Patty’s Neighborhood

by Ellen Brown

“Regular people know that they got done in by excesses on Wall Street, and they see a Democratic administration shoveling trillions of dollars to the same Wall Street banks that caused the mess. . . . What is overdue is a little bit of populist retribution against the people who brought down the system — and will bring it down again if the hegemony of the traders is not constrained.” --Economist Robert Kuttner arguing for a “Tobin tax”

In the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs is having a banner year. According to an October 16 article by Colin Barr on CNNMoney.com:

“While Goldman churned out $3 billion in profits in the third quarter, the economy shed 768,000 jobs, and home foreclosures set a new record. More than a million Americans have filed for bankruptcy this year, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. A September survey of state finances by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think tank found that state governments faced a collective $168 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2010. Goldman, by contrast, is sitting on $167 billion in cash . . . .”

Barr writes that Goldman’s “eye-popping profit” resulted “as revenue from trading rose fourfold from a year ago.” Really. Revenue from trading? Didn’t we bail out Goldman and the other Wall Street banks so they could make loans, take deposits, and keep our money safe?

...

Speeding Tickets to Slow Day Traders?

The fact that Wall Street’s speculative trades remain untaxed suggests a tidy way taxpayers could recover some of their billions in bailout money. The idea of taxing speculative trades was first proposed by Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin in the 1970s. But he acknowledged that the tax was unlikely to be implemented, because of the massive accounting problems involved. Today, however, modern technology has caught up to the challenge, and proposals for a “Tobin tax” are gaining traction. The proposals are very modest, ranging from .005% to 1% per trade, far less than you would pay in sales tax on a pair of shoes. For ordinary investors, who buy and sell stock only occasionally, the tax would hardly be felt. But high-speed speculative trades could be slowed up considerably. Wall Street traders compete to design trading programs that can move many shares in microseconds, allowing them to beat ordinary investors to the “buy” button and to manipulate markets for private gain.

Goldman Sachs admitted to this sort of market manipulation in a notorious incident last summer, in which the bank sued an ex-Goldman computer programmer for stealing its proprietary trading software. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti was quoted by Bloomberg as saying of the case:

“The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

The obvious implication was that Goldman has a program that allows it to manipulate markets in unfair ways. Bloomberg went on:

“The proprietary code lets the firm do ‘sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,’ prosecutors said in court papers. The trades generate ‘many millions of dollars’ each year.”

Those many millions of dollars are coming out of the pockets of ordinary investors, who are being beaten to the punch by sophisticated computer programs. As one blogger mused:

“Why do we have a financial system? I mean, much of its activity looks an awful lot like gambling, and gambling is not exactly a constructive endeavor. In fact, many people would call gambling destructive, which is why it is generally illegal. . . .

“What makes Goldman Sachs et. al. so evil is that they offer vast wealth to our society’s best and brightest in exchange for spending their lives being non-productive. I want our geniuses to be proving theorems and curing cancer and developing fusion reactors, not designing algorithms to flip billions of shares in microseconds.”

Gambling is an addiction, and the addicted need help. A tax on these microsecond trades could sober up Wall Street addicts and return them to productive labor, and transform Wall Street from an out-of-control casino back into a place where investors pledge their capital for the development of useful products.

...

Read the whole article.

A Pilgrimage to the Altar of Saint Helga

(for Andrew Wyeth)

But First Lunch

This room is a valley of flickering
firefly tumbleweed lights
between tall buildings

Lusty Lady – All Clothing 100% Off

winks the sign across the street

My son has found

a numerical pattern in the blinks

We are here to see Wyeth's Lady

clothed and unclothed

Helga in her incarnations

but first lunch

The waiter looks like Groucho Marx

Hear the sound of over fifty spoons and forks

the chatter of the crowd

my children's voices

Seeing Helga

We see Helga floating on velvet crush

her nighttime lake

Little trout of light swim

her body tide-pools

We see her in her Austrian coat

standing for hours in the snow

with great discipline

We see her with her braids

the nape of her neck naked

where spine joins brain 

a white triangle exposed

holy peephole

We see her smile creases

her blue eyes

slips of horizon over wild grass

and her hair

you can feel it

the soft order in those braids

We go home in dark and rain

the autumn trees light our path

every leaf

a flame

in a lantern

Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 10/15/2009

I ordered new carpet today for all the bedrooms and Ben's office.
They will start on Tues. By then I should also have received the guest bedroom furniture and Ben's office furniture!
Once the carpet is in , and furniture put together and in place I'LL BE DONE!

Well, I'll still have things I'll want to add to the house, but we will be waiting till spring to do those since they are all outside!

Photos will follow carpet and furniture - I promise.

Maybe I ought to write an entire book this way, by thumb, on my phone. I could call it *The Phone Book.* James Merrill crafted an epic poem from the sputterings of a Ouija board. That French guy blinked out his opus, then died. Theoretically, at least, the prose would be economical; though I have noticed I am willing to lapse into a sustained, trance-like state so as to capture each and every nuance of a mental composition. Until I become tired, and then--now--it suddenly seems tiresome and absurd.

Sent from my iPhone

Most of us call 'em leftovers. Because some people prefer not to eat food they consider "old" my mum decided to rebrand them as "plan aheads".

Homefries from Sunday, pan heated with fresh spinach and smashed garlic. It's amazing how much spinach reduces when cooked; one of my fav ways to consume my quota of green leafys.

Because I think I bought the wrong size. Or it doesn't match the rest of my decor.

This is me after a day spent in the attic. Yes, I'm wearing a bandanna, goggles, dust mask, and a head lamp. It's fricking dark up there. And eerily quiet. And full of moon dust-like insulation. And pixies. But I wasn't supposed to tell anybody about the pixies.

Oh, right, what was I doing up there? Installing ceiling fan braces. There are few home features I hate more than wobbly or rattly ceiling fans, so I believe in attaching them to serious braces fastened to the studs with heavy deck screws. Also, I love ceiling fans. I'm installing them in the bedroom, the office, the living room, and the kitchen. I'd install one in the dining room, but that just seems like overkill.

To prepare for this adventure, I loaded up my backpack with all the tools I thought I might possibly need for the adventure, including my newly purchased cordless drill. I don't own 200 feet of extension cord, so I figured that would come in handy. I should have taken snacks.

The kitchen was easy. I had to enlarge the hole in the ceiling a bit to accommodate a 4-inch electrical box, which is standard for ceiling fan braces, but the brace went in easily. From there, I crawled to the pantry, where I installed a new electrical box, and ran the wiring to the light switch. Then I schlepped over to the office, dragging all my supplies and my plywood platform with me. (Because squatting on joists for hours at a time is unpleasant, it's better to have somewhere to sit.) Once again, the hole in the ceiling had to be enlarged via drill and hand saw. Then I had to shim one end of the brace to make it level, but it went in easily enough.

After that I slithered over to the bathroom to repair a hole in the ceiling and install a new electrical box. Seeing a trend? Yes, most of the light fixtures in the house had been attached directly to the ceiling without the benefit of a box. While doing that, I realized I'd forgotten a box to install in the hallway. And it was getting dark. And the dining room light fixture opening was in the wrong place. I wasn't going to be able to get it all done in a day.

Still, I was dead-set on getting all the ceiling fan braces installed, so I persevered. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. I crept toward the bedroom, but as I felt about with my foot, digging through layers of blown insulation looking for the next ceiling joist, I found ... nothing. No joist. Not where it should have been anyway. In most modern houses, joists and studs are installed at 18-inch intervals, or sometimes 24-inch intervals. Things are slightly less predictable in old houses. I once lived in a house with 21-inch center studs and joists. How I discovered that, it's a long story.

This house, though, this house ... it mostly has 24-inch centers, except where it doesn't, namely in the bedroom and living room. There, the ceiling joists are 36 inches apart. Too far to install a ceiling fan brace. So I get to plan another day in the attic and this one will be a doozy. I'll have to drag a bunch of lumber up there and sister in some more joists, close enough together to support ceiling fans, and to provide a bit more stability in those ceilings.

Am I starting to regret buying this project house? Oddly enough, no. I'm kind of looking forward to the project. As sick as that is.

WTF! How many calorpes do you think are in this?

Especially when they're endlessly recursive. Sorry about that, but it does help so to get something up here in public that I'm responsible for, and that I can cross out in front of other people, too.

Today/night:

Today/night: