Not much time this morning, but

Glenn Greenwald notes today that National Review asks: Did WaMu fail because it employed minorities?

While juxtaposing these two facts -- (1) WaMu has a racially and ethnically diverse workforce and (2) WaMu collapsed yesterday -- the National Review writer headlined his post: "Cause and Effect?" He apparently believes that the reason Washington Mutual failed may be because it employed and was too accommodating to large numbers of Hispanics, African-Americans and gays.

Oh good; they must be panicked. Remember the fundamentalist right blaming queers for 9/11? Now National Review is blaming us for the repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley and eight years of Fed housing bubble inflating and Bush administration failure to enforce trading and leverage regulations. Yay!

Dr. Roubini at RGE Monitor notes that no economists were at the hearings on the Treasury bailout plan, and calls the plan "a disgrace." Some of us are having a little informational protest today; meet at 11:15am in front of the standalone coffee shop out front of Westlake Centre if you want to help pad the tiny crowd.

Outstanding Washington Mutual shares are trading at 16¢. Snif.

I can't let it go unnoted that the new H.3 report from the fed shows banks at a new astounding negative net nonborrowed reserves low: US$-157 Billion. This despite an extra $100B in lending to said banks. The weird part is that they're now being listed as $60B over reserve requirements. Presumably this was part of the setup to hand WaMu's remains over to JP Morgan, but with the complete lack of transparency, who knows?

All I have time for right now. More later.

Well, that was different

So we had our tiny informational protest downtown, and we only had three people actually doing things, but it was enough to hold up two big signs and hand out an assload of flyers, so it went pretty well by informational protest measures, I think. We only had a couple of people argue against, which is equal to the number of LaRoaches who tried to come over and horn in on our action. (We sent them packing.)

Protests where people are generally okay with you are very different to ones where they aren't. Go fig.

( Look! Pictures! )

sunburst

Sunburst

GUN O'CLOCK!

GUN O'CLOCK!