SEC Loosens Accounting Rule Banks Blame for Crisis

The standard, also known as "mark to market," has led portfolios to plunge in recent months as banks affixed fire sale prices to their assets, a move that sometimes required them to raise still more capital to meet regulatory requirements. The measure also led to clashes between corporate executives and independent auditors over how low the markdowns should be forced to dip. Read more…

Long-troubled Douglass High could lose its identity

Many Douglass supporters accept that some high schools should move to more state-of-the-art buildings, but they argue the disappearance of Douglass' program altogether would mark the loss of an institution that has stood as a symbol of community resilience in the 9th Ward for decades.

Nantrell Malveo, a 2008 graduate, compared her experience at Douglass favorably to her time at a Jefferson Parish school generally considered to be better.

"I learned more at the run-down school (Douglass) because I could relate to it, and it taught me to fight for what mattered," Malveo said. Read more…

I went to the Mall yesterday and bought a copy of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It only took my an entire afternoon via public transportation, since, of course, buses run every hour, I suppose not to impede the tens of thousands of cars using the public roads. And the mall 1. doesn't even have any fucking sidewalks!

Anyhow, the book is wonderful, illuminating, terrifying. You should--must--go buy it and read it immediately if you want us all to be able to start thinking strategically instead of reacting to each shock as it comes, and the next one is coming; that panting sound you hear in the dark is the wingers, waiting for it. (Despite being long, and heavily footnoted--footnotes are anti-authoritarian, since they enable you to check sources--the book is quite readable. It is not an academic work, though it is analytical). Shock Doctrine integrates all the economic and political shards of my own life since I came of age; and also integrates and vindicates many of the themes and memes and sense-making tools that we've been home-brewing in the blogosphere in the years since Bush seized power.

So what I'm going to do, over the next several days--or more than several, the book is long--is read TSD from front to back, and fair-use quote and annotate passages that I find especially suggestive, in a series of posts. (In the beginning, everything seemed suggestive. Even from the first few pages, the sense I had of conceptual doors opening--that I could finally take a mental walk-through of the ground plan for the Green Zone I know I've been trapped in--was exhilirating. Even if many of the walls are of cold stone, many of the windows are barred and high up, many of the corners are dark, and even though the sound of screaming comes from behind some of the closed doors.* (TSD's impact is such that it makes everything else look like The Process Dodge.)

That said, pages 4-6: Read more…