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Making that first entry in a blog is sort of like taking that first step into sexual deviancy. Once that zipper comes down, the label sticks forever.  Blogger. What a horrible word. It has such an awful, dirty, biological sound to it. The words it reminds me of are words like felch, belch, bilge, log, globes and rubber. It sounds like belching log-rubber. And now I am one. I feel sick.

I’ll get into why we here at Rollingstone.com decided to start this blog at some other time. Let’s just say that I’ll be making semi-regular updates to this page, and occasionally adding live or nearly-live commentary to things like debates and other events. This page will also contain links to web versions of all my print articles from Rolling Stone and provide contact info for anyone looking to reach or stalk me/my editors as the case may be.

I’ve been getting a lot of mail about my online chat Wednesday with National Review geek Byron York, which devolved into an unsurprisingly ugly argument about the Wall Street mess. Most of the mail was approving, but there were some who called bullshit. “You sound like a guy who studied up on the financial crisis CliffsNotes five minutes before the interview and then lorded it over the other guy like you actually know something,” was one reader’s comment. “But you don’t fool me.”

Well, duh. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I had the faintest idea of what a CDO or a CDS or an MBS was before a month or so ago. That’s the point, none of us did. But since the crisis started, we’ve all had to do a lot of reading. As a journalist you don’t have to be an expert – and if you’ve screwed up enough in life to end up in this field, you probably won’t be no matter how hard you try – but you have to at least know enough to have a halfway decent sense of who’s lying. That’s unless you’re a guy like Byron York of the National Review, whose job consists mainly of repeating the idiot talking points handed down to him from somewhere higher up in the food chain of the Republican Wally World.

The reason things got ugly with York is because in the middle of a discussion we were having on the campaign, he pulled out the latest Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity/Laura Ingraham propaganda line about the financial crisis, i.e. that the problem was rooted in the efforts of left-wing reformers dating back to the Carter administration to bring by government fiat the benefits of the “ownership society” to poor people and minorities. Humorously it took the Republican punditocracy a good long while to settle on this particular explanation for the crisis, and I honestly think the reason for that was that none of the ranking talking heads understood enough at first about the real reasons for the crisis to even come up with an informed lie.

In any event, I first saw this vile line of reasoning trotted out when Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe ran a piece at the end of last month, essentially arguing that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 forced so many private lenders to cough up mortgages to ill-qualified minority borrowers that the whole system ended up collapsing.

When I first heard this, I actually laughed – I figured that no one would be stupid enough to think that the entire system of international finance could be brought down by a bunch of individual defaults to low-value urban properties. Nothing could be more comic than the idea that this whole teeming galaxy of rich Ivy Leaguers and bespectacled European bankers and keen Japanese finance professionals could be so massively and credulously over-invested in urban black American homeowners that the whole world could be thrown off its axis by a sudden – and apparently wholly unexpected – failure of these low-income borrowers to make their payments. I mean, this stuff goes beyond preposterous. You’d have to spend weeks breathing straight out of a nitrous oxide tank in order to even begin to take an idea like this seriously.

But they plowed ahead with this line of attack, and why not? If your business is stoking the fears of nervous white people who are disinclined to spend more than thirty seconds wondering why their IRAs or 401Ks just lost 25% of their value, then this is exactly what you should do – find some arcane corner of the affirmative action universe that happens to intersect with banks and mortgages, and move all your chips onto that square. It makes sense, from a propaganda point of view.

The reason people like York get away with this stuff with regard to the financial crisis is because these assholes on Wall Street – like any tribe of arrogant, vernacularizing insiders in any profession – have intimidated people into thinking that what they do for living is so complicated and subtle that no ordinary person could ever hope to understand it.

This is horseshit. It’s almost exactly like, say, going to a race track. The first time you go and someone hands you a racing form, you feel like it might as well be written in ancient Greek. You see these wrinkly guys walking around with their forms all marked up in pen in the margins and you feel like you’ll never understand all those numbers on the page.

But after about an hour you realize that it’s just a bunch of people watching dogs run in a circle. That’s all it is. The track came up with all these different columns and complex wagers to make the underlying activity seem more interesting, but that doesn’t change what you’re watching. Wall Street is basically the same deal. It’s twenty square blocks of guys in ties finding increasingly fancy ways to argue about the value of the crap they spend all day selling back and forth to each other. They make it sound like rocket science, but in the end it’s still just dogs running in a circle.

The exactas and trifectas and superfectas of this particular mess at the racetrack are financial instruments like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and CDS (Credit Default Swaps). Massive trading in these two types of instruments, among others, were the key causes of this crisis. There are two basic bubble-causing concepts at work here and these are concepts that any person can understand: the first is selling worthless crap to people who think it’s gold and the other is betting with money you don’t have.

On the betting with money you don’t have front, the CDS is basically a form of insurance in which two idiots make promises to pay each other sums of money if some third totally unrelated person defaults on his debt.

Let’s say Aquaman takes out a million-dollar bond to open a gay strip club. You’re gay and you like superheroes so you think it’s a good idea – but your mother doesn’t, so you agree to pay your mother a million dollars in the event that Aquaman’s strip club fails, in exchange for her paying you, until that time, regular monthly payments of $10,000. All your family members agree with your mother and they, too agree to pay you $10,000 a month in exchange for a promise that you’ll pay them a million bucks if Aquaman defaults.

Now, thanks to Phil Gramm, who lobbied for the so-called “Enron Exception” covering these trades back in 2000, this market is totally unregulated, so you don’t have to show that you have even a dollar, much less a million bucks for every promise you made to your family members. So a year later your entire extended family is betting against Aquaman’s place and when it finally does go bust, thanks to Superman opening a far superior and better-managed club down the block, Aquaman’s one-million-dollar loss creates a hundred million dollars in losses for you (and, it turns out, for society in general, which might end up having to use tax money to pay your mother and everybody else for the bet you couldn’t cover).

You will note that when a person buys insurance for his own businesses, this is called good business. When two people bet on whether or not a third person pays his debts, this is called gambling. There is currently $62 trillion worth of Credit Default Swaps out there. This is more than the gross domestic product of the entire world.

Given that, is it really that much of a mystery why the collapse of a single investment bank like Lehman Brothers can send all of Wall Street underwater? Like any Ponzi-type scheme, the whole system explodes the instant one link in the chain, or one brick in the pyramid, fails: if you get a million people betting on the same small pool of mortgages, you can turn a $300,000 in actual defaults into $300 million in gambling losses overnight. More to the point, you can blow up all of Wall Street, or almost blow it up, with just the defaults of bonds issued by Lehman brothers. No one even knows for sure how much money has been lost via Lehman-related Credit Default Swaps. Some estimates say the number is $400 billion.

This is why it’s so revolting when guys like Byron York try to pin the financial crisis on the minority homeowners who defaulted on their home loans. There aren’t enough low-income minority homeowners in the remaining years of human history to create $62 trillion worth of pressure on the economy. You’ve got not billions but trillions of dollars tied up in the Wall Street equivalent of a craps game – the ruling class of the earth gambling away the whole world’s bank deposits on a dice roll, which is about as irresponsible a use of resources as can be imagined – and guys like York want to blame the blowout on a few black people who tried to do something absolutely and completely sensible with their money, buying houses they intended to live in.

In the area of selling worthless crap as gold, there is the CDO (great explanation here). This is basically an instrument which one entity sells a package of securities to another. That package can contain anything, from bonds to college loans to mortgages. The actual mathematics of how they work is complicated, but all you really need to know about them is that the package of securities within a CDO can also contain other CDOs – and if one CDO packaged within a second CDO happens to contain fucked-up subprime mortgages, you can trade the second CDO as though it had an investment-grade rating.

So long as the housing market is booming, this is an easy way for the person issuing the CDO to turn worthless paper into real cash. What he is selling, essentially, is a promise that the shit in his package is worth what he says it's worth. Since this market is totally unregulated, he doesn't have to back that promise up with anything. Some meth addict on a skateboard can put a dollar down on a boarded-up $580 row house in East St. Louis and this asshole can sell it as though it’s as solid a bet as the mortgage on the Queen of England's Monte Carlo villa.

Again, this is not exactly a Ponzi scheme, but the dynamics are very similar. In a Ponzi scheme the operating problem is time. If you promise every investor a 300% return on a $100 investment, you‚re fine as long as you continually get enough new investors to keep the first ones off your back. But once the demand slackens even a hair the whole structure crumbles, and what you get in the end is a panicked bumrush as everybody you conned races to your office with their fists raised to reclaim what’s left of their money, understanding at last that their cash was the only asset that ever existed in this enterprise.

Does that sound familiar? Because that’s what happened with this market. The valuation of all these securities was based on faith and promises, not real assets. And once everyone realized that, the whole world raced for the exits.

Now, there are types of pyramid schemes – we’ve all come across them – where every investor on the bottom level has to find two more investors and continually kick his money up the pyramid. We all know that if the guys on the bottom screw this up and so much as one person fails to get those targeted two investors, the whole thing collapses. Which is too bad, I guess, but you’d have to be nuts – or, apparently, a Republican – to blame this whole catastrophe on the general slacker-ness of the bottom-rung investor.

A pyramid scheme is a criminal enterprise. The guys running the game are criminals. Amazingly, these Republicans are trying to tell everyone that it’s low-income minorities at the bottom defaulting on their mortgages who queered this whole deal for everybody. But all it takes is a thimbleful of common sense to realize that a few individual mortgage defaults don't cause this kind of worldwide financial holocaust unless somebody much higher up fucked up very, very badly.

Which is why the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and so on who are pushing this line about the crisis being blowback from an attempt to bring the “ownership society” to minorities either have no idea what they’re talking about, or they’re the most shameless liars of all time. Thank God they’ll be out the door and picking strawberries in Siberia a few weeks from now.