Bredonborough A very busy night
08.53
Bredonborough.
A very busy night,
In the first part, the four members of the Special Study Group re-entered life as babies; and were together as small tadpole-like creatures in a bowl of water. One, S, was my personal charge, and I carried her on a journey. Yet they were able to speak, and S used a word of three or four syllables, impressive for a new-born child.
Waking at 01.56, or 08.56 in NYC where The Humans were appearing.
Onto other adventures, including one with Steve Ball.
Rising to a quieter life, and attending to WillyFred. Wilf’s eagerness for his breakfast buffet rivals that of anyone I have known, or seen anywhere, at any breakfasting trough, ever.
First thing over the street to World HQ I…
II...
Morning reading…
12.04 Amidst the current lunacy of my professional life, and the negative impacts of OMG! – it’s UMG and Grooveshark, a few small rays of sanity and delight. News of The Humans last night in NYC (reportedly, the best performance Bill Rieflin has had in that town), an e-letter with articles attached from/by Dr. Alfonso Montuori of the CIIS
… and
a link from Declan Panegyric. Lets hear it for Leopold Kohr: Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. And this wonderful comment that summates our current problems with UMG: …whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions. I note: all the companies that UMG has taken over in the past few years, with whom we have dealings, have given us problems.
This is also true of Mr. Alder’s EG which, expanding from an artist management company, to a record company, to a property company, was unable to grow its intelligence to match. An alternative explanation, by Mr. SG Alder himself: We were Big Boys – caught with our pants down!
The certain limits of Mr. Kohr I understand as the limit of our capacity to engage in a particular present moment.
12.32 Brother Elan is in Seattle…
Elan Sicroff and Katharina Paul play the music of De Hartmann, both from the Gurdjieff years and beyond. Included in the repertoire is a special performance, as yet unavailable on CD, of the sonata for Piano & Violin, Op. 51. Friday, October 14 at 8:00pm - October 15 at 11:00pm
Fremont Abbey Arts Center 4272 Fremont Ave N., Seattle, WA
18.35 Lunch, gym, afternoon practicing. Back to World HQ.
The Era Of Accountability is here! On tv at lunchtime…
The men who crashed the world
A four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that led to a financial collapse.… Part Two, featuring
Mr. Joseph Cassano (25 people to blame for the financial crisis)http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877321,00.html.
In August 2007, as the financial crisis broke, Cassano claimed everything was fine. “It is hard for us, and without being flippant, to even see a scenario, within any kind of realm or reason, that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions,” he told investors, as his CEO listened in on the call…
In the final three months of 2007, AIG lost over $5 billion. Under the terms of the bonus scheme, top executives should have had their pay cut for poor performance. When the compensation committee met in March 2008 to award bonuses, however, the Essex-born CEO urged it to ignore the losses. The board approved the change, even though losses were growing by the month, and Sullivan pocketed $5.4m. He was also awarded a golden parachute worth $15m. He was out of the company three months later, with a severance package worth $47m (£31m). That is $39,500 (£26,000) for every day he was in charge. Pension funds and other savers holding AIG shares lost $58.4m (£39m) a day during his tenure.
In seven years, the 400 employees in Cassano’s division were paid $3.5 billion. Cassano received $280m. When the losses became public, AIG parted company with him immediately. But he wasn’t fired: he “retired”, with a contract paying him $1m a month for nine months, and protecting his right to further bonus payments…
Cassano’s division then imploded… AIG posted the biggest quarterly loss in corporate history: $61.7 billion. This is equivalent to losing $28m (£19m) an hour, every hour, for the final three months of 2008. But by now, the company’s problems were the property of the American taxpayer, creating extraordinary new conflicts of interest. Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary in the outgoing Bush administration, was an ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs. He received tax benefits of about $200m (£133m) for taking on a government role. When the US decided to bail out AIG, the chief beneficiary of the rescue was… Goldman Sachs, which received $12.9 billion of public funds via the insurer. The new CEO, Edward Liddy… is ex-Goldman Sachs. He even has $3.2m in the bank’s shares.
AIG tried to keep secret its payments to Goldman Sachs and others, somehow imagining you could have $182.5 billion of taxpayers’ money and not say how you were using it… “It is not outright fraud that has caused the most damage to the market,” says Tim Freestone, the analyst first to see AIG’s troubles. “It is the suppression of information, wittingly or unwittingly, by most of the market’s players.”… The challenge is to confront the keiretsu, the interlocking relationships that give insiders such an advantage.
Richard Wray guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 April 2010 18.38 BSTJoseph Cassano unlikely to face charges over AIG crisis
Federal prosecutors look ready to end their investigation into the near collapse of the American insurance group AIG without bringing any charges against the former head of its UK operation, Joseph Cassano.
London-based AIG Financial Products created many of the complex insurance-like products – called credit default swaps – that landed AIG with huge liabilities when financial meltdown ensued after the collapse ofLehman Brothers in 2008.
AIG, America's largest insurance company and former sponsor of Manchester United football club, was forced to take hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money from the US government. Controversially it has continued to pay out mammoth bonuses, including "retention" bonuses totalling $450m to staff in London last year.
19 SEP, 2011, 09.20AM IST, MAYUR SHETTY,TNN Joseph Cassano, head of AIG's Financial Products division in London, almost brought down the American giant with losses on credit default swaps-essentially insurance cover on subprime mortgages. It turned out that Cassano sold protection worth several billion dollars on subprime mortgages through the issue of credit default swaps to generate record profits.
The FT articles…
18.57 A call from The Humans at JFK in NYC. Now, to OMG! – it’s UMG: The Furore Of Horror.
20.02 Well. Disputation enough for today.
To practising.
