Obama Administration Takes Tough Stance on Banks

[ed.  Finally, right?  Read on.]

by Glenn Greenwald

In mid-May, I wrote about the commendable -- one might say heroic -- efforts of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to single-handedly impose meaningful accountability on Wall Street banks for their role in the 2008 financial crisis and the mortgage fraud/foreclosure schemes.  Not only was Schneiderman launching probing investigations at a time when the Obama DOJ was steadfastly failing to do so, but -- more importantly -- he was refusing to sign onto a global settlement agreement being pushed by the DOJ that would have insulated the mortgage banks (including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo) from all criminal investigations in exchange for some relatively modest civil fines.  In response, many commenters wondered whether Schneiderman, if he persisted, would be targeted by the banks with some type of campaign of destruction of the kind that brought down Eliot Spitzer, but fortunately for the banks, they can dispatch their owned servants in Washington to apply the pressure for them:

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal.

In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks.

Mr. Schneiderman and top prosecutors in some other states have objected to the proposed settlement with major banks, saying it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities.

But Mr. Donovan and others in the administration have been contacting not only Mr. Schneiderman but his allies, including consumer groups and advocates for borrowers, seeking help to secure the attorney general's participation in the deal, these people said. One recipient described the calls from Mr. Donovan, but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Not surprising, the large banks, which are eager to reach a settlement, have grown increasingly frustrated with Mr. Schneiderman. Bank officials recently discussed asking Mr. Donovan for help in changing the attorney general’s mind, according to a person briefed on those talks.

In response to this story, the DOJ claims that the settlement is necessary to help people whose homes are in foreclosure, an absurd rationalization which Marcy Wheeler simply destroys.  Meanwhile, Yves Smith, whose coverage of banking and mortgage fraud (and the administration's protection of it) has long been indispensable, writes today:

It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.

Admittedly, corruption among our elites generally and in Washington in particular has become so widespread and blatant as to fall into the "dog bites man" category. But the nauseating gap between the Administration's propaganda and the many and varied ways it sells out average Americans on behalf of its favored backers, in this case the too big to fail banks, has become so noisome that it has become impossible to ignore the fetid smell.

The Administration has now taken to pressuring parties that are not part of the machinery reporting to the President to fall in and do his bidding. We’ve gotten so used to the US attorney general being conveniently missing in action that we have forgotten that regulators and the AG are supposed to be independent.

Her entire analysis should be read.  The President -- who kicked off his campaign vowing to put an end to "the era of Scooter Libby justice" -- will stand before the electorate in 2012 having done everything in his power to shield top Bush officials from all accountability for their crimes and will have done the same for Wall Street banks, all while continuing to preside over the planet's largest Prison State . . . for ordinary Americans convicted even of trivial offenses, particularly (though not only) from the War on Drugs he continues steadfastly to defend.  And as Sam Seder noted this morning, none of this has anything to do with Congress and cannot be blamed on the Weak Presidency, the need to compromise, or the "crazy" GOP.

Read more:

Profile: Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee could have been a billionaire if he had sold his invention, the World Wide Web. Instead, he is campaigning for internet access to be a fundamental right of everyone on earth.

by John Naish

Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web among a small circle of fellow computer enthusiasts. Today, the 56-year-old Briton remains one of the internet's most vigorous advocates. Its vast success, however, has had a downside: it has exposed him to a bombardment of requests from visionaries, obsessives and rubberneckers, as well as hordes of children demanding help with school projects. All expect him to exist as some kind of open-source human being.

Berners-Lee has never been an enthusiastic self-publicist. Nowadays, he shelters behind carapaces of email gateways and protective staff. He seldom gives interviews. If you're not persistent and pertinent, you may not even earn a rebuff. "I'm quite busy," he explains - a huge understatement - when eventually we talk on the phone.

“I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions. What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do." (He tends to use techy terms such as "function" quite a lot. He doesn't mind "geek", either.)

That the creator of the web - a father of two children, separated from his wife and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he pursues his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - has to live like an electronic Howard Hughes is just one of the many paradoxes that his invention has thrown up over the past two decades.

Nevertheless, Berners-Lee is campaigning for ever more openness, pushing for the internet to exist as a free-for-all, unfettered by creeping government interference or commercial intrigue. He believes that access to the internet should be a human right.

Born to mathematician parents in west London in June 1955, Berners-Lee studied at Oxford University, graduating with a First in physics in 1976. In 1980, he joined the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, better known as Cern, as a consultant but left a year later to become director of the tech firm Image Computer Systems.

Returning to Cern in 1984, he started working on hypertext to help researchers share information. His new project could easily have been dismissed as another case of a back-room enthusiast tinkering with clunky, electronic networks: even though he had the ability to construct a computer using a soldering iron and an old television set, Berners-Lee was just one of many sandal-wearing scientists.

“I wanted to build a creative space, something like a sandpit where everyone could play together," he says now. "Life was very simple. I was too busy to think about the bigger questions. I was writing specs for the web, writing the code. My priority was getting more people to use it, looking for communities who might adopt it. I just wanted the thing to take off."

Berners-Lee formally introduced his hobby-built system to the world on 6 August 1991 by posting a message on an internet bulletin board for fellow hypertext program developers. That day, he put the world's first proper website online. It explained what a website was and gave details of how to create one. Neither initiative caused any immediate interest.

Read more:

Lee Koloidis. #185
via:

Crisis of Confidence

How Washington Lost Faith in America's Courts

by Karen J. Greenberg

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus. The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize. On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.

If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.

Clearly, a key factor in that decision was a growing belief, widely shared within the national-security establishment, that none of our traditional or even newly created tribunals, civilian or military, could have handled a bin Laden trial. Washington’s faith went solely to Navy SEALs zooming into another country’s sovereign airspace on a moonless night on a mission to assassinate bin Laden, whether he offered the slightest resistance or not. It evidently seemed so much easier to the top officials overseeing the operation -- and so much less messy -- than bringing a confessed mass murderer into a courtroom in, or even anywhere near, the United States.

The decision to kill bin Laden on sight rather than capture him and bring him to trial followed hard on the heels of an ignominious Obama administration climb-down on its plan to try the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, in a federal court in New York City. Captured in Pakistan in May 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, his proposed trial was, under political pressure, returned to a military venue earlier this year.

Given the extraordinary record of underperformance by the military commissions system -- only six convictions in 10 years -- it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the United States has little faith in its ability to put on trial a man assumedly responsible for murdering thousands.

And don’t assume that these high-level examples of avoiding the court system are just knotty exceptions that prove the rule. There is evidence that the administration’s skepticism and faint-heartedness when it comes to using the judicial system risks becoming pervasive.

Pushing Guilt Before Trial

Needless to say, this backing away from courts of law as institutions appropriate for handling terrorism suspects began in the Bush-Cheney years. Top officials in the Bush administration believed civilian courts to be far too weak for the Global War on Terror they had declared. This, as they saw it, was largely because those courts would supposedly gift foreign terrorist suspects with a slew of American legal rights that might act as so many get-out-of-jail-free cards.

As a result, despite a shining record of terrorism convictions in civilian courts in the 1990s -- including the prosecutions of those responsible for the 1993 attempt to take down a tower of the World Trade Center -- President Bush issued a military order on November 13, 2001, that established the court-less contours of public debate to come. It mandated that non-American terrorists captured abroad would be put under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon, not the federal court system. This was “war,” after all, and the enemy had to be confronted by fighting men, not those sticklers for due process, civilian judges and juries.

Tom Tom Club

Watch this one.

Let Them Eat Cake

GOP may OK tax increase that Obama hopes to block

by Charles Babington

News flash: Congressional Republicans want to raise your taxes. Impossible, right? GOP lawmakers are so virulently anti-tax, surely they will fight to prevent a payroll tax increase on virtually every wage-earner starting Jan. 1, right?

Apparently not.

Many of the same Republicans who fought hammer-and-tong to keep the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts from expiring on schedule are now saying a different "temporary" tax cut should end as planned. By their own definition, that amounts to a tax increase.

The tax break extension they oppose is sought by President Barack Obama. Unlike proposed changes in the income tax, this policy helps the 46 percent of all Americans who owe no federal income taxes but who pay a "payroll tax" on practically every dime they earn.

At issue is a tax that the vast majority of workers pay, but many don't recognize because they don't read, or don't understand their pay stubs. Workers normally pay 6.2 percent of their wages toward a tax designated for Social Security. Their employer pays an equal amount, for a total of 12.4 percent per worker.

As part of a bipartisan spending deal last December, Congress approved Obama's request to reduce the workers' share to 4.2 percent for one year; employers' rate did not change. Obama wants Congress to extend the reduction for an additional year. If not, the rate will return to 6.2 percent on Jan. 1.

But Republican lawmakers haven't always worried about tax cuts increasing the deficit. They led the fight to extend the life of a much bigger tax break: the major 2001 income tax reduction enacted under Bush. It was scheduled to expire at the start of this year. Obama campaigned on a pledge to end the tax break only for the richest Americans, but solid GOP opposition forced him to back down.

Many Republicans are adamant about not raising taxes but largely silent on what it would mean to let the payroll tax break expire.

Read more:

via:

via:

Why Software Is Eating The World

[ed.  Contrasting perspective to the Silicon Valley article posted below.]

by Marc Andreessen

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same as the broader stock market, despite Apple's immense profitability and dominant market position (Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!"

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Read more:

via:

via:

An Empty Regard

[ed.  Our military has been stretched thin for so long in an unfocused and seemingly never-ending effort to do what?  End terror?  Advance democracy?  Stabilize the Middle East?  Ensure steady oil supplies?  Who knows, our purposes are so opaque they've devolved into abstraction.  But for the men and women who are killed or maimed every day in support of those policies abstraction is not an option.  Stories like this one need to be told more often.]

by William Deresiewicz

No symbol is more sacred in American life right now than the military uniform. The cross is divisive; the flag has been put to partisan struggle. But the uniform commands nearly automatic and universal reverence. In Congress as on television, generals are treated with awed respect, service members spoken of as if they were saints. Liberals are especially careful to make the right noises: obeisance to the uniform having become the shibboleth of patriotism, as anti-Communism used to be. Across the political spectrum, throughout the media, in private and public life, the pieties and ritual declarations are second nature now: “warriors,” “heroes,” “mission”; “our young men and women in uniform,” “our brave young men and women,” “our finest young people.” So common has this kind of language become, we scarcely notice it anymore.

There is no question that our troops are courageous and selfless. They expose themselves to inconceivable dangers under conditions of enormous hardship and fight because they want to keep the country safe. We owe them respect and gratitude — even if we think the wars they’re asked to fight are often wrong. But who our service members are and the work their images do in our public psyche, our public discourse, and our public policy are not the same. Pieties are ways to settle arguments before they begin. We need to question them, to see what they’re hiding.

The new cult of the uniform began with the call to “support our troops” during the Iraq war. The slogan played on a justified collective desire to avoid repeating the mistake of the Vietnam era, when hatred of the conflict spilled over into hostility toward the people who were fighting it. Now the logic was inverted: supporting the troops, we were given to understand, meant that you had to support the war. In fact, that’s all it seemed to mean. The ploy was a bait and switch, an act of emotional blackmail. If you opposed the war or questioned the way it was conducted, you undermined our troops.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on, other purposes have come into play. The greater the sacrifice that has fallen on one small group of people, the members of the military and their families, the more we have gone from supporting our troops to putting them on a pedestal. In the Second World War, everybody fought. Soldiers were not remote figures to most of us; they were us. Now, instead of sharing the burden, we sentimentalize it. It’s a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them. This is also a form of service, I suppose: lip service.

The cult of the uniform also bespeaks a wounded empire’s need to reassert its masculinity in the wake of 9/11. “Dead or alive,” “bring it on,” “either you’re with us or you’re against us”: the tenor of official rhetoric in the ensuing years embodied a kind of desperate machismo. The war in Iraq, that catharsis of violence, expressed the same emotional dynamic. We’d been hit in the head with a rock; like a neighborhood bully, we grabbed the first person we could get our hands on and beat him senseless. Mission accomplished: we were strong again, or so we imagined, and the uniform — as George W. Bush understood when he swaggered across the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit — was the symbol of that strength. The soldier is the way we want to see ourselves: stoic, powerful, focused, devoted.

As the national narrative shifts from the war on terror to the specter of decline, the uniform performs another psychic function. The military is can-do, the one institution — certainly the one public institution — that still appears to work. The schools, the highways, the post office; Amtrak, FEMA, NASA and the T.S.A. — not to mention the banks, the newspapers, the health care system, and above all, Congress: nothing seems to function anymore, except the armed forces. They’re like our national football team — and undisputed champs, to boot — the one remaining sign of American greatness.

Read more:

(A)sexual: An Interview with David Jay

by Caroline Casper

This is what I expected: Jay and I were meeting to talk about the one thing that is harder to talk about than sex—not wanting to have sex. Ever. We were also meeting to discuss a new feature length documentary he starred in called (A)Sexual. The film, produced by Angela Tucker, debuted at the Frameline Film Festival at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco in June and at NewFest, the New York LGBT Film Festival in July. It follows the growth of the asexual community—people that experience no sexual attraction—and their efforts to claim a voice and identity in a sex- obsessed culture.

But this is what I didn’t expect: Within the next two hours David Jay, a guy who identifies himself as a lifelong asexual, would give me more insight on dating, sexual intimacy and forming deeper romantic relationships than any sexual person I’ve ever met. Jay carries a brilliant perspective on the subject of sex, one that can only be achieved through exclusion. As it goes, only from the sidelines of the game can you see the entire field.

Jay came out as an asexual to his parents and friends during high school in 2000. Later in 2001 while at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, he started a website called asexualuity.org (or AVEN, The Asexual Visibility and Education Network) because he realized swarms of people were using the word “asexual” to describe themselves and then later, feeling broken and desperate for more information, typing it into Google. (Studies show that 1% of the population is asexual). Asexaulity.org is marked as the first organized community to provide information and a safe place to discuss issues surrounding what it means to be asexual.

In 2004, the New Scientist in the UK became fascinated with the growing asexuality community here in the states and ran a 6-page feature on it. The story exploded and was featured all over the British press, marking the beginning of Jay’s very public persona as an asexual person. He was featured in the London Times (four different times from 2003- 2006), was on British TV and five different BBC radio stations. The news spike triggered press in the U.S. too and Jay was later featured in the New York Times and was a guest on 20/20 and The View where he held strong as the hosts teased him and tried to reduce him to just a confused kid. But they were soon rapt with his knowledge, emotional intelligence and candid honesty.

When an article featuring Jay came out on Salon.com in May of 2005, Angela Tucker read it and the idea for this film was born.

The Rumpus: What did you think of the film?

David Jay: As the subject of the movie, I’m much happier with it than I thought I would be because it is very personal. I’m used to talking about my sexuality in a very public way, but this film got into some really deep and personal stuff about my relationships–on a level that no other press has ever has managed to reach. It captured some really complicated insecurities and uncertainties I was going through at the time. The way our society talks about intimacy is really sexualized but this film showed a great deal of intimacy in my life that isn’t at all sexual. It was also a great visibility tool. Our community’s whole goal is get people talking about everything–power, peoples’ bodies, and all the stuff that is wrapped up in sex. But if sex is not happening, how are you going to relate to these things?

Read more:

Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen

by Anthony Tommasini

The latest young pianist from China to excite classical music audiences and earn raves from critics is the 24-year-old Yuja Wang, a distinctive artist with a comprehensive technique. That Ms. Wang is already a musician of consequence was made clear this year when Deutsche Grammophon released her first recording with an orchestra: performances of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Second Piano Concerto with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The conductor is Claudio Abbado, no less, a towering maestro who is extremely discriminating in his choice of collaborators.

Ms. Wang’s virtuosity is stunning. But is that so unusual these days? Not really. That a young pianist has come along who can seemingly play anything, and easily, is not the big deal it would have been a short time ago.

The overall level of technical proficiency in instrumental playing, especially on the piano, has increased steadily over time. Many piano teachers, critics and commentators have noted the phenomenon, which is not unlike what happens in sports. The four-minute mile seemed an impossibility until Roger Bannister made the breakthrough in 1954. Since then, runners have knocked nearly 17 seconds off Bannister’s time.

Something similar has long been occurring with pianists. And in the last decade or so the growth of technical proficiency has seemed exponential. Yes, Ms. Wang, who will make her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall in October, can play anything. But in China alone, in recent years, there have been Lang Lang and Yundi Li.

What long-term effect this trend will have on the field is not clear. Classical music is facing its share of challenges, including declining appreciation of the art form among the general public, and not all segments of the audience are noticing the breakthrough in technical accomplishment that is apparent to insiders: pianists, concert presenters and pianophiles. Because so many pianists are so good, many concertgoers have simply come to expect that any soloist playing the Tchaikovsky First Concerto with the New York Philharmonic will be a phenomenal technician.

A new level of technical excellence is expected of emerging pianists. I see it not just on the concert circuit but also at conservatories and colleges. In recent years, at recitals and chamber music programs at the Juilliard School and elsewhere, particularly with contemporary-music ensembles, I have repeatedly been struck by the sheer level of instrumental expertise that seems a given.

The pianist Jerome Lowenthal, a longtime faculty member at Juilliard, said in a recent telephone interview from California that a phenomenon is absolutely taking place. He observes it in his own studio.

When the 1996 movie “Shine,” about the mentally ill pianist David Helfgott, raised curiosity about Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, Mr. Lowenthal was asked by reporters whether this piece was as formidably difficult as the movie had suggested. He said that he had two answers: “One was that this piece truly is terribly hard. Two was that all my 16-year-old students were playing it.”

Read more:

In Silicon Valley, the Night Is Still Young

by Claire Cain Miller

Let the rest of the country worry about a double-dip recession. Tech land, stretching from San Jose to San Francisco, is in a time warp, and times here are still flush.

Even now, technology types in their 20s and 30s are dropping a million-plus each on modest ranch houses in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley and Victorian duplexes in San Francisco, and home prices in some parts have jumped nearly 50 percent in the last six months.

Jobs — good, six-figure jobs, with perks like free haircuts and lessons on how to create the next start-up company — are here for the taking, at least for software engineers.

And for anyone with a decent idea and the drive to start a company, $100,000 to get it off the ground is easy to come by.

Yet, for all the outward optimism, even before the recent gyrations on Wall Street, old fears have been creeping in, nagging memories of the dot-com bust. You can sense it at cocktail parties in Menlo Park, at business conferences in Redwood City, inside the hipper-than-thou offices of young Web companies in San Francisco. Maybe, just maybe, these good times won’t last, and it will all come crashing down again.

“There’s this ’90s hangover people still have,” says Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and tech investor.

Now the worry is that all the turmoil on Wall Street will spread West. Can Silicon Valley really prosper if the general economy tips back into a recession? Can you make a fortune on your I.P.O. if the market is falling? Probably not. But then, no one should work here unless she is prepared to be lucky. Even in worrisome moments, like now, the essential optimism of this place endures.

Even more than buying a new Prius or jetting off to Cabo for the weekend, the new money set here wants to keep investing — and believing. Backing another start-up is a status symbol, the No. 1 splurge, and it captures both the tech industry’s belief in the future and its fear of missing the next big thing.

“These are nouveau tech millionaires,” says Adeo Ressi, a coach for entrepreneurs. “It’s not that they don’t see the warning signs. It’s like roulette.”

Even before the fragility of the stock market became apparent, people here had been asking this question: Are we in a new tech bubble?

Read more:

Sterling Hundley
via:

Autolux

"Awesome video for an Autolux song. The process of ink and charcoal drawings set to music in a way that really works.  Created by Nomono in collaboration with Freiland Films"

via: 

via:

Migration

[ed.  A powerful photo-essay depicting the grim conditions under which these young women work.]

The phenomenon of foreign women, who line the roadsides of Italy, has become a notorious fact of Italian life. These women work in sub-human conditions; they are sent out without any hope of regularizing their legal status and can be easily transferred into criminal networks.

Many are Africans working as prostitutes to send money home to their families.
For nearly twenty years the women of Benin City, a town in the state of Edo in the
south-central part of Nigeria, have been going to Italy to work in the sex trade and every year successful ones have been recruiting younger girls to follow them.

The Nigerian trafficking industry is fueled by the combination of widespread emigration aspirations and severely limited possibilities for migrating to Europe.

Ensuring a better future for one’s family in Nigeria is a principal motivation for emigration within and outside the trafficking networks. Working abroad is therefore often seen as the best strategy for escaping poverty. The success of many Italos, as these women are called, is evident in Edo. For many girls prostitution in Italy has become an entirely acceptable trade and the legend of their success makes the fight against sex traffickers all the more difficult.

Full series here:

Produced by Japanese pop art king Takashi Murakami, actress Kirsten Dunst was directed by McG in a video for the song Turning Japanese by The Vapors.

via: