Olbermann Tells It Like It Is

"There Are Enough Villains to Go Around"

Transcript HERE

I don't think much commentary is necessary to embellish KO's commentary except on this one point:

"And Sen. Reid, put the public option back in, or the Medicare Buy-In, or both. Or single-payer. Let Lieberman and Ben Nelson and Baucus and the Republicans vote their lack-of-conscience and preclude 60 "ayes." Let them commit political suicide instead of you."

I don't think Leader Reid or any of the other 'centrist' Democrats or fucktard Republicans who wage legislative war against their own constitutents give a flying rat's ass about 'political consequences' anymore. They know the system, and they know that over 90% of them have their seats because they spent more on campaign advertising than their opponent. Voters don't matter, they haven't for a long time. Only contributors matter, which means only large corporations.

And what if they do get turfed out of office by some principled upstart, the next Al Franken or Alan Grayson? They'll be richly rewarded by the same corporations - a seven figure sinecure at some think tank, perhaps. Or maybe they'll turn around and join one of the lobbying firms - corrupting in turn their successors as they have been corrupted.

If this is the way that sausage is made these days in Washington, it's time to get a new butcher.

TAGS: Keith Olbermann, Special Commentary, Health Care Reform, Broken Government

What's Really Wrong With the Economy?

Adam Smith and the
Roots of Neo-Conservative Hypocrisy

You've doubtless seen recent headlines showing that unemployment in the US is above 10% officially, higher than it's been since 1983. But that's not the whole story.

New figures in Friday's jobs report from the Labor Department indicate that the broadest measure of unemployment—including those unemployed who have looked for work in the last four weeks, discouraged workers, and the "underemployed" (part-time workers looking for full-time work)—has hit its highest recorded rate. More than one in six, or 17.5 percent of workers, are unemployed or underemployed, and in some hard-hit states like California, Arizona, and Michigan, the figure can get as high as 20 percent. The current figure is almost a half-percent higher than the previously recorded high of 17.1 percent in December 1982, even though the official jobless rate remains lower than its peak in the 1980s.
(more details at The New York Times)

While all the Wall Street firms are flush with the money from the Bush bailout, Main street has yet to see full benefits from the Obama stimulus package. As always America's top-down priorities can be summed up as "comforting the comfortable." Station Agent's post today got me thinking about the whole 'too big to fail' meme, and this post is an expansion of my response there in comments.

Adam Smith is almost universally considered to be the father of economics. His book The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, and that coincidence in date leads conservatives to regard it as though it was one of America's founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence. Much in Wealth can be used as an argument for unbridled and unregulated capitalism, but like the Bible (Old Testament, New Testament, or any religious writings for that matter) cherry picking of certain passages while ignoring others can lead to a conclusion far from the original intent.

It's no accident that people with mental illness are often referred to as 'unbalanced.' If your every thought and consideration pulls you in one direction it's just a matter of time before you're dragged over the edge. I haven't actually read Wealth of Nations, but I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that it has been cherry-picked mercilessly to present only one side of Smith's philosophy. Smith himself was seemingly quite aware that his own thoughts ran a considerable gamut.

On the road from the City of Skepticism,
I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
-- Adam Smith --

One can certainly cherry-pick through Smith's writings and assemble quotes backing every core conservative argument. He is presumed to have been against regulation and the welfare state, for instance. Quotes can easily be found to bear that out.

"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice,
is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way,
and to bring both his industry and capital into competition
with those of any other man or order of men."

"Every man is, no doubt, by nature,
first and principally recommended to his own care;
and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person,
it is fit and right that it should be so."

An argument mitigating the laissez faire effect of that first quote would focus on the underlined phrase. Smith lived and died well before the emergence of the modern multinational corporation. How would he have reacted to the idea of corporate lobbying, especially when the intent is so often to alter the laws so they no longer even resemble justice? What would he have thought of a government that was blatantly for sale to the highest bidder?

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul
can always depend on the support of Paul."
-- George Bernard Shaw --

Just because you bribe or coerce the Legislature into making something legal that was once criminal doesn't make it right. And one other question; would Smith have seen the monopolistic practices of giants like Microsoft as constituting a form of market regulation of their own?

Those who might cite Smith in defense of the free market could in no way rely on him in the case of the crony capitalism that now dominates the global economy. He quite clearly abhorred monopolies, trusts, and price fixing.

People of the same trade seldom meet together,
even for merriment and diversion,
but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public,
or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The whole justification for free-market capitalism can be summed up in a sentence; "it creates a free market environment where competition spurs excellence." That's fine in theory, but where the rubber hits the road you always see capitalists trying to merge into entities that are not just too big to fail, but too big to compete with. Whether they buy out anyone who challenges them, as for example Microsoft has always done, or collude with them and form a cartel, as you see in the oil and health insurance industries, the result is the same. No competition. No free market. Prices are fixed at artificially inflated values, and the public is screwed.

As the saying goes; "in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice they are quite different." This is true in spades in the field of economics.

The sad truth about free market capitalism is that it inevitably leads to concentration of wealth in so few hands that the free market vanishes. You're left with crony capitalism. Which as I've already stated, is a kind of regulation unto itself. I'm absolutely certain that Smith would have considered the no-bid, cost-plus model that Cheney used to dole out cash to Halliburton and Blackwater as nothing less than criminal. I certainly do.

Happily my search for Adam Smith quotes led me to this brilliant post that contains the conclusion to the first book of Wealth of Nations. You should, indeed MUST read this post in its entirety.

It is my contention that much of today's discourse is seriously distorted by the near universal acceptance of some points which are, in fact, completely false. One of these is the idea that modern Conservative/Republican philosophy is strongly tied to the principals of free market capitalism as espoused by the like of Adam Smith.

The author then shows that Smith considered the investor class to be parasitic on the rest of the economy, and their interests contrary to general prosperity.

The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labour, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connexion with the general interest of the society as that of the other two.
[...]
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

By taking the top-down investors-first approach to the economy Barack Obama's financial advisers (all members of the investor class and most alumni of the Goldman Sachs boardroom) ignore the lessons of history and all credible economic theory. Listening to those , "who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it," would seem to constitute Obama's biggest mistake to date.

That mistake, to be blunt, has been to pick the wrong side in what is really a class struggle. Or, put another way, it's like investing in new draperies for a house whose foundation is crumbling. Even Republicans once recognized that prosperity is based in the working class. Anyone who looks at it honestly agrees to that, regardless of ideology. Even John McCain, caught in the absurd statement that the economy was strong while the banks were failing, tried to rescue himself by equating the American worker with the 'fundamentals.' For once he was right.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor,
and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.
Labor is superior to capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration."
-- Abraham Lincoln --

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase -
money that was paid for all things.
It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour,
that all wealth of the world was originally purchased. ”
-- Adam Smith --

"Capital is dead labor,
which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,
and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
-- Karl Marx--

By this yardstick there is only one thing that could be more dangerous than the gloomy unemployment statistics at the head of this post. And that danger is that the blood-sucking investor class can continue to shop for fancy draperies (paid for by the taxpayer) while the nation's foundation crumbles beneath them. Conservative philosophy revealed itself to be unsustainable practically speaking with the banking crisis last year. Hopefully this post shows that it is and always has been a sham on the theoretical side as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

UPDATES: There are a couple of pertinent links to add to this, which have just appeared on the web since I posted on Friday.

Ellen Brown has a new post up at Truthout: "Shifting the Burden from Main Street to Wall Street: Why We Need a Tobin Tax"

The BBC has released the results of a new poll: "Free market flawed, says survey"

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well. Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary. There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

So, as some celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall (which was after all a good thing) others regret the collapse of communism that brought it about.

TAGS: Economics, Adam Smith, Republican Hypocrisy
Cherry-picking the Facts to Support an Unsustainable Argument

Canadian Study a Lesson for Teabaggers

"Three in Four Suffer From Cuts to Public Spending"

From CBC.ca:

Tax cuts could diminish the standard of living for the vast majority of Canadians who enjoy the public services that they fund, according to a study (pdf HERE) by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released on Wednesday.

The majority of Canadian households enjoy a higher quality of life because of the public services their taxes fund, the study argues.
[...]
"What passes for a tax cut debate in Canada is really only half the debate," said study co-author Hugh Mackenzie, an economist. ..."The suggestion we often hear, that taxes are a burden, hides the reality that our taxes fund public services that make Canada's standard of living among the very best," he said.

The study uses Statistics Canada data on government revenues and expenditures to compare public spending in categories including health care, education, social services, old-age security benefits and employment insurance. ...Using the statistics, the report finds that the average per capita benefit from public services in Canada in 2006 was about $16,952.
[...]
"The overall impact of tax cuts — and the cuts in public services that accompany them — has not been addressed in any substantive way," the study states. "Tax cuts are always made to sound like they're free money to middle income Canadians. They are anything but," Mackenzie said. "We're far better off with the public services our taxes fund than we are with tax cuts." Any reduction in income tax results in an equivalent constraint on public spending, the study says, and about three in four Canadians suffer from cuts to public spending.

Overall, the tax cuts implemented in Canada in the last 15 years have had the net effect of reducing the living standards of most Canadians, the reports says.

The study also finds that the number of public services used by Canadians appears to increase as household income and size increase. This is particularly true for households that have children who are accessing publicly funded elementary and secondary schools and seniors who are more likely to use the public health-care system. "Families with young children will tend to benefit relatively more from the health-care system, whereas families with older children will tend to benefit from the public education system to a greater extent than other types of families," the study states.

It's not hard to predict the kind of reaction that this report is going to get from the conservative movement in the US. Reports based on provable facts and confirm-able statistics are not to their liking anyway. They much prefer to rely on ideologically-based theory drawn out of thin air (or worse) - thin air that evidently gets compressed and heated, then spewed out of bloviators' blowholes at FOX "news" in support of this tea-bagging movement. Which, by the way, is an excellent example of astroturfing as defined by Wikipedia, "formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf."

Nor should the motive behind this campaign escape anyone but the morans (sic, see photo) it is directed towards. (or should that be against?) The conservative movement has been pretty successful in the past at getting the poorly educated to vote against their own interests based on simplistic slogans. "Read my lips, just say no, drill baby drill" etcetera. My guess is that they're trying to bring back the glory days of monosyllabic right-tard propaganda -- in spite of being utterly discredited by the spectacular economic disaster wrought from their trickle-down 'free market' policies. My hope is that they're wrong, and that even the worst of the low-information voters will wake up once they've lost their jobs and their homes, and are living in cardboard boxes and depending on food stamps. But then, past experience has been that really poor people don't vote at all, and the GOP has made it nearly impossible for the homeless to even register to vote, so that hope might be a bit optimistic.

The Economist just hosted a debate on whether it's time that the rich be required to pay more in taxes. Just reading some of the closing remarks by Chris Edwards of the Cato institute, arguing against the motion, reveals the paucity of the conservative argument. Unable to attack the logic of his opponent, he mounts a personal, ad hominem attack. "[Parisian economist Thomas] Piketty's understanding of the nature of income is very European, " he whinges. Name calling is rightly regarded as the lowest rung on the scale of debating technique, (see triangular diagram near the bottom) and is characteristic of someone who can't base their argument on facts or logic. So I would say the pro-tax side won the argument.

(Parenthetically, it could, should and must be said that this debate is just one battle being fought in an ongoing and increasingly bitter war between the classes. Because this whole unfortunately named teabagging movement is nothing more than a propaganda effort to perpetuate the Reagan tax cuts. The rich would prefer that you pay for the jackboot that presses against your own neck. If you don't mind, there's a good boy.)

One of the comments at The Economist succinctly expresses why certain functions should not and can not be left to the marketplace.

Of course, the free market doesn't provide universal quality education: thus we must rely on governments to provide this service, and others like it that also serve the greater good but generate no profit. Isn't that the point of taxes in the first place?

You'll often hear Thom Hartmann make the same point in a slightly different way on his radio show. "Don't we already have socialist fire services, socialist police forces, socialist roadways, and a socialist armed forces?"

I would add an observation of my own to that argument. When governments contract out to private enterprise to provide necessary services, they almost invariably do so under a system that is more crony capitalism than healthy competitive free enterprise. Can you say 'cost-plus, no-bid?' It is far better for the public that the money be spent within a government department where it can be more carefully controlled, and where there is recourse for diversion, mis-spending and waste. The whole 'privatization is more efficient' argument falls apart under any close examination.

Certainly the argument against paying taxes for government corruption is a valid one, but just as certainly the remedy is to attack the corruption, not the taxation. Ironically the same type of people who want to spare their buddies the burden of paying their fair share tend to be the type who want to pay off those same buddies through graft. A kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which if you think of it is hardly surprising considering that they want the government to fail. Or at least they claim to; really what they want is a government under their control - maximizing and guaranteeing their profits, socializing their losses, and calling out the guard should the hoi-polloi ever get fed up with the arrangement. In a word, fascism.

Going back to the comment made in The Economist, I think the author chose the perfect example. There is no better investment that a government can make than providing the public with free quality education. A better-educated citizen will earn much more during his lifetime, eventually paying back all the taxes gone into his schooling with interest. Which a wise government will then re-invest on educating his kids.

Maybe it's high time that the wise taxpayer learned that simple lesson. It would certainly be preferred to being conned into participating in some phony protest against your own interests.

ADDENDUM: Just as one example of the COST of LOWER taxes, here's a study of what it cost Americans to NOT have universal health care. (From the National Coalition on Health Care.) Just one fact from this piece forms a conclusive argument. The US spends 17% of GDP on health care and 40% of people are either not covered or not sufficiently covered. Canada covers EVERYBODY for 9.7% of GDP.

TAGS: Tax Day, Public Policy
Conservative "Ideology", vs. Common Sense

A Wonderful Lie

Glenn Greenwald's post yesterday leaves very little left to be said about the bailout - quite brilliantly covering all the bases.

The virtues of public anger and the need for more:

The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.
[...]
...the financial crisis is a fundamental indictment on the way the country functions and of its ruling class. What would be unhealthy is if there weren't substantial amounts of public rage in the face of these revelations.
[...]
(Quoting The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi:)
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. . .Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?
[...]
(Quoting Atrios:)
The issue is that [Geithner] and friends never distinguished between bailing out the system and bailing out the players. There was a way to do that, and they didn't do it.
(Quoting Krugman:)
"The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system."

If you were to do nothing this weekend other than read this tour de force of a blog post and click a few links to Glenn's sources you would end up better informed about this issue than the vast majority. And a hell of a lot angrier.

Speaking on clicking on source links, if I have one criticism of Glenn it's that he truncated the Krugman quote robbing it of some of its impact. The original reads:

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank.

Now that inevitable brings to mind the famous George Bailey speech from It's a Wonderful Life. Trying to prevent a run on an essentially sound bank, Bailey points out that the money isn't cash sitting in the bank's vault, it's invested in the homes and businesses of Bedford Falls.

A Community Chest

Try to translate that to the current system and you get,
"Well, shucks Joe, your life savings are tied up in Goldman Sachs' CDO's and Goldman Sachs is heavily into Merrill Lynch's Credit Default Swaps, and Merrill Lynch is putting it into Lehman hedge funds. Then Lehman leverages it back into Goldman and we all make a tidy profit."

No matter how homespun your cloth coat or how endearing your accent, you're going to come off more like the despicable Mr. Potter than the lovable George. Lending out money to build assets makes sense. Lending money to tear down structure is unremittingly wrong-headed.

The bottom line of this post is the source of all this righteous anger. As Glenn says, "When it comes to its primary challenge, the administration elected on a platform of "change" is, above all else, viciously devoted to preservation of the status quo." Greenwald's underlying point, that it is well past time for an angry population to re-exert some influence on their government echoes a Thomas Jefferson sentiment - one I have always heartily agreed with.

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;
When the government fears the people, there is liberty."

So, keep those pitchforks sharp and be ready to light those torches at a moments notice.

TAGS: Kleptocracy, Bailout, Anger AGAINST Management
AIG - The Pirates of Wall Street

Corporate Welfare

...Worse Than You Could Have Imagined

Was anybody wondering how the DJIA miraculously rose by nearly 900 points yesterday on the news of the lowest consumer confidence results since that benchmark has been measured? It just doesn't make any sense unless there's some serious market manipulation going on. I asked myself what was happening and ran into something called the PPT, an entity whose very existence confirms some of my worst fears about how the world works.

Have you ever heard of the Plunge Protection Team? That's OK, until today neither had I. Officially it's called the Working Group on Financial Markets, and is a mechanism for manipulating the markets that is shockingly apposite to anything resembling free market principles - all the more so because it was set up under the Reagan administration. Wikipedia tells you what it is:

The Working Group on Financial Markets (also, President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the Working Group, and colloquially the Plunge Protection Team) was created by Executive Order 12631, signed on March 18, 1988 by United States President Ronald Reagan.

The Group was established explicitly in response to events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987 ("Black Monday") to give recommendations for legislative and private sector solutions for "enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of [United States] financial markets and maintaining investor confidence".[1]

As established by Executive Order 12631, the Working Group consists of:

• The Secretary of the Treasury, or his designee (as Chairman of the Working Group)
• The Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or his designee
• The Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or his designee; and
  
• The Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or his designee.

The current holders of the listed offices are respectively Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Chris Cox and Walter Lukken. I'm sure you've heard about the first three. I have a theory about why you haven't heard of Lukken, the CFTC's acting chairman, which I'll tell you later.

Wiki's explanation of what the Working Group is is straightforward and uncontroversial. What it does is another thing entirely. Indeed the reasoning behind the PPT epithet brings out conspiracy theory accusations:

"Plunge Protection Team" was originally the headline for an article in The Washington Post on February 23, 1997, and has since become a colloquial term used by some mainstream publications to refer to the Working Group. Initially, the term was used to express the opinion that the Working Group was being used to prop up the markets during downturns. Financial writers for British newspapers The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, along with U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and writers Kevin Phillips (who claims “no personal firsthand knowledge” and is “not interested in becoming a conspiracy investigator”) and John Crudele, have charged the Working Group with going beyond their legal mandate. Claims about the Working Group generally include that it is an orchestrated mechanism that attempts to manipulate U.S. stock markets in the event of a market crash by using government funds to buy stocks, or other instruments such as stock index futures—acts which are forbidden by law. However, these articles usually refer to the Working Group using moral suasion to attempt to convince banks to buy stock index futures.

Let's first address this idea that the characterization of the PPT as market manipulators using tax dollars is a conspiracy theory. The pertinent question to ask is "if the group cannot buy or sell stocks, how can it intervene to prop up the market?" And unless you can come up with a believable answer to that, the whole conspiracy theory idea evaporates. Which, by the way, puts you by the fire in the conspiracy camp. And me, I'm not buying the moral suasion argument, so pass the coffee please.

Anyway, the recent $700 BILLION government intervention in the banks renders the question moot. Having a direct interest in the banks through the TARP program, the government can directly intervene in the markets through something rather less moral than mere suasion. And all apparently with nothing approaching meaningful oversight.

Unlike Wikipedia, this extremely persuasive article from WebofDebt.com makes no bones about what is really going on in the markets. Note that it was published last Saturday, before the inexplicable Dow Jones Miracle occurred. The author, Ellen Brown, was responding to the fact that Wall Street somehow managed to weather the storm relatively speaking on Friday after "Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell nearly 10% during the [previous] night, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 8%, and Germany’s and Britain’s fell 5%".

THE NOT-SO-INVISIBLE HAND:
HOW THE PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM
KILLED THE FREE MARKET

Traders prepared for the worst, but remarkably, disaster was averted. The U.S. market fell only 3.5%, just another “ordinary” bearish day.

Why the more modest drop in the U.S., where the financial debacle originated and should have hit hardest? Suspicious observers saw the covert hand of the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), the group set up under President Reagan to maintain market “stability” by manipulating markets behind the scenes. Bill Murphy commented in LeMetropoleCafe.com:

“Today the Muppets on CNBC were remarking how well our market acted, not falling apart as expected. All day long they spoke of how our market was acting differently today than every other stock market in the world. Well hello, the other countries don’t have a PPT, which is WHY our market is so different.

“There are those who might think what the PPT is doing is right. What they don’t realize is their making ‘Everything is fine’ for so long, and not allowing the market to trade freely . . . like allowing the stock market to fall the way it should, has kept the individual in the market . . . when they might have been SCARED out some time ago.”

In response to Bill Saporito’s comment in Time it might be countered that Henry Paulson’s Plunge Protection Team is quite adept at rigging an economy. The difference between an acknowledged socialist state and the stealth socialism we have in the U.S. today is that in a socialist state, everyone expects the market to be rigged and operates accordingly. In a rigged pseudo-capitalist economy, investors are easily separated from their money because they expect the market to follow “free market principles” based on “supply and demand.” They are seduced into “pump and dump” schemes – artificial manipulations that allow insiders to unload stock at a high price or buy it at a low price – because they trust in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which is supposed to automatically set things right in a market left to its own devices. The market today is indeed controlled by an invisible hand, but it is not necessarily serving the interests of small investors.

To quote more of this article might go beyond fair use, and I would anyway be tempted to quote the entire thing, so instead I will urge everyone to read the whole thing, maybe twice or more, because it does get pretty technical. Most important is that you understand what a 'pump and dump' scheme is, and that it always favors the big player and milks everyone else. The idea that the government is using your tax dollars to help transfer wealth out of small player's (such as retirement investment accounts) hands into the pockets of the already obscenely rich should eventually sink in.

As Ms. Brown lays it out, it's a case of "Plunge Protection for Some, Plunge Creation for Others." Her home-page (promoting her book Web of Debt) contains some excerpts from the book, which must have been published about a year ago - there are reviews from November of 2007. There is little doubt that she saw then what is happening now. And it don't look good.

To keep up appearances, the "Plunge Protection Team" has been authorized by presidential order to use U.S. taxpayer money to manipulate markets to make them appear healthier than they are, and lately it has been working overtime. But official assurances of a "soft landing" are mere window dressing, aimed at preventing another worldwide depression as home buyers and stock market investors stampede for the exits.

It's particularly galling that this brand of corporate welfare is going on while the McCain campaign rails on about Barack Obama's socialism. Apparently it's not the idea of the government redistributing wealth that bothers them, just the fact that it's going to someone who actually needs it. Anyway, it's all business as usual under the crony capitalist operating principles of the Republican Corporate Feudal State. Socializing the losses while privatizing the profits.

This whole story should give you the right to call BULL-SHIT!! to any Republican who ever opens their pie-hole and lets the words 'free market' emit from it, in perpetuity. It's worth a read if for no other reason than that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, and I said I'd tell you why you've never heard of Walter Lukken, didn't I? It's simple. He's the head of the CFTC, whose mandate under the Commodity Exchange Act is to prohibit fraudulent conduct in the trading of futures contracts. A regulatory agency. If you had heard of Walter Lukken it would have meant that he was doing his job. Which might have meant that this economic meltdown would never have occurred. Like the OSM that purportedly regulates the mining industry, or the EPA that supposedly protects the environment, the CFTC has been reduced to an office with one guy doing crossword puzzles and playing paddle-ball all day - regulators are the Maytag repairmen of the Bush administration. Business. As. Frickin'. Usual.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Addendum: There's a great related story from Wonkette about how Cindy Jacobs, a Christian dingbat associated with Pat Robertson's 700 club, declared a "Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008" “We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the 'Lion’s Market,' or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said.

“While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

Because the stock market crash was caused by the sinfulness of allowing gays to marry, doncha' know?

“This is so severe in the economic area because we are facing judgment from the actions, not only for our stance towards Israel, but our blatant sin against Him in passing laws such as the one allowing homosexual marriages,” Cindy said.

Gawd, it'll be good to see the likes of those relegated to their backwaters again when the neocon/greedhead/Christofascist coalition is finally scattered to the four winds.

UPDATE: There's video of Cindy and her followers serenading the bull to the tune of God Bless America. hat-tips go to Slog the Stranger and TC.

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TAGS: Economy, Government Bailout, Bush Epic Failure
You Can't Make This Shit Up