Black on White collarcriminalsinusia

William K. Black, author, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry Democracy Now.

Well, I mean just what we say in the law: fraud is when you use deceit to steal something from someone. And so, the essence of fraud is, I get you to trust me, and then I betray that trust for gain. And as a result, there’s no more effective acid against destroying trust than fraud, particularly at the elite levels. And when you destroy trust, you destroy economies, families, democracies.

Programming opportunity

"I love this place and its people", says Mr. Stanford. That relationship deepened four years ago, he says, when he met a local Catholic priest with wounds in his hands and feet that he believed to be the stigmata of Jesus Christ. As a memento of that life-changing experience, Mr. Stanford carries with him a vial with the congealed fluids drained from the priest's foot. 

Antigua in the shadow of R. Allen Stanford, from the Wall St. Journal, as cited in the Guyana Chronicle, March 31, 2002 (h/t to Kia). (The page reverts but search on Stanford and it'll pop up.)

So, really: if one were to go back over the last eight or nine years, and remove all things Texan from all things economic, all FIRE wheels and deals since the end of Clinton, what would the global economy look like? Could someone please devise and run that program? Then tweak it a bit, and delete all Republicans -- just for mierdas y huelgas. pls?

Blind man's roulette

"We've re-established 'moral hazard,'"

A person involved in the Lehman talks this weekend offered that breathtaking analysis to the (Murdockal) Wall St. Journal, which repeated it soberly -- a tidbit in its massive coverage of Wall Street in Crisis.

This bloodletting is the cure. The crisis began back in 2000, when Bush/Cheney got elected. Soon after, the regulatory framework - what was left of it -- took a barrelful of buckshot in the face, and people without homes, money, or jobs were buying property and discovering the joys of home equity.

An isolating, maverick, insensate war does not go together with lower taxes and tsunamic mortgage fraud (or, "overtrust" as suggested by someone on the WSJ's "Deal Journal"). The people who re-sent in the clowns in 2004 still do not see this. When Bush & co. bribed middle-class favor by tacitly giving USians freedumb to do anything, say anything, promise anything to one another in the business arena so long as the admin had a blank check to keep shooting people in the Middle East, we as a polity forfeited any claim to "moral hazard."

Should this sort of vision lead not to a dethronement of Bush, but to a sort of sublimation of his lunacy into President Palin, the USian game of "fool me a million times - fool me more fool me more fool me" will have risen to its greatest challenge.

Glimmer.

Freedom from wealth accumulation on the march

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is planning government intervention to back troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. WSJ

Privatize Profits, Socialize Losses.

Privatize Profits. Redistribute Bush-enhanced fraudulent lending fallout.

Privatize Profits. Democratize pyramidal sub-prime bail-out.

Centralize Assets. Democratize Liabilities.

fARTstor

Apopos of JSTORiana, Juke puts us in mind of another mode of expropriating our intellect in order to sell it back to us: The AMICA library, which, despite its name, may not be the friendliest purveyor of cherished cultural flotsam. Apparently this fine "library" purports to own images - some of which at least are freely available to the public at no charge from the superb Library of Congress online archive -- and sells them back to us for the mere pittance of $150 a year subscriptions (individual rate).

Can we just stipulate that so long as USia maintains its commanding lead in the world decathalon of universal stupidity, scams like this will not starve for lack of suckerage?

AMICA is not alone. On the model of JSTOR, behold ARTstor, a digital library with half a million images in art, architecture, humanities and social sciences. #.



ARTstor, another Andrew W. Mellon intelprop gatekeeper, bills itself as "Images for Education and Scholarship." It is avowedly emulative of JSTOR, but currently refuses participation to individuals on any terms. Its blog is free and open to the public. There we learn that:

ARTstor recently announced a collaboration with Art Resource and Scala Archives (Florence, Italy). Through this collaboration, ARTstor will ultimately make available approximately 12,000 high quality images of European art and architecture, with a special focus on the archaeology, art and architecture of Italy and on the collections of the major museums in Italy and other European countries.

We are pleased to announce that we have released additional images of major Italian and other European work from Scala Archives, bringing the total number of Scala images now available to ARTstor users to approximately 7,800.

"Available," "have released," -- code reminiscent of the language of country clubs, whose amenities are "free" to every single child of the earth whose membership obligations are current and paid in full.

In the course of their education, some children will see these images and read this scholarship, and some will not.

AMICA mia, amigo mio, mon amis, ARTstor my hypocrite, mon frere, what will you sell us next? MUZAKstor, LIFEstor, DNAstor, AIRstor, VISIONstor, H2Ostor, JOCKITCHstor, BOOGERstor -- the possibilities stagger.

Not Weinberger's fault

When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting. When it was discovered that the curtain itself was painted on the surface -- the curtain was Parrhasius' painting, Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Wikipedia

Certain recent posts here at IMproPRieTies might seem rather random. What could Everything is Miscellaneous, JSTOR, the White House Press Corps and the Extraordinary and Plenipotent Roland E. Arnall possibly have in common? I'm not sure. All I know is, after reading David Weinberger's book, and writing a bit about it, a certain stimulus deriving from that reading seemed to propel me to "voice" certain, uh, reservations I've had about, among other things, the JSTOR Fortress of Knowledge.

Weinberger's take on miscellaneity is provocative. Even with Mr. Plenipotentiary Arnall - not that David in any directed way "caused" my interest in him - but when, in EiM, he speaks of shifting from an Aristotelian order of proper nomenclature, personhood and taxonomy to multiple, more open orders that are not so much contesting each others' claims but rather learning how to play well with each other, and to discover that knowledge resides between, not in, knowers, one of the first flags for me is the potential for fraud.

The space of fraud is the space between what something is said to be and what it "really is." Under an Aristotelian mode of knowing as representation, fraud is certainly possible -- and begins perhaps with the stories of Zeuxis, an artist Aristotle apparently did not care for, fooling the eye of the beholder -- but this falseness can be checked, unveiled, dis-covered through a penetrating effort of investigation (or by sheer chance); it can be seen to be other than the truth.

These considerations I think apply meaningfully to Journalism's failing to coincide with itself: News becomes news of the reception of the news of the reception of the... en abîme.

If everything is miscellaneous, it becomes ever so much more difficult to differentiate claims about some thing from the thing, because, per the argument, things per se, essences, no longer anchor the realm of signs. Metadata would appear to become increasingly difficult to distinguish from data - what is said about things replaces things with more of what is said about things: Reality dissolves into a welter of voices about reality, internet intercourse upends the stable epistemology of traditional discourse, rendering efforts to arrive at "truth" more problematic. Instead of a truth model of veil/unveil, we have -- no, in Weinberger's sense, we are becoming -- Parrhesian: all veil.

Obviously I'm still trying to figure out what David is saying, and why I'm finding what he's saying so provocative. While I wonder about these things, I'd be curious to hear whether other readers of the book find themselves provoked into vocalizing a bit more than usual.

And lest I forget, there's an interesting looking article about Aristotle and the Painters by Graham Zanker. Would have loved to have read it, but it's inside the anal crevass of JSTOR.