Government of Gangsters

Matt Taibbi notes that the Wall street bailout not only didn't fix the economy but has the potential to completely tank it:

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

Wall Street should have been allowed to fail, the big banks should have been allowed to fail, and the perpetrators of the massive fraud on the country should have gone to jail.

The fact nobody has gone to jail over this catastrophe shows how utterly corrupt our government is. It is literally being run by and for gangsters.

Good piece recounting how in the hell we got into this mess.

Obama Risks Not Getting Re-elected

because he missed the opportunity to truly reform the country's financial system.

This is very troubling, and I believe he handled it the way he did because of his relative inexperience.

The biggest worry is the GOP will get back in the White House, and then the country will almost certainly slide into third world status.

State Budget Messes

Naturally nobody thinks of looking at other sources of revenue, so it is the programs which affect working people or the poor which are affected most with budget cutbacks:

In response to budget shortfalls, states have carried out deep cuts to essential social services. The CBPP reports that “budget difficulties have led some 39 states to reduce services to their residents, including some of their most vulnerable families and individuals.” The numbers are staggering. Twenty-one states have made cuts that will restrict access to health care services for low-income families. Twenty-two states are “cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care, or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities, or [are] significantly increasing the cost of these services.”

Thirty-two states have made cuts in funding to colleges and universities while 24 states have made cuts in K-12 and early education. Forty-one states have had to reduce the hours of state employees or the size of their public workforce.

In North Carolina, where layoffs are widespread and the unemployment rate is at a record high of 11 percent—89,500 manufacturing jobs have been wiped out since 2007—state workers are now bracing themselves for the worst. In the Burlington, North Carolina school system alone, 130 teaching assistants have been laid off as a result of the state’s budget crisis. At least 200 teachers have been told they may also lose their jobs as the start of the school year draws nearer.

North Carolina’s poor and unemployed are increasingly turning to a woefully-unprepared system of private charities. The Winston-Salem Journal recently reported that this month the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina ran out of food for the first time in its 28 year history. The organization has been unable to keep up with the demand for food which has risen an alarming 76 percent this year. According to the latest numbers, 20 percent of North Carolina’s children live in poverty.

Republicans, of course, believe the poor should turn to "private" charities, which are totally inadequate in providing for their needs. As long as these creeps don't have to pay for it, it's okay.

Meanwhile, the crooks who created the economic mess we are in are getting billions of bonuses, courtesy of you and me.

The Robber Barons

have a lot of nerve asking small investors to bail them out of their wrongdoing by creating the equivalent of war bonds during World War II.

IF there are any "small investors" left in this country.

America Doesn't Need Inbreeding

in order to create a dumbass aristocratic class in this country. Just take a look at the latest Wall Street shenanigans for proof.

Gene Lyons' column has been moved to Thursdays now instead of appearing on Wednesdays.

Paul Street

takes on the neoliberal tendencies of the Obama administration regarding its bailout of Wall Street interests:

The unleft conservative Obama administration's challenge right now is to soothe popular anger in the face of his profound accommodation of Wall Street. The meaning of his recurrent calm-down rhetoric ("we can't govern out of anger") and of related pacifying messages in the dominant media is clear: "Populist Rage" (corporate news magazine Newsweek's cover story this week [12]) is dangerous and dysfunctional. If you are (quite reasonably) mad about inequality and corporate corruption, if you follow in accord with majority progressive public opinion by wanting elementarily democratic policies like national health insurance, union organizing rights, public control of the financial system, the discharge and expropriation of criminal Wall Street perpetrators, the prosecution of war crimes, the reduction of the bloated Pentagon budget, and a real peace dividend to go along with it...if you want all these things and are ready to fight for them beyond the plutocratic supervision of the Obama-Summers-Geithner team then you are a suitable case for psychiatric treatment . You are threat to civilized decency. You are too "emotional" and "angry." You don't believe in "unity" and "progress" and "hope." You are an "ideologue" and too "cynical" ("The power of accurate observation," as George Bernard Shaw wrote, "is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it"). You are not being "helpful." You are not staying properly quiet and respectful so that the new (supposedly non-ideological system) coordinators can "get things done."

Opposing the deliberate destruction of the middle class, wanting the U.S. to get out of Iraq, insuring the uninsured, and returning to the basic Democratic principles as outlined in the New Deal are hardly radical ideas, and Obama needs to do this instead of listening to the Wall Street types who have ruined this country.

Neoliberalism is a failure the same way the GOP's adherence to Friedmanomics is a failure, for both are two sides of the same coin.

The Booming Economy

In southern Oregon, the jobless rate is an impressive 12.8 percent, double what it was a year ago.

However, the stimulus has created 150 forest jobs, so somebody is working.
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Wall Street has gone apeshit over the new taxpayer-financed windfall for these crooks.

You Know Things Aren't Good for

Obama's administration when The New Republic believes Geithner is bad, yet the magazine continues with its neoliberal philosophy and says this inept "Brownie" type should not be sacked.

The Administration

continues to help out Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Obama

is trying to do a tightrope act regarding those Wall Street bonuses everybody else is worried about.

The media feign outrage people are actually waking up to the fact they have been robbed blind.

Robert Scheer on AIG, Etc.

Some of Obama's people need to get the hell out of Dodge.

Miscellaneous

Natasha Richardson likely had "talk and die" syndrome, and therefore she didn't get the immediate help she needed. By the time she entered the hospital, it was too late.

This is an interesting statistic:

A 2007 review in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience found "talk and die" patients were about 2.6 percent of those who died of head injuries.

Tragically the first ambulance sent to help Richardson at the time of her accident was turned away.

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In response to widespread outrage over outrageous bonuses being paid to executives who are with companies being bailed out by the federal government, the House has decided to levy heavy taxes on those bonuses.

Naturally a few of the Republicans, though judging from the vote not all of them, still think it is okay to pay obscene bonuses funded by the taxpayers.

The Kool Aid Has Finally Worn Off

for this commentator, and he doesn't like what he sees in Obama, with the Obama administration's clear pandering to Wall Street:

As everyone who has ever read anything I write knows, I am a big fan of Barack Obama, an absolute yellow-dog Democrat, and much quicker to defend anything any Democrat does or says than to criticize it.

But I have to say that I believe that Barack Obama has chosen the wrong people for his economic team and needs to rectify this mistake quickly or risk losing the public support he needs to accomplish what he intends. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke have got to go, and go quickly.

I would suggest replacing Timothy Geithner with Robert Reich, Larry Summers with Paul Krugman, and let them pick Bernanke's replacement.

See, Summers, Geithner and Bernanke are striving to rehabilitate the existing system that has failed. We need a fresh team, a team without ties to the Wall Street of the last two decades, to create a new financial system that is better suited to the realities of the times in which we now live.

These guys (and members of Congress) talk about taxing the bonuses of executives of bailed-out corporations at a confiscatory rate, or banning those bonuses outright. Why is this limited to bailed-out corporations only? Why not confiscate or ban them throughout the entire economy for all American businesses? They are NEVER fair, they are rife with cronyism and nepotism, and they are the source of a lot of the difficulties we now face. For example, take AIG (in the immortal words of Henny Youngman, "Please!"). The "performance" that triggered the receipt of these bonuses involved smooth-talking agents selling snake-oil investments, and the more persuasively deceptive they were, the more customers they bilked, the more likely it was that they'd get the big money. And this is true throughout the whole system of investment banking and insurance, not just AIG.

We have GOT to stop rewarding that kind of corruption. It is not good for our national health.

With the announcement of today's ADDITIONAL $1.2 t-t-t-trillion in stimulus from the Fed, that's ANOTHER two months of EVERYBODY'S pay. It brings the cost of this bailout to FIFTEEN MONTHS of the salary of EVERY AMERICAN WORKER'S SALARY COMBINED. How stimulative would it be if we just gave everybody a lump-sum check for a year and three months of salary?

I am afraid we are following in the footsteps of the Weimar Republic. And I am afraid that Goldman Sachs is the Obama administration's Halliburton.

The Underemployed

are mostly ignored in this economy, but they are there.
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The WSWS continues to take a dim view of Obama as he continues to defend Wall Street as anger is building over those outrageous bonuses.
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Wall Street "Brain Drain"

If Wall Street incompetents are upset because of pay caps, then this is the "brain drain" the country can well afford.

The more they have screwed up and stole, the better they do, and the greater chance they get away with it.

The Crook Chronicles

Although it is a truism the less one does, the more money one makes, and the more an executive screws up on the job, the more he or she is compensated, it is still considered smart business to reward these incompetents. Now Wall Street is upset there are strings attached to any bailout plan which dares to cap salaries.

Of course what the WSWS advocates isn't going to be realistic, but it is true there has a been a class war waged in the past 30 years, only this was waged by the elite few and their hacks in Washington against everybody else. Even now most people don't know there is a class war going on.

The Booming Economy

I certainly am not surprised about this report of banks importing foreign workers while at the same time the system was going down the shitter.

Why should I be surprised? When companies couldn't outsource jobs for cheap labor, they'd "insource" the cheap labor to undercut workers here.

This really and truly is criminal behavior:

The dozen banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.

As the economic collapse worsened last year — with huge numbers of bank employees laid off — the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in the 2007 budget year to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

The AP reviewed visa applications the banks filed with the Labor Department under the H-1B visa program, which allows temporary employment of foreign workers in specialized-skill and advanced-degree positions. Such visas are most often associated with high-tech workers.

The H1B program has been abused for years solely to undercut white-collar workers. And honestly, white-collar workers didn't bitch when blue-collar jobs were being sent overseas. We kept hearing the mantra of the blue-collar workers being "retrained" for the "new economy" jobs, which in turn would disappear eventually. Now there's virtually NOTHING to be retrained for, except perhaps in health care, but many of THOSE workers are also foreigners.

In the end it's all about greed and destroying what middle class we have left in this country in order to turn this into a third world paradise for the zillionaires and their political hacks. Now that so many people are laid off and have NO income apart from measly unemployment insurance, the whole house of cards has collapsed. Third world country workers who received the stolen American jobs themselves cannot even buy the products they make; the products were made SOLELY for the American consumer market. Well, that's gone with all of these AMERICAN workers being laid off.

It's payback time, and people are going to get madder and madder. Yours truly saw this class warfare be instituted against working-class and middle-class workers when Reaganomics took hold. There's no shock in this neck of the woods about the banks doing the same thing.

(H/T Cannonfire)

The Booming Economy

Union Pacific is looking to shed 3,150 jobs and possibly more.
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I think it is good of Obama to criticize companies that are squandering taxpayer-funded bailouts.

Companies should be held accountable for the money:

Moving forward, the president said, it would be necessary to pass reforms
ensuring the kind of “oversight, transparency, accountability that’s going to
be required in order for the American people to confidence in what we’re
doing.”

Exactly.
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In more good news, Obama says he is going to keep the estate tax.

If anything, he should increase the estate tax on the wealthiest individuals.

The estate tax is absolutely crucial in this country not only to raise revenue but to prevent an inherited aristocracy. The lack of an aristocratic class in this country is one characteristic distinguishing the United States from so many others despite the best efforts of the GOP right to create one.
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Obama says his new stimulus package is on target.

There is a video of his remarks:


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The latest housing and unemployment figures are far worse than economists anticipated.
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Harley-Davidson plans to cut 1,100 jobs.
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The Booming Economy

Bank executives should FOREGO their bonuses unless or until the economy gets back on track.

Why should they be rewarded for the mess they helped create?

The Economic Mess

Inhofe might have a point or two about Paulson, but he is full of shit about unemployment benefits.

If people who aren't currently working aren't given money to survive and pump MORE money into the economy as a result, the ECONOMY doesn't do better.

Jesus, dipshit, Friedmanism is deader than a doornail. Quit drinking the Kool Aid.
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