Bernie Sanders: The American people are angry

from senator sanders youtube site...



yes, indeed, the american people ARE angry and rightfully so... we've been screwed sixteen ways from sunday by our super-rich elites, their criminal banker colleagues and their bought-and-paid-for government officials... it's all part of the grand plan to control all the world's money and resources while keeping the peasant class in thrall to keep it all running to their benefit...

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Percent Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions

atrios...

Ultimately the point is that in February of 2012, this is still the scariest chart ever. Hopefully it will continue to become less scary more fast, but I don't think anybody can declare with any confidence that this is inevitable. People can believe that, of course, but it isn't yet obviously true.

(click on graphic for larger image)

yeah, it's scarey all right... besides me, i know at least a half dozen other people who are looking for work, some of them for over two years...

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Significant risk of a Eurozone breakup

roubini prognosticates...

There is a “significant risk of a Eurozone breakup,” sources say Roubini told a handful of select party guests recently, reports the Business Insider. Adds the economist, if the Eurozone goes under, “everything around the world goes sour.”

Roubini has claimed that in the past he correctly predicted both the housing market crash and the worldwide recession, the aftermath of both is still evident in the crises across the globe. For his forecasting, Roubini has earned the title “Dr. Doom” from members of the media, who look to him for economic outlook and have been met with not-so-optimistic — and correct — assumptions from the analyst in the past. As the American economy continues to show slumping statistics and the unemployment rate stays at or above a stagnant 9 percent for months, a collapse across the pond could cause a catastrophe for the world economy.

Sources say Roubini announced, "If the Eurozone blows up, it all gets worse."

Less than two weeks ago, Roubini had predicted that the odds of a eurozone collapse were one-in-two.

“Unfortunately, in my view there is a risk, at least a 50 percent probability, that in the U.S., in the eurozone, in the United Kingdom, and in most advanced economies, the future in the next 12 months might suggest a recession, a downturn, rather than reacceleration of growth,” Roubini said on October 24 to Bloomberg.

i hate to endlessly repeat myself but i sure as hell do wish this damn house of cards would just go ahead and collapse already...

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Eurozone breakup shock larger than Lehman

nouriel roubini...

The Eurozone eventual breakup shock could be larger than the fall of Lehman in 2008

In my view, there's a significant probability, more than 50 per cent, that over the next 12 months there's going to be another recession in most advanced economies," "Whether you call it a double dip recession, a continuation of the first recession or a second recession doesn't matter, it's semantic.

In a situation where it becomes disorderly, with defaults by a number of countries and a resulting exit of a number of states from the eurozone and its eventual break-up, the shock that could occur ... could be as large, if not larger, than the fall of Lehman in 2008.

i've made a habit of listening to roubini...

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So, if income falls faster AFTER a recession, what can we expect when the NEXT recession hits?

nyt...

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing. Unhappiness and anger have come to dominate the political scene, including the early stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.

just think back to all the glowing media reports about the end of the recession... HA...!

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The market is toast - the stock market is finished; I go to bed dreaming of another recession

zero hedge...

In an interview on BBC News this morning that left the hosts gob-smacked (google it... it is the BBC after all), Alessio Rastani outlines in a mere three-and-a-half-minutes what we all know and most ignore. While the whole interview is worth watching, the money shot for us was "This economic crisis is like a cancer, if you just wait and wait hoping it is going to go away, just like a cancer it is going to grow and it will be too late!". While he dreams of recessions, sees Goldman ruling the world, and urges people to prepare, it is hard to disagree with much (or actually anything) of what he says and obviously interventions and machinations means we will have days like this (in Silver for instance), there is only one endgame here and we hope there is less hopeful euphoria (and more preparedness) as we pull back the curtain further and further.

While we do not know who this trader is, one thing we can be 100% certain of is that he will never appear on CNBC.

watch it... we'll NEVER see that kind of bald-faced honesty on u.s. media...

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A headline to gag a maggot

gee... how nice for them...

Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care

The nation’s major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care.

[...]

Yet the companies continue to press for higher premiums, even though their reserve coffers are flush with profits and shareholders have been rewarded with new dividends. Many defend proposed double-digit increases in the rates they charge, citing a need for protection against any sudden uptick in demand once people have more money to spend on their health, as well as the rising price of care.

it would be hard to swallow news like this under the best of circumstances but, reading this while sitting at my desk here in kabul, it's particularly nauseating... our super-rich elites continue to vacuum up every last teeny-tiny bit of money and power from the struggling masses and screw the common good and any semblance of "we're all in this together" thinking...

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Our super-rich elites - enough to gag a maggot

i don't know how reading a story like this makes YOU feel, but i know it makes ME want to scream, jump up and down and run gagging to the bathroom to toss my cookies...

Signs of Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall St. Dares to Indulge

Exuberance made a comeback this year at Josh Koplewicz’s annual Halloween party. More than 1,000 people packed into a 6,000-square-foot space at the Good Units night club in Manhattan, a substantially larger crowd than in the last several years. The open bar was sponsored by Russian Standard vodka, and Mr. Koplewicz, an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs, was able to snag a big headliner: the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim, who performed dressed in a black cat costume.

The scene was more extravagant in September, at a 50th birthday party in Hong Kong for Brian Brille, the head of Bank of America Asia Pacific. Mr. Brille, who is well known on the New York social scene, wore a gray Hugh Hefner-esque jacket. Women dressed like Playmates, with feather boas and satin ears, danced behind a pink silk screen.

Two years after the onset of the financial crisis, the stock market is recovering and Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again. And this means in some cases they are spending again — at times cautiously, but sometimes with a familiar swagger.

"official" u.s. unemployment continues to hover above 9% while our congress fails to approve an extension of unemployment benefits, millions are subsisting on food stamps, millions more are being tossed out of their homes, the entire financial services industry continues to run out of control, and accountability for the rich and powerful has all but disappeared, but wall street is back to its old ways... as crude as it may sound to say it, they can all go fuck themselves...

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Elizabeth Warren on Rachel Maddow

my fellow liberals, ever alert for even a photon of hope coming from the obama administration, are waxing ecstatic over the appointment of elizabeth warren... rather than being a dyed-in-the-wool cynic and curmudgeon (i'm actually both), i thought i might give at least a nod to something positive...



however, i ain't holding my breath...

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Happy Labor Day, everybody...!

for all the working stiffs out there...

robert reich has a worthwhile opinion piece in today's nyt...

How to End the Great Recession

This promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. Friday’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will almost surely show fewer new jobs created in August than the 125,000 needed just to keep up with growth of the potential work force.

The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

[...]

Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

it's a long opinion piece but i would suggest reading it all... in the last half, reich sets out some very rational suggestions for real economic reform all of which, unfortunately in today's polarized climate, have about as much chance of being adopted as finding that proverbial pig with wings...

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Our kleptocratic rulers know exactly what they are doing

i've said all along, there's nothing incompetent or unintentional about what's happening...

ismael hossein-zadeh in counterpunch via alternet...

[T]he kleptocratic rulers in the US, EU, and other debt-burdened countries know exactly what they are doing: to let the recession drag on, to take advantage of the crushing recession in order to extract “enough” concessions from the working people until welfare states are dismantled and labor costs in the more developed capitalist countries are made competitive with those of the less-developed countries. This explains why despite new signs of further global economic contraction, the reigning governments in these countries (whether they are nominally headed by Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, Democratic, Conservative or other parties) are maintaining their coordinated abstention from expansive or stimulating fiscal policies while continuing their brutal spending cuts on health, education, wages, pensions, and the like.

This is not to say that these governments do not want to have economic growth or job-creation—they do—but that they want them on their own (Neoliberal) terms, that is, through Neoliberal policies that would create jobs that would pay wages on a par with those of workers in less-developed countries. In other words, they prefer the kind of lopsided economic growth whose fruits would be reaped mostly by the wealthy—the so-called trickle-down or supply-side economic growth. As writer/reporter Patrick O’Connor points out, “In the US, Europe and other advanced capitalist economies, the aim is permanently reducing the living standards of working people.

It is not surprising then that, instead of calling for bold expansionary policies of growth promotion and job creation, US and European government heads, their economic policy makers and the collusive corporate media are frequently calling for “tolerance” and “endurance” in the face of economic hardship, exhorting the unemployed and economically distressed that they “need to be patient” because, as President Obama has occasionally put it, “the road to economic recovery does not follow a straight line,” and that “it's going to take some time to fix it." (The President made this statement on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Mr. Stephanopoulos obligingly spared the President the obvious question: “why is it, Mr. President, that fixing the enormously expensive problem of Wall Street gamblers did not take much time, but reviving the economy and creating jobs, which would take only a fraction of the cost of the Wall Street bailout, would take a long time?”)

yes, mr. president... why IS it...?

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Headin' back on the road

tomorrow i head out once again... i'll be spending time with a friend in macedonia for a couple of days before heading off for greece and the beaches of the halkidiki peninsula with her and her family... i'm curious to see what's happening on the ground in greece, one of the most distressed of the euro zone p.i.i.g.s. (portugal, ireland, italy, greece and spain) countries...

Greek Recession Deepens

The Greek economy contracted sharply in the second quarter ... The national statics service Ellsta said Thursday that second-quarter gross domestic product fell 1.5% on a quarterly basis, weaker than forecasts of a 1% drop and the 0.8% fall in the first quarter.

Jobs data for May, meanwhile, revealed persistently high unemployment, which ticked higher to 12% from 11.9% in April.

hopefully, the greeks will hold off on any full-blown street riots until i depart on the 27th... 'course, i'll be heading to kosovo from there, not exactly a hotbed of prosperity...

p.s. note that greece is struggling with a 12% unemployment while we here in the u.s. are hovering between 9 and 10 (at least according to OFFICIAL stats)... not that far off, eh...?

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Joe is running in the red every month

from zero hedge, a guest post by graham summers...

It’s Impossible to “Get By” In the US

While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day.

but wait, there's more...

In 2008, the median US household income was $50,300. Assuming that the person filing is the “head of household” and has two children (dependents), this means a 1040 tax bill of $4,100, which leaves about $45K in income after taxes (we’re not bothering with state taxes). I realize this is a simplistic calculation, but it’s a decent proxy for income in the US in 2008.

Now, $45K in income spread out over 26 pay periods (every two weeks), means a bi-weekly paycheck of $1,730 and monthly income of $3,460. This is the money “Joe America” and his family to live off of in 2008.

Now, in 2008, the median home value was roughly $225K. Assuming our “median” household put down 20% on their home (unlikely, but it used to be considered the norm), this means a $180K mortgage. Using a 5.5% fixed rate 30-year mortgage, this means Joe America’s 2008 monthly mortgage payments were roughly $1,022.

So, right off the bat, Joe’s monthly income is cut to $2,438.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average 2008 monthly food bill for a family of four ranged from $512-$986 depending on how “liberal” you are with your purchases. For simplicity’s sake we’ll take the mid-point of this range ($750) as a monthly food bill.

This brings Joe’s monthly income to $1,688.

Now, Joe needs light, energy, heat, and air conditioning to run his home. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average US household used about 920 kilowatt-hours per month in 2008. At a national average price of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour this comes to a monthly electrical bill of $101.20.

Joe’s now down to $1,587.
Now Joe needs to drive to work to make a living. Similarly, he needs to be able to drive to the grocery store, doctor, etc. According to AAA, the average cost per mile of driving a minivan (Joe’s a family man) in 2008 was 57 cents per mile. This cost is based on average fuel consumption, tires, maintenance, insurance, license and registration, and average loan finance charges.

Multiply this cost by 15,000 miles per year and you’ve got an annual driving bill of $8,550. Divide this into months (by 12) and you’ve got a monthly driving bill of $712.

Joe’s now down to $877 (I’m also assuming Joe’s family only has ONE car). Indeed, if Joe’s family has two cars (one minivan and one sedan) he’s already run out of money for the month.

Now, assuming Joe’s family is one of the lucky ones (depending on your perspective) they’ve got medical insurance. Trying to find an average monthly medical insurance premium for a family in the US is extremely difficult because insurance plans have a wide range in deductibles, premiums, and co-pays. But according to eHealth Insurance, the average monthly premium for family policies in February 2008 was $369.

So if Joe has medical insurance on his family, he’s now down to $508. Throw in cell phone bills, cable TV and Internet bills, and the like, and he’s maybe got $100-200 discretionary income left at the end of the month.

and here's the kicker...

If Joe:

1) Overpaid on his house
2) Didn’t have a full 20% down payment
3) Owns two cars
4) Eats at restaurants
5) Splurges on heating & A/C bills
6) Has any medical expenses aside from monthly premiums…

… he is running into the red EVERY month.

[...]

This is why there simply cannot be a sustainable recovery in the US economy. Because we outsourced our jobs, incomes fell. Because incomes fell and savers were punished (thanks to abysmal returns on savings rates) we pulled future demand forward by splurging on credit. Because we splurged on credit, prices in every asset under the sun rose in value. Because prices rose while incomes fell, we had to use more credit to cover our costs, which in turn meant taking on more debt (a net drag on incomes).

And on and on.

Does this mean the market is about to tank? Not necessarily, stocks have been disconnected from reality since November if not July. Bubbles (and we ARE in a bubble) take time to pop and this time around will be no different.

ya gotta love the "recovery"...

(thanks to kevin at cryptogon...)

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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 "recovery" marches on

to a new record low...

Sales of newly built U.S. single-family homes fell for a fourth straight month to a record low in February, a government report showed on Wednesday, heightening fears of renewed weakness in the housing market.

The Commerce Department said sales fell 2.2 percent to a 308,000 unit annual rate from an upwardly revised 315,000 units in January.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected new home sales to edge up to a 320,000 unit annual pace from January's previously reported 309,000 units.

The data came on the heels of report on Tuesday showing existing home sales fell for a third straight month in February and a jump in the supply of houses on the market.

[...]

Sales have barely responded to the extension and expansion of a popular tax credit, which boosted purchases in the second half of 2009, raising concerns over the fragile housing market's recovery just as a key pillar of support is being dismantled.

The Federal Reserve will end purchases of mortgage-related securities next week, which had lowered the cost of home loans to record lows.

just wait 'til commercial real estate collapses...

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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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2.4M forclosures predicted for 2010, up from 2.1M in 2009

feelin' that sweet, sweet "recovery" yet...? funny... neither am i...

BofA holds about 1 million mortgages that are at least 60 days delinquent. About 4 million homeowners nationwide are 90 days or more delinquent on their mortgages or in foreclosure proceedings, according to Moody's Economy.com, which analyzes data from credit reporting company Equifax Inc.

Trial modifications and other delays have kept many of those mortgages out of foreclosure, but by the end of this year, 2.4 million borrowers are expected to lose their homes, said Celia Chen, a housing economist at Economy.com.

That would be up from 2.1 million foreclosures and short sales last year and five times the annual numbers earlier in the decade.

It's unclear when those distressed properties would hit the market, but their large numbers are likely to push home prices back down this year, to a bottom in the fourth quarter, Chen said. And that would make things worse for the 25% of homeowners who already owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth.

The biggest blows will be felt in California, Florida, Nevada and other states where home prices have dropped the most and the ranks of struggling homeowners have swelled.

As of December, 11.4% of California homeowners were 90 days or more late on their loans, according to First American CoreLogic, a Santa Ana real estate data firm. That compares with a delinquency rate of 8.4% nationwide.

so, if more homeowners, folks like my son and his wife, are forced even deeper underwater than they already are, dontcha think that's going to drive even more foreclosures... if you thought people were walkin' away now, just wait...

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The economic "recovery" continues...? Ya, right...!

if you belong to the super-rich elites, maybe... for the rest of us...

Study: Hunger in America jumps unprecedented 46 percent

70 percent of emergency food centers face threats to their survival

If there is any indicator of the toll that the Great Recession has taken on the public, it would be the statistics beginning to emerge about hunger in the US.

According to a study from the nation's largest food bank operator, the number of Americans in need of food aid has jumped 46 percent in three years, including a 50 percent jump in the number of children needing food assistance, and a 64 percent increase in hunger in senior citizens' homes.

The study, Hunger in America 2010, found that 37 million people, or roughly one in eight US residents, received food aid in 2009. That's a 46 percent jump from a similar survey carried out in 2006.

how 'BOUT that recovery...?

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Domestic spending freeze...? Obama's jumped the shark...

when i first read the story about obama maybe, possibly, declaring a spending freeze, i thought it might be just a rumor... this morning's headlines made it official...

Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficits

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

i'm no fan of the ballooning deficit and i'm certainly no fan of an increasingly worthless fiat currency that's leaping off the printing presses so fast it's breathtaking... but, in the midst of a super-rich, elite-created economic storm in which businesses, states, and millions of citizens are suffering through furloughs, layoffs, foreclosures, unemployment and the complete wastage of the middle class, to put a freeze on domestic spending while still allowing free rein to our totally out-of-control defense and war spending is perhaps the most unconscionable thing done yet among the many disturbingly unconscionable things done by this president...

i'm glad to see krugman shares some of my utter dismay...

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

this is one of the reasons i've slowed way down on blogging... my psyche is evidently too fragile at the moment to be able to regurgitate abominations of this magnitude...

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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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