Useful Oxy Morons


Don't laugh, these people are serious

More delusional framing of the issues that make the world what it is from the Masters of the Universe, this time from the place where old times are not forgotten- just misremembered.

There’s no screaming on the first great song of the bailout era. No audible rage. No tears. Instead, on “Shuttin’ Detroit Down,” the country star John Rich, singing evenly, sounds perfectly levelheaded, as if he’d thought through his position thoroughly and acquired the peace of the righteous...

...even though Mr. Rich’s subject matter is au courant, his tropes are familiar country tugs of war: urban versus rural, modern versus traditional, white collar versus blue. The most bracing moment on “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” comes not when Mr. Rich points a finger at those “living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town,” but when he reflects on the little guy: “Well that old man’s been working in that plant most all his life/ Now his pension plan’s been cut in half and he can’t afford to die,” his voice dropping a half-step on the last word to indicate where the real locus of tragedy resides.

But in many ways “Detroit” has less to do with “Okie” and more to do with the left-wing protest music of that era. That it comes from the other side of the aisle seems a minor detail. “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” is skeptical of big business as well as big government — “D.C.’s bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground” — keeping a song that’s postpartisan, at least on the surface, consistent with right-wing thinking.

This isn’t Mr. Rich’s first dalliance with Republican talking points. Last year he stumped for Fred Thompson before throwing his support behind Senator John McCain and recording a rally song, “Raising McCain,” a far less imaginative slice of propaganda. (“He got shot down/in a Vietnam town/fighting for the red, white and blue.” )

Now that Republicans are underdogs, it’s a particularly good time to be a conservative agitator, and Mr. Rich is seizing the moment...

Yes, those Right-wing, anti-Big Government, anti-Big Business Republicans.

Not socialists, National Socialists.

Don't laugh, these people are serious. It's not that the people promoting this have bad memories. After all, the banksters that own Mr. Rich are getting bailed out, too. They simply think you do.

Sadly, somebody does, or this crap would be laughed right off the air.  ¶ 6:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

  I Want Yours

Call it Uncle Sam's hedge fund. The rescue of the American financial system proposed by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is, in all but name, a gigantic hedge fund. The government would lend vast sums to private investors to enable them to buy loss-ridden assets at discounts from banks with the prospect of making sizable profits. If that's not a hedge fund, what would be? The hope is that the $14 trillion U.S. banking system would expand lending if it could get rid of many of the lousy securities and loans already on its books...

That being The Washington Pravda, Mr. Samuelson goes on to tell us how it's ...not as crazy as it sounds.

No, sir. We're not as dumb as you and the rest of the Village think we are.

Another myth that the Village is trying to propagate is that the only opposition to the bankster takeover of the Treasury comes from down home, McCainiac, Right wing populists who are anti-Big Government and anti-Big Business.

Like this guy, I guess.

Here's a quick flash to the main$tream. The Republicans are and have always been the party of Big Government and Big Business. It's just the Democrats have also been bought out now. Paulson or Geithner, both owned, and only the gullible would think otherwise.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few like that. Bu$hie's core "30%" of the electorate. The Oborg Assimilated, too. It's enough to ensure interesting times for the foreseeable future.  ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Multinational Corporation

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, ["almost exclusively" when a quarter of the pirate servers are based in California? Frame things much?] ...but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

...Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.

...Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

...Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.

The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.

They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California...

  ¶ 12:54 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It all depends on what the definition of "in touch" means

If you define being "in touch" as blowing a better bubble, why, the resources of the U.S. Treasury are exactly what you need to show some skin:



The "clap louder for Tinkerbell" crowd thinks its all in our minds.

They also want to keep your savings in the casino [via Susie Madrak]. To them it's an integral part of the "recovery"- being able to bet the US Treasury as well as every cent you have or will ever make on the table.

They think that a bubble is a substitute for a real stimulus.



When in reality it's just a shell of hot gas.

So go on ahead and get that new adjustable rate mortgage. Things are only going to get better, right? You listen to your financial advisors, to your stock broker and bankster friends, and you'll put all your money back in the market, which is now backed by the U.S. government. The Chinese government, likely, too.

What could go wrong for in touch people?  ¶ 9:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  New Strategery for the Great Society Deal

Lyndon Baines Obama embraces a non-escalation escalation, and tries on Rudy 9u11iani's favorite dress:

...So let me be clear: al Qaeda and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the U.S. homeland from its safe-haven in Pakistan...

Obama announces fealty to the Pentagon, with Poppy and Slick Willie's puppeteers pulling the strings

Obama looks uncomfortable, as you would too with both of those hands up your colon.

Meanwhile,

...Gates has hinted that the withdrawal of combat brigades will be accomplished through an administrative sleight of hand rather than by actually withdrawing all the combat brigade teams...

"They will be called advisory and assistance brigades," said Gates. "They won't be called combat brigades."

Obama’s decision to go along with the military proposal for a "transition force" of 35,000 to 50,000 troops thus represents a complete abandonment of his own original policy of combat troop withdrawal and an acceptance of what the military wanted all along - the continued presence of several combat brigades in Iraq well beyond mid-2010.

National Security Council officials declined to comment on the question of whether combat brigades were actually going to be left in Iraq beyond August 2010 under the policy announced by Obama Feb. 27...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to chlamor]

Slick Dick trick, that: Iraq will not have combat troops, just advisors. Now where have I heard of that one before? And why do I feel that history is not just rhyming, but rhyming badly?  ¶ 12:14 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "Unilateral Geoengineering"

Just go read it. They're really talking about doing it-moreso. They're not asking anyone about it, except each other. They're serious.  ¶ 6:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Masters of the Universe Ignore the Obvious Again

Dr. Krugman is more than willing to spell it out for them:

On Monday, Lawrence Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, responded to criticisms of the Obama administration’s plan to subsidize private purchases of toxic assets. “I don’t know of any economist,” he declared, “who doesn’t believe that better functioning capital markets in which assets can be traded are a good idea.”

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether a market in which buyers have to be bribed to participate can really be described as “better functioning.” Even so, Mr. Summers needs to get out more. Quite a few economists have reconsidered their favorable opinion of capital markets and asset trading in the light of the current crisis.

But it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.

The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.

And the financial system wasn’t just boring. It was also, by today’s standards, small. Even during the “go-go years,” the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company.

It all sounds primitive by today’s standards. Yet that boring, primitive financial system serviced an economy that doubled living standards over the course of a generation.

After 1980, of course, a very different financial system emerged. In the deregulation-minded Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale. The new system was much bigger than the old regime: On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies — giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

And finance became anything but boring. It attracted many of our sharpest minds and made a select few immensely rich.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

Sooner or later, things were bound to go wrong, and eventually they did. Bear Stearns failed; Lehman failed; but most of all, securitization failed.

Which brings us back to the Obama administration’s approach to the financial crisis.

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

Thank you for once again stating the obvious for the Masters of the Universe, Dr. Krugman. Yours is one of the few rational voices loud enough to penetrate the walls of the financial Olympus they live in.

Just try to stay out of small airplanes, please!  ¶ 6:24 AM 0 comments links to this post

  What's a little poison between friends?


a.k.a. 2-（4-isopropyl-4-methyl-5-oxo-2-imidazolin-2-yl)nicotinic Acid

...The U.S. Border Patrol plans to poison the plant life along a 1.1-mile stretch of the Rio Grande riverbank as soon as Wednesday to get rid of the hiding places used by smugglers, robbers and illegal immigrants.

If successful, the $2.1 million pilot project could later be duplicated along as many as 130 miles of river in the patrol’s Laredo Sector, as well as other parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Although Border Patrol and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials say the chemical is safe for animals, detractors say the experiment is reminiscent of the Vietnam War-era Agent Orange chemical program and raises questions about long-term effects.

“We don’t believe that is even moral,” said Jay Johnson-Castro Sr., executive director of the Rio Grande International Study Center, located at Laredo Community College, adjacent to the planned test area.

“It is unprecedented that they’d do it in a populated area,” he said of spraying the edge of the Rio Grande as it weaves between the cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Border Patrol agent Roque Sarinana said the pilot project aims to find the most efficient way to keep agents safer and better protect the nation’s border. “We are trying to improve our mobility and visibility up and down the river,” Sarinana said.

...Members of the Laredo City Council have raised concerns about the spraying program and called on Mexico President Felipe Calderon to intervene.

Mexican officials are raising concerns the herbicide could threaten the water supply for Nuevo Laredo.

A U.S. government outline of the project indicates the Border Patrol is going to test three methods to rid the 1.1-mile bank of river of carrizo cane, which has thick stalks that form tight, isolated trails that can be dark and all but invisible from higher up on the bank.

One method calls for the cane to be cut by hand and the stumps painted with the herbicide, Imazapyr.

Another involves using mechanical equipment to dig the cane out by the roots. It is unclear if herbicides would be necessary in this scenario.

The third and most controversial removal method calls for helicopters spraying Imazapyr directly on the cane — repeatedly — until all plant life in the area is poisoned...

[via truthout]

But it's totally harmless! The Government wouldn't lie, would it? Well, it might miscommunicate a bit to encourage the private contractors that I'm sure will make a bundle off of this economically stimulating enterprise.

Heterocyclic aromatic amine pesticide use and human cancer risk: results from the U.S. Agricultural Health Study. Int J Cancer. 2009 Mar 1;124(5):1206-12.

...Imazethapyr, a heterocyclic aromatic amine, is a widely used crop herbicide first registered for use in the United States in 1989. We evaluated cancer incidence among imazethapyr-exposed pesticide applicators enrolled in the Agricultural Health Study (AHS). The AHS is a prospective cohort of 57,311 licensed pesticide applicators in the U.S., enrolled from 1993-1997. Among the 49,398 licensed pesticide applicators eligible for analysis, 20,646 applicators reported use of imazethapyr and 2,907 incident cancers developed through 2004. Imazethapyr exposure was classified by intensity-weighted lifetime exposure days calculated as [years of use x days per year x intensity level]. Poisson regression analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between imazethapyr exposure and cancer incidence. We found significant trends in risk with increasing lifetime exposure for bladder cancer (p for trend 0.01) and colon cancer (p for trend 0.02). Rate ratios (RRs) were increased by 137% for bladder cancer and 78% for colon cancer when the highest exposed were compared to the nonexposed... These findings provide new evidence that exposure to aromatic amine pesticides may be an overlooked exposure in the etiology of bladder and colon cancer. The use of imazethapyr and other imidazolinone compounds should continue to be evaluated for potential risk to humans.

  ¶ 9:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

  But It's Okay When We Do It


That's what we all need, a regular guy President you'd want to sit down and have a beer with, right?

Gail Collins:

... Tim Geithner — Really cool guy. Super job on that bank bailout thing. Look at the way the stock market jumped. Way better Treasury secretary than last week’s Tim Geithner, who seemed a lot ... shorter.

Barack Obama — Kinda boring. Did you see the news conference? Same thing over and over again. Not that we mind. In these troubled times, we like stability. Thank God we didn’t elect somebody who was all charisma and exciting speeches.

Eliot Spitzer — He was the only one who got it, really got it, about A.I.G. before the big collapse. Great New York attorney general. What ever happened to him?

TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility) — This is the thing Tim Geithner is doing, and, you know, whatever Tim wants ... We like TALF much, much better than TARP, which was the brainchild of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who had that dumb idea about buying up all the bank’s toxic assets. Which is what Tim is going to do, except it’s going to be way cooler...

  ¶ 8:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

  From the Department of Framing the Argument

The New York Pravda this morning about the Oborg Prime Unit's lecture last night:

...The session in the East Room came at a volatile moment for the new president as he sought to quell Democratic misgivings about his ambitious economic agenda and deflect strong Republican opposition...

Of course, what his detractors on the Left are saying isn't that his agenda is too ambitious, it's that it's not ambitious enough.

Krugman speaks for many. The plan is designed to simply blow more bubbles, not resolve the underlying insability. Sooner or later, real market values will assert themselves with a vengence no matter how much Uncle $ugar sweetens the toxic waste of the speculators. Under the Obama plan, they're trying to get the speculators back in the game to drive up market prices by backing the Big Shitpile with the United States Treasury.

All that's going to do is open the doors of the Treasury to the pirates. Wider.

The main$tream media tries to frame the issue to make it seem the Democrats are siding with the Republicans. Well, the DINOcrats might be. But most the rest of us simply want the government to call a zombie a zombie, give it a head shot, bury the waste, and set up shop until the system recovers enough for private sharholders to buy back the banks.

Anything else- like the Oborg plan- simply propagates the virus.  ¶ 6:43 AM 1 comments links to this post

  But in which direction?

The Oborg Prime sees signs of progress.

Progress, that is, if you see an attempt to create a government-fueled financial bubble as something to move toward.

The banksters will wreck it again if there is any profit in it for them.  ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  If you'll be his friend, he'll give you a dollar



Or several. No risk.

No real solution of the problem, either.

The real problem?

...that Goldman Sachs holds an unelected place inside the government.

Among others.

...We let the banks get out of control and the cost will be enormous; our debt/GDP ratio will in all likelihood rise from around 40% to over 80%. We cannot afford to have the same problem again. We must break the power of banks before they break us all. And if you don’t think banks can do that much damage to economies, just look around outside the United States - the world is full of countries where growth is slowed or distorted by a financial system that becomes too powerful. This is not about tweaking the existing U.S. regulatory system; it is about complete change and - in many senses - turning back the clock to a financial system that was simpler, smaller, and much less dangerous.

  ¶ 7:28 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Spring storm



A blast on the far side of the sun, the first since February.

SOHO observed a solar storm blast off to the left of the Sun (Mar. 17-19, 2009) over a two-day period. It appears to have originated on the far side of the Sun. In general, these coronal mass ejection (CME) explosions are fairly common, but with the Sun bumping along the bottom of its 11-year activity cycle, we have seen only a few storms over the past month. In this coronagraph still image, the Sun and some of its atmosphere are covered by an occulting disk so that we can see faint features in the surrounding corona. We superimposed an extreme UV Sun image also from SOHO taken at the nearly the same time to show its size.

  ¶ 7:22 AM 1 comments links to this post

  "Something's happening here..."

What it is seems exactly clear.

Krugman:

...the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work...

Elections do have consequences. In this one, we had the alternative of accepting the same old policymakers that ruined the country in the Bu$h administration. Or, we could elect a bold, fresh new Democratic face. In other words, we could allow ourselves to be flat out speared by the banksters, or swallow their shiny new Hopeful bait, hook, line, and sinker.  ¶ 6:00 AM 1 comments links to this post

  All Quieter on the Solar Front



The blips of February are gone, and the sun has returned to a quiet state except for a transient disturbance early today.



The increase in ambient cosmic radiation suggests its magnetic field strength hasn't reached a minimum yet either.

That's two years of quiet. That's fascinating in an uneasy sort of way.  ¶ 9:19 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Sheep

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You'd better watch out!
There may be dogs about
I looked over Jordan, and I've seen
Things are not what they seem.

That's what you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal terror in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is not a bad dream.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He lays me down to lie
Through pastures green He leadeth me the silent waters by.
With bright knives He releaseth my soul.
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.
He converteth me to lamb cutlets,
For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger.
When cometh the day we lowly ones,
Through quiet reflection, and great dedication
Master the art of karate,
Lo, we shall rise up,
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.

Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as you're told.
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Ed Encho]  ¶ 11:13 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Sockpuppet Scapegoats

The expendible, of course, while the real pirates get away with the booty.

...Here’s the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1 per cent – one thousandth – of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a “pass-through” to its counterparties. This sum, over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters, did not stay with AIG. For over six months, the public media and Congressmen have been trying to find out just where this money DID go. Bloomberg brought a lawsuit to find out. Only to be met with a wall of silence.

Until finally, on Sunday night, March 15, the government finally released the details. They were indeed highly embarrassing. The largest recipient turned out to be just what earlier financial reports had rumored: Paulson’s own firm, Goldman Sachs, headed the list. It was owed $13 billion in counterparty claims. Here’s the picture that’s emerging. Last September, Treasury Secretary Paulson, from Goldman Sachs, drew up a terse 3-page memo outlining his bailout proposal. The plan specified that whatever he and other Treasury officials did (thus including his subordinates, also from Goldman Sachs), could not be challenged legally or undone, much less prosecuted. This condition enraged Congress, which rejected the bailout in its first incarnation.

It now looks as if Paulson had good reason to put in a fatal legal clause blocking any clawback of funds given by the Treasury to AIG’s counterparties. This is where public outrage should be focused...

With the usual worms in the compost. It's nice to see where Poppy's boys fit into this. It's all still working out very well for them, isn't it, Babs?

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Lambert again]  ¶ 9:41 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Hey Paul Krugman

Where the Hell are you man?



I believe that's him in the washroom throwing up:

...The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won...

  ¶ 9:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

  All He Needed Was a Saxophone

More Clintonista than Slick Willie-


[via Bag News Notes]

Sure, just saying you're going to act really makes it so. For actors, anyway.

Meanwhile, the play has the overwhelming feel of a set-up, and some of the actors seem to realize it-


Dodd has become a point of focus in the AIG bonus story after he inserted language in the last economic stimulus bill that allowed the bonuses to be awarded to employees of the insurance giant. Dodd said he added the language at the request of the Obama Administration...
via

Elsewhere, Frank Rich continues to try to warn the captain of the Titanic about the difference between ice cubes and icebergs:

A charming visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

...The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.

Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.

Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhanded in addressing the “retention bonuses” handed to the very employees who brokered all those bad bets. After reciting the requisite outrage talking point, he delivered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible to abrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americans might know that contracts are renegotiated all the time — most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers, which consented to givebacks as its contribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being rewarded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and American authorities.

...David Axelrod tried to rationalize the lagging response when he told The Washington Post last week that “people are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about A.I.G.,” but are instead “thinking about their own jobs.” While that’s technically true, it misses the point. Of course most Americans don’t know how A.I.G. brought the world’s financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

They know that the corporate bosses who may yet lay them off have sometimes been as obscenely overcompensated for failure as Wall Street’s bonus babies. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, chief executives at businesses as diverse as Texas Instruments and the home builder Hovnanian Enterprises have received millions in bonuses even as their companies’ shares have lost more than half their value.

...What made Jon Stewart’s takedown of Jim Cramer resonate was less his specific brief against CNBC’s cheerleading for bad stocks than his larger indictment of the gaping economic inequality that defined the bubble. As Stewart said, there were “two markets” — the long-term market that Americans earnestly thought would sustain their 401(k)’s, and the fast-moving, short-term “real market” in the back room where high-rolling insiders wagered “giant piles of money” and brought down everyone with them.

...Inquiring Americans have the right to know why it took six months for us to learn (some of) what A.I.G. did with our money. We need to understand why some of that money was used to bail out foreign banks. And why Goldman, which declared that its potential losses with A.I.G. were “immaterial,” nonetheless got the largest-known A.I.G. handout of taxpayers’ cash ($12.9 billion) while also receiving a TARP bailout. We need to be told why retention bonuses went to some 50 bankers who not only were in the toxic A.I.G. unit but who left despite the “retention” jackpots. We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those “stress tests” the Treasury Department is giving those banks?

...Another compelling question connects all of the above: why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.

The “dirty little secret,” Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that “most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal.” An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary circumstances.”

Given that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw [.pdf], after he was pushed out of Harvard’s presidency at the bubble’s height, you have to wonder how he can now sell the administration’s plan for buying up toxic assets with the help of hedge funds. It will look like another giveaway to his own insiders’ club. As for Geithner, people might take him more seriously if he gave a credible account of why, while at the New York Fed, he and the Goldman alumnus Hank Paulson let Lehman Brothers fail but saved the Goldman-trading ally A.I.G.

As the nation’s anger rose last week, the president took responsibility for what’s happening on his watch — more than he needed to, given the disaster he inherited. But in the credit mess, action must match words. To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail. With all due deference to Ponzi schemers from Madoff to A.I.G., this would be the biggest outrage of them all.

As long as Obama is owned by the same players that own the Republicans, no real solution will be found. The Republicans aren't competing for popular support in other than a simple minded, off hand sort of way. They're competing for access- indeed, monopoly- of the river of money that Washington controls. But they're poised to use the anger of those who think there is one political side or another that will debug the Great Depression v.2.


[via]

The outrage is just beginning. Especially since more and more people are correctly regarding their government as sockpuppets for pirates.  ¶ 7:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Pirate Strategery


Hedge Funds and the Global Economic Meltdown from Judd Bagley on Vimeo.  ¶ 10:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  WTF? Battlestar Rippedofftica



A finale that could have been written by MKULTRA. In fact, it probably was.

First hour: awesome, right through the point Starbucks jumps to paleo Earth using co-ordinates from Dylan's "Watchtower".

Then, an incredibly disappointing last hour.

I hate it when otherwise intelligent people buy into the "we were happier in simpler times" meme.


"If only they had never discovered fire I'm sure I'd be happier", he thinks. "Better fed, too."


Perhaps if Laura had been eaten by a smilodon or Ellen had been ripped apart by a pack of dire wolves or Six had immediately been flatlined by malaria or yellow fever the Old Man would've second guessed their decision to abandon technology and follow the Path of the Enlightened Toasters.

Or at least have given Lampkin a few techies to kite off in the opposite direction of the Centurions. After they'd left, of course.

As I've said elsewhere just for the record, the G-d of the Cylons, and by default of the Capricans, that was happy when the remnant of the human race wanted to revert to paleolithic simplicity is not a benevolent being.

Sign me up for the Opposition. Prometheus needs rescuing, and I'm on Herc's side, not heyZeus's. So say you all.  ¶ 8:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Dr. Doom Speaks

You listen.

Americans lived in a "Made-off" and Ponzi bubble economy for a decade or even longer. Madoff is the mirror of the American economy and of its over-leveraged agents: a house of cards of leverage over leverage by households, financial firms and corporations that has now collapsed in a heap.

When you put zero down on your home, and you thus have no equity in your home, your leverage is literally infinite and you are playing a Ponzi game.

And the bank that lent you, with zero down, a NINJA (no income, no jobs and assets) liar loan that was interest-only for a while, with negative amortization and an initial teaser rate, was also playing a Ponzi game.

And private equity firms that did over a $1 trillion of leveraged buyouts (LBOs) in the last few years with a debt-to-earnings ratio of 10 or above were also Ponzi firms playing a Ponzi game.

A government that will issue trillions of dollars of new debt to pay for this severe recession and socialize private losses may risk becoming a Ponzi government if--in the medium term--it does not return to fiscal discipline and debt sustainability.

A country that has--for over 25 years--spent more than income and thus run an endless string of current account deficit--and has thus become the largest net foreign debtor in the world (with net foreign liabilities that are likely to be over $3 trillion by the end of this year)--is also a Ponzi country that may eventually default on its foreign debt if it does not, over time, tighten its belt and start running smaller current account deficits and actual trade surpluses.



Whenever you persistently consume more than your income year after year (a household with negative savings, a government with budget deficit, a firm or financial institution with persistent losses, a country with a current account deficit) you are playing a Ponzi game. In the jargon of formal economics, you are not satisfying your long-run inter-temporal budget constraint as you borrow to finance the interest rate on your previous debt, and are thus following an unsustainable debt dynamics that eventually leads to outright insolvency.

According to Hyman Minsky and economic theory, Ponzi agents (households, firms, banks) are those who need to borrow more to repay both principal and interest on their previous debt; i.e., Minsky's "Ponzi borrowers" cannot service either interest or principal payments on their debts. They are called "Ponzi borrowers" as they need persistently increasing prices of the assets they invested in to keep on refinancing their debt obligations.

By this standard, U.S. households whose debt relative to income went from 65% 15 years ago, to 100% in 2000, to 135% today were playing a Ponzi game.

And an economy where the total debt to GDP ratio (of households, financial firms and corporations) is now 350% is a Made-Off Ponzi economy. And now that home values have fallen 20% (and they will fall another 20% before they bottom out) and equity prices have fallen over 50% (and may fall further), using homes as an ATM to finance Ponzi consumption is not feasible any more. The party is over for households, banks and non-bank highly leveraged corporations.

The bursting of the housing bubble, the equity bubble, the hedge funds bubble and the private equity bubble showed that most of the "wealth" that supported the massive leverage and overspending of agents in the economy was a fake bubble-driven wealth. Now that these bubble have burst, it is clear that the emperor had no clothes, and that we are the naked emperor. A rising bubble tide was hiding the fact that most Americans and their banks were swimming naked; and the bursting of the bubble is the low tide that shows who was naked.

Madoff may now spend the rest of his life in prison. U.S. households, financial and non-financial firms, and government may spend the next generation in debtor's prison having to tighten their belts to pay for the losses inflicted by a decade or more of reckless leverage, over-consumption and risk-taking.

Americans, let us look at ourselves in the mirror: Madoff is us and Mr. Ponzi is us!

  ¶ 5:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Bipartisanship Privateers

WASHINGTON — The White House stopped short on Friday of endorsing legislation to severely tax bonuses paid to executives of companies that accepted taxpayer bailout funds.

Administration officials said instead that President Obama would assess the potential effect of the bill that emerged from Congress on efforts to stabilize the financial system.

At the same time, as Wall Street executives anxiously pondered the ramifications of the measure quickly passed by the House this week, some Senate Republicans began to voice opposition to the legislation, saying it was hasty and abusive...

Of course, it's okay to terminate contracts of hundreds of thousands of American workers. That has no effect on the $ystem, right? But you must honor those contracts, even if the privateers don't work at AIG anymore.

Because they're Company boys and girls.

Meanwhile, more people question the rectitude of the righteous regulators:

...The relationship between AIG and Goldman goes back long enough that one would think that Goldman would know, having bought so much of this "insurance" or whatever it was, whether the "products" were ...er...real or feasible at all. Indeed, Goldman and AIG almost merged a few years ago, but Spitzer notes that the unknown black hole of AIG's business practices were probably what prevented it. Still, that didn't stop the incestuous dealings; it almost makes one think that this whole thing was a setup.

This is country that Spitzer is familiar with; he has been a terrible liability to entities that, under the Bush administration, were allowed to literally gut the country and its citizens. All of this seems to have been part of the Bush Administration's own Ponzi Scheme, which figured that the illusion of an ownership society, terrified of the "terraism" and steeped in the me, me, me, culture would look the other way while they finished clearing out the vault. Beyond that, it's clear that the media hyped housing bubble encouraged the house flip mentality and the idea that anyone could be rich. The idea of the lottery dropping on our own heads made us more protective of the rich, because we might one day be one....or look, we could be one with no money down, if we could just balance that on this, and flip that house!!


Every week came a new offer from our bank or credit card to just put the enclosed check into the bank for a $50,000 loan, unsecured and with a low APR!! Who would know that those same banks would go out of their way to cause a day or week default by changing the cycle or stopping refusing cards that went over-limit, in order to charge fees and raise the rates. Who could know that the fine print on all those little fliers talking about privacy rights and how they are selling all of our information, also said that by-the-way the interest rate is now 25% and the minimum payment has tripled! Default on that and likely AIG has sold insurance to your lending institution that should repay them for making the bad loan in the first place....no money down mortgages? No problem....its the same story. This is the ownership society and we all need to own alot of stuff. It is... what did he say?...uniquely American!


Spitzer was questioning this back in February 2008 when he wrote his Valentine to predatory lenders in the Washington Post. He detailed that Attorneys General across the country had entered into litigation in an attempt to protect the people of their states from predatory lending. The response from the federal government was astounding!

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.


Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye...

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.


But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

It's nice to see the bonding of the contentious pirates that rule. After all, Company unity is what makes the Amerika Empire work.  ¶ 8:56 AM 0 comments links to this post

  DIversionary Tactic for the Financial Shock Doctrine

Even The Washington Pravda is asking Does Geithner Get It?

But the greater question is: Does America? Paul Craig Roberts:

Professor Michael Hudson (CounterPunch, March 18) is correct that the orchestrated outrage over the $165 million AIG bonuses is a diversion from the thousand times greater theft from taxpayers of the approximately $200 billion “bailout” of AIG. Nevertheless, it is a diversion that serves an important purpose. It has taught an inattentive American public that the elites run the government in their own private interests.

Americans are angry that AIG executives are paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses after having cost the taxpayers an exorbitant sum. Senator Charles Grassley put a proper face on the anger when he suggested that the AIG executives “follow the Japanese example and resign or go commit suicide.”

Yet, Obama’s White House economist, Larry Summers, on whose watch as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration financial deregulation got out of control, invoked the “sanctity of contracts” in defense of the AIG bonuses.

But the Obama administration does not regard other contracts as sacred. Specifically: labor unions had to agree to give-backs in order for the auto companies to obtain federal help; CNN reports that “Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday [March 10] that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance”; the Washington Post reports that the Obama team has set its sights on downsizing Social Security and Medicare.

According to the Post, Obama said that “it is impossible to separate the country’s financial ills from the long-term need to rein in health-care costs, stabilize Social Security and prevent the Medicare program from bankrupting the government.”

After Washington’s trillion dollar bank bailouts and trillion dollar gratuitous wars for the sake of the military industry’s profits and Israeli territorial expansion, there is no money for Social Security and Medicare.

The US government breaks its contracts with US citizens on a daily basis, but AIG’s bonus contracts are sacrosanct. The Social Security contract was broken when the government decided to tax 85% of the benefits. It was broken again when the Clinton administration rigged the inflation measure in order to beat retirees out of their cost-of-living adjustments. To have any real Medicare coverage, a person has to give up part of his Social Security check to pay Medicare Part B premium and then take out a private supplemental policy. The true cost of Medicare to beneficiaries is about $6,000 annually in premiums, plus deductibles and the Medicare tax if the person is still earning.

Treasury Secretary Geithner, the fox in charge of the hen house, has resolved the problem for us. He is going to withhold $165 million (the amount of the AIG bonuses) from the next taxpayer payment to AIG of $30,000 million. If someone handed you $30,000 dollars, would you mind if they held back $165?

PR flaks have rechristened the bonus payments “retention payments” necessary if AIG is to retain crucial employees. This lie was shot down by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who informed the House Committee on Financial Services that the payments went to members of AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary, “the unit of AIG that was principally responsible for the firm’s meltdown.” As for retention, Cuomo pointed out that ”numerous individuals who received large ‘retention’ bonuses are no longer at the firm”.

Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor who was set-up in a sex scandal to prevent him investigating Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, pointed out on March 17 that the real scandal is the billions of taxpayer dollars paid to the counter-parties of AIG’s financial deals. These payments, Spitzer writes, are “a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.”

Goldman Sachs, for example, had already received a taxpayer cash infusion of $25 billion and was sitting on more than $100 billion in cash when the Wall Street firm received another $13 billion via the AIG bailout.

Moreover, in my opinion, most of the billions of dollars in AIG counter-party payments were unnecessary. They represent gravy paid to firms that had made risk-free bets, the non-payment of which constituted no threat to financial solvency.

Spitzer identifies a conflict of interest that could possibly be criminal self-dealing. According to reports, the AIG bailout decision involved Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, former New York Federal Reserve president and currently Secretary of the Treasury. No doubt the incestuous relationships are the reason the original bailout deal had no oversight or transparency.

The Bush/Obama bailouts require serious investigation. Were these bailouts necessary, or were they a scam, like “weapons of mass destruction,” used to advance a private agenda behind a wall of fear? Recently I heard Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a member of a congressional bailout oversight panel, say on NPR that the US has far too many banks. Out of the financial crisis, she said, should come consolidation with the financial sector consisting of a few mega-banks. Was the whole point of the bailout to supply taxpayer money for a program of financial concentration?

Yah think?

Krugman:

...I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

  ¶ 8:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Winning the War Against Terror

Captain Hugh C. Thompson, Jr.  ¶ 6:44 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Military Industrial Complex Sunscreen to Halt Global Warming

If our CO₂ emissions turn up the heat, we'll just turn down the thermostat by living in the shade.

An intelligent comment from AJ:

"This is bar none the worst idea I have ever heard. The whole climate change problem stems directly from the law of unintended consequences. While some of these outlandish ideas might actually fix the problems they are intended to address, they are also guaranteed to create a host of other problems that we couldn't possibly hope to foresee."

That is very well said.

Speaking as a pro-environment liberal progressive, I find this apalling when Al Gore or the TED intelligentsia wax poetic about it too.



Global warming is real. It's so real it may be responsible for ending the Little Ice Age of the last millenium. It promises much chaos if the poles permanently melt over the next century, but nothing compared to the chaos another Ice Age might cause if they screw up the environment by shutting out too much sunlight.

Yes, 20 meters of water over Manhattan by 2100 would be a disaster. But a kilometer of glacial ice over every city north of the Ohio River would effectively end modern civilization, too.

Melting the poles is to be avoided, but it's not incompatible with life. Some of the most biologically diverse periods in geological history have been when the poles were melted. Massive disruption and relocations of coastal populations over a generation would happen, but fertile areas in the Northern United States, Canada, and Siberia would remain. In fact, they would expand northward, as there's a lot of new arable land that would thaw.

Civilization would adjust- barring powerful fools with nukes and Little Boots complexes.

Only idiots would intentionally block the sun to avert global warming. The cure would be far more deadly than the disease. Unfortunately there are idiots ruling everywhere. It almost seems requisite for the job description.  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Who are these "people" of which you speak?

“Their mythology starts with the false premise that these are irreplaceable geniuses.”

Well, maybe if you are a product of Regent University the Bu$hie Bunnypants hired.

To which the Mouth of Bu$hCo speaks:

"...it seems that Dana Perino, former President Bush’s press secretary, didn’t receive the memo. On C-Span’s Washington Journal on Sunday, Perino defended the bonuses:

PERINO: And the people who are working there that are middle-class people, are expecting to get this bonus. If they do not get it, maybe they won’t be motivated enough to try to help the company turn around and getting the company to turn around and be more profitable is important for all of us.

Perino then chastised the “rhetoric in Washington” that “can try to make things so black and white, and make things sound so easy — demonize people when I don’t think that that’s fair.”

Especially when 11 of the executives who earned $1 million or more don't even work at AIG any more.

Now that the stars have changed again, these Old Ones are out on the streets. One supposes, like David Addington or Alberto Gonnzales, these stalwarts are having a hard time finding jobs elsewhere. Apparently Atilla the Hun just isn't hiring anymore.  ¶ 6:46 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Emergent Market Banksterism for Herd Identity

The indignation goes viral, but they're raging over the tip of the iceberg.

It is organized crime, though. Think of Shystee's Emergent Conspiracy Theory, though, and not Don Corleone. The worst banksters are as easy to spot among all the players as a single zebra in a stampeding herd.



Of course, if you break up the herd, you make it easier to pick out the leaders.

Meg White at Buzzflash:

...perhaps we can save a million here or there by stopping at least some of these bonuses before the checks go out. But that won't solve the main problem of getting these clowns out of a place where they can keep taking undue risks with the American economy and taxpayer money. They should be fired, regardless of what happens with their bonus bucks.

Strangely enough, it's The Wall Street Pravda, pissed that the bonuses of its favorites are under fire and jealous at the Company that played everyone, that comes closest to fingering the Dons:

...Taxpayers have already put up $173 billion, or more than a thousand times the amount of those bonuses, to fund the government's AIG "rescue." This federal takeover, never approved by AIG shareholders, uses the firm as a conduit to bail out other institutions. After months of government stonewalling, on Sunday night AIG officially acknowledged where most of the taxpayer funds have been going.

Since September 16, AIG has sent $120 billion in cash, collateral and other payouts to banks, municipal governments and other derivative counterparties around the world. This includes at least $20 billion to European banks. The list also includes American charity cases like Goldman Sachs, which received at least $13 billion. This comes after months of claims by Goldman that all of its AIG bets were adequately hedged and that it needed no "bailout." Why take $13 billion then? This needless cover-up is one reason Americans are getting angrier as they wonder if Washington is lying to them about these bailouts.
* * *

Given that the government has never defined "systemic risk," we're also starting to wonder exactly which system American taxpayers are paying to protect. It's not capitalism, in which risk-takers suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And in some cases it's not even American. The U.S. government is now in the business of distributing foreign aid to offshore financiers, laundered through a once-great American company...

The politicians also prefer to talk about AIG's latest bonus payments because they deflect attention from Washington's failure to supervise AIG. The Beltway crowd has been selling the story that AIG failed because it operated in a shadowy unregulated world and cleverly exploited gaps among Washington overseers. Said President Obama yesterday, "This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed." That's true, but Washington doesn't want you to know that various arms of government approved, enabled and encouraged AIG's disastrous bet on the U.S. housing market.

Scott Polakoff, acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, told the Senate Banking Committee this month that, contrary to media myth, AIG's infamous Financial Products unit did not slip through the regulatory cracks. Mr. Polakoff said that the whole of AIG, including this unit, was regulated by his agency and by a "college" of global bureaucrats...

And his agency wasn't the only federal regulator. AIG's Financial Products unit has been overseen for years by an SEC-approved monitor. And AIG didn't just make disastrous bets on housing using those infamous credit default swaps. AIG made the same stupid bets on housing using money in its securities lending program, which was heavily regulated at the state level. State, foreign and various U.S. federal regulators were all looking over AIG's shoulder and approving the bad housing bets...

There is a word for what went on in the last years of the Bu$h administration.

It's called a feeding frenzy.



But this frenzy was planned by the sharks that walked away with the alligator skin wingtips.

  ¶ 8:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Only Paranoiacs Distrust Their Ruling Class...

So scoff our betters, of course, via a paranoiac hangout-

The highest levels of the Obama administration are infested with members of a shadowy, elitist cabal intent on installing a one-world government that subverts the will of the American people.

It sounds crazy, but that’s what a group of very persistent conspiracy theorists insists, and they point to President Obama’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, as the latest piece of evidence supporting their claims.

It turns out that Sebelius – like top administration economists Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker, as well as leading Obama diplomats Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross – is a Bilderberger. That is, she is someone who has participated in the annual invitation-only conference held by an elite international organization known as the Bilderberg group...

Past participants have included Margaret Thatcher, who attended the 1975 meeting at Turkey’s Golden Dolphin Hotel, former media mogul Conrad Black, who has been to more than a dozen conferences, and Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, King Juan Carlos of Spain and top officials of BP, IBM, Barclays and the Bank of England...

The fulminating is aggravated by Obama's preference for surrounding himself with well-credentialed, well-connected, and well-traveled elites. His personnel choices have touched a populist, even paranoid nerve among those who are convinced powerful elites and secret societies are moving the planet toward a new world order.

Their worldview, characterized by a deep and angry suspicion of the ruling class rather than any prevailing partisan or ideological affiliation, is widely articulated on overnight AM radio shows and a collection of Internet websites...<

Now, there is no question the One has surrounded himself with "...well-credentialed, well-connected, and well-traveled elites". No red flags, there, from the people at Politico. There seems to be no problem with acknowledging the "ruling class", either. What our journalistic elite seem to have problems with is the sense of "deep and angry suspicion" out here where the far left wing of cyberspace meets the far right and agrees the Constitution is in deep, deep trouble.

We feel this way for many of the same reasons. Elites fit better in an Empire than a Republic. We didn't like Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton carrying "the white man's burden". Should we be more comfortable with a pseudo African-Amerikan figurehead Leader than a pseudo South Texas oilman?

But let's allow a little illumination of the Illuminati. They don't sit up at night plotting to take over the world. Our betters simply think a lot about how to make as much money as they possibly can, in a world more crowded and with less resources to exploit every day. Naturally, they prefer the company and association of people with the Right Stuff.

They don't plot to take over your world, but they'd prefer you kept your place, serving them in theirs.

They don't have to plot to take over our world. They already own it. They already own you.

They're the ruling class, and we are the ruled.  ¶ 9:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Drone Wars



Can cylons be far behind?

A missile fired by an American drone killed at least four people late Sunday at the house of a militant commander in northwest Pakistan, the latest use of what intelligence officials have called their most effective weapon against Al Qaeda.

And Pentagon officials say the remotely piloted planes, which can beam back live video for up to 22 hours, have done more than any other weapons system to track down insurgents and save American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan...

And the four people killed late Sunday at the home of a militant commander? Militants? Combatants? Civilians? Innocent? Guilty? Or just more statistics?  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Masters of War

The Undead walk among us.

WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Americans are less safe now that President Barack Obama has overturned Bush terrorism-fighting policies and that nearly all the Republican administration's goals in Iraq have been achieved...

Bob Dylan had a few things to say about Darth Cheney's type of people.

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead  ¶ 3:14 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "You are special, yes you really are..."

Of course, some are more special than others.

As my kids used to ask long ago, "Because Why?"

In a world where the main$tream asserts real conspiracies don't exist, several top AIG executives are being indicted for fraud and conspiracy.

Perhaps more interesting are the unindicted co-conspirators, such as Maurice ``Hank'' Greenberg, former chief executive officer of AIG, who's being sued for misappropriation of millions, and who's also working nowadays for Starr International. That's a multinational corporation run by the Starr family- and as you might have guess, Monicagate prosecutor Ken Starr is part of that blood. Maurice Greenberg was apparently once floated as a potential appointment director of the CIA in 1995.

But it gets even weirder. Most of the primary links down this rabbithole have vaporized, as you can see from that RI board post.

...AIG was founded by OSS operative Cornelius V. Starr (2 R’s), the uncle of Clinton’s friend Kenneth Starr. AIG was created for and is currently a front which provides cover for intelligence community illicit operations. In 2001, AIG owned a Risk Management firm called Kroll Associates.

Kroll played a major role in the events of September 11th, and continues to this day to enable events like the 7-7 and 7-21 bombings in the London Tube system… they then go on TV and provide “expert” counterterrorism testimony to the goldfish at home tuned into FoxNews and the like.

While Kroll provided the necessary operational capability, in part, for what was perpetrated; AIG and Marsh were focused on participating in both short and long-term money schemes. Kroll’s Jerome Hauer (a long time personal friend of ex-FBI Counterterrorism & Osama bin Laden expert John O’Neill) hired O’Neill as head of security for the WTC.

Kroll had also managed the bunker in WTC 7 for Guiliani, and Kroll’s board of directors shared one peculiar member in common with AIG; that being Frank G. Wisner Jr., son of OSS co-Founder Frank Wisner. I won’t go into the history of the OSS, Reinhard Gehlen, or the Council on Foreign Relations / Dulles affiliation with its creation, but I can recommend an excellent book, wherein its relevance is comprehensively documented; the title you’re looking for is: The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA by Burton Hersh (and printed in 1992)...

This rabbit hole gets very deep very quickly: AIG seems to have been moving money around covertly for the CIA since its inception and involved in every dirty dealing ever since.

Although you have a hard time following links in this story: there seems to be a high rate of drift. The bare bones of the connections are still plain to see. That is, if you are inclined to believe a board on a site mostly concerned with UFOs and things that go bump in the night.

One speculates that AIG won't be allowed to fail, although it may be transformed into something different, if only to throw off the trail of blood.  ¶ 11:51 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Return of the Zombified Market Avengers

Via Atrios

HORSHAM, England (Reuters) - The Treasury will offer more details in the coming week about how proposed public-private partnerships to take bad assets off banks' books will work, a senior department official said on Saturday.



The proposal for such partnerships was first made by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in February but the lack of detail about them at the time disappointed financial markets led to a sharp drop in stock prices.

Many analysts say the problem of toxic assets -- particularly mortgages gone bad as a result of the U.S. housing bust -- is at the heart of banks' reluctance to lend and must be dealt with before credit markets can operate normally again.

The Treasury official told reporters it wants to put out enough information in the coming week so that potential participants can better judge the proposal and it wants to indicate the timeframe within which it is expected to become operational.

Geithner, who was in southern England to meet finance ministers from Group of 20 nations, had indicated that something was likely soon but gave no details...

You, too, can be a weiner.

The Company doesn't care whether or not the recovery is real, only if the $ystem can make the Undead Empire walk.  ¶ 8:36 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "... they create desolation and call it peace."

-Tacitus

Chris Floyd dissects the rise of the New Americans among the Oborg, and of course, it's all good.

...despite the glaring transparency of the NYT's stovepiping duties, it is still instructive to watch these operations in action now and then, if only to keep one's bullshit detector in fighting trim. And a story by Thom Shanker highlighted in the Times on Saturday provides an excellent example of this venerable and pernicious process.

The nugget of "news" in the story was unsurprising -- but its implications were no less disturbing for that. Shanker, in the usual cringing courtier mode of our higher media, funnels the usual unexamined, unquestioned spin of the usual anonymous "senior official" to let the rabble know that the poobahs on the Potomac are gearing up to fight even more wars simultaneously all over the globe. Specifically, what we have is -- as Shanker puts it in the inelegant prose that characterizes most NYT pieces - a "rethink [of] what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time."

No, what we need now, says Shanker's Anonymous Militarist, is the ability to fight every damn body every damn where in every damn kind of way. Not just a two-front war, but three-front wars, four-front wars, counterinsurgencies, police actions, nation-building (with the preceding nation-destroying, of course), on and on, all at the same time.

Nowhere -- absolutely nowhere -- does the story give the slightest space for even the briefest consideration of a viewpoint that questions in even the mildest way the assumption that the United States should and must be prepared at all times to wage war on multiple fronts all over the world, forever. No, this "need" is simply a given -- for Thom Shanker, for the New York Times, and for the bipartisan Beltway elite...

  ¶ 7:42 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Retaining the Best and the Brightest Thieves

WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.

The payment of so much money at a company at the heart of the financial collapse that sent the broader economy into a tailspin almost certainly will fuel a popular backlash against the government’s efforts to prop up Wall Street. Past bonuses already have prompted President Obama and Congress to impose tough rules on corporate executive compensation at firms bailed out with taxpayer money.

A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled. In a letter to Mr. Geithner, Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., said at least some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday...

They say an honest politician is one who stays bought, and it certainly looks like the banksters got a good deal in the Oborg.  ¶ 6:59 AM 0 comments links to this post

  “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.”

Packaging does not neccessarily resemble content.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.

The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.” Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.

In television advertisements last fall, Mr. Obama criticized his Republican rival for the presidency, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. The benefits have long been tax-free, regardless of how generous they are or how much an employee earns. The advertisements did not point out that Mr. McCain, in exchange, wanted to give all families a tax credit to subsidize the purchase of coverage.

At the time, even some Obama supporters said privately that he might come to regret his position if he won the election; in effect, they said, he was potentially giving up an important option to help finance his ambitious health care agenda to reduce medical costs and to expand coverage to the 46 million uninsured Americans...

As with the Bu$h administration, there are always the Some and They, the measured pragmatists telling everyone how it really ought to be done.

Unless there's a great political groundswell all your health benefits are about to be taxed. And if there is a popular opposition against it, the One will get on the tube and tell everybody, why, this wasn't his idea, but some nameless faceless person in his Administration, and of course he won't let it happen.  ¶ 6:45 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Not gone, just walked off to look for America



[thanks to Mr. Fish]  ¶ 9:36 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Meet the New Boss



Overtly Kinder, gentler, speech using more Hope, but really pretty much same as the old boss:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would abandon the Bush administration’s term “enemy combatant” as it argues in court for the continued detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies.

But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration...

What is this "won't be fooled again" of which you speak?  ¶ 1:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Another Notch in the Gun

Earlier this week this created a momentary alert in the left wing of cyberspace. Seymour Hersch:

..."Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people..."

Now one wonders if this wing still does not report to anybody, whether they've returned to plausible deniablity mode, or whether they're still reporting to the same people they have for the last 10 years.

What one doesn't wonder at is the total lack of official outrage. It's only here in the wilds of cyberspace you can find people even talking about it. In the more main$tream boards it's "Sy Hersch was all wrong about Iran, why should we believe him now".

But was he, really, any more than Clinton was wrong about the Y2K danger? In both cases people got motivated to action, and something bad didn't happen. Quite likely because people got motivated to act.

This issue, though, faces the same kind of progressive inertia now that every other issue the Oborg disregard.

Plausible deniablity from those in denial mode. It's the Economy, stupid. Certainly it's the stupid the Company find useful idiots.  ¶ 8:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Struggle

Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report says what really needs to be said.

Lots of folks on the left, it is now apparent, no longer seek anything more than to bask in the sunshine of Barack Obama’s smile. No matter how much national treasure their champion transfers to the bankster class, and despite his exceeding George W. Bush in military spending, so-called progressives for Obama continue to celebrate their imagined emergence as players in the national political saga. Having in practice foresworn resistance to Power, they relish in bashing the non-Obamite Left...

Left Obamites only weakly “criticize” and virtually never “resist” Obama’s rightist policies and appointments in the crucial military and economic arenas – which was, first, the fear and, later, the main complaint of the non-Obamite Left. The Obama Effect is to neutralize Blacks and the Left (Blacks being the main electoral base of the American Left) by capturing their enthusiasm for Obama’s own corporate purposes. Obama and his Democratic Leadership Council allies (and their corporate masters) monopolize the “motion,” all the while shutting out even mildly Left voices (as in the recent White House Forum on Health, from which single payer health care advocates were initially barred). Blacks and the Left have not been in any kind of effective forward “motion” since Election Day. As we shall see, Burnham’s definition of “motion” does not involve confronting Power, but rather, attaching oneself to it.

“Whatever kind of “evil” Hillary and Bill are, Obama is.”

Policy-wise, Obama no more “represents a substantial, principally positive political shift” than his political twin, Hillary – again, color aside...

Obama is “just another steward of capitalism, more attractive than most, but not an agent of fundamental change.” This has been easily observed, since Blacks and the Left have allowed Obama to act upon his corporate and imperial instincts, unimpeded by even the mildest counter-pressures. His presidency takes shape to the Right of Democratic congressional leaders, who have made more noise over Obama’s Iraq trickle-out and his clear threats to Social Security and other “entitlements,” than have many Left Obamites.

Obama is not simply “bound to disappoint” – he has already been cause for great disappointment, even among those of us who scoped his essential corporatist nature years ago. Who would have predicted that he would play the most eager Gunga Din for the bizarre Bush/Paulson bank bailout decree, last year? Who would have foreseen that Obama would retain the loathsome international criminal Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense? That he would continue Bush’s policies on Africa – Zimbabwe, Sudan, Somalia, AFRICOM – without missing a beat? That he would so quickly offer to put Social Security “on the table” for “reform” (in the Republican sense of the term)?

...Obama’s military budget, bigger than Bush’s, his escalation in Afghanistan/Pakistan, the unraveling of his Iraq “withdrawal” promises, and his provocations in Africa all signal that this president has no intention of relinquishing the goal of global U.S. hegemony. To paraphrase his famous statement on war, “I’m not opposed to imperialism, just dumb imperialism...”

Obama is a Company Man. The Recovery is aimed at the Market. But strangely enough, a Recovery aimed at the Market will not lead the Market to recovery.

We have a $ystemic virus, and the to curve the disease, the $ystem must be abandoned.  ¶ 10:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

  One Hopeless Bad Idea

Go tell the One to shove it up where the sun doesn't shine of whatever beaurocrat that thought it up.

And he better Hope that no one traces this idea to his Change.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance.

But the proposal would be "dead on arrival" if it's sent to Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said.

Murray used that blunt terminology when she told Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. Her remarks came during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs about the 2010 budget.

No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama voicing their opposition to the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration.

The groups also cited an increase in "third-party collections" estimated in the 2010 budget proposal -- something they said could be achieved only if the Veterans Administration started billing for service-related injuries.

Asked about the proposal, Shinseki said it was under "consideration..."

Why don't you just go ahead and lick that Third Rail, Mr. Hopeful Audacity? Yes indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing that made America hate Bu$hCo and Darth Rumsfeld. You just continue to listen to Robert Gates and see where it gets you.  ¶ 10:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Far from the hand of any god but Mammon

The New York Pravda outlines what all the locals know but the Faithful can not believe:

It's been a year since Bear Stearns collapsed, kicking off Wall Street’s meltdown, and it’s more than time to debunk the myths that many Wall Street executives have perpetrated about what has happened and why. These tall tales — which tend to take the form of how their firms were the “victims” of a “once-in-a-lifetime tsunami” that nothing could have prevented — not only insult our collective intelligence but also do nothing to restore the confidence in the banking system that these executives’ actions helped to destroy...

...Can it possibly be true that veteran Wall Street executives like Messrs. Cayne, Schwartz and Fuld — who were paid an estimated $128 million, $117 million and at least $350 million, respectively, in the five years before their businesses imploded — got all that money but were clueless about the risks they had exposed their firms to in the process?

In fact, although they have not chosen to admit it, many of these top bankers, as well as Stan O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch (who was handed $161.5 million when he “retired” in late 2007) made decision after decision, year after year, that turned their firms into houses of cards.

...Mr. Cayne never seriously considered raising the firm’s equity, which we now know was perilously low, nor did he seriously consider selling or merging it. Rather, he deliberately chose to take Bear deeper into the manufacture and sale of all those risky mortgage-backed securities, as well as into the business of doing trades with hedge funds. Why? Simply put, Bear’s board paid him and the other four members of Bear’s executive committee — including Mr. Schwartz and another former chief executive, Alan C. Greenberg — to maximize the firm’s “return on equity” calculation, which is Wall Street lingo for figuring out how much money one can make using as little capital as possible.

This directive encouraged Mr. Cayne to make the firm as profitable as possible — a worthy goal, no doubt — but without raising any more cash or issuing any new stock, as doing either would increase the denominator of the return-on-equity calculation, and thereby lower the bonus pool Mr. Cayne and his executives could split among themselves.

When viewed through this simple prism, it is not the least bit surprising that when Bear Stearns ran into trouble soon after its two hedge funds blew up in June 2007, Mr. Cayne — and later Mr. Schwartz — chose not to raise new equity, even though they could easily have done so back then. So Bear’s balance sheet remained larded with extremely risky assets that the firm had leveraged to the hilt by borrowing cheaply in the overnight financing markets...

Like Mr. Cayne, Mr. Fuld had made huge and risky bets on the manufacture and sale of mortgage-backed securities — by underwriting tens of billions of mortgage securities in 2006 alone — and on the acquisition of highly leveraged commercial real estate. Five days before the firm imploded, Mr. Fuld proposed spinning off some $30 billion of these toxic assets still on the firm’s balance sheet into a separate company. But the market hated the idea, and the death spiral began.

Even Goldman Sachs, which appears to have fared better in this crisis than any other large Wall Street firm, was no saint. The firm underwrote some $100 billion of commercial mortgage obligations — putting it among the top 10 underwriters — before it got out of the game in 2006 and then cleaned up by selling these securities short. Basically, Goldman got lucky.

When in the summer of 2007 questions began to be raised about the value of such mortgage-related assets, the overnight lenders began getting increasingly nervous. Eventually, they decided the risks of lending to these firms far outweighed the rewards, and they pulled the plug.

The firms then simply ran out of cash, as everyone lost confidence in them at once and wanted their money back at the same time. Bear Stearns, Lehman and Merrill Lynch all made the classic mistake of borrowing short and lending long and, as one Bear executive told me, that was “game, set, match.”

Could these Wall Street executives have made other, less risky choices? Of course they could have, if they had been motivated by something other than absolute greed. Many smaller firms — including Evercore Partners, Greenhill and Lazard — took one look at those risky securities and decided to steer clear. When I worked at Lazard in the 1990s, people tried to convince the firm’s patriarchs — André Meyer, Michel David-Weill and Felix Rohatyn — that they must expand into riskier lines of business to keep pace with the big boys. The answer was always a firm no.

Even the venerable if obscure Brown Brothers Harriman — the private partnership where Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of two presidents, made his fortune — has remained consistently profitable since 1818. None of these smaller firms manufactured a single mortgage-backed security — and none has taken a penny of taxpayer money during this crisis.

Then of course, the punchline:

...there can be no restoration of confidence in the banking system — and therefore no hope for an economic recovery — until Wall Street comes clean. If the executives responsible for what happened won’t step forward on their own, perhaps a subpoena-wielding panel along the lines of the 9/11 commission can be created to administer a little truth serum.

With this statement, the whole editorial turns into high comedy. In other words, make a government inquiry to scape the right goats. Because a Commission will only ensure the wolves get to keep wearing the sheepskins.  ¶ 7:23 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Chipping your chicks

The New York Pravda, amazingly enough, publishes an Op-Ed against the Department of Agriculture's drive to microchip all farm animals and in the process drive all family farms out of business.

...So who would gain if the identification system eventually becomes mandatory, as the Agriculture Department has hoped? It would help exporters by soothing the fears of foreign consumers who have shunned American beef. Other beneficiaries would include manufacturers of animal tracking systems that stand to garner hefty profits for tracking the hundreds of millions of this country’s farm animals. It would also give industrial agriculture a stamp of approval despite its use of antibiotics, confinement and unnatural feeding practices that increase the threat of disease.

At the same time, the system would hurt small pasture-based livestock farms like my family’s, even though our grazing practices and natural farming methods help thwart the spread of illnesses. And when small farms are full participants in a local food system, tracking a diseased animal doesn’t require an exorbitantly expensive national database...

Exactly the point.  ¶ 9:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Opium of the People

  ¶ 8:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  More Simple Answers to Simple Questions

At Kos, bobswern asks a simple question:

Wall St. Bailout: Is A Massive Scandal About To Unfold?

...Reports have been circulating, based upon leaks to the media over the past 24 hours, that:

1.) AIG ("Bad Bank" #1): $50 billion of the $173 billion forked over to AIG, since September, has been doled out to a handful of Wall Street heavy-hitters--a/k/a the "couterparties" that paid AIG to insure their toxic paper--to support their so-called insurance claims, backed by the good faith of AIG; folks who happened to make a pantload of money writing insurance policies on these Credit Default Swaps and Commercial Debt Obligations over the past few years.

We have Ms. Morgenson in the NY Times telling us the counterparties' sweetheart deals are "likely to increase" in terms of sheer numbers of billions of taxpayer dollars. But, it's the additional documentation ("NEW INFO") below Morgenson's quote which is most troublesome...it's not $50 billion...it's already $80 billion...and these same firms are receiving 100 cents on the dollar for this toxic paper, too!

...It's already a LOT more than $50 billion, which was reported as "the number" in the past 24 hours; it's at least $80 billion and growing, or almost half of all the funds sent to AIG to date...and growing; perhaps much more if not MOST of the funds dished out to AIG to date all going to the same usual suspects...

The facts are we may just be scratching the surface on the AIG matter. It's going to--and already is--getting much more out-of-hand than originally reported, and virtually all of those funds has gone to the same 20-25 firms (and that's only as of late December '08); and, perhaps even more outrageous, it appears that a trend had developed early on with regard to these toxic debt purchases, whereby the recipients (that same list of 25+/- firms) of the Treasury Department's and the Federal Reserve's largesse were profiting to the tune of 100% on the actual value of the paper being purchased. They're doing this by allowing the counterparties to KEEP the collateral, on top of receiving the payments!!! (See story link and quote, immediately below.) In other words, the Fed was overpaying these firms to the tune of full face value, 100 cents on the dollar, on paper that was only worth from 20 cents to 60 cents on the dollar in the marketplace!

...The Treasury Department is currently in the process of providing a $500 billion infusion (along with another $1.5 trillion government guarantee to the hedge fund industry) into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And, while some naive speculation in the MSM is focused upon a handful of large bank defaults with regard to how this money is going to be spent, the reality is that it's apparently the stealthiest way for the government to actually provision that "Bad Bank" that everyone's been hearing about. (Some have said that the first bad bank was, in effect, AIG. But, based upon the sheer magnitude of Geithner's plans--already on record in a few stories--for this massive FDIC scam, the AIG mess pales in comparison.) You see, Geithner's stated plans call for "private investment" (i.e.: hedge funds and sovereign funds) to buy up as much as another $2 trillion in toxic debt; but here's the scam: the government is going to insure 100% of all investor's funds via the FDIC, under something they're calling, a "Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program," basically eliminating all risk in the deall for these hedge fund investors!

...1.) AIG: Almost all of the $173 billion that's passed through AIG may be going to these 20-25 key Wall Street "players." It's not the $50 billion that's been widely reported in the past 24 hours. We know it is at least $80 billion...and growing. And, these good ole' boys are getting 100 cents on the dollar on assets that are only worth between 20 cents and 60 cents on the dollar now.

2.) FDIC: It appears that the primary reason the FDIC's sole mission is being contorted is to: a.) provide a massive handout to the hedge fund and sovereign fund sectors, b.) avoid the negative spin that would occur if this was labelled for what it actually is, a bad bank and a massive extension of TARP, c.) and a situation where much more control of our nation's traditional banking services are being put in the hands of a grossly underregulated hedge fund industry cowboys...the exact opposite of the much more intensive regulation which is, both, so desperately needed and for which so many are clamoring as I write this. (In reality, we're turning over the keys to the car to the very "drivers" that got us into this mess in the first place.)

Simple answer: No. There is scandal, but it will only proceed, not unfold.

Obama is owned by the Free Marketeers.

There will be no real fixes, only patches that give the privateers more license to steal from us in more inventive ways, while the Faithful read the latest Washington Scripture.

Seeing is believing.

All I see is a lot of posturing while letting the banksters of Goldman-Sachs continue to steal the show.

Even if he stopped it all tomorrow, the money would be gone. He won't, he can't. Instead he continues to try to ride the tiger that's eating him. His excuse is that he has to compromise to effect change.

Once we all pass through the colon of the Company we'll have change, alright.

For us, the change I see is more like a Joan Rivers facelift for progressive policy.

The wrinkles are gone, but it's still the same old story underneath.  ¶ 6:52 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Codex Alimentarius



If you headed an multinational corporation that wanted to have a monopoly on all the world's food supply, what would you do?

Well, first you might pay for some multinational regulations in the guise of Free Trade.

Then you might go about making it illegal for anyone but your corporation to grow and sell food. Or make it illegal to eat it if you didn't grow it. All in the guise of "food safety".

Now once upon a time the FDA handled things like this, but that was before Bu$hie drowned the government in a bathtub. So now that the official face of guvmint has changed from Stern Daddy to Soul Big Brother, there will be action. Of course, not by reviving the FDA.

Where's the campaign contributions profit in that?  ¶ 8:51 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Jobs Program



Pork is what the other guy spends your money on.

...Congressional and industry leaders say they recognize that defense spending is peaking, and the time has come — given the many financial strains on the federal government — to overhaul an acquisition system that has resulted in smaller, but more expensive, fleets of combat planes and ships.

There is also broad political support for the Pentagon’s plans to shift some of the more than $650 billion in defense spending from futuristic weapons programs to simpler arms that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan can use now.

But with a labor report on Friday showing that the economy has lost 4.4 million jobs since the recession began, “if you’re talking about canceling major weapons systems, that becomes hard,” said William S. Cohen, a former senator from Maine who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton.

“Given the economic climate we’re operating in now, any congressman or senator is going to say, ‘I’ve got to protect the jobs in my district or state,’ and that’s understandable,” Mr. Cohen said. “The difficulty now is how do you get a majority to vote against their own interests, even if you could persuade them that the changes would be best for the national defense?”

Doubtless we should continue to use hundreds of billions of dollars a year on futuristic weapons we can only use to fight Skynet, which we are also using hundreds of billions of dollars a year to create.  ¶ 6:37 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Shearing the Sheep Before They Eat Mutton

Last week Jon Stewart said what should have been said:



But, Deep Capture has been talking about CNBC's motivations for doing this for awhile.

Yes, Virginia, it is organized crime.

It is organized crime working in the interests of very old money. It is organized crime working with an aim. The aim is de-modernization of most of America and most of the rest of the world.

As unpalatable as this is coming from the overtly aristocratic Republicans, it's important to realize this same kind of attitude is endemic in many environmentally conscious and socially active Democrats as well. Their fallacy comes in thinking that you can end the rapacious industrialism of the their Republican adversaries by returning the world to a pre-industrial state.

This is exactly wrong. The rapaciousness of those who would be feudal lords in increased in a demodernized world. The modern values of rationality, of education, of separation of church and state are what allowed the progress of the world in humanitarian advances in the 20th century.

Take that away and there will be collapse and a new Dark Age.  ¶ 8:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

  It's a matter of national security

Loose Change, Final Cut.

Also, what the bailout money's being used for.

Check it out.  ¶ 8:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Law of motion

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Catherine Austin Fitts:

The full page ad in Ruppert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its “Future of Finance Initiative” starts off by saying that the financial system has stopped working.

I completely disagree.

The financial system is working for the first time since Bob Rubin and his colleagues created the “strong dollar policy” complete with gold market manipulation and mortgage bubble. It is working because a wide group of market participants do not want to invest capital in unproductive activities or banks, lawyers and accounting firms that intentionally engage in criminal fraud.

To date, the Fed and Treasury theory is that $10 trillion of central bank and government guarantees and subsidies will permit a fraudulent system to continue to function. The answer is, of course, no it won’t. Hence, the proposal for a new initiative to make sure markets are not allowed to work.

I got my MBA at Wharton. I have heard it all my life and I know it is true. When something is unproductive, overpriced or unhealthy, markets shift capital away. That is a good thing.

A market is like a human body in trauma. It moves the blood away from the toes and preserves it for the heart, brain and lungs.

However, the institutions that made this mess—the likes of Goldman Sachs, Sullivan & Cromwell, The Carlyle Group, and the academic institutions that give them air cover and many more - are now persuaded that a financial system that no longer trusts them needs “fixing” and they are the men for the job. They want to show us how we can shift more blood out of the heart, lungs and brain and into the them and their fellow toes.

This conundrum of keeping the unproductive in control is why the Administration is proposing a massive defense and enforcement budget. Only financial totalitarianism can keep something this expensive and destructive going.

Such arrogance proves that we do indeed need markets to continue to work. We need those who need $10 trillion of bailouts (and counting) to fail and, as legendary investor Jim Rodger suggests, learn how to drive a taxi, or better yet a tractor.

If you have any question exactly what the movement really is, you should read another piece of Ms. Fitts':Financial Coup d'Etat.

Make no mistake: the economic crisis is 9-11.v.2.  ¶ 3:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Every Watchman's got to know his limitations



Wherein Masters of the Universe show themselves totally unable to dislodge Richard Nixon.

And totally uninterested in doing so.

Arrgghh, teh Stupid, it Burns.

Of course, 15 minutes of go Army, go National Guard, and rock & roll- country music Marines come-on-and-enlist commercials was the perfect warm-up to a killer evening of blood and sex. And of course deep dialog.  ¶ 10:19 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Dither into action if it serves as a distraction

After a lot of campaign noise about reversing the regulations on stem cell research, it seems Obama is set to actually do it.

One supposes it is better to have the bobbleheads foment on this than where all the AIG money went. Saudi Arabian oil, Columbian cocaine, or Afghani heroin?  ¶ 8:24 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Another Family Guy

Keeping it all in the Family, doubtless.

MARAJ, Lebanon — For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife...

...From his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys that might have been used to transport weapons to Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say. He spoke with his handlers by satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money, cameras and listening devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length, investigators say...

...Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

[via Res ipsa loquitur @ Swedish Meatballs Confidential]

It's doubtless another case of you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours.


[img via Bag News]

You know it's getting hard for even the players to tell the players or even the plays even with their scorecards.  ¶ 7:34 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Denial Is Just Another Brand of Kool-Aid

Krugman hits it again:

...The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.

Call it the "clap louder" approach to policy. Rumsfeldian, isn't it? It's because the financial equivalent of NeoCons- the Chicago School Free Marketeers- ran the Bu$hCo economy, and run the Oborg economic collective too.

...Thus, in a recent interview Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, tried to make a distinction between the “basic inherent economic value” of troubled assets and the “artificially depressed value” that those assets command right now. In recent transactions, even AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities have sold for less than 40 cents on the dollar, but Mr. Geithner seems to think they’re worth much, much more.

And the government’s job, he declared, is to “provide the financing to help get those markets working,” pushing the price of toxic waste up to where it ought to be.

What’s more, officials seem to believe that getting toxic waste properly priced would cure the ills of all our major financial institutions. Earlier this week, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was asked about the problem of “zombies” — financial institutions that are effectively bankrupt but are being kept alive by government aid. “I don’t know of any large zombie institutions in the U.S. financial system,” he declared, and went on to specifically deny that A.I.G. — A.I.G.! — is a zombie.

This is the same A.I.G. that, unable to honor its promises to pay off other financial institutions when bonds default, has already received $150 billion in aid and just got a commitment for $30 billion more...

...So why has this zombie idea — it keeps being killed, but it keeps coming back — taken such a powerful grip? The answer, I fear, is that officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable...

It's not because it's a dirty commie idea, as much as they posture about it. As a matter of fact, people like Alan Greenspan have also advocated it. It's a war of bankster factions, some of which have postured themselves to profit if the feds buy the toxic waste, others of which have postured themselves if the feds do a takeover.

It's a Mafia style gang war playing out in high finance. One wonders, if no one is willing to yield their turf, who is going to be sleeping with the fishes. Aside from the American people, that is.  ¶ 6:33 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Mobius Rabbitholes



TocqueDeville at Kos has noticed that CNBC has become quite the anti-Obama financial policy platform, including staging a bogus uprising against Obama's mortgage plan. Among other things.

...This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial "journalists" from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes "blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft."

And if that wasn't fun enough, it may be the underlying story of what collapsed the entire, global banking system or at least served as the catalyst for the collapse...

It's always good to see the Oborg notice the world they live in.

Now, if they would only notice the other crowd of banksters that actually surrounds and guides policy for The One is the same crowd that surrounded and guided policy for Bu$hie in his final months at the behest of Poppy.

And they're making enemies.

The question is , do Chicago style banksters have Chicago style vendettas?

In the world of Bu$hCo, we saw internal struggles within the CIA that reflected the dissent within the Company. The repercussions of this internal war led to the Der Decider ignoring the pre-9-11 warnings, while propagating his own biases. The outing of Plame was part of a wider war for control.

That produced the Endless War in Iran, and screwed it up so bad Poppy had to knock Rummy out of the driver's seat with Gates.

Similarly, Paulson was sent in to manage the money once it became clear the Kewl Kids had drunk a little too much of their own Kool-Aid and actually believed their own cooked books. He didn't really solve anything, he only made things appear more solvent. Geithner's a similar sort of man doing a similar sort of thing.

In the world of the Oborg, we are seeing a similar factional dispute in the administration of economic policy. The One has no more real control of the Company's financial machine than Der Decider did of its war machine. What he does do is set the tone among the factions. Negotion instead of confrontation. Still, all those two-bit gangsters the Cheney administration elevated to positions of power and inflluence are now being discarded. Change has come, and the short changed, both the innocent and the shyster, are increasingly outraged.

The reality is, many of the banksters that profited under the old Bu$h smash-and-grab are real gangsters. Many are people who can't keep up with the New World Order they brought upon themselves. Many will do more than curse those who ride higher on the new wave of chaos they themselves propagated.

I believe the saying is: There Will Be Blood.  ¶ 9:11 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Bipartisan Gittin' Yer Iran On v2

It's déjà vu all over again, as the PNAC walk among us in their latest incarnation as the "Bipartisan Policy Institute" task force.

The disbelief among the Oborg Kool-Aid drinkers Lotus-eaters registers in various permutations at b's and Floyds separate posts as:

"yes, but why is this leaked? If it was policy surely Obama would say so publicly?"

Like The One really runs things. Like He'd really talk about the pending Pentagon jobs program when he needs to take care of all the unemployed. Like he doesn't remember what happened to a Kennedy who blocked a CIA-Pentagon invasion of Cuba in the 1960s.

Elections may have consequences, but so does embarrasing the Company in an obvious way.  ¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

  "Americans are like mushrooms..."

...In general, they like being kept in the dark and fed bullshit. They’re absolutely content to bathe in official PSYOP and .gov will give ‘em what they want.

As long as someone else is willing to buy U.S. Treasuries in ever larger amounts, the vast, dumb horror show will play on.

My guess is that the next major false flag event will occur at some point after U.S. Treasury auctions begin to fail and the Fed starts buying the paper. It’s game over at that point, so why not light off a nuke?

It would be like hitting a reset switch. It would induce total and instant amnesia in the small, neural swellings between the ears of the zombie sheep...

Agreed, Kevin. Most Amerika won't even admit psyops exist. Perhaps it's because at any given moment there are dozens of independent sources broadcasting their own takes into the consensual reality of the main$tream.  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Only the Rahmmer knows for sure

...every step He takes.

While profiling White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza saw something interesting in Emanuel’s office. It’s mentioned only in passing:

Next to his computer monitor is a smaller screen that looks like a handheld G.P.S. device and tells Emanuel where the President and senior White House officials are at all times.

So, Obama, Biden, and other “senior White House officials” are lojacked?

One wonders who holds Rahm's leash, too.  ¶ 9:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Secret Government v2

You thought- may still think- your vote made a difference.

George Washington knows better:

Yesterday, in his appearance before Congress, Bernanke revealed with a single word who really runs the United States:

Senator Sanders: "Will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars?"

Bernanke: "No"

No?

Indeed, Bernanke and Treasury refuse to provide this information even confidentially and off-the-record to Congress. And the official overseer of the TARP bailout program can't even get the information of where all the bailout money is going.

With his single word "no", Bernanke revealed that Congress is impotent and out of the loop. In other words, Congress doesn't really run the country in the core area of business, finance and the economy. The financial giants and their servants at the Fed and Treasury do.

Indeed, Bernanke's testimony is related to - and as important as - the fact that the warmongers gave themselves dictatorial powers.

The warmongers and the financial elite run the country. The people and their elected representatives do not, except to the extent that those representatives play ball with the real powers-that-be behind the scenes...

This seems to surprise a lot of people. Others vehemently deny it. George Washington seems aware of it, giving a long list of quotes that suggest it's been our lot for some time. Like ever since the country was founded.  ¶ 9:13 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Cause & Effect "In a Time of War"

Avedon pulls together a lot of posts responding to the revelation that, duh, Bu$hie's kewl cruel crew pretty much operated like a dictatorship:

...no one mentions the other big hole in what appears to be everyone's excuse for this illegal madness, which is that people got a bit carried away in the days after September 11th of 2001. See, this doesn't work too well with the revelation that the NSA program of illegal spying on Americans was initiated months earlier. It wasn't power they took in the heat of the moment after being shaken by a terrorist attack, nor was it something they did because it was "necessary" in time of war, but something they had started doing almost immediately upon taking office. It makes their entire argument moot; there was no "wartime" to "justify" the violations they were committing in March, not September, of 2001...

This is a dirty little secret that was in fact no secret at all.

People were exposing this virtually from the time Bu$hie seized office.

"Seized office" being another dirty little non-secret of the Bu$h years. There were two stolen presidential elections. The only reason this one didn't get stolen was there were too many pissed people showing up to vote for the republicans to get away with it.

The main$tream continues to act surprised by all of this. But they ignored and ridiculed us then, just as they ignore and ridicule us now. The only difference is larger and larger audiences ignore them because they can't ignore what they've done to the economy and the nation.

Which brings me to something Greenwald said:

... It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect...

  ¶ 6:47 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Chaos is the Financial Plan

Patrick Byrne:

"I’m pretty sure that someone out there wants the finance system to crack."

Several someones, in fact. For your consideration:

... it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.

As hundreds of billions of dollars flow from Washington to jump-start the nation’s staggering banks, automakers and other industries, a new economy is emerging of businesses that hope to make money from the various government programs that make up the largest economic rescue in history...

A new economy of emerging business- run by banksters, too.  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "It's not socialism when we get it"

Krugman on zombie financial ideas that won't die:

...Every plan we’ve heard from Treasury amounts to the same thing — an attempt to socialize the losses while privatizing the gains. We’re going to buy up all the bad assets at premium prices; no, we’re going to offer the banks guarantees against losses; no, we’re going to let private investors buy the stuff, but offer them de facto guarantees against losses in the form of non-recourse loans...

...the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?

Both.  ¶ 5:26 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Endless Denial of Endless Crimes

The New York Pravda's editorial page once again hits close to the mark in two different opinion posts, but never quite dons the full tinfoil jacket regarding the disarray in our society.

After all, it has to make a payroll, and who manages their money?

In Wars, Endless Wars , Bob Herbert questions one of the third rails of the Village:

...The U.S. economy is in free fall, the banking system is in a state of complete collapse and Americans all across the country are downsizing their standards of living. The nation as we’ve known it is fading before our very eyes, but we’re still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we are still unable to define.

Even as the U.S. begins plans to reduce troop commitments in Iraq, it is sending thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan. The strategic purpose of this escalation, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged, is not at all clear...

Why, he might even question the wisdom of trying to make ExxonMobil customers out of one of the oldest cultures in the world sitting on one of the biggest pools of what ExxonMobil wants so much.

Obviously he isn't listening to Petraeus Caesar's words of wisdom:

...We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don’t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.

Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down.

As for Iraq, President Obama announced last week that substantial troop withdrawals will take place over the next year and a half and that U.S. combat operations would cease by the end of August 2010. But, he said, a large contingent of American troops, perhaps as many as 50,000, would still remain in Iraq for a “period of transition.”

That’s a large number of troops, and the cost of keeping them there will be huge. Moreover, I was struck by the following comment from the president: “There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments, but our enemies should be left with no doubt. This plan gives our military the forces and flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners and to succeed.”

In short, we’re committed to these two conflicts for a good while yet, and there is nothing like an etched-in-stone plan for concluding them. I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fragile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time — with endless warfare...

The solution obviously is for the DIA to secretly tap his phones and watch his every move from $500 billion dollars worth of spy satellites. He must have terrorist connections somewhere. If Kevin Bacon does, anyone can. Making those connections is what Information Warfare is all about, anyway.

That's where your tax dollars are going.

In another almost-see-the-light moment, the editorial page notes The Never-Ending Bailout:

Americans awoke to the news on Monday that federal officials had spent yet another feverish weekend concocting yet another bailout. This time, the Obama Treasury Department — sounding a lot like the Bush Treasury Department — promised another $30 billion to the American International Group, the giant insurer.

It was the fourth time since September that taxpayers have been called upon to rescue A.I.G. from collapse. It brings the bailout commitment for that one company to some $160 billion.

...What no one is saying — the Bush folks wouldn’t, and the Obama team seems to have taken the same vow of Wall Street omertà — is which firms would be most threatened by an A.I.G. collapse. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve noted in their statement that A.I.G. is a “significant counterparty to a number of major financial institutions.”

That means that by enabling A.I.G. to avert bankruptcy proceedings, the taxpayer is also bailing out — whom exactly?

Not knowing is not acceptable. At this stage of a deepening crisis, no one is arguing that the government should let A.I.G. collapse into a disorderly bankruptcy. It is too interconnected. During the housing bubble, it used unregulated derivatives to insure mortgage securities that turned out to be toxic — without putting aside reserves in case it had to pay up. If it now went under, there could be a chain of catastrophic defaults among banks that hold the securities and related investments.

The A.I.G. bailouts fail the basic test of transparency: Who ends up with the money? Major financial institutions are not innocent victims of A.I.G.’s demise. They are sophisticated investors, and they should have known the risks being taken — and who profited mightily from the relationship before it all came crashing down.

Whomever the recipients are, they should be investigated for their roles in the crash and, to the extent possible, be made to pay for the bailouts.

The serial A.I.G. bailouts are especially problematic for their connection to the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs. At the time of the first A.I.G. rescue last fall, it was reported by Gretchen Morgenson in The Times that Goldman was A.I.G.’s largest trading partner, with some $20 billion of business tied into the insurer. Goldman has said that its exposure to risk from A.I.G. was offset, or hedged, by other investments.

What is certain is that Goldman has lots of friends in high places — yet one more reason why this bailout has to be as transparent as possible. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, was the only Wall Street executive at a September meeting at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial A.I.G. bailout. Also involved in the discussion was the then head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner, who is now President Obama’s Treasury secretary...

Well that's going too far, and I'm sure the Men in Black will be paying a visit to whoever wrote that screed if the Company can scrape together their payroll, anyway.

What's really missing is any connection of the black hole in the economy, the black hole of endless war, and the red hole where so much of the money goes. The NIDA:

...In recent years, the availability of higher purity heroin (which is more suitable for inhalation) and the decreases in prices reported in many areas have increased the appeal of heroin for new users who are reluctant to inject. Heroin has also been appearing in more affluent communities...

All our efforts in Iraqiranistan have secured one thing: a number of consecutive years each with the highest rate of production of the opium poppy ever in history from the world's top supplier.

It's probably a little too tinfoily for the main$tream, but the connections are clear. The pity with conspiracy theories is that criminal conspiracies don't need a Bond-style SPECTRE to hold them together. Hundred of cells of criminal activity can work together and even compete for top dog without any co-ordination at all. This becomes particularly easy in a Republic that's abandoned its Constitution for the lure of Empire.  ¶ 6:28 AM 0 comments links to this post

  There are reasons...

Why?

The Law condemns the Man or Woman
Who steals the Goose from off the Common,
But sets the greater Felon loose
Who steals the Common from the Goose.

It's deja vu all over again in the 21st century, with eavesdropping & rendition of the usual suspects but a whole new manifest destiny deal for the aristocrat banksters.

They're not good reasons, of course.  ¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Fireballs Happen



Earthgrazer: The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972

...In 1972, an unusually bright meteor from space was witnessed bouncing off Earth's atmosphere, much like a skipping stone can bounce off of a calm lake. The impressive event lasted several seconds, was visible in daylight, and reportedly visible all the way from Utah, USA to Alberta, Canada. Pictured above, the fireball was photographed streaking above Teton mountains behind Jackson Lake, Wyoming, USA...

  ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments links to this post

  What does it mean when Greenspan talks Nationalization?

What does it mean when Free Marketeers embrace socialism?

It's not just simple doublespeak, it's double talk.

Let's reiterate Hudson's conclusion- and Floyd's final comment- here:

...Neoliberal denunciations of public regulation and taxation as “socialism” is really an attack on classical political economy – the “original” liberalism whose ideal was to free society from the parasitic legacy of feudalism.

A truly socialized Treasury policy would be for banks to lend for productive purposes that contribute to real economic growth, not merely to increase overhead and inflate asset prices by enough to extract interest charges. Fiscal policy would aim to minimize rather than maximizing the price of home ownership and doing business, by basing the tax system on collecting the rent that is now being paid out as interest. Shifting the tax burden off wages and profits onto rent and interest was the core of classical political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the Progressive Era and Social Democratic reform movements in the United States and Europe prior to World War I.

But this doctrine and its reform program has been buried by the rhetorical smokescreen organized by financial lobbyists seeking to muddy the ideological waters sufficiently to mute popular opposition to today’s power grab by finance capital and monopoly capital. Their alternative to true nationalization and socialization of finance is debt peonage, oligarchy and neo-feudalism. They have called this program “free markets.”

The brass of our financial elites is awe-inspiring, indeed almost sublime. In broad daylight, they are taking a gargantuan catastrophe -- for which they are to blame, and for which everyone rightly and angrily blames them -- and they are using it to further entrench their power and privilege. That sure is one hell of a trick...and there sure enough will be hell to pay -- for us, not them -- if they can pull it off.

They will, and there will be. Count on it.  ¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Reality-based enviromentalism

Why am I hearing this from well-educated progressives in the 21^st century:

"... it may be too late to save ourselves from Gaia's reaction to having us around, and many millions are likely to die."

Gaia's doubtless pissed.



Don't laugh. They're serious.
[i have to apologize, they took the original image offline;
this one is almost as anthropomorphically
silly, though]

Unless, of course, the sun's period of extended quiescence from 2007-8 continues to extend itself. In which case the excess CO₂ is all that's keeping us from another Ice Age. In which case, Gaia likes us.

Green cities, planting trees, renewable energy, decreasing carbon emissions and other pollutants are all good rational ideas.

Gaia is a silly concept. We live on a planet. We can screw it up, but we'd be killing ourselves. It would be cause-and-effect, but it wouldn't be the reaction of an angry planetary entity.

More science, please, and less New Age mythology. The neolithic and iron age stuff we're surrounded with is bad enough. There's no Hell below us, and above us only sky.

There's no planetary Goddess, either, any more than there is a Hairy Thunderer, a Cosmic Muffin, or a Flying Spagetti Monster.  ¶ 9:03 PM 3 comments links to this post

  Company Wars circa. 1987

The Memory Hole has the .pdfs for the entire Kerry Report. Just sayin'.

In 1987/8, two subcommittees of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held three 14 days of hearings on drug trafficking. Headed by Sen. John F. Kerry (D - Mass.), the panel heard evidence of official corruption in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The next year, the government published the transcripts in a 4-volume set that has remained a touchstone for anyone interested in narco-corruption, particularly as it involves US intelligence agencies.

The trouble is, this 1,800-page goldmine of information has been incredibly hard to find. The Memory Hole's copy was given to me by a friend of the family—Lorenzo Hagerty—who told me an interesting story. As soon as the Kerry Report was published, Lorenzo ordered a set of the transcripts from the Government Printing Office. When it arrived, he began reading it and realized how important it was. He immediately called the GPO to order another set. He was told that the set was already out of print and would not be published again. It had been available to the public for one single week.

Small portions of the Kerry Report transcripts have been published online, but they are only a fraction of the entire four volumes. The Memory Hole has scanned and posted the entire thing...

The Company has doubtless come a long way since then, but you won't see an unclassified report from the Feds like this again about it.  ¶ 7:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The New Third Rail

This one is powering a train headed towards another Bastille Day. Frank Rich:

...G.O.P. pseudopopulism ran riot last week as right-wing troops rallied around their latest Joe the Plumber: Rick Santelli, the ranting CNBC foe of Obama’s mortgage rescue program. Ann Coulter proposed a Santelli run for president, and Twitterers organized national “tea parties” to fuel his taxpayers’ revolt. Even with a boost from NBC, whose networks seized a promotional opening by incessantly recycling the Santelli “controversy,” the bonfire fizzled. It did so because — as last week’s polls also revealed — the mortgage bailout, with a 60-plus percent approval rating, is nearly as popular as Obama.

The Santelli revolution’s flameout was just another confirmation that hard-core Republican radicals are now the G.O.P.’s problem, not the president’s. Rahm Emanuel has it right when he says the administration must try bipartisanship, but it doesn’t have to succeed. Voters give Obama credit for trying, and he can even claim success with many Republican governors, from Schwarzenegger to Crist. Now he can move on and let his childish adversaries fight among themselves, with Rush Limbaugh as the arbitrating babysitter. (Last week he gave Jindal a thumb’s up.)

But that good news for Obama is countered by the bad. The genuine populist rage in the country — aimed at greedy C.E.O.’s, not at the busted homeowners mocked as “losers” by Santelli — cannot be ignored or finessed. Though Obama was crystal clear on Tuesday that there can be “no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis,” it was telling that he got fuzzy when he came to what he might do about it. He waited two days to drop that shoe in his budget: a potential $750 billion in banking “asset purchases” on top of the previous $700 billion bailout.

Therein lies the Catch-22 that could bring the recovery down. As Obama said, we can’t move forward without a functioning financial system. But voters of both parties will demand that their congressmen reject another costly rescue of it. Americans still don’t understand why many Wall Street malefactors remain in place or why the administration’s dithering banking policy lacks the boldness and clarity of Obama’s rhetoric.

Nor can a further bailout be easily sold by a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, whose lax oversight of the guilty banks while at the New York Fed remains a subject of journalistic inquiry. In a damning 5,600-word article from Bloomberg last week, he is portrayed as a second banana, a timid protégé of the old boys who got us into this disaster. Everyone testifies to Geithner’s brilliance, but Jindal, a Rhodes scholar, was similarly hyped. Like the Louisiana governor, the Treasury secretary is a weak public speaker not because he lacks brains or vocal training but because his message doesn’t fly.

Among the highlights of Obama’s triumphant speech was his own populist jeremiad about the “fancy drapes” and private jets of Wall Street. But talk is not action. Two days later, as ABC News reported, the president of taxpayer- supported Bank of America took a private jet to New York to stonewall Andrew Cuomo’s inquest into $3.6 billion of suspect bonuses.

Handing more public money to the reckless banks that invented this culture and stuck us with the wreckage is the new third rail of American politics. If Obama doesn’t forge a better plan, neither his immense popularity nor even political foes as laughable as Jindal can insulate him from getting burned.

It's hard not to dance with the people who brought you to the party. Particularly in Obama's case, the choice is sticky. He can either dance with the voters, who overwhelmed the Republican effort to steal the last election, or dance with the Big Money that bankrolled his half-billion dollar campaign.

But there is all kinds of third rail clutching in Washington these days. The Reptilicans and the DINOcrats (not to mention the Wall Street privateers) continue to gaze hungrily at the Social Security fund, and although Obama continues to mention it in passing he's smart enough not seriously talk about it in front of the children. Then there's the third rail known as the Pentagon. Obama's made a big deal in public about how that budget is getting "frozen" at a 4% increase this year, but every estimate I've seen also acknowledges an extra hundred billion or so will be included to sort of round things out.

Still, selection for doublethink inproves the opacity of the doubletalk at least in the echo chamber.  ¶ 7:44 AM 0 comments links to this post