Twitter

On Speaking To Power, Or, When Sanity’s Gone, There’s Always Satire

fake consultant — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:20:32 -0400

So everybody’s hearing the news, right?

There is a tentative debt ceiling deal, and this Administration and Congressional Democrats seem to have won everything they wanted: Republicans get to have multiple “we don’t approve” votes before 2012 on raising the debt ceiling, there won’t be any new revenue, there’s going to be another “hostage-taking” event around Christmastime, for many Democrats the issue of the Ryan Budget and the dismantling of Medicare is likely off the table for the 2012 electoral cycle, and the Administration seems to have figured out a way to not involve itself in shaping the way that entitlement reform will work out.

All in all, it’s some pretty slick negotiating, and I’m sure this Administration and Democratic Congressional leaders must be very proud.

Even on bad days, however, you gotta have some fun, and that’s why I’m encouraging everyone to take a minute today to say #thanksalot.

“This is tremendous, Don, just tremendous. The atmosphere heavy, uncertain, overtones of ugliness; a reminder in a way of how it was in March of 1964, at Miami Beach, when Clay met Liston for the first time and nobody was certain how it would turn out.”

--Howard Cosell, from the Woody Allen movie “Bananas”

There are a thousand other people today who will detail exactly where this went wrong, but I’m all about at least sending some kind of message; in order to say “thanks a lot” I’ve been Tweeting satire to the White House, and I’m hoping you’ll take some time today to do the same thing, using the #thanksalot hashtag.

“But I don’t Twibble, or Twister, or whatever they do on twitter”, you might say “and I don’t really get how it works”.

No problem.

If you want to send a message to a twitter user, you just put an “@” in front of their name, as in @whitehouse, usually right at the beginning of your message.

Hashtags are keywords that allow for lots of similar messages to be located, all together; when you put an “#” in front of a “word” it becomes a hashtag, as in #thanksalot or #arentyoutiredof. Popular hashtags become “trending” hashtags, and that’s one way how you make a big public statement on twitter (“Retweeting” someone else’s message is another way it’s done; retweeting and the sending of hastagged messages often occur symbiotically.)

Just to get you in the sarcastic spirit of the thing, here are some of the Tweets I’ve sent so far today:

@whitehouse Obama visits fallen building, a collapsed trench, and Carlsbad Caverns; says he'll "never cave" on debt deal. #thanksalot

@whitehouse republicans propose "logan's run", obama seeks reasonable compromise. #thanksalot

@whitehouse offers 1 Wet-Nap for each American thrown under bus yesterday; Republicans protest new "entitlement" #thanksalot

@whitehouse Prozac pill commits suicide; says in note that White House caving once again is "too depressing" #thanksalot

@whitehouse To avoid uncertainty in December, Obama Administration announces today they're caving on Bush tax cut extension #thanksalot

@whitehouse Dec. 23, 2011-Boehner: "We'll agree to revenue increases when both houses have a clean vote to repeal Obamacare..." #thanksalot

@whitehouse Dec 25, 2011-Administration announces entitlement compromise: cat food now food stamp-eligible #thanksalot

@whitehouse Obama Administration announces they prefer to negotiate with hostage-takers: "It makes us feel less guilty..." #thanksalot

@whitehouse Obama Administration "feels America's pain", announces nationwide program to distribute K-Y after debt deal #thanksalot

@whitehouse is there some sort of political viagra that could make obama "stand firm", just once? #thanksalot

At this point it looks like the only way this stinker goes down is if House Democrats vote against this bill and take the “Debt Ceiling Sword of Damocles” that the President has placed over their heads and put it right back on his, forcing either a 14th Amendment solution or a “clean” debt limit increase; if they do they not only stop this next hostage-taking dead in its tracks, but they create, for this Administration, the same level of fear that the Tea Party has today, and if that happens, then we move into the next stage of debt reduction negotiations from a position of strength.

If they fail to stop this deal, then when Medicare gets whacked in December the Democrats become co-conspirators – and at that point, for a Congressional Democrat up for reelection in ‘12 it’s gonna be either go down with all the other incumbents or run against Obama.

And at that point, the most interesting political question might be: did Obama depress turnout enough to cause Democrats to lose even more seats in Congress, or, when the details are better-known, is there going to be a huge “throw out all the bastards” vote that hammers Republicans just as ferociously as it does Democrats?

And what about Michelle Bachmann?

I don’t know, but it should be quite a soap opera between now and then, so stay tuned, make sure to say #thanksalot…and then do it a few times more…and most importantly of all, try to have as much fun in a bad situation as you can.

After all, as long as it’s happening to everyone else, it’s still comedy; until it finally does hit you…it’s not yet officially tragedy.

3 Simple Things to Do Today Instead of Saying "Eff You Washington!"

Richard Eskow — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:09:23 -0400

People in the capital were thrilled by Twitter's role in 2009's Iranian uprisings. They probably weren't as excited this weekend when a new "hashtag" (topic) suddenly climbed toward the top of Twitter's trend list. It's not printable here, but the first word began with a "F." After that came the words "you" and "Washington."

The frustration's understandable, given Washington's bizarre monomania with applying the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. But there are more constructive ways to spend your day than tweeting four-letter words in the general direction of the Potomac River.

Tweet Dreams

The Twitter trend was started by the seemingly mild-manner media analyst Jeff Jarvis, who explains (warning: not work safe): "I listened to the latest from Washington about negotiations over the debt ceiling ...After dinner, I tweeted: "Hey, Washington *****, it's our country, our economy, our money. Stop f**ing with it."

Somebody responded by tweeting, "Hashtag it: #F***YOUWASHINGTON." Says Jarvis: "So I did ... And then it exploded as I never could have predicted."

It's easy to make too much out of this sort of thing. Twitter users aren't a cross-section of America. Too much can be made of its top trends -- which as of this writing include #Dear Taylor Swift, #Fantasy Football, and #Russell Brand. If hashtags alone can predict our political future, comedians will rule a nation of make-believe athletes who write love letters to teenaged country singers. (Somebody's probably muttering, 'You mean, like right now?')

The revolution will not be twitterized.

Genuine and Widespread Discontent

But there may be a larger phenomenon here, once that can be seen in polling numbers too. People are in despair for their future. Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe we're still in a recession (which, for many people, we are). Consumer confidence has plunged. Almost 40 percent of Americans believe we've entered a state of permanent decline, while nearly half expect another major recession in the next year.

And they don't believe anything's being done to stop it, since unemployment is still high and the views of the American Majority aren't being represented in this week's deficit discussions. More than 60 percent now say that the country's on the wrong track and unfavorable opinions of both parties are nearing record highs.

In other words, "F**k you, Washington."

Deal or No Deal?

Harry Reid's "grand bargain" won't include cuts to Medicare and Social Security. If he's successful (the president now supports him) that will mean that public outcries have once again thwarted attempts to cut these programs.

But Reid's proposal has problems, too. Like Boehner's plan, it would create a "supercommission" empowered to recommend drastic cuts, which would be submitted for an up-or-down vote with no modifications. (It's not clear if entitlements would be excluded from Reid's version.) There would be no tax increases under the Reid plan, either, which means the wealthy would continue their easy ride while other Americans bear the brunt of spending cuts. You can't fix our economic problems without increasing taxes, as this chart from economist Menzie Chinn shows:

It's all there. Spending rose sharply and tax revenues declined dramatically when George W. Bush took office. Both trends spiked again after the Great Recession. Why? First came the cost of two major wars, along with the Bush tax cuts. Then came the cost of (partially) repairing the damage left by a deregulated and unsupervised Wall Street, along with lost tax revenue as millions of people lost their jobs.

In the face of all this, here's Washington's plan: Continue the wars, preserve tax cuts for the wealthy, and fight Wall Street regulations. Hey, what was that hashtag called again?

Into Action

But despair not, ye infuriated Americans. As promised, here are three things you can do today (unless it's not Tuesday, July 26, in which case you can only do two of them):

1. Use this link to tell your Senators and Representatives that you oppose any deal that would cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, and ask them to raise the debt limit without any conditions attached.

2. Call your Senators and/or Members of Congress to tell them the same thing. (The link above should give you their contact information when you're done. It will ask you for a donation, too -- which, if you decide to give, would make four things you can do today.) If the phone numbers don't appear, they're publicly available.

3. If it's before noon on Tuesday, you still have time to find your Representative's local office and go there for a noon demonstration sponsored by a number of groups, including MoveOn and the Campaign for America's Future. You can find the nearest office here and then, as MoveOn says, "tell your Representative that they need to protect the programs working families rely on, and make the richest few pay their share."

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee summarizes the goals of these actions as 1) thanking the 81 Democrats in Congress who signed the Progressive Caucus letter opposing cuts to Social Secial, Medicare, and Medicaid, 2) urging other Democrats to oppose any plans that includes these cuts, and 3) telling Republicans to stop pushing for cuts to these programs. (They could add a few Democrats to that list, too.)

These actions could make a difference. And if these actions continue and grow, we may someday live in a country where the biggest trending hashtag on Twitter is "#thankyouWashington."

Taylor Swift might be disappointed, but the rest of us would be pretty happy.

(Abbreviated from an earlier version that was published in The Huffington Post)

Tell President Obama and Everyone Else: There's No Deficit Problem

Joseph M. Firestone — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:34:43 -0400

Over the past year, in an attempt to head off the austerity program gaining steam in Washington, DC, I've blogged the truth about the deficit/debt problem on many occasions. That truth is that there is no deficit/debt problem, and that deficits and debts, no matter how large they may be, don't affect the ability of the United States to create more money.

So, there is not and cannot be a solvency problem, unless Congress refuses to do its duty and appropriate dollars to pay the Government's bills. Of course, if the Government spends beyond what's necessary to add enough aggregate demand for the US to get to full employment, then demand-pull inflation will result from the excess spending. But 1) we've got a long way to go until we reach that point; and 2) the inflation issue not a debt/deficit/solvency issue.

So, the solvency issue needs to be taken off the table for discussion, and certainly as a basis for action, and austerity programs and long-term deficit reduction plans like those of Paul Ryan and the Administration. In addition, our erstwhile leaders need to all get off their high horses about fiscal responsibility, fiscal sustainability, "biting bullets," "having adult conversations," and other such nonsense, and face up to their real responsibility which is spending enough, in the right way, to give every American who wants to work a job at a living wage with decent fringe benefits. Until they do that, they are the ones who are being fiscally as well as morally irresponsible.

So far, my efforts to send this message to our politicians don't appear to have gotten through. So, I want to try again. This time by trying a twitter campaign. A little while ago, I tweeted:

The US can't run out of money, unless Congress refuses to make it! #nodeficitproblem

I'm going to continue this effort by tweeting all the reasons I can think of why the US has “#nodeficitproblem.” If you agree with me, please hep me tweet the truth. Let's get “#nodeficitproblem,” trending!

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).

Booya! Latest Wall Street Innovation – Twitter Trading

Mary Bottari — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:00:39 -0500

Two years after a catastrophic financial collapse and six months after the passage of a Wall Street reform bill, astonishing tales of volatility in the market are all too common. If you think inexplicable flash crashes are worrisome, brace yourself for the next big financial “innovation” – Twitter Trading.

Wall Street computers are beginning to analyze and trade on a wide array of media sources – without human intervention. Graham Bowley from the New York Times has done [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/technology/22trading.html?_r=1&hpw a series] of articles recently on high-speed trading that are a must read. From the Times:

Math-loving traders are using powerful computers to speed-read news reports, editorials, company Web sites, blog posts and even Twitter messages – and then letting the machines decide what it all means for the markets. In some cases, the computers are actually parsing writers’ words, sentence structure, even the odd emoticon. A wink and a smile :-) for instance, just might mean things are looking up for the markets. Then, often without human intervention, the programs are interpreting that news and trading on it.

Mad Money

For those of us who might be worried about thousands of computers making millions of trades based on how many times Mad Money’s Jim Cramer has “Booya” in his Tweets, have no fear. The issue has been subject to rigorous academic scrutiny.

A [http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003new paper] by the University of Manchester and Indiana University published last October said the number of emotional words on Twitter could be used to predict daily moves in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with 87.6 percent accuracy. The researchers found it useful to use the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of six dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy). Apparently, “Reckless” and “Trigger Happy” were not options.

The researchers found that the “public mood” deduced from Twitter and Google is a leading indicator for the Dow. Not the other way around. Analysis of calm vs. anxious states can predict what happens with the Dow a few days out and give an edge to media-obsessed traders – that is if real humans are actually analyzing the data flow.

Major news providers Dow Jones and [http://www.opencalais.com/aboutThomson Reuters] offer news products that archive and structure news to provide machine-readable feeds for use in trading algorithms. This enables large-scale trading with little human screening. The market for unstructured data is also big. The New York Times reports that about 35 percent of quantitative trading firms are exploring whether to use unstructured data feeds of news, blogs and tweets. Two years ago, only about two percent of those firms used them.

Gee, unstructured news plus Tweets feeding directly into trading algorithms, what could go wrong?

Halt the Arms Race

Information is the most valuable commodity on Wall Street. Traders with the best information and fastest computers can make a killing. “It is an arms race,” Roger Ehrenberg, managing partner at IA Ventures, told the [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/technology/22trading.html?_r=1&hpw Times]. But trading based on public mood swings as evidenced by Twitter and Google is taking the arms race to a whole new level.

About seventy percent of Wall Street trades already qualify as “high-frequency.” Computers buy and sell shares up to 1,000 times faster than the blink of an eye often with little human forethought and intervention. Some of this is “noise trading” – ill-informed investors simply following the stampede. Now we will have “Twitter trading” – sure to lead the cattle off the cliff.

In an era of inexplicable flash crashes, reckless commodity speculation on gas prices and “too big to fail” taxpayer guarantees backstopping much of this activity, do we really need to be trading on Tweets?

There is an easy way to halt the arms race. An increasing number of world leaders, business leaders, organizations, and economists are calling for a [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Financial_transaction_tax financial speculation tax.] Even a modest tax of .25 percent on stocks and other trades based on transaction costs would crimp the style of high-volume high-speed traders by raising the cost of each transaction and force the traders to ground their activities in some rational thinking. Plus, it could raise an astounding $100 billion a year that could be put to use creating jobs or preserving essential public services.

The Nation magazine [http://www.thenation.com/article/157281/progressive-honor-roll-2010 recently] dubbed a financial speculation tax “the best legislative proposal of 2010.” Give those Wall Street boys a headache and Tweet it today.

*****

Track big bank shenanigans at [http://www.banksterusa.org BanksterUSA.org.]

Which Is More "Gangsta," 50 Cent's Twitter Stock Pitch or Goldman's Facebook Deal?

Richard Eskow — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:18:49 -0500

Music was Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's second career. News reports say he began dealing crack at the age of twelve, after the murder of his coke-dealer mother. Early tracks like "Ghetto Quran" and "How to Rob" reflect a brutal, street-hustling life, and Jackson has the bullet wounds to match. He's talented, wildly successful, and I sure wouldn't mess with him.

But when he starts mixing social media with pumped-up investment pitches, 50 Cent is moving into Goldman Sachs territory. "Fitty" reportedly earned millions for touting a stock on Twitter, without disclosing that he owned shares in the company. How does that stack up against Goldman's own social media deal with Facebook? When you move into the stock market, you're going where the real gangstas roll.

The Message

We're in the middle of a much-needed national dialog about harsh and violent rhetoric, and rappers like 50 Cent have been singled out again for criticism. I'm opposed to music censorship, but I get the concern. Even some of the best rappers glamorize things I despise. Yet even as some politicians wag their fingers at hip-hop criminals, their other hand's stretched our for campaign cash from corporate lawbreakers. Sometimes the difference between crime on the Mean Streets and crime on Wall Street is just a matter of degree.

And don't think the language and lifestyle can't get rough on Wall Street. Morgan Stanley's brokers had a now-famous phrase, used whenever they sold their own clients bad investments: "I ripped his face off." It was a Goldman Sachs executive who praised another employee for selling Goldman clients on a program he described as a "shitty deal." (That guy's now a senior exec at Bank of America.) And the depositions in Goldman's sex discrimination suit read like the script to a rap video: female employees pressured to join a party in a topless bar, a woman pinned against a wall and forcibly kissed, a Christmas party with female escorts wearing "short black skirts, strapless tops and Santa hats."

Throw in some beats and a few "uh-huh's" and "yeahs" and you've got yourself a video.

Fitty Twitters

"Ok ok ok my friends just told me stop tweeting about HNHI so that we can get all the money. Hahaha check it out its the real deal."

50 Cent tweeted about a marginal stock all weekend and into early Monday, calling it "BIG MONEY" and saying "you can double your money right now." The effect was mindblowing:

Jackson's credited with moving the stock of a company called HNHI by $50 million dollars in one day, even though its own auditor reportedly "expressed concerns about its financial future." Fitty didn't mention that he held 30 million shares of the stock, which he picked up for $750,000 last fall. Yesterday's surge reportedly netted him somewhere between $8.7 million and $10 million. No wonder so many news accounts repeated the name of his hit album, Get Rich or Die Tryin'.

HNHI increased in value by about 200%. Even after it dropped more than 23% today, Jackson was way ahead of the game. Fitty's attorneys presumably got a little worried, because the disclaimers started appearing late Monday: "HNHI is the right investment for me it might not be for u! Do ur homework," "I own HNHI stocks thoughts on it are my opinion. Talk to your financial advisor ..."

Old School

How does Fitty's Twitter run compare with Goldman Sach's Facebook deal? Goldman consolidated a number of its clients into a single artificial "investor" to get around a legal requirement that any company with more than 500 investors be publicly traded and subject to the regulations that protect investors. Felix Salmon observes that this deal is bigger than many IPOs, but doesn't have to follow any of the same rules.

Goldman sure knows how to create a feeding frenzy. They wouldn't let anybody into the deal for less than $2 million - a surefire way to make the marks salivate - and touted the deal shamelessly to its clients: "When you have a chance I wanted to find a time to discuss a highly confidential and time sensitive investment opportunity ... If you agree not to use information that we reveal to you ... I will be able to disclose the name of the company and provide you with more information..." Former Goldmanite Nomi Prins captures the essence of the deal: create an artificial bubble and then "pawn off the overpriced goods on the clients." As Prins notes, Goldman's giving itself the option to unload this investment if it goes bad, but it's locking its clients in until 2013.

Knowing Goldman, they'll also be shorting Facebook somewhere along the way. The country learned their M.O. afer the last crisis by reviewing their internal emails, and by the cynical and lawless way they played clients in the ABACUS deal. To avoid legal trouble this time around, Goldman's even disclosed in advance that it may short Facebook. Goldman skims a lot off the top, then lets you buy into a deal so skewed that one of its own funds turned it down. In return, you get to say you own a piece of Facebook. Maybe they'll even give you a nice certificate you can hang on the wall of your Las Vegas investment property.

Blowin' Money Fast

Does that mean Facebook is this year's version of Vegas real estate? Could be. Even the most successful business has a real and an inflated value, after all, and I tend to agree with Douglas Rushkoff and others who say Facebook's going to fade away like MySpace did.

Think about it: Facebook has a badly designed interface, it's difficult to use, and it continues to irritate and infuriate its customers. Poorly-managed companies can thrive for a while, but not forever. And the Goldman deal sidesteps the very public accountability that might encourage Facebook to make the changes it needs. But whatever happens to Facebook, the Goldman deal's a bubble machine designed to inflate its price. If they take Facebook public in 2012, they could ride an initial wave of "BIG MONEY" hysteria to a quick killing, then cash out while their own customers are still locked in. "Hahaha check it out ."

And Goldman's tapped the mother lode: the US government. As Simon Johnson points out, their Facebook investment is backed by the Fed - and therefore by the public's dollars. The money boys have knocked off Fort Knox.

Goldman invested $75 million in Facebook early on through a hedge fund. Now they're saying they've put $450 million of their own money into this deal, but they get that money at the ultra-low Fed rate the government gives them. So they don't need to earn the same returns their clients do. What's more, they're charging at leat $60 million in service fees, and they can unload their investment whenever the bubble deflates.

Those "lucky" Facebook investors: Goldman will get rich. They'll die tryin'.

Fitty vs. Blankey

So how does 50 Cent stack up against Goldman - morally, ethically, and legally? For one thing, Mr. Jackson is not a bank or investment manager and doesn't claim any special financial expertise. Fitty doesn't receive low-rate loans through the Fed's discount window. Neither he nor his company, G-Unit Records, received a Federal bailout. 50 Cent did not receive $13 billion in taxpayer money as a "backdoor bailout" through AIG. (Disclaimer: I used to work at AIG.) And 50 Cent has never paid himself a nickel, much less a huge bonus, after being rescued with Federal funds.

Goldman wouldn't admit that it misled clients about its ABACUS product until it was time to plea bargain its way out of SEC fines and potential criminal charges. Until then Goldman execs congratulated themselves for dumping bad investments on their clients. Now that's cold. Fitty, on the other hand, copped to his actions right away.

On the rhetoric front, 50 Cent's pretty rough: "I'll hit your vertebrae, rip through your tissues/your wife on the futon huggin' the shih tzu." Goldman's more genteel - but some of its political allies aren't. Most of its campaign contributions are placed through intermediaries - in this case, the GOP Senate and Congressional Committees. Some of the candidates funded by these groups have used a lot of violent rhetoric, like threatening "Second Amendment" reactions (i.e., gun violence) to decisions they don't like,firing guns at targets with their political opponent's face on it, and suggesting they would issue "hunting permits" for "liberals."

If there's a difference between this rhetoric and 50 Cent's, I can't see it. (And despite all their populist Tea Party rhetoric, these candidates have come through for their Wall Street patrons. )

The chorus to the "shih tzu" song is "I'm laughing all the way to the bank." But 50 Cent has an actual product - music - so he's a part of the productive economy, not the financial sector. Curtis Jackson's a self-made success who came up the hard way, with talent. If Kanye is rap's F. Scott Fitzgerald, its chronicler of the high life's pain and pleasure, 50 Cent is its Jim Thompson. He's the poet of blood and bullets. His raps remind me of what a great jazz bass player once told me about that instrument: that it stands on the bordeline between melody and percussion. 50 Cent raps on the border between prose and percussion.

There's no evidence of criminal behavior in either Curtis Jackson's Twitter move or Goldman's Facebook deal. But 50 Cent has proved that the so-called "rational" "free market" is neither. And Goldman has proved that Wall Street is still up to its old tricks, getting rich creating bubbles and then getting even richer as they pop.

No, I don't like the violent language. Or the sexism. Or the glorification of bad behavior. But enough about Wall Street: I don't like those things in music, either. One of the things worth remembering about language is that it reflects deeper values. If we despise what these words reflect, we shouldn't tolerate the behavior.

Don't censor music. Regulate banks.

_______________________________

UPDATE: A commenter at the Huffington Post observes that 50 Cent may have violated SEC rules, which of course is possible. My disclaimer about "no evidence of criminal behavior" meant that I wasn't claiming to pass legal judgement on either Curtis Jackson or Goldman Sachs - I don't have all the facts, am not a judge or attorney, etc. - but rather to make larger ethical and social points.

Behavior doesn't have to be criminal to be wrong. And next to Goldman Sachs, 50 Cent is small change.

(Here are two videos for your enjoyment: 50 Cent and Lloyd Blankfein. Play them at the same time for the proper effect.)

This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project.