All posts by James

About James

James Seidler is a writer living in Chicago. The editor for the now-defunct humor publication FLYMF, he has now decided to maintain his web presence and smart remarks through this blog.

UT Tower Massacre Remembered

Well Worth Reading

Our radio news director, Joe Roddy, went to Brackenridge Hospital and read the names off the first list of casualties. As soon as he finished, Paul Bolton, who was back in the newsroom, grabbed the microphone and said, “Joe, hold it.” Bolton was the very first television news anchor in Austin, a good friend of LBJ’s. He was a gruff, hard-boiled newsman, but you could hear that his voice was wavering. He said, “I think you have my grandson on there. Go over that list of names again, please.” Well, his grandson was Paul Sonntag. His full name, we later found out, was Paul Bolton Sonntag—his namesake. Joe read through the list again, and Bolton pretty much broke down in the newsroom.

It’s three years old, but The Morning News directed me to a heartbreaking Texas Monthly story recounting the University of Texas tower massacre. Titled “96 Minutes,” it collects observations from a number of sources, including those who were shot and lived, those who attempted to rescue others and those who admitted they were too scared to do much of anything.

Matt Taibbi Deflates Goldman Sachs

Politics

While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control.

“Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting standards that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took those guidelines and threw them in the trash.” Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.”

Matt Tabbi’s Rolling Stone article on Goldman-Sachs, “The Great American Bubble Machine (PDF),” is just as frustrating as advertised. The U.S. economy comes off as a big confidence game, rigged to the benefit of insiders and lacking any consequences for its momentous failures.

Instead of improving the situation, Obama seems to be further entrenching the status quo.