Sterling's seemingly meandering and occasionally infuriating talk at the annual Reboot digital culture conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this year attracted some notice, originally, but deserves a wider hearing, if only for his contextualization of Steve Jobs and Nicolas Sarkozy as gothic figures and his advocacy on behalf of expensive beds. Luckily, protoblogger Dave Winer recently re-uploaded and linked the talk.

Observers of the social networking wars should listen to Sterling's rundown on "favela chic," excerpted above. Rupert Murdoch, familial overlord of MySpace parent News Corp., is cast as the "remote, distanct, old-school Brazilian tyrant," while MySpace accounts are likened to "huts." Who knows: Maybe when you lose your job, an anonymous space in News Corp.'s online hellscape might start sounding a lot more fun than the prim, proper — and all-too-accountable — playground that is Facebook.

(Sterling pic: Daniel Barradas)

Finn Caspersen, a New Jersey heir and philanthropist, may have dodged up to $100 million in taxes via accounts in the tax haven of Liechtenstein, sources told the New York Times. Under scrutiny from the IRS, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Labor Day.

And now, amid a major federal crackdown on tax shelters, other tax dodgers face a wrenching choice: Hope they don't get caught and, perhaps, meet Caspersen's fate; or turn themselves in and pay their back taxes. They have a week to decide; the IRS will give them a sort of amnesty if they fess up by September 23, one week from now. Might as well act now, amid an economic collapse that has the fallen rich trying to reinvent themselves left and right. That sort of brutal redemption won't stay in vogue much longer.

(Pic via)

[via Business Insider]

Former Institutional Investor editor Michael Carroll is the apparent ghost writer for Paulson's memoirs, Heidi Moore writes in Daily Intel. And yet Paulson was too "busy writing" those memoirs to give an interview to the Times, his flack told the paper ahead of a big article questioning Paulson's calls to Goldman Sachs.

The flack also tried to claim Paulson had been barred from speaking by his publisher; this was refuted nearly instantly. It should be, on some level, comforting that the man once entrusted with distributing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars can't pull of the simplest of lies. And yet, it isn't, is it?

Moe Tkacik (hey, that name sounds familiar) over at Talking Points Memo had a chat with her own CNBC source, present at the now-famous 30 Rock meeting between GE chief Jeff Immelt, NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker and top personalities and executives from CNBC.

The source "took offense" to the idea that the meeting was "creepy," saying it had been convened to give network reporters the chance "to pick Immelt's brain," since he not only heads GE but is on the president's economic advisory council and on the board of the New York Fed.

It's worth noting that this is third explanation of why the meeting was called, CNBC having said previously it was convened "to thank CNBC for a job well done" and an aggrieved insider having told Page Six it was all about bowing down before General Secretary Barack Obama.

Tkacik's source acknowledged that the meeting did turn to "soul searching", but only as part of an ongoing self-examination at the network:

Our source said some CNBC employees and executives now accept that the network was too willing to play cheerleader to the financial engineering-based economy, but expressed surprise that anyone felt political "pressure" after the dinner.

Conservative anchor Dennis Kneale agreed there's been no political pressure.

Which raises the question: If CNBC's corporate overlords won't smack the broken network's most intractable elements into a serious reform program, who the hell will?

[Talking Points Memo]

Page Six "has learned" — such credible language from a gossip sheet — that such pressure was applied. But CNBC disputes any political overtones to the event, which it said was a "to thank CNBC for a job well done." Uh, really? A job well done?

In any case, someone at NBC clearly has an axe to grind. Six's source insists GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker (pictured) want the network in the tank, for the socialist in chief:

There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much... The whole meeting was really kind of creepy.

This account is definitely disconcerting, if only because there are far better reasons to call CNBC on the carpet: failing to warn investors about the pending financial meltdown, actively mocking experts with enough foresight to do so, swallowing so many CEO lies whole, and just generally being a part of the dysfunctional, broken Wall Street system rather than a check on it.

Rick Santelli's cheap Fox News schtick is the least of the network's many problems.

[Page Six]

The photo is dated 1999 on the ScanCafe website; a company rep said in an email that the shot is believed to be from one of Madoff's costume Christmas parties. Between the hat, dollar-sign chain and fur coat, worn shirtless, it's pretty clear the photo subject is dressed as a pimp.

In other words, a criminal who normally impersonated a legitimate businessman apparently liked to sometimes impersonate a different type of criminal. A less ambitious type, and one who would be facing far less jail time right now if busted by the cops.

The ScanCafe picture could always be a prank. We wonder who would go to this much trouble, though. If it is a fake, then the subject has a future career ahead of him as a Madoff impersonator.

[ScanCafe]

American bankers are sitting on trillions of dollars in troubled mortgage securities they can't sell without admitting their banks are nearly worthless. So they need billions of fresh dollars from the government.

But the government has been trying to take away their precious bonuses, as if they're not excellent at running banks. So the bankers are being dicks, to the president. According to the Wall Street Journal:

When administration officials began calling them to talk about the next phase of the bailout, the bankers turned the tables. They used the calls to lobby against the antibonus legislation...

The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

To summarize, the banks are offering this tremendous bargain: Before they will accept billions from the government, for free, they demand their bonuses remain untouched. If the government doesn't give into these demands, the bankers claim they will go to — seriously, this is what they claim — hedge funds and private equity groups for the money they need.

Private equity and hedge funds are in the same pit as banks because — hello? — they borrowed their leverage from banks. They are desperately salivating over Obama's bailout plan, because they'll finally have a sugar daddy again.

But the bankers apparently figure their bluff will never be called. The government clearly isn't going to let them fail, and it's not like we're about to nationalize the banks and fire all these executives, because who better to get our economy out of this mess than the geniuses who got us into it? (Our Treasury Secretary certainly doesn't know!)

"The Rollout Dazzles This Time" was how the Times billed the story on its website. By which the paper's editors meant it dazzled the stock market, for one day: the Dow closed up nearly 500 points, or 7 percent.

That such a "verdict" would define the day's bailout coverage (along with quotes from those receiving the money) should sound dubious to anyone who has scoffed as conservative commentators said the stock market hates Barack Obama, tanking the day after he was elected, the day he was sworn in and the day he signed the economic stimulus package into law.

It should also sound absurd to anyone who remembers how Congress foolishly contorted itself around the stock market's "verdict" last fall. Stocks plummeted after the House rejected a poorly-structured, $700 billion bank bailout. A panicked Senate scrambled to pass basically the same bill, which soon cleared the House and became law.

Just a few weeks later, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson implicitly conceded that the House had been right the first time: He scrapped his initial crap plan to buy up distressed mortgage securities and instead planned a bank "recapitalization."

Five months have passed, and the press is still letting Wall Street — whose dysfunction is, itself, the financial crisis — define the debate. In Monday's front-page bailout coverage, the Wall Street Journal quoted only Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the head of private-equity giant Blackrock and two Republican senators. Oh, and Obama, from his 60 Minutes appearance.

Which is basically inexcusable. Details of the bailout had leaked two days earlier. Economists had already begun blogging about it. Tomorrow's WSJ front-pager is only slightly better, quoting a broader array of players within the financial services industry but no economists or other experts with a less-than-direct stake in how things turn out.

The stock market has become "the media's real-time economic report card," according to a recent New Republic story. The market plummeted after Geithner outlined a bailout plan in February, but so what?

...was the market drop a signal that Obama's plan was bad for the economy as a whole or just bad for bank stocks? The two propositions mean very different things.

This, alas, is the very distinction the stock-mongers on television fail to grasp.

The magazine was talking about notorious CNBC shouting head Jim Cramer. It's kind of pathetic that these days it could be referring to the front page of the New York Times.

In any case, some of those "parasites" in the blogosphere are taking up the slack, see for example here, here, here and here.

The AIG executives in Britain are basically ignoring Cuomo's populist hardball, given the relative lack of outrage in their country.

But Cuomo announced that nine of the top 10 bonus recipients will return the money! And 15 of the top 20 in the financial products division! Victory!

See? Mob rule Democracy works.How much money was returned, you ask? Like, of the original $165 million? Fifty million dollars, give or take. Another $80 million went to foreigners, and there's $35 million in unreturned U.S. bonuses.

Cuomo would like the Americans holding the latter money to know he is conducting a "risk assessment" about releasing their names/addresses. Emphasis on "risk."

Having him ask why he's crying.

On the surface it might seem callous and out of touch for the president to say, "sorry, buddy, you still got the job" to the Treasury Secretary, who pushed for those ridiculous AIG bonuses, and didn't pay his taxes, and fumbled his financial bailout plan, and is probably doing so again. (The right is already calling that (with no apparent irony) the president's "Brownie Moment.")

Or to laugh about maybe not being able to bail out the auto industry.

But you know what? People don't want to see the president trashing his underling while they watch, or to see their relatively young and inexperienced leader betraying the slightest hint of fear about the already-terrifying economy.

And they'd downright expect their president to laugh at Steve Kroft's improbable question about whether America was in danger of losing all its genius financial executives to hedge funds, since the government has capped some bankers' pay at a quarter million dollars a year.

Here's to hoping "a little gallows humor," as the president described it, gives Obama not only some good PR, but the perspective to stop coddling his Treasury Secretary's banker friends. Because the administration's financial bailout plan is scary. (Seriously.)

Laughing moments are excerpted in the clip above; below find an embed of the whole segment.

A political group supported by organized labor is planning a bus tour of AIG homes this weekend, according to a front-page New York Times story on the fate of these sad, bonus-dappled plutocrats. The leader of the group, Connecticuit Working Families party, promises to try and not "foment... unnecessarily" all the anger and "rage about what's happened."

He just wants to take a bunch of unemployed and foreclosed-upon people with nothing to lose, put them on a bus, and show them exactly what they're missing, and who to blame.

Anyway, the Times' story has precisely one secondhand report of a death threat, one angry neighbor in a driveway and a couple of pissed off Connecticut residents. None of the various Connecticut police departments contacted by the newspaper has heard anything about any sort of danger to these rich guys.

But still, let's feel anxious and a little ashamed of ourselves, on behalf of these wealthy executives. All that stands between them and terrible, fearsome populist mobs are their private security guards, their lawns, their state-of-the-art security systems, several flights of probably marble stairs and the entrenched political/law-enforcement establishment they bought over the past couple of decades, when the gettin' was good.

(Well, it's pretty good now, actually. When they gettin' was amazing.)

The president has done all of two primetime TV speeches, and now he's requesting a third, during sweeps. If he's taking this much airtime now, what's Obama going to do when there's, like, a war or two going on, or maybe some kind of looming depression?

The network suits are all bitching, anonymously, to the Hollywood Reporter:

"These repeated interruptions — and the rumor of even more to come — really make it difficult to build audience flow and loyalty. We will all lose one or two million dollars for this."

Which is, you know, rough, given that NBC (cable nets included) generated a mere $400 million+ in profits last year; Fox TV made $18 million in the most recent three-month quarter; CBS' quarterly profit was $136 million.

Roubini reiterated that "most" American financial institutions are "entirely" (not partially!) insolvent; that the government should nationalize the banks; that the world economy may shrink and that there are signs we're in deflationary death spiral.

Then he added that the economy is literally dying, via 1,000 cuts, and that we're in the 15th month of a lengthy (he predicts) 36-month recession or near-depression. Breaking "every mortgage contract" might improve things, Roubini helpfully added.

It was a dark forecast even by the barely-legal standards of the pessimism porn pusher. While it's disconcerting to see CNBC still chock-a-block with vocal defenders of the Wall Street status quo, at least one knows where that leads: more of the same, with boomtime robber-barons socializing their losses during the busts. Roubini may well be right, but it is no doubt frightening for your typical, self-styled big-government-hating, Euro-socialism-fearing American to contemplate where it might take us.

The top-tier art dealer, who bridges the worlds of art and finance, seems panicked by the recession, turning into even more of a workaholic jerk than he was before the crash. Gagosian won't talk, but the New York Times surmises he's in trouble along with the rest of the art industry:

Everyone is vulnerable. Especially Larry Gagosian...

The prices of work by the young artists he has been luring into his galleries... are falling like bank stocks.

Christie's and Sotheby's are in trouble, too, but Gagosian's bread and butter is brokering private deals between rich people. Since the wealthy have lost much of their taste for art acquisition, Gagosian is especially vulnerable.

Why should anyone care about Gagosian's fortunes? Because this was the guy who, through his access to the filthy rich, could make a young artist. That's why most in his stable were poached from rivals: Gagosian could pluck the best.

As the Times put it, "the postwar art world is basically a stock market with a couple of thousand really valuable shares." Gagosian was the gateway to being listed on that market.

His apparent decline indicates that artists have seen their own bubble burst along with Wall Street's other false economies. The vast majority of artists won't have to adjust their lives to that, but they will have to adjust their professional fantasies.

In his column this weekend on General Electric, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera never actually uses the word "bailout." He doesn't have to.

CNBC owner GE just cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression after denying it would do so. The company's stock price was cut in half in less than a month and by nearly two-thirds over two months.In April the company missed earnings by $700 million two weeks after assuring investors it would meet its numbers.

Nocera shows (without telling) where this trouble might end up:

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G., Merrill Lynch, Citi, Morgan Stanley - they'd all come under the same kind of intense pressure, seemingly out of the blue, hammering the stock and blowing out the credit-default swaps while rumors swirled of imminent catastrophe.

CNBC has been aggressively protecting its right political flank against Fox Business News; it doesn't want to lose to Fox the way CNN did. As the two clips above show, CNBC has laid plutocratic cheerleading on just as thickly as right-leaning Fox.

Its anti-bailout rants will look pretty foolish, though, if GE falters and seeks government help, as Andrew Perez of The New Argument points out. Should investors trust a financial network owned by a financial disaster of a company? More even than GE's myriad other units, CNBC should hope it never has to answer that question.

[via The New Argument]

Santelli had agreed to discuss with Daily Show host Stewart his recent on-air diatribe against homeowner bailouts. His network, CNBC, cancelled, saying it was "time to move on to the next big story."

The Daily Show wasn't going to let that happen; it's entire seven-minute opening block was devoted to an extended, heroic evisceration of the financial network, starting with its many false, optimistic predictions before and during the economic meltdown and continuing through to its softball CEO interviews and general Wall Street cheerleading. (We edited the takedown into the two-minute clip above.)

Stewart surely would have made Santelli squirm through some of the devastating material had the TV reporter come on the Daily Show, just as he does when Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly visits. But Stewart would have been genial (he is with O'Reilly), there would have been less time for his clips and, most important, Santelli would be there to defend himself.

Maybe CNBC's flacks have figured that out by now and are planning to reverse their decision. It's not like a stonewall will keep Stewart from slamming the network amy more than the passage of time stopped Letterman from harping on McCain. But we're totally OK with the network remaining silent; we could watch this sort of CNBC-bashing for years.

First off, the logo is a circle, evoking unity, Mother Earth, peace symbols and the folk music LPs that go so well with a little libtard reefer. Even the internal pie pieces have rounded corners, so as not to cut anyone's feelings, accidentally.

Heck, you even have, like, a little weed thing down there in the lower left corner, symbolizing how we'll grow our way out of this recession by, uh, preserving forests? Or maybe via genetic talking plant experiments or something.

And you have to love how the little industrial gears in the lower right corner are softened with the medical red cross for some reason. Abortion factories for everyone! At least that's what Rush Limbaugh will say tomorrow. More likely it's a biotech shout-out.

But the Obama logo isn't the absolute softest brand of its kind. It's got "RECOVERY.GOV" stamped in masculine ALL CAPS on top, and some proud flag stars. And as the last two images in our gallery below illustrate, the Franklin Roosevelt administration's art deco posters and artwork could be pretty frilly. There were all sorts of WPA-funded posters as homoerotic as that last one.

(Pics, from Top: Obama logo via; National Recovery Administration logo via; WPA USA Work program logo via; WPA poster via; Paul Mays mural via)

Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, architect of the endless free credit of the 2000s, was famously an acolyte in Rand's "Objectivist" inner circle. He and George W. Bush were all for lighter regulations and oversight of an already-wild Wall Street.

Now, of course, everything has come crashing down. Corporations of all sorts beg the government to socialize their losses. The SEC was, in retrospect, incompetent. De-regulation (of say credit default swaps) and under-regulation (of say Fannie Mae) helped bring on the crash. Free market mechanisms like credit ratings and elaborate risk-hedging failed.

And yet Atlas Shrugged, the worst sort of libertarian porn, went to an average monthly Amazon ranking of 127 from 542, spiking recently to around rank 30, according to the Economist.

It's hard to tell which is more sad: That bailed-out financiers are successfully agitating the masses against bailed-out poors via tools like CNBC's Rick Santelli, or that Atlas Shrugged is still the go-to polemic for people pissed at the government. Surely someone can write a superior manifesto, and make it popular? It stands to reason someone will. But then counting on people to behave "rationally," as Rand might put it, hasn't panned out very well lately.

Unemployed men do less housework than their employed brethren despite their new-found free time, according to a study cited by the magazine.

What do they do? Well, in 20th century recessions they drove up business in big-city saloons, created man rooms in their homes, ordered bodybuilding equipment and tried to get women fired from their wartime jobs for being women.

American men have responded to layoffs with consistency through the years: seeking solace in the bottle, railing against women, walling themselves away in all-male enclaves and searching for vicarious achievement through sports and popular culture.

This time things could be different, because men on the whole are less inhibited by gender expectations and thus less likely to 1) feel depressed and thus get all drinky and belligerent and 2) more likely to actively take up "girly" activities like cooking and taking care of the kids.

On the other hand, a disproportionate number of those laid off in this downturn are bankers. Good luck turning those guys into sensitive Park Slope-daddy types.

(Image via raincoaster (!))

Trump's skill at public relations is vital to his business interests. It has allowed him to sell books and TV shows over the course of three decades despite at least four business bankruptcies and a series of forced asset sales, among other problems. You can watch it at work on Letterman's show in the clip above.

Notice how Trump:

• Calmly let Letterman finish his long question: Doesn't want to appear defensive, even though he's come prepared to defend himself.
• Distanced himself from the problem: "I wasn't involved at all in management." Trump neglects to mention he was chairman of the company's board of directors until less than a week ago, when he resigned because it was clear the company would soon file for bankruptcy under pressure from bondholders. He also omits that the only relinquished the position of CEO as part of the company's last bankruptcy restructuring, in 2004.
• Minimized the problem: "It represents almost nothing of my net worth." Well, that would be because bankrupt companies are worthless, making Trump's statement practically a tautology. Even before the filing, the company's shares had fallen to about 1/20th their value one year ago, according to the Journal. Trump held 28 percent of the company stock, according to a recent filing, the paper said.
• Minimized culpability: Many casinos are doing poorly, Trump said. Therefore we shouldn't judge Trump Entertainment Resorts too harshly, right? Funny, when Trump railed against banks later in the show, he wasn't so sympathetic to the players in that industry, because collective idiocy is hardly more forgivable than the individual kind.
• Compared himself to someone worse: The grand finale: Trump notes that at least he didn't ask for a government bailout like those big American car companies. This actually makes him a lesser businessman, but he gets applause because it also makes him, for a brief instant, to the audience or the guy who controls the "CLAP" sign, a swell human being. Ha.