The Shadow Lobbying Complex

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and I found myself hanging around the House-side entrance to the Capitol building, hoping to interview lawmakers during the protracted government shutdown in October. The members had been called by the Republican leadership to open just one slice of the government without authorizing funds for the Affordable Care Act, a partial solution that had rallied Democrats in opposition. As dusk settled in, I lingered to interview the representatives as they walked in and out of what everyone considered at this point to be a scene of political theater.

While I waited, a small crowd gathered, composed of men and women in business attire, creating something of a receiving line where they could exchange pleasantries with members of Congress as the latter made their way from their offices across Independence Avenue to cast a perfunctory vote. The city, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers sent home from the job, was far from dead. On Capitol Hill, the real financial engine of Washington, the selling of access and policy hummed along at full speed, and I was in the midst of it. (...)

On paper, the lobbying industry is quickly disappearing. In January, records indicated that for a third straight year, overall spending on lobbying decreased. Lobbyists themselves continue to deregister. In 2013, the number of registered lobbyists dipped to 12,281, the lowest number on file since 2002.

But experts say that lobbying isn’t dying; instead, it’s simply going underground. The problem, says American University professor James Thurber, who has studied congressional lobbying for more than thirty years, is that “most of what is going on in Washington is not covered” by the lobbyist-registration system. Thurber, who is currently advising the American Bar Association’s lobbying-reform task force, adds that his research suggests the true number of working lobbyists is closer to 100,000.

A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register—all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying.

While the official figure puts the annual spending on lobbying at $3.2 billion in 2013, Thurber estimates that the industry brings in more than $9 billion a year. Other experts have made similar estimates, but no one is sure how large the industry has become. Lee Drutman, a lobbying expert at the Sunlight Foundation, says that at least twice as much is spent on lobbying as is officially reported. (...)

Rather than using the L-word to describe what they do, many lobbyists prefer the more banal rubric of “government relations” or “government affairs.” Reflecting this trend, the American League of Lobbyists—a professional association for the industry—changed its name in November to the Association of Government Relations Professionals. And while lobbyists must report their payments from clients, those ducking the system quietly bring in the biggest paydays.

by Lee Fang, The Nation |  Read more:

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Kerry James Marshall
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The Dark Power of Fraternities

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.

It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests—including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.

And so it was that Louis Helmburg III joined forces with Timothy P. Rosinsky, Esq., a slip-and-fall lawyer from Huntington who had experience also with dog-bite, DUI, car-repossession, and drug cases. The events of that night, laid out in Helmburg’s complaint, suggested a relatively straightforward lawsuit. But the suit would turn out to have its own repeated failures to launch and unintended collateral damage, and it would include an ever-widening and desperate search for potential defendants willing to foot the modest bill for Helmburg’s documented injuries. Sending a lawyer without special expertise in wrangling with fraternities to sue one of them is like sending a Boy Scout to sort out the unpleasantness in Afghanistan. Who knows? The kid could get lucky. But it never hurts—preparedness and all that—to send him off with a body bag.

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic. In a sense, they are older: they emanated in part from the Freemasons, of which George Washington himself was a member. When arguments are made in their favor, they are arguments in defense of a foundational experience for millions of American young men, and of a system that helped build American higher education as we know it. Fraternities also provide their members with matchless leadership training. While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities. Many more thousands of American men count their fraternal experience—and the friendships made within it—as among the most valuable in their lives. The organizations raise millions of dollars for worthy causes, contribute millions of hours in community service, and seek to steer young men toward lives of service and honorable action. They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Phil Toledano

Google Plus You Equals $$$$

It is one of the great Internet mysteries of the last few years: Why does Google Plus still exist? The search engine company’s social network launched in mid-2011 and most people who signed up to “check it out” stopped using it several hours later in mid-2011. Since then, the only people I’ve seen actively promoting their Google Plus (or shall we say Google+!) accounts are the couple of people I know who work for Google Inc. So why hasn’t Google Inc. shitcanned this clearly failed rival to Facebook already?

Because while you may have stopped using Google Plus, Google Plus hasn’t stopped using you. In fact, you’ve been a great product for Google Plus!

Five-hundred-some million people have Google Plus accounts, mostly because using Gmail or YouTube or whatever other web-based software requires you to set up a Google Plus account. You, reader, probably have a Google Plus account and don’t even know it, aside from the occasional “Check out what you’ve missed on Google+” emails the infernal company spams you with from time to time. And since you’re logged into it pretty much all the time, this helps Google track everything you do on the Internet to make you a clearer target for advertisers. The New York Times writes:

But Google isn’t worried. Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does. 

The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself. 

Before Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the company can build a database of your affinities.

The true star of the piece is a certain Bradley Horowitz, the vice president of product management for Google Plus. As the piece goes into detail describing how Google Plus is just a more comprehensive method for the company to hoover up as much of your information as possible, there’s Bradley Horowitz, ready with the glib bizspeak quote to suggest that no, this product is actually about helping you. “Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that common understanding of who you are.”

by Jim Newell, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: US Govt.

Why Actors Act Out

The recent erratic behavior of Shia LaBeouf, the 27-year-old actor best known as the star of the “Transformers” movies, has sent the press into a feeding frenzy. Though the wisdom of some of his actions may seem questionable, as an actor and artist I’m inclined to take an empathetic view of his conduct.

Let’s review the facts. First, in December, Mr. LaBeouf was accused of plagiarism after critics noted similarities between “Howard Cantour.com,” a short film he created, and a story by the graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. Though Mr. LaBeouf apologized on Twitter, conceding that he had “neglected to follow proper accreditation,” it turned out that the apology itself appropriated someone else’s writing. Was that clever or pathological?

Then, earlier this month, with these actions focusing the tabloid gaze on him, he wore a paper bag over his head that read “I am not famous anymore” at the red-carpet premiere of his latest movie, “Nymphomaniac.” And last week he staged an art show called “#IAmSorry” that involved having him sit opposite visitors to a Los Angeles gallery while he wore a similar bag over his head and stared at them through cutout eye holes.

This behavior could be a sign of many things, from a nervous breakdown to mere youthful recklessness. For Mr. LaBeouf’s sake I hope it is nothing serious. Indeed I hope — and, yes, I know that this idea has pretentious or just plain ridiculous overtones — that his actions are intended as a piece of performance art, one in which a young man in a very public profession tries to reclaim his public persona.

Actors have been lashing out against their profession and its grip on their public images since at least Marlon Brando. Brando’s performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn’t seem to be “performing,” in the sense that he wasn’t putting something on as much as he was being. Off-screen he defied the studio system’s control over his image, allowing his weight to fluctuate, choosing roles that were considered beneath him and turning down the Oscar for best actor in 1973. These were acts of rebellion against an industry that practically forces an actor to identify with his persona while at the same time repeatedly wresting it from him.

by James Franco, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Jeff Vespa/WireImage.com

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Heroin in Charlotte

Imagine a substance that feels like a hug. It warms you, quiets your mind, and rocks you gently to sleep. There is just you and this warmth, and the sensation is almost like being loved.

This is the way addicts describe heroin.

“As soon as I did it, it felt like I had found what I was looking for,” a 27-year-old female heroin addict from south Charlotte said in a recent interview. “I felt right for the first time in my life.” (...)

Buying heroin in Charlotte is similar to ordering a pizza. Phone numbers of dispatchers float around the city. For an eager customer, dealers are easy to find. Call the number, place an order, and the dispatcher will instruct you to drive to a safe, public place—a mall parking lot, a suburban cul-de-sac. The park behind the Arboretum was once a popular place to buy. A runner—not the person who took the order—meets the buyer, and they can complete the deal window to window, without ever leaving their cars.

Much of the heroin being sold here is called black-tar heroin, named for its sticky, gooey consistency and dark brown color, which can resemble brown sugar or a Tootsie Roll. Its production is overseen primarily by Mexican drug cartels, DEA agent Ferris says. Black tar is a crude, unrefined version of the drug. To make white powder heroin, opium is converted to morphine and then to heroin. When making black tar, manufacturers leave out a refining step, and leave in many impurities. This means the drug is cheaper, but full of bacteria and other dangers.

At any given time in Charlotte, there can be 10 to 15 trafficking “cells” receiving heroin from the cartels, Ferris says. Members of the cells process the drug, dilute it to increase their yield, roll it in plastic, and wrap it in tiny, brightly colored latex balloons containing anywhere from one-tenth of a gram to a full gram. Runners and dispatchers travel to Charlotte primarily from Mexico. They are often quiet men in their 20s who may sell for an average of a year at a time. If they are not arrested, they go back home, Ferris says, although some return to America to be promoted through the ranks of the drug-dealing organization. To the cartels, runners and dispatchers are interchangeable and dispensable. Hundreds may be arrested, but they are quickly replaced.

by Lisa Rab, Charlotte Magazine | Read more:
Image: Logan Cyrus

Rafael Araujo
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This Old Man

Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.

Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or head: nothing in the middle. But cheer up: if I reverse things and cover my right eye, there you are, back again. If I take my hand away and look at you with both eyes, the empty hole disappears and you’re in 3-D, and actually looking pretty terrific today. Macular degeneration.

I’m ninety-three, and I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb. Shingles, in 1996, with resultant nerve damage. (...)

Recent and not so recent surveys (including the six-decades-long Grant Study of the lives of some nineteen-forties Harvard graduates) confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising ourselves with happiness. Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still with us, we sense a trickle of contentment flowing from the reliable springs of routine, affection in long silences, calm within the light boredom of well-worn friends, retold stories, and mossy opinions. Also the distant whoosh of a surfaced porpoise outside our night windows.

We elders—what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel?—we elders have learned a thing or two, including invisibility. Here I am in a conversation with some trusty friends—old friends but actually not all that old: they’re in their sixties—and we’re finishing the wine and in serious converse about global warming in Nyack or Virginia Woolf the cross-dresser. There’s a pause, and I chime in with a couple of sentences. The others look at me politely, then resume the talk exactly at the point where they’ve just left it. What? Hello? Didn’t I just say something? Have I left the room? Have I experienced what neurologists call a TIA—a transient ischemic attack? I didn’t expect to take over the chat but did await a word or two of response. Not tonight, though. (Women I know say that this began to happen to them when they passed fifty.) When I mention the phenomenon to anyone around my age, I get back nods and smiles. Yes, we’re invisible. Honored, respected, even loved, but not quite worth listening to anymore. You’ve had your turn, Pops; now it’s ours. (...)

I get along. Now and then it comes to me that I appear to have more energy and hope than some of my coevals, but I take no credit for this. I don’t belong to a book club or a bridge club; I’m not taking up Mandarin or practicing the viola. In a sporadic effort to keep my brain from moldering, I’ve begun to memorize shorter poems—by Auden, Donne, Ogden Nash, and more—which I recite to myself some nights while walking my dog, Harry’s successor fox terrier, Andy. I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window. But shouldn’t I have something more scholarly or complex than this put away by now—late paragraphs of accomplishments, good works, some weightier op cits? I’m afraid not. The thoughts of age are short, short thoughts. I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

by Roger Angell, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Brigitte Lacombe

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Won Tons Are Easily Domesticated

[ed. I love making these except my house usually ends up smelling like a won ton all day because I make the crispy versions fried in oil. Simple dipping sauce of Coleman's mustard and soy sauce. Recipe: Pork and Shrimp Won Tons]

Winter does not retreat. Here’s what I want: a table by a fogged-up window, with fat won tons, drizzled with hot pepper oil and stinking of garlic and ginger, bobbing in a huge bowl of steamy broth. Where? Why, at home — where else?

It’s not hard to have won tons or dumplings at home. You buy a bag of 60 frozen ones for a few bucks and boil them at home. I wouldn’t really call it cheating; you could do much worse. They are relatively healthy, convenient, cheap and a better choice than many other frozen options.

But what if you could get all that and have it freshly made (you control the ingredients and the seasonings) and have the taste be about a thousand times better?

You can. Making won tons is so easy, it almost feels like cheating. You buy the won ton skins in a package at the store. They are rolled to the perfect thickness, cut to the perfect size and have the perfect moisture content. Even the most fanatical cook will agree that store-bought won ton skins and phyllo dough are better.

Your won ton filling, whatever it is, will usually be a mixture of minced meat: chicken, duck, pork, shrimp or a combination. I love the combined flavors of not-too-lean, minced pork and shrimp, and the texture, too. Ginger, garlic, sesame oil and serrano chiles are happy additions, along with a spoonful of spicy fermented bean paste.

If you can get Chinese garlic chives, by all means use them. They add a green freshness to the won ton filling that is more vegetal than garlicky, and quite delicious. If not, carry on with scallions. Like meatballs, idiosyncratic variations of fillings are part of the experience. Taste your filling in advance, though, to ensure that it is well seasoned. Fry a little bit, check the seasoning and correct it. Because it will be wrapped in dough, the filling should be bright.

Won tons can be served plain or in broth. I prefer the broth version, but here is where I draw the line: don’t cheat on the broth. You’ll never get a good one from a can or a cube. If you don’t have worthwhile broth, stir-fry some spinach with garlic and a splash of water, then use the greens and their juices to moisten the dish.

Red pepper oil, in my opinion, should always be on hand.

by David Tanis, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Stephane Calais - Genau (2007)
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Joel Meyerowitz, St. Louis, 1978
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Browser Exploit for Android Highlights Google’s Update Problem

A security researcher has discovered a way to take over roughly 70 percent of Android devices via a Web page or app. It’s not known if anyone’s actually using the exploit to attack people’s phones, but the researcher’s findings are nonetheless a reminder that Google faces a growing headache because it lacks any way to effectively distribute security updates to the hundreds of millions of devices running its software worldwide. Many of those devices have outdated versions of Android.

The new exploit was developed by Joe Vennix, a software engineer at security company Rapid7, who last week added the exploit to the company’s Metasploit software used to test devices and systems for known vulnerabilities. His code makes use of a bug, first disclosed in December 2012, in the Web browser built into Android. The exploit could be used to take over a phone after directing someone to a Web page with the malicious code embedded, or by delivering the code via an app, many of which display content such as ads using Android’s browser capabilities. Vennix found that one Baidu app, for example, was vulnerable to the exploit when installed on a device using the version of Android released in December 2013. Another researcher found that the exploit works on Google Glass.

Vennix estimates that 70 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to the exploit, based on Google’s figures for the proportion of devices running different versions of Android. And crucially, although Google released a new version of Android with a fix for the underlying bug in November 2012, most devices running the software will likely remain vulnerable to the attack for as long as they remain in use because they will not be updated.

Google has convinced many manufacturers to install Android on their products, but few are quick about rolling out new versions of the software. Nor does Google have any mechanism to push updates directly to devices, such as those built into desktop operating systems including Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. (...)

Over a billion Android devices have been activated since the software launched in October 2008, according to Google. Android devices are hardly plagued by malware to the extent that PCs are, and the use of app stores helps limit the spread of malicious code. Even so, the incidence of malware is growing and expected to get significantly worse (see “Attacks on Android Intensify” and “New Business Models for Malware to Bring PC Security Woes to Mobile”).

by Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

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Lessons on Love From 100 American Couples

I’m a single, 20-something woman, so I should note off the bat that I don’t know much about marriage. But most young singles go into what is meant to be a lifelong commitment relatively clueless. Our perceptions of marriage often stem from some mix of romantic comedies, mainstream media, and the example set by our parents, which can leave us with an unrealistic, decidedly negative, and, at best, incomplete picture of what it really means to build a committed, fulfilling relationship.

Coming from a single-parent household (which is increasingly common—the number of single-parent households has doubled since 1950), my feelings toward marriage are cautious, but hopeful. Many of my peers, after watching their parents get divorced or experiencing a divorce of their own, are more cynical about the institution of marriage. They say 50 percent of marriages end in divorce (though that is an inflated statistic). The Huffington Post has an entire section dedicated to divorce, with the despondent tagline, “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.”

But even if the 50 percent divorce statistic were actually true, my question is: What about the other 50 percent? How are they making it work? In an effort to find out, last year, I traveled across the country to capture 100 of America’s great love stories with my friend Nate Bagley, for a project we call The Loveumentary. (...)

Here are five of the biggest lessons I learned from these couples:

1. Marriage isn’t meant to make you happy.

Measuring the success of a marriage by how happy you are makes it easy to assume that experiencing unhappiness in a marriage means you're in a bad one. But every couple we interviewed agrees it is not realistic to assume you’ll be happy all the time. If a fluctuating emotion, like happiness, is the measuring stick you use to gauge the success of your relationship, you will continuously come up short.

The primary purpose of marriage isn’t to keep you happy—it’s to keep you growing. Steve Hambrick, Lead Pastor of Vintage 242 Church in Dallas, Georgia has been married to his wife Randel for more than 12 years. He says, “It boils down to the selfless understanding that I'm not married for what's best for me. Love is a selfless choice about what's best for the other, because she is the most important thing in my life. The greatest way to find joy in the context of marriage is to bring joy to someone else."

When you approach marriage looking to grow with and from one another, it fundamentally shifts the way you look at the health of your relationship. The catalysts for this growth range from pursuing common goals and interests together, to lovingly challenging one another’s views, to traversing devastating hardship alongside one another.

Of course, happiness tends to be a natural byproduct of healthy growth in a relationship. However, it shouldn’t be the reason you choose to stay in or leave one. Couples that stay together know there will be less exciting or happy seasons. But, these seasons pave the way for personal and relational growth–not an exit strategy.

by Melissa Joy Kong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: mrhayata/flickr

The Vampire Squid Strikes Again

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America's banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world's banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or "modifying," as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

All of this was big enough news in itself. But it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is "complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally."

Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?

"From the perspective of the banks," says Saule Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, "pretty much everything is considered complementary to a financial activity."

Fifteen years later, in fact, it now looks like Wall Street and its lawyers took the term to be a synonym for ruthless campaigns of world domination. "Nobody knew the reach it would have into the real economy," says Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Now a leading voice on the Hill against the hidden provisions, Brown actually voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley as a congressman, along with all but 72 other House members. "I bet even some of the people who were the bill's advocates had no idea."

Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.

There are more eclectic interests, too. After 9/11, we found it worrisome when foreigners started to get into the business of running ports, but there's been little controversy as banks have done the same, or even started dabbling in other activities with national-security implications – Goldman Sachs, for instance, is apparently now in the uranium business, a piece of news that attracted few headlines.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Victor Juhasz

Cécile Bart, Mobile 2013
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