Yesterday You said Tomorrow

I'm out of the current music scene, but every once in a while come across someone that catches me; Christian Scott's one.

I heard him in an interview on NPR a while back, and he impressed me with his intelligence and poise. Then I heard his chops and kept him on my radar. Last Sunday, I saw him on his promo tour for his album. From his "Diz-angled" axe to his incorporation of other styles and influences - such as hip hop - this young man and his band - all young as well - can kill it.

Here's some footage from the gig - non-edited, because I'm lazy like that.

Pants on Fire

In the continuing disaster that is the mainstream media's EM08 reporting, no less than NPR's venerated "Marketplace" just fired off an interview with this jerkoff, Leonard Zumpano, who's an academic (U. of Alabama). This is yet another faction, the academics, who with rare exception - like William Black - add their pile of crap to the lawyers's pile, the accountants' pile, uncle scam's pile....

Chumpano today gave his cheerleading effort toward residential real estate. Don't take my word for it, give it a bit and go to their site, listen yourself to today's program:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/episodes/show_rundown.php?show_id=14

[NOTE: As of 10/12/15 this segment has been archived here]

As I've said and let me be clear - now is NOT a good time to buy property. And people and businesses like Chumpano are setting up another battalion of fish who listen to drivel like this and put their futures at stake buying right now.

This should be a crime.

 Transcript follows below.

[NOTE: Edited 10/12/15

Coldwell extends homebuying tax credit

 Monday, April 26, 2010 - 19:01

• Transcript

TEXT OF INTERVIEW

Tess Vigeland: The government's $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit expires on Friday. If you haven't entered into a contract to buy a house by then -- you're not getting anything back from Uncle Sam. But you very well may get something back from one of the nation's biggest real-estate companies.

Coldwell Banker says it will make the credit an option for sellers participating in its "Buyer Bonus Sales Event." Homebuyers would have until July 31st to take advantage of the offer. For some insight we turn to Leonard Zumpano. He teaches finance at the University of Alabama. Good to have you with us.

Leonard Zumpano: My pleasure.

Vigeland: You know, before we get to what Coldwell Banker is doing, let's take a bit of a broader picture of the housing market. Did the homebuyer tax credit actually make people buy homes?

ZUMPANO: It has. The National Association of Realtors does an annual home buying and selling survey, and their numbers indicate that the tax credit was responsible for approximately 800,000 home sales. To put this in perspective, it includes the original $7,500 refundable tax credit, the $8,000 first-time homebuyer credit, and the extended credit that allows for credit for existing home sales.

Vigeland: Well, 800,000 people sounds like a lot.

ZUMPANO: It is a lot in absolute numbers. But during that same time period, there were five million homes sold. That's about 16 percent, which is not insignificant. Of all the reasons for purchasing a home, the tax credit was singled out by 16 percent of those homebuyers.

Vigeland: 800,000 people saying that the credit factored in, you know, the fact that it is now ending would presumably prompt a little bit of panic on the part of the realtors then.

ZUMPANO: One would expect that the availability of the credit and having a limited life expectancy ending at the end of the month put people that might have been sitting on the fence over the fence. So I think there will probably be a decline in future home sales in the next couple of months, assuming nothing else changes, like employment and mortgage rates. I think part of the most recent push from homebuyers who were watching interest rates beginning to rise.

Vigeland: Well, certainly for Coldwell Banker this is quite the unique marketing technique. Hey, you know, if Uncle Sam isn't going to help you out, we will.

ZUMPANO: Yeah, that's exactly right. But how profound is that going to be and what kind of incentive does it create? It's difficult to forecast because it may in fact cause other real-estate companies to do basically the same thing.

Vigeland: Right, that just means we're back in 2004-2005, right?

ZUMPANO: Right, exactly. There is evidence that the market is beginning to firm up. The most recent numbers I've seen for part of 2009 show that those states that suffer the worst in 2007, like California, are coming back. Buyers are being induced back into the market, and that's happening also in cities like Miami, which had a glut of condominiums just two years ago. With employment beginning to stabilize, the prospects for a housing market recovery are there. You're not going to see the kind of appreciation we saw between 2000-2005, but I don't ever want to see that again because that was simply unsustainable and everybody knew it.

Vigeland: Leonard Zumpano is a professor of finance with an emphasis on real estate at the University of Alabama. Thanks so much for chatting with us today.

ZUMPANO: My pleasure.

 

Featured in: Marketplace for Monday, April 26, 2010

Just Like Me

Huh. In one of those strange confluences of coincidence, Anthony Lane's review of Exit Through the Gift Shop references both Welles' F for Fake and Surrealism.(*) Although he ends up in a different place - he hates the flick, and I understand his feelings, but being from LA I found it pretty entertaining - what are the odds of both of us making the same arguments and supporting them with the same fairly obscure references?

In fact, I sympathize with his misgivings, but the part that I liked was its commentary on "the scene and scenesters." THAT is the true value of this flick, and having come up in LA and watching it evokes a feeling not unlike watching Spinal Tap. It's a joke - not necessarily satire - about a joke. The transparent commenting on co-modification is okay, though a well-worn re-tread, and yet, that's not his fault. It is, after all, the way the system works, trite as it is to point it out.

One other thing; I saw ETtGS with Renee and two of her friends. Afterwards I asked her friends if they thought it had significance that it took part mainly in LA. They didn't think so.

Back to Anthony Lane.

The Welles reference I get, as his thing, like mine, is movies. Still, even among movie heads, F for Fake is obscure.

The Surrealist reference is more improbable; the guy's 48, so Surrealism was for all intents and purposes a dead issue as a movement. Now, England did play a fairly major minor role back in the day, and they had an active coterie of English Surrealists who organized some pretty big shows with the participation of many of the French group, including Breton and Eluard. Fairly recently, I believe the Tate ran a show about a decade or so ago.

Smart dude, that Anthony Lane; haha, a transparent hat tip to myself, there. His excerpted review follows.

===========================

(*) The forever elegant Duchamp, though never formally a member, was a participant supporter and even curated some of their most famous shows, like the one where he glued coal sacks to the ceiling which created a weird and decidedly non-elegant setting to say the least.

Tzara, the Zurich dada boss before Surrealism was codified, was "awaited like the second coming" when the young, soon to be Surrealists courted him to Paris and they threw themselves into dada full force. It didn't last long; as the French group was steeped in the romantic tradition and interested in psychic explorations - this is Freud's time - dada's incessant nihilism wore on them. After the breach and formal organizing with the first Surrealist Manifesto in '24, Tzara - in a bit of weird symmetry - eventually re-joined them as a Surrealist. Thus, the father became the son.

The Current Cinema
Street Justice
“Kick-Ass” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
by Anthony Lane

April 20, 2010

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane#ixzz0lq6IZpTw

Who made “Exit Through the Gift Shop”? No writer or director is credited, but it describes itself as “A Banksy Film.” To those of you who keep up with developments in street art less eagerly than you should, it must be explained that Banksy is not a derogatory adjective but the alias of an unspecified British artist who has indeed put art on the streets. His paintings and stencillings have won him a fan base of fashionable ardor, unceasingly piqued by his anonymity.

As if in tribute to that eel-like elusiveness, only a portion of “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about the man himself. We see a cowled and low-lit figure, who speaks with a West Country burr. (This is the most derided of English accents, associated in the public ear with a rustic slowness, and splendidly out of kilter with the braying of the art world.) Banksy tells us about a guy who was trying to make a documentary about him, whereupon—hey, presto!—the rest of the movie turns around and follows that guy. He is Thierry Guetta, though he pronounces his first name “Terry,” thus becoming one of the few Frenchmen in history to prefer his Anglicized self. Even his mustache betrays a Victorian luxuriance; “He looked like something out of the eighteen-sixties,” as Banksy says.

Guetta explains that, living in Los Angeles, with his wife and children, he became interested in, then addicted to, the hit-and-run world of street art. He made friends with a number of artists, whether they wanted befriending or not, and filmed them with a handheld video camera as they worked. Eventually, the road led to Banksy, for whom Guetta became a partner in crime—accompanying him to Disneyland, where Banksy placed an inflatable doll resembling a hooded inmate at Guantánamo next to a ride, causing Guetta to endure hours of unamused questioning by the authorities. Even this failed to sate him, and the latter half of the movie shows him deciding to cross over and become an artist himself, like a war reporter picking up a gun. The joke is that he has no discernible gift, save a knack for self-advertisement; the more depressing joke is that this crumb of talent turns out to be enough. He calls himself Mr. Brainwash, and fills an abandoned television studio with sub-Warholian dreck of his own devising. Art scavengers, lured by the smell of publicity, line up, open the jaws of their wallets, and feast.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” could and should have been an excoriating work. It isn’t often that I wish a high-minded Marxist had been in charge of a motion picture, but who else would you trust with the spectacle of subversive activity being commandeered, and fetishized, by the capitalist machinery that it was meant to undermine? This doesn’t apply just to Guetta, who still believes, bless him, that rehashed images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis retain the power to mock and shock, and who, long before the movie is done, dwindles from a doting eccentric into a tiring bore; it also applies to Banksy himself, or, at any rate, to the moment when his paintings found their way onto the walls of Sotheby’s. To forge a million pounds’ worth of fake British banknotes, with the Queen’s head replaced by that of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a definable feat of guerrilla art. But to have your print of Kate Moss sold by a London auction house for ninety-six thousand pounds of real money, whatever you choose to do with it, means that you have been press-ganged from the street where you roamed free.

As a study in prankhood, this Banksy film can’t touch “F for Fake,” Orson Welles’s 1974 movie about an art forger. Welles both conspired with his untrustworthy subject and held him at arm’s length, like a conjurer with his rabbit, and you came out dazzled by the sleight, whereas “Exit Through the Gift Shop” feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult—almost, dare one say it, of a brand. Nothing by Banksy or his acolytes would have been remotely alarming to Marcel Duchamp, or to Tristan Tzara; what would have struck them was the means by which a Banksy image can be reproduced—the sudden velocity at which its impact can travel, whether online or through the eyes of a hundred cell phones. That is what binds “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” unexpectedly, to “Kick-Ass”: the sense, both arousing and disconcerting, that, whatever you want to be, whether it’s an artist, a superhero, or a mystery man, all you need is the nerve to exhibit that desire. Then hit Send.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=all#ixzz0lqeg3x5w

A Corpse

Renee and I saw Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop yesterday and it was pretty funny. It was so appropriate that the crazy shit he talks about went down in LA, probably the goofiest place on earth.

One clarification; people seem to forget that there's history. In reading some of the reviews on ETtGS, you'd think that Shephard Fairey and Banksy had created street art. But I really don't like it when reviewers say things like this:

This self-conscious Post Modern sort of cinematic device--which, of course, reached new heights in the fiction-non-fiction films of Charlie Kaufman--works really well in this film and within the street art context. Street art itself turns reality into fantasy as its creators transform public places into unlikely and often illegal canvases and impromptu galleries. So, while narrators and voiceover are usually loathed devices in film, they seems to give Gift Shop an appropriately fable-esque magical sensibility.
-Shana Ting Lipton (in the HuffPo!)

First, Charlie Kaufman as "new heights in the fiction-non-fiction films" is as a kid compared to Welles' achievement.

Second, the great thing about Banksy is the taste of subversion that sometimes peeks its head up. When he hung up his own paintings in museums for instance, it was the act itself that eclipsed any artistic merit the painting itself might have had.

Aside from ignoring history in the form of the early hip hop graf crews and before them, LA's own king of the streets Robbie Conal and the barrios of East LA, today's generation takes subversion and makes it an in-joke. I get it, you're hipsters, okay?

As a young person I got lucky and hit the lottery in my discovery of Surrealism. Coming up as I did in the 60's/70's, I was at first attracted to the "far out" quality of their paintings. But I stuck with it, and because of my amateur sleuthing and fate, I discovered that Surrealism was a movement, moral in its philosophy, poetic in expression and subversive in tactics.


This is a picture of one of the titans of Surrealism, Benjamin Peret, insulting a priest. Coming up in a thoroughly Catholic environment I found this picture astounding; the spell was cast. These dudes had balls the size of which wouldn't be seen again until the 60's.

Subversion's cousin, scandal, was also an oft used Surrealist weapon. Their public hanging of Nobel Laureate Anatole France - the man of French letters - is legendary.

The first pamphlet, arranged largely by André Breton and Louis Aragon, appeared in response to the national funeral of Anatole France. France, the 1921 Nobel Laureate and best-selling author, who was then regarded as the quintessential man of French letters, proved to be an easy target for an incendiary tract. The pamphlet featured an essay called Anatole France, or Gilded Mediocrity that scathingly attacked the recently deceased author on a number of fronts. The pamphlet was an act of subversion, bringing into question accepted values and conventions, which Anatole France was seen as personifying.
--Wikipedia

Some of the details of the Wiki on "Un Cadavre" can be misleading, but I'll leave that for now.

Irony and humor were founding principles and strategies as well. When Surrealism's "Pope," Andre' Breton, performed what would become one of his customary excommunications from the ranks, his butt got bit on more than one occasion.


That's Breton in the pic, of course, the target of some of his victims.

All of this is to say that while I enjoy some of Banksy's stuff, I particularly relish when he's subversive. Trouble is, in this post-post-modern world full of hipsters, something's been lost. When Banksy hangs one of his pictures in a museum, it comes off as a self-conscious prank, a joke, as opposed to dadaists and Surrealists who would pass out pamphlets inviting the public to attend a theater performance. Upon showtime, the audience would be greeted by the young subversives reading off tracts, insulting and scandalizing everything from French politics to cookie-cutter morals. Perhaps it's a sign of the times that we live in an era when priests are fucking kids but the world looks away, and back in the day the Surrealists got right in their face and cursed them out.

The young Surrealists in the golden age of the Left Bank and their dada forefathers understood one thing; they'd just come out of devastation in the form of WWI, and being writers they knew what to do; get busy. Their logic was impeccable; if it was rationality that had shit out the war, then in true dialectical manner they deduced ir-rationality must have something worthwhile to combat it. As rationality was a necessary component of life their conclusion was a fusion and transcendence of a world that did its best to exclude "the marvelous" in life and reduce living to the mundane. "Where contradictions cease to exist - sur-reality."

That their golden age was framed by two miserable wars is not lost on students of the movement. Fast forward and Vietnam becomes the catalyst for the counter-culture of the 60's and 70's. Today, with two out of control and un-winnable wars raging away and EM08 relentlessly wood-chipping the world, the feeling is of utter hopelessness. As Bunuel, a Surrealist to the end, famously said; "Where is the kindness and intelligence that will save us?"

Meanwhile, Banksy makes bank and incites no one except to pull out their pocketbook, as he himself documents.

Last, the Surrealists loved Paris, famously documented in Aragon's classic Paris Peasant. They reveled in late night walks around their beloved city, thinking and planning ways to further scandalize what they saw as a lost society. So in parting, here's Richard Hawley's song that opens and closes the film, The Streets are Ours.

Don't Mention it

The classic con game 3 card monte employs one of the most effective social engineering tactics ever devised; the shill. When you think about what a shill does it's really simple and highly effective; s/he instills confidence (and thus the "con" in "con game") in the sucker. This is an advanced level of mis-direction as opposed to lying through pr.

Now with the SEC trotting out its dog and pony "let's get Goldman" script, the stage is set for yet another round of pr. My prediction? In the endgame, Goldman will settle but get back to business, "business" defined in Goldman terms as "raping and pillaging."

The crux of the case is the counter bets that Goldman took out against the financial packages poisoned by the sub-primes - basically, shorting them, but not in the traditional stock market kindergarten way, but in "sophisticated" schemes called CDSs, or credit default swaps. Goldman's argument is that they were simply protecting their clients' interests, while the SEC is crying "foul!" in the form of fraud by not having disclosed the counter bets to buyers. Whatever you think of this, once again, uncle scam is employing dirty tricks, this time in the form of our old friend mis-direction. Here's the set up...

While everyone from the NY Times to the WSJ to the market (as of this, Goldman's down, of course, but that'll change) is reporting on the basis of this case, what of John Paulson?He's the hedge fund manager who got Goldman - and others - to sell him shorts based upon on the sub-prime loan packages that he cherry-picked! And in case you don't know, his fund made a killing; six billion or so.

The SEC has said Paulson is not being indicted because he didn't defraud investors, and therefore they are going after Goldman. But here's my question; Say you steal a truck loaded up with large flat panel LED TVs on delivery. You sell me two at 500 bucks a piece.

Now let's say the cops bust you, and you were dumb enough to keep a log of all your customers. They find it and trace me down. They come to my crib, have a search warrant and compare the serial numbers on a master list from the delivery company to my TV; there's a match. Do I get to keep my TV, even though I did nothing wrong?

Now, six billion is small in the EM08 landscape. But whose money was invested? One of the big problems facing us is the dis-entangling (in real estate speak, this is called "chain of title") of the sub-prime loan packages, tracing their steps backwards to find out just where they originated. Many have been so over-leveraged that the originating party/ies have simply disappeared under a convoluted paper blizzard. It makes the tax code look cute.

In a similar way, and if this investigation were to be conducted with thoroughness let alone justice, we'd put the faces of real people on that six billion that Goldman and Paulson sold down the river. They'll never be made whole much less more than whole to the extent the banks took our bailout money and lent it back to us by buying T bills.

But the SEC (and DoJ) has already given Paulson a pass. It's a dangerous message; cheat and win. But here's the rub; if the SEC is going after Goldman, then Paulson -- the architect of the deal -- shouldn't be able to keep his TV.

They Didn't Mean It

Now this is interesting; this article shows how perception is reality. The gist is that pain can be graded according to whether or not the receiver thinks the giver intended to hurt or not.

When we think about EM08 and the banks, isn't it interesting that they can admit their role which is pretty overwhelmingly undeniable, but that they say "I didn't know" or basically that it wasn't intentional? What about Joseph Cassano? "The man who crashed the world" has never admitted his key role in the CDS scams at the heart of the real estate bubble.

No one is guilty or they didn't know. It wasn't intentional, so therefore we don't burn down the house.

People think controlling the masses is done by force, and of course, that's what cops and armies are for. But before it comes to brute force, the battlefield of the mind is where combat takes place. It's not brainwashing, it's mind control. Don't laugh; Bernays knew this and so did Goebbels, and both were extremely successful. Uncle scam knows this too.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111307.htm

Pain Hurts More If Person Hurting You Means It

ScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2008) — Researchers at Harvard University have discovered that our experience of pain depends on whether we think someone caused the pain intentionally. In their study, participants who believed they were getting an electrical shock from another person on purpose, rather than accidentally, rated the very same shock as more painful. Participants seemed to get used to shocks that were delivered unintentionally, but those given on purpose had a fresh sting every time.

The research, published in the current issue of Psychological Science, was led by Kurt Gray, a graduate student in psychology, along with Daniel Wegner, professor of psychology.

It has long been known that our own mental states can alter the experience of pain, but these findings suggest that our perceptions of the mental states of others can also influence how we feel pain.

"This study shows that even if two harmful events are physically identical, the one delivered with the intention to hurt actually hurts more," says Gray. "Compare a slap from a friend as she tries to save us from a mosquito versus the same slap from a jilted lover. The first we shrug off instantly, while the second stings our cheek for the rest of the night."

The study's authors suggest that intended and unintended harm cause different amounts of pain because they differ in meaning.

"From decoding language to understanding gestures, the mind distills meaning from our social environment," says Gray. "An intended harm has a very different meaning than an accidental harm."

The study included 48 participants who were paired up with a partner who could administer to them either an audible tone or an electric shock. In the intentional condition, participants were shocked when their partner chose the shock option. In the unintentional condition, participants were shocked when their partner chose the tone option. Thus, in this condition, they only received a shock when their partner did not intend them to receive one. The computer display ensured that participants both knew their partner's choice and that a shock would be coming, to ensure the shock was not more surprising in the unintentional condition.

Despite identical shock voltage between conditions, those in the intentional condition rated the shocks as significantly more painful. Furthermore, those in the unintentional condition habituated to the pain, rating them as decreasingly painful, while those in the intentional condition continued to feel the full sting of pain.

Gray suggests that it may be evolutionarily adaptive for this difference in meaning to be represented as different amounts of pain.

"The more something hurts, the more likely we are to take notice and stop whatever is hurting us," he says. "If it's an accidental harm, chances are it's a one-time thing, and there's no need to do anything about it. If it's an intentional harm, however, it may be the first of many, so it's good to take notice and do something about it. It makes sense that our bodies and brains might amplify our experience of pain when we know that the pain could signal threats to our survival."

These findings speak to how people experience pain and negative life events. If negative events are seen as intended, they may hurt more. This helps to explain why torture is so excruciating – not only are torture techniques themselves exceptionally painful, but it's the thought that counts—and makes torture hurt more than mere pain.

On the other hand, if negative events are seen as unintended, they may hurt less. This may explain, in part, why people in abusive relationships sometimes continue to stay in them. By rationalizing that an abusive partner did not intend harm, some victims may reduce their experience of pain, which could make them less likely to leave the relationship and escape the abuse.

The research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Institute for Humane Studies.

The Oligarchy of Sports

As I listened to Artie Lange guesting on Bubba the Love Sponge, he was of course entertaining and, as usual, poignant. Toward the end Bubba, a big sports fan, asked fellow sports nut Artie if he'd gone for the Yankees' scheme; pay $20,000 to hold your season seats for the new Yankee stadium. My transcription of that dialog - with edits - is as usual at the end of my rant.

Here's the scenario when I was a kid: I went to at least a half dozen to a dozen Laker games a season. There were so many future Hall of Fame-rs then, and I saw them all; Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Wilt, Rick Barry, and my fave, Elgin Baylor... I am this old; I saw the Lakers play first at the Sports Arena. I did that up until about the age of 12. Then they moved to a bigger arena.

Sports then weren't dominated by athletes looking to get paid for endorsing some jerkoff sugar water. I suppose with what little most of them made then I wouldn't begrudge them if they had. But the air was unassuming then, so much so that a kid could hang around after the game and get all of their autographs - save for Russell and Chamberlain who never signed - which I still have on programs socked away somewhere. With the move to the Forum in '67, things changed. Much nicer venue, higher prices - but still in the ghetto. Jack Kent Cook - who'd go on to own the Redskins (a horrible name) - was the money and the man behind the move.

My last great memory associated with the Lakers is '88, when they were going for the first back-to-back championship in 20 years since the Celts. We didn't think we had a chance at tickets, and I didn't want to hassle going to the box office with all of the yahoos and scalpers. But my friend Linda went and got two tickets - one for game 6, one for game 7. That's all they had, singles. She asked me which one I wanted, and I said she should pick since she was the one who went through the trouble; she took game 7.

Game six is my favorite sports experience. The Forum was packed, the game was a classic, and produced one of the most jaw-dropping performances I've ever witnessed by a human being:

One of Piston guard Isiah Thomas' career-defining performances came in Game 6. Despite badly twisting his ankle midway through the period, Thomas scored a still-NBA Finals record 25 third quarter points, as Detroit fell valiantly, 103-102, to the Lakers at the Forum.
-from the Wiki on the '88 Finals

At one point, when the Lakes - both teams really - were whipping the crowd into a frenzy, it got so loud that the young couple beside me who I'd befriended and I tried shouting to each other to no avail.

I think we got those seats for under 30 bucks each. They weren't great seats, but this was the Finals. It was history in the making. And it was a classic matchup.

Sports have provided so many moments seared into my being that to me, life is kind of colorless without them. I mean, I love art in all of its forms, but for my money, nothing matches the intensity and elation of sports at its best. Let alone really good books or docs on sports - HBO's Real Sports being some of the best filmmaking around. Then there's playing sports, because if you play consistently and long enough the odds are that you'll experience "the zone" at least a few times. That's a remarkable thing.

Just last year, Fish got tickets for the playoffs. It was the first round, Denver, and they were good seats through one of her company's clients. I hadn't been to the Staples Center in a few years for a Laker game, although I'd seen the Clippers a few times, but any team that has had Benoit Benjamin start for them, well, that doesn't count.

Sports today, the business of sports, like everything else, is about spamming you relentlessly to cram consumerism down your throat and up your ass. The sheer amount of wattage running all of the spam signs in Staples could power Kobe's ego for a week. And for me, a lifelong Laker fan who's been priced out but who helped build their fucking business, it's bittersweet at best.

I don't like Kobe, I think many have problems with him but are cowed because he's a superstar. But what else explains why Shaq - arguably the most dominant player in the league then - would leave when by my estimation they could have won 2 possibly even 3 more after already three-peating?

The Lakers of today are a name only, or a commodity, a thing that's used - for status, not for enjoying. There's a thrill when you hear a band that you like; but it's so much more when you see them play live. TV and sports are cool, but watching a live game, being in that atmosphere, particularly as a kid, it's indescribable. And I would have loved to share that with Renee, but the Lakers fucked the very fans who made them what they are.

And still, the Lakers of today are nothing like the great 80's or even the struggling 70's teams (with the exception of the '71 championship team which is really an extension of the 60's team), let alone the classic 60's. Today it's all very in your face crass, impersonal, all about money and that just kills what sports used to be about - the real fans enjoying their team. It's Lamar - pay me 14 mil and watch as I fuckin' disappear - Odom. It's Kobe jackin up 20 footers with the team standing around just watching, about as interesting to watch as the jerkoff business people in the corporate boxes sipping fuckin' chardonnay or whatever their lame-o candy asses like. It's depressing.

No, the Lakers, they've broken cardinal rule number one of the streets; don't forget where you came from.

Just like our government and these jerkoff corporations are giving a big "fuck you" to all those from the working class who had grandparents and older generations claw their way over and literally build this fucking country. My grandparents' generation for one are stomping and yelling from their graves, but it's one quality of being a complete fucknut that you can't have a conscience.

No, the Lakers, much like Artie Lange's Yankees, have given a great big resounding finger to us from the working class, the real fans, and opted for the Hollywood jerkoffs who take their blonde bimbo with the fake everything because the Laker game is where you go to be seen. It's sad; the Laker game has become a circle jerk beauty pageant. God forbid you should get distracted by a basketball game.

Oh, as Fish and I drove up to Staples for that playoff game, I saw what for me was the most astounding representation of just how lame sports are today. As we passed a parking lot right off of Fig, I believe, there was a small parking lot almost directly across from the arena. In the lot were nothing but Lexuses, Audis, Benzes, Beemers, Bentleys, limos... a sign read: $40.

Sports are supposed to be fun, not getting you to whip out your wallet to corporations. For god's sakes, it's supposed to be something working class kids can have in their otherwise deprived lives of not being able to shop on Montana Avenue, but these shitheads don't care. It's like the kid who comes to a marble game and wants all the marbles so that no one else can play except whom he deems. The league, owners and corporations have all conspired and now only the kids in Beverly Hills and Brentwood can go, or those with parents who have connections. It's just mean and sad.

What's become of the world?

From Bubba the Love Sponge, 3/20/09 – guest, Artie, at about 1:07:45; transcribed & edited by jp
Note: Artie's a multi-millionaire, and Bubba's not poor by any means. Still, their working class roots keep them grounded. Spice is Bubba's sidekick.

Bubba: Did you cough up the extra money, just the fuckin’ outlandish amount of money they’re making people lay down for a seat deposit for the new Yankee Stadium?

Artie: Unfortunately man, I did.

Bubba: My god. Can I ask at all what that seat deposit was?

A: Well I’m splittin’ it with uh…

B: (Astounded) Man…

A: …with two other guys who I’ve always split it with. My cut now… in the old stadium, I had amazing seats; I had five rows behind third base, and I had ‘em for ten years. And, uh, you know, throughout the World Series and everything, they cost me, I had ta lay out about twenty g’s. But, when the Yankees are good, you know, back then they cracked down on this now you can’t do it anymore because, you know, huh, the Yankess don’t want you scalping tickets, not because of any ethical reasons because they fuckin’

B: Resell ‘em!

A: Exactly. So they wrote me a letter threatening to take my fuckin’ tickets away because… to a legal scalper, no bullshit…

B: A ticket broker.

A: Yeah, a ticket broker. So, uhm, I was laying out twenty grand but back when they didn’t give a shit about that you could make money on the fuckin’ deal because it was like a part-time job, the Yankees were that good. So you’re not allowed to do that anymore, so obviously, I’m not gonna sell tickets to anybody, cuz fuck it.

B: You have the same seats or no?

A: Okay, twenty g’s for five rows behind third. In the new stadium, okay? I’m now ten rows behind third because five rows back are all corporations. You can’t even get near it.

B: Not even close, huh?

A: And, it would have been two hundred grand.

COLLECTIVE: OOOO!

B: AIG needs that bailout money to get those.

A: Yeah. That includes the vig they charged everybody…

B: Jesus…

A: So now, going back another five to seven rows, I’m like around the tenth or twelfth row, I gotta see, behind third, still downstairs, not bad, uh, I laid out… sixty five thousand.

COLLECTIVE: OH!

B: That was only one third.

A: Yeah.

B: That would make me no longer a Yankee fan.

A: And I did it reluctantly. I actually told my friend who I do it with all the time, I said you know what?, cuz I hate A Rod, I just don’t like the guy, uh you know, he’s got no rings with the Yanks yet…

B: Missing in October.

A: Right exactly. I said this on Letterman, I said I got no problem with A Rod doing steroids, but clearly he stops doing ‘em October first.

B: It’s the truth.

LAUGHTER

A: If you’re gonna do ‘em do ‘em all fuckin’ year brother. I mean, Jesus. So uh, I’m an underdog kinda guy too like you guys, the Yanks were the one frontrunner I always liked. But it’s even getting nauseating for me with the A Rod. You know Jeter doesn’t like him, uh, he’s out for a couple of months. I don’t care if Scott Brosius is drunk with a big huge gut somewhere, and I don’t know if he drinks at all, I’m just saying if he is somewhere, just bring him back. I like Brosius better. Bring back Graig Nettles who I know drinks, I love Nettles, he’s the best! Dig up Clete Boyer’s bones, 1960’s guy who fuckin’ died.

B: Just prop him up there.

A: So … I almost said, “You know what? Fuck these motherfuckers”…

Spice: Cuz they’re fuckin’ the fans is what they’re doin’.

A: And I have a venue to say it. I almost wanted to say “Fuck the tickets” and then get on the air …

B: And say it.

A: …and say “Look, this is why I’m not doin’ it.”

B: Yeah. It’s highway fuckin’ robbery.

S: If you’re an average fan no way can you go to the game.

A: My old man climbed roofs for a livin’ man, I don’t think he ever made sixty five thousand dollars in a year, and he’s the one who got me into the Yankees, that’s what the Yankees were born on.

B: But you know, your dad, back in the day, he could still take his boy to the ball game.

A: That’s what I’m saying.

S: None of these corporate assholes are true Yankees fans from back in the day.

A: The story I tell in the book about when [my dad] threw me on the field, the Reggie Jackson game…

B: I remember that!

S: That’s great…

A: Now we sent away for tickets, World Series game, game six, he sent away in the middle of the season, cuz the Yanks had played the Reds in the series, got killed the year before, but, he took a chance, he said, “You know what? I’m gonna send away through the mail for tickets.” We got nosebleed seats cuz they came through the mail, last row of the upper deck behind third base. I remember Graig Nettles looked like a speck – not a spic, a speck – it was the South Bronx. So I can remember, that’s where a guy, right in front of my father, you talk about a different time, the ‘70’s, a guy asked me to hold his beer while he rolled a joint.

LAUGHTER

A: Ten years old I had a contact high cost my old man $80 in hot dogs. I still have those ticket stubs, it’s a shit seat, last row the upper deck, but this is a World Series game. TEN BUCKS A PIECE.

B: Yep!

S: God that’s cool…

B: And a guy could afford to take your boy to the ball game.

A: Oh! You know who you see at the Yankees games now? Guys in suits who get there in the third inning and leave in the seventh…

B: With their fuckin’ Blackberrys...

A: Or some rich kid in a polo shirt with khaki fuckin’ shorts whatever the fuck…

B: Penny loafers…

A: Right. In the ‘70’s and even into the mid 80’s you saw guys who just worked for the city somewhere, you saw a fireman, a cop, a plumber. Or guys like my father, I remember my father taking me to a Yankee game right from work. He had sheet rock on his arm and insulation, and he’d wash up in the fuckin’ sink at Yankee Stadium, and hold me up to take a piss in the sink.
…
A: But yeah, that’s it man. Can you believe that? Sixty five g’s I’m payin’. And I’m not allowed to sell ‘em anymore. I mean they’re just rape… They’re telling the blue collar fan to fuck off, and the Jets and the Giants both did it too. It’s a fuckin’ shame.

The Third War is the First War

Matt Taibbi continues to relentlessly tail the shitheads trashing everything, and we're better off for it.

For starters, the timing of Jamie's cryin' is hilarious in light of Taibbi's expose'.

Jamie Dimon Complains About Demonization of MegaBanks

One has to wonder whether anyone in a position of influence really believes what he is selling. At best, Jamie Dimon’s defense of too big to fail banks like his own JP Morgan is a vivid illustration of Upton Sinclair’s saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” But Dimon’s patently self-serving argument is more likely part of a broader industry push to try to win over the public it just looted.*

Then, at the top he cites bringing home the (worst of the) third world, the horrible degradation of poverty. Aside from third world poverty's outcome as a result of historical forces, I can tell you that this reminded me of a conversation I had with Greg, who's black and from North Carolina; he's seen his share of poor ass country folks living off of dimes.

When he'd been here a while, we had a discussion about LA's notorious Skid Row section, as poor and urban mean as it gets. Day by day it's more impossible to cope said the Ghetto Boys, and the horror stories about "the row" pile up and are added to on a consistent basis like stats on a war, and it hits women and children hardest. Of course, the mainstream media doesn't give a fig about Skid Row habitues. They're the walking dead, with no hope in sight. It's why one of LA's darkest secrets has its name; they've hit the skids.

Now, I'm an old man, and for as long as I can remember, Skid Row's always been there, tucked just south of downtown. The downtown of "revitalization" in the form of a bazillion condos with that stupid "Starbucksy" feel, no doubt one of the faces of the massive influx of debt money that was the land futures heyday before EM08.

But this is about main street, not its dirty cousin. And if Michael Lewis continues to weave his writing spell as the king of the jungle writer on EM08, then Matt Taibbi is the new lion. To inject another metaphor, Lewis is our elder statesman but Taibbi's our rock star. In this most insane of times, it's breathtaking to watch these two - and a few others - putting it out there. "Disaster journalism," to steal from Naoimi Klein, or better yet, the poetry of disaster. Given the absurdity of the mainstream media's EM08 coverage we owe these two a hat tip.

Kudos, too, to Jan Wenner and RS for keeping it going.

One last thing; if nothing else, the Net, and specifically the blogosphere, are already validating the phrase citizen journalism. Granted, there are still a lot of hurdles to be overcome, such as investigative journalism that necessitates traveling and spending a lot of money. So, it's not that citizen journalists are good at discovery, but in terms of deciphering what's going on with EM08, the citizen journalists are so out in front of the mainstream media it's remarkable; one need only look at the sample of recommended writers here in the sidebar. You may not understand everything, but the key is sticking with it, because otherwise you're just a fish, or the more rude gambling term, a sucker. And in these historic times, to do nothing is to lay the biggest sucker bet of all.
======================

* I suggest you check out Yves Smith's article at Naked Capitalism, yet another citizen journalist/blogger who's out in front of the mainstream media. This deconstruction of Jamie's cryin' by Yves is pretty great, point by point. She and others like "Tyler Durden" of Zero Hedge are fighting the info war on the right side - our side. They can be pretty hard core on the economics as they're for "the professional investing public," but their messages are right on - don't believe the hype and prepare for the coming meltdown, which is just more EM08 growth.


URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street

Rollingstone.com

Looting Main Street
How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 31, 2010 8:15 AM

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.

Birmingham became the poster child for a new kind of giant-scale financial fraud, one that would threaten the financial stability not only of cities and counties all across America, but even those of entire countries like Greece. While for many Americans the financial crisis remains an abstraction, a confusing mess of complex transactions that took place on a cloud high above Manhattan sometime in the mid-2000s, in Jefferson County you can actually see the rank criminality of the crisis economy with your own eyes; the monster sticks his head all the way out of the water. Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — "the price of doing business," as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.

Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October, right around the time that Lisa Pack went back to work at reduced hours, Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. "It never gets back to JP Morgan," says Pack.

If you want to get all Glenn Beck about it, you could lay the blame for this entire mess at the feet of weepy, tree-hugging environmentalists. It all started with the Cahaba River, the longest free-flowing river in the state of Alabama. The tributary, which winds its way through Birmingham before turning diagonally to empty out near Selma, is home to more types of fish per mile than any other river in America and shelters 64 rare and imperiled species of plants and animals. It's also the source of one of the worst municipal financial disasters in American history.

Back in the early 1990s, the county's sewer system was so antiquated that it was leaking raw sewage directly into the Cahaba, which also supplies the area with its drinking water. Joined by well — intentioned citizens from the Cahaba River Society, the EPA sued the county to force it to comply with the Clean Water Act. In 1996, county commissioners signed a now-infamous consent decree agreeing not just to fix the leaky pipes but to eliminate all sewer overflows — a near-impossible standard that required the county to build the most elaborate, ecofriendly, expensive sewer system in the history of the universe. It was like ordering a small town in Florida that gets a snowstorm once every five years to build a billion-dollar fleet of snowplows.

The original cost estimates for the new sewer system were as low as $250 million. But in a wondrous demonstration of the possibilities of small-town graft and contract-padding, the price tag quickly swelled to more than $3 billion. County commissioners were literally pocketing wads of cash from builders and engineers and other contractors eager to get in on the project, while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs. Jefferson County, in effect, became one giant, TV-stealing, unemployed drug addict who borrowed a million dollars to buy the mother of all McMansions — and just as it did during the housing bubble, Wall Street made a business of keeping the crook in his house. As one county commissioner put it, "We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a million-dollar mortgage."

To reassure lenders that the county would pay its mortgage, commissioners gave the finance director — an unelected official appointed by the president of the commission — the power to automatically raise sewer rates to meet payments on the debt. The move brought in billions in financing, but it also painted commissioners into a corner. If costs continued to rise — and with practically every contractor in Alabama sticking his fingers on the scale, they were rising fast — officials would be faced with automatic rate increases that would piss off their voters. (By 2003, annual interest on the sewer deal had reached $90 million.) So the commission reached out to Wall Street, looking for creative financing tools that would allow it to reduce the county's staggering debt payments.

Wall Street was happy to help. First, it employed the same trick it used to fuel the housing crisis: It switched the county from a fixed rate on the bonds it had issued to finance the sewer deal to an adjustable rate. The refinancing meant lower interest payments for a couple of years — followed by the risk of even larger payments down the road. The move enabled county commissioners to postpone the problem for an election season or two, kicking it to a group of future commissioners who would inevitably have to pay the real freight.

But then Wall Street got really creative. Having switched the county to a variable interest rate, it offered commissioners a crazy deal: For an extra fee, the banks said, we'll allow you to keep paying a fixed rate on your debt to us. In return, we'll give you a variable amount each month that you can use to pay off all that variable-rate interest you owe to bondholders.

In financial terms, this is known as a synthetic rate swap — the spidery creature you might have read about playing a role in bringing down places like Greece and Milan. On paper, it made sense: The county got the stability of a fixed rate, while paying Wall Street to assume the risk of the variable rates on its bonds. That's the synthetic part. The trouble lies in the rate swap. The deal only works if the two variable rates — the one you get from the bank, and the one you owe to bondholders — actually match. It's like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don't do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.

Not unless you're a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.

In a small office in a federal building in downtown Birmingham, just blocks from where civil rights demonstrators shut down the city in 1963, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Martin points out the window. He's pointing in the direction of the Tutwiler Hotel, once home to one of the grandest ballrooms in the South but now part of the Hampton Inn chain.

"It was right around the corner here, at the hotel," Martin says. "That's where they met — that's where this all started."

They means Charles LeCroy and Bill Blount, the two principals in what would become the most important of all the corruption cases in Jefferson County. LeCroy was a banker for JP Morgan, serving as managing director of the bank's southeast regional office. Blount was an Alabama wheeler-dealer with close friends on the county commission. For years, when Wall Street banks wanted to do business with municipalities, whether for bond issues or rate swaps, it was standard practice to reach out to a local sleazeball like Blount and pay him a shitload of money to help seal the deal. "Banks would pay some local consultant, and the consultant would then funnel money to the politician making the decision," says Christopher Taylor, the former head of the board that regulates municipal borrowing. Back in the 1990s, Taylor pushed through a ban on such backdoor bribery. He also passed a ban on bankers contributing directly to politicians they do business with — a move that sparked a lawsuit by one aggrieved sleazeball, who argued that halting such legalized graft violated his First Amendment rights. The name of that pissed-off banker? "It was the one and only Bill Blount," Taylor says with a laugh.

Blount is a stocky, stubby-fingered Southerner with glasses and a pale, pinched face — if Norman Rockwell had ever done a painting titled "Small-Town Accountant Taking Enormous Dump," it would look just like Blount. LeCroy, his sugar daddy at JP Morgan, is a tall, bloodless, crisply dressed corporate operator with a shiny bald head and silver side patches — a cross between Skeletor and Michael Stipe.

The scheme they operated went something like this: LeCroy paid Blount millions of dollars, and Blount turned around and used the money to buy lavish gifts for his close friend Larry Langford, the now-convicted Birmingham mayor who at the time had just been elected president of the county commission. (At one point Blount took Langford on a shopping spree in New York, putting $3,290 worth of clothes from Zegna on his credit card.) Langford then signed off on one after another of the deadly swap deals being pushed by LeCroy. Every time the county refinanced its sewer debt, JP Morgan made millions of dollars in fees. Even more lucrative, each of the swap contracts contained clauses that mandated all sorts of penalties and payments in the event that something went wrong with the deal. In the mortgage business, this process is known as churning: You keep coming back over and over to refinance, and they keep "churning" you for more and more fees. "The transactions were complex, but the scheme was simple," said Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement for the SEC. "Senior JP Morgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees."

Given the shitload of money to be made on the refinancing deals, JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. "Look," the commissioners told him, "if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms." LeCroy didn't blink. "Whatever you want," he told them. "If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much."

Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.

The solution they came up with was an extraordinary one: JP Morgan cut a separate deal with Goldman, paying the bank $3 million to fuck off, with Blount taking a $300,000 cut of the side deal. Suddenly Goldman was out and JP Morgan was sitting in Langford's lap. In another conversation caught on tape, LeCroy joked that the deal was his "philanthropic work," since the payoff amounted to a "charitable donation to Goldman Sachs" in return for "taking no risk."

That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. "This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," says Taylor, the former regulator.

With Goldman out of the way, JP Morgan won the right to do a $1.1 billion bond offering — switching Jefferson County out of fixed-rate debt into variable-rate debt — and also did a corresponding $1.1 billion deal for a synthetic rate swap. The very same day the transaction was concluded, in May 2003, LeCroy had dinner with Langford and struck a deal to do yet another bond-and-swap transaction of roughly the same size. This time, the terms of the payoff were spelled out more explicitly. In a hilarious phone call between LeCroy and Douglas MacFaddin, another JP Morgan official, the two bankers groaned aloud about how much it was going to cost to satisfy Blount:

LeCroy: I said, "Commissioner Langford, I'll do that because that's your suggestion, but you gotta help us keep him under control. Because when you give that guy a hand, he takes your arm." You know?

MacFaddin: [Laughing] Yeah, you end up in the wood-chipper.

All told, JP Morgan ended up paying Blount nearly $3 million for "performing no known services," in the words of the SEC. In at least one of the deals, Blount made upward of 15 percent of JP Morgan's entire fee. When I ask Taylor what a legitimate consultant might earn in such a circumstance, he laughs. "What's a 'legitimate consultant' in a case like this? He made this money for doing jack shit."

As the tapes of LeCroy's calls show, even officials at JP Morgan were incredulous at the money being funneled to Blount. "How does he get 15 percent?" one associate at the bank asks LeCroy. "For doing what? For not messing with us?"

"Not messing with us," LeCroy agrees. "It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal."

That's putting it mildly: The deals wound up being the largest swap agreements in JP Morgan's history. Making matters worse, the payoffs didn't even wind up costing the bank a dime. As the SEC explained in a statement on the scam, JP Morgan "passed on the cost of the unlawful payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions." In other words, not only did the bank bribe local politicians to take the sucky deal, they got local taxpayers to pay for the bribes. And because Jefferson County had no idea what kind of deal it was getting on the swaps, JP Morgan could basically charge whatever it wanted. According to an analysis of the swap deals commissioned by the county in 2007, taxpayers had been overcharged at least $93 million on the transactions.

JP Morgan was far from alone in the scam: Virtually everyone doing business in Jefferson County was on the take. Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blount in their scramble to do business with the county. In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 "arranger's fee." At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners. "If you go into the county courthouse," says Michael Morrison, a planner who works for the county, "there's a gallery of past commissioners on the wall. On the top row, every single one of 'em but two has been investigated, indicted or convicted. It's a joke."

The crazy thing is that such arrangements — where some local scoundrel gets a massive fee for doing nothing but greasing the wheels with elected officials — have been taking place all over the country. In Illinois, during the Upper Volta-esque era of Rod Blagojevich, a Republican political consultant named Robert Kjellander got 10 percent of the entire fee Bear Stearns earned doing a bond sale for the state pension fund. At the start of Obama's term, Bill Richardson's Cabinet appointment was derailed for a similar scheme when he was governor of New Mexico. Indeed, one reason that officials in Jefferson County didn't know that the swaps they were signing off on were shitty was because their adviser on the deals was a firm called CDR Financial Products, which is now accused of conspiring to overcharge dozens of cities in swap transactions. According to a federal antitrust lawsuit, CDR is basically a big-league version of Bill Blount — banks tossed money at the firm, which in turn advised local politicians that they were getting a good deal. "It was basically, you pay CDR, and CDR helps push the deal through," says Taylor.

In the end, though, all this bribery and graft was just the table-setter for the real disaster. In taking all those bribes and signing on to all those swaps, the commissioners in Jefferson County had ­basically started the clock on a financial time bomb that, sooner or later, had to explode. By continually refinancing to keep the county in its giant McMansion, the commission had managed to push into the future that inevitable day when the real bill would arrive in the mail. But that's where the mortgage analogy ends — because in one key area, a swap deal differs from a home mortgage. Imagine a mortgage that you have to keep on paying even after you sell your house. That's basically how a swap deal works. And Jefferson County had done 23 of them. At one point, they had more outstanding swaps than New York City.

Judgment Day was coming — just like it was for the Delaware River Port Authority, the Pennsylvania school system, the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, the states of Connecticut and Mississippi, the city of Milan and nearly 500 other municipalities in Italy, the country of Greece, and God knows who else. All of these places are now reeling under the weight of similarly elaborate and ill-advised swaps — and if what happened in Jefferson County is any guide, hoo boy. Because when the shit hit the fan in Birmingham, it really hit the fan.

For Jefferson County, the deal blew up in early 2008, when a dizzying array of penalties and other fine-print poison worked into the swap contracts started to kick in. The trouble began with the housing crash, which took down the insurance companies that had underwritten the county's bonds. That rendered the county's insurance worthless, triggering clauses in its swap contracts that required it to pay off more than $800 million of its debt in only four years, rather than 40. That, in turn, scared off private lenders, who were no longer ­interested in bidding on the county's bonds. The banks were forced to make up the difference — a service for which they charged enormous penalties. It was as if the county had missed a payment on its credit card and woke up the next morning to find its annual percentage rate jacked up to a million percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the annual payment on Jefferson County's debt jumped from $53 million to a whopping $636 million.

It gets worse. Remember the swap deal that Jefferson County did with JP Morgan, how the variable rates it got from the bank were supposed to match those it owed its bondholders? Well, they didn't. Most of the payments the county was receiving from JP Morgan were based on one set of interest rates (the London Interbank Exchange Rate), while the payments it owed to its bondholders followed a different set of rates (a municipal-bond index). Jefferson County was suddenly getting far less from JP Morgan, and owing tons more to bondholders. In other words, the bank and Bill Blount made tens of millions of dollars selling deals to local politicians that were not only completely defective, but blew the entire county to smithereens.

And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time "termination fees" of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.

Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.

The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There's a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance." And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.

[From Issue 1102 — April 15, 2010]