We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

With all the bullshit being broadcast, you would think that some green shoots would indeed be sprouting somewhere sooner of later, but somehow it’s not all that convincing.  Remember those “stress tests” used to determine the health of the banks spreadsheets under various scenarios of economic growth and unemployment?  Hot damn!  What a confidence booster.  The banks passed them after renegotiating their grades.  Even though the then-current economic conditions were already worse than the worst-case scenario envisioned.  We can attribute that to “lag time,” or something.  In defense of the Masters of the Universe, things really are moving faster than the speed of thought.

At least someone in charge is catching up after the fact.  The woman in charge of overseeing the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program–what a sweet-assed name for a broken apocolypse condom!), Elizabeth Warren, suggests that we need to re-run the stress tests “right now” based on current conditions, because:

We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment.

In other words, the stress test results are about as valuable as the paper in the bank vaults.  Less than not very much at all.  We have already “blown past” those sunnier scenarios.

I appreciate Warren’s candor, which is certainly at odds with what we’ve been hearing from Obama and the MoUs.

Today is June 9th, one day after when the banks were to present their plans on exactly how they were going to raise capital to prop up their collapsing balance sheets.

One foreclosure tsunami down, two to go.  Seriously, what’s going to be left?

Let’s face it: Obama’s behavior in the face of this crisis has been abysmal.  He’s not unlike Bush during Katrina, except this is global.  The utter lack of transparency, the dissembling about the extent and nature of the problem, has been appalling.  Like everything else, from Guantanamo, to warrantless wiretapping, to torture, to states secrets, and all previous trangressions against humanity and law, Obama chooses to cover-up rather than ‘fess up.  Move along, nothing to see.  When Obama says he will always be open and honest with the American people, he is lying.

There was actually a half-way decent article in the NY Times the other day, entitled “The Economy is Still at the Brink.”  Some good questions were asked, such as:

Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid – the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth – when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?

Good shot, eh wot?  Seriously, what are the contingency plans to save the bottom of the pyramid when saving the top fails and all the downside has been transferred to the little people in the form of debt peonage?  Geithner: We don’t need a Plan B.  Confidence FAIL.

I sure hope this guy is wrong, wrong, wrong, even though so far he’s been right, right, right:

[faith in American capitalism and in our nation] can and will never be restored, there’s no going back, partly because it lost all credibility, partly because it lost its manufacturing base, and partly because it lost all of its money…

There will come a day, though it will come far, far too late, when the fact that this is not merely some financial crisis will be evident to many of us. That realization may well coincide with the one that spells out that if the only people capable of understanding and fixing a highly flawed system, mired in behavior on both sides of the line that defines criminal acts, are the ones that designed it, that whole system needs to be discarded. Which is the precise opposite of what we do now. In other words: we have a long way to go, and it won’t be a pleasant ride.

Obama is playing hide-and-seek politics to defend the financial parasites with so many other lives at stake.  I suspect his popularity would be somewhat dinged, dented, or perhaps even “totaled” if regular people realized this.  I don’t think Obama has bad intentions toward us regular folk, but I do think he has drunk the Wall Street Kool-Aid until his eyeballs are purple.