Chart of the day: Is there a pattern here?

From Michael Greenwell:

Keiser Report: Horror Bankers Attack!

In one of his best episodes yet, Max exposes the confidence game that is quantitative easing after a delightful little excursion into the surrealism of modern banking praxis with co-host and inamorata Stacy Herbert.

The program notes:

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss Ben ‘Horror Frog’ Bernanke ripping the legs off the global reserve currency in order to defend itself from deflation, while in Europe, the Magritte and Dali of policymakers worry not about bankruptcy as long as the fraud flow fees keep flowing, or F-cubed. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Simon Rose of SaveOurSavers.co.uk about his recent experience giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee and about the moochers living on the dole of quantitative easing while the Bank of England sits on one third of the stock of gilts with a ‘cunning’ plan to sell them one day and theoretically make a profit.

Quote of the day: Colonial war, rotten rationale

From Veteran BBC documentarian Adam Curtiss, writing in his blog, The Medium and the Message:

The West is worried about the rise of Islamism in Africa. There are two big fears — one is that there is a new international terror network that will come and attack Europe and America. The other is that sneaky Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood will get themselves elected — and then promptly abolish democracy.

But behind these fears is an incredibly simplified — almost fictional — vision of the world. It possesses the minds of many western politicians, journalists and associated think tank “experts”. And at its heart is a kind of filter that wipes away anything complex about power and the struggles for power in African countries — and replaces that with a simple picture of the world as divided between goodies (us in the west) and dangerous frightening baddies who are out to destroy us.

It’s both blind and arrogant. And it’s terribly dangerous.

Curtis also features a clip from a documentary about the U.S. intervention in Somalia under Bill Clinton, filmed by British journalist Richard Dowden and featuring, from Mogadishu,

“a US marine interviewed on the street who puts it all so clearly:

“the place is filling up with American contractors all bidding to rebuild this joint. That’s all the Defence Department is. We’re bodyguards for American contractors ……………… You should know that – you’ve been to college.”

Quote of the day: The U.S. invades Africa

From veteran Australian journalist John Pilger:

A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media.

The invasion has almost nothing to do with “Islamism”, and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a “menacing arc” of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus “red menace” of a worldwide communist conspiracy.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments.  Last year, Africom staged Operation African Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking part, commanded by the US military. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

Read the rest.

Juxtapositionalism: First a fact, then a question

Sometimes two items just seem to go together, especially for a blog that’s devoted some attention to AFRICOM and its links to Pentagon plans to exercise military suzerainty over resources in times to crisis.

First, consider the latest move to bolster AFRICOM, the  command spawned by a general who’s since become a private sector agrofuel and security consultant.

From Eric Schmitt of the New York Times:

The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

>snip<

A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.

Read the rest.

In light of the above, consider this question from Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard, in a blog post headlined “Top ten tough questions for Hillary Clinton”:

U.S. military forces are now organized in various regional combatant commands, each under a designated regional “commander-in-chief” or CINC. These regional CINCs have a vast array of military, intelligence, and other assets at their disposal, and the resources they can bring to bear far exceed those of the State Department. For this reason, foreign governments often pay as much or more attention to the CINCs as they do to the U.S. ambassador, for the simple reason that the CinCs can do more for or against them. Here’s my question: if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to make a mark on U.S. foreign policy, why go to a nice four-year college and then join the Foreign Service? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to West Point, Annapolis, or Colorado Springs and try to become a senior military leader instead?

Quote of the day: Headed for the last Roundup?

From Farm Industry News, reporting on the infestation of half of America’s farms by so-called superweeds, plants with genetic resistance to the glyphosate, the weedkiller in Monsanto’s market-dominating Roundup:

The area of U.S. cropland infested with glyphosate-resistant weeds has expanded to 61.2 million acres in 2012, according to a survey conducted by Stratus Agri-Marketing.

Nearly half (49%) of all U.S. farmers interviewed reported that glyphosate-resistant weeds were present on their farm in 2012, up from 34% of farmers in 2011. The survey also indicates that the rate at which glyphosate-resistant weeds are spreading is gaining momentum, increasing 25% in 2011 and 51% in 2012.

The Stratus Glyphosate Resistance Tracking study is conducted annually. It’s now in its third year. In 2012, Stratus completed interviews with nearly 3,000 farmers during the summer and fall.

Read the rest.

Quote of the day: Barack Obama, lobotomist

From former Defense Department senior analyst Franklin (Chuck) Spinney, writing in Time:

American politics continues to repeat the practice of buying domestic power by inflicting misery and destruction on third world nations. In my view, Obama’s own contribution to statecraft in this regard has been his ability to lobotomize almost the entire Democratic base. The same people who were screaming about Bush’s illegal wars, unconstitutional surveillance, lack of due process, etc., are now silent or singing Obama’s greatness.

Even when Democrats can see how Mr. Obama has disappointed them, the insanity of Republican politicians provides the Democrats a ready rationale to excuse Obama. (By the way, does anyone notice that if Hagel is confirmed it means two of Obama’s three SecDefs will have been Republicans?)

The Republican party, with a few exceptions, is so visibly crazy that they have become an indispensable foil that permits Obama to govern as he does. The conventional wisdom of liberals is that Obama’s heart is in the right place, but he is conflict averse and therefore must govern as a centrist (really a center-rightist), because the GOP is crazy and intransigent. But in reality, Obama actually is a center-rightist who uses his image as a diffident compromiser as a cloak to hide his pro-corporatocracy given aways.  And because most people prefer center-right governance to out-and-out fascism, the GOP plays an essential role as a “bad cop” to the center-right “good cop,” which is why Democrats went along with  Obama’s plan to enshrine the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 99.3%, and a huge giveaway on the estate tax, in perpetuity. My fear is that, in the same way, Democrats will go along with Obama’s inflated defense budgets and his permanent conflict foreign policy.

Read the rest.

Chart of the day: Satisfaction, American-style

From Gallup, a new poll reveals that we’re happiest with the military and the war on terror:

The u$ual $uspect$, $till unpuni$hed

Americans were robbed on a scale undreamt-of by criminals of generations past, banksters criminally reckless in their disregard for any interests save those that fattened their paychecks and bonuses.

This should’ve come as no surprise. Certainly we weren’t suddenly shocked to discover that once again, the financial system collapsed under the weight of bankster greed, leaving once again poor shlubs like thee and we to carry the freight.

Nor are we surprised to see some of the same responsible for the mess occupying positions of power, along with the return of pay raises and bonuses for the very folks whose misdeeds the rest of us will be paying for the rest of our lives. After all, it had happened before.

James S. Henry is a unique figure in being both an economist and an investigative report — and a lawyer to boot.

Here he talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the Obama administration’s distinctive failure to reform either regulations or regulators:

The full transcript of the segment is posted here. An excerpt:

James S. Henry: These major institutions have basically walked away from justice when it comes to the federal government, and it’s been left to the private lawsuits and to the SEC, to the state of New York, to actually piggyback on these private lawsuits and make these cases. It begs the question of, you know, whether or Lenny Breuer and his team was really doing their job when it came to these major financial institutions. They seem to have a soft place in their hearts.

And that also extends to other kinds of corporate crime, for example the settlements that they engaged in with HSBC and the money laundering, the tap on the wrist that UBS got for being at the heart of the Libor scandal. It’s not just the bank crises; it’s also these other kind of shenanigans. So, many of us have been expecting the Justice Department to act here, but they haven’t.

Quote of the day: Not so great expectations

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at Clusterfuck Nation:

What’s obvious to me is what I have been fearing about this country for some time now: that all the disorders of our time would prompt a campaign to defend the status quo at all costs and to sustain the unsustainable. That is really the master wish behind all the political hijinks of the day, especially the pervasive accounting fraud in all high-order money matters. We see the comforts and conveniences of modernity slipping away and we’ll do anything to try to hang onto them, including lying to ourselves to such an immersive degree about what is really happening that we suppose we can manufacture a happy counter-reality. That’s at the heart of zero interest rate policies, and Federal Reserve manipulation of markets, and statistical misreporting from all the national agencies charged with adding things up. So, the Fed pumps its $90 billion-a-month and the Standard & Poor’s index inflates like an old tire while ten thousand more families get added to the food stamp rolls, and the banks sit on enough foreclosed property to fill the state of Indiana, and another 25-year-old college loan debt serf ODs on vodka and Xanax because he finally understands that even bankruptcy will not save him from perpetual penury.

Apparently, there are moments in history when nations just get lost. I maintain that things would go a whole lot better for us if we acknowledge what is actually going on, namely: a major shift of direction into economic contraction after 200-plus thrilling years of expanding energy resources and easy-to-get material riches. It’s in the nature of this world that things cycle and pulse, and we have entered a certain phase of the cycle that demands certain responses. We have to make the scale of human activities smaller, finer, simpler, and more rooted to the local particulars of place. We have to let go of WalMart and globalism and driving cars incessantly and attempting to manage the affairs of people half a world a way… and we just can’t imagine engaging with this endeavor. That is true poverty of imagination.

Read the rest.

Meeting to save Berkeley Post Office Tuesday

Passing on an announcement from the local neighborhood netwrk about a meeting to save Berkeley’s downtown post office:

Community Meeting 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, January 29, 2013 re: Post Office

You are invited to a Community Meeting at 6:45 pm on Tuesday, January 29th at the Berkeley Arts Festival Space, 2133 University Avenue between Shattuck & Oxford, in downtown Berkeley.

Citizens to Save the Berkeley Post Office is hosting an informational and working meeting. We will share information on the status of Berkeley’s Downtown Post Office, discuss outreach and education strategies, sign up to help save the Berkeley post office and a publicly-owned postal service.

The cause is good, though it could cost Sen. Diane Feinstein’s spouse a nifty commission, since his company is handling the sales of post office real estate, including downtown Berkeley’s post office including some impressive public artwork.

Headline of the day: Pissing in our own well

From Pro Publica:

Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

Quote of the day: Inventing our own enemies

From Alán Camilo Cienfuegos, writing in Irish Left Review:

The United States military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has never been based on the African continent, headquartered instead in Germany. The chief leader of the opposition to US imperialism in Africa, the main opponent to the basing of AFRICOM bases on the continent and to the presence of US troops on the ground in African countries, was Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. Now that the anti-western Libya has been smashed, and the western-puppet Libya has been set up in its place, the field is clear for the most part for US and western imperialism to move physically into Africa and begin setting up bases in strategic locations in the region. But ironically, one of the main obstacles remaining is none other than the myriad Islamist groups funded by the west to help fight and destroy Gaddafi’s Libya. Large numbers of Islamist fighters, veterans of the war against the Libyan state, have since the fall of Gaddafi moved back across the Sahara and into Mali and surrounding countries, taking their weapons and experience with them, in order to set up their own forces to impose Islamic law on larger and larger areas of north Africa, threatening the stability of imperialism’s plans in the region. And this is where the French military comes in.

The United States has long been the spearhead of western capitalist imperialism, with its running dogs mostly playing second fiddle to its domination. But today, with the US military smarting from blows received in Afghanistan and Iraq, and gearing up for a potential war with new regional nemesis Iran (with the attendant face-off with Iranian allies Russia and China), the time has come for the rising military power of the European Union, internally strengthened by various treaties of economic integration and military co-operation, to take its place as the vanguard of the imperialist forces. Britain and France have already taken part in the destruction of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, and France took the lead role in the bombardment of Libya in 2011 in support of the western proxies there. The EU, with its continuing, rapid integration of economic and military power, will soon be an imperialist force to be reckoned with in the world, a vital bulwark for the United States against the equally growing powers of Russia and China.

And thus, we now have French forces, with the backing of the US and EU, bombing the same rebels they funded and armed to destroy Libya, and French troops (currently around 2,500 of them) gearing up to fight alongside the Malian government to secure the interests of imperialism in the region. One wonders if the French have learned the lessons of their past colonial adventures, for although French officials have claimed that the Mali operation will last only a few weeks, it is very possible that, in facing once again a well armed, battle-hardened and fanatical enemy on its own soil, the imperialists may well be sucked into yet another war that they cannot win, this time against an enemy of their own making.

Read the rest.

Chart of the day: Dysprosium, empire, Berkeley

As we reported in detail last February, UC Berkeley is at the forefront of the government’s push to develop more efficient ways of using rare earths that are key to a range of so-called “clean energy” technologies, including one especially critical element, dysprosium.

From a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announcement we included in a post last February:

Belonging to a family of elements known as lanthanides—also called rare earths—dysprosium and other rare earths are used in almost every high-tech gadget and clean energy technology invented in the last 30 years, from smart phones to wind turbines to hybrid cars. Although the United States was self-sufficient in rare earths or obtained them on the free market until the early 2000s, the vast majority are now mined in China and the supply has been subject to fluctuations. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) aims to change the status quo by reviving the study of these critical materials to better understand how to extract them, use them more efficiently, reuse and recycle them and find substitutes for them.

Read the rest.

With most of the world’s developed dysprosium supplies in China, along with other critical rare earths, the Obama administration has launched a major military shift, concentrating American naval forces in the Pacific while using legal pressure to force China to part with more of its stockpiles, resources critical for American high tech industry.

Now comes a new report from the Department of Energy revealing that no matter how much of China’s dysprosium goes on the market, it’s not going to be enough.

From the U.S. Department of Energy Critical Materials Strategy [PDF]. Click on the image to enlarge:

From the report:

Figure 4-4 illustrates the ranges of projections of global requirements for dysprosium oxide in magnets for wind turbines and vehicles, as well as non-clean energy use during the period of 2010–2025. These amounts are given in terms of dysprosium oxide because it is the commercial feedstock from which dysprosium metal is refined and NdFeB magnets are fabricated. Also included in Figure 4-4 are supply estimates for 2010 and 2010 plus additional individual mines, as well as an estimate for 2015 supply.

Figure 4-4 shows that the basic availability of dysprosium oxide is tight in the short term. Anticipated new mines will provide relatively little new supply—an additional 10%—by 2015. Global demand meets or exceeds projected 2015 supply under all four trajectories in the beginning of the medium term. Non-clean energy demand alone will lead to a supply-demand mismatch by the middle of the medium term under the assumed trajectory, highlighting the need for corresponding material intensity improvements or substitutes in non-clean energy technologies. Clean energy demand makes up a growing share of global dysprosium demand, increasing from 11% in 2010 to 52% in 2025 under Trajectory C. Demand for dysprosium oxide is roughly four-times as much for vehicles compared to wind turbines in 2025. In order to meet demand under Trajectory C, global production of dysprosium oxide needs to more than double by 2025. The developing supply-demand imbalance in the medium term under all trajectories highlights the importance of R&D on alternative approaches to heat management (a main function of the dysprosium content) in magnets or substitutes for NdFeB magnets in general in clean energy technologies.

Quote of the day: Privatization, the new serfdom

James Meek, writing in the London Review of Books on the grim results of the privatization of Britain’s once state-owned electricity system:

More than twenty years after the great electricity experiment was launched, it can be seen that although it was an act of privatisation – of taxation, principally – it was most significantly an act of alienation, lowering an impenetrable barrier of complexity, commercial secrecy and sheer geographical distance between the controlling interests of electricity companies and the customers they serve. It’s easy to switch suppliers. But behind that barrier citizens and small businesses have no way of knowing that they aren’t being fleeced as egregiously by the cheapest provider as they are by the most expensive. The consumer-peasants of Britain bring their tithes to the locked gates of the great electrical estates and wonder who lives in the big house now, and whether they are at home, or in one of their other estates around the world.

Read the rest.

One of the beneficiaries Meek mentions is a name familiar on the UC Berkeley campus, Li Ka-Shing, the richest man in Asia, who bought himself the naming rights to the university’s new public health building. Li had no connection with Berkeley, but he loves to buy monuments. The building he bankrolled replaced another named for a UC Berkeley graduate, the man under whose tenure as Chief Justice the U.S. Supreme Court did more to establish civil rights for Americans than any other court in American history, the late Earl Warren Jr.

Video: The plot to destroy the postal system

From The Real News Network, a report from Berkeley on the neolibertarian-planned destruction of the U.S. postal service, including the sell-off of buildings, many architectural jewels, to the immense profit of the spouse of California Senator Diane Feinstein.

An excerpt from the webcast produced by TRNN’s David Zlutnick, including a quote from UC Berkeley geographer Gray Brechin:

[S]ome private contractors will do quite well off of the ongoing USPS fiscal crisis. CBRE, for example, is the world’s largest commercial real estate broker, chaired by San Francisco billionaire Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Diane Feinstein. Last year CBRE won a contract from the USPS to be the sole manager of its property sales, as well as an advisor on which properties should be sold.

Brechin: CBRE also arranges the leases, so it’s involved in all aspects of the sale. They’re making a ton of money off this.

CBRE has played this role before. In October 2009, the firm was contracted by the State of California to sell over $2 billion in office buildings the state wanted to privatize because of its own financial problems. But USPS dismisses any possible conflict of interest CBRE may have in performing its services.

Read the rest.

One of the post offices on the block is the downtown Berkeley building, listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places and the home of some very notable New Deal-created artwork featured in a previous post.

Quote of the day: Fiscal cliffs and sunny days

James Howard Kunstler at his acerbic best, writing on the meaninglessness of the “fiscal cliff” crisis at his blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

Do people like Barack Obama and John Boehner think we’re going to re-start another round of suburban expansion (a.k.a. the housing market)? That’s largely what the old economy was based on, and what Wall Street fed off of parasitically the past twenty years. That is so over. Do they believe that when absolutely every task in America is computerized there will be any gainful work outside of a sort of janitorial IT to tend all the computers. We’ve already seen what happens with the telephone system: after 30 years of techno-innovation in “communications,” it’s now impossible to get a live human being on the phone and robots call you incessantly during the dinner hour. Anyway, we don’t really have the energy resources to supply the electricity for all this crap indefinitely, or probably even another twenty years.

All the tendencies and trends in contemporary life are reaching their limits at the same time, and as they do things will crack up and fall apart, whether it involves the despotic reach of a government, or a tyrannical corporation, or a hedge fund server farm stuffed with algo-crunching computers sucking the life out of every honest market transaction until the markets are zombies. The euphoria that greeted the end of the fiscal cliff ritual has settled back into the feckless collective state-of-mind that we call “bullish.” It’s all noise and the madness of crowds now. And black swans shitting on your head some sunny day.

And for those who don’t get his final “some sunny day” reference, here’s the closing scene from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

Quote of the day: Oarless boating up fecal creek

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at his delightfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

We’re now entering the seventh year of a smoke-and-mirrors, extend-and-pretend, can-kicking phase of history in which everything possible is being done to conceal the true condition of the economy, with the vain hope of somehow holding things together until a miracle rescue remedy — some new kind of cheap or even free energy — comes on the scene to save all our complex arrangements from implosion. The chief device to delay the reckoning has been accounting fraud in banking and government, essentially misreporting everything on all balance sheets and in statistical reports to give the appearance of well-being where there is actually grave illness, like the cosmetics and prosthetics Michael Jackson used in his final years to pretend he still had a face on the front of his head.

The secondary tactic has been intervention in markets wherever possible and the intemperate manipulation of interest rates, all of which has the effect of defeating the principle purpose of markets: price discovery — the process by which the true value of things is established based on what people will freely pay. For instance the price of money-on-loan. The functionally less-than-zero percent interest rates on money loaned between giant institutions like central banks and their client “primary dealers” (the Too Big To Fails) essentially pays these outfits for borrowing, which is obviously a distortion in the natural order of things (because it violates the second law of thermodynamics: entropy) as well as an arrant racket. The campaign of intervention and manipulation also deeply impairs the other purpose of markets, capital formation, by the resultant mismanagement and misallocation of whatever real surplus wealth remains in this society. What’s more, it allows these TBTF banks to become ever-bigger monsters which hold everybody else hostage by threatening to crash the system if they are molested or interfered with.

Which brings us to the third tactic for pretending everything is all right: complete lack of enforcement and regulation by all the authorities charged with making sure that rules are followed in money matters. This includes the alphabet soup of agencies from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to the Federal Housing Authority, and so on (the list of responsible parties is very long) not to mention the Big Kahunas: the US Department of Justice, and the federal and state courts. Aside from Bernie Madoff and a few Hedge Fund mavericks nipped for insider trading and arrant fraud, absolutely nobody in the TBTF banking community has been prosecuted or even charged for the monumental swindles of our time, while the regulators have behaved in ways that would be considered criminally negligent at best, and sheer racketeering at less-than-best, in any self-respecting polity. The crime runs so deep and thick through all the levels of money management and regulation that one can say the whole system has gone rogue, up to the President of the US himself, the chief enforcement officer of the land, who has not lifted a finger to discipline any of the parties involved. The  fact that Jon Corzine, late of MF Global, is still at large says it all.

Fourth-and-finally, the news media in league with the public relations industry have undertaken a campaign of happy talk to persuade the public that everything is okay and all the machinations cited above are kosher so that there is absolutely no political agitation over these crimes against their own interest, which is to say, the public interest. The PR/media happy talk racket is also aimed at maintaining various subsidiary  fictions about the economy, such as the fibs that the housing market is bouncing back, that “recovery” is ongoing, and that the channel-stuffing monkeyshines of the car industry amount to booming sales of new vehicles. Perhaps the most pernicious big lie is the bundle of fairy tales surrounding shale oil and shale gas, including the idea that America will shortly become “energy independent” or that we have “a hundred years of shale gas” as President Obama was mis-advised to tell the nation. It is pernicious because it gives us collectively an excuse to do nothing about changing our behavior or preparing for the new arrangements in daily life that the future will require of us.

Headline of the day: Come, let us prey

From Bloomberg:

Billionaires Worth $1.9 Trillion Seek Advantage in 2013

Images from an endangered, precious legacy

Barack Obama seems intent on reversing the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, refusing to take the stands that endeared FDR to the American people [can you imagine Barry O saying to the forces of what he called organized money “I welcome their hatred”?].

One of FDR’s legacies, the great public art explosion of the New Deal, is coming under intense fire as the government — pushed by California Senator Diane Feinstein and to the profit of her developer spouse Richard Blum — sells off many of America’s post offices, including the Berkeley central post office in the city center.

Just by coincidence [snicker] the listing agent for the post office properties is Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis [CBRE] — owned by none other than Richard Blum.

And they say Greece is corrupt!

But, heck, that’s the way the game is played in Washington.

It’s not the first time Blum has benefitted from federal legislation to sell off properties.

On 21 April 2009, Washington Times reporter Chuck Neubauer wrote this:

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments – not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) – the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman – had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

Read the rest.

Blum is, in other words, the embodiment of FDR’s “organized money.”

Somehow, it reminds us of this.

Blum’s axe and a Berkeley legacy

The main Berkeley facility is both a notable piece of architecture [listed on the National Register of Historic Places (PDF)] and the repository of two notable New Deal artworks created under the Treasury Department’s Treasury Relief Art Project [TRAP], a remarkable historical mural by Suzanne Scheuer surrounding the door to the postmaster’s office and a bas relief plaque on the eastern side of the building’s loggia by David Slivka, the subject of today’s post.

It’s on the list of Blum’s plums, ripe for the plucking, along with that wonderful art, paid for by the public.

First the sculpture:

31 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 44 mm, 1/640 sec, f4.5

And here is a closeup of the upper package:

31 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 200 mm, 1/400 sec, f5.6

And the lower package, the artist’s signature:

31 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 200 mm, 1/400 sec, f5.6

Here’s some background on Slivka from the website of New York gallery Vincent Vallarino Fine Art:

A passion for art came at a young age for the Chicago-born David Slivka, son of Russian immigrants. At the age of thirteen he was awarded a scholarship to attend classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Slivka’s family moved around the country for the next three years until finally settling in San Francisco where he won a scholarship to The California School of Fine Arts and spent the next one and a half years studying under the guidance of Ralph Stackpole.

Stackpole recommended Slivka for a commission on the Public Works of Art Project (a precursor to the Works Progress Administration). In 1937, Slivka completed a bas-relief of postal workers on the Berkeley Post Office, commissioned by the Treasury Department. Like many artists during the time, Slivka’s career was placed on hold as the US entered World War II. In 1941, Slivka became a Ship Fitter on Naval vessels before joining the Merchant Marine in 1942.

After the War, Slivka moved to Manhattan where he studied painting under Stanley William Hayter. It was through Hayter that Slivka was introduced to other contemporary artists like Joan Miro, Jacques Lipchitz, and Romar Bearden. An early member of The Artists’ Club, Slivka also began to exhibit with many artists from the New York School like Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Franz Kline.

During this time Slivka also changed his artistic style from the figural, evident from his earlier PWA commissions, to the abstract. The artist began to work in carved marble but eventually turned to lost-wax bronze casting. In 1951, after the death of his friend, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, Slivka was asked to make a death mask