And, probably, a very strange thing going on with Dame Hilda – the greatest of English Divas.

You can find her greatness here.

Julia Preston writes in the New Duranty:

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”...

In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported....

I'm at a bit of a loss to figure out why this is a story. Does anyone think if they smuggled themselves into Guatamala illegally and then were caught with forged identity papers that the Guatamalan government would give you a lawyer and a translator, a speedy trial, a mere five months in a decent prison where you were well-fed, and then pay to send you all the way back to America?  And what about American citizens committing identity fraud? More than five months? And what if you do something less serious, like fudge on your income to the IRS?  The U.S. government will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

What exactly is so terrible about the working of American justice in this case?

Many's the time I've been gagging for a double entendre and nobody's given me one. Today, at last, Jim Holt probes deep - and he goes down well. Mind you , the competition's not exactly stiff. From the LA Times:

There are, of course, those who are so innocent of improper impulses as to be beyond the reach of lewd humor. A while back, shortly after Bill Clinton went on a successful diet, someone cracked, "Clinton's lost so much weight, now he can see his intern." This struck me as a pretty good joke, so I repeated it to several of my rock-ribbed Republican friends, thinking that they would enjoy a little mockery of the former president. But the joke left them nonplused. "I don't get it," was the universal reaction. To the pure, all things are pure.

And to those of you who find the Clinton joke offensive: Honi soit qui mal y pense (the motto of the Order of the Garter -- which here might be rendered "Shame on you if you know enough to take offense.")

Sexual humor does not so much corrupt us as remind us that we are already corrupted. Only in modern times has it been feared. The sole surviving joke book we have from the Greek and Roman world, the Philogelos, or "Laughter-Lover," abounds with sex jokes. Probably put together in the 4th or 5th century, the volume contains 264 numbered jokes, the most haunting of which is surely No. 114, about a resident of Abdera, a Greek town whose citizens were renowned for their foolishness. "Seeing a eunuch, an Abderite asked him how many children he had. The eunuch replied that he had none, because he lacked the means of reproduction. Retorted the Abderite... " The rest is missing from the surviving text, which goes to show the strange potency of unheard punch lines.

[...]

The other time-honored view of humor has a rather sweeter flavor, and a more intellectual one. It is the "incongruity theory," versions of which were held by Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, which says that we laugh when the decorous suddenly dissolves into the absurd. "Do you believe in clubs for small children?" W.C. Fields was once asked. "Only when kindness fails," he replied.

[...]

But take this joke, reputedly a favorite of George H.W. Bush: "How do you titillate an ocelot? You oscillate its tits a lot." Ostensibly, it falls into the category of raunch, with its use of the not-ready-for-prime-time word for breasts and its winking allusion to bestiality. But it is essentially sheer nonsense, a sonic jeu d'esprit. (Compare: "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.")

Such "innocent" jokes, as Freud called them, serve to overcome the adult inhibition against play. Even the primmest of dowagers will emit a reluctant chuckle.

What makes sexual humor funny is precisely the sort of playful incongruity that redeems it from pure lewdness. The dirty joke has been evolving over the centuries, and I like to think that this is a story of progress, with nastiness and filth giving way to the intellectual delight in the absurd.

Q: What's brown and sticky?

A: A stick

I really like that joke, although it is hardly sophisticated. Many a true word is spoken in simple jest - "sticky" used to mean "like a stick", and we didn't really have a satisfactory word for sticky before the eighteenth century. (Stick as a verb has been around since the thirteenth century.) Stick around and read this from Dot Wordsworth. But don't get the wrong end:

Longfellow, in the middle of writing ‘Hiawatha’, complained to his diary one hot day of ‘Chamber-maids chattering about — children crying — and everything sticky except postage stamps, which having stuck all together like a swarm of bees, refuse further duty.’ It’s funny how Longfellow wrote better informally than when he tried. Anyway, stickiness has, my daughter tells me, become a virtue in business circles. It is a desirable quality for websites, from which so many strive to squeeze money. Stickiness glues users to your site and makes them return to it, like flies to syrup.

‘Determining the sticky quotient of your website requires server log analysis,’ says some site not unconnected with server-log analysts. ‘These stats can tell you how long each visitor stayed at your site, how often they return and what drew their attention.’

I’m not sure how we managed before the word sticky came into use. In the 16th century they had to make do with words such as glutinous or gluish (a word used in the 14th century for the pitch on the infant Moses’ little ark of bulrushes). The word sticky was used first to mean ‘like a stick’. Only in the 18th century did it find employment in the adhesive sense.

The word stickiness has recently been recruited for scientific use, describing forces that keep atoms together, as if this metaphor explained anything. There is even a tiny particle called a gluon, postulated in 1971 and defined by a series of terms probably unknown to us innocent bystanders: ‘Any of a group of massless bosons possessing colour that are postulated as carriers of the colour force that binds quarks together in a hadron.’

Long may it thrive. To most of us, a far more useful semi-adhesive item is called by some a sticky or, by those who like using proprietary names, a Post-it note. Both words were harvested in 2003 for draft entries for the OED.

Since 1969 Pritt has been sold, being marketed in Britain as ‘the non-sticky sticky stuff’. Similarly non-sticky is Blu Tack, dating from the 1970s, with a version made by another manufacturer going under the name Sticky Tack. A generation was in search of not very sticky stickiness, but now it appears that the bird-lime merchants of the internet will stick at nothing to maximise their stickiness.

Another good stick joke was made by James Joyce's father about his son's future wife, Nora Barnacle: "She'll stick to him." And let's not forget George Formby, whose little stick was good enough to eat:

With my little stick of Blackpool Rock, along the promenade I stroll.
It may be sticky but I never complain, it's nice to have a nibble at it now and again
Every day wherever I stray the kids all round me flock.

Honi soit qui mal y ponce.

I've got all their albums. I've seen Bjorn Again four times. I've seen Muriel's Wedding twice. I tried to get tickets for Mamma Mia, the musical, but it's booked up for the next thirty years. Tonight, I am delighted to be going to see Mamma Mia, the film. I like Abba, not in an ironic way, but really. Deborah Ross of The Spectator likes Abba too, and it's just as well, as Mamma Mia is not the film for people who don't like Abba:

Mamma Mia has to be the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Or is it off? When you get to my age, it’s such a struggle to remember. Either way, though, if you are now expecting this review to be subtly and cleverly interweaved with punning ABBA song titles then you can just forget it. My, my, how can I resist it? Easily, my dears; easily. Or, as Bubbles says, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.’ Well, it just goes to show; you can live with someone for years and years and years and still not know everything about them.

Anyway, this is the film adaptation of the stage musical, which has already been seen by 30 million people in 160 cities across the world and proves what I have said all along or, if you are going to quibble, then at least since I was three: take those supremely catchy ABBA hits, construct the loosest of loose narratives around them, shake it all up with lashings of enthusiasm and just the right amount of cheesy, cheeky self-awareness and voilà! There’s your global smash. I do wish people would listen to me. It is very irritating, you know. And we could all have made a truckload of ‘Money, Money, Money’, which is always handy, it being a rich man’s world. (Sorry; won’t happen again.)

This loosest of loose narratives concerns Donna (Lady Meryl of Streep), who runs a small hotel on a small Greek island and has a daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who is 20, about to get married, and wants her father to walk her down the aisle. Trouble is, who is her father? She’s never been told. So she reads her mother’s diary from that time and secretly invites the three men who, 20 years earlier, each enjoyed a ‘romantic encounter’ with her. I can see why the filmmakers opted for Mamma Mia as a title but, come on, it could just have easily been: Mamma Mia, What a Slag! (That said, you can tell Donna hasn’t had any for a while. She wears dungarees.)

[J]joyful abandon is the thing, I think, and the key. Mamma Mia (What a Slag, Pre-Dungarees!) has been made with the most delicious, joyful abandon and all it asks is that you joyfully and deliciously abandon yourself to it and don’t make too many observations along the lines of: how clever of Sophie to know the exact addresses of her three possible dads after all these years! You have to buy into its spirit and, oh, the joy of the big numbers, like ‘Dancing Queen’, when the whole island ends up on the beach, including the little old Greek ladies, or Julie Walter’s pursuit of Stellan Skarsgård, pleading with him to ‘Take A Chance On Me’. Lovely. Such fun. In fact, Julie Walters performs as if she never knew there was so much fun to be had (with clothes on or off; I am still struggling to remember).

OK, it’s a busy film, perhaps too busy, and there is a lot of hugging, perhaps too much hugging, and Sophie is quite wet, but it’s also a beautifully realised piece of cinema which has no agenda beyond pure, full-on, toe-tapping entertainment. Go and enjoy, although not after midnight, should you fear missing out on a gentlemen caller. (Do you fear that, Bubbles? ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do.’)

Who's the father is a staple of soap operas. Is it by chance that the Aramaic word for father is Abba? I think I'll take a chance. Take a chance on me.

By the way, Mamma Mia contains an unseen man from Liverpool. "Where are you?" asks his mother. "Mam, I'm 'ere." The Liverpuddlian is a descendant of the unseen Irishman in Hamlet: "Now might I do it pat..."

"I don't get it."

Of course they got it. They merely wanted to pretend they didn't get it, as if the unseemly business with the plump fellatrix was about matters that they simply did not know about, or were sufficiently unfamiliar with, so as not to quite get, right away, the joke. Lewinsky Stooped To Conquer; these possibly made-up "rock-ribbed Republican friends"  were stooping -- and pretending to be stupid -- to conquer any suspicions of their own favorite forms of recreation, in another way.

Hollywood rumor has it that there is to be a remake of "Born Yesterday" with a man taking the role once played by Judy Holliday. Someone should let Mr. Holt know when VARIETY -- it's the spice of my life -- announces casting calls.

It's raining. Is it going to get better? Ask the Two Ronnies:

And now for the weather forecast. It will be cool in Goole, dry in Rye, choking in Woking, and if you're going to Lissingdown, take an umbrella.

Lissingdown it is. Bugger.

Mark LeVine, who, as Hugh Fitzgerald has pointed out, stands rather high in his own opinion, has a book out, Heavy Metal Islam. Here is an excerpt from NPR:

The first time I heard the words "heavy metal" and "Islam" in the same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5:00 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fes, Morocco in 2002. I was at the bar of the five-star Palais Jamai Hotel with a group of friends having a drink—and only one drink, considering they were about twenty-five dollars apiece—to celebrate a birthday. Out of nowhere the person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen not long before we met, in the city of Rabat.

"There are Muslim punks? In Morocco?" I asked him.

The idea of a young Moroccan with a mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink.

"Of course," he replied. "And the metal scene here is good too." That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying, traveling, and living in it. If there could be such a thing as a Heavy Metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001.

I shouldn't have been surprised at the notion of Muslim metalheads or punkers. Muslim history is full of characters and movements that seemed far out of the mainstream in their day, but that nevertheless helped bring about farreaching changes in their societies. As I nursed my drink, I contemplated the various musical, cultural, and political permutations that could be produced by combining Islam and hard rock. I began to wonder: What could Muslim metal artists and their fans teach us about the state of Islam today?...

Mark LeVine should tell us how many of these Goth and spiked-hair swell fellows he met, in his all-expenses-paid five years of academic research on the wilder shores of Muslim life – he actually met. Do Muslim cities and towns, from Rabat to Ramallah, from Ramallah to Rawalpindi, simply teem with these fellows, with their electric gibsons and their defiantly-haram tattoos, not to mention those de rigueur piercings of lips, nipples and parts south, including the presumably painful hafada (the varieties of ways that people willingly inflict physical but apparently fashionable pain on themselves never ceases to amaze).

Yes, I await a scholarly article by Mark LeVine on how piercings, and tattoos, of which he no doubt found some evidence in those Muslim lands through which, over five years, he dutifully traveled in the interests of his disinterested “scholarship,” demonstrate the loosening-up, the changing, of Muslims and hence, it doth follow as the night the day, of Islam. A heavy-metal band over here, in Morocco, and a hidden tattoo parlor over here, in Ramallah, and a piercings studio in a dusty alley in Karachi, all adds up to this: we can stop worrying about Islam, and learn to love Jihad. It’s nothing at all. They’re just like us. So true. And of course, “us” are all like… well, like Mark LeVine. Please give me a minute, do, to adjust my scrotum ring, before continuing to post. Yes, and let me turn up even higher the heavy-metal music I love to play. And that’s what makes the whole world kin in the worldview of Mark LeVine: the heavy-metal, the tattoos, the piercings.

And just think. Californian taxpayers, supporting the University of California system, paid for all that heavy-metalling backpacking through the lands of the Muslims. Five years of it, on and off. The next time you want to suggest cuts in the California state budget, you could do worse than to start with the likes of Mark LeVine, and his “research project, “ and other, similarly idiotic endeavors, money lavished on it when half the members of the incoming freshmen class can’t read or write. We now know about Mark LeVine. Are there others like him, or is he sui generis, to a fault?

And when, having completed his “research,”  LeVine shows up on NPR to tell a waiting nation about the fact that he found here and there some heavy-metallers in Morocco, or Pakistan, and that this is all very significant, he reminds one of people who only outwardly appear to be of a different type, because they wear suits and ties, and know nothing about heavy-metal music, and their manner smacks of Lawrence Welk, or possibly the Muzak that chloroforms you in the elevators of tall and powerful office buildings,.

Yes, Mark LeVine is just a variant cultivar of the same species, one that appears to grow particularly well in sunny California, and the species consists of all those who keep being fooled, who practically fool themselves, about Islam, or the Arabs, or Saudi Arabia, or the “Palestinians.”

Think of how many American officials, striding down their corridors of power – this way the banana peels, gentlemen! – have allowed themselves to be fooled -- by the agents of Saudi Arabia. Yes, so many American officials, including National Security Advisers, and Secretaries of State -- see James Baker, see Colin Powell -- have been led to believe or allowed themselves to pretend to believe, that the "real" Saudi Arabia is not that of the grim clerics, or of the hate-filled textbooks, or the mutawwa beating men and women with sticks for the slightest infraction, or of the slavery in which so many foreign workers are essentially held, or of the fantastic corruption by a thieving family, or of the unbelievable laziness of the Saudi Arabs, or of the primitive nature of the country, that continues because of the loyalty of the Al Saud, or rather the buying-off of clerical opposition, by the Al Saud, through their unwavering support for the most retrograde version of an already retrograde Total Belief-System.

No,  for these officials, many of whom have received little gifts from the Saudis, ranging from the Jaguar given to the wife of the "incorruptible" Colin Powell by Prince Bandar, to the many millions of dollars lavished by the Saudis on James Baker directly and indirectly (including donations to his modestly-named "James Baker Institute" at Rice University, and the millions earned by Baker & Botts for Saudi-connected legal business, the "true" Saudi Arabia was for decades to be found in those port-and-cigars gatherings that Prince Bandar offered, where they could all be worldly men together, and Bandar, with a forgiving if pained expression on his face, could explain that "of course my country is corrupt. And your country is corrupt. But it is always a question of degree. We are not really that corrupt. We are doing the best we can, to modernize our country. We are doing the best we can to be your true friends, and to keep the price of oil moderate." Und so weiter.

Yes, under the heavy-metal facade, Mark LeVine is just one more dreary corridors-of power Republican on the make, or on the take. (In this particular case, it hardly matters which). They allowed themselves to believe that the siren songs of Prince Bandar offered the  truth about the "real" Saudi Arabia. And Mark LeVine believes that the existence of a a handful of heavy-metal bands, in Morocco or Pakistan, with the musicians possibly sporting or hiding their tattoos (which are haram), and even possible piercings, mean something, even mean a lot. 

But he’s the one who’s a musician in heavy-metal bands himself, a “heavy-metal musician.” An artist. And he’s the one who can’t sit still long enough to read those big heavy tomes about Islam. And he’s the one who has instead been gallivanting about, spending his time gaily listening to, or even taking part sessions of these unrepresentative representatives of Islam, or what he takes to be a conceivable Islam, these heavy-metallists. I can just imagine the sounds he and his Muslim brothers must have produced. My dear – the noise, the people!

And now he’s had the mad idea to actually endow all of his self-indulgence and silliness with portentous meaning, a Meaning For All Of Us Who Wish To Avoid “a clash of civilizations.”  

God, he’s dumb, isn’t he?

More than a year ago, US soldiers Byron Fouty, Alex Jimenez, and Joseph Anzack Jr. were kidnapped in southern Baghdad.  Anzack's body was found 11 days later floating in the Euphrates.  This week, the other two bodies were found.  Their identities will be confirmed by dental records.  Those are the basic facts;  the rest of the article personalizes the men with interviews with their bereaved families.

This is not the first time that Coalition soldiers have been taken prisoner and later found murdered.

There was the similar case, also in southern Baghdad, of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas L. Tucker, who were kidnapped in June 2006.  Their bodies were found a week later, mutilated beyond recognition and booby-trapped with IED's.

Two U.S. contractors suffered a similar fate.  Ronald Withrow was kidnapped Jan. 5, 2007;  John Roy Young was kidnapped Nov. 16, 2006.  Their bodies were found in March 2008.

In these cases and all the others, the military and the media decline to describe how the men died, or in what condition the bodies were found.  Out of a misplaced sense of sensitivity to the survivors, the story of what these men endured is whitewashed and sanitized.

But I believe another motivation is at play.  If we knew how our soldiers are treated as POW's, and how fellow-Iraqi-citizens (who are the majority of the kidnap victims) are treated, it would make it that much harder to maintain the lie that "we are all the same", "all people share the same universal values".  It would make it that much harder to drum up empathy for "our good friends and allies" in Iraq.  It would make it that much harder to claim that these Islamic wars are independent cases of nationalistic fervor, and not a fundamental clash of cultures that share few, if any, common values. 

Any lingering naivety about how the kidnap victims are treated can be cleared up here (Warning: these are not images of prisoners with panties on their heads, nor images of holy, holy Qur'ans being "mishandled" by kufirs, nor images of fat and healthy prisoners being served non-strictly-halal meals.):

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0524072torture1.html

Any question of how a society can come to accept this sort of treatment of prisoners need look no further than the behavior of the Perfect Man for All Time, Allah's Prophet Mohammad, in the ahadith:

Ishaq:464 "The Jews were made to come down, and Allah's Messenger imprisoned them. Then the Prophet went out into the marketplace of Medina, and he had trenches dug in it. He sent for the Jewish men and had them beheaded in those trenches. They were brought out to him in batches. They numbered 800 to 900 boys and men."

 

Tabari VIII:96 "A raiding party led by Zayd set out against Umm in Ramadan. During it, Umm suffered a cruel death. Zyad tied her legs with rope and then tied her between two camels until they split her in two. She was a very old woman. Then they brought Umm's daughter and Abdallah to the Messenger. Umm's daughter belonged to Salamah who had captured her. Muhammad asked Salamah for her, and Salamah gave her to him."

 

Tabari VIII:122/Ishaq:515 "The Prophet gave orders concerning Kinanah to Zubayr, saying, 'Torture him until you root out and extract what he has. So Zubayr kindled a fire on Kinanah's chest, twirling it with his firestick until Kinanah was near death. Then the Messenger gave him to Maslamah, who beheaded him."

In 1985, Navy Diver Robert Stethem was, in the banal nomenclature of modern jihad reportage, "shot and killed".  Here is an unexpurgated description of his death, and of the heroism he displayed in his final hours: 

http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/twa-flight-847/

Soldiers die in war.  Young men (and women) are struck down in their prime.  That is horrifying enough.  But that's not what has happened in these cases.  These are not battlefield deaths.  That doesn't come close to describing what happened in these cases, or who or what we're up against.

Last month we posted articles on the emergence of Congressional concerns about the speculation in energy futures and derivative markets, driven through several ‘loopholes’ and the lassitude of federal commodity trading regulators.  Senator Lieberman, as we pointed out in those New English Review and The Iconoclast  articles, had  conducted  substantive hearings on what lay behind the ‘oil bubble’, as we labeled it.

Today on NYMEX oil futures contracts spiked to a record $147.00 a barrel, driven by ‘war risk’ premiums as a result of Iranian ‘war games’,  alleged Israel attack scenarios  and thugs disrupting production in the important  Gulf of  Niger.  Yesterday, Senators Lieberman, Collins and Cantwell introduced a new bill to address adverse speculation: S 3248, the Commodity Speculation Reform Act of 2008.  The news release held out this hope:

Senator Lieberman believes the legislation will eliminate the excessive speculation in commodity markets that is contributing to food and energy price inflation, and at the same time, will not put U.S. regulated exchanges at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the OTC markets or foreign boards of trade.  Moreover, the bill ensures that commodity markets will continue to provide adequate liquidity for commercial participants.

 In our original New English Review article we noted the following:

Senator Lieberman’s HSGAC hearing on oil and commodity future speculation identified the ‘swaps loophole’ as matters to be addressed. Masters in his testimony at the Senate Committee hearings recommended that Congress move to close the swaps loophole "which speculators use to roll over monthly future contracts, allowing them to 'effectively circumvent position limits.'"

The CFTC issued proposed rules in November, 2007 to address so-called excessive speculation as defined under 7 U.S.C. sec 6a.

Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery made on or subject to the rules of contract markets or derivatives transaction execution facilitates causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations of unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity.

Senator Lieberman’s Committee may hold hearing on this remaining loophole to gauge ideas and proposals for closing it. Some ideas as to how to address this are contained in the proposed Consumer First Energy Act of 2008 S. 2991, released on May 8^th. Title V – Market Speculation has two provisions that endeavor to limit use of overseas OTC exchanges such as the London International Exchange (ICE) and limit the speculation by increasing margin requirements. The following is an excerpt from the legislative history of the proposed measure:

The Consumer-First Energy Act of 2008 would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to limit the price impacts of excessive speculation by preventing traders of U.S. crude oil from routing their transactions through off-shore markets in order to evade speculation limits and also impose reporting requirements.

Additionally, the bill would require the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to substantially increase the margin requirement on crude oil future trades within 90 days to limit excessive speculation and protect consumers. The current margin requirement varies between five and seven percent which essentially means that a commodity trader can control $10 million worth of future oil contracts by only putting $500,000 to $700,000 down. 

In a follow up The Iconoclast blog post we cited what Senator Lieberman’s ‘thinking’ was as of mid-June.

Senator Lieberman has apparently reacted to the pain of his constituents and most Americans about the oil bubble. He announced additional hearings set for June 24^th on the subject of curbing manipulation and speculation of the oil and food commodity markets.  Of interest he called for the aggressive banning institutional investors from the commodity markets.

He also proposed ,“strengthening existing regulatory limits on the size of the stake that each speculative investor can hold in a given market, called speculative position limits”.

And he plans to propose barring investment banks from using the regulated futures markets to hedge speculative bets their clients are making in the vast unregulated global swaps market — what he called the swaps loophole.

So, let’s see what S3248, the Commodity Speculation Reform Act of 2008 does to prick the oil bubble. 

According to the Committee’s release, the measure would:

Create a seamless system of speculative position limits applied to energy-related futures and derivative contracts held by financial speculators encompassing over-the- counter and positions on foreign exchanges.

Apply position limits beyond those of legitimate hedging activities specifically those risks associated with OTC derivatives, swaps and structured debt;

Clarify amounts of position limits no greater than those necessary to maintain commodity market liquidity in bona-fide hedging activities;

Repeals the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) authority to set position limits on commodity exchanges;

Repeals CFTC authority to substitute so-called position accountability levels reporting for actual position limits;

Requires off shore futures exchanges to provide the CFTC daily with  comparable trading information; and

Authorizes new funding of the CFTC to carry out its expanded responsibilities under the bill.

As we noted in our original Oil Bubble article, the mammoth Farm Act of 2008 had effectively closed one of the more glaring loopholes, the so-called ‘Enron loophole’ that enabled highly speculative trading in the OTC markets that lead to the melt down of at least one hedge fund  in 2006, Amaranth.  S. 3248 would appear to address the swaps, speculative trading limits and reporting of OTC futures and derivative transactions in both US and overseas exchanges.  What appears to be ‘missing’ is the earlier suggestion of barring institutional investment in commodity index futures that had grown over 20 times from a base of $13 billion to over $260 billion in 2007.  The question remains as to whether the major investment banking firms will be effectively barred from using the swaps in the derivatives markets that benefitted financial speculators.

Assuming that S. 3248 becomes law in a form along the lines of this bill, let’s hope that the Oil Bubble is pricked by this measure and may be deflated to benefit all energy-related consumers.