Werewolves of Wall Street

Frank Rich is right. Bu$hie's Ba$e is just as much to blame as Bu$hie himself for the economic mess we're into:

...on Feb. 10, 2007, when, on another frigid day, he announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill. Citing “our mounting debts” and “hard choices,” he talked of how “each of us, in our own lives, will have to accept responsibility” and “some measure of sacrifice.” His campaign, he said then, “has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship.” But the press, convinced that Obama was a sideshow to the inevitable Clinton-Giuliani presidential standoff, didn’t parse his words all that carefully, and neither did a public still maxing out on its gluttonous holiday from economic history. However inadvertently, Time magazine had captured the self-indulgent tenor of the times when, weeks earlier, it slapped some reflective Mylar on its cover and declared that the 2006 Person of the Year was “You.”

It was in keeping with the unhinged spirit of the boom that three days after Obama’s Springfield declaration, a Wall Street baron, Steven Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, a private equity and hedge fund, celebrated his 60th birthday with some 350 guests in the vast Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s East Side. To appreciate the degree of ostentation and taste, you need only know that Rod Stewart was the headliner, at an estimated cost of $1 million.

That same week the National Association of Realtors told less well-heeled Americans not to fret about its report that median home prices had fallen in 73 metro areas during the final quarter of 2006. “The bottom appears to have already occurred,” said one of the N.A.R. economists. Another predicted: “When we get the figures for this spring, I expect to see a discernible improvement in both sales and prices.”

We have discerned what happened to those sales and prices ever since. As for the Blackstone Group, it went public four months after its leader’s 60th birthday revels. Its shares have since lost 85 percent of their value, and Schwarzman’s bash has become a well-worn symbol of our deflated Gilded Age.

Yet the values of the bubble remain entrenched even as Obama takes office. In the upper echelons, we can find fresh examples of greed and irresponsibility daily even without dipping into the growing pool of those money “managers” who spirited victims to Bernie Madoff.

Last week’s object lesson was John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch. He was lionized as a rare Wall Street savior as recently as September, when he helped seal the deal that sped his teetering firm into the safe embrace of Bank of America on the same weekend Lehman Brothers died. Since then we’ve learned that even as he was laying off Merrill employees by the thousands, he was lobbying (unsuccessfully) for a personal bonus as high as $30 million and spending $1.22 million of company cash on refurbishing his office, an instantly notorious $1,405 trashcan included.

Thain resigned on Thursday. Only then did we learn that he doled out billions in secret, last-minute bonuses to his staff last month, just before Bank of America took over and just before the government ponied up a second bailout to cover Merrill’s unexpected $15 billion fourth-quarter loss. So far American taxpayers have spent $45 billion on this mess, and that’s only our down payment.

In less lofty precincts of the American economic spectrum, the numbers may be different but the ethos has often been similar. As Wall Street titans grabbed bonuses based on illusory, short-term paper profits, so regular Americans took on all kinds of debt wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. The nearly $1 trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next big crash.

This debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility washed over our culture not just through the Marie Antoinette antics of a Schwarzman and a Thain but in mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment. Cable networks like Bravo, A&E, TLC and HGTV produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called Subprime Pornography. Some of the series — “Flip This House,” “Flip That House,” “Sell This House,” “My House Is Worth What?” — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness.

The austerity of Obama’s Inaugural Address seemed a tonal corrective to the glitz and the glut. The speech was, as my friend Jack Viertel, a theater producer, put it, “stoic, stern, crafted in slabs of granite, a slimmed-down sinewy thing entirely evolved away from the kind of Pre-Raphaelite style of his earlier oration.” Some of the same critics who once accused Obama of sounding too much like a wimpy purveyor of Kumbaya now faulted him for not rebooting those golden oldies of the campaign trail as he took his oath. But he is no longer campaigning, and the moment for stadium cheers has passed.

If we’ve learned anything since the election, it is this: We have not remotely seen the bottom of this economy, and no one has a silver bullet to arrest the plunge, the hyped brains in the new White House included. Most economists failed to anticipate the disaster, after all, and our tax-challenged incoming Treasury Secretary may prove as evanescent as past saviors du jour. As we applauded Thain in September, we were also desperately trying to convince ourselves that Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs would turn the tide, and that Hank Paulson, as Newsweek wrote in a cover story titled “King Henry,” would be the “right man at the right time.”

Obama couldn’t give us F.D.R.’s first inaugural address because we are not yet where America was in 1933 — in its fourth year of downturn after the crash of ’29, with an unemployment rate of 25 percent. But no one knows for sure that we cannot end up there...

Then again, where we find ourselves depends not only on the perception of where we are but of how we got there. For your consideration, Bernie Madoff:

...Although hardly a household name, he secured a longstanding role as an elder statesman on Wall Street, allowing him to land on important boards and commissions where his opinions helped shape securities regulations. Along the way, he snared a coveted spot as the chairman of a major stock exchange, Nasdaq.

And his employees say he treated them like family.

There was, of course, another side to Mr. Madoff, who is 70. Reclusive, at times standoffish and aloof, this Bernie rarely rubbed elbows in Manhattan’s cocktail circuit or at Palm Beach balls. This Bernie was quiet, controlled and closely attuned to his image, down to the most minute details.

He was, for instance, an avid collector of vintage watches and took time each morning to match his wedding ring — he owned at least two — to the platinum or gold watch band he was wearing that day.

Per his directives, the décor in his firm’s New York and London offices was stark. Black, white and gray — or “icily cold modern,” as one frequent visitor to the New York operation described it.

Despite nurturing a familial atmosphere in his offices, he installed two cameras on the small trading floor of the firm’s London operations so he could monitor the unit remotely from New York.

This Bernie also ran a money management business on the side for decades that he kept hidden far from colleagues, competitors and regulators.

While he managed billions of dollars for individuals and foundations, he shunned one-on-one meetings with most of his investors, wrapping himself in an Oz-like aura, making him even more desirable to those seeking access.

So who was the real Bernie Madoff? And what could have driven him to choreograph a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, to which he is said to have confessed?

An easy answer is that Mr. Madoff was a charlatan of epic proportions, a greedy manipulator so hungry to accumulate wealth that he did not care whom he hurt to get what he wanted.

But some analysts say that a more complex and layered observation of his actions involves linking the world of white-collar finance to the world of serial criminals.

They wonder whether good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators...

Now there's a non-reality based oversimplification for you. It's not because of the ultimate cosmic power he held, head of NASDAQ and writing the rules that would ensure he wouldn't be easily prosecuted. And of course, he must have acted alone, despite unpopular unfortunate employees of the SEC, analysts, and common ordinary people shouting from the rooftops for the last ten years about how his practices were driving the American economy off a cliff.

The thought that this was intentional, and co-ordinated, and supposed to happen falls into the realm of the unthinkable, that only the fools who've been shouting it over the rooftops for the last ten years would consider.

Life in Laputa

Being President instead of preznit means you can have a Blackberry if you want to:

...The battle over whether the president could keep his BlackBerry has been fueled to a large degree by Mr. Obama himself, who mentioned it again and again. He would not take no for an answer. In an interview this month, he worried aloud, “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

Mr. Obama received his BlackBerry on Tuesday, but officials declined to specify what kind. In a conversation with reporters on Thursday evening, he said, “I don’t think it’s actually up and running yet.”

Throughout the transition, several of his aides talked openly about Mr. Obama’s obsession with keeping his BlackBerry. And some of them, when speaking privately, said they were eager to have his device taken away so the case could be closed...

Bu$hie had handlers. The man spent 8 years in office hearing only what said handlers wanted to tell him. He was famous for his isolation and insulation.

If Obama is wise he will fire these flappers immediately.

Free to be Like Me

You Can Not Make This Stuff Up-

that is to say you can not make up how much the Company makes up stuff that doesn't exist but sounds "Truthy".

Maybe Obama should just stop listening to people like Robert Gates, too.

The nomination of William Lynn as Deputy Secretary of Defense has placed Barack Obama under the burn of political heat just days into the presidency.

Having lobbied the government on behalf of the defense industry giant Raytheon, Lynn's appointment violates the newly-instituted ethics guidelines that the president applied to his staff shortly after taking office. Questioned about the transgression, the White House said Lynn was being granted a waiver.

But there is a second layer to the Lynn issue that also is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of Democrats, good government groups and Republicans eager to cry hypocrisy. Raytheon is no mom-and-pop defense contractor shop. It is the type of industry behemoth that protesters of the Iraq invasion bemoaned for profiting off of the war and encouraging militarization. And as the man who led "the company's strategic planning and [oversaw] the government relations activity," Lynn was intimately involved.

Takeover Finesse

Russ Baker:

...A more profound explanation for the rise of George W. Bush came as I studied the concerted effort to convince the public that he was independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. The reason for this, it turned out, was that exactly the opposite was true. W. may have been bumptious where his father was discreet, but in fact the son hewed closely to a playbook that guided his father and even his grandfather.

Over much of the last century, the Bushes have been serving the aims of a very narrow segment from within America's wealthiest interests and families -- typically through involvement in the most anti-New Deal investment banking circles, in the creation of a civilian intelligence service after World War II, and in some of that service's most secretive and still-unacknowledged operations.

Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence that George W. Bush's father, the 41st president of the United States, had been working for the intelligence services no less than two decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again, Bush 41 and his allies have participated in clandestine operations to force presidents to do the bidding of oil and other resource-extraction interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president showed independence or sought reforms that threatened entrenched interests, this group helped to ensure that he was politically attacked and neutralized, or even removed from office, through one means or another.

We are not dealing here with what are commonly dismissed as "conspiracy theories." We are dealing with a reality that is much more subtle, layered and pervasive -- a matrix of power in which crude conspiracies are rarely necessary and in which the execution or subsequent cover-up of anti-democratic acts become practically a norm.

In 1953, 23 years before he became CIA director as a supposed neophyte, George H.W. Bush began preparing to launch an oil-exploration company called Zapata Offshore. His father, investment banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a Senate seat from Connecticut; and his father's close friend Allen Dulles had just taken over the CIA. A staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, purportedly "resigned" to go into the oil business with young George.

Bush then began to travel around the world. His itineraries had little apparent relationship to his limited and perennially unprofitable business enterprises. But they do make sense if the object was intelligence work. When his company at last put a few oil rigs in place, they ended up in highly sensitive spots, such as just off Castro's Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

As part of his travels, Bush senior even appeared in Dallas on the morning of the Kennedy assassination, although he would famously claim that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. After leaving the city, he called the FBI with a false tip about a possible assassin, pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside Dallas. It is also intriguing to learn that an old friend of Bush's, a White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, shepherded Lee Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the assassination. In any event, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy, the oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a friend in the White House.

The pattern continued. New evidence suggests that Bush senior and his associates in the intelligence services, far from being the loyalists to Richard Nixon they claimed to be, had turned on the 35th president early in his administration, unceasingly working to weaken and eventually force him out. These efforts culminated in what appears to have been a deliberately botched Watergate office burglary -- led by former CIA officers.

Ironically, Nixon's career had been launched with the quiet backing of Wall Street finance figures upset with the man Nixon would defeat, a leading congressional supporter of banking reform, and Prescott Bush himself had played a key role. Yet, when Nixon finally achieved the presidency, he became surprisingly resistant to pressure from the very power centers that had helped him get to the top. He turned a deaf ear to the demands of the oil industry, battled with the CIA and cut the Pentagon out of the loop as he (and his aide Henry Kissinger) negotiated secretly with Moscow and Beijing.

These acts estranged Nixon from those who felt he had betrayed his sponsors -- men who had the means to do him in. Bush senior, it turns out, was closely allied with the surprising number of White House officials with covert ties to the intelligence service that surrounded Nixon. Through it all, Bush senior would routinely claim to be "out of the loop," as he would later pretend during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan era, although we know that as vice president he was at the center of that and other abuses of power.

None of this let up after Nixon was forced to resign. His pliant successor, Gerald Ford, brought in young staffers named Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two participated in the so-called Halloween massacre, which saw the administration veer in a far-right direction on foreign policy, a development that paved the way for the appointment of Bush senior as CIA director. This happened just as Congress was launched into the deepest investigation ever of intelligence abuses, and public voices were clamoring to reopen official inquiries into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Then came Jimmy Carter, whose plans to reform the CIA were an echo of JFK's intent to scatter the CIA to the winds after the ruinous Bay of Pigs invasion. When Carter defeated Ford, ousted Bush from the CIA helm and sought to bring the intelligence juggernaut under control, he ended up deeply compromised by complex financial shenanigans orchestrated by figures from the same intelligence circles -- and undermined by the crisis with Iran, exacerbated by covert dissident CIA elements tied to Bush. Carter was a one-term president, defeated by a ticket with none other than George H.W. Bush, backed by a phalanx of CIA officers, as vice president. And then Bush senior became president himself.

Bill Clinton apparently grasped the pattern. He cultivated a friendly relationship with the elder Bush and instituted virtually no significant reforms in, or issued challenges to, either the intelligence or military establishments.

All this is relevant today because the furtive forces and pressures that haunted, and ultimately dominated, these past presidents have not abated.

Indeed, what the presidency of George W. Bush truly represented was the unfettered, most reckless manifestation of the objectives this group has pursued for many decades...

There's much more here you need to become familiar with if you aren't already.

There's a problem with the kind of $ystem the Bu$hies want in their vision of the new world order. Their $ystem is one that countless other racketeers can profit off of nicely. So nicely, as in the case of Madoff's, it clogs up the the plumbing, and requires some outside help.

But not too much help. It's a Bu$h family minion that still runs the D.o'D. It's a financial advocate of Bu$hie economic policy that still runs the Treasury.

The Company will only show restraint until it perceives the market has stabilized. At that point, Obama will be faced with a policy dysfunction similar to that which made Carter's a single term presidency. Such a dysfunction is guaranteed, because Poppy Bu$h has virtually handpicked much of the Obama cabinet.

And let's face it, even if these guys weren't into sabotage, they're incompetent at anything other than stealing power.

But now that everyone knows race is no longer a factor in Amerika, everyone knows that the political $ystem works- Obama was $elected, wasn't he?- everyone knows that thinking otherwise is just a lot of conspiracy theory, Amerika won't be disturbed by the mainstreaming of the remaining politically active people of America that worked to overturn the Cheneyburton faction of the Company.

Which, you may remember, actively brushed off Poppy and his Consigliere and their faction of the Company shortly after Iraq was invaded. The new Dear Leader didn't need the Old Man's advice anymore, having Darth Rumsfeld and Darth Cheney in the house. Little Boots paid for that with some humiliation. Like Nixon, he forgot he wasn't really Der Decider.

One wonders if Obama will suffer from the similar delusion of actually thinking he's in charge. If he does, his honeymoon will end sooner rather than later. It will also end far more spectacularly than if he does what he's told by Gates and associates.

Then Jebbie, Poppy's favorite, will ascend the throne.

That certainly won't make things work any better, but by then the Company will have an even tighter grip on the mind of Amerika.

Who Watches the Watchers?

I don't know, but you're likely in the database too.

RoundUp for the Netroots

The Company really, really doesn't like this free speech thing.

Yet another lawsuit designed to shut down the essence of the internet, news and information.

There are not that many Americans who actually pay attention to what's going on in the world around them, and after this election the Bush faction of the Company wants there to be even less.

Hating Bridges and Buildings and Trees and Roads and Schools

...and loving lots of money for their generous banking friends.

That's Larry Summers:

Earlier this week, Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) explained that funding for mass transit infrastructure projects was nixed from the stimulus proposal in order to make room for tax cuts. Despite the fact that tax cuts already comprise a bulky 33 percent of the stimulus (compared to only 7.5 percent for transportation infrastructure), conservatives are pressuring President Obama to include even more.

Tonight on the Rachel Maddow Show, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) said the amount of infrastructure spending in the legislation is “not enough.” He argued that if the Republicans are recycling failed ideas of the past, “we don’t need to buy them off with $300 billion in tax cuts.” DeFazio said Democrats in Congress originally proposed more for infrastructure spending, but the effort was shot down by Obama advisers...

...Maddow noted Obama speaks “very highly” of infrastructure. “If there’s a distance between him and his advisers,” she said, then that’s a problem. DeFazio responded, “He needs to know it, and that’s why I’m speaking out.”

Read it all for the links and hope Peter DeFazio has the foresight to stay out of small airplanes

It takes two to tangle

It's no surprise the remaining Republicans are trying to assert their right to date-rape.

Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of "petty grievances," President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.

Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president's pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation. The first drafts of the plan would result in more spending on favored Democratic agenda items, such as federal funding of the arts, they said, but would do little to stimulate the ailing economy.

The GOP's shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama's first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote -- little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras...

He hasn't begun to hear it. This is the main reason Roosevelt's first 100 days had only limited success: Republican resistance in Congress and the Supreme Court. Does Obama have the spine to do what needs to be done anyway?

Krugman:

...In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.

That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.

Thus, in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no idea what he meant. This is, first and foremost, a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry. And if we failed to rein in that industry, it wasn’t because Americans “collectively” refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a great idea.

Or consider this statement from Mr. Obama: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

The first part of this passage was almost surely intended as a paraphrase of words that John Maynard Keynes wrote as the world was plunging into the Great Depression — and it was a great relief, after decades of knee-jerk denunciations of government, to hear a new president giving a shout-out to Keynes. “The resources of nature and men’s devices,” Keynes wrote, “are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life. ... But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

But something was lost in translation. Mr. Obama and Keynes both assert that we’re failing to make use of our economic capacity. But Keynes’s insight — that we’re in a “muddle” that needs to be fixed — somehow was replaced with standard we’re-all-at-fault, let’s-get-tough-on-ourselves boilerplate.

Remember, Herbert Hoover didn’t have a problem making unpleasant decisions: he had the courage and toughness to slash spending and raise taxes in the face of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, that just made things worse...

It's not just going to be the economy either. The pro-torture brigade is currently up in arms and disinformation in response to Obama's break in the War on Terra.

Of course, in the fine print there's the disclaimer:

...Although the Pentagon has said that dozens of released Guantánamo detainees have “returned to the fight,” its claim is difficult to document, and has been met with skepticism...

That's the only proper response to people whose first reaction is to throw you in prison, torture, and kill you. For profit.

The Legacy of Little Boots

Ed Encho waxes rude over at The Existentialist Cowboy.

The *only* reason Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton & Associates did not start a global thermonuclear conflagration was that they couldn't figure out how to profit off it.

But even that wasn't enough for Cheney, who really wanted to do it just for the Hell of it.

Poppy wouldn't let him, 'cause his darlin' son Jebbie hadn't had his turn yet.

Exceptional Story

Some people don't understand why I don't have Faith in the Free Market. What they don't understand is how the $ystem, isn't- for you and me, anyway.



Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture:

Bernard L. Madoff was once the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He was one of the most important market makers on Wall Street. And he managed what was, by some estimates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.

Yes, Bernard Madoff was an impressive man. That much was clear even before we learned that his $50 billion Ponzi scheme may have been orchestrated in cahoots with the most powerful, sophisticated, and indiscriminately murderous organized crime syndicate the world has ever known.

Charles Gasparino (citing “speculation” from investigators) reported last week on CNBC that the Russian Mafia might have been partners in Madoff’s larcenous fund business. Or perhaps the Mob had an even greater interest in Madoff’s market making operation, as some of our sources have told us in recent weeks.

Either way, there is a certain cachet.

But it wasn’t just pierogies and pistol-packing wiseguys in purple suits. Mr. Madoff was also a dedicated public servant, volunteering countless hours at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Indeed, Madoff seems to have written many of the SEC’s rules. For example, Madoff was the principal author of an SEC rule that exempted market makers (i.e. Madoff) from various regulations governing short sellers (i.e. Madoff’s friends).

Madoff’s rule ensured that market makers (Madoff) could, among other things, engage in so-called “naked short selling.” To sell “naked” is to sell stock that one does not actually possess. That is “phantom stock,” according to the SEC Chairman and many others.

Sometimes, short sellers (who profit when shares lose value) offload massive amounts of phantom stock to drive down prices, destroy pubic companies, or even crash the market. That is why there used to be restrictions.

At any rate, I don’t think Madoff had an office at the SEC. He certainly was not employed there. But the SEC was glad to have Madoff write a rule exempting Madoff from the rules. The formal name of the rule is, “the option market maker exception to Rule 203(b)1,” but the SEC was so thankful that it named the rule after the great man himself.

It was called, “The Madoff Exception.”

After Madoff wrote that rule, market makers (e.g., Madoff) proceeded to “rent” their exemption to hedge funds (i.e. friends-of-Madoff).

It remained against the law for hedge funds to sell phantom stock to manipulate the markets. It was also against the law for market makers to help hedge funds orchestrate such schemes. But under the Madoff regulatory regime, unscrupulous short sellers (i.e. friends-of-Madoff) could engage in this illegal activity so long as they did so with the illegal connivance of a law-breaking market maker (i.e. Madoff).

A few months ago, this naked short selling was implicated–by numerous academics, the U.S. Chamber of Chamber of Commerce, the Secretary of the Treasury, the CEOs of Wall Street’s biggest banks, respected law firms, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and numerous congressmen – in the near total collapse of the American financial system.

The SEC has not prosecuted anybody for this. After all, there is an “exception.”

It is unclear whether the SEC will continue to name this “exception” after a man who might have absconded with 50 billion dollars (a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of Pakistan) in league with the Russian Mob, an organization that is said to be in the market for a nuclear bomb – in addition to narcotics, sex slaves and, yes, phantom stock.

In any case, the major news organizations seem to have lost interest.

It's because recriminations and accountability is all part of the the tired partisan politics of the past. Hope and Change and Faith and Reconciliation without Prosecution are what's needed. For Obama's Ba$e and their lackeys, anyway.

Only cynics ask silly questions!

It seems there are a few unfashionable people left at The New York Pravda, and they're letting some of those cynical practicioners of the dismal science give voice:

Some of the better questions:

1. Ordinary taxpayers would like an answer to this question: Why have they been billed more than $45 billion to rescue Citigroup from failure when, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, you were its primary supervisor? Three major problems led to Citigroup’s downfall: bad investment policy; overexpansion, which overwhelmed Citigroup’s management; and an inadequate capital base. Why was Citigroup’s supervision inadequate to deal with these problems?

2. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have been selecting which companies in American industry and finance will get taxpayer money. What criteria do you use to decide?

3. During the banking crisis of the late 1980s, assets of failed savings and loans were acquired by the government’s Resolution Trust Corporation. The trust corporation then sold off the assets in an orderly fashion. Would you consider requesting Congress to revive the Resolution Trust Corporation, so you would not have to decide which companies to save and which not to save? Would you consider re-establishing the trust corporation now for commercial banks that are likely to fail?

— ANNA JACOBSON SCHWARTZ, an economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the author, with Milton Friedman, of “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 to 1960”

...

1. In the past, you have praised the “resiliency” of the American financial system. But a resilient financial system would demand that banks maintain stricter capital standards in normal times so that when a crisis hits, they don’t all have to tighten lending at the same time. What exactly did you mean by “resiliency”?

— ROBERT SHILLER, professor of economics at Yale

...

1. This country has long benefited from the world’s confidence in our financial markets. Are financial regulatory reforms necessary now to restore investors’ confidence and revive our economy?

2. Should debt securities that are held by regulated banks and pension funds be rated by multiple independent credit reports that have been commissioned by a federal agency, or should we continue to let the issuers of debts decide who will rate their risks?

3. Should large financial institutions incur higher reserve requirements or other regulatory penalties when they become “too big to fail”?

— ROGER B. MYERSON, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a winner of the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Then there's the infamous Dr. Krugman himself, a most vocal cynic of the Bu$h era, still keenly aware of those old partisan divisions that constitute the world for those of us who ate the red pill instead of the blue one:

Old-fashioned voodoo economics — the belief in tax-cut magic — has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans...

That's awfully shrill, sir. Aren't you engaging in the tired old politics of the past instead of the shiny new era of the spotless empty open mind?

...But recent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.

To explain the issue, let me describe the position of a hypothetical bank that I’ll call Gothamgroup, or Gotham for short.

On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.

So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout.

Why would the government bail Gotham out? Because it plays a central role in the financial system. When Lehman was allowed to fail, financial markets froze, and for a few weeks the world economy teetered on the edge of collapse. Since we don’t want a repeat performance, Gotham has to be kept functioning. But how can that be done?

Well, the government could simply give Gotham a couple of hundred billion dollars, enough to make it solvent again. But this would, of course, be a huge gift to Gotham’s current shareholders — and it would also encourage excessive risk-taking in the future. Still, the possibility of such a gift is what’s now supporting Gotham’s stock price.

A better approach would be to do what the government did with zombie savings and loans at the end of the 1980s: it seized the defunct banks, cleaning out the shareholders. Then it transferred their bad assets to a special institution, the Resolution Trust Corporation; paid off enough of the banks’ debts to make them solvent; and sold the fixed-up banks to new owners.

The current buzz suggests, however, that policy makers aren’t willing to take either of these approaches. Instead, they’re reportedly gravitating toward a compromise approach: moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation, but without seizing the banks first...

Sir, you have a partisan prejudice that makes you think that if the government- the taxpayers- take the risk, the bankers shouldn't reap their fair profits! You penalize the bankers and the shareholders who treated the depositors' securities like a wad of cash at Los Vegas! Politics of the past!

...In my example, Gothamgroup is insolvent because the alleged $400 billion of toxic waste on its books is actually worth only $200 billion. The only way a government purchase of that toxic waste can make Gotham solvent again is if the government pays much more than private buyers are willing to offer.

Now, maybe private buyers aren’t willing to pay what toxic waste is really worth: “We don’t have really any rational pricing right now for some of these asset categories,” Ms. Bair says. But should the government be in the business of declaring that it knows better than the market what assets are worth? And is it really likely that paying “fair value,” whatever that means, would be enough to make Gotham solvent again?

What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense, disguised as “fair value” purchases of toxic assets...

Sir, you are failing to engage in Hope and Change! "Bait and switch" is an old political tactic of the past. Our new President has pointedly said he's breaking with all the old poisoned past tactics. Even though he's got the same old usta-bees in charge.

You obviously cynically aren't taking him at his word!

...Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.

Unfortunately, the price of this retreat into superstition may be high. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that taxpayers are about to get another raw deal — and that we’re about to get another financial rescue plan that fails to do the job.

I humbly submit it's not a single word, "nationalization", that this crew fears, sir.

It's a phrase they all fear the most despite all their high sounding rhetoric: "I won't get a piece of the action".

Up is not anti-Downism Anymore!

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply...”

They say Obama lacked a sense of humor, but saying the political arguments of the past no longer apply is one of the funniest lines I've ever heard, comparable to the "End of History" phrase the Bu$hies used to sling around.

True Color Behind the Silver Lining

The Dark Wraith continues to shed light on the kind of Change we're getting:

...Having already taken an initial shot at Obama's choice for Secretary of the Department of Education by recommending a reading of Greg Palast's article, "Obama Slam-Duncans Education," readers here might want to get some more details about just how outrageously loathsome Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan is by reading Andy Kroll's article, "The Duncan Doctrine: The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education."

...Congratulations. You suckered the Left, you suckered the progressives, you even suckered some conservatives. You suckered a damaged, hurting, wanting nation with your rhetoric. I would use harsh language to describe those who voted for you, but I just cannot bring myself to do that; not now, anyway. The American people were so desperate to escape the spiral of decay into which this country had been falling because of the Bush Administration that they simply could not see the awful maw of an imprudent choice standing before them in the fineries of salvation and rectitude you so masterfully wore.

...You are not an imbecile; you ought to know better. Take a hard look at your cabal about whom I have already written and warned: Zionist thug Rahm Emanuel; paramilitary law enforcement enabler Eric Holder; AIPAC and Project for the New American Century maven Dennis Ross; Chicago slumlord Valerie Jarrett; Israeli military violence apologist Joseph "I Am a Zionist!" Biden; agri-business shill Tom Vilsack; war management flop Robert Gates; and Federal Reserve Open Market Committee bagman Timothy Geithner, to name just a few. And let us not forget your comfort level with a couple of the worst of the Bush people serving as holdovers: that wrecking ball of privacy rights, Robert Mueller, from whom you could demand resignation (oh, yes you could), and monetary policy failure Ben Bernanke, whose tenure you could repudiate for his staggering mismanagement and malfeasance (thereby eviscerating him and the other Fed Governors of any backing to proceed with yet another round of catastrophically bad, "accommodative" monetary policy). You even plan to corporatize and militarize NASA.

How many ways through these choices can you flout the principles and dismiss the hopes of your wide base of support before people see you for what you really are?

That rhetorical question need not be answered: for years, George W. Bush did it to honest, decent, genuine conservatives. You will have perhaps not as many, but quite a few, to do the same to honest, decent, genuine liberals and other progressive sorts...

The Dark Wraith sees the cloud looming behind the silver lining.

I'm glad somebody does.

I have one respectful disagreement in his evaluation of George W. Bush. Bu$hie's no imbecile. Look at the crimes he's gotten away with.

May I offer one final suggestion for those who doubt Mr. Obama's true color, so to speak.

Today was the Martin Luther King national holiday.

Anyone familiar with events since 1968 might recall hearing how Dr. King's family no longer accepts that James Earl Ray assasinated Dr. King.

Perhaps it is time for a new President to re-open the investigation.

But I wouldn't bet on it.

Business is Booming

The Pentagon has its own Works Progress Administration:



As far as they're concerned, Bork was right: a return to Imperial Amerikan values does require a Depression at home.

Extending the War on Terra to Cover Noisy Kids

Of course, it can't happen here!

"...a white Al-Qaeda..."

Or as Maasanova likes to say, Al-CIAda:

...The Fox and Friends news models have recently warned America of an new impeding, dangerous threat to the United States via Great Britain and Europe. As if the threat of Al Qaeda, or as some like to say 'Al CIA-da,' could not have gotten anymore cartoonish, we are now supposed to be on the look out for the 'white Al Qaeda.'

The reports of the white Al Qaeda primarily stemmed from an obscure article from The Scotsman, with the wild claim that around 1,500 British non-Muslim have converted to Islam and been recruited by Al Qaeda. The claims appear largely unsubstantial and aside from Lord Carlile, and independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, their sources are vague and unnamed. In fact, the entire article reeks of fear mongering propaganda, much like the Fox and Friends report...

It was only three years ago when two British SAS soldiers were arrested in Basra after impersonating Arabs and shooting Iraqi policemen. A dramatic, but unsuccessful rescue attempt was staged as British Army tanks crushed a prison wall, only to find the prisoners were being detained elsewhere. The whole incident was a nightmare public relations debacle for the British but went largely unreported here in the mainstream media.

Ironically, the Scotsman was one of the main media outlets that tried to explain away the claim that the two SAS soldiers were more than likely staging false flag terror attacks. I would think that the British press would be quick to downplay the fact that they could have homegrown terrorism from people not normally thought to engage in terrorist activities operating in the UK. I would also think that the British press would rather not give anymore conspiracy theory fodder to those that think that the 7/7 bombings were an inside job carried out by British intelligence.

...Here we have what looks to be typical Al Qaeda training video that American intelligence just happened to stumble upon, and yet the Fox news models give us zero background on the video. By the way, If you don't know the story behind the questionable authenticity of the Al Qaeda tapes or Al Qaeda in general then you should read this and this.

We also have a certain subtle talking point in the mainstream media that supporters of presidential candidate Congressman Dr. Ron Paul are dangerous, and could be prone to violent acts of homegrown acts of terrorism. Well, many Ron Paul supporters are young, white and idealistic, just like those crafty 'white Al Qaeda,' except that there is zero evidence that a Ron Paul supporter would be prone to violent and homegrown acts of terrorism!

To add to all of this nonsense, we had the most dangerous man in America, Department of Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, confirming that yes he believes in the 'white Al Qaeda', and that he also believes that America faces the threat of homegrown terrorists. And finally we have the Violent Radicalisation and Home Grown Terrorism Prevention Act (also known as the 'though-crime bill'), which is soon going to be voted on, and possibly passed by our cowardly and mostly treasonous Congress. This bill, which uses vague, Orwellian-esqe language, is know by civil activists as the 'Patriot Act Lite...'

Massanova sites people like Rense and Alex Jones saying things I haven't included here, so perhaps his disinformation discriminator is a bit off.

Perhaps with the fall of the NeoCons, we've seen the last of the Michael Chertoffs.

After all, could it be there are NeoLiberals that would view it as their patriotic duty to spread the Free Market gospel the same way Chertoff wanted to spread the Company way.

Inauguration of the Faithful

This is not Hope and Change we're seeing regardless of exchanging the faux cowboy boots for an afro sheen.

Robert Scheer:

...Why rush to throw another $350 billion of taxpayer money at the Wall Street bandits and their political cronies who created the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression? And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the 10 still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public?

We don’t have time, President-elect Barack Obama’s key economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, insisted in a letter to Congress on Monday, promising that the new infusion would not be squandered as was the first installment. But given that Summers is personally as responsible for this meltdown as anyone, why should we trust him on this? Yes, it sounds wonderfully bipartisan that Obama is backing President Bush’s request for spending the money now, short-circuiting congressional inquiry, but it was just that sort of bipartisan politics that created this nightmare.

How insulting that we must now accept Summers’ assurance that the Obama administration will “move quickly to reform a weak and outdated regulatory system to better protect consumers, investors and businesses.” This from the guy who, as President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, pushed the deregulation legislation making the subsequent financial crimes of Wall Street legal. The “toxic derivatives” that we taxpayers are now forced to purchase from the Wall Street hustlers were deliberately shielded from all government regulation, thanks to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Summers got Congress to pass in the closing days of the Clinton administration with the same urgency that he now pushes for the new Wall Street handout.

Back then, Summers was a disciple of Robert Rubin, who just last week resigned from his director’s position at Citigroup, the financial conglomerate that grew to unmanageable and corrupt proportions thanks to the empowering legislation that Rubin initiated when he was Clinton’s first treasury secretary. Rubin has been paid more than $115 million plus stock options at Citigroup, and despite his horrid record is a close Obama adviser. It is one of the great swindles of U.S. financial history that Citigroup was bailed out with $45 billion in a deal that could eventually cost taxpayers an additional $269 billion to guarantee those toxic assets that would have been illegal if not for the legislation backed by Rubin and Summers.

How did Obama allow himself to become ensnared with the very same folks who are the most culpable? His treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner, is another Rubin protégé, who, as head of the New York Fed, worked tirelessly with Rubin to concoct the Citigroup bailout. When candidate Obama gave his major economic address back on March 27, he couldn’t have been clearer in condemning the deregulation that Rubin and Summers had engineered:

“Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one—aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner-take-all, anything-goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.”

"How did Obama allow himself to become ensnared with the very same folks who are the most culpable? " What do people think becoming the most powerful person in the most powerful un-Empire in the world is all about?

Meanwhile, those of us with the witch-sight watch as the Free Marketeers prepare to dismantle the remains of the New Deal as they play their Unity tune.

Avedon:

...I really, really wish Obama would stop using language that suggests that he thinks the Republicons are right about Social Security. Social Security is paid for. Social Security is not the thing that is sucking the life out of our economy. It's the people who keep attacking "entitlements" who are doing that. There are a lot of big, systemic things that need to be addressed if we are really going to restore our economy to something most of us can live with. (And in the meantime, it sure wouldn't hurt to quit wasting money on crap like this.) We need people to be talking about why those big social programs are good for the economy, not reinforcing the Village-Republicon consensus. For dog's sake, people, Britain had just been through the Great Depression and had the hell bombed out of it by the Nazis and was not just broke but in debt and they still managed to create the NHS...

Why does watching the Oborg NeoLibs remind me of Mars Attacks? It's seeing the aliens disintegrate the Faithful as they laugh saying "We come in peace!"

Torture is a Crime

So we can't call it that, right?

What will the children say?

The children will say: prosecute the bastards. Every one of them. Because if we don't, they will torture interrogate the innocent to justify their stranglehold on power keep the Homeland secure again.

Recipe for disaster

Poll Finds Faith in Obama, Mixed With Patience



Pure dementia:

...President-elect Barack Obama is riding a powerful wave of optimism into the White House, with Americans confident he can turn the economy around but prepared to give him years to deal with the crush of problems he faces starting Tuesday, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll...

Don't worry, campers. Given the new Ba$e for Barack, he won't raise taxes- on the Right Sort of people, anyway!

If he does, too, he's creative enough to frame it in a way the middle amerikans won't even notice- selective service for your first born sons and daughters, perhaps for those that can't afford to send them to college, anyway.

Comfortably numb, you won't feel a thing.

Saucer Snatches

Atrios thinks the alien abductions to blame.

Those space invaders seem to take all the money, too.

Good Question

Was the 2008 election fixed and if not, why not?

This sort of answers it all:



ninakat has it.

...nothing has changed and that voter fraud is alive and well. But this time around, the PTB had pre-selected Obama to win -- his campaign contributions were almost double that of McCain's for example, and that amount of money surely didn't come from the grassroots (see chart below) -- so in fact, this was a psy-ops coup: Americans being hypnotized into believing the hope/change rhetoric. This quashed the cries of foul-play as if election fraud was somehow magically eliminated overnight, regardless of the fact that there was zero evidence of substantial reforms in voting.

So, as it turns out, Obama actually DID receive the majority of votes. The people fell for this charade. The result is that the general population has been lulled into a false sense of security about the true state of democracy in this country. A brilliant move by the PTB.

The charade s unsustainable though, because Obama will just continue everything as it was before, albeit with a few crumbs of change (closing Guantanamo, and reversing some of Bush's presidential directives) in an attempt to quell dissent. How long that might last is up for debate.

My guess is that the economic woes of the country are going to accelerate to a critical level this year, and that something will need to happen to divert attention -- another false flag event and/or major war, which will keep Obama in the driver's seat whilst taking the heat off him concurrently.

A Suggestion and a List

Here's a list of cronies that ought to do some time with Dear Leader. Not likely, but one can always wish...

Back to Business as Usual

The Free Market rides again!

At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.

“Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

...Congress approved the $700 billion rescue plan with the idea that banks would help struggling borrowers and increase lending to stimulate the economy, and many lawmakers want to know how the first half of that money has been spent before approving the second half. But many banks that have received bailout money so far are reluctant to lend, worrying that if new loans go bad, they will be in worse shape if the economy deteriorates.

Indeed, as mounting losses at major banks like Citigroup and Bank of America in the last week have underscored, regulators are still searching for ways to stabilize the banking system. The Obama administration could be forced early on to come up with a systemic solution, getting bad loans off balance sheets as a way to encourage banks to begin lending, which most economists say is essential to get businesses and consumers spending again.

Individually, banks that received some of the first $350 billion from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, have offered few public details about how they plan to spend the money, and they are not required to disclose what they do with it. But in conversations behind closed doors with investment analysts, some bankers have been candid about their intentions.

Most of the banks that received the money are far smaller than behemoths like Citigroup or Bank of America. A review of investor presentations and conference calls by executives of some two dozen banks around the country found that few cited lending as a priority. An overwhelming majority saw the bailout program as a no-strings-attached windfall that could be used to pay down debt, acquire other businesses or invest for the future.

Speaking at the FBR Capital Markets conference in New York in December, Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele, said there were no immediate plans to do much with the $154 million it received from the Treasury.

“With that capital in hand, not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession,” he said, “but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out...”

Well, yes, taking advantage of the situation, it's what the Free Market is all about.

It's also why trying to salvage the economy by giving the banks all the unregulated money they want first is like trying to save your children from a lion by offering the lion your right arm first.

Expert Disinformation

If Greenwald hadn't picked up on this, none of the main$tream would've.

If you were paying sttention, you probably thought the FISA courts just okayed warrentless wiretapping: "Court Affirms Wiretapping Without Warrants".

But you'd be wrong.

...Is it really that hard -- especially for people who pretend to be experts in this controversy -- to tell the difference between (a) whether the President had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of a Congressional statute and (b) whether the Congress is constitutionally permitted to enact a statute authorizing warrantless eavesdropping? Apparently it is hard, because hordes of right-wing advocates, including those who claim to be "legal experts," are falsely claiming today that the FISA court did (a) (namely: found that the President had the power to order warrantless eavesdropping in violation of a statute), rather than what the court actually did: (b) (found that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit Congress from legalizing warrantless eavesdropping)...

From the installation of the Unibama to the reporting of what's going on from day to day around you, the Kewl Kids still run the show.

They are the gatekeepers and the gate.

The Source of All Evil

It's an interesting analysis as far as it goes.

The problem is it does not go far enough.

Does the tail wag the dog?

Israel its fascist government were created by a highly influential and extremely well bankrolled collection of groups. But Zionism is a mask they use. Few of them in fact are Jewish- the Bush family certainly isn't, for example.

Oh, certainly their shock troops in the Middle East, the avowed Zionists, are. But of the ones that plan across the generations, not all are, and if Israel was of no further use to them they'd abandon it in a moment.

Call them what you will. They work through the CIA and many other agencies. They use the government of Israel. They use the government- and pervasively the people- of the United States. Black, White, Asian, Muslim, Christian, Jew. Their goal is Dominion and power and a post-industrial feudalism for the greater part of humanity.

They use the people of the Middle East, Palestinian and Israeli. They use the United States. They succeed the most when people see each other as peoples and not people.

Accountability

I think Krugman is reading all the comments I leave on his blog and refusing to post, ruminating, and spitting up the exact same spiel.

...if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

Dr. Krugman is absolutely right. There is no limit to what a man would do who is willing to kill 4,500 of America's finest and 100,000 Iraqis in a war he doubtless knew was a fraud. We certainly won't know what these people are capable of until a prosecutor- or more likely a special prosecutor's office- uncovers the full extent of what they did.

I don't think there is a single prison in the country big enough to hold all the Bu$hies who broke the law trying to create a hegemony for their Dear Leader.

Maybe we can use some of those concentration camps KBR built after Katrina...

Not Ready for Prime Time Acting

George Bu$h is finishing up the role of his lifetime, and his press is doing the best they can to make up his role.

...Katrina registers within him as a failure to take symbolic action (“Could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge?”). The Iraq War is a string of unfortunate “rhetoric” and symbolism. (“Clearly putting a ‘Mission Accomplished’ on an aircraft carrier was a mistake.”) Abu Ghraib: “a huge disappointment.” Not finding weapons of mass destruction: “a significant disappointment.” Weak, watered-down words from a man who seems utterly disconnected from what will soon be his legacy.

This is a man who throughout his adult life has been in flight – into alcohol, into religion, into ideology (he still manages to wax rhapsodic about tax cuts) – into behaviors and intellectual postures generally that allow him to escape the necessity of looking at reality and engaging fully and honestly with it. How I wish he were nothing more than a fictional character, a foil perhaps for Jack Bauer.

As a TV show, Bush’s presidency might have been entertaining. His performance on Monday morning was just sad. Now that it’s all over, it is hard not to feel pity for this limited character as he leaves the stage, so obviously worn down with his running, so obviously embittered, so obviously incapable, for the life of him, of seeing where he went wrong.

Somebody should give that man an Oscar before they send him to prison.

This is Judith Warner speaking. The same person who once characterized the "Reagan Revolution" as the formative error era of her life and now imagines that everything's changed again. But in a good way.

The urbane and articulate and liberal Ms. Warner has, as they say down South, has met her ex-Leader's impression of the Country Boy.

Ms. Warner let me suggest the value of "of looking at reality and engaging fully and honestly with it."

Bu$hie was highly successful. Bu$hie gets away with rape, robbery, and murder. His brothers will be back soon to finish the job. Meanwhile, their Ba$e's latest master thespian will be sworn in on January 20th.

People Bin Watching

You can run things, Harry, but you can't hide:

So now we find out that "Harry Reid contacted Rod Blagojevich to oppose a roster of African American candidates because he considered them 'unelectable.'" And we have Reid fiddling with the law to prevent seating Blagojevich's actual pick: a corrupt, egotistical black Chicago pol. This is, in turn, putting progressive Al Franken's seat at risk. Say what? Reid is the Senate Majority Leader. Why is he acting like a two-bit crook?

There have been other moments of "wha?" FISA, Iraq, running interference for the oil and coal industries, and on, and on. And Reid isn't just a Democrat from a conservative state--he's the Senate Democratic Leader, chosen by the Senate Democrats. I've been watching Reid, now, for years, make excuses to Democratic voters, most of whom are far more liberal than Reid. It seemed for a while that he might be a wimp. Only how could a wimp become Senate Majority Leader or retain his seat while consistently opposing his party's own constituency? No, Reid is pursing a conservative agenda and he's doing it with the support of a substantial faction of the Senate Democrats, who chose Reid, by their arcane institutional process (which seems to be secret) to lead them. Which means, not only has Reid sold out his party's rank and file, not only is he corrupt in some well-concealed way, but a substantial faction of the Senate Democrats are, too...

I think the Raven has pretty much hit the nail on the head, but I think it's too simple to call the corruption conservatism.

It's money. True enough, big money is usually conservative. But mostly big money is looking for more money.

Reid is precisely where the weight should fall, along with Pelosi, because these two will ante up the legistlation that Obama has to play with.

[thanks again to Avedon for the link]

"It just doesn't make sense..."

It really doesn't, does it?

That is, if the objectives are the ones they present.

'Sponsatility

...Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices--particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare - should be made on his watch. "We've kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road," he said...

He means he's going to do the responsible thing and raise Social Security and Medicare taxes, right?

If not...

When you grab that third rail, Mr. Obama, be sure to use both hands.

I wouldn't want to prolong your suffering.

Idle Speculation Amidst the Ruins

Quoth the Oracle over at Avedon's place:

...What if the Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina deliberately withheld federal disaster assistance from Louisiana and New Orleans to give time for their smear campaign against Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to work.

And what if the Bush administration and right-wing pundits deliberately slandered and defamed these two Louisiana Democrats so Republicans would have a better chance of defeating one or both in the next Louisiana election?

And what if this was orchestrated at the highest levels of the Bush administration?

And in combination with this White House/right-wing news media smear campaign, what if top Bush officials, espeically at DHS, actually sabotaged efforts by FEMA's director and the FEMA disaster coordinator at the FEMA command center in Baton Rouge as they tried to do their job and get desperately needed supplies and personnel into New Orleans after it flooded?

And what if some of the FEMA supplies and personnel that were meant for Louisiana and the flooded city of New Orleans were shifted to Mississippi and Alabama instead, two Gulf Coast states also in the path of Katrina, but both with Republican governors?

Get the picture?

In other words, for the Bush White House's (Karl Rove's) smear campaign against Louisiana Democrats to work then things had to get much worse in Louisiana and New Orleans instead of getting better. Because how could their malicious and wholly unfounded smear campaign succeed if federal disaster relief supplies and personnel made it into New Orleans fast and people were rescued expeditiously with minimum loss of life and suffering?

Nope. What the Bush administration did (or failed to do) during Hurricane Katrina was deliberate, premeditated and criminal...for purely partisan political purposes...and American citizens died.

What if the wreck of the American economy was a strategery engineered by conservative and religious fanatic members of the wealthiest 0.1% of Amerika to destroy the immoral economic clout of the middle class? Look at some of the things Robert Bork and the religious right were saying during the Clinton era.

What if Bu$hie knew perfectly well there were no WMD in Iraq?

What if the surge in fuel prices and the subsequent collapse of Detroit was all part of an energy policy intentionally engineered by a certain vice-president and the smartest (and most evil) guys in the room?

What if they knew torture was good for nothing except providing a source for policy statements justifying their own increasing grip on power?

What if they knew that Al Qaeda was going to fly airplanes into buildings back in August 2001 and just, you know, got out of the way because the chips would fall nicely?

Now, consider this, what if Barack Obama lets them all, their minions, their sycophants, and their spooks just glide away quietly into the night?

They'll be back. You can count on it. Chaos is the plan.

One Hopes but Does Not Expect

Bob Herbert:

...Another month, another half-million Americans out of work. The ranks of the unemployed have now stretched beyond 11 million, and millions more are underemployed — working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time jobs.

As bad as this sounds, the reality confronting working men and women is actually significantly worse. Some 2.6 million jobs have been lost since December 2007, and as the Economic Policy Institute tells us:

“Just to keep up with the ever-expanding labor force, the economy would have needed to create 1.5 million jobs over the last 12 months. This means that the 2.6 million jobs lost leaves us over 4 million jobs short of what the economy required to provide employment for the American work force.”

We’re in employment quicksand. The official unemployment rate (a notoriously rosy statistic) is 7.2 percent. But more than one in every eight workers in America is jobless or underemployed. That’s 21 million people. And it’s not even counting the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for a job.

More than a million jobs were lost in November and December, and millions more are projected to vanish this year. When the November job losses were announced, David Leonhardt wrote in The Times’s blog, Economix:

“The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000. At no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women fallen so much from its peak.”

This is an emergency. There is one overriding mission for the incoming Obama administration when it comes to dealing with the economy, and that’s putting Americans back to work. Forget the G.O.P.’s mania for tax cuts. Forget, for the time being (but not forever), the ballooning budget deficits. Forget the feel-good but doomed-to-fail effort to play nice-nice with the rabid partisans of the right who were the ones most responsible for ruining the economy in the first place.

Put the people back to work!

To do that, Democrats will have to overcome their natural timidity. They will have to fend off the Republican opposition in Congress and set in motion an enormous surge of public spending aimed at creating jobs, jobs, jobs.

Each new surge of job losses is an additional violent assault on the already profoundly damaged economy. Idle workers do not pay taxes and that ratchets up budget deficits at the federal, state and local levels. They draw down unemployment benefits and further strain the Medicaid rolls. In many cases, they are forced to turn to food stamps for their families’ daily bread. And, of course, they stop purchasing cars and homes, goods and services.

The economy will not be saved by putting a pitiful $500 into the hands of the average taxpayer. And it won’t be saved by gift-wrapped concessions to the G.O.P. in the form of business tax cuts that the president-elect is said to be considering.

With credit tight, savings depleted, the stock market in the tank and home prices in a state of collapse, the only way to get real money into the hands of ordinary Americans (and thus back into the economy) is through employment. The way to truly stimulate the economy and save the jobs of anxiety-ridden workers who are still employed is to get the unemployed back to work as soon as possible.

And the way to create jobs is through infrastructure investments (building and repairing roads, bridges, tunnels and water and sewer systems); and by investing in 21st-century clean energy initiatives, in public transportation systems, and in school construction; and by providing access to health care for the millions who don’t have it.

In other words, by investing in the people and the enormous productive capacity of the United States.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was blunt this week after he and other Senate Democrats met with Obama aides to discuss the president-elect’s stimulus package. “There is only one thing we have got to do in the stimulus, and that is how can we create jobs,” he said.

Referring to Mr. Obama’s national economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, Mr. Harkin added: “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle down. If we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down.”

Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.

The madness of trickle down and its corollaries ruined the economy and millions of Americans with it. President-elect Obama ran to the mantra of change. One hopes he is not too timid to deliver.

One also hopes that the Oborg Collective doesn't decide that employment federally bankrolled by his volunteer civilian jobs corp is just not bipartisan enough.

Like Herbert says, Americans need jobs to work at paying their bills. Buying food. Buying shelter. It's great to do volunteer work for free, but you don't exactly volunteer to build bridges or roads or plant a million trees or develop alternative energy sources. That requires money and not just for payrolls but infrastructure investment.

You know, the kind of things the Republicans- and Obama's own personal political bankrollers on Wall Street- just plain hate since they can't make a buck off them.

There is a strategery that certainly does seem to fit the bipartisan bill: mandatory national service for everyone under 25. Or 30. Or 45. A "non-draft", because as Darth Rahm says, "Freedom isn't free".

This would come with an option for the military to engage in a little selective service skimming off the top, too, since the Pentagon- and Obama's own personal political bankroll and brand new Ba$e- thinks there are all of these jobs for Team Amerika World Police to take care of.

The Company's War on Gaza

And I bet you thought it was the Israeli government running their little party when really it was the same people that own Joe the Mouth of Sauron Plumber.

How can you tell?



Well, for starters, her name was Kawkab al Dayeh, and she was 4 years old when she met the Company. For the more squeemish, that's her head being dug out of the rubble, and the rest of her body is below. Though why it makes a difference I can't imagine: the innocent dead are the dead.

For some reason the strategery planners in the Company wars from Cambodia to Columbia to the Sudan to Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine love to kill women and children they can't sell into prostitution.

Then there's the fossil fuels no one wants to talk about...



...because it's all about the threat and the terror and the fear and how they hate us for our way of life.

There might be something to that last point after all.

A Modest Proposal

Bob Herbert speaks heresy:

...there’s a good idea floating around that takes its cue from the legendary Willie Sutton. Why not go where the money is?

The economist Dean Baker is a strong advocate of a financial transactions tax. This would impose a small fee — ranging up to, say, 0.25 percent — on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds and other financial assets, including the seemingly endless variety of exotic financial instruments that have been in the news so much lately.

According to Mr. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the fees would raise a ton of money, perhaps $100 billion or more annually — money that the government sorely needs.

But there’s another intriguing element to the proposal. While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders — people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time — they would amount to a much heavier lift for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino.

“It raises money in a way that comes primarily at the expense of speculation,” said Mr. Baker. “The fees would be a considerable expense for someone who is buying futures, or a stock, or any asset at 2 o’clock and then selling it at 3. The more you trade, the more you pay.

“For the typical person holding stock, who is planning to hold it for a long period of time, paying the quarter of one percent on a trade is just not that big a deal.”

The fees, though small, could amount to a big deal for speculators because in addition to the volume of their trades they often make their money on very small margins. Someone who buys an asset and then sells it an hour later at a one percent appreciation might feel quite pleased. He or she would be less pleased at having to pay a quarter-percent fee to purchase the asset in the first place and then another quarter percent to sell it.

This, according to Mr. Baker, is part of the beauty of the transfer tax; it tends to curb at least some speculation. “It’s a very progressive tax,” he said, “that discourages nonproductive activity.”

A hallmark of the Bush years has been the rampant irresponsibility — by the White House, Congress and the general public — when it comes to matters of finance. The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were placed on credit cards and off the books. Their ultimate overall costs will be in the trillions.

Incredibly, President Bush and Congress cut taxes in wartime, which is insane.

Budget deficits and the national debt are streaking toward the moon. And the only remedy anyone has come up with for fending off Great Depression II has been deficit spending on a scale reminiscent of World War II.

Excuse me, but did somebody say the baby boomers are about to start retiring?

Maybe the piper will never have to be paid. Maybe the deficits will someday magically right themselves. Maybe some prosperous future generation will be more than happy to clean up the mess we left behind.

If none of that is true, we should start looking now for some real money somewhere. A stock transfer tax is not a bad place to start.

Why not, indeed. That's the best way to control the irrational exuberance I know of.

If an Israeli Objects to Genocide and Nobody Hears It

...you know what happens.

The Israeli is ignored, ridiculed, and called a "self-hating" Jew by other Israelis and "just another Zionist-lite" by everyone else.

But unlike what The New York Pravda would have you believe, there are many out there that don't like what their government is doing.

Uri Avnery:

Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all...

Please, read it all.

And of course, the Israeli government secret police targets the Jews who don't go for genocide.

Open WiFi is a Commie Islamofascist Terror Plot

So says India, anyway. Noah Shachtman:

...Open wi-fi is a terrorist tool and has to be shut down, right this second. That's the conclusion, at least, of the Mumbai police. Starting today, the Times of India reports, "several police teams, armed with laptops and internet-enabled mobile phones, will randomly visit homes to detect unprotected networks."

"If a particular place's wi-fi is not password-protected or secured then the policemen at the spot has the authority to issue notice to the owner of the wi-fi connection directing him to secure the connection," deputy commissioner of police Sanjay Mohite tells The Hindu. Repeat wi-fi offenders may receive "notices under the Criminal Procedure Code," another senior officer warns the Times.

Mohite notes that e-mails taking credit for terror attacks in New Delhi and Ahmedabad were sent through open wireless networks. "Unprotected IP addresses can be misused for cyber crimes,'' he says. Other Indian cities now require cyber cafes to install surveillance cameras, and to collect identification from all customers...

The telcoms would really like that idea here, too.

On the new season of 24, I can see Jack Bauer torturing people to get them to use passwords for their wireless and switch to Fox cable news webfeeds to protect National Security.

Tell Barry O. the news: FDR had a plan

Remember the Dust Bowl? The last time the Free Market devastated the planet, it threatened to turn the entire Great Plains into a desert- similar to the ancient deserts of the Middle East, and for much the same reasons.

FDR stopped it and physically changed the face of the world in the better direction.

How?

In 1932, when the American public voted President Herbert Hoover out of office, they were searching for an end to the economic chaos and unemployment that had gripped the nation for two years. They turned to a man promising a better life than the one they had known since the beginning of the Great Depression — Franklin D. Roosevelt.

When FDR took office, he immediately commenced a massive revitalization of the nation's economy. In response to the depression that hung over the nation in the early 1930s, President Roosevelt created many programs designed to put Americans back to work.

Roosevelt was not interested in the dole. He was was determined, rather, to preserve the pride of American workers in their own ability to earn a living, so he concentrated on creating jobs.

In his first 100 days in office, President Roosevelt approved several measures as part of his "New Deal," including the Emergency Conservation Work Act (ECW), better known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). With that action, he brought together the nation's young men and the land in an effort to save them both. Roosevelt proposed to recruit thousands of unemployed young men, enlist them in a peacetime army, and send them to battle the erosion and destruction of the nation's natural resources. More than any other New Deal agency, the CCC is considered to be an extension of Roosevelt's personal philosophy.

The speed with which the plan moved through proposal, authorization, implementation, and operation was certainly a miracle of cooperation among all the agencies and branches of the federal government. From FDR's inauguration on March 4, 1933, to the induction of the first CCC enrollee, only 37 days had elapsed.

The CCC, also known as Roosevelt's Tree Army, was credited with renewing the nation's decimated forests by planting an estimated three billion trees from 1933 to 1942. This was crucial, especially in states affected by the Dust Bowl, where reforestation was necessary to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil in place. So far reaching was the CCC's reforestation program that it was responsible for more than half the reforestation, public and private, accomplished in the nation's history.

...By 1942, there was hardly a state that could not boast of permanent projects left as markers by the CCC. The CCC worked on improving millions of acres of federal and state lands, as well as parks. New roads were built, telephone lines strung, and trees planted.

CCC projects included:

* more than 3,470 fire towers erected;
* 97,000 miles of fire roads built;
* 4,235,000 man-days devoted to fighting fires;
* more than 3 billion trees planted;
* 7,153,000 man days expended on protecting the natural habitats of wildlife; 83 camps in 15 Western states assigned 45 projects of that nature;
* 46 camps assigned to work under the direction of the U.S. Bureau of Agriculture Engineering;
* more than 84,400,000 acres of good agricultural land receive manmade drainage systems; Indian enrollees do much of that work;
* 1,240,000 man-days of emergency work completed during floods of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys;
* disease and insect control;
* forest improvement — timber stand inventories, surveying, and reforestation;
* forest recreation development — campgrounds built, complete with picnic shelters, swimming pools, fireplaces, and restrooms.

...The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most successful New Deal programs of the Great Depression. It existed for fewer than 10 years, but left a legacy of strong, handsome roads, bridges, and buildings throughout the United States. Between 1933 and 1941, more than 3,000,000 men served in the CCC...