Fannie Mae as a Tax Supported Charity

I see that Fannie Mae Foundation closed in 2007.  I don't quite get the legal structure of Fannie Mae, but I guess it is a kind of triple bottom line social venture, part for profit, part governmental agency, and part charity in its own right, sucking in tax dollars to cover its massive losses, and providing good livings to good people who do good things. At Freddie Mac, though, they do even better doing even more good.

Comments

[tom]

At the FMs, they bring only the humblest and most saintly devotees of wealth bondage to the table.

[archi]

i feel dirty.

[Phil]

As long as the stock market goes up, the country can go to heck.

[tom]

and stay thin at the same time.

[JJ Commoner]

No need at all for conspiracies ...

[phil]

A social class of more highly evolved bloodliness, whose merits are proven like those of racehorses, by object performance under competitive conditions, has every right to look down upon the nags broken to pull a milk cart. Shared assumptions, self satisfying myths, favors one to another, funding for institutions supportive of the class, friends made at Ivy schools, at board meetings or in exclusive clubs, friends made at $2,000 a plate political fundraisers or charity balls, none of this is a conspiracy. Friends do business with friends; and, friends look out for each other's interests. At Davos, no less than around the Dumpster, one good deed deserves another, and what goes around comes around. Trickle down? Why would that happen unless a quid pro quo trickled up? And what can we give to those who have most except our admiration, our obedience, and our own aspiration to be like them? We identify with them. And they to avoid conflict drive a pickup truck to a private hanger to board their private jet, or they have the helicopter take them to a Nascar event, where they can be photographed shaking handks with pit crews, thus showing that we are all in this together. No class. No class war. Just a flat world where most live below sea level and the levies always seem about to break. The nation is a cash cow. The cash feeds the global firms. The firms write legislation through their lobbyists, and put their ex-CEO into positions like those of Secretary of the Treasury to bail out the flim flam firms deemed too big to fail. Country down, market up. The market essentially is floated on money borrowed into the national debt. Everybody who matters wins, and gets their money off shore pending the ultimate collapse. And for the losers, well, for that we have charity. Let Informant 38 add a paypal account to his site, or go through the garbage cans looking for food. Everything is under control and going according to plan. Privatizing social security will fix our problems.

[Timmy (and Lassie!)]

Hi, I'm Timmy, Lassie's friend and master. What I don't get is if it makes a difference if there is or if there isn't a formal explicit conspiracy versus an organic self-reinforcing one. Do you guys think it doesn't matter? It kind of seems like that.

If it doesn't matter, why not, and if it did matter, why would it?

You guys are probably a lot older than me and Lassie and probably went to a lot of school so we're eager to hear your opinion. Thanks!

[Phil]

We can be sure, I think, that there is a global village of several thousand key players. CEOs, heads of state, hedge fund managers, celebrities, thought leaders. In some respects their interests are adverse, in some respects aligned with one another, or aligned with subsets. These key figures move from business, to politics, to nonprofit boards. They meet in "safe spaces." They have often many ties in common. They call one another when they need one another's help. They move money and favors and clout around in their circle. They would not describe this as a conspiracy. They would describe it as networking, knowing the right people; they might call it public service or philanthropy. But the net result is a supervenient group of people who have disproportionate influence.

Say that Cheney as VP meets with old friends from the oil business. Say many have funded the Bush campaign. Say these old friends provide draft legislation for regulating the oil business. Say the meetings are top secret and that no transcript is ever released. Say the legislation is enacted and the old friends make a fortune and give more to the next campaign. Is this a conspiracy, or just a blue ribbon panel?

Conspiracy theories arise when people on the outside of the groups sense that they are being gamed. Or, sometimes conspiracy theories are actively promulgated by insiders to scapegoat outsiders and deflect blame. (Red baiting, Protocols of Zion, Terrorists as anyone who dissents).

Would you describe the interwoven strands of Iran Contra as conspiratorial? Riggs Bank? BCCI? Enron? Hard for me to know because the truth is so complex, and the shell game as so many shells. I get as far as calling it Wealth Bondage.

Espousing or mocking conspiracy theories gets us nowhere. What does help is understanding as best we can how the system works, its codes and decorum, and how things get recoded from private talk behind closed doors into public talk and public policy. I value the testimony of C.A. Fitts because she has been behind the closed doors and has first hand info on how things work there. Yes, and then she goes into conspiracy theories that are at best shorthand for something more complex, and which play into the paranoia of the ignorant. My sense is that the truth is bad enough, without adding the paranoid elements. But when actors who can coerce or bamboozle are given the right to operate in secret with secret budgets and no accountability, you can expect all kinds of trouble. And we are seeing that. It is important, I think, to speak up as best we can, even if we sound paranoid, or tasteless, because fear and intimidation silence so many. For me the satirical mode works best. For Catherine the talk radio paranoid conspiracy stuff goes over with the kind of voter who might otherwise be listening to Limbaugh.

[JJ Commoner]

Timmy, are you going to translate that into your own private woof-woof for your Lassie ?

[Timmy (and Lassie!)]

Thanks, Mr. C! Hi, Mr. Commoner!

Lassie has this super sense that helps a lot sometimes. To get your attention she whimpers and whines, pulls at your clothes, barks, and runs in the direction of help.

Right now she is lying down looking at me with her head resting on her paws. Now she turned her head to the side and sighed.

Near as I can figure, that means she doesn't understand how she can oppose something so unfocused and organic and inevitable as a headless superclass. I get the feeling she understands it good enough but feels a little empty after that. She wonders if we can't point her toward the main bad guy, I think, because being only one sensitive dog, she understands that it would be impossible for her to jump on the chests of several thousand superclassers before the series ends, and thinks that wouldn't make much difference anyway.

Whoops, she just farted... Lassie!

[Phil]

So, listen. What Catherine suggests may not resonate with Lassie (sorry girl), but is coherent. She suggests that the Superclass centralizes power through taxes, hierarchy, global corporate structures, and through its networks across the tips of these pyramids of power. How fight it? Her answer is new to me, but actionable. She says to starve the beast. Withdraw funds from centralizing organizations. Withdraw attention and energy from them. Reinvest locally in organizations owned and run by people you know and trust. Financial intimacy. That way we build something with each other and for each other in small face to face networks.

You can say this is capitalism. You can say it is Main St conservatism, but it intersects with such progressive trends as the green collar jobs promoted by Van Jones and Bill Clinton, among many others. It also intersects the old hippie sense of community. It also gets us back to things like slow money, local food, being thrifty.

I find her action steps well considered and intellectually consistent. To the extent we withdraw our energy and money from Wealth Bondage and invest ourselves outside it, we create a better world.

If you deposit savings, where? If you shop, where? If you work, where? In each case with either advance the powers of centralization or those of decentralization.

When you begin seeing the world this way, differences like left and right or red and blue or cultural differences seem a lot less significant, especially since the centralizing powers are bipartisan to say the least.

So, we don't ask if there is a conspiracy, we start our own local, or online conspiracies for the good. Only we do it in a fashion that lets us make a living and a life outside Wealth Bondage or what she calls the Tapeworm.

My conversations with her add a twist: to the extent that donors, clients, customers, consumers, voters, vote with their feet and wallets, they do begin to affect established global firms and their political allies. At that point the established forces may be more amenable to reform.

In my little world, I think training clients and donors to be more proactive in leading the planning conversation with advisors, even of global firms, would have the effect of bringing those firms to the donor's side of the table, more so than now. But it will be the donors and clients who lead in that change.

[ikorush sikorsky]

I think the problem here is the uncritical acceptance of the "truth" of seamless globalization managed by a transnational superclass, as if it were self-evidently and empirically obvious that this has occurred. The actual evidence is scant, which is why conspiratorial theories about the influence of global elites - for instance, regarding the promulgation of what are patently US *national* interests in the internal politics of Columbia - lack credibility.

[Phil]

Well, Superclass is the name of recent book by a guy who moves within it, a former member of Henry Kissinger's firm. He provides quite a lot of detail of how that global village of bigwigs has come together and how they work, sometimes together, sometimes in competition with one another. He does not say "managed," he does not say "governed." What he says is that global capital flows, global companies, and global NGOs have exceeded or escaped the governing bodies of any one nation. And yet there is no robust, let alone elected, international government to restrain and regulate these giants. So they, perforce, must work it out amongst themselves, in a kind of informal self regulatory community. The head of Goldman Sachs, when convened with his peers to stave off a pending financial crisis, spoke of the meeting of "the 14 families."

I am not big on conspiracy theories, but I am big on theories of the gift, of community, collegiality, and small group dynamics. I submit to you that these apply not only among losers on the net, but among those who have most. Once you get a group of people who form their community, you don't need conspiracy, you have group norms, ways of life, accepted procedures, as well as friendships that do the job.

That was really the point of Gay's Beggars Opera, when he likened the fellowship of thieves and doxies to the fellowship of the Walpole administration. Now we have such fellowships on all levels, from the dumpster, up through local, to national to international.

Rather than calling it a conspiracy, we should get get masks and set it to music, as did Gay. Let us celebrate what we cannot change.

[tom]

Consider a global group that's been forming bonds like hot molecules at swell places around the world, and that's not just doing a lot of things that don't make the news, but each of whom is likely thinking about doing a whole lot more.

Where is their money? They escape home and bank? Their last wills and testaments? Conspiracy can be truly nonexistent and yet, through a sort of wisdom of crowds effect, coupled with the most reliable insider knowledge possible, still produce an effect that looks conspiratorial, (especially when none of the potentially diabolical stuff is reflected in the shitfaced what-me-worry? looks on the faces of anchors across the networks, cable, npr, Clear Channel and news/info/trend/brand purveyors to the middle classes).

Information may by necessity be conspiratorial in structure, because while all want the same things, there is always the blinding speed at which some species of "good" information inevitably outstrips "bad" or outdated or rumored-to-be-false information.

[Phil]

Tom, that is my take as well. "Conspiracy" is how it feels to outsiders. To insiders, it is another slippery game, where no one is secure. Look at Elliot Spitzer. One day you are making other insiders do the perp walk. Next day you are on national tv, shamed yourself. Self organizing systems, wisdom of crowds, a community formed by exclusion, after exclusion, after exclusion, until the 6,000 most important vie for status among themselves. Rothkopf says, among the winners at Davos are a few people who "seem to have been smuggled in via someone's luggage." He also quotes Leo Gerstner as saying, "Davos has become a mob scene." You can see the kind of culture that has evolved there. How will Fannie and Freddie be saved? Who do you think will be in that room when the deals and decisions are made? Goldman Alums, Hedge Fund managers, Fannie and Freddie's CEO making $15 plus million, politicians plied by lobbyists and themselves headed into cushy jobs on the boards of financial firms. No tv coverage, no reporters. Is that a conspiracy, or just building consensus so that concerted action can avert a crisis? Of course the foreknowledge, best informed guess, of what will be done can be highly profitable. To sell a stock short based on insider knowledge is illegal, but to sell a country short?

[O Lucky Man]

Another Slippery Game.

Great title for something.

[Timmy (and Lassie!)]

Gramps asked me if our family was offered only one seat to escape earth on Richard Branson's space ship who I thought should go, including Lassie. (He's always posing these hypotheticals.)

At first I thought I should go because I am the youngest and the strongest and still cute and quick enough to be protected from the omnivorous alpha males by an earth mother type who is probably married to one of the particularly evil guys but still just wraps you in goodness at the drop of a hat.

But really, Lassie should probably go because of her super sense and ability to rebound from setbacks. If she was somehow able to couple with the earth mother (hot space molecules?) maybe their offspring could help to moderate the evil space rays that the alphas are thinking of directing back at earth to finish it off.

Gramps just narrowed his eyes, drew on his pipe, and rocked a while. I don't know why he even asks these things if he doesn't want to know but he is my Gramps and I love him.

[Phil]

OLM, thanks for the links to Valentine's essays.

[Phil]

Timmy, time for bed. Lassie can sleep in with you tonight. Life is good kid; sleep tight.

[David Gillespie]

If you wish to seriously investigate this matter, there is plenty of food for thought at this reputable source:

http://www.worldreports.org/news/149_confirmed_two_countries_seeking_u.s._collapse

[phil]

I will read around on it.