Why does the criminal banker Larry Summers continue to command a global forum?

probably because the venue is the financial times, the newspaper of the 0.0001%...

The US tax system needs rebuilding

By Lawrence Summers

i won't even bother posting snippets from the above article... suffice it to say, summers starts out by sounding the alarm about "entitlements," social security, medicare, etc., and then goes on to suggest the plenary solution to everything that ails us is to revisit the catfood commission (simpson-bowles)...

however, the most galling piece of information to come my way this past week is that summers' name is actually being floated by obama as a replacement for zoellick at the world bank... fuck... what do we have to do to get rid of these dangerously evil people...?

Larry Summers To Run World Bank? 37,000 Sign Petition Saying No In 24 Hours

anybody who's got two brain cells to rub together should be putting his or her name on that petition... you can do it here...

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Moyers & Company: On Crony Capitalism

did i mention how glad i am to see bill moyers back on the air...?

Moyers & Company Show 102: On Crony Capitalism from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

from alternet...

"Crony capitalism is about the aggressive and proactive use of political resources, lobbying, campaign contributions, influence-peddling of one type or another to gain something from the governmental process that wouldn't otherwise be achievable in the market. And as the time has progressed over the last two or three decades, I think it's gotten much worse. Money dominates politics."

Those are the words of former budget director for President Reagan, talking to Bill Moyers in this week's episode of Moyers & Company. Continuing to focus on the intersection of money and politics, Moyers' new program talks to Stockman about the financialization of the economy, re-regulating the big banks, the Fed's enabling of Wall Street, and how the banks buy influence with politicians to ensure favorable treatment.

“As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.”

He names names--Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt, and more--who are deeply involved still in the Obama administration.

"If you have a former community organizer who was trained in the Saul Alinsky school of direct democracy, appointing the worst abuser, the worst abuser of crony capitalism, GE, who came in and begged for this bailout, to head his Jobs Council, when obviously GE's international corporation, they've been shifting jobs offshore for decades, then it becomes so obvious that we have a new kind of system, and that we have a real crisis."

Moyers also talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times business and finance reporter Gretchen Morgenson, who tells him, "You and I don't have a lobbyist and so we are not represented in this melee."

She continues, "There is no balance here. There's a drastic imbalance between the people who created the problem and the people who had to pay the problem and it has not been addressed."

When Moyers asks if a crisis like the one in 2008, the meltdown that nearly collapsed the financial system, could happen again, Morgenson replies, "It will happen again."

yes, it WILL happen again...

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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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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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When stocks rise on Wall Street, how does that benefit the average schmoe struggling with unemployment?

it doesn't...

Wall St rises on resources, banks, data

U.S. stocks extended gains on Monday, pushing major indexes up 1 percent as investors snapped up shares of natural resource companies and banks after fresh data pointed to signs of economic stabilization.

before we look at unemployment, let's look at what's happening with rental and homeowner vacancy rates...

In Kansas City, rental vacancy rates rose from 11.9% to 15% over the past year; homeowner vacancy rates nearly doubled, up from 2.1% to 3.8%. Comparatively, the average homeowner vacancy rate in the country's 75 largest metro areas improved slightly from 3% to 2.7%, while the rental vacancy rate edged up to 10.2% from 10% a year ago.

Kansas City isn't the only metro where rental and homeowner vacancy rates are rising in tandem. Second on our list is the San Francisco-Oakland metro, where high prices are pushing Bay Area residents out of the region. Third is Tucson, Ariz., where the aftermath of the housing boom has left a glut of inventory. The pair's predicament illustrates both sides of the vacancy coin.

[...]

Miami, which ranks No. 8, owns a whopping 12.7% rental vacancy rate, up from 11.4% a year ago; residential towers built in the final stages of the boom now stand as empty monuments to an over-hyped market downtown. Homeowner vacancy stands at 5.6%, up from 3.8% last year, thanks mostly to a spate of foreclosures. According to Trulia.com, 40% of the homes available in Miami's city limits are foreclosures.

now, how about that unemployment...

The U.S. unemployment rate may not peak until the second half of 2010, even as the broader economy shows signs of improvement, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said.

[...]

Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, said that while the economy will resume growth in the second half of the year, the job picture “will be serious for some time to come.”

and what's going to make things all better...?

Much of the economic recovery will depend on the housing market, [former Fed Chairman Alan] Greenspan said.

oh, well then...

note to you average schmoes struggling with unemployment... the tradesters and banksters may be kissing the recession goodbye but, for the time being, you can kiss your ass goodbye...

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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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Summers, Paulson, Rubin, Geithner, Bernanke, Liddy, and Blankfein are schizoid

chris hedges, writing on truthdig via alternet...

Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.

[...]

"The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism." [Theodor Adorno, "Education After Auschwitz"]

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.

[...]

The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.

"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."

interesting... i've had a lifelong aversion to corporate types of the sort that adorno describes, for most of the same reasons he outlines... i've found most of them to be the sort of people that i simply wouldn't consider having as friends...

in addition, i've noticed that there's an entire sub-category of such individuals i would characterize as " 'manipulative character' wannabes"... these are the people who set out to be the summers, paulson, rubin, geithner types but couldn't quite cut it... you can seem them walking the corridors of organizations everywhere, semi-brain dead, but still pledging fealty to the system that rejected them...

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An excellent question from Think Progress

Why Are AIG’s Contracts Sacrosanct But Not Union Workers’ Contracts?

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