WONKESS

It's ALIVE!!...

Vacations are weird.

Vacations to foreign countries are weird.

Vacations to hot foreign countries with two little aliens are really, really weird.

Things I completely missed because I was in Hot Chinese City with my two little pumpkins (sans childcare), in no particular order:

• Iran elections
• Governor Sanford's affair
• some stuff in Pakistan
• some stuff in Kyrgyzstan
• KKR's yes, we're going public, no, we're not going public weirdness
• some stuff about financial regulatory reform

Then we get home, and now I know more about Michael Jackson than I really ever cared to.  Not that I don't have my nostalgic MJ moments (I do.  He was my very first memory of pop awareness.), but srsly?

The trip to Hot Chinese City?  Phenomenal.  My sister, who was supposed to visit us from Nearby Chinese City kinda totally flaked, but only in so far as she decided to come back to the US half a week before we left, so we did at least get to see her before we left for Hot Chinese City. 

What did we do in Hot Chinese City?  Srsly?  We ate.  We literally had ginormous meals with friends and family for every single meal over the 10 days that we were in HCC.  We ate at old favorites, new introductions, local cuisine, not-so-local cuisine, street-side-stand cuisine.  It was a smorgasborg of food.  Because it was so hot, of a variety that the girls have never experienced in their short lives, we basically didn't un-jet-lag, and lived according to our meal clock.  The girls would sleep from midnight to 5 am, we'd wake up to go to the park, go to breakfast, do one quick morning sightsee, then lunch, then retreat out of the sun for a long afternoon siesta, wake for dinner, and then do some night sightseeing.

I could not have been happier with Loo and Kali's reaction to the city.  They had a blast of a time, and continue to talk about their trip with bright shiny eyes.  Their only complaints: the heat and the bugs.  Oh, poor Loo, with her incredible sensitivity to bug bites.  By the second half of the trip, her legs were absolutely swelling with bug bites which had blistered.  We kept lathering on the anti-itch, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic-filled medicine, but it was a slow healing process that hed her whimpering for many days.  And Kali had a "slight" gastrointestinal problem, no doubt influenced by the fact that we were eating far too much, far too often and foods that were far too rich for her 2.5 year old body.  On the other hand, now that we've returned to the US, we've had several people comment that Kali seems to have gotten thinner (or taller, or both, will have to check). 

Things are (sort of) back to normal now.  The girls are still slighly jet-lagged, which means they are up between 4-5 in the morning.  And they take enormous early afternoon naps.  I'm back at work, but this is a ridiculous week as half the attorneys are out on vacation.  J is back at his research.

Being back in Hot Chinese City was very jarring for me.  When we left, I was sure that I had closed that chapter of my life.  I'd lived in 3 Asian countries over 8 years, worked for local companies and large multi-nationals.  I had more frequent flier miles then I knew what to do with (I ended up donating them to LegalAid, rather than watching them expire).  But being back, after 8 years away, I was absolutely washed in nostalgia.  Life can be surprisingly "simple" there.  And fun.

J and I are seriously considering moving back.  Not in the near future, but pending how successful he is in his academic career.  We will know in 4 years if his current school intends to keep him on, and if it doesn't, Asia seems as good a next move as any.

It doesn't really mesh well with the direction I've taken as a lawyer, but... oh, well. 

Right now, I can't really worry about any of that, since I'm fairly consumed with my ongoing epic battle (?) w/r to getting Loo into kindergarten.

Automobile Bankruptcies... It's the Banks, Stupid...

I hate left-right bickering.  Hate it.  I especially hate the left-right bickering about the automobile bankruptcy/bailout.  Yes, the approach taken w/r the bankruptcies left much to be desired, yes, I question the legality of the various things done by the government to ensure that the bankruptcies proceeded according to their "plan", and yes, there was probably a ton of politics involved (not the least of which, the preservation of the almighty union vote).  But yes, a too rapid shutdown of the American auto industry would probably have had pretty deep and severe consequences, which would have required extraordinary "other" taxpayer funded programs (if nothing else, more budget for the police/military to quell the riots and social instability that would inevitably happen if unemployment climbed into the mid-teens or even twenties), and yes, I too wonder what America would look like once we lose all of our ability to manufacture (though Robert Reich, a pretty darn tootin' liberal guy, has a series of blog posts about why the whole idea of preserving American manufacturing should be pwnd).  But the auto bankruptcies are not about the the unions, or the recession, or American competitiveness, or the small bondholders (more about this later).

Most of all, I hate left-right bickering because I'm increasingly convinced that it is all manufactured for the preservation of those who have absolutely destroyed America.  Watch I.O.U.S.A. if you don't believe that America is up shit's creek w/o a paddle.  Because of all these ridiculous left-right battles (and don't get me started on the cultural ones), we hate each other even more than we hate (1) those whose political might structured a financial system where they could get extraordinary magnified returns on the backs of those of us just trying to save for retirement or trying to put a roof over our families' heads and (2) those in other parts of the world who are just counting down the days until we explode magnificently. 

When will people realize that it won't matter if we have or don't have gender equality, have or don't have the right of choice, have or don't have gay marriage, have or don't have high or low taxes when we no longer have a country?

When it's too late.

Rape the country?  Too late, already done.  Want more proof?  Here's one:

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders – led by Morgan and Citibank – expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock.

Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash - from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.

And here's another:

JPMorgan is widely understood to be one of the biggest lenders to the U.S. auto industry, if not the single biggest. But CEO Jamie Dimon, when asked about the issue on the bank's first quarter conference call, said total losses in a worst-case scenario would be relatively small.

...a JPMorgan-led group of banks was largely unsuccessful in selling off a $12 billion loan in 2007 to finance Cerberus Capital Management's purchase of Chrysler in 2007, according to several reports at the time. Other lenders on that deal were Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, though JPMorgan assumed Bear's exposure when it bought the faltering firm the following year.

The banks apparently hedged a good deal of this exposure by buying credit default swaps of Ford and GM. A report by bond research firm CreditSights in 2007 noted a sudden rise in credit default swaps on Ford and GM that July, which it attributed to bank hedging activity as efforts to sell the Chrysler debt ran into trouble.

Do you see what just happened?  The too-big-to-fail banks NEVER LOSE.  No matter what happens to every other industry, every other player in the market, every other citizen of this country, only one group of persons? bandits? cylons? are guaranteed to NEVER LOSE.

And we suck because we allow this to happen.

Charts and Graphs Monday...

Map of GM's influence across the globe.
Graph of TARP transactions.

I *heart* graphic representations.