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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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]

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]

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...

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.

Pirate Strategery

Hedge Funds and the Global Economic Meltdown from Judd Bagley on Vimeo.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Winning the War Against Terror

Captain Hugh C. Thompson, Jr.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

"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.

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.

"... 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...

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.

“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.

Not gone, just walked off to look for America

[thanks to Mr. Fish]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Opium of the People

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.

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?

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.

Shearing the Sheep Before They Eat Mutton

Last week Jon Stewart said what should have been said:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

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.

It's a matter of national security

Loose Change, Final Cut.

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

Check it out.