DSK resigns from IMF... Good guy...? Creep...? No matter... An erect penis is STILL a tool of power and domination... [UPDATE]

hmmmmmmm...

Strauss-Kahn Resigns From I.M.F. in Wake of His Arrest

Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned Wednesday as head of the International Monetary Fund after explosive accusations that he had sexually attacked a housekeeper in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room.

i've read a number of things about the whole dsk soap opera, everything from "he totally deserves whatever he's got coming" to this from paul craig roberts...

The Amerikan Police State Strides Forward

The International Monetary Fund’s director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested last Sunday in New York City on the allegation of an immigrant hotel maid that he attempted to rape her in his hotel room. A New York judge has denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the grounds that he might flee to France.

President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades, because he was a servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn, like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system, and, like Eliot Spitzer, Strauss-Kahn has been deleted from the power ranks.

Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime, if memory serves, who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing on the poor and ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and the Western banks. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed on the greed-driven, fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated, destroyed the lives of ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a handful of economists who has a social conscience.

Perhaps the most dangerous black mark in Strauss-Kahn’s book is that he was far ahead of America’s French puppet, President Sarkozy, in the upcoming French elections. Strauss-Kahn simply had to be eliminated.

It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and saved Washington the trouble. However, as a well-traveled person who has often stayed in New York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world, I have never experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much less when I was in the shower.

In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. Anyone who ever served on the staff of a powerful public figure knows that this is unlikely. On a senator’s staff on which I served, there were two aides whose job was to make certain that no woman, with the exception of his wife, was ever alone with the senator. This was done to protect the senator both from female power groupies, who lust after celebrities and powerful men, and from women sent by a rival on missions to compromise an opponent. A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.

ok, believe what you want...

could dsk have been the champion of the poor and downtrodden that roberts claims...? hey, i suppose it's possible... could dsk have rubbed our super-rich elite handlers the wrong way because of that view...? sure... but here's where the story comes apart... if dsk was any kind of stand-up guy, he wouldn't have fallen for the "honey trap" and neither, goddamit, would eliot spitzer... if those guys were all that smart, all that committed to doing good and all that focused on what's right, they certainly would have to be smart enough not to fall for such obvious crap...

here's what i think... whether or not dsk's heart was in the right place, i think he was still totally enamored of his own position, his power, his money and his status in the global elite... so enamored, in fact, that he believed he could take what he wanted when he wanted it without suffering any consequences...

what's most interesting to me at this particular point in history is that the cycle for dealing with one's karma is becoming shorter and shorter -- and THAT'S a VERY good thing...!

[UPDATE]

i stumbled across what i think is a very astute article describing exactly the dynamic of unfettered, unaccountable power that i was pointing out above...

a couple of short excerpts...

Where there is shocking news, there must be a conspiracy theory. So it is that the arrest of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn for sexual assault has spawned its own spate of wild speculation.

[...]

As it turns out, Dominique Strauss-Kahn may not like women very much. He appears instead to be a classic megalomaniac who thinks all women should be at his disposal. Power breeds hubris, both in men and women (See: Indira Gandhi, Jayalalithaa et al). But in a number of men, this arrogance becomes a form of sexual entitlement. Perhaps those simian analogies are indeed apt. Much like an alpha gorilla or chimp, DSK feels he should be allowed to readily take any female who catches his fancy, be it a fellow politician or the daughter of a family friend or a hotel maid.

Power also breeds a sense of immunity. Why did he do it? Because he could. If he got away with attacking a privileged member of the French elite, then why not a semi-literate African immigrant?

yep... that's pretty much the way i see it too...

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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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Finally, some action against bank malfeasance

imho, this should have happened quite some time ago and, yes, i know the wheels of justice turn slowly, but...

New York AG filing civil charges against BofA

The New York Attorney General's office is filing civil charges against Bank of America and its former CEO Ken Lewis, saying the bank misled investors about Merrill Lynch when it acquired the Wall Street bank in late 2008.

Civil charges were also being filed against Joe Price, the bank's former chief financial officer.

Lewis stepped down from Bank of America on Dec. 31 after almost a year of strife that followed the bank's purchase of Merrill Lynch.

Bank of America has been accused of failing to properly disclose losses at Merrill and bonuses paid to investment bank employees before the deal closed.

the banksters and our super-rich elites have had to face virtually NO accountability for the havoc they've created... quite the contrary, in fact... they've been systematically REWARDED for it at every turn... their greed has left the u.s. middle class in shambles and taken an even more horrific toll on the most vulnerable world economies, yet perps like ken lewis waltzes on out with his pockets lined with millions and millions of dollars... we simply can't continue to tolerate this kind of shit and kudos to the ny attorney general for having the cojones to step up to the plate... maybe he's picking up where spitzer left off...

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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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Spitzer: "Where is the public's fair payback for playing banker to the bankers?"

eliot spitzer seems to be taking a much more public profile in the last week... it's good stuff and i hope he keeps it up... i'd like to hear a lot more from joseph stiglitz as well...

from the 28 july slate...

Presenting income data is fraught with risks, as there are so many ways to look at any arrangement of numbers. So I will use three sets of data to shed light on the road we have traveled. The single most frequently used measure to gauge income distribution is the Gini coefficient, which ranges from zero to one, with zero representing perfect equality (that is, everyone has the same level of income) and one representing perfect inequality (that is, one person has all the income).

U.S. Gini Coefficient
1967	0.397
1977	0.402
1987	0.426
1997	0.459
2007	0.463

As a point of reference, the Gini coefficient for Canada is 0.326, for the United Kingdom it is 0.36, for Norway it is 0.258, and for Germany it is 0.283. In fact, the U.S. Gini coefficient is significantly higher than that for any Western European nation.

More textured are the data showing the percentage of total income garnered by each quintile of the population over a particular time frame.

Percentage of Total Income by Population Quintile
	Lowest Quintile	Middle Quintile	Highest Quintile
1967	4.0	17.3	43.6
1977	4.2	16.9	44.0
1987	3.8	16.1	46.2
1997	3.6	15.0	49.4
2007	3.4	14.8	49.7

The top 1 percent of all income earners garnered 21.8 percent of all income in 2005, up from 8.9 percent in 1976.

Of course, it can be argued that these pure distributional percentages are less meaningful if everybody's absolute income grew substantially over the period of time measured. But that is not the case. In fact, the gap here is quite remarkable:

Mean Household Income
	Lowest Quintile	Middle Quintile	Highest Quintile
1967	$8,683	$38,415	$96,725
1977	$10,394	$45,323	$110,579
1987	$10,706	$45,492	$130,768
1997	$11,385	$47,886	$158,128
2007	$11,551	$49,968	$167,971

Before 1987, it might have been reasonable to argue that overall income growth was softening the effects of rising inequality. But since then, the rate of overall growth for all but the top quintile has slowed dramatically, with the lowest quintile seeing its income grow by only 7.8 percent in the last two decades, while income for the top quintile grew by 28 percent. And looking at after-tax income, which factors in the impact of favorable tax policy for the rich, the numbers are even starker: Between 1979 and 2004, the top 1 percent of all earners saw their income grow by an astounding 176 percent.

Pretty much no matter how you examine the numbers, they are not encouraging for those in the middle class—and they are even worse for those at the bottom of the income totem pole. Once upon a time, America's income was distributed across the economy like a bell curve, with an increasing share of both population and income converging in the middle. Now a slow but continuous redistribution to the top, with the middle being squeezed, makes the graph look more like a barbell, with a bigger bump at either end—income at one end, population at the other.

[...]

The outcry over Wall Street salaries and bonuses is more understandable when you realize that, over the last 40 years, there has been an inexorable shift of wealth and income toward the upper end of the income spectrum. With the return to profitability of many of the institutions that needed bailouts, taxpayers are wondering why we have socialized the risk of failure but allowed the rewards of success to remain private. Where is the public's fair payback for playing banker to the bankers?

indeed...

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The real reason Eliot Spitzer got taken down - he's telling the truth about the Federal Reserve

spitzer's got a real pair to be speaking out like this after our super-rich elites tried to shut him up through abject humiliation...

from msnbc via raw story...

The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions, says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney-general of New York.

In a wide-ranging discussion of the bank bailouts on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, host Dylan Ratigan described the process by which the Federal Reserve exchanged $13.9 trillion of bad bank debt for cash that it gave to the struggling banks.

Spitzer — who built a reputation as “the Sheriff of Wall Street” for his zealous prosecutions of corporate crime as New York’s attorney-general and then resigned as the state’s governor over revelations he had paid for prostitutes — seemed to agree with Ratigan that the bank bailout amounts to “America’s greatest theft and cover-up ever.”

Advocating in favor of a House bill to audit the Federal Reserve, Spitzer said: “The Federal Reserve has benefited for decades from the notion that it is quasi-autonomous, it’s supposed to be independent. Let me tell you a dirty secret: The Fed has done an absolutely disastrous job since [former Fed Chairman] Paul Volcker left.

“The reality is the Fed has blown it. Time and time again, they blew it. Bubble after bubble, they failed to understand what they were doing to the economy.

“The most poignant example for me is the AIG bailout, where they gave tens of billions of dollars that went right through — conduit payments — to the investment banks that are now solvent. We [taxpayers] didn’t get stock in those banks, they didn’t ask what was going on — this begs and cries out for hard, tough examination.

“You look at the governing structure of the New York [Federal Reserve], it was run by the very banks that got the money. This is a Ponzi scheme, an inside job. It is outrageous, it is time for Congress to say enough of this. And to give them more power now is crazy.

watch it...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

when are the crooks that are running this show going to face some accountability...? i'm really, REALLY tired of waiting...

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Is this maybe why Spitzer was set up for a fall...?

spitzer seems to be talking pretty straight to me, something that was certainly not a quality that endeared him to the powerful moneyed elites who saw to it that he went down...

here he's talking about the federal reserve bank of new york in slate magazine...

[I]s it any wonder that the N.Y. Fed has been complicit in the single greatest bailout of poorly managed banks in history? Any wonder that it has given—with virtually no strings attached—practically the entire contents of the Treasury to the very banks whose inability to manage risk has brought our economy to its knees? Any wonder that not a single CEO or senior executive of a major bank has been removed as a condition of hundreds of billions of direct cash and guarantees? Any wonder that, despite its fundamental responsibility to preserve the integrity of the banking system, it sat quietly on the sidelines as the leverage beneath the banks exploded and the capital underlying their investments shrank?

I do not mean to suggest that any of these board members intentionally discharged their duties with the specific goal of benefitting themselves. Rather, what we have seen is disastrous groupthink, a way of looking at the world from the perspective of Wall Street and Wall Street alone. That failure has brought the world economy to the edge of unraveling. And some of Geithner's early missteps betrayed an inability to get beyond this tunnel vision, such as the idea that the banks need to be first in line to be paid and to be paid in full. We can only hope that Geithner, who, to his credit, did try to raise some of the regulatory issues that mattered while he was at the Fed, is no longer in the mental prison of Lower Manhattan and will have more success now that he has a board of one—President Obama.

Perhaps it is time to calculate what these board members have been paid by their banks in salary and bonuses over the years and seek to have them return it to the public as small compensation for their failed oversight of the N.Y. Fed. And more fundamentally, perhaps it is time to take a hard look at the governing structure and supposed independence of this institution that actually controls the use of our tax dollars and, heaven help us, the fate of our economy.

it's not only time, it's way, way, WAY past time...

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More on the shamelessly UNcovered Spitzer backstory [UPDATE and BUMPED]

[BUMPED]



from youtube and brasscheck tv...

Mortaging America's future
for a quick buck

It's one of the most amazing displays of journalistic incompetence and malpractice in recent memory.

The US news media failed to draw the obvious connection between the bizarre federal law enforcement investigation and leak campaign about the private life of New York Governor Spitzer and Spitzer's all out attack on the Bush administration for its collusion with predatory lenders.

While the international credit system grinds to a halt because of a superabundance of bad mortgage loans made in the US, the news media failed to cover the details of Spitzer's public charges against the White House.

Yet when salacious details were leaked about alleged details of Spitzer's private life, they took that information and made it the front page news for days.

To the 9/11 fiasco, the Iraq War, the travesty of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and the shredding of the US Constitution, we can now add a deliberate and reckless undermining of the credit and banking system of the US to its list of "accomplishments."

our collective screwing is part and parcel of a coordinated, comprehensive, and thoroughly strategized plan on the part of the powerful, super-rich elites to continue to accrue ever more power and money... why would we expect anything less...?

[UPDATE]

here's what brought spitzer down...

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime
How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers

By Eliot Spitzer
Thursday, February 14, 2008; Page A25

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

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.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

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.

Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

wow... amazing, ain't it, that this editorial was largely uncovered during the extended hoo-ha over spitzer's downfall... i didn't even know it existed until today...

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Greg Palast fills in the blanks to the Bernanke-Spitzer backstory

and what a story it is...

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. The Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinning’s, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).

When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.

And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

yeah, it's a little more than "fair use," but, hey... it deserves wide exposure...

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So, unlike David Vitter and Larry Craig, Spitzer is quitting

i don't have a dog in this fight, but i was secretly hoping spitzer would stonewall it and continue right along serving his term like craig and vitter... i do believe that resigning is the honorable thing to do but i don't see any reason why spitzer should be any more "honorable" than those other two slimeballs...

Spitzer Aides Say Governor Will Resign Today

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, reeling from revelations that he had been
a client of a prostitution ring, will resign today, some of
his aides said they have been told, though the precise timing
remains unclear.

don't do it eliot... the r's are in high dudgeon over this and maybe their elevated blood pressure will cause a few aneurysms...

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The back-BACK-story on the Spitzer outing?

kevin at cryptogon has his usual interesting take...

This is probably a FBI counterintelligence operation targeting a Mossad HUMINT operation. The fact that the U.S. is going with prostitution/money laundering probably indicates that some kind of deal has been worked out between the U.S. and Israeli governments.

he's got a lot more... go read it...

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