Don't know much 'bout economy...

But should I be worried?:

Cost of the Bush tax cuts.

Don't know much 'bout geography... of the US or the world (via Marcellina of The Practice Room).

Goldman Sachs is in the news

Matt Taibbi:

THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again.

And a wonderful reaction to Taibbi's article by Stephen Foley of The Independent:

Perhaps you have heard by now that Goldman Sachs is "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".

It is the opening line of a piece in Rolling Stone magazine, which has been zinging around the email inboxes of Wall Street for the past few days, and which has got Goldman's tentacles all a-twitching with fury.

Matt Taibbi's piece is a rip-roaring read, obviously. It goes over well-trodden ground, listing all the Goldman alumni in positions of power in governments and at regulators around the world (or not listing them actually, since that would be "absurd and pointless, like trying to make a list of everything"), and then accuses the bank of using its influence to get government out of the way so that it can inflate all the recent investment bubbles, from dot.com stocks, through oil prices, to the biggest one of all, the US housing bubble.

In keeping with the hyperbole of the row, Goldman's wonderfully arch spokesman Lucas van Praag described the piece as "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories," adding: "Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F Kennedy's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing."

Very funny. The Rolling Stone article is indeed a horribly unfair arrangement of the facts. In these howls of rage against the way unfettered finance led us into boom and bust, it is always tempting to assume Goldman must be uniquely villainous just because it has been uniquely profitable – but it is illogical to single out any one institution for stoking investment mania that by definition has many, many participants.

It is also not true that the US government's bailout of Wall Street was a matter of Goldmanites at the Treasury handing taxpayer money over to help out a few of their friends in banking. That is an outright misrepresentation of what happened last autumn, and if people start to believe it, we will doom ourselves to one day letting the banking system collapse – at which point we will learn all over again how ensuring the soundness of the banks is vital to keeping an economy out of a slump.

Yet there has been something troubling me about Goldman's response to this little flap, and it is this: the sheer lack of humility.

And speaking of Goldman Sachs' lack of humility:

Goldman Sachs bankers in line for record bonuses

Bankers at Goldman Sachs could be in line for record bonuses as compensation on Wall Street looks set to rebound in spite of problems in the wider economy.

And:

NEW YORK -- The U.S. Justice Department arrested a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employee and charged him with stealing computer codes related to the firm's high-speed trading platform.

Sergey Aleynikov, a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Russia, allegedly unlawfully copied, duplicated, downloaded and transferred computer codes from Goldman Sachs and uploaded the codes to a computer server in Germany, according to a complaint filed by federal prosecutors.

The complaint from the government didn't specifically reference Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was referenced during Saturday's bail hearing, and a person familiar with the matter confirmed that Mr. Aleynikov worked as a computer programmer for the company.

The person familiar with the matter also said, "The theft has had no impact on our clients and no impact on our business."

Explains why Bush got his friends out of the country so fast

Doesn't it?

WASHINGTON — Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.

But we already knew this.... and they are trying to get rid of the evidence.

Why? We already know if we really had wanted to retaliate against the 9/11 hijackers, we would have invaded Saudi Arabia.

Let the wild rumpus begin

Rewriting history:

...In an article about the Obama administration's "effort to undo bonuses at A.I.G.," The New York Times reported, "The Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said they had known about the bonus program as far back as last fall." But at no point in the article did the Times note that the Treasury Department at the time was then-President Bush's Treasury Department. Indeed, the article did not mention Bush or his Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson at all, much less report that the Bush Treasury Department worked with the Federal Reserve in carrying out last year's bailouts and bought AIG stocks notwithstanding the existence of these bonus contracts.

The fake uproar about Gibb's joke about Dick Cheney:

Dick Cheney is one of the most divisive -- and disliked -- political officials in memory. Maybe Chip Reid and Rick Klein haven't heard, but he just presided over the virtual collapse of the American economy and is directly implicated in severe war crimes and other pervasive criminality. Yet they speak of him -- and demand that everyone else treat him -- as royalty: This is the former Vice President of the United States you're talking about; have you no decency?

Journalists love to depict themselves as hard-nosed, rambunctious, ornery adversaries of establishment orthodoxies and political power. The reality is the opposite: there simply is no class of people more reverent of the political establishment and more devoted to protecting and defending its prerogatives.

Good for you, Canada! Thank you!!:

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - More than 100 protesters chanted "war criminal" and flung shoes in Calgary on Tuesday, angry that former U.S. President George W. Bush was in the Canadian city to give his first speech since leaving the White House.

At least two demonstrators were hauled away by police after brief skirmishes, as 1,500 business people in the oil patch city waited outside a convention center for an hour to pass through tight security and enter the C$400-a-plate ($315) luncheon.

Media were barred from the invitation-only event, during which Bush had been expected to reflect on his eight years as president.

9/11 empowered the little guys dreaming of immense powers

And what ends up happening are events like this. A photographer being harassed by an overly aggressive cop in San Antonio:

A few frames later, a man approached out of the corner of my eye (in plain clothes) and said,

"Can I see some ID?"

My instinctive response, before I saw what he was holding, was "no."

As he shouted, "I better or you're goin' t' jaail!", I noticed he was displaying in his hand some sort of police identification.

Finding him unusually aggressive, noting his weapon and ID, and hearing his threat of arrest if I did not produce identification, I decided to show him my license.

"Are you taking pictures for personal use or a company?"

"Well, it depends.. probably personal, but I suppose if someone wants to run them, they can... why?"

(getting in my face) "You ever hear of September the 11th?"

"Uhhh, yeah, but I'm not sure what it has to do with this."

"You are between two buildings, housin' communications equipment."

"OK... and I am in a public place, taking pictures of things in plain view. There's nothing secret or sensitive here. I mean, if I had criminal intent, do you really think I'd be out here in the open like this taking photos?"

"You'd be surprised."

"I would? Have you ever caught such a person?"

As he began a call on his cell phone (my license in hand) and talked (or pretended to talk) with someone, I noticed a news crew setting up about 50 meters away. He ended his call shortly thereafter and our conversation continued.

"How do I know you're not going to give these pictures to someone [to do harm]?"

"Well, I suppose you don't - but how do you plan to ascertain that by checking my identification?"

(shouting again) "LOOK - you give me any lip, and you're goin' t' jaail!"

It is so absurd it feels like a parody, but these situations are happening all about the U.S. We will not catch terrorists this way. We will just make our citizens extremely angry.

Update: This is not to control terrorists, this is to control the citizenry:

Private businesses such as rental and mortgage companies and car dealers are checking the names of customers against a list of suspected terrorists and drug traffickers made publicly available by the Treasury Department, sometimes denying services to ordinary people whose names are similar to those on the list.

The Office of Foreign Asset Control's list of "specially designated nationals" has long been used by banks and other financial institutions to block financial transactions of drug dealers and other criminals. But an executive order issued by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has expanded the list and its consequences in unforeseen ways. Businesses have used it to screen applicants for home and car loans, apartments and even exercise equipment, according to interviews and a report by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area to be issued today.

"The way in which the list is being used goes far beyond contexts in which it has a link to national security," said Shirin Sinnar, the report's author. "The government is effectively conscripting private businesses into the war on terrorism but doing so without making sure that businesses don't trample on individual rights."

The lawyers' committee has documented at least a dozen cases in which U.S. customers have had transactions denied or delayed because their names were a partial match with a name on the list, which runs more than 250 pages and includes 3,300 groups and individuals. No more than a handful of people on the list, available online, are U.S. citizens.

Yet anyone who does business with a person or group on the list risks penalties of up to $10 million and 10 to 30 years in prison, a powerful incentive for businesses to comply. The law's scope is so broad and guidance so limited that some businesses would rather deny a transaction than risk criminal penalties, the report finds.

And then you get this:

Billionaires for Bush put out a press release today in response to the news that the New York city police were spying on them:

Billionaires For Bush Respond to N.Y.P.D. Spying Report

- Billionaires to release own domestic surveillance files as gesture of good faith.

- “We guessed he was an undercover officer when he kept asking for stock tips.” Meg A Bucks, National Co-Chair.

Now the Treasury Department gets in the act

I guess when you say the sky's the limit, no holds barred, make the pie higher, make your own reality, people take it seriously:

WASHINGTON - Under a little-noticed provision in the USA Patriot Act, the Treasury Department has ordered severe restrictions against foreign banks or countries for reasons beyond the stated purpose of the law and without producing evidence.

Section 311 of the 2001 Patriot Act was drafted to halt terrorist financing and money laundering, but the Bush administration has used it against an alleged source of terrorist financing - a bank in Syria - only once. The Treasury has invoked it more often to punish alleged human-rights abuses or offshore banking havens.

Although Congress has yet to examine the Treasury's use of Section 311, the provision is likely to add to the controversy over other sweeping powers the executive branch of government acquired under the Patriot Act. According to a recent audit, the FBI used the act illegally to obtain personal information about U.S. citizens, and the administration has agreed to abandon a provision that it used to replace eight U.S. attorneys for what Democrats charge were partisan political reasons.