Eurotarp and state-sanctioned wealth confiscation

max keiser and stacy herbert...



max and stacy make quite a pair and their informed rants always perk up a slow tuesday afternoon...

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We are dealing with shameless demagogy - the financial End Time has arrived

michael hudson in counterpunch via alternet...

We are dealing with shameless demagogy. The financial End Time has arrived, but Mr. Obama’s happy-talk pretends that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Mr. Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council on the party’s right wing? One of its leaders, after all, was Mr. Obama’s Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.

The second pretense is that cutting taxes for the super-rich is necessary to win Republican support for including the middle class in the tax cuts. It is as if the Democrats never won a plurality in Congress. (One remembers George W. Bush with his mere 50+%, pushing forward his extremist policies on the logic that: “I’ve got capital, and I’m using it.” What he had, of course, was Democratic Leadership Committee support.) The pretense is “to create jobs,” evidently to be headed by employment of shipyard workers to build yachts for the nouveau riches and sheriff’s deputies to foreclose on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears.

hudson engages in a re-naming exercise that is sadly appropriate...

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich.

and sums up the situation in a most sobering fashion...

Mr. Obama’s appointees are turning the U.S. economy into a Permanent Emergency, a Perpetual Ponzi Scheme requiring injections of more and more Quantitative Easing to to rescue “the economy” (Mr. Obama’s euphemism for creditors at the top of the economic pyramid) from being pushed into insolvency. Mr. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.

naturally, being a u.s. citizen, i am focused more on what's happening in my own country... however, as someone who also spends a great deal of time outside the u.s., i can state with certainty that this same scenario - the super-rich elites looting every last molecule of the world's natural and financial resources - is being played out in every country i have had the pleasure of visiting...

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The State of the Union - July 2010

let's try some real news for a change...

bottom line - privatize gains, socialize losses...



thanks to brasscheck tv...

This video comes from the consistently excellent Max Keiser program.

He covers a lot of ground very fast and his economic projections have been outstanding, but he is also an outspoken advocate for freedom and human rights.

It's all tied together: tyranny, government lying, torture, media collaboration, financial fraud, rampant corporate criminality. Max Keiser is one of the very few who gets it and puts it out there.

The only difference between the US today and Germany during the Hitler era
is there's no obvious goose stepping in the streets and the swastikas are in the closet.

The country has completely lost its way.

and that last is a sad understatement...

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More on the "recovery," Floyd "Ostrich" Norris, "Smilin' Ben" Bernanke and Donald "Movin' in the Right Direction" Kohn

following up on the previous post, mr. norris also chooses to ignore this, no small blip on the world economic data radar...

The debt crisis that has taken root in Greece, sparking an investor panic and talk of a national default in the heart of Europe, is at the leading edge of a problem expected to roll through the economically developed world as government borrowing rises into uncharted territory.

This mounting government debt poses a painful choice for developed countries such as Britain, Japan and the United States: either a deep reordering of public expectations about everything from the retirement age to tax rates, or slower growth as record levels of borrowing crimp economic activity.

Economists at the International Monetary Fund project that the amount of government debt held in the world's advanced economies will soon be so great that it surpasses the value of what they produce in a year.

recovery...? RECOVERY...?? sorry... i just don't see it...

maybe i ought to find out what bernanke and kohn are smokin' and get some for me...

Bernanke says policymakers prevented 'cataclysm' worse than Great Depression

The world's economic policymakers successfully learned the lessons of the Great Depression, helping to avert a horrendous economic outcome from the 2008 financial crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Thursday.

[...]

Separately, Fed Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn said Thursday that a "moderate" economic recovery is underway and that the uncertainty around the economy has dissipated in recent months.

"The economy appears to be moving in the right direction, though not as quickly as we all would like," Kohn said in a speech in San Francisco. The fact that conditions have evolved as he and other forecasters had expected last fall "suggests that the future may, just may, be a bit less uncertain than before," he said.

sayin' it doesn't make it so but these guys seem to think it does... i ain't buyin' it...

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The core driver of modern capitalist society is fraud... Someone has to go to jail...

from tyler durden at zero hedge...

The evident conclusion is that the core driver of modern capitalist society is fraud at its very core, and nothing short of a massive revolutionary overhaul of the political system, which is the number one defender of the status quo courtesy of very lucrative bribes and kickbacks originating from the same rotten Wall Street that day after day is uncovered to be nothing but a sham filled with toxic assets, used to collateralize an ever growing wall of liquidity (think you Bernanke).

dylan ratigan talks with eliot spitzer on msnbc about lehman brothers...

dylan ratigan...

This report comes just short of suggesting this is by no means an accident but instead one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated by a group of people, and enabled by the US government.

eliot spitzer...

There is no doubt civil cases will be brought. We had a failure of CEO, the CFO, the accountants, and indeed the regulators, the Fed and the Treasury, that were inside these banks, and the question has to be asked: where were they.

ratigan and spitzer make a very clear case in very simple language that there has been a massive con perpetrated on the american people... intuitively,we knew this was happening and it's high time the truth comes out...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

mike whitney at the smirking chimp via alternet...

This story isn't going away. Someone has to go to jail. It's clear that Geithner acted as the "chief facilitator" of industrial scale securities flim-flam which led directly to the Great Crash of '08. He needs to be held accountable for his actions.

the united states has been bending to the greedy scams of its super-rich elites and their bankster buddies for a long, long time... let's get this party going and start seeing some rule of law and accountability...

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Bad news

Bernanke Confirmed for Second Term as Fed Chief

The 70-30 Senate vote was a victory for President Obama, who had called Ben S. Bernanke a critical leader in the nation’s recovery from recession.

'course, if bernanke hadn't been confirmed for a second term, we would have had to face the prospect of a bernanke clone being nominated... right...? right...

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Naming Ben "The Tool" Bernanke Man of the Year is an insult to us all

all time magazine is doing is reinforcing the already indisputable fact that the super-rich elites and their extended family, the banksters, are the ones really running the country...

[Ben Bernanke's] creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivaled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.

ben has his job for one reason and one reason only, to provide "creative leadership" to help ensure that his bosses and handlers ever and always get their interests met... everything he has done simply makes a mockery out of serving the common good of the american people...

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Spitzer: The Rx has been wrong from the beginning

and THIS, dear friends, is precisely WHY spitzer had to be taken out...

eliot spitzer in an interview on democracy now...

[I]t wasn’t that the Fed was asleep at the switch; they were actually complicit. And by that, what I mean is that the Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, when he was the president of the New York Fed, actually built and participated in creating the structure that now has collapsed. And that, I think, is what is so problematic to so many of us. They are now claiming credit for having taken trillions of our tax dollars and given those dollars back to the banks to return them to solvency, when the initial bankruptcy and the initial illiquidity and the initial crisis was very much a consequence of the very policies they put in place.

Stepping back for a moment, we have a major crisis in this nation, and that crisis is jobs. That crisis is that we are seeing the elimination of the middle-class job foundation that permits most Americans to do better year after year after year. The reality is median family income has been stagnant for forty years, and the policies of what I call financialization, which is major banks trading assets back and forth, the Wall Street banks, such as Goldman, which is rightly a lightning rod right now for much of what’s going on, buying and selling, playing with tax dollars in proprietary trading—they make huge money, nothing is added to the economy, jobs are sent overseas. All of this going on simultaneously. That is what our economy has become.

And Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner were the architects of this. And now they are saying, “Didn’t we do a good job six months ago giving money to the banks?” No. Go back two, three, five years. Where were they? Tim Geithner, over and over, bailed out the banks. He was, as president of the New York Fed, the overseer of the institution that collapsed. And so, it’s akin to going to a doctor who has said, “I have a great technique for you: I’m going to bleed you,” and he bleeds you, and he gets you more and more sick and sick and sick. Then when you’re about to die, he puts a tourniquet on you and says, “Gee, I’m good.” No, your prescriptions have been wrong since the beginning.

you simply CAN'T have a truth-teller in a position of power, not in this country, not at this time...

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Big news - Bernie Sanders puts a hold on Bernanke's nomination

O. M. G...! am i witnessing an outbreak of senatorial cojones...?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today placed a hold on the nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” Sanders said. “What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”

As head of the central bank since 2006, Bernanke could have demanded that Wall Street provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy, but he did not.

He could have insisted that large bailed-out banks end the usurious practice of charging interest rates of 30 percent or more on credit cards, but he did not.

He could have broken up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that took Federal Reserve assistance, but he did not.

He could have revealed which banks took more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed secret loans, but he did not.

“The American people want a new direction on Wall Street and at the Fed. They do not want as chairman someone who has been part of the problem and who has been responsible for many of the enormous difficulties that we are now experiencing,” Sanders said. “It’s time for a change at the Fed.”

not only did sanders have the guts to do it, he also had the guts NOT to do it anonymously...

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The "recovery"...? HA...!! How about 36M folks on food stamps...

seeing light at the end of the tunnel...? me neither... guess it's probably because i'm not a member of the super-rich elite...

food stamps...

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.

[...]

From the ailing resorts of the Florida Keys to Alaskan villages along the Bering Sea, the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day.

There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times.

foreclosures...

The Obama administration on Monday plans to announce a campaign to pressure mortgage companies to reduce payments for many more troubled homeowners, as evidence mounts that a $75 billion taxpayer-financed effort aimed at stemming foreclosures is foundering.

“The banks are not doing a good enough job,” Michael S. Barr, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said in an interview Friday. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be.”

Even as lenders have in recent months accelerated the pace at which they are reducing mortgage payments for borrowers, a vast majority of loans modified through the program remain in a trial stage lasting up to five months, and only a tiny fraction have been made permanent.

meanwhile, as citizen anger at the incredible amount of our money being thrown at those who already have way too much of it continues to grow, the likes of the fed's bernanke simply can't stop defending the very system that precipitated this hellish mess...

In a column published on The Washington Post’s Web site and scheduled to appear on the op-ed page on Sunday, the chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, sharply criticized a Senate provision that he said “would strip the Fed of all its bank regulatory powers” and a House provision to repeal a 30-year-old law “to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence.”

The Federal Reserve’s jurisdiction to regulate banks has come under increasing attack in Congress in recent months, reflecting the anger of voters at the huge taxpayer costs of the bailout of Wall Street.

Mr. Bernanke repeated, as he has many times before, that while some of the measures in response to the financial crisis were “distasteful and unfair,” they were necessary.

ol' ben is such an obvious tool... admitting that things are "distasteful and unfair" but still "necessary" is akin to the old parental adage - "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" - while strapping the hapless kid with the business end of a belt...

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Change Bernanke's medication and let him face Pittsburgh's 93,700 jobless

greg palast on the obama's letter to the g20 players that has still not been released by the wall street journal...

If Bernanke and Obama were truly concerned about preserving jobs, they would have required banks loaded with taxpayer bail-out loot to lend these funds to consumers and business. China did so, ordering its banks to increase credit. And boy, did they, expanding credit by an eye-popping 30%, rocketing China's economy out of recession and into double-digit growth.

But the Obama Administration has gone the opposite way. The White House letter to the G-20 calls for slowly increasing bank reserves, and that can only cause a tight credit market to tighten further.

It's not that the White House completely ignores job losses. The US letter suggests, "The G-20 should commit to ... income support for the unemployed." You can imagine the Europeans, who already have generous unemployment benefits--most without time limits--turning purple over that one. America's stingy unemployment compensation extension under the Stimulus Plan is already beginning to expire with no live proposal to continue aid for the jobless victims of this recession.

The Europeans are so cute when they're angry, when they pound their little fists. Obama assumes he can ignore them. The EU, once the big player in the G-7, has seen its members' status diluted into the G-20, where the BRIC powers (Brazil, Russia, India and China) now flex their muscles. But Europeans have a thing or two to teach Americans about the economics of the twilight of empire.

Maybe the differences are cultural, not economic; that Europeans lack America's Manifest Destiny can-do optimism.

So, to give the visitors a taste of the yes-we-can spirit, Obama should invite Pittsburgh's 93,700 jobless to the G-20 meet to celebrate that 35% rise in the stock market.

Or -- my own suggestion -- change Bernanke's medication.

all the euphoria about the recession being over is solely due to the fact that the super-rich elites are once again raking it in... the millions of poor bastards who are out on the street looking for work ain't gettin' nothing but lip service...

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The economy suffers as the super-rich elites - a/k/a G20 - prepare to meet, greet, eat and determine our fate

paul craig roberts debunks the spin that the recession is over...

Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over.

[...]

Refreshed with the TARP $700 billion and the Federal Reserve’s expanded balance sheet, banks are again behaving like hedge funds. Leveraged speculation is producing another bubble with the current stock market rally, which is not a sign of economic recovery but is the final savaging of Americans’ wealth by a few investment banks and their Washington friends. Goldman Sachs, rolling in profits, announced six figure bonuses to employees.

The rest of America is suffering terribly.

The unemployment rate, as reported, is a fiction and has been since the Clinton administration. The unemployment rate does not include jobless Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year and have given up on finding work. The reported 10% unemployment rate is understated by the millions of Americans who are suffering long-term unemployment and are no longer counted as unemployed. As each month passes, unemployed Americans drop off the unemployment role due to nothing except the passing of time.

craig hedges suggests that, despite the heavy-handed security presence, we seize the opportunity to show our masters just how displeased we are at the treatment we've been receiving at their hands...

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

[...]

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger.

[...]

But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history.

[...]

The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.

none of this is news, of course... most of us - at least the people i know and the folks who read this blog - are acutely aware of the situation... why i even bother with posting this kind of doom and gloom is in the hopes that the downfall of our merciless handlers will somehow accelerate...

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Three big banks now hold $3 of every $10 on deposit in the U.S. while the little fish continue to die off

the "too big to fail" banks are, gosh and golly sports fans, now even BIGGER thanks to the strategy pursued by those who supposedly have the common good of the citizenry at heart... HA...!

check the stats in the last paragraph...

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

leapin' lizards, batman...! that essentially means that you and i are now officially wholly-owned subsidiaries of the banksters...

meanwhile, the smaller fish continue to die off...

Regulators seized 45 firms during the first half of the year. In the past two months they have closed 36 more, including regional powerhouses Colonial Bank of Alabama and Guaranty Bank of Texas. The FDIC said Thursday that it counted 416 banks at risk of failing as of the end of June, a 36 percent increase from the first quarter. As with the cost of failures, the number was the highest since the early 1990s, when regulators were dealing with the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis and excessive lending for commercial development.

In recent quarters, the failures have forced the FDIC to spend more money than it collects. Banks use money from depositors to make loans. As a result, when a bank fails, much of the depositors' money is no longer in the vaults, and some of it is tied up in loans that will never be repaid. The FDIC was created by Congress to replace the missing money -- up to $250,000 in each account, under current rules.

The insurance fund held $45.2 billion at the end of June 2008. It held $13 billion at the end of March. The agency has warned that the balance could reach zero by the end of the year.

oh, but never fear... between you and i and our deep pockets, the treasury can always print more money to hand out...

Should the FDIC need even more money, the agency can borrow from the Treasury Department, then repay the government with fees collected from banks in years to come.

and what about the economic recovery that all the punditocracy is crowing about...? not so much...

[I]n an indication that the industry has not turned the corner, the share of troubled loans increased even more quickly. A trend that began with distressed mortgage lending has long since spread to other categories including credit card lending, loans to small businesses, and -- now deteriorating most rapidly -- loans for commercial real estate development.

kinda warms your heart, doesn't it...? in the mad dash of our controllers and handlers to preserve the status quo - the status quo of the super-rich and powerful elites, that is - we've ended up not only preserving the status quo, we've significantly bolstered it... heckuva job, tim... heckuva job, ben... heckuva job, larry... heckuva job, hank...

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Bernanke tries to counter criticism of the Fed

the la times, in a long article that purports to limn the details of how bernanke is responding to the growing call for fed scrutiny up to and including its dismantling, instead ends up only trying to elicit sympathy for poor beleaguered ben without bothering to elaborate on what is, imho, well-justified criticism (see previous post)...

[O]dds favor Bernanke to be reappointed by Obama. Bernanke has strong backing from economists and is well regarded in the White House, where he has had a long and good relationship with the president's economics team, including Christina Romer, with whom Bernanke played bridge when they were both teaching at Princeton, and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers. The latter is often mentioned as a potential candidate for Fed chief, but is generally seen as an underdog because of his forceful style.

[...]

With global finances and the Fed's reputation imperiled, Bernanke has asserted his leadership. In addition to dropping its key lending rate to banks to nearly zero interest, the Fed has taken unprecedented action by invoking emergency powers under the 1913 Federal Reserve Act to prop up Bear Stearns Cos., American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and other faltering institutions. Bernanke's Fed has bought hundreds of billions of dollars of government debt to drive down mortgage rates.

ya gotta love the list of impressive "accomplishments" in that last paragraph... "propping up" a.i.g., citi, bear stearns and bofa sure would make the top of MY list of major efforts carefully crafted to help out the mass of u.s. citizenry...

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THIRD bailout for Citi - how disgusting is this...?

why don't they skip the middleman and just deposit the cash directly into the bank accounts of the board members and the senior executives... this smoke and mirrors shit is enough to gag a maggot...

The Treasury Department reached a deal late Thursday to take a stake of 30 to 40 percent in Citigroup as part of a third bailout of the embattled bank, according to several people close to the deal.

Vikram S. Pandit, the chief executive, will remain at the helm, but Citigroup will have to shake up its board so that it has a majority of independent directors, a move that federal regulators had already been pursuing.

Under the terms of the deal, the Treasury Department has agreed to convert up to $25 billion of its preferred stock investment in Citigroup into common stock.

It will convert its stake to the extent that Citigroup can persuade private investors, including several big foreign government investment funds, to do so alongside the government, two people close to the deal said.

The Treasury Department will match the private investors’ conversions dollar-for-dollar. That accounts for uncertainty in how big the government’s stake will be.

mish offers his usually trenchant perceptions on this travesty...

With all due respect Mr. President, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are offering the same policies as President Bush and Secretary Paulson. Those policies are to bail out banks regardless of cost to taxpayers. Mr. President, it's hard enough to overlook Geithner's tax indiscretions. Mr. President, it is harder still, if not impossible, to ignore the fact that neither Geithner nor Bernanke saw this coming. Yet amazingly they are both cock sure of the solution. Even more amazing is the fact that [the] solution changes every day.

With all due respect Mr. President, Geithner and Bernanke are a huge part of the problem, and no part of the solution and the sooner you realize that the better off this nation will be

[...]

With all due respect Mr. President, you and Congress want to force banks to lend when banks (by not lending) are acting responsibly for the first time in a decade. Mr, President can you please tell us who banks are supposed to lend to? Do we need any more Home Depots? Pizza Huts? Strip malls? Nail salons? Auto dealerships? What Mr. President? What? And why should banks be lending when unemployment is rising and lending risks right along with it?

not much i can add to that...

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The $7.76 TRILLION DOLLAR BAILOUT - enough to gag a maggot and could pay off HALF the country's mortgages!

bloomberg is keeping score...

The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”

so, how does this all trickle down to you and me...?

The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

and, ferchrissake, they won't even tell us WHO'S GETTING THE GODDAM MONEY...!

“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”

The Fed should account for the collateral it takes in exchange for loans to banks, said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Chicago-based Northern Trust Corp. and a former research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

“There is a lack of transparency here and, given that the Fed is taking on a huge amount of credit risk now, it would seem to me as a taxpayer there should be more transparency,” Kasriel said.

if it feels suspiciously like we're getting screwed big-time, i would have to say, a la sarah palin, "YOU BETCHA...!"

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'Scuse me, but I have a VERY strong suspicion about WHY there's opposition to an automaker bailout

yes, i'm cynical, but you already knew that...

i was watching cnn last evening where paulson and bernanke were testifying before congress on the bailout... this was interspersed with stories about the big three automakers also scheduled to appear with hat in hand... now, i don't know about you, but i've been watching our - taxpayers' - money being handed out by the billions to banks, insurance companies, investment brokers and damn near everybody else that passes by, and i was sitting there trying to make sense out of why, fercryinoutloud, our super-rich elites, personified by paulson and bernanke, people who've been so free with our money up to now, were suddenly so hard over against helping detroit... then it dawned on me...

what sets detroit's situation apart from the banks, insurance companies, etc...? hmmmmmm...?? think about it... yep, that's right... unions AND a very large, blue-collar labor force... what is it that our elite, corporatist, super-rich overlords hate beyond almost everything else...? hmmmmmmm...? that's right... unions... who works for banks, insurance companies and investment brokers...? hmmmmmm...?? the super-rich power brokers, that's who... why would these people who are so busy feeding at the taxpayer trough pass up the chance to completely destroy the unions AND take out a large swath of the u.s. middle class in one fell swoop...? what a golden opportunity...!

don't get me wrong... i'm not favoring a detroit bailout... i'm just trying to understand an apparent contradiction... why is aig "too big to fail," but detroit, with almost three million jobs at stake, can be flushed down the toilet without a backward glance...?

just sayin'...

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Dear Senator: "If you vote for this bill, you will not get my vote in the next election"

it's not very often i urge people to phone, email, write or fax anybody, but, after sending off three sets of emails and two sets of faxes to my senators, reid and ensign, wherein i threatened to withdraw my support for them in perpetuity if they supported and voted for the bailout bill, i read this on mish's global economic trend analysis and was moved to put up a post...

Sample Fax

Dear Senator/Congressional Leader

The Paulson plan is not workable. It is a sellout to corporate America at taxpayer expense.

Nouriel Roubini: "Paulson Plan is a Disgrace"

On Friday, Nouriel Roubini, the most widely respected economist in the country stated...

"The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown."

Former FDIC Chairman Weighs In

"Bailout Plan Will Not 'Work' in Current Form"

Mad Rush To Financial Judgment

On Friday we heard president Bush and Paulson, preach the same set of lies they have preached before.

• There can be no delay.
• Sweeping new Powers for the Fed are needed.
• The Treasury needs $700 billion dollars.
• There is no time to study alternatives.
  

In your heart you know all of the above are lies. It was the very same mad rush to judgment that started the Iraq War. We do not need and cannot afford a financial mad rush to judgment.

Thee odds of failure on the Paulson plan are 100%. The Paulson plan will not create any jobs or help homeowners pay their bills. Instead it diverts $700 billion of taxpayer funds to failed banks that took excessive risks. The sheer size of the bailout will cause interest rates to rise, further adding to taxpayer woes.

Long term interest rates are already up a half point on news of this bill. They will rise more if it passes. How is that supposed to help homeowners?

Robbing taxpayers to pay failed banks cannot possibly work!

Printing money and giving it away cannot work either. If it did work, Zimbabwe would be the most prosperous nation in the world.

190+ Economists Slam Bailout

Over 190 top economists in the country have slammed this bailout on grounds of fairness, ambiguity, and long term effects.

http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/john.cochrane/research/Papers/mortgage_protest.htm

Paul O'Neil Is Against The Plan

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said today that our nation's leaders -- especially President Bush -- are "in a panic" and haven't thought through the $700 billion bailout plan in a rush to pass it by the end of the week.

"I don't think he understands or knows much about any of this and it shows. It is possible to re-liquefy the credit system without 'We the People' owning $700 billion worth of homes," he said.

BB&T Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Allison critiques the plan

Treasury "is totally dominated by Wall Street investment bankers" and "cannot be relied on to objectively assess" the impact of government policy on the financial industry, Allison wrote in a Sept. 23 letter to Congress.

The letter was verified by Bob Denham, a spokesman for BB&T, North Carolina's third-largest bank.

• What is it that Paulson knows that 190+ economists don't?
  
  
• What is it that Paulson knows that William Isaac, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does not know?
  
  
• What is it that Paulson knows that former Treasury Secretary O'Neil does not know?
  
  
• What is it that Paulson knows that small bank CEOs who avoided this mess do not know?
  
  
• What is it that Paulson knows that Roubini does not know?
  

Remember it was Paulson who was telling us all how safe the US Banking system was just a few weeks ago.

Roubini: "It is a disgrace that no professional economist was consulted by Congress or invited to present his/her views at the Congressional hearings on the Treasury rescue plan."

Block This Bill

Our prayers are with you that you have the courage to stand up do what you know you must do: Block This Bill.

I cannot and will not vote for any member of Congress who votes for this bill in its current form or anything remotely close to the current form.

This insane rush to push something through, is wrong. If you vote for this bill, you will not get my vote in the next election. It is as simple as that.

It is time to scrap the Paulson Plan and start all over. Doing nothing is far better than wasting $700 billion in a Wall Street Bailout Boondoggle that puts an already stressed taxpayer in further jeopardy.

Your Name
Your Phone Number

Please fax everyone on this list.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R) 202-224-3416 or 202-224-5137 (try both not sure which is correct)
Sen. Harry Reid (D) 202-224-7327
Sen. Jim DeMint (R) 202-228-5143
Sen. John Ensign (R) 202-228-2193
Sen. Jim Bunning (R) 202-228-1373
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) 202-224-6020
Sen John McCain (R) 202-228-2862

Sen. Barack Obama 202-228-4260
Sen. John D. Rockefeller 202-224-7665
Sen. Dianne Feinstein 202-228-3954
Sen. Ron Wyden 202-228-2717
Sen. Evan Bayh 202-228-1377
Sen. Barbara Mikulski 202-224-8858
Sen. Bill Nelson 202-228-2183
Sen. John Kerry 202-224-8525
Sen. Daniel Inouye 202-224-6747
Sen. Hillary Clinton 202-228-0282

Those inclined should also fax their own senators as well.

they're meeting as we speak, so get to faxin', people...

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Oh, lovely...! Hard on the heels of $85B for A.I.G., let's throw in $55 BILLION more...!

holy shit...!

Scrambling to break the grip of a worsening global credit crisis, the Federal Reserve stepped up action Thursday pumping billions into financial markets here and abroad.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in two operations, injected $55 billion into temporary reserves in the United States, a move aimed to help ease a strained financial system in danger of freezing up.

the printing presses at the mint must be seriously overheating...

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Spiegel: The Madness of Ben Bernanke

as usual, you have to read the foreign press to get any semblance of truth about what's happening in our own country... (and ya gotta love spiegel's headline...)

The dollar is in a tailspin, the trade deficit is growing and a recession is on the horizon. The American way of life is in serious danger. But the head of the Federal Reserve keeps on pumping easy credit into the system -- a crazy policy that will worsen the crisis.


Ben Bernanke at the G7 meeting
of central bank governors over
the weekend.

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have more in common with the big cat entertainers Siegfried & Roy than any of us can be comfortable with.

The Las Vegas magicians call themselves "Masters of the Impossible" and have been fascinating audiences for decades by getting snow-white tigers to leap through burning rings.

The legendary Federal Reserve Chairman and his successor were equally adept at fascinating their audiences -- with a policy of miraculous monetary growth that gave America one of the longest periods of economic expansion in modern times. Many saw them as "Masters of the Universe." It seemed as if the central bankers had tamed predatory capitalism with their constant interest rate cuts.

[...]

The credit-financed consumer boom of recent years is coming to a painful end. Today's American Way of Life has no chance of surviving the coming years undamaged. The virus will continue to ravage its way through the financial system.

The property crisis is likely to spread to credit card providers soon and will then probably infect car manufacturers, furniture makers and all the other firms that owe their sales increases to the growth in credit finance. "The virus will keep on infecting the system," one management board member from a large bank said, requesting anonymity in return for the candour of his analysis.

His argument is that banks that grant mortgages to home buyers virtually unable to pay their bills are unlikely to be especially scrutinizing when it comes to lending cash to the buyers of fridges, cars and furniture. Indeed, a furniture store in Miami recently tried to lure consumers with the following offer: buy now, pay your first credit installment in three years, and no need for a down-payment.

The credit-financed way of life is typical of the US these days. Many people resort to credit to plug the gap between the lifestyle they have become accustomed to and their declining wages.

The borrowed cash is like an anaesthetic against the painful impact of globalisation. Private household debt has been growing by $4 billion each business day for years.

yeah, well, ok, but what spiegel fails to point out is that the financial and credit markets ain't going to hell just in the u.s... it's all well and good to point a finger at the unbelievable mess that the so-called "leaders" of the u.s. corporatocracy have created, but that conveniently ignores the complicity of europe, japan, australia, and the rest of the industrialized world... today's globally-interconnected financial markets have all been operating on an ethos of unrestrained greed and the collapse is happening world-wide, not just in the u.s., even though the u.s. has certainly been a leading role model...

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