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The creek continues to drop – notice the narrower channel and higher exposure of rocks on the east (viewer’s right and stream’s right) bank.
The descriptive terms, 'right bank' and 'left bank', always apply from the perspective of looking downstream, in the direction the current is going.
La Rive Gauche de La Seine (the left bank of the Seine – but it sounds so much more exotic and interesting in French) is known for fostering artists, philosophers, playwrights, poets, and expatriates. It reminds of the 1920’s, of Pablo Picasso, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Henri Matisse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was a place for Bohemians and still retains the cachet. La Rive Droit, the right bank, developed a reputation for elegance, for glamour, for wealth and other than sight-seeing probably would attract me less than the left bank where I ever lucky enough to visit Paris.
The mention of Paris brings to mind a trial which took place in October 1927. The defendant, Shalom Schwartz bard may be a distant cousin of mine. My cousin Leonard told me that his, Leonard’s, father claimed that the relationship existed. One letter difference in the last name, Schwartzbard or Schwartzburd, is really not a significant difference when one considers that many Jews in the Pale were just acquiring last names and that the translation from Yiddish to other languages could have been hampered by a lack of vowels in use. The tale is interesting. It deals with pogroms, with revolution in multiple countries, with anti-Semitism in the Pale, in Eastern Europe, and in France. It deals with assassination and with high profile trials. Good places to begin are linked below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholom_Schwartzbard#The_trial
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2009/04/ever-heard-of-shalom-schwartzbard.html
I hope that my cousin Leonard is correct. I’d be happy to be able to verify familial ties with Sholom Schwartzbard.
Bad banks can be undercut. They can be unstable, too porous, and too slick to climb. They can be choked with weeds, with willows or alder. They can vanish under your feet as you try to climb them. Bad banks are dangerous. They can kill you before you know it is happening.
Bad banks, les banques du mauvais, are a problem not limited to hydrology, to flow mechanics, to creeks and rivers.
Banks, the ones we trust with our money can become killers, too. Today, the rivers and streams of our lives have become riddled with bad banks and financial houses. We’re all in danger of things sliding out from beneath our feet before we know it is happening.
The deregulation of the American financial industry, the long term goal of the GOP’s financial base, came within a hair’s breadth of collapsing the world’s economy. The Reagan – greed is good – policies were continued under Bush II. From a balanced budget with a surplus at the end of the Clinton years, Bush II and Cheney spent more than any other administration and ran up the biggest deficit in history. Two wars, no-bid sweetheart deals for Halliburton, Black Water, energy policies formulated in secret meetings with oil company executives, and continued deregulation of banks and financial houses coupled with immense tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and the encouragement of off shoring and outsourcing every possible job; have led the nation to unemployment greater than 10% of the workforce, ever increasing numbers of bankruptcies due to loss of jobs, homes, healthcare, and savings. The actual number of unemployed citizens exceeds 10% but is not calculatable because there is no way to track how many people have exhausted all unemployment benefits and are no longer recorded as unemployed.
The Bush administration encouraged and allowed the financial industry to discard nearly every regulation put into effect by the Roosevelt administration to prevent financial houses and banks from engaging, ever again, in practices that brought about the Great Depression. The result is now known as the “Great Recession.” Given the number of people who have lost homes, jobs, savings, and all hope of recovery since December 2007, only the rapid infusion of billions of dollars into insolvent financial houses and banks prevented this becoming the “Reagan- Bush not-so-great depression.” We’ve all been subjected to 20 years of trickle down economic policy. What finally trickled down is not gold.
The Bush administration was caught completely off guard as their vaunted “free market” collapsed around them. They bailed out banks and insurance companies using tax payer funds, sky-rocketing the national debt; but laid neither constraints nor restraints upon those firms receiving bail-outs. Those corporations then paid out billions of dollars in bonuses to the very executives that put them into near collapse. While they were rewarded, by the tax payers, millions of citizens lost every bit of their savings, their future, and their retirement funds. In less civilized times those executives would have been lynched, faced the Guillotine, been thrown to the mob. While I understand the need for rule of law in any nation that hopes to remain a nation, I can easily understand the rage that must have driven the mob in the French Revolution. I can understand how easy it would be to haul the men who essentially looted the national treasury into the streets and to let the mob render them limb from limb. I can picture myself taking my place in the firing squad that would deal with the CEOs in question, or tripping the lever to open the gallows floor beneath them. The men who did this, the Reagan-Bush free-marketers, the irresponsible CEOs, the regulators who failed to apply what few regulations were left in place to stop such practices, are guilty of destroying the lives of millions. But even worse, they have no remorse for their part in such destruction. They are like the anti-Semitic Ukranian Petlura. They have destroyed the lives of people as surely as if they had initiated a pogrom; merely because they can.
They’ve managed to remain on the job, they’ve scammed more taxpayer money for their companies, and they are not using it as intended, to help the middle class recover. They are hoarding it for their companies, starting the whole risky trading practice all over again, and the bastards are already getting ready to pay out billions of dollars in yearend bonuses to the same people who wrecked the global economy this time last year.
It is time to publish their names, phone numbers, cell numbers, fax numbers, addresses, and any other data that might help the mob locate them. They should be hounded from their jobs, without separation pay, without bonuses, their credit should be revoked, bank accounts – particularly the big off-shore one – seized, they should not be able to sleep at night for the din of people standing outside their homes, calling them the names they’ve earned for their selves. The penalties they deserve should make prison look desirable.
The Obama administration immediately had to dump more billions into these firms to cover their debts. The question of bonuses was raised last February, with no action from the White House or Congress. The regulations that were removed by Reagan’s and Bush’s administrations need to be put back into effect immediately. We cannot tolerate financial piracy of this magnitude. The pay and bonus policy of executives vs. that of employees and line workers needs to be studied and corrected. No corporation executive is worth that much money, particularly for destroying the company. The administration needs to find its balls and stop these thieves and pirates, today, now! If they don’t this nation may not survive long enough to vote them out of office in 2012.
Shall we consider again, who is virtuous and what constitutes virtue?
Do we need another Sholom Schwartzbard, today?
If one should appear, would he be acquitted?
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