Here's a clip from Frontline's The Warning, focusing in on former CFTC chair Brooksley Born's attempts in vain to regulate derivatives during the Greenspan Era. For more background, see "Credit Crisis Cassandra," in the Washington Post last May.
Face it: Men are dogs. And the current CFTC chair, Gary Gensler, is just a little mutt, not the kind of shepherd that's needed. Born, on the other hand, was one tough and prescient bitch.
In the contest of scandalized governors, Mark Sanford has a clear edge over Eliot Spitzer. South Carolina's governor really had a thing going on that went beyond the physical: His Argentine lover, Maria, suggested in one of her emails that Marky Mark read Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence.
A girlfriend who takes a Greenspan autobiography to read on the beach — what's better than that?! It's clear that Mark and Maria had more scintillating conversations than New York governor Spitzer's negotiations with his hookers about the price of a blowjob.
But maybe Sanford should have read the Greenspan memoir before he started sparkin' with the woman since identified as Maria Belen Chapur.
At the very least, Sanford should have recalled that Greenspan famously raised the question of "irrational exuberance" way back in 1996. (Read about it in Gideon Haigh's excellent 2007 review of the Greenspan memoir here.)
Plenty of po-faced people swirling around this affair — Gawker's John Cook isn't one of them; he actually exhibits a sense of humor while charting the "million monkeys Googling" the name of Sanford's lover.
Sanford himself — an early critic of fellow horndog Bill Clinton's "moral legitimacy" — leads the po-faced parade, closely followed by 99 percent of all commentators and the remaining 1 percent of weak jokesters.
Sanford stood for the sanctity of hetero marriage, while abandoning his boys on Father's Day weekend so he could screw the pooch in Argentina. All Spitzer did was vigorously prosecute prostitutes while using them on the side. On the other hand, Spitzer dragged his wife on stage to try to spin his mortification. What's more po-faced than that?
In the aftermath of a market rally that now looks more and more like a "dead-cat bounce" (or a "Seinfeld rally") than a true sign of recovery, the blame game is intensifying.
AIG bonuses, Tim Geithner, Stewart vs. Cramer — that's entertainment. Now we have Barack Obama breaking new ground by becoming the first sitting president to grant an audience to Jay Leno's audience. And why not? Obama is cool and funny.
He's also the first president to fill out his March Madness NCAA brackets for ESPN. The nation's most powerful basketball player didn't just pick a winner, he filled out the whole damn bracket.
So which power center should be voted off the island: Wall Street or Washington?
A crowd of Wall Streeters listening to a debate on the issue this week blamed Washington more than themselves, of course.
But for entertaining quotes, see Nouriel Roubini's take on the debate. (And the transcript.)
Eternally glib, the NYU prof, sometimes known as the "party-boy economist," had this, among other things, to say:
"[Alan Greenspan] has been a creator of serial bubbles one after the other and when people expect to be bailed out then they behave accordingly, that's the Greenspan put.
We created a system which people expect, that the gains are going to be privatized, and the losses are going to be socialized; this is a welfare state for the rich, for the well-connected and for Wall Street. That's what happened, that's public policy."
Don't get pissed off, PETA. It's not a real cat, just as it wasn't a real rally. Investopedia gives a succinct definition of that term: "A temporary recovery from a prolonged decline or bear market, after which the market continues to fall."
As if Barack Obama's choice of Tim Geithner and other capitalists for crucial jobs doesn't clinch it, Billy Wharton's recent rap, "Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know," does:
To repeat what Wharton, editor of The Socialist, says, Obama's no socialist. Got it?
Ayn Rand aside, Obama is no socialist. Gathering around her such acolytes Alan Greenspan (who literally sat at her feet as a young intellectual), Rand preached directly against altruism and railed that anybody who showed the slightest altruistic tendencies was a socialist.
Read Wharton's piece here, from last Sunday's Washington Post.
Click on the above video for Mike Wallace's 1959 interview with Rand. Then take a look at these pieces:
• Wharton taking questions from readers the next morning in the Post.
• A riff that touches on the difference between socialism and Europe's popular brand of social democracy, in "Loosening Labour's golden straitjacket," in this morning's New Statesman (U.K.)
• Wharton's magazine, The Socialist — which you have to pay for.
If you're wondering why the Socialist Party in the U.S. is so tiny and politically impotent, go back to It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks.
The late Lipset was a stalwart of the anti-Stalinist left in his early days and a card-carrying Socialist. As he built a well-known career as a political sociologist, he quit the Socialists and moved to the center, frequently criticizing socialism. If you can't find this book, read Robert Dreyfuss's 2001 review in the American Prospect.
Then tell me that Barack Obama is a socialist. Compared with conservative Democrats like the Clintons, he's a Communist. Only in the conservative U.S. would anyone with the slightest sympathy for the working class be dubbed a "socialist." It didn't happen here? It never will happen: You can't even use the word "class" (as in "working class") without being branded a socialist.
Wharton's piece, incidentally, is funny and charming — especially considering that he's a dirty, rotten Socialist bent on sabotaging Wall Street, which incidentally just sabotaged itself without his help.
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