the great american bubble machine

Read it and weep. Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone.

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. . . .

"The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals."

going away

Going away to look at houses in Mexico on August 6. Can't wait. Maybe I'll come back with a beach house?

well fuck mark sanford

Okay. I was wrong. Forget this asshat, he's just like the rest of them. Nothing special in his love affair with the Argentinian woman, just another cheating man ~ a serial cheater at that ~ caught with his hand in the cookie jar. So to speak.

I was willing to allow that he'd had a post-Clinton conversion, motivated by finding his soulmate in the romantic Argentina. I imagined him having second thoughts about his judgmental proclamations, having met up with this woman eight years ago, beginning his slo-mo affair of the heart. But now he's confessed to involvement with at least three other women, assuring us, of course, that none of those relationships involved sex. Of course not.

Despite my naivete, my hopefulness, my wish that folks were better than they are, I do know hypocrites like this one. I mostly want to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially when it comes to love. But this guy, good lord. What a tool. I expect in his version, no sex means assfucking, cocksucking, and handjobs, just none of that other thing. You know, the real sex thing.

I was wrong. I admit it. He's an asshole. Same as it ever was. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If nothing changes, nothing changes. Nothing like a Rethug spouting the Bible while some woman's blowing him (or man, they're all about equal opportunity when it comes to cocksucking). I was wrong, so wrong. Fuck Mark Sanford.

***And Oh. My. God. If my husband stood up before the country, said Miss Argentina was his soulmate, then said he was going to "try to fall in love with his wife again?" Are you fucking kidding me? I would be so gone. Just try to find a wife to fall in love with. She's a Yankee, but she's living in the south, so she could be armed.. She ought to shoot his sorry ass.