Dirty Double-Crossin' Rats

I'm not a voyeur, so I couldn't bear to watch the public orgy known as the Dimon-Senate Banking Committee hearing writhe its way to completion yesterday. I'll paraphrase what I did watch, with one hand over my eyes:

Dimon: (sounding kind of like James Cagney in one of his gangster roles, talking rapid-fire oligarchy-barky Brooklynese with a mouth full of gravel)."Sorry, so glibly sorry. But I am so huge that even a glitch like a $4 billion loss doesn't put a dent in my greatness. Yeah, yeah we might need a few regulations, but let me do the regulating, guys. I'm just too big for most people to even understand. But I got it covered, see?"

Senators: "Okay, Your Greatness. Would you like some taxpayer-funded champagne to go with your caviar? Are the camera lights creating a drop of perfumed perspiration on your lofty brow? Would you like to retire to a special room where we can enjoy our make-out session in private?"

Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist-independent senator of Vermont, was very much a part of Wednesday's hearing although he is not an actual member of the Committee. Protesters screamed at Dimon to listen to Bernie before they were escorted out by security guards. Dimon, busy schmoozing with his gentle inquisitors, appeared unruffled by the outbreak of hoi polloi-dom. He is triply safe. He is in charge of a bank the size of a country, he serves on the regulatory board overseeing himself, and he funds the campaigns of almost every senator on the Banking Committee. He is a ranking member of the Board of Directors of the United States of America.

Sanders has just named names in a report by the Government Accountability Office, showing that Dimon is not the only member of the Federal Reserve Board who is a fox guarding the henhouse. Since the 2008 financial meltdown, The Fed gave trillions of dollars in no/low interest loans to Dimon's bank and 17 other corporations whose CEOs also just happened to have seats on the Fed.

JP Morgan, Dimon's bank, received  $390 billion in emergency Fed funds at the same time his bank was used by the Fed as a clearinghouse for emergency lending programs. Jamie Dimon's Fed gave Jamie Dimon $29 billion in financing to buy distressed investment house Bear Stearns in March 2008 after it allowed Jamie's bank to cook the books and erase Bear Stearns' risky mortgage related assests from the balance sheet. Jamie Dimon's Fed gave Jamie Dimon's bank an 18- month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements. (It gave carte blanche to recklessness. It ensured that Jamie Dimon's bank would grow too big to fail, that Jamie Dimon could risk other people's money with impunity and into perpetuity.)

The GAO report says all this chicanery sure does give the "appearance" of impropriety. Ya think? They probably should have called it "Public Enemies" to give it a little more pizzazz.

Sanders, meanwhile, has introduced quixotic legislation that would try to bar banking and corporate CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt of GE from serving on the Fed board. The names of the other plutocrats who profited from their dual positions can be found here.

Meanwhile, the great Crony Capitalism World spins, a magical place where all the risks are subsidized and all the gains are privatized. The dirty rats remain at the helm of the sinking ship.

Moon Struck

The Senate usually moves with all the deliberative speed of a snail on Valium, so everybody perked up when all of a sudden it voted unanimously to strike the word "lunatic" from the federal code. Since the bill must now go to the House for final approval, it's still quite possible that lunacy will remain official in The Homeland for eons to come. After all, the Senate did its usual half-assed job by allowing "idiot" to remain on the books.

Sen. Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, introduced the bill last month after it came to his attention that calling mentally disabled people lunatics is insulting. It is also outdated by about a century. The British Parliament, after all, got rid of the term way back in 1930, replacing it with "person of unsound mind."

The word "lunatic" appears in the U.S. Code in Title 1, Chapter 1, which covers rules of construction. Chapter 1 holds that when determining the meaning of any law, "the words 'insane' and 'insane person' and 'lunatic' shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis."

According to Conrad's bill, it also appears in laws related to banking that deal with the authority to take receivership of estates.

Lunatic (derived from lunaticus) literally means "moonstruck" and despite its current political incorrectness, may actually have a basis in fact. From Wikipedia:

Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full Moon induced insanity in susceptible individuals, believing that the brain, which is mostly water, must be affected by the Moon and its power over the tides, but the Moon's gravity is too slight to affect any single person, Even today, people insist that admissions to psychiatric hospitals, traffic accidents, homicides or suicides increase during a full Moon, although there is no scientific evidence to support such claims.

In a 1999 Journal of Affective Disorders article, a hypothesis was suggested that the phase of the moon may in the past have had an effect on individuals with bipolar disorder by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible individuals through the well-known route of sleep deprivation. With the introduction of electric light, this effect would have gone away, as light would be available every night, explaining the negative results of modern studies. The authors suggested ways in which this hypothesis might be tested.

I confess, having worked in both the journalistic and medical fields, to somewhat believing the theory that the full moon brings out the craziness in people. Ask any emergency room nurse, cop, or beat reporter if they don't agree. It just seems that after any given night of mayhem, it turns out that the moon was full. But actually testing the hypothesis as suggested by the above experts? Sounds like something the CIA may already have done.