Was Cassano "the Man Who Crashed the World"?

AIG. Was Joe Cassano of AIG “the man who crashed the world” as Michael Lewis proclaimed , and as other anti-capitalists such as Gretchen Morgenson alleged?

The always reliable Homan Jenkins says: apparently not.

The Google Octopus. In a way, you have to love this. The news today is that the Spanish socialist Joaquin Almunia, who is a member of the European Commission responsible for “competition,” has decided to take it upon himself to ask whether he believes Google is engaged in “anti-competitive conduct.”

But yesterday, Google’s “doodle” celebrated the 103rd birthday of Frida Kahlo

And who was Frida Kahlo? Well, here is a quotation from an article in the leftist Washington Monthly: “Kahlo's Communism--now treated as somehow sort of quaint--led her to embrace some unforgivable political positions. In 1936, Rivera, a dedicated Trotskyite, used his clout to petition the Mexican government to give Trotsky and his wife asylum after they were forced out of Norway. Rivera and Kahlo put up the Trotskys in Kahlo's family home, where Kahlo seduced the older man. (She painted a self-portrait dedicated to him that now hangs in Washington's NMWA.) After Trotsky was assassinated, however, Kahlo turned on her old lover with a vengeance, claiming in an interview that Trotsky was a coward and had stolen from her while he stayed in her house (which wasn't true). ‘He irritated me from the time that he arrived with his pretentiousness, his pedantry because he thought he was a big deal,’ she said. Rarely is this unflattering detail included in the condensed Kahlo story. Nor is the fact that Kahlo turned on Trotsky because she had become a devout Stalinist. Kahlo continued to worship Stalin even after it had become common knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, not to mention Trotsky himself. One of Kahlo's last paintings was called ‘Stalin and I,’ and her diary is full of her adolescent scribblings (‘Viva Stalin!’) about Stalin and her desire to meet him.” As they say, read the whole thing: “The Trouble with Frida Kahlo.”

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