Dreier, and the hyena-like Wall Street mentality).

As the ticker refreshed to reveal improbable rises and falls, I was reading Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's article in The Atlantic, Caveat Donor. It details the rise and fall of Amit "Dr. Horror" Kumar, India's kidney-theft king. Initially paying Mumbai Muslims $500 to $2,500 for a kidney, Kumar's body-parts empire spread to the states of Hary'na and Uttar Pradesh. Arrested in 2007 after a street fight between a 'donor' and an agent, the man "... with clients from Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Middle East, and with homes and properties in Mumbai, Toronto, Hong Kong, and Australia ..." is now serving time in a Hary'na prison.

Kumar's evil is made banal by its ubiquity. For me, the speed of his arrest and conviction was intriguing. If investigative magazine noseweek and the Independent Group are to be believed, Netcare Limited, one of South Africa's largest hospital groups and health-care providers, has been flogging kidneys for years from its hospitals in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town.

In collaboration with Israeli body-parts thief and Medikt manager Ilan Perri, and supervised by Netcare's national transplant co-ordinator, a veritable Who's Who of South African surgeons happily contributed R50 million to Netcare's not-insignificant coffers between 2001 and 2003 by gutting impoverished Brazilians and Romanians.

To their credit, Netcare paid $3,000 to their victims. And, after seven years, it seems the matter will go to court with Netcare facing, among others, charges of racketeering and homicide.

My interest in matters formerly deemed "medical" (they now form part of the commodities' markets) was piqued by the origins of "Transplant Tourism" in China. Netcare collaborator Ilan Perri found, among condemned Chinese prisoners, a lucrative source of cheap kidneys for Israelis, who appear to suffer mightily from the failure of these organs.

Perri, and others working for health-care provider Kupat Holim Klalit and insurance company Dikla, were nabbed for stinting the taxman of 30,000 shekels after an investigation by Yediot Aharonot. The Wall Street Journal reports the Chinese government putting a stop to Transplant Tourism in March last year. It's assumed the organs of executed prisoners now go to deserving Chinese recipients.

With the Asian and European markets pretty flat today, U.S. futures are looking up.

Which, I guess, is where Gao Xiqing comes into the picture. I'd been reading "Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money" before discovering the similarities between organ thieves and Wall Street bankers. General Manager and Chief Investment Officer of the China Investment Corporation, Xiqing uses The Atlantic to offer the butchers of Wall Street sage, dispassionate advice.

People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.

We—the Chinese, the Middle Easterners, the Japanese—we can see this too. Okay, we’d love to support you guys—if it’s sustainable. But if it’s not, why should we be doing this?

James Fallows | “Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”

As far as I can see, no good reason at all. CapeTalk's running an advert for a financial publication. The introductory voiceover has a guy building up to a big, cold-infested sneeze. It takes forever; numerous short, sharp intakes of breath to avert the inevitable. Eventually, it explodes. A couple of seconds' silence is followed by a sympathetic voice: "Bless you, America. Now, find out what it feels like for the rest of us."

Playing on the old maxim "When America catches a cold, Europe catches the 'flu, and Africa contracts pneumonia, tuberculosis, and AIDS", the advertisement lends weight to Gao Xiqing's many salient observations. Down here at the foot of Africa, we can no longer afford to subsidize "The American Way" or have our economies eviscerated by ruthless banksters out to enrich themselves. It's costing us an arm and a leg.

Note: Well, there we go. With Goldman Sach's reporting a fourth-quarter $2.12 billion loss, slashing 2,500 jobs and reducing average pay by 45 percent, U.S. consumer prices dropping a further 1.7 percent in November, and the Fed set to lower interest rates to an historic low, the Dow's up a healthy 75 points — with GS adding 8.25 percent.

It still amazes me that the market rewards companies for slashing jobs but plummets on the release of increased unemployment figures. There's a definite contradiction somewhere in there. Ah well ... if it's light reading you want — and some background on Indo—Pakistani relations, you can do no better than read Arundhati Roy's 9 Is Not 11.

And for dessert, don't miss A. Gary Shilling's (I'm assured it's his real name) Semi-Annual U.S. Economic Outlook: Collapsing On Schedule. Excerpted by the ever-informative, insightful, and prolific John Mauldin (for accredited investors with a net worth exceeding $1.5 million) at InvestorsInsight, it highlights how bailout (Hoover) and quantative easing (Japan) strategies have thus far failed to revive a global economy fast approaching rigor mortis. However, and as Mauldin explained last week, having no playbook for systemic collapse forces the Treasury and Fed to 'make it up as they go along'; no matter who's in charge.

A Few Good Men ...

Spot the Democrat ...

Blagojevich Complaint

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Politics blagojevich complain

Perhaps sadly, Tom, I spent some time reading Agent Daniel Cain's affidavit detailing Rod Blagojevich's alleged misdemeanours. I still — despite decades of compelling evidence, find it difficult to believe people can be so blatantly arrogant, dumb, and criminal. Worse, I find my own inability to comprehend such high-profile criminality responsible, within reason, for aiding and abetting it. I've a feeling it's the flagrant nature of their violations. "All your base are belong to us" is a great line and they use it freely. A part of us (the Mugabe bit) wants to believe it's not real.

Again sadly ...

Comment appended to "There is no innocent explanation."

The Good, Bad, and Ugly

You probably thought it was smart to buy a foreign import of superior quality, with better mileage and resale value. Maybe you even thought that years of market share loss might prod us into rethinking our process and redesigning our products with better quality in mind. But you forgot one thing: We spend a shitload of money on lobbyists. So now you're out $25 billion, plus the cost of your Subaru. Maybe next time you'll buy American like a real man. Either way, we're cool.

We're The Big Three. We Don't Need to Compete.

Source: Yule Heibel who, in the interests of invention and innovation, will be joining Zonker and me in our campaign to reintroduce and legalize the social use of Laudanum™.

Krugman Writes Off Detroit

The Old Studebaker Plant, Detroit Pic: DetroitYES

Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman said Sunday that the beleaguered U.S. auto industry will likely disappear.

"It will do so because of the geographical forces that me and my colleagues have discussed," the Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist told reporters in Stockholm. "It is no longer sustained by the current economy."

Krugman won the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for his work on international trade patterns. Some of his research on economic geography seeks to explain why production resources are concentrated in certain locations.

Speaking to reporters three days ahead of the Nobel Prize ceremony, Krugman said plans by U.S. lawmakers to bail out the Big Three automakers were a short-term solution, resulting from a "lack of willingness to accept the failure of a large industry in the midst of an economic crisis."

Associated Press | Krugman: US auto industry will probably disappear

Urk. I gather that there’s a report on the wires quoting me as saying that the US auto industry would disappear. What I actually said was that the concentration of the industry around Detroit would disappear.

And did I really say “me and my colleagues”? I guess it’s possible — but that doesn’t sound like I speaking.

Paul Krugman | Me, misreported

At least the blogs offer a a respected journalist opportunity to correct misquotes. It seems Krugman merely pointed out the folly of handing $15 billion to Ford, Chrysler, and GM — an informed and highly qualified insight for which we thank him.

Because it (the bailout) really is a dumb move, demonstrating a "lack of willingness to accept the failure of a large industry in the midst of an economic crisis." As is reported elswhere, Detroit — the auto-capital, has been dying for decades.

A frantic, last-ditch attempt to forge a relief package for the auto industry collapsed in the U.S. Senate, dealing a giant blow to the immediate hopes of the Big Three.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada suggested the $14 billion wouldn't be revisited until January. "It's over with," he said.

Wall Street Journal | Rescue Bid for Detroit Collapses in Senate Friday 12 December

Parse that carefully. It's Friday and it ain't over yet. As the WSJ later points out, the auto moguls will likely coerce the White House into allowing them to shave 'their share' from the discredited $700 billion Wall Street Benevolent Fund.

[Later...]

The Treasury Department said Friday that it would step in and lend funds to the Big Three auto makers until Congress has time to consider a long-term rescue package next year. ... The decision to use TARP funds is a shift in the White House's previous position that the $700 billion should be used only to stabilize the financial sector. However, the head of the Government Accountability Office testified last week that the wording of the legislation was flexible enough to authorize loans to the auto industry.

MarketWatch | Treasury stands ready to aid auto sector Friday 12 December

God! They're as predictable as addicts. There's far too much of this going on:

If GM is faking it, good for them. Ethics should be secondary to shareholder and employee concerns.

24/7 Wall St | Douglas A. McIntyre

I'm sure iconic Wall Street wizard and investment adviser Bernard Madoff would concur.

The Not-So-Unreal Economy

He walks on, doesnt look back | He pretends he cant hear her | Starts to whistle as he crosses the street | Seems embarrassed to be there

The exemption of property and the wealthy (through capital gains) from taxation places the tax burden squarely on the shoulders of a poor and middle-class base that feeds the greedy by foregoing its right to social security and health care. The need to subsidize the rich reduces these essential services to 'add ons', paid for privately by an increasingly impoverished populace.¹

And it's not only Joe Soap that keeps the likes of Senators Dodd and Frank fat, sleek, and silver-haired. Curtailed public spending promises infrastructural collapse. But why build new roads, bridges, and buildings when you can milk the average wage earner tolling existing infrastructure until it collapses? Should Obama's stimulus package pay off in infrastructure, the poor — rather than the rich benefiting from easier access to their dubious services, will pay for it.

Private jets don't come cheap and every source of income — from the real economy, must be exploited to profit those inflating the financial economy.

Nigel Rees's observation that "Democracy is too good to share with just anybody" holds good. A luxury previously affordable in Western countries founded on Third World sweat, it's now too expensive for those countries to maintain. Why? Because the kleptocrats made it so. As Hudson points out, developed European and Asian economies — financed by the real wealth of their citizenries and pandering to the 'needs' of the American consumer, have sunk themselves chasing an illusory financial wealth.

They have no counter but the most radical to American profligacy. The answers must come from within the belly of the beast.

I'll be forever grateful to The Happy Tutor for his noting the Berlin Wall's downing on December 9, 1989 signalled the demise of communism and democracy. The realization of Ronald Reagan's demand "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" erased the naive mythology attending both systems of command and control. Political systems mirror the economies of societies and, while increasingly exploited workers cosset memories of better times, the now authoritarian Western 'democracies' reflect the neoliberal financial wars being waged globally by the rich on the poor.

Hudson details, through their refusal to allow land to contribute its wealth to the common weal (as it has done for thousands of years), the ease with which today's self-serving New Mandarins have exempted themselves from the common law. Democracy and empire make uneasy bedfellows, especially in an age where industrial overlords' socially engineered wants clash with citizens' barely considered needs.

Scars remaining on the global psyche preclude incisive introspection and overt opposition to authoritarianism. Just as former East and West Germans still aver cultural differences and refer to "... the wall in the head", ordinary people pervert Kundera's observation of memory and forgetting to facilitate their increasing enslavement. They do so by wallowing in a nostalgia capable of obliterating — like The Wall, a brutal present and uncertain future. A gift to their new and unscrupulous overlords, their willing blindness serves only to increase the abridgement and, in many cases, abolition of their civil liberties.

They are the new public servants, their dumb indenture ensured for as long as they continue to remember themselves as private citizens flourishing in a system that once accommodated and distinguished between public and private sectors. Their unthinking obeisance is assured for as long as they do not entertain the common sense that it is the rich, rather than the poor, that should contribute excess wealth to the tax base.

They will continue to believe these things only because they are allowed to continue believing these things.

Sadly, we are all clerks now.

Even so, "mutual distrust about both sides' intentions has grown," says Lieberthal, 65, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

On a recent trip to Beijing, he says he discovered that many Chinese — officials and ordinary citizens — believe the U.S. purposely triggered a global financial crisis to thwart China’s growth. Likewise, many Americans assume a stronger China would marginalize the U.S.

"Each side hedges against what they fear the other might try to do," Lieberthal says.

Bloomberg | Obama to Borrow China’s Wealth, Clout in Effort to Steady World

I wonder why ...

¹ This entry, comprising ill-formed afterthoughts and equally ill-informed ruminations, flows from that posted yesterday. Should its subject be of any interest, follow yesterday's links to, in the main, Professor Michael Hudson's work.

Oh think twice, its another day for | You and me in paradise | Oh think twice, its just another day for you, | You and me in paradise

Cholera Grips Zimbabwe as Mugabe Alleges Coup Plot

She calls out to the man on the street | He can see shes been crying | Shes got blisters on the soles of her feet | Cant walk but shes trying

Oxfam agreed that there are likely to be thousands of unreported deaths.

"When you look at people who are already weakened by hunger, many already weakened by HIV and AIDS, and with rainy season comes malaria, and we know anthrax is spreading, it's really just a recipe for disaster," a spokeswoman said.

Guardian | Thousands of 'unrecorded' cholera deaths in Zimbabwe

Unicef "... has warned 60,000 cholera cases could emerge in the coming weeks." It's about time the mainstream press latched on to this simple truth:

"Many more deaths are going unrecorded because hospitals and clinics are shut, health groups warned.

Itai Rusike, executive director of the Community Working Group, said: "Phones are not working, nurses are not there, so their information system has collapsed. It is very difficult to tell how many people have died."

Bob? Bob has other fish to fry. Having seen off Tsvangirai, Mbeki, and others who feel election results should be respected, he alleges Britain and the U.S. are planning his ouster. The BBC reports:

The Zimbabwean presidential spokesman told the state-owned Herald newspaper that Western countries were planning to bring Zimbabwe before the UN Security Council by claiming the cholera epidemic and food shortages had incapacitated the country's government.

"The British and the Americans are dead set on bringing Zimbabwe back to the UN Security Council," George Charamba was quoted as saying. "They are also dead set on ensuring that there is an invasion of Zimbabwe but without themselves carrying it out. In those circumstances, they will stop at nothing. We would not be surprised if they spring a 'mission' involving the UN," he added.

Bob should look closer to home. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has called for "foreign intervention", either by way of an African Union (AU) force or a United Nations (UN) mission to rescue those dying of cholera, starvation, AIDS, etc.

Africans are understandably loath to take this on. South Africa has probably the largest military in the region, but we don't have the logistical means or necessary defensive capacity to carry it out. A multinational force would need planning, training, time, and money. We don't have any of these things.

More important, perhaps, we have this outdated belief that unsanctioned forces invading foreign, sovereign states — no matter the cause, to be against international law.

It's a bugger. Meanwhile, thousands are dying and the cholera has crossed our border into Limpopo.

"Dead people are better off. They don't need water or sadza (maize porridge). They're just lying there nicely in their graves."

Independent | 'Dead people are better off'

Oh lord, is there nothing more anybody can do | Oh lord, there must be something you can say

Just Another Manic Tuesday

You can tell from the lines on her face | You can see that shes been there | Probably been moved on from every place | 'cos she didnt fit in there

The protest action left a wide swathe of violence across the city, as the early-morning sun shone through a blanket of smoke from out-of-control mountain fires above Gordon's Bay.

Independent | Commuters flee rampaging taxi drivers

The mountains are burning, i.e. aflame in 35-degree heat around the Peninsula and the sky's a tan pall of smoke. Several houses have gone in Gordon's Bay. Our firefighters, professional and voluntary, are saints.

A power outage in the CBD this morning heightened fears that a taxi and bus-driver protest at the Civic Centre, after city-bound motorists were stoned this morning, might turn ugly. A police helicopter clattered tight circles around the inner-city's hazy sky and blue-lighted police cars huddled around main intersections.

I've just received a report that cops are swarming all over our suburb. Turns out they've cordoned off a large area in the wake of a xenophobic attack by taxi drivers on a couple of Somali vendors. Lots of cops with automatic rifles and taxi drivers lying on the ground.

Out on the N2, the cops have just shot a taxi driver who fired on them after trying to push their vehicle off the road. They chased the minibus, shot the driver, and arrested the passengers. Figure it out ... the taxi must have been moving, its driver with a bullet in his head, his passengers wondering "WTF?".

On the other side of town, outside Masipumelele, there's an armed stand-off between taxi drivers and Metro cops ...

And now some guy's just phoned in to the radio station to report he's been hijacked ...

Ah fuck it; just another day in paradise ...²

"Over the weekend, in informal settlements we responded to about 27 incidents. There were three deaths that I know of," said the city's chief fire officer Ian Schnetler.

Independent | Heat wave fans fires ahead of tourism season

Oh think twice, its another day for | You and me in paradise | Oh think twice, its just another day for you, | You and me in paradise

Phil Collins | Another Day in Paradise

² It's been one of those days worthy of J.M. Coetzee, writing The Life and Times of Michael K, In the Heart of the Country, or Waiting for the Barbarians. In a good way, I must add ... it is, after all, Monday evening.

Obama Stimulus Doomed

The Future Looks Grim ...

None of the money being given to the banks really will trickle down, of course. Instead, the largest upward transfer of property in over seventy years will occur. The policy of giving money to the wealthiest sectors – these days the financial sector – turns the trickle-down economy into a euphemism for the concentration of wealth. The pretense is that America’s economy needs the financial and property overhead in order for the "real" economy to "take off" again. But a stronger financial sector selling yet more debt to the economy at large threatens to deter recovery, not to speak of a new takeoff.

Seeing the imminent shrinkage of the U.S. market, lenders and investors are dumping their shares, not only those of U.S. firms but also stocks in European and Asian export sectors. This is the "inner contradiction" of today’s financial rescue operation. Finance itself cannot survive in the face of a stifled domestic "real" economy.

Michael Hudson | Financial Warfare against Labor and Industry

I've been reading Michael Hudson again. He makes sense. Hudson served as Chief Economic Advisor for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kucinich, a moderate who introduces legislation giving substance to the platitudes mouthed by the plutocrats, was on to a hiding to nothing and was beaten like a dog. Fact is, people like Kucinich lend respectibility to a system absolutely corrupted. It's better that, rather than perpetuate the myth of private and public sectors, he stands aside to bare the Hydra-headed monster Eisenhower's military-industrial complex has become.

Let's get a couple of things straight. Business in the States is not being nationalized. Government, in a blatant, front-page MSM coup d'etat, has been privatized. The Federal Reserve, a private institution, has been fully integrated into a U.S. Holding Company hellbent on self-enrichment through the reinflation of myriad bubbles paid for by middle to lower-income foreign and U.S. taxpayers. The PNAC And AIPAC boys, their mammoth bases strung like imperial pearls across the Middle East and Asia, have fulfilled their mission. Today, the site of struggle is the economy, the generals of the revamped presidency come out of the Council for Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institute, and the global poor are the enemy.


The New Mushroom Cloud ...

And I mean global. With Pakistan set to get a flogging and no slowdown in the military's propaganda war against Iran, India, Japan, Russia, and China, the economic decimation of EU and Asian economies salted over decades with junk dollars, is now in full swing. What answer have these economies to an onslaught by the global reserve currency? Nothing. China cannot dump her dollar reserves. Why? MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction. All the Japanese can do is watch in envy as the U.S. Holding Company, subjecting its people to the same economic policies adopted by the eviscerated Asian Tiger through the 80s and 90s, turns said policies to the advantage of its voracious elite while bankrupting every economy enslaved by the greenback.

Consider this. Barack's Boys are busy drafting legislation to oversee the soon-to-be-announced auto-industry bailout. They're calling for a Car Czar, five cabinet secretaries, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The whole charade is being choreographed by Senator Christopher Sleazeball Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee (why do these people look so dissolute. Barney Frank would put a pig wearing lipstick to shame). There is no need for this bullshit. What happened to the SEC (ho ho) and, in the wake of Enron and Worldcom, SOX? There are regulatory laws aplenty, but enforcing them would inconvenience the banksters now ruling the roost from Pennsylvania Avenue.

If you can't get round to listening to Hudson, he offers below a nine-step program of recovery for recidivist money moguls. There's no need — unless the motive is distinctly ulterior, to fix the markets, flood the globe with dollars, or play Senate Committee Hearing with car dealers. Over to Hudson:

Here are some purely fiscal and financial changes that a future presidential candidate might propose — changes that I don’t expect to be hearing any more about during the next four years. Just to get the discussion going, why shouldn’t these merely marginal changes within the existing system be implemented right now by a presidential candidate who is still bragging about his “mandate for change”:

• Regarding fiscal policy, re-introduce the estate tax, along with (at the very least) the Clinton era’s progressive-tax schedule.
• Tax capital gains at the same rate as wages and profits, rather than at half the rate; and make these taxes be paid at the point of sale of real estate or other assets, not deferred ad infinitum if the gains simply are invested in yet more wealth.
• Require a cost-benefit analysis of any publicly backed infrastructure spending so as to recapture all “external economies” (such as windfall real estate price gains) as the first line of financing such investment.
• Tax corporate borrowing that is used merely to pay stock dividends or buy back one’s own stock at least at 50%.
• Close the practice of offshore tax avoidance, and bring criminal cases against accounting firms abetting this practice.
• Only let a building be depreciated once, not repeatedly as a tax writeoff.
• Refocus state and local taxation on the property tax, remembering that whatever the tax collector relinquishes is simply "freed" to be paid to the banks as interest.
• In the sphere of bad-debt banking, when a government agency takes over a bank or company that has negative net worth, the stockholders must be wiped out as their stock has lost all market value. Bondholders must stand in line behind the government in case of insolvency.
• Write down mortgage debts to the ability of property owners to pay and/or the present market value. Banks that have made loans to these borrowers must take responsibility for their decision that the owners could afford to pay. Even better, apply New York State’s existing Fraudulent Conveyance law, and simply annul loans that are beyond the ability of debtors to pay.

None of this involves real structural change. It is simply more economically efficient under existing laws and practices — something like actually enforcing environmental law, anti-fraud and anti-crime laws, and the original intent of our tax legislation. It is a small step back toward the Progressive Era a century ago — the era that set America on the path of prosperity that made the 20th century the American century.

Michael Hudson | The Obama Letdown

Of course, we all know Hudson's correct. These are changes he won't be hearing any more about during the next four years. He can write till his fingers turn to bloodied stubs but nobody who matters will pay him any mind. The man's a loser, destined for a KBR Resettlement Camp somewhere in the Ozarks or Rockies. In fact, all this raving about the writing on the wall reminds me of 2002. The nut of it is that the war waged by the rich on the poor is being ratcheted up and the Dream Team are firmly in charge.

Over at the New York Times, Frank Rich reminds us exactly who they are:

Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Frank Rich | The Brightest Are Not Always the Best

Fuckers. For a fresher refresher, I found Richard Cook's April and May 2007 articles, An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States and Monetary Reform and How a National Monetary System Should Work over at Global Research.

Remember Mogadishu?

Cape Point and Da Gama Peak

Give me back my broken night | My mirrored room, my secret life | It's lonely here, | There's no one left to torture | Give me absolute control | Over every living soul | And lie beside me, baby, | That's an order!

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and — according to Isse and civil rights activists — secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

Paul Salopek | Nobody is Watching


Olifantsbospunt to Simonsbank

Give me crack and anal sex | Take the only tree that's left | And stuff it up the hole | In your culture | Give me back the Berlin wall | Give me Stalin and St Paul | I've seen the future, brother: | It is murder.

Screw Mogadishu. The Courts will prevail. Besides, on the strength of one of your earlier attempts to invade that country, I warned you foreign fuckers to stay out of Africa.

But that was five or six years ago. Today, weep for Harare, a tragedy of our own making.

CapeTalk carried an item this morning wherein it stated that a visibly thinner Braam Hanekom has returned from our northern neighbour. The Cape Town-based refugee rights activist and chair of People Against Suffering Suppression Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) reckons the game in that cholera-infested country is almost up.

I don't recall Braam's words, but I do remember what he and others had to say. With extended-family members in various stages of either staying or leaving the place, I also know that Tamar Jacobson holds Zimbabwe pretty close to her heart.

Collapse is all but complete and despair and desperation reign. The morgues are full and bodies are now found everywhere. With the country's main hospitals having shut down, Harare is pervaded by the sickly-sweet stench of death.

In a city without potable water — further damaging business in a country where 90 percent are unemployed, many of those not dead now have cholera. People dig for water wherever they can. Compounding their destitution, the sewerage system has collapsed. All are starving.

Roaming bands of soldiers, having spent three days rioting after finding they could no longer draw money from the banks, heighten a sense of untamed anarchy.

Anybody able to flee is getting out. Cape Town, a couple of thousand miles south, is full of refugees, whose interests are looked after only by NGOs such as Hanekom's and that of Sam Pearce, eMzantsi Ubuntu Coalition.

The Times reports:

Soldiers went on the rampage last week in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, looting shops and assaulting illegal foreign currency traders. The soldiers clashed with the police as a protest over unpaid salaries turned ugly.

The capital has been without running water for more than 48 hours, officials having cut supply because of the cholera outbreak that has already claimed 473 lives across the country. According to the World Health Organisation, more than 11000 cholera cases have been recorded since August.

Zimbabwe is now on the brink of a precipice. But the most frightening thing about this is that the world seems unwilling or powerless to do anything about it.

You know things are getting bad when what remains of the Health Ministry warns people against shaking hands. The cholera death toll is hopelessly understated. Perhaps it's time Zimbabweans "remembered Mogadishu".

The world monetized a botched American invasion and many fat people in foreign countries profited handsomely from the suffering of the emaciated people in the dusty streets of that blighted city.

Most couldn't give a damn about starving Africans. Like the Somalis, Zimbabweans are on their own and need to pull this one out of the fire. Reuters tells us:

Muttiah Muralitharan took five wickets Sunday to lead Sri Lanka to a 19-run win over Zimbabwe and a 5-0 sweep in the limited-overs series. After Sri Lanka was bowled out for 152 for its lowest total in the series, Muralitharan claimed 5-29 for his 10th five-wicket haul in 50-over internationals and Nuwan Kulasekara took 3-14 to bowl out Zimbabwe for 133 at Harare Sports Club.

"When we came here we set ourselves goals. We needed to win 5-0. We did that," Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene said. "Yes, it wasn't convincing, but considering the conditions and that the opposition played well in the last three games, especially with the ball, we have to take that as an achievement.

And although these teams are barely competing on level playing fields (literally), the International Cricket Board (ICC) expresses dissatisfaction with the administration and development of the game in Zimbabwe.

S'far as I'm concerned, it's just not cricket.

It's bizarre ('surreal' does not do it justice), but such is the way of the world and it has happened many times before. People will deny a reality so completely, almost nothing will wake them to it.

For now, the carnival continues. I fear ordinary Zimbabweans may well starve or succumb to disease before their sporting and business compatriots come to the realization that they need to put their skills to good use, i.e. ending Mugabe's genocidal rampage.

Give me back the Berlin wall | Give me Stalin and St Paul | Give me Christ | Or give me Hiroshima | Destroy another fetus now | We don't like children anyhow | I have seen the future, baby: | It is murder.

Leonard Cohen | The Future

Note: Interestingly, in warning "you fuckers" to stay out of Africa five years ago, I quoted one General James Jones: "I think Africa is a continent that is going to be of very, very significant interest in the 21st century," said President-Elect Obama's National Security Adviser back in May 2003.

Jones's value to Obama? "He understands the connection between energy and national security," says the President Elect in November 2008 (Jones, formerly head of United States European Command, is a Board member of both Boeing and Chevron).

Credence ...

Paulson's Fairy Tales ...

I see a bad moon risin' | I see trouble on the way | I see earthquakes and lightnin' | I see bad times today

Of the 120 publicly traded firms the Journal analyzed, CEOs cashed out a total of more than $21 billion. However, data was gathered only from publicly traded companies, and thus does not include similar fortunes that have been made by "hedge fund chiefs, Wall Street traders, and executives who sold their companies outright." Nor did it include data related to exit packages, the multimillion-dollar "golden parachutes" awarded to retiring or fired executives.

The Journal’s findings underscore the parasitism and criminality of the US financial elite. Defenders have long justified extravagant CEO pay by claiming that these were the talented "risk-takers" who generated enormous wealth for investors. But the Journal’s data shows that there is no correlation between compensation and a firm’s success. On the contrary, many CEOs rewarded themselves just as their corporations approached ruin.

Tom Eley | CEOs "Cashed Out" Prior To Economic Crisis

I hear hurricanes a'blowin' | I know the end is comin' soon | I fear rivers overflowing | I hear the voice of rage and ruin


... meet your back pocket

Hope you got your things together | Hope you are prepared to die | Looks like we're in for nasty weather | One eye is taken for an eye

The creation of equity bubbles is just a clever means of social engineering, just like regressive taxation. It separates the wheat from the chaff, exacerbating dormant animosities between the classes. The Fed has skillfully aided its White House counterparts in creating the same divisions that existed during the Gilded Age, further fueling the animus towards workers. But now the massive debt bubble is crashing and threatens to bring down the whole system in heap. Bernanke and Paulson are frantically trying to plug the holes in the dam rather than rebuild on a solid foundation of fair pay for productivity.

Mike Whitney | Every Trick in the Book

Don't go around tonight | Well, it's bound to take your life | There's a bad moon on the rise

Creedence Clearwater Revival | Bad Moon Rising

The Beginning

Elephant's Eye

The dilemma Paulson has created with his inept handling of the crisis is simple: If the US Government paid the true value for these nearly worthless assets, the banks would have to write down huge losses, and, as Levy economists put it, ‘announce to the world that they are insolvent.’ On the other hand, if Paulson raised the toxic waste purchase price high enough to protect the banks from losses, $700 billion ‘will buy only a tiny fraction of the 'troubled' assets.’ That is what the latest nationalization of Citigroup is about.

It is only the beginning. The 2009 year will be one of titanic shocks and changes to the global order of a scale perhaps not experienced in the past five centuries. This is why we should speak of the end of the American Century and its Dollar System.

How destructive that process will be to the citizens of the United States who are the prime victims of Paulson’s crony capitalists, as well as to the rest of the world depends now on the urgency and resoluteness with which heads of national Governments in Germany, the EU, China, Russia and the rest of the non-US world react. It is no time for ideological sentimentality and nostalgia of the postwar old order. That collapsed this past September along with Lehman Brothers and the Republican Presidency. Waiting for a ‘miracle’ from an Obama Presidency is no longer an option for the rest of the world.

F. William Engdahl | Colossal Financial Collapse: The Truth behind the Citigroup Bank "Nationalization"

"The worst is yet to come."

Tehran Times | IMF economist says worst of crisis to come

The Revolution Will Not Be Published

Constantiaberg

This is how the story runs in RIA Novosti:

A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily Izvestia published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."

The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events.

RIA Novosti | Russian analyst predicts decline and breakup of U.S.


Constantiaberg

... and this is how it appears in Bloomberg.

A professor at the diplomatic academy of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the U.S. will break into six parts because of the nation’s financial crisis.

“The dollar isn’t secured by anything,” Igor Panarin said in an interview transcribed by Russian newspaper Izvestia today. “The country’s foreign debt has grown like an avalanche; this is a pyramid, which has to collapse.”

Panarin said in the interview that the financial crisis will worsen, unemployment will rise and people will lose their savings — factors that will cause the country’s breakup.

Bloomberg | Russian Professor Says U.S. Will Break Up After Economic Crisis


Constantiaberg

Why does Bloomberg hack it to a caricature?

Ask Noam Chomsky.

And remember: "It's up — or down — to you."

Let me make one final comment on this. There was a meeting on November 7, I think of a group of couple, of a dozen advisers to deal with the financial crisis. Their careers were, records were reviewed in the business press, and Bloomberg News had an article reviewing their records and concluded that these people, most of these people shouldn’t be giving advice about the economy. They should be given subpoenas.

Noam Chomsky | The Elections, the Economy, and the World

Amy Goodman also chats to Desmond Tutu and Breyten Breytenbach, the latter offering "Mandela's Smile: Notes of South Africa's failed revolution" over at Harper's, where information doesn't want to be free.

Woolies UK Goes Bust

Silvermine

Woolworths, which opened its first shop in 1909, said this morning that it filed petitions for administration after an attempt to sell its retail stores ended. ... Woolworths has more than 800 stores across the U.K. selling goods from candy to appliances. It employs almost 30,000 people, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

As sales crumbled, the retailer was hampered by debt that totaled 295 million pounds when its first half ended on Aug. 2, more than 16 times its current market value. Woolworths had interest costs of 18.6 million pounds in the period, more than today's market capitalization. The stock has plunged by nine-tenths this year after falling 62 percent in 2007.

"If they didn't have any debt, things would have been short of expectations, but there would have been nothing to tip them into administration," Stoddart said.

Woolworths was started as part of its U.S. parent's expansion. The company has no relation to Cape Town, South Africa-based Woolworths Holdings Ltd. or Woolworths Ltd., located in Sydney, which today deferred plans to buy back stock because of concern about the world economic slump.

Bloomberg | Woolworths Near Collapse, Risking 30,000 U.K. Jobs

Deficits Don't Matter

Living the high life ...

"Reagan proved deficits don’t matter."

Dick Cheney

One thing you have to admit: Dick Cheney and the Bush Gang knew the economy. But they got shorted. MarketWatch reports the U.S. government agreeing "... Sunday night to rescue Citigroup Inc. with a huge bailout plan that includes a $20 billion capital infusion, guarantees for up to $306 billion of Citi's troubled assets — and control of executive bonuses."

Today, looking remarkably like the old kids, the new kids hit the block.

Commenting on Barack Obama's choice of Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, and Peter Orszag to head his fiscal hit squad, Bloomberg sees "... an economic team steeped in fighting crises and likely to push for an unprecedented government role in reviving growth and stabilizing the financial system."

Bloomberg's Rich Miller and Robert Schmidt consider Obama's top priority to be "... a stimulus package that may run to $700 billion or more, in an attempt to head off millions of job losses as the credit crunch freezes the economy."

The financial mess in which the U.S. now finds itself has already had several trillion dollars thrown at it. The stimulus package Obama will likely sign into law next February adds another trillion to the more than ten already weighing down the U.S. economy.

Bloomberg quantifies the figure so far pledged big business on behalf of the taxpayer: $7.76 trillion. This to a system that has 'vanished' $32 trillion in recent years.

Bloomberg also suspects the original 'bailout bill' will likely face that typically US-ian problem, obesity. "The incoming administration may also enlarge the $700 billion financial-rescue fund enacted last month. It may surge to perhaps $1.2 trillion, said Martin Baily, who served as White House chief economist under Clinton and is now at the Brookings Institution in Washington."

That's another half trillion.

It was the abovementioned Peter R. Orszag, who will head the Congressional Budget Office, who not too long ago noted of the U.S. budget deficit: "The key point is, even if it were sustainable, it's not desirable. We still will owe the money to foreigners. We're still mortgaging our future national income. Just because you can take out a larger mortgage to buy a bigger house doesn't mean you should."


... in BubbleWorld

"... we shouldn't worry about the deficit next year or even the year after."

Barack Obama

It seems Orszag's boss — having undergone a Keynesian Awakening, shares Dick Cheney's view. And that of the man shaping his team of Clintonistas, i.e. the only one not on it; Citigroup director, former NEC chief, and Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin.

Of Rubin, Rahm Emmanuel's father might say: "Obviously he’ll influence the president. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? With $20 billion in his pocket, he’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House."

When you see only one solution, I guess that's the one you use. However, with Rubin massaging the future from the Citi, one wonders just who won this past election.

"Stimulus shouldn't be paid for."

Hillary Clinton

Indeed. She should know. As top Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee put it on MSNBC: "Look, it needs to be as big a number as it needs to be. I really mean, it's got to meet the task at hand."

I'm sure Hillary, Rubin, Dick, and the President-Elect would agree.