Allspace in a Notshall

Just found out that Thomas Pynchon has a new novel on the way. Exciting news for us Pynchon fans. The book, titled Inherent Vice, will be his first book since 2006, which is remarkable, considering the fact he usually takes about 10 years to write a new book.

You can read about the new book and as well as an excerpt of it here.

Can’t wait to read the damn thing, but I’ve got some time.  Comes out 8/4/09.  Which is good, because I’m currently only 300 pages in to Against the Day.

But what a hell of a novel AtD is.  And because one of the story arcs takes place in Colorado, in the late 1800s mining towns, it immediately got a special place in my heart.

Any other Pynchon fans excited for the new one?

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• Thomas Pynchon’s Private Detective Hits Streets in August 2009 (mediabistro.com)

While I’m not a conspiracy nut, the more I read about things the more I tend to come to the opinion that there is more than meets the eye on just about everything (no shit?).  Sometimes, I can go full blown conspiratorial, especially when a very large sum of money transfers with such ease, especially now, as information about the TARP(+) (the “+” sign is my addition) bailout plan becomes more and more available.

Keep in mind that US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is not required to report where any of the TARP(+) money is going.

In F. William Engdahl‘s article “Citigroup Abyss“, he claims:

A case in point is the secretive manner in which Paulson has used the $700 billion in taxpayer funds voted him by a labile Congress in September. Early on Paulson put $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for his old firm, Goldman Sachs. However, if one compared the value of the equity share that $125 billion bought with the market price of those banks’ stock, US taxpayers have paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could have bought for $62.5 billion, according to a detailed analysis from Ron W. Bloom, an economist with the US United Steelworkers union, whose workers face devastating job losses were GM to fail.

That means half of the public’s money was a gift to Paulson’s Wall Street cronies.

What neither Paulson nor anyone in Washington is willing to reveal is the real truth behind the Citigroup bailout. By his and the Republican Bush Administration’s adamant earlier refusal to take an initial resolute action to immediately nationalize the nine or so largest troubled banks and reorganize the assets into some form of ‘good bank’ and ‘bad bank,’ similar to what the Government of Sweden did with what it called Securum, during its banking crisis in the early 1990’s, allowing the healthy banks to continue lending to the real economy so the economy could continue operating, while the State merely sat on the undervalued real estate assets of the Swedish banks for some months until the recovering economy made the assets again marketable to the private sector, Paulson and his ‘crony capitalists’ have turned a bad situation into a globally catastrophic one.

His apparent realization of the error of his initial refusal to nationalize, deeming it in effect ‘un-American’ came too late. When Paulson reversed policy on September 19 and presented the nine largest banks with an ultimatum to accept partial Government equity ownership, abandoning his original bizarre plan to merely buy up the toxic waste asset-backed securtities of the banks with his $700 billion TARP taxpayer money, he never revealed why.

Paulson soon realized the scale of crisis, largely triggered by his inept handling of the Lehman Brothers case, had created an impossible situation. Were Paulson to use the $700 billion to buy up toxic waste ABS assets from the select banks at today’s market price, the $700 billion would be far too little to take an estimated $2 trillion ($2,000 billion) in Asset Backed Securities off the books of the banks. The Levy Economics Institute states, ‘It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today — with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson’s entire $700 billion in one gulp.’

That reality is the real reason Paulson was forced to abandon his original ‘crony bailout’ TARP plan and opt to use some of his money to buy equity shares in the nine largest banks. That scheme as well is ‘dead on arrival.’ The dilemma he has created with his inept handling of the crisis is simple: If the US Government paid the true value for these nearly worthless assets, the banks would have to write down huge losses, and, as Levy economists put it, ‘announce to the world that they are insolvent.’ On the other hand, if Paulson raised the toxic waste purchase price high enough to protect the banks from losses, $700 billion ‘will buy only a tiny fraction of the ‘troubled’ assets.’ That is what the latest nationalization of Citigroup is about.

And the most important quote of the entire post:

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

Now onto Naomi Klein, who I believe is doing amazing work. Here is her interview with Democracy Now about the bailout, which she calls “Multi-trillion-dollar Crime Scene” and more about what I posted above:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyhC_zUaOhg&hl=en&fs=1]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcyyZo-Br9M]

And you can read her article about it in The Nation here.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. “None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression,” explained one unnamed Congressional aide.

How could you not start thinking like a conspiracy nut now? This is quite possibly the greatest swindle of all time. And there was nothing we could have done either, because to do so would be labeled unpatriotic; which is what Bush and co. has been doing for eight years.

Change?

It’s too much money for “change”.

***Update – 11-26-08***

$ 8.5 Trillion!
___________________________

Here’s some interesting news from Bloomberg via AfterDowningStreet about the Federal Government and what it’s doing with our money. Bolds are mine.

The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.

William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the two programs are unlikely to lose money. The bigger risk comes from rescuing companies perceived as “too big to fail,” he said.

The government committed $29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns Cos. by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and $122.8 billion in addition to TARP allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group Inc., once the world’s largest insurer. Yesterday, Citigroup Inc. received $306 billion of government guarantees for troubled mortgages and toxic assets. The Treasury Department also will inject $20 billion into the bank after its stock fell 60 percent last week.

Read the whole thing here.

Click the pic to go to The Economist website.

Do you think the government is actually going to give these three automakers money?

An article in last week’s Economist said that if 50% of Detroit’s production was to fail, 2.5 million jobs would be lost:

Mr Cole’s firm has modeled a scenario in which Detroit’s production falls by 50%. He estimates that in the first year that would cost 2.5m jobs: 240,000 from the carmakers themselves; 795,000 from suppliers and 1.4m from other firms indirectly affected. The cost in transfer payments and lost taxes would exceed $100 billion over three years. Some of Mr Cole’s assumptions are likely to be too pessimistic, but his blood-curdling forecast and others like it have helped to convince legislators that the $50 billion of help that the carmakers are asking for would be cheap at the price.

That, on top of an already rising unemployment rate sounds rather scary.

Here’s an article from CNBC stating that claims for jobless benefits rose to their highest point in 15 years.

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits surged last week to their highest level in 16 years, Labor Department data showed on Thursday, as a harsh economic environment forces employers to cut back on hiring.

Initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits were a seasonally adjusted 542,000 in the week ended Nov. 15 from a revised 515,000 the previous week. That was higher than analysts’ forecast for a reading of 505,000 new claims.

The latest data has added to fears that the U.S. economy faces a deep recession and paints a gloomy outlook for the labor market.

“It means we’re probably facing another payroll employment report showing November job losses in the vicinity of 200,000.”

The four-week moving average of new jobless claims, a better gauge of underlying labor trends because it irons out week-to-week volatility, rose to 506,500 from 490,750 the week before, the highest since the start of 1983.

Continuing claims were 4.012 million in the week ended Nov. 8, the latest data available, up from 3.903 million the prior week and the highest since December 1982.

Analysts estimated so-called continued claims would be 3.92 million. The insured unemployment rate, a measure of the workforce receiving unemployment benefits, was 3.0 percent in the week ended Nov 8, rising from 2.9 percent the prior week.

This was the highest reading since June 2003.

What’s the answer?

Just started getting in to these guys’ music. I’m stunned. Haven’t been this impressed since The Mars Volta’s first album.

Here is Beyond the Pale off of Remedy Lane. Simply an amazing song.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EZhRBPE7HI]