But I would like to take this time to suggest to Israel that if you insist on attacking United Nations sponsored schools full of civilians and children, I suppose you’ll never be too worried about that nagging feeling in the back of your soul that you just might be doing something really, truly, wrong. Because if decades of apartheid, stolen homes and land, military occupation, a policy of economic and literal starvation, and political marginalization aren’t enough, what’s a few more women and children? Right, Israel? What’s a few more women and children? I suppose you think of them as not even women and children… just Palestinians. Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian terrorist women and Palestinian terrorist children at a Palestinian terrorist school sponsored by the pro-terrorist anti-Semitic United Nations. That’s just how you see it, isn’t it?

So, let’s assume likewise that that debt is relatively sustainable - That the average American makes enough money to service this debt but that it is crushing. That the average consumer probably spends between 5% and 20% of his or her yearly income on servicing their debt - No matter what, that is a debilitating effect.

But even in current economic conditions, it is sustainable. Then again, we’re talking about averages.

What about the folks who are up to their ear drums in debt, $80,000, $90,000, in debt, much of which is in high interest credit cards? Does anybody believe they’re in much of a position to pay it down without winning the lottery?

Well, it seems to me there is a fairly simple solution: Communal Debt Repayment. Consider:

Let’s say that a person makes, after taxes, $1,500 a month. Not a lot at all - In a year, that person makes $18,000 after taxes - so we’re talking about someone who lives below the poverty line and makes minimum wage in America. This person is poor - But then again, in the brave new world of the past two decades, this person was likely eligible for many predatory credit cards with outrageously huge limits. Let’s say this person now owes $60,000 to a variety of credit institutions.

Let’s also assume, for the moment, that our deeply in-debt minimum wage worker, we’ll call her Jane, spends $500 a month on her rent, and $250 a month on food. She has a cell phone bill of $40, pays a car loan of $200, has other various expenses, and then sends a check for $200 to the credit card companies. Thanks to a number of factors, namely her monthly food budget and her rent budget, along with her “other various expenses” and her car, Jane will pay off her credit card company sometime in the next millennium. She will never accumulate enough to get out of the hole, and she will never have enough to retire. The debt will stay with her forever.

But imagine an entirely different story line: Jane enters a “get out of debt” commune. Jane surrenders her entire paycheck each month to said commune. Jane eats breakfast and dinner at the commune, and is given a packed lunch to take to work. At this commune, everything is bought and prepared in bulk - This isn’t some hippy commune where there are full-fledged farms, but some essentials are produced on sight - There’s a garden, for example. By and large, however, the commune harnesses the power of bulk buying and bulk living - Jane signs a contract with the commune - She sells her car, cancels her cell phone, etc. For a year, she will live at the commune, carrying out her day to day and working as usual. At the end of the day, when she returns home, she has a guarantee of a room, all the food she wants, and shared entertainment resources. The commune also employs a fleet of energy efficient vehicles to drop her off at work and take her home at the end of the day.

At the end of every month, the commune pays her credit card company her entire paycheck, minus the expense of hosting her. Not only does she benefit from food and housing costs dropping dramatically thanks to shared resources, but by seeding her financial life to the commune, as part of her contract, she has, essentially, no cash on hand, ever, which means she is incapable of frivolous spending. The commune has arrangements for bulk purchasing of clothing, basic medicine, etc. should she need it - again, this keeps costs down considerably, and lessens her identity as a single-buyer.

At the end of the year, Jane assesses her financial position - Whereas she might have paid the credit card companies $2400 ($200 x 12) in her old life, this year she was able to pay them $1150 per month, a grand total of $13,800. In one year she has managed to level 23% in immediate debt, plus sidestepping mountains of future interest payments. In return, she has sacrificed her American consumer identity, and an extraordinary amount of privacy (communal living guarantees both), for one year. At the same time, the community that she has lived in for a year has radically improved her awareness of the importance of fiscal responsibility, as well as the inherent value of communal purchasing power versus individual purchasing power.

The communal aspect is not radical - what is radical is the pragmatic capitalism inherent in this scheme. There is no “communism” per se here - this is more like intensive financial rehab - “Spenders Anonymous.” It is not communism for communism’s sake, but instead a realistic remedy for Jane to get out of what would otherwise be life-crushing high-interest debt in under five years without declaring bankruptcy while sustaining a life at minimum wage.

The primary assumption here is that the commune could drop Jane’s overall life expenses from $1300 a month to $350 a month. The inherent problem with this assumption is that though this is a fair assumption when you factor in that Jane will no longer own a car, a cell phone, will have all her entertainment at “home,” and will pay her rent and food in conjunction with dozens of other people, that doesn’t leave a lot left over for profit. Hense such a commune would have to opperate as a no-fee not-for-profit, which means the only benefits it would provide to its management would be cheap housing and food.

At the end of the day, there are several important elements to this idea:

1. Jane has to work, but she does not have to focus on getting raises to pay her debts. She need only continue to work.
2. #1 does not only apply to Jane but to everyone else participating in the commune, including its management - no one is getting a free ride
3. The agenda of such an organization is inherently capitalistic, not communistic - Jane has performed poorly in a capitalistic world, and therefore is essentially going to “capitalist limbo” where for a time she will surrender her rights as a free consumer in order to pay off all or a at least a manageable portion of her debts. In the meantime she will learn valuable lessons in frugality and savings.
4. This is a win-win solution for everyone involved, except perhaps the credit card industry which had hoped it would take Jane years to pay her debts, and for Jane’s identity as a consumer

Imagine then, if Jane had made $40,000 a year, banking therefore approximately $2,600 a month after taxes. Under the same operational conditions by which Jane’s monthly expenses drop to $350 a month, her monthly payment to her debtors is $2,250. At $27,000, Jane is capable of being debt-free in just over two years, eliminating years of crushing interest payments.

There is no other solution to America’s high-interest debt problem. Even if Jane got a second job, her monthly payments would only increase by a few hundred dollars a month at the very most, not by over a thousand. A second job would also increase her transportation expenses, and if she regularly consumes “entertainment products” to cope with the increased work load, i.e. cigarettes, candy, alcohol, etc., the second job creates new costs as well.

In the scheme I’ve laid out above, Jane might not have a personal life in the standard way of thinking about a personal life, but then again if she got a second job she wouldn’t have much of one either. The difference is ultimately that Jane is able to get plenty of sleep and not degrade the quality of her work at her first job, making promotion more difficult. Jane’s sanity is intact and she knows exactly when she will be debt free. The people running the commune are able to tell her every month how much longer she has to go, and she can quit at any time.

I am not an advocate in giving up personal freedoms, and I believe that buying is an important personal freedom. However, people like Jane all over America and Europe have been shackled by a terrifying Chimera, large amounts of high-interest debt. Only by giving up the personal freedom of consumption for a short while will Jane regain her opportunity to be a free-agent in the market system.

BEIRUT: A strategic partnership between Lebanese technology companies EDM and eSharing is breaking the “go-it-alone” status quo of the Middle East IT sector. eSharing will develop enterprise resource software that interfaces directly with EDM’s new Global Positioning System (GPS) and mobile cellular communications (GPRS and GSM) hardware platform for corporate-fleet vehicle management.

In separate interviews with The Daily Star, EDM managing partner Imad Kozem and eSharing CEO Joe Hage agreed that the partnership bucked a trend in the information-technology (IT) sector in Lebanon and, more generally, throughout the Middle East.

“Lebanese and Middle Eastern companies almost always believe that, [only] by themselves, can they, and should, do anything. Very rarely do they see the value in saying, ‘I need you to be my partner …’ [but by partnering] we obviously benefit,” Kozem told The Daily Star.

Hage echoed Kozem when discussing the value of strategic business partnerships: “In fact, we view it as a recipe for success,” he said.

Hage told The Daily Star that he believed his company’s partnership with EDM represented an American attitude toward cross-company resource sharing. The focus of eSharing is on software development, as well as on IT and localization services, but their expertise is not in building IT hardware.

When considering their core competency, Hage says of eSharing: “We have a mindset that is typical of the United States: Do we build, buy or partner? Let’s make sure we are investing in the right things.”

On the other hand, EDM’s TRAX Locator, a GPS, GPRS and GSM device, highlights its hardware expertise. It allows firms to track the movement and status of their entire fleet of vehicles in real time, combining location and communication services such as tracking, geofencing, mapping and messaging, as well as engine immobilization and service reports.

While such fleet-management platforms are available from Western firms, cost, language, and culture are usually significant barriers for business development in markets outside of Europe and the US. It is these areas that are the target markets for the TRAX hardware and accompanying software.

The firms’ partnership underlines the advantages of competency specialization and draws a clean line between the hardware manufacturer and software developer, potentially limiting both initial and total costs.

In so doing, the partnership is also testing Lebanon’s potential as a technology-outsourcing and off-shoring hub with specific advantages, including an educated population, a centralized geographic location, and multi-lingual capabilities.

EDM and eSharing initially met at the Termium technology exhibition, and Kozem believed that the annual event is a good opportunity for meeting potential partners. However, he told The Daily Star that, though those events that are effective networking arenas in Lebanon, they are rare and often expensive to attend.

This is likely both a symptom of, and a reason for, the ingrained aversion to similar business partnerships in Lebanon, whether or not they are in the IT sector. That the most entrepreneurial of Lebanon’s population leave the country in droves clearly reinforces roadblocks to corporate-openness to resource sharing and dynamic strategies.

Whether this collaboration will stand as an example of the benefits of cross-company resource sharing in the Middle East remains to be seen. The global financial crisis will certainly test the standard “go-it-alone” business model in the region. Partnerships that allow companies to focus on economies of scale and core-competency, while reducing cost of ownership, will increase their competitiveness even as budgets tighten.

Kozem believes that, “2009 will be tough … Obviously a company shouldn’t partner for partnership’s sake, but the right partnership is one that takes advantage of specific expertise.”

Congratulations. Since you’re so good at starving a caged population of almost a million and a half people to death and then, to add insult to injury, kill more people in one day than they’ve killed with their toy rockets in a year, only to be asked politely by the Bush Administration to “take care not to hurt people,” it’s clear that you are used to getting your way.

So perhaps, you being all good at getting your way without having to explain yourself, you would like to tell me how to explain myself to the Palestinian children I’m supposed to be tutoring tomorrow at Sabra? You know, Sabra? The Sabra Palestinian refuge camp? Does that ring a bell, Israel? Does it?

After, all, it’s American money, American weapons, and above all else, American complicity that’s at the heart of all this.

On second, thought, maybe I’ll skip Sabra tomorrow…

Construction cranes dot Beirut’s Mediterranean skyline. Planes are full of expatriate Lebanese coming home for Christmas and New Year’s, as well as foreign tourists. The number of arrivals at Beirut’s international airport is expected to reach 1.3 million at year’s end - a figure not achieved since 2004.

Downtown Beirut is choked with traffic jams, and shops and boutiques are full of customers. Tourists pack restaurants and street cafes to enjoy Lebanon’s famed cuisine and smoke fragrant waterpipes. Central Martyr’s Square now has a giant Christmas tree next to the city’s biggest mosque, and luxury hotels are planning New Year’s parties at New York and Paris prices - up to $1,500 a plate.

Even the global economic crisis has bypassed the nation for now - thanks to conservative bank regulations long in place that prevented the sort of risky transactions that have undone other countries’ institutions, Lebanese financial officials say. Banks have been flooded with cash from depositors looking for a safe haven.

via Lebanon festive for now, but tough issues ahead - Forbes.com.

Interestingly, the article quotes “Engineer Bashir Khoury, 34, visiting from abroad, says he’s happy to enjoy Lebanon but wouldn’t risk coming home for good.”

It says he’s from Haiti. HAITI? Haiti must be a MILLION times more risky than Lebanon.

BEIRUT: The Education’s Ministry decision to make intellectual property rights (IPR) the theme of its SchoolNet project in 2009 highlights the growing prioritization of anti-piracy initiatives in Lebanon. Education Minister Bahia Hariri delivered a speech to a workshop on Monday in Beirut, highlighting the need for a cultural shift, beginning with young people, in Lebanon’s attitude toward intellectual property rights and violations. The workshop kicked off this year’s SchoolNet initiative, entitled, “Intellectual Property Rights: Duty or Necessity?”

The initiative will teach students about the inherent consequences, both individual and systemic, that arise when Lebanese consumers and businesses violate intellectual property rights by buying pirated software, music, movies, print material, and other trademarked products.

The Education Ministry’s initiative also aims to educate students about the struggle to end Lebanon’s unfortunate reputation as one of the world’s most flagrant violators of intellectual property rights, trademarks, and copyrights.

Lebanon’s accession to the World Trade Organization hangs to a significant extent on the country’s ability to improve its reputation and record on intellectual property rights. Combined legislative and enforcement efforts by government, non-government, and corporate entities brought recognition this year, as the United States upgraded Lebanon’s status from “Priority Watch List” to “Watch List.” The country’s previous status had threatened its lucrative trade relationship with the United States.

Those efforts notwithstanding, Hariri raised the question of complicity at Monday’s workshop, asking: “Should we bring our children to account for not respecting intellectual property rights when they did not even learn about these rights in school? Can education about intellectual property rights be more effective than [only] strict implementation of laws?”

Many of those individuals and organizations that are working to increase awareness of, and to strengthen, intellectual-property legislation and enforcement were on hand at Monday’s workshop at the UNESCO building.

“Educating consumers and businesses about the importance of intellectual property and how they can benefit from acting within the law is key, along with proper enforcement,” Aly Harakeh, a Microsoft Lebanon executive, told The Daily Star.

The Education Ministry and the Schoolnet Initiative have historically worked closely with Microsoft Lebanon. Because of Microsoft’s involvement with digital intellectual property enforcement in the Levant, this year that relationship is especially important.

Also attending the SchoolNet workshop was Pierre al-Khoury, representing the Commercial Law Strengthening Project, whose Lebanese component is specifically focused upon intellectual property law. The project stretches across four nations in the Middle East: Lebanon, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates (specifically Dubai), and Yemen.

Khoury told The Daily Star that “intellectual property law is something new in Lebanon … [few] know about it. The problem is that the enforcement of law is not applicable - you can go out on the street and buy any software for, say, LL1,000.”

Asked about socially engrained cultural challenges, he said: “When there are campaigns highlighting this issue, talking about intellectual property on television and on the radio, it’s easy to make the point.”

The Brand Protection Group (BPG) initiated two such campaigns over the past five years, both with considerable success.

These campaigns followed a 2003-04 BPG study that found brand counterfeiting led to an annual loss of as much as $100 million loss to the Lebanese Treasury. This study seemed to at least partly validate Microsoft’s assertion to The Daily Star that intellectual property violations and piracy accounted for an annual $1 billion loss to the Lebanese economy.

The BPG’s conclusion was that “the negative impact is on all [Lebanese], and therefore all [Lebanese] should bear the responsibility of fighting this phenomenon.”

In 2005 and 2007, the BPG organized hotline call centers, advertising campaigns, and press releases to highlight the importance of reporting the sale of, and the refusal to purchase, counterfeit consumer products.

Post-campaign studies showed a considerable drop in Lebanese apathy toward intellectual property violations, validating Khoury’s theory that the Lebanese people are not culturally immune to respecting copyrights and trademarks.

Harakeh and Khoury agreed that, following the BPG’s campaigns, there has been a “change in perception.”

The widespread availability of pirated brands and software, and limited government action to combat their illicit sale - usually in broad daylight - is at the heart of Lebanon’s poor track record with intellectual property violations.

However, Khoury did tell The Daily Star that there are four separate pieces of legislation in Parliament to strengthen intellectual property rights, though Harakeh pointed out that “without enforcement, this will not be enough.”

But whether the parliamentary elections scheduled for the spring of 2009 will prevent timely consideration of such legislation is difficult to predict.

Kawkab Sinno, chair of the Brand Protection Group’s government relations committee, told The Daily Star that “serious Lebanese homegrown companies are aware of the importance of IPR protection for their innovation and brand names in Lebanon and outside the country. But first they need to respect the IPR protection given to other well-known names and there should be better government enforcement in this category of products and innovation.”

On the subject of enforcement, Harakeh said that Microsoft recently brought legal action against a Lebanese engineering firm whose profits were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and whose 80 or more office computers allegedly lacked a single genuine license for their software.

Harakeh used this story to demonstrate that the reasons for software piracy among Lebanese businesses are not always related to cost, but rather willful, or at least apathetic, non-compliance.

Yahia Ramadan, a liaison for Microsoft’s attorney, confirmed to The Daily Star that he had participated in a raid on the allegedly offending engineering company with the Cyber Crime Unit of the Internal Security Forces.

A decision on the case is still pending, although Microsoft won a conviction in a similar case in 2003.

The wanderer is at the feast of Saint John, with its tents, archery contests and country food. Suddenly, a clown begins to mimic his gestures. People laugh, and the wanderer laughs, as well, and invites the clown to have coffee with him.

“Commit to life!” says the clown. “If you are alive, you have to shake your arms, jump around, make noise, laugh and talk to people. Because life is exactly the opposite of death. “To die is to remain forever in the same position.

If you are too quiet, you are not living.”

-From “Maktub” by Paulo Coelho

It was an interesting bookend to our discussion last spring in Boston as we considered how far away we were from doing things in the world - Here we were, a Journalist and a Web Developer, trying to change the face of Journalism in Lebanon and the world, two 24 year old white kids, born two days apart, just sitting and eating in a place that 20 years ago was the heart of a civilization’s collapse? Literally, people used to kill each other where we were sitting on a daily basis - the statue has bullet holes and shrapnel all through it.

Last night I spent the evening in a smokey jazz lounge on Gemayze St. called “Bar Louie,” listening to some real honest-to-God jazz while drinking scotch that was probably a little outside of my price range, but I didn’t care too much because it was such an amazing show. The jazz scene in the Middle East tends to be patchy and it’s really difficult to find talented live musicians who can put on a show like that is both technically perfect and musically engrossing. This really was both - it was a great show and I couldn’t get over the authenticity of the thing itself - I feel that Beirut, in its finest moments, is like a combination of the way I envision Paris must has been in the 50’s and Brooklyn was in the late 90’s. Now it’s not always at its finest, but trust me when I say that Beirut has more of its fare share of these truly authentic moments, without the yuppies ruining it for everyone, than perhaps anywhere else in the world (see my note above regarding lunch today if you have any doubts…)

Beirut has something else to - People talk a lot about the Clash of Civilizations and obviously Lebanon has its fare share of that, but in a country so prone to civil and religious conflict, right next to Martyr’s square is an enormous Christmas tree, which is right outside of Beirut’s biggest Muslim Mosque, right next to that Mosque is an enormous Church, and right next to the Church is the heart of Downtown Beirut, which also happens to reflect the capitalistic ideal in about as succinct away as I can imagine. A block from there are both Parliament and the Hariri memorial - For the uninformed, it was Hariri’s assassination in April 2005 which led ultimately to Syrian’s withdrawal from the Lebanon.

So within just one block you have a perfect image of the Anti-Clash of Civilizations - and it is not by any small measure of irony that this is just a short distance from the “Green Line,” the epicenter of the Civil War in the 80’s that led to the death of over 100,000 people. From a human perspective, the image of this one block, home to an enormous Mosque, an enormous Church, a Christmas Tree, Martyr’s Statue (riddled with bullet holes), Hariri’s memorial, and the busiest block of Downtown Beirut, and only a short distance from Gemayze St. which is sort of like the Georgetown (Washington D.C.) of Beirut, is an enormous thing, and in my mind the relative co-existence represents not only an “Anti-Clash” of Civilization, but the reality of the growing up of the post-Cold War world.

I stopped to pray at a Church on my way back from Microsoft - I haven’t been in a Church for a long time, let alone for any real spiritual reason. I think probably the last time I went to Church just to pray was maybe a year ago in Portland. Anyone who knows me probably knows my relative aversion to organized religion, an aversion which ultimately was a major part of choosing not to go into the priesthood. This particular Church I think is either Catholic or Greek Orthadox (I am neither) but that wasn’t a concern - The building, both inside and out, is beautiful. So I’m sitting there praying - Generally I try to pray in as nebulous a way as possible - “I hope I’m on the right path, stay with me on this,” etc. What struck me was that about three-quarters of the way through praying the Mosque next door started with their call to prayer -  which if you’ve ever heard it is fairly haunting and definitely beautiful - It added a nice touch. In standard Lebanese fair, the Church gave the Mosque about three-quarters of the Call before they started ringing their bells at a million decibels, promptly drowning the Muslims out. Oh well.

Anyways, it was nice - Just to pray I guess but also to take a breather. I’ve been living in a really cheap place, writing and consulting for free, and things are finally starting to progress - I dunno. It was a nice day and a nice evening last night and then a nice afternoon, so it seemed a good occasion for praying.

So - On a lighter note, I wanted to make a point about Lebanon not being backwards and all that, so here’s a picture of some Burger King I ate a few days ago - Looks delicious right? Click the picture to see it full size, so that you can be assured that, yes, there is Burger King in the Middle East. Lots of Burger Kings for that matter.

Missing everyone back home - Will keep you all posted as things move along. Oni, if you’re reading this, we’re going to change the world man! Let me know how things are going in New York.

So Bernard Madoff has admitted that the Financial Services and Management division of his company is essentially an enormous Ponzi Scheme

FoxNews reports that,

Many charities have been devastated by Madoff’s unparalleled investment failure, which paid off false returns to investors and went unnoticed by many observers for more than a decade. Billionaire Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties and owner of the New York Daily News, told FOX News that his charitable trust lost $30 million because of Madoff’s mishandling.

In the context of reality, however, I’m curious how this particular scheme of Madoff’s differs in any real way from the Wall Street of the last 15 years.

Wikipedia gives a pretty good example of a Ponzi Scheme:

Suppose an advertisement is placed promising extraordinary returns on an investment—for example 20% for a 30 day contract. The golden key is to bamboozle ordinary people who have no in-depth knowledge of finance or financial terms. High flown terms that sound impressive but are essentially meaningless will be used to dazzle investors. Terms such as “global currency arbitrage”, “hedge futures trading”, “high-yield investment programs”, “offshore investment”. Taking advantage of the lack of investor financial sophistication, the promoter will then proceed to sell them a stake in his pot of gold.

With no proven track record for the investors, only a few investors are tempted, usually for smaller sums. Sure enough, 30 days later the investor receives the original capital plus the 20% return. At this point, the investor will have more incentive to put in additional money and, as word begins to spread, other investors grab the “opportunity” to participate. More and more people invest, and see their investments return the promised large returns.

The reality of the scheme is that the “return” to the initial investors is being paid out of the new, incoming investment money, not out of profits. No “global currency arbitrage”, “hedge futures trading” or “high yield investment program” is actually taking place. Instead, when investor D puts in money, that money becomes available to pay out “profits” to investors A, B, and C. When investors X, Y, and Z put in money, that money is available to pay “profits” to investors A through W.

One reason that the scheme initially works so well is that early investors—those who actually got paid the large returns—quite commonly reinvest their money in the scheme (it does, after all, pay out much better than any alternative investment). Thus those running the scheme do not actually have to pay out very much (net)—they simply have to send statements to investors that show how much the investors have earned by keeping the money in what looks like a great place to get a high return. They also try to minimize withdrawals by offering new plans to investors, often where money is frozen for a longer period of time, for example 50% return per month for one year. They then get new cash flows as investors are told they could not transfer money from the first plan to the second.

The catch is that at some point one of three things will happen:

1. The promoters will vanish, taking all the investment money (less payouts) with them;
2. problems paying out the promised returns. When the promoters start having problems, the word spreads and more people start asking for their money, similar to a bank run; The scheme will collapse under its own weight, as investment slows and the promoters start having
3. The scheme is exposed, because when legal authorities begin examining accounting records of the so-called enterprise they find that many of the “assets” that should exist do not.

Bernard Madoff, indicted by the SEC for securities fraud, bragging to Congress about profits

Pretty nifty right? Well the question in my mind is, when the vast majority of Wall Streets profits are hedged essentially on the belief that land and property values will continue to increase forever, the belief itself hedged largely on suspension of disbelief and on charismatic individuals, what is the real difference between this and a Ponzi scheme?

Consider Wikipedia’s definition of a “Bubble”:

A bubble relies on suspension of disbelief and an expectation of large profits, but it is not the same as a Ponzi scheme. A bubble involves ever-rising (and unsustainable) prices in an open market (be that shares of a stock, housing prices, the price of tulip bulbs, or anything else). As long as buyers are willing to pay ever-increasing prices, sellers can get out with a profit. And there doesn’t need to be a schemer behind a bubble. (In fact, a bubble can arise without any fraud at all - for example, housing prices in a local market that rise sharply but eventually drop sharply because of overbuilding.) Bubbles are often said to be based on “greater fool” theory. Although, according to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, bubbles are caused by expanding the money supply beyond what genuine capital investment supports, and in this case would qualify as a Ponzi scheme, with expanded credit taking the place of an expanded pool of investors.

If this is true, when the modern financial market and its relationships to speculative real estate lending, both at prime and sub-prime rates, is taken into account, one has to wonder about the true complicity in this most recent scandal on Madoff’s part, and the entire sub-prime lending crises itself. Because in my mind, whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry about a bubble is incorrect about whether the financial markets in the past 15 years have become anything but a vast Ponzi Scheme - one far bigger than Madoff’s triffel $50 Billion, but instead involving trillions of dollars that have woven their way around the entirety of the American capitalist model, and we have all been taken for a ride.

Bernard Madoff might be the “bad guy” and everyone else he did business with “poor stooges,” but in age of far-too-cheap credit, a Federal Bank with a policy that has stealthily increased the money supply by leaps and bounds for far too long, and the essential Americanization of global financial markets that have led to exposure throughout the world, I seriously wonder: Just who is the Ponzi, who is the stooge, and what in the world are we going to do next?

Thanks for destroying capitalism jerks.

Other than that, there’s isn’t too much to report - I’m looking forward to seeing Nick’s mom on the 26th when she comes to visit after Christmas, I’m looking forward to inevitably getting paid for my work at the Daily Star, and I’m looking forward to six or so months of hard work to radically redirect the Daily Star’s position as an international provider of news about Lebanon and the Levant and Middle Eastern regions.

My best to all back home - I’m missing you a lot as Christmas comes closer… Take care!