Global 99%

Noted economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz had this to say about the Occupy Wall Street movement in an article in English language Al Jazeera this weekend:

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now become global - with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalisation and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can.

And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: A sense that the "system" has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right - at least not without strong pressure from the street.

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The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: The rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth - and their influence. The US Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence the direction of politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn't allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphone.

The contrast between overregulated democracy and unregulated bankers did not go unnoticed. But the protesters are ingenious: They echoed what I said through the crowd, so that all could hear. And, to avoid interrupting the "dialogue" by clapping, they used forceful hand signals to express their agreement.

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The protesters have been criticised for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.

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On one level, today's protesters are asking for little: A chance to use their skills, the right to decent work at decent pay, a fairer economy and society. Their hope is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, on another level, they are asking for a great deal: A democracy where people, not dollars, matter, and a market economy that delivers on what it is supposed to do.

The two are related: As we have seen, unfettered markets lead to economic and political crises. Markets work the way they should only when they operate within a framework of appropriate government regulations; and that framework can be erected only in a democracy that reflects the general interest - not the interests of the 1%. The best government that money can buy is no longer good enough.

Amen, brother. And how about Stephen King in Florida a few months back:

#OWS is about speaking truth to power. If markets are not regulated properly, if the disparity between rich and everybody else gets too great, if the wealthy seek only to protect their own capital and bleed the rest of us, we know historically that empires fall and revolutions arise. For example, the American Revolution.

So, leaving aside a noble sense of civics: will greed or self-preservation win out?

Tax the Rich

I will vote for any politician in 2012 who promises to do just that. And by rich, I mean any politician who specifically goes after multimillionaires. Anyone making over $1MM/annum after deductions should pay a higher marginal tax rate than just about everyone I know. Anyone over $10MM should, by law, give more of it back to our citizens through our elected government than anybody else, for the privilege of living in a country where they can have the most taxes taken away of anybody with the least diminution of lifestyle. As in none.

The superstar on arrival House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) 10-year budget that arrived with fanfare today kills Medicare for good in return for a paltry voucher system offloading, once again from Republicans, more risk onto individuals. Than any other industrialized nation. It is based on fantasy 4% unemployment projections and ultimate increases the deficit without reducing medical costs -- dumping it all back in the private sector for more gouging and C-level salary packages. Per the White House:

The White House rejected Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) "Path to Prosperity" budget blueprint for fiscal 2012 Tuesday, arguing that it unfairly guarantees the prosperity of wealthy millionaires while overburdening seniors and the poor.

While President Obama is committed to dramatically reducing the country's long-term deficit, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, Ryan's plan is exactly the wrong approach.

"The President believes that dramatically reducing America's long-term deficit is essential to growing our economy and winning the future," Carney said in a statement. "Any plan to reduce our deficit must reflect the American values of fairness and shared sacrifice. Congressman Ryan's plan fails this test."

The Republican slogan, "Path to Prosperity." Through a return to Robber Baron era Social Darwinism. As the NY Times asks, "Prosperity for who?"

We don't have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem, and we need to return to the still historically mild tax levels of the successful Clinton Presidency, rather than the disastrous Bush Presidency. Return those revenues, make America healthy again.

Read my lips:

Tax. The. Rich.

And win my vote.

Black Death

The Gulf of Mexico:



Another rig just overturned as well.

Plenty of blame to go around, but it turns out that secret meeting Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney had with oil companies back in 2001, the meeting he would not allow anyone to get answers about, has a big part to play:

An 'acoustic switch' would have prevented this catastrophe - it's a failsafe that shuts the flow of oil off at the source - they cost only about half a million dollars each, and are required in off-shore drilling platforms in most of the world...except for the United States. This was one of the new deregulations devised by Dick Cheney during his secret meetings with the oil industry at the beginning of Bush's first term.

The GOP appears eager to call this "Obama's Katrina," as if that might efface the culpability of their most recent two-term President. It turns out this on that Administration as well -- this one is Dick Cheney's Katrina.

Thanks for leaving all those burning bags of dogshit on President Obama's doorstep, guys.

Thieves

This Rolling Stone article by the incomparable Matt Taibbi, Looting Main Street, tells of how big banks like JP Morgan are acting like Tony Soprano in driving places like Jefferson Country, Alabama (the case Taibbi chronicles) to massive debt on top of debt, well beyond the actual cost of any infrastructure improvements needed:

...In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.

It's an amazing article, which also shows you what happened to Greece -- now causing massive bankruptcy/bailout pain for the EU, threatening the Euro itself:

Now if the euro was a company, the Greek division would be closed or sold off. The product line had not lived up to expectations. It was important therefore to protect the core business. Other weaker divisions might have to go too. Now some economists like Paul Krugman, who is an admirer of Europe, opined recently that the problem was that Greece had joined the Euro before it was ready. We are now living out the consequences of a fudge ten years ago.

One big question: will Goldman Sachs be indicted in Europe?:

Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.
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But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
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At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.

At what point do we start using the f-word to describe what these huge "masters of the universe" banks have done? As in, F is for Fraud?

Greedy Greedy Greedy

So AIG wants to reward themselves for deep-sixing the economy:

American International Group is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.

The troubled insurance giant has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.

I'd say, I've got your blessing right here.

The greed of Wall Street predates Gordon Gekko, as Matt Taibbi hilariously and pointedly nails Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, who claims that it "has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression," and lays out:

The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.

But there's three greedies in the title of the post, and the last one for tonight is a couple, Doug and Cindy Hampton, which is increasingly looking like an Indecent Proposal variation where the reveal is looking like Doug pimping out his wife to Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) for a long period of time in hopes of the big score:

Senator John Ensign’s wealthy parents gave almost $100,000 to his former lover and her family, ostensibly out of concern for their welfare and as part of a “pattern of generosity,” his lawyer disclosed Thursday...

...“After the senator told his parents about the affair,” the statement issued by Mr. Coggins said, “his parents decided to make the gifts out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time. The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others...

...The disclosure of the $96,000 gift came a day after Doug Hampton said on a Las Vegas television program that Mr. Ensign had paid Mrs. Hampton more than $25,000 in severance pay.

Y'know, a good couple is a good team. Working together towards common goals. And not too possessive -- his wife was bending the marital contract for nine months (December 2007 - August 2008).

On the Ensign side, isn't he getting a little old for his folks to be bailing out his adultery?

Grifters, grifters everywhere. Wall Street and Washington.

Who could have predicted that?

Crisis Made Clear

Want to know how the credit crisis happened? Thanks to a loyal reader for this tip, here's a cartoon than may end up more popular than Watchmen:


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Per another of our loyal readers, it's hard to imagine that former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan doesn't end up swirling down the toilet bowl of history...he's even the only individual called out in this video.

Bully Pulpit

At 3:00 in, the President gives it to the Wall Street bonus gang:



Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) goes all the way to offering a bill capping their salaries. If that doesn't scare the high capitalist class, I'm not sure what will. Yes, regulating prices, wages and productivity is what the GOP would call Socialism. But at an average of $2,600,000 in executive pay for the execs at banks bailed out by taxpayers -- $18 billion worth -- they deserve nothing less. In fact, I'd like to see if any of it is actionable. Like, prison actionable.

As for the Republicans trying to win by standing in the way of Obama's stimulus package or maybe twisting it into another tax giveaway to the wealthy, Frank Rich has the goods:

If anything, the Republican Congressional leadership seems to be emulating John McCain’s September stunt of “suspending” his campaign to “fix” the Wall Street meltdown. For all his bluster, McCain in the end had no fixes to offer and sat like a pet rock at the White House meeting on the crisis before capitulating to the bailout. His imitators likewise posture in public about their determination to take action, then do nothing while more and more Americans cry for help.

The problem is not that House Republicans gave the stimulus bill zero votes last week. That’s transitory political symbolism, and it had no effect on the outcome. Some of the naysayers will vote for the revised final bill anyway (and claim, Kerry-style, that they were against it before they were for it). The more disturbing problem is that the party has zero leaders and zero ideas. It is as AWOL in this disaster as the Bush administration was during Katrina.

While the GOP likes to complain about "class warfare" the fact is that they have brought it on and it is plain for every American to see. The plutocratic class in this country has derivative-ized the financial assets of the masses to the point that the Middle Class are losing their homes, their jobs, their life savings all in one fell swoop -- while those at the top reward themselves with taxpayer money, i.e. more dollar from the very classes they have shat upon. They're lucky there aren't guillotines on Wall Street, but then again this ain't over yet.

The face of the 2009 Republican Party isn't Michael Steele, it's Rush Limbaugh. If an elected Republican criticizes him he is forced to turn around and grovel for forgiveness. Rush is the voice of the GOP in openly articulating the desire for Obama to fail -- and, hence, for this economic meltdown to metastasize all the way into a second, even more devastating Great Depression. But they'll still have their radio contract money, their bonuses, their Oxycontin.

But the ads using Rush are coming now, being used against the GOP by progressive interest groups:

That face, I've seen it somewhere before...on HBO Sunday nights for almost a decade.

And maybe, like Tony himself, he won't see what's coming.

Amen

Go watch Keith on that lying bastard Bush.

What a heartless, greedy son of a bitch.

No end while he is in office.

Follow the nuns.

Worst President ever? He's in the running for one of history's greatest villains, especially if he lights up Iran.
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Anger is an entirely appropriate response.

To evil.