Tuesday, 4 October 2011
Afghans rock at first music festival in three decades
Bands from Australia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan served up a six-hour musical feast of blues, indie, electronica and death metal to hundreds of fans, many of whom had never seen live music before.
Sound Central was something new in a deeply conservative Muslim country where music was banned under the austere Taliban regime. Even now music shops are attacked in some cities and musicians taunted for their clothes or hair.
The festival retained a distinctly Afghan accent, with alcohol banned, kebabs the only snacks and a respect for strong religious values amid the rock and roll.
Bands left the stage and the microphones were turned off twice in the late afternoon to allow the call to prayer to sound out uninterrupted from nearby mosques.
"Where I live, there's nothing like this. I heard about it so I had to come," said Ahmad Shah, dressed in a traditional white shalwar kameez and waistcoat, who traveled from Kandahar, a southern city roiled by insurgent violence.
"I came to escape the cancer of the Taliban and this makes a refreshing change." Violence is at its worst in Afghanistan since U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.
Young Afghans lunged toward the stage, jumping and thrusting their arms into the air to the sound of local band White Page, and the handful of security guards were overwhelmed.
The crowd briefly parted when one man in jeans and a tight t-shirt took to the floor for an impromptu burst of back flips and break-dancing.
The festival was held under tight security in a corner of picturesque Babur Gardens, a normally tranquil park surrounding the centuries-old tomb of Babur, the first Mughal emperor.
The date and venue was kept a closely guarded secret until the last moment to ward off the chance of an insurgent attack.
Despite the secrecy, the concert attracted more than 450 paid-up revelers and scores more trickled in from street markets outside. A few elderly men with turbans and long beards appeared taken aback, but not entirely disapproving.
CHANGE THE WORLD
The crowd's enthusiasm persuaded even security staff and police to join in, nodding and moving their legs in time with the beat.
Loud cheers erupted when singer Sabrina Ablyaskina of Uzbek band Tears of the Sun jumped, gyrated and screamed into the microphone: "Kabul, my new friends -- let's rock!"
Tears of the Sun, now recording their sixth album, said they were surprised by the event's success.
"We didn't expect this crowd -- it's amazing, such energy," Ablyaskina told Reuters. "We love Kabul, more and more every day and we'll be coming back again, of course."
Guitarist Nikita Makapenko said: "Rock and roll will change the world, and we hope it will change Afghanistan too. This is historic, and it's just the beginning."
Sound Central was the brainchild of Travis Beard, an Australian photojournalist who joined a band when he moved to Kabul and was inspired by the talent and dedication of local musicians.
In the run-up to the festival, he held workshops to nurture the local talent showcased by Sound Central, and underground concerts to build the buzz and help bands rehearse.
The festival seemed to have served his goal of not just providing a day's entertainment, but kindling a love for modern music among young Afghans.
"We heard about the music festival from the radio, and when my friend asked whether we should go, I said 'Why not?'," said Lauria, a 19-year-old university student dressed in a bright headscarf, jeans and strappy sandals.
"This is great. I hope we can see more of it in Kabul," she said.
Martin Petty @'Reuters'
The Torrid Romantic Life of Kim Jong-il
Kim Ok, Song Hye-rim and Ko Yong-hui
Yun Hye-yong was a woman beyond the reach even of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. Yun, the lead singer of Kim's former favorite band Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, was brutally executed after she spurned Kim's persistent advances and fell in love with another man.Or so claims Chang Jin-song, an author formerly affiliated with the North Korean Workers' Party, in "Kim Jong-il's Last Woman." Published in May, it is an epic poem that details Kim's private life and inside story of his regime based on the true story of the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble.
According to the book, Kim ordered Yun Hye-yong's songs to be used for the mass gymnastic performance "Arirang," and attended a concert with her on his birthday. Although many women had found the dictator's favor before, none had ever merited a place next to him at a public event. Kim even sent officials to Europe to buy her stage costumes and accessories. Yet Yun loved the band's pianist. When Kim's agents discovered their relationship by tapping her phone, Yun jumped from the roof of Mokran House, an official banquet hall, with her lover. Although the man died instantly, Kim ordered his men to kill Yun after resuscitating her by any means. She was eventually executed at the end of 2003, while still in coma.
Kim Ok, another of Kim's paramours, was introduced in the South Korean media in July 2006 as his fourth wife. However, the woman whom the media named "Kim Ok" was not the woman who features in a book by Kenji Fujimoto, Kim Jong-il's former personal chef. According to the June issue of the Monthly Chosun, "Kim Ok was in fact Kim Son-ok, a former aide to Jo Myong-rok, the first vice chairman of North Korea's National Defense Commission.
The real Kim Ok was the pianist of Wangjaesan Light Music Band and a graduate of Kumsong Senior Middle School, known for extensively training Kim's private entertainers. Kim loved her more for her bold personality and sharp wit than her looks, and granted her the privilege of speaking informally to him. To Kim, long used to absolute obedience to his authority, Kim Ok's gestures would've appeared refreshing.
Although Kim's former wives Song Hye-rim and Ko Yong-hui were artists, they were civilians to begin with, not women exclusively trained to entertain Kim. But Kim Ok had been selected for such a purpose, and often entertained Kim at the orgies he held with his inner circle. It would have been unthinkable, therefore, for Kim to make Kim Ok his official wife.
Most women with whom Kim was involved were celebrities. It is widely known that he moved in with the actress Song Hye-rim after abandoning his fiancé Kim Yong-sook. Hong Yong-hui, who was bestowed the title of "distinguished actress" at the age of 18, or Woo In-hui, an actress publicly executed for openly speaking about her relationship with Kim, were among many celebrities who had become Kim's paramours.
@'The Chosun Ilbo'
Kim Jong-Il’s Teenage Grandson Is Having a Facebook Scandal
Radiohead Take Over Boiler Room
For anyone unfamiliar with the Boiler Room, it's a watch-from-your-computer club music event that's taken the net by storm over the last nine months or so; to learn more, read Angus Finlayson's recent comment piece, where he very adeptly frames it as 'Top Of The Pops for the UStream generation'.
Tickets are invite only, but you can stream the entire show live from the Boiler Room website - it runs from 8-11pm GMT on October 11th.
Via
Monday, 3 October 2011
Brian Eno: Success ruins artists
His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. “Drums Between the Bells” is his latest release.
David Mitchell, born in 1969, is the acclaimed, award-winning author of the novels “Ghostwritten” (1999), “Number9Dream” (2001), “Cloud Atlas” (2004) — the latter two shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — “Black Swan Green” (2006), and “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (2010). Granta selected him as one of the best young British novelists, and he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, which credited him with having “created the 21st century novel.” Mitchell was raised in England, spent many years teaching and writing in Japan, and presently lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.
Mitchell and Eno were fans and admirers of each other before the idea for this conversation came about, and spoke for the first time over email. David Mitchell asked questions, and Brian Eno provided answers.
I. NO SONG, NO BEAT,
NO MELODY, NO MOVEMENT
Do you agree that no new genre is ever invented, but rather hybridized from something that was there before? That infallible source Wikipedia credits you with coining the phrase ambient music. If that’s so, from what was ambient music cross-pollinated?
Yes, nothing starts from nowhere. My version of ambient was the coalescence of lots of different streams. Some of them were musical, others not. The musical threads I picked up would include Satie, of course, but also the early experiments of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and the other minimalist composers of the late ’60s — all of whom were looking at music as a “steady state” rather than a narrative experience. Also, I would have to add that it was the slow movements of classical works that appealed to me most — the parts where less was happening.
But really, the idea arose out of the new possibilities of the medium of recording. I listened with interest to the work of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek and George Martin because I realized that they were doing things with music that could be described as sound painting. For me, trained as a painter, this was exciting: Music was being made like paintings were made, adding and subtracting, manipulating colors, built up over a period of time rather than performed in one sitting. Separated from performance, recorded sound had become a malleable material, like paint or clay. And the results of this process were pointing toward a type of music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.
The technologies of this manipulation were what I came to specialize in, and they multiply every week, so quite a lot of my time is spent playing with new technology to see what it can do that could never be done before.
What does Doctor Pangloss have to say about how 21st-century human ingenuity is being channeled into inventing juicy gizmos like the iPad, instead of preparing for a world without oil, which, if even conservative estimates are correct, will be upon us by the time my daughter is in her late 20s?
The hope is that some of these gizmos become the tools by which we make those preparations. It’s a worry: Are we entertaining ourselves to death, or are we actually learning new ways of coping? Only time will tell.
One of my favorite definitions of time is that time is what stops everything happening at once. I wonder if music is what stops noise happening all at once?
I think much of your music — like on the albums “Music for Airports,” “Apollo,” “Discreet Music,” “The Pearl” — is ideal writing music. It can kick-start a good writing session, and then, if your mind wanders back to the here and now, your music sends it back to work, but these four albums never obtrude or nag or distract. I wonder if there’s a “Man From Porlock” spectrum on which all music can be placed with, say, Ian Dury at the Porlock end — which is impossible to work to, where listening is compulsory — and much of your work toward the non-Porlock end?
I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like, “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement” — and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc … The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
I wanted to hear a music that could create an atmosphere that would support your attention but still let you decide where it was directed.
I think I got to this place by noticing what I wanted from music in my own life. Of course I wanted the high-focus, exclusive, pure-Porlock stuff like the Velvet Underground and Shostakovich — but I also wanted a music that simply “tinted” the air around me. Problem was, there wasn’t much of that kind, and what there was all had something wrong with it from my point of view — classical was too stiff and carried the baggage of people sawing away at violins; jazz had too much personality; Muzak was unbearably oversweet.
By the early ’70s, a few friends and I were exchanging cassettes we’d compiled from our record collections — long sequences of “mono-mood” music that were intended to create and maintain a feeling for a long time. Remember that records at this time were compiled on the assumption that nobody could possibly want to spend more than four minutes in the same feeling, so you’d get a fast track and then a ballad and then a dance number, and most classical music was similar: allegro, andante, largo. All of this was based on the idea that music was an ephemeral form — which it used to be, before recording — and that you’d therefore be after an adventure, a narrative.
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture. It’s an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music. But my feeling is that it just widens the possibilities: It doesn’t prevent anyone from writing difficult and engaging, high-Porlock music if that’s what they want to do, and I’ve always tried to make it clear where I felt any particular piece of my own work rested on that widened spectrum. I came up with the word “ambient” to suggest that here was a kind of music that rewarded a different sort of listening behavior, but the term certainly isn’t meant to cover everything I do.
I notice that a lot of pop music now is much further toward the non-Porlock end than it used to be. Bands like Portishead and the Cocteau Twins started it (well, I suppose I did, too, but they made it successful). Now there are countless bands that have a sort of ambient-pop sound, where the vocals are partly buried, the instruments are swathed in echo, and the rhythm instruments are softer and more distant.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive...
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Audio Palimpest
Audio Palimpsest (2010) is an interactive sound-based installation that explores applications of indeterminacy and randomness in an interactive platform. The piece is based on a hacked cassette recorder, where the device functionalities are reconfigured to work in a different context. Audio Palimpsest is an auditory art system that allows multi-point interaction by synthesizing data inputs collectively and emphasizing the thought of open-endedness in its execution -- opening up content generation to sources beyond the traditional expectations.
Via
Such a good word 'palimpest'...
Arctic ozone loss at record level
Ozone loss over the Arctic this year was so severe that for the first time it could be called an "ozone hole" like the Antarctic one, scientists report.
About 20km (13 miles) above the ground, 80% of the ozone was lost, they say.The cause was an unusually long spell of cold weather at altitude. In cold conditions, the chlorine chemicals that destroy ozone are at their most active.
It is currently impossible to predict if such losses will occur again, the team writes in the journal Nature.
Early data on the scale of Arctic ozone destruction were released in April, but the Nature paper is the first that has fully analysed the data.
"Winter in the Arctic stratosphere is highly variable - some are warm, some are cold," said Michelle Santee from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
"But over the last few decades, the winters that are cold have been getting colder.
"So given that trend and the high variability, we'd anticipate that we'll have other cold ones, and if that happens while chlorine levels are high, we'd anticipate that we'd have severe ozone loss."
Ozone-destroying chemicals originate in substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that came into use late last century in appliances including refrigerators and fire extinguishers.Their destructive effects were first documented in the Antarctic, which now sees severe ozone depletion in each of its winters.
Their use was progressively restricted and then eliminated by the 1987 Montreal Protocol and its successors.
The ozone layer blocks ultraviolet-B rays from the Sun, which can cause skin cancer and other medical conditions.
Longer, not colder Winter temperatures in the Arctic stratosphere do not generally fall as low as at the southern end of the world.
No records for low temperature were set this year, but the air remained at its coldest for an unusually long period of time, and covered an unusually large area.
In addition, the polar vortex was stronger than usual. Here, winds circulate around the edge of the Arctic region, somewhat isolating it from the main world weather systems.
"Why [all this] occurred will take years of detailed study," said Dr Santee.
"It was continuously cold from December through April, and that has never happened before in the Arctic in the instrumental record."
The size and position of the ozone hole changed over time, as the vortex moved northwards or southwards over different regions.
Some monitoring stations in northern Europe and Russia recorded enhanced levels of ultraviolet-B penetration, though it is not clear that this posed any risk to human health.
While the Arctic was setting records, the Antarctic ozone hole is relatively stable from year to year.
This year has seen ozone-depleting conditions extending a little later into the southern hemisphere spring than usual - again, as a result of unusual weather conditions.
Chlorine compounds persist for decades in the upper atmosphere, meaning that it will probably be mid-century before the ozone layer is restored to its pre-industrial health.
Richard Black @'BBC'
Al-Qaeda Claims al-Awlaki is Still Alive
As the U.S government is relishing its victory over al-Qaeda with the alleged death of several of the group's top leaders, amongst whom well-known cleric and mastermind in al-Qaeda in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki; the terror group has announced that the allegations were false and that al-Awlaki was still very
alive.
Only a few days, the Yemeni and American government bi-laterally announced to the world that they had killed U.S most wanted terrorist in an airstrike in al-Jawf province in Yemen, north of its capital Sana'a.
Allegedly, al-Awlaki was traveling in a 3 car-convoy when he was struck from the air, leaving him and 3 of his companions dead.
Soon after the announcement of al-Awlaki's death, U.S intelligence officials declared that they believed the bomb maker Ibrahim al-Asiri and Samir Khan, the group' English magazine co-editor, had as well been killed in the attack.
As is happens, al-Qaeda in Yemen is now claiming that both al-Awlaki and al-Asiri are still alive and were in fact nowhere near the explosion.
Since the Yemeni government claimed once already having successfully eliminated the infamous cleric, to be later proven wrong when the man issued a televised statement, doubt has been cast upon the veracity of the American-Yemeni's declarations of victory.
@'Yemen Post'
alive.
Only a few days, the Yemeni and American government bi-laterally announced to the world that they had killed U.S most wanted terrorist in an airstrike in al-Jawf province in Yemen, north of its capital Sana'a.
Allegedly, al-Awlaki was traveling in a 3 car-convoy when he was struck from the air, leaving him and 3 of his companions dead.
Soon after the announcement of al-Awlaki's death, U.S intelligence officials declared that they believed the bomb maker Ibrahim al-Asiri and Samir Khan, the group' English magazine co-editor, had as well been killed in the attack.
As is happens, al-Qaeda in Yemen is now claiming that both al-Awlaki and al-Asiri are still alive and were in fact nowhere near the explosion.
Since the Yemeni government claimed once already having successfully eliminated the infamous cleric, to be later proven wrong when the man issued a televised statement, doubt has been cast upon the veracity of the American-Yemeni's declarations of victory.
@'Yemen Post'
McKenzie Wark on Occupy Wall Street: 'How to Occupy an Abstraction'
The occupation isn't actually on Wall Street, of course. And while there is actually a street called Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, “Wall Street” is more of a concept, an abstraction. So what the occupation is doing is taking over a little (quasi) public square in the general vicinity of Wall Street in the financial district and turning it into something like an allegory. Against the abstraction of Wall Street, it proposes another, perhaps no less abstract story.
The abstraction that is Wall Street already has a double aspect. On the one hand, Wall Street means a certain kind of power, an oligopoly of financial institutions which extract a rent from the rest of us and in exchange for which we don't seem to get very much. “What's good for General Motors is good for America” was the slogan of the old military industrial complex. These days the slogan of the rentier class is: “What's good for Goldman Sachs is none of your fucking business.”
This rentier class is an oligopoly that makes French aristocrats of the 18th century look like serious, well organized administrators. If the rhetoric of their political mouthpieces is to be believed, this rentier class are such hot house flowers that they won't get out of bed in the morning for less than a thousand dollars a day, and their constitutions are so sensitive that if anyone says anything bad about them they will take their money and sulk in the corner. They have, to cap it all, so mismanaged their own affairs that vast tracts of public money were required to keep them in business.
The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can imagine running beneath one's feet throughout the financial district. Let's call this power the vectoral. It's the combination of fiber optic cables and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light. Wall Street in this abstract sense means our new robot overlords, only they didn't come from outer space.
How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets..?
The abstraction that is Wall Street already has a double aspect. On the one hand, Wall Street means a certain kind of power, an oligopoly of financial institutions which extract a rent from the rest of us and in exchange for which we don't seem to get very much. “What's good for General Motors is good for America” was the slogan of the old military industrial complex. These days the slogan of the rentier class is: “What's good for Goldman Sachs is none of your fucking business.”
This rentier class is an oligopoly that makes French aristocrats of the 18th century look like serious, well organized administrators. If the rhetoric of their political mouthpieces is to be believed, this rentier class are such hot house flowers that they won't get out of bed in the morning for less than a thousand dollars a day, and their constitutions are so sensitive that if anyone says anything bad about them they will take their money and sulk in the corner. They have, to cap it all, so mismanaged their own affairs that vast tracts of public money were required to keep them in business.
The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can imagine running beneath one's feet throughout the financial district. Let's call this power the vectoral. It's the combination of fiber optic cables and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light. Wall Street in this abstract sense means our new robot overlords, only they didn't come from outer space.
How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets..?
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Dear angry motorists: you are hilarious. Go drive your fuming tin cans up your own arses. At 80mph.
The 80mph speed limit is a waste of time
Occupy Everything
October 1, 2011. Day 14. 700+ protestors are arrested after thousands march from Liberty Plaza to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Filmed by Kristopher Rae
Edited by Kristopher Rae & Nicky Eyebrows
Music "The Youth" - MGMT
Filmed by Kristopher Rae
Edited by Kristopher Rae & Nicky Eyebrows
Music "The Youth" - MGMT
We are the 99 per cent
I have spent the last two days at the Occupy Wall Street gathering. It was a beautiful display of peaceful action: so much kindness and gentleness in the camp, so much belief in our world and democracy. And so many different kinds of people all looking for a chance at the dream that America had promised them.
When people critique this movement and say spurious things about the protesters' clothes or their jobs or the general way they look, they are showing how shallow we have become as a nation. They forget that these people have taken time out of their lives to stand up for values that are purely American and in the interest of our democracy. They forget that these people are encamped in an urban park, where they are not allowed to have tents or other normal camping gear. They are living far outside their comfort zone to protect and celebrate liberty, equality and the rule of law.
It is a thing of beauty to see so many people in love with the ideal of democracy, so alive with its promise, so committed to its continuity in the face of crony capitalism and corporate rule. That should be celebrated. It should be respected and admired.
Their message is very clear and simple: get money out of the political process; strive for equality in taxation and equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, social status, sexual preference or age. We must stop poisoning our food, air and water for corporate greed. The people on Wall Street and in the banking industrial complex that destroyed our economy must be investigated and brought to justice under the law for what they have done by stealing people's homes and savings.
Jobs can and must be created. Family farms must be saved. The oil and gas industry must be divested of its political power and cheap, reliable alternative energy must be made available.
This movement transcends political affiliations. America has been debased and degraded by greed. This has touched 99% of America's population. The other 1% is doing just fine – with more than a third of the wealth of this nation. We all know people who have been hurt by the big rip-off. We all know people who have lost their jobs or their homes. We all know people who have had to go and fight wars that seem to have no objective and no end – leaving families for years on end without fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.
The 99% of us have paid a dear price so that 1% could become the wealthiest people in the world. We all pay insanely high energy prices while we see energy companies making record profits, year after year. We live with great injustices in the land of justice. We live with great lawlessness in the land of the law.
It's time to check ourselves, to see if we still have that small part that believes in the values that America promises. Do we still have a shred of our decency intact in the face of debasement? If you do, then now is the time to give that forgotten part a voice. That is what this movement is ultimately about: giving voice to decency and fairness.
I invite anyone and all to participate in this people's movement to regain your dignity and what you have worked for in this capitalist society. Each of us is of great value to the whole. Do not forget your greatness. Even when the world around you is telling you you are nothing. You have a voice. You want a better life for your children and the people you love. You live in a democracy. You belong, and you deserve a world that is fair and equal. You have a right to take your place and be heard.
Show up at an Occupy Wall Street gathering in any major city in the US. Hit your social media outlets. Tweet it. Facebook it. Talk it up. It's easy to do nothing, but your heart breaks a little more every time you do.
Mark Ruffalo @'The Guardian'
The Great American Bubble Machine
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump 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 consumer credit rates, half-eaten 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...
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Matt Taibbi @'Rolling Stone'
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