The Celebrity Center

Small, orange, blisteringly uninterested in that outside his narrow billionaire's ken -- that's my Mayor. In his 19 (or so) years as NYC's chief executive, Mike Bloomberg has indeed proven himself to be one of your more efficient moderate Republicans, where moderate Republican is defined as "unstintingly pro-business in every way, but not a total jerk about women's issues and gay rights." New York is tough to govern, and he has indeed governed it, but he has also been roughly as poor as his demon-weasel predecessor at making the city a less shitty place in which to live if you're poor or non-white or take mass transit or send a kid to public schools or are a civil servant or are not a Manhattanite or are unfortunate enough to be living someplace where a real estate mega-developer wants to drop a Tampa-style luxury condo-turd. But he has also tried somewhat hard on the green building side of things, given boatloads to charity, painted down some bike lanes, and generally done the sort of things that might (have) convince a casual liberal on the Upper East Side that Bloomberg is the good kind of plutocrat.

Anyway, a liked-but-not-well-liked billionaire is nevertheless still a billionaire, which means that -- in addition to his invisible nuclear helicopter and lunchtime diamonds-and-kale salads and low, low taxes -- Mayor Bloomberg receives regular, gentle-but-affectionate HJ's from the political press, and is routinely bruited as a potential presidential candidate. New Yorkers are surely confused by all this, because -- while Bloomberg is indeed rich as hell -- he is about as poor a retail politician as one could imagine. And yet for those whose understanding of politics is based purely on anecdote and unofficial polls of like-minded buddies -- this underwhelming tranche of NYC's politi-thinkers, oddly, include New York Times political chief Matt Bai -- Bloomberg is indeed considered very viable. The reasoning, again, being that while he is indeed another billionaire prone to issuing all kinds of churlish plutocratical ridiculousnesses about the manifest riskiness of "scaring" money with regulation or taxation or punishment for massive systematic fraud or the other vicissitudes of life under the rule of law, Bloomberg is at least the kind of billionaire who is cool with gay people and not a total asshole about a woman's right to choose. Again: basically, Our Type of Rich Guy.

There are a decent number of other people out there like Bloomberg -- very rich men (and women) who are not total assholes, but still have some very self-serving ideas about Terrifying Deficits and corporate taxes -- and many of them live in New York City. The High Moderate Druids of the establishment press love these guys, both because a disappointingly large segment of The Culture At Large currently sports diamond-cutter boners for the super-wealthy and because Our Type of Rich Guy occupies the sort of valorous middle ground -- valorous because it is in the middle, not because it is readily defended in any coherent way -- between the imaginary revolutionary left (these guys, you mean?) and the tricorn-hat buttheads bellowing incoherences at George Washington impersonators in Colonial Williamsburg. If being capital-r Reasonable is the greatest and glibbest of rhetorical luxuries, then both Bloomberg (and, vicariously, his fluffers) get to enjoy the best of both worlds -- the security and influence of unassailable and well-defended mega-wealth, but also the ability to evince a casual-but-nuanced familiarity with sustainable development and charter schools and suchlike.

The term "limousine liberal" is tempting, here, but for the fact that 1) Bloomberg is Hydrogen-Powered Hovercraft Rich, not Limousine-With-Neon-Tubes-On-The-Interior rich and 2) Bloomberg's sort of facile social liberalism is essentially and only a pose when de-coupled from things economic. For instance, "sustainable development" means nothing when the city has essentially ceded zoning decisions to mega-developers, and ceded its own right to demand concessions in re: affordable housing from those developers; do that and go to war with the city's public workers, turn the public schools into laboratories for glib market-forces cynicism, and etc. and it doesn't matter how many trees you plant or where you ban smoking -- you're on your way to a city that does not make sense, is not healthy and which is impossible to live in for all but the very wealthy. But of course economic stuff is tough to report upon and understand, and style and pose is easy to report upon, and most people care more about style than they do about civil servants or public schools or whatever. SEO strategy certainly dictates as much.

And so we got, Monday, something called No Labels, which is a sort of third party dedicated to Non-partisanship and Centrism and Civility and finding a less stridently dickish way to argue for cutting taxes on the rich and loosening regulation across the board in order to free the power of the market and so barfily on. Michael Bloomberg, burnt-umber prince of the city and very wealthy dude, is probably one of the group's anonymous wealthy donors, and definitely high on its masthead -- alongside actual idiot Joe Scarborough and noxiously reasonable animate custard Evan Bayh.

And if Bloomberg is there, then the New York Times' poignantly besotted civility-flogging Bai is also there. Here is what Bai wrote about No Labels on Monday, in a piece that's redolent with a wish for a Bloomberg presidential run in 2012 and rife with what Jonathan Bernstein, who knows a lot about this sort of thing, describes as a boatload of basic misunderstandings and errors on Bai's part. Guh ahead, Bai-bee:

Mr. Bloomberg brought some star power to the inaugural No Labels convention at Columbia University, which also featured speakers like Joe Scarborough, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida and a smattering of congressmen and senators. No Labels aspires to become a counterweight to ideological groups like MoveOn.org and the Tea Party movement — a network of activists devoted to pushing politicians from both parties toward a nonpartisan consensus on vital issues.

...No Labels was created by two Washington consultants, the Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and the Republican image-shaper Mark McKinnon, and its slick opening event featured throngs of journalists, free boxed lunches and a song written for the occasion by the pop sensation Akon. The group’s slogan, printed on T-shirts and banners, summarizes its purpose this way: “Not left. Not right. Forward.”

There's more, but honestly that's probably good enough. Not since Jon Stewart's Everyone Chill Out Knowingly Rally (feat. John Legend) has a dimmer message been more successfully narrowcasted at media types and no-fucking-one else, and so it wouldn't be surprising if this -- like Stewart's impassioned urgings that all those unemployed people and war widows just please calm down about Juan Williams for a minute -- sunk into a quick and richly deserved anonymity. But it also wouldn't be surprising if it didn't -- the lure of A Billionaire We Can Believe In is stronger now than ever -- Bai, and others, evidently believe that a shorter, more moderate and notably un-charming version of Obama, albeit one with a better helicopter, would heighten the debate and perhaps save our nation from deficits. You know, because Bloomberg knows business and creates jobs himself and so on.

Ridiculous, I think -- Bloomberg has done fairly well at his government hobby, but there are no lessons for the rest of the nation in Bloomberg's NYC, just a slightly softened micro-scale version of the nation's troubling broader trends and some better-than-average bars. But if a true-blue charlatan like Pete Peterson can see his self-serving lifelong obsession become a real and Serious thing like the Presidential Deficit Commission, Bloomberg and Them might hang around for a few more news cycles. There really is a media elite, although it's not the kind that haunts Glenn Beck's moist night terrors. It's something far scarier -- fatuous celebrity columnists whose hard-ons for prestige and wealth are paired with both a desperate wish to appear reasonable and a sad, suffocating lack of interest in what might actually be reasonable in times like these.

The Lower Depths, Or The Limits of My Financial Understanding

(I actually watched almost all of Leviathan on HBO a couple weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon. Spoiler alert: it ends with Peter Weller punching a woman right in the face. Triumphantly.)

So, I'm more or less willing to admit defeat when it comes to writing about the banking and securities reform we either will or will not get. When I read good horse-race pieces on the subject, I feel only half-educated by dint of all that horse-racery. Boldface the names and it's basically a long gossip column about ugly people, without the Page Six-y product placement: "The bill Senator Chris Dodd moved through his Banking Committee in March was significantly tougher than the bill the House passed in December. Then, last week, Senator Blanche Lincoln shocked Wall Street by producing an even tougher bill than that. “This thing is not a battle they’d anticipated,” says one administration official. The industry had widely expected Lincoln to soften Dodd’s derivatives measure as part of a compromise with her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss. Senator Jim DeMint was spotted canoodling with Peaches Geldof at Avenue and drinking Ciroc vodka."

There's information there, but it's the sort of thing you get in the "Around The League" bit at the end of a baseball column; who's up, who's down, how Senator Maria Cantwell's arm is feeling after a rough outing against the Twins last week, etc. And I'm on the record with a bunch of indistinct outrage at the fatuity of the macro-scale press and politicians on this, too.

But the more I've read about all this in the last few days, the more I've developed... well, not a sympathy for the people either getting this wrong (the media, willing to discuss only minutia and political optics) or not even trying to get it right (Republicans in the Senate, unwilling to do any fucking thing). But something like a sympathy, if only because of how devilishly complicated this whole thing is. The amount of deceit and creativity and calculated disinformation that goes into a mega-scam like the Magnetar -- This American Life segment on it here, very concise summary from The Economist here -- is almost impossible to summarize in a couple of sentences, and an attempt to go deeper is so winding and bottomless a rabbit hole that it is admittedly a lot simpler to weigh how everything's polling and what political effect it all might have. The problem with that, of course, is that the polls and politics reflect the result of the media's hands-in-the-air abdication of its duty to even attempt to cover this stuff. It's complicated, but it can be summarized. I tried it myself, and I think this is more or less correct:

Because there are essentially no legal rules governing the trading of real and synthetic securities -- and because the SEC can't and doesn't enforce anything and -- all kinds of crazy financial shit got created and traded. Because there are essentially no legal regulations regarding hedge funds, regulators have no idea what they're doing and thus no way to stop them from constructing scams in which they game the market. Goldman did something like this, and they're now getting in some temporary trouble for it. But the bigger problems, in no particular order, is the absence of any responsibility on the part of the dealers, the lack of laws explicitly forbidding the worst behavior, and the compromised, cash-strapped, overwhelmed SEC's inability to enforce what laws do exist. And because no one but the ethically deficient scam-architects knows anything about any of this, slower and less-sophisticated institutional investors got rolled and the actual human-scale economy got a robust dick-kick

And I'm terrible at summarizing things. I write 500-word emails to people to see how their weekends went and 1100-word blog posts about Gary Matthews Jr. Surely a professional could do it better.


Still, I don't really want the job of writing about finance. This is because I still don't get much of anything about it, as that supposed-to-be-nifty summary actually bears out. Luckily, there are others who are 1) better at holding all these different narratives in their minds without having to lie down, 2) more interested in the topic in general, and 3) more comfortable with accepting the idea of the unknowable and opaque. Moe Tkacik writes about this stuff really, really well and does so in breaking down Goldman and Magnetar (and the opacity of each) here; I got to her post via another accessible and intelligent post on the subject by Choire Sicha today; Andrew Leonard at Salon is always good for a patient and coherent explanation. I, for my part... will stick to sports and Dino-Riders videos going forward, because those are my core competencies. But:

But, I am hoping that maybe, at last, we are going to get some sort of conversation on this. The collapse these guys created is now nearly two years in the past, and if it's slightly better understood in certain ways it's also still mostly un-discussed. I guess it's easier to dress up like the old New England Patriots logo and yell about how Obama is as socialist as The Joker or whatever. I know that it is. But even if it's more or less impossible to explain how things got this bad -- how these scams even work, were concocted, were essentially legal -- it's seeming possible to me that an ignorant-ish, over-emotional national conversation on this could possibly still lead to public pressure for real regulation and maybe (this is iffier) actual regulations, provided the bad guys in that ignorant conversation are the actual (and actually very bad) bad guys. Which is maybe kind of cynical/Straussian of me or something, but I'm trying to find a place where necessarily bleak realism and stubborn hope overlap.