A Little Of The Old In And Out



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In: Tyler Perry. Perry's "A Family That Prey's" populated entirely by not-quite A-Listcharacter actors was only slightly edged out in this weekend's box office receipts by the star-heavy Coen Brothers film "Burn After Reading." Musto described Preys as "like an extended Knots Landing via BET, but with lots of Perry's customary life-loving."

That's a particularly impressive box office feat considering Burn After Reading starred A-Listers George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Also: Did you know that more African-Americans watched Tyler Perry's House of Payne than watched Monday Night football? From TargetMarketNews: "In their first head-to-head match-up of the season, Tyler Perry's House of Payne overtakes ESPN's Monday Night Football to take the week's No.1 spot on the Top 25 most popular cable shows. The sitcom also took the third, fourth and fifth spots. 'Payne' delivered the most watched network of the week title to TBS, thanks to its 6.9 million viewers. VH1 was second with 2.8 million, followed by BET which claimed 2.6 million. The total number of viewers for the Top 25, according to Nielsen, dropped by three percent, when compared to the previous week, to 23.4 million." Bet the mainstream media won't report on that.



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Out: Unfettered Free Market Capitalism. At Empire's End, we appear to be witnessing the the disintegration -- at least for a generation -- of free-market capitalism as a muscular policy-influencing ideology. Globally, economic nationalism is on the rise and capitalism is in retreat. Both Presidential tickets are racing to appear more anti-economic establishment. Don't just take The Corsair's word for it. From Mark Gilbert of the capitalism-friendly Bloomberg News:

"The past year has been a bit like watching the Great Crash of 1929 in real time. Financial firms have now written off $516 billion, according to Bloomberg figures. Say it fast, and the number doesn't seem so scary. Slowly chanting 'more than half a trillion dollars' sounds a whole lot worse.

"Most of those hits came in the derivatives arena. AIG revealed last year that it had $64 billion at risk in contracts representing AAA rated CDO portions, known as 'super senior' debt. That stuff turned out to be not quite so super after all; the insurance company has posted losses of $18.5 billion over the past three quarters after its financial-products trading division generated about $25 billion of writedowns.

"It turns out that the alphabet soup cooked up by the derivatives chefs -- boil some CDOs, toss in a dash of ABS and a soupcon of CDS, season with CPDOs and serve with a garnish of SIVs -- was sufficiently toxic to poison the entire financial system. Capitalism itself is looking very, very sickly."