So long for now to Wed Poetry, returning the mezzo gig

Though I will still be doing the email update and maintaining the wedpoetry.net website, I will be missing my weekly Wed Night Poetry fix from now until summer. And I will be missing it very much.

Next Wed. I have committed to slamming in the first White Plains Public Library Slam of the season.  After that, I will be attending a choir rehearsal every Wed. starting Oct 8 until the end of June and I will so miss the marvelous community of folks I have met over the incredible 14 years of this poetry series.  This seasonal music gig as a paid mezzo/alto in a church is my only job right now and I cannot afford to not go back. I do enjoy the work, just wish rehearsal was some other night.   Rehearsal gets out at 9:30 p.m. or so. I will head right to Molten Java  from there and try to catch the very tail end of Q&A.

I plan to take up the slack by going to other poetry events around the area and to music open mic nights at several local venues. 

Consumer reaction to Wall Street woe is a no-brainer

President Bush has now gone to the American People and said we have an enormous financial crisis on the horizon. Of course  this is the same American public that has been losing its homes and jobs for a while now.   

    The treasury and the fed - in the form of Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernekie - set that gigantic $700 billion figure to restore WALL STREET CONFIDENCE.    And now, suddenly the talking heads are worried that CONSUMER CONFIDENCE is low and people aren't buying.    DUH.     

    They have been using some stern-faced scare tactics to get this almost-a-trillion dollar financial stabilization package/BAILOUT passed - calling pension funds, 401ks into question and painting a picture where your credit card and ATM card stop working.  ERGO consumer sentiment is going to get even worse.  The general public (the bulk of folks who weren't losing a home or job), they are only now becoming aware of this crisis so we can expect spending AND saving will decline even further. Where will the money go? Check your local mattress.

    When the financial crisis of the century is on the horizon --  why on earth do we want to spend what little we have left?

Blood Brothers from Inverse Origami

The poem Blood Brothers was included in Inverse Origami (1998) and also in From We Shijin Book I" 2004, from Hanover Press
    

Hemoglobin shovels O2
into the furnace of this flesh,
Mt. St. Helena hot in the veins,
the blinding burn of this mortal mess:

Volcanic Serb and Croat erupting
Christian, Muslim, Jew, Tutsi
Hutu spew fire and ash, Skinhead
Treader of the Shinning Path, smoke
and vent like Irish Catholic and Protestant
pro-life bombers, policemen with plungers
unemployed militiamen with
fertilizer and fuel oil.

We all wear the white hat and
god is always on our side as
hungry and hissing we blister
to flame ---- and blood flows always
just as red as the time before.

Whatever cause we cite, there is another   
and we avert our eyes --- In each generation
the ancient animal wakes anew, the sleeping
mountain rumbles, metaphysicians mumble
incantations, the people bring their offerings to the craters rim:
.....learning and law
.....compassion and tolerance
.....forbearance and forgiveness.
These spread their opium salve and the   
Blood-beast dozes a while
under a gilding of grace.

Pick the scab of blessedness
and blood roils forth once more.
Some new Pompeii is burned or buried
smothered in sulfur, an ocean boils
but the mountain does not care

for blood has no age of consent
no theology nor dogma   
blood holds no point of view
no nationality, no vote
no academic certification
no credit rating, no latex condom.

And the blood dries to a crust,
of ugly smudges down the pages
of every sacred text.

Cain and Abel were brothers
blood-brothers.   
O blood without end --

Ah men.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Warren Buffett backs Paulson plan.... and Paulson

I heard Warren Buffett interviewed on CNBC this morning. Buffett is buying 5 billion dollars worth of Goldman Sachs, his first buy of an  investment house since 1978, according to CNBC.  (It's not the common stock...)

    "The Market could not have taken another week like the one developing last week," he said, adding that the Paulson plan is absolutely necessary to avoid "going over the precipice..." 

    "If they do it right,  I think they'll make a lot of money," he said. He insisted that they shouldn't be buying this paper at what the institution paid, nor at the carrying value  -- but at bargain basement prices.  He said nobody can "leverage up" right now. If they could and would, there's 15 to 20 % profit to be made.  "I like a market related price," he said. He suggested the government might want to sell off some of it into the market to see what the real price is before buying more....  He said they have the staying power to hold these things until things improve. Holding 700 billion is beyond private entities.

    "You couldn't have any better guy," doing this than Paulson, Warren Buffett said. 

     If you weren't watching the market last week, it went down 300 points one day 340 the next and 405, next  topped by the sequential collapse of  Lehman Brothers, AIG etc etc.  AIG was a crucial fall since it underwrites the debt of every major corporation around the world. 

    "AIG would be doing fine right now if they never heard of derivatives," Buffett said.

REMEMBER WMDs? This gambit seems strangely familiar....

My letter to  the White House,  one letter of millions that no one will ever read:

Sent to: comments@whitehouse.gov, vice_president@whitehouse.gov, president@whitehouse.gov

Dear Executives:

Well,well, when you said IRAQ had weapons of mass destruction, I thought oh surely you must know and now we have spent 500 billion making war on the wrong country. Fooled me once. That's enough. Now you say, OH WE HAVE TO SIMPLY HAVE TO SPEND a trillion dollars, immediately,  without oversight, bypassing all the established protocols on spending and contracting.  Big surprise.  Could the end of the financial system you are declaring be a lot like those weapons of mass destruction we never found only the fraud is even more expensive and would enrich your pals for years and leave main street drained dry...  You have cried wolf fraudulently once too often and I for one will urge my representatives and senators to vote down paying your pals trillions.

MM Walker

-- 

That is the letter. However.  Big trouble may arrive even if  they buy up a trillion dollars worth of bad paper. Across the globe everything economic is grinding to a stall or might in the next week or month.  Untenable derivatives/credit swaps, and deals so complex and flagarently under "collateralized" if you will,  are so utterly unregulated and opaque, that the treads of causality can not be untangled.   A simple solution will not be found for this one.  Maybe Uncle Hal was right.  (YIKES)  

Let's spend a trillion buying hospitals instead

If the feds are going to spend a trillion in tax payers dollars, just like that, I think they should buyout ALL hospitals and medical facilities  - saving millions and millions in health care costs by taking banks and insurance companies out of the equation....

Henry Paulson --- Your wheeler dealers won't be grateful for this bailout you are peddling. They will look at it he way a shark looks at a distressed swimmer -- can I get a meal or not?  The idealist thought that the moguls are not going to make off with as much as they can if unlimited underwriting is involved  --  is naivety of the sort that brought us IRAQ.   I was one of the ones hoodwinked. I thought the president must know about those WMD  and with-held my cynicism, when we invaded. I learned my lesson Mr. Paulson. Officials will hoodwink us if they can for their own obtuse reasons, their own selfish interests or those of their freinds or for their very personal delusions.

And, now I should believe that a TRILLION DOLLARS will fix this  just because Paulson says so....???  

Henry Paulson blames the borrowers

I am listening to Henry Paulson's speech and I note that in his first few paragraphs -- he blames the borrowers not the banks. He said that "borrowers took out loans they couldn't afford" and this is the root of this crisis. As if the trembling would- be-home owner, who was swayed by a so called "expert" bank official offering a variable rate mortgage with a balloon payment bears all the blame. The question remains to be answered -- WHY DID THE BANKS GRANT THESE LOANS?