Something Wicked This Way Comes

In light of renewed calls to give the Federal Reserve more regulatory powers, a new report by Neil M. Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP, or the taxpayer-financed financial bailout) lays out some startling, if not altogether unsurprising, curiosities. From the Times:

The Fed, under Mr. Geithner’s direction, caved in to A.I.G.’s counterparties, giving them 100 cents on the dollar for positions that would have been worth far less if A.I.G. had defaulted. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Société Générale and other banks were in the group that got full value for their contracts when many others were accepting fire-sale prices. On the question of whether this payout was what the report describes as a “backdoor bailout” of A.I.G.’s counterparties, Mr. Barofsky concluded: “The very design of the federal assistance to A.I.G. was that tens of billions of dollars of government money was funneled inexorably and directly to A.I.G.’s counterparties.” The report noted that this was money the banks might not otherwise have received had A.I.G. gone belly-up.

Goldman Sachs, we all should know, was led from 1998 to 2006 by none other than the Bush administration’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, who had actually worked for the company in some capacity since 1974. Now, you don’t devote over thirty years to a company and then forget who your friends are. Especially when your compensation package in 2005 was upwards of $37 million. Noting the above, what Barofsky terms a “backdoor bailout,” I am more inclined to call a multi-billion dollar “reach around.”

I have not yet read the entirety of the report, but I plan to (as you should too). It can be found here.

How Much Art Can You Take?

Art Practical, or The-Website-Formerly-Known-As-Shotgun-Review, has debuted. Yay! So if you live in the Bay Area, enjoy contemporary art(s), and at least pretend to keep yr melon out of the sand, better get this RSS’d to the hilt, cause they’re already at Issue Two. Entitled “Nomads & Residents,” you’ll find an openings calendar, two on-going features, and six in-depth reviews of exhibitions going on around town, including one starring my homie from Charleston, Lena Daly. Also: Jess Brier, Headlands extraordinaire, wrote a fine essay on Futurist NOISE at YBCA, and I—full disclosure—even penned a piece myself which you can find here.  Now ENJOY!

Help Wanted: NYT Copy-Editors

Is “I” close to “A” on your keyboard?

Clash of the Teutons

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance…

(via The Chronicle Review)

and:

Not only did [Hannah] Arendt have an affair with [Heidegger] when she was an 18-year-old student about half his age, before Hitler took over, but despite his public exaltation of the Fuhrer, despite his firing Jews once he became rector of Freiburg University. We now know that she later resumed some kind of warm relationship with the brownshirt philosopher (yes, it turns out he often wore one to his lectures). Arendt helped usher Heidegger back into the intellectual version of polite society, indeed assisted in preventing his ostracism as a Hitlerite, at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity….

(via Slate)