Team Barack Obama (TBO) was closed by the U.S. government in by far the largest failure of a U.S. President since George W. Bush, and its political assets were sold to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.   Team Obama was originally jointly purchased in early 2008 by Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum, both of which have been suffering devastating political setbacks in recent weeks.  The rescue marks a historic step to clean up a U.S. financial system littered with toxic mortgage debt, and was initiated by the Office of Thrift Supervision after the TBO division suffered deposit outflows of $14 trillion USD since Sept. 15, 2008.

“With insufficient political capital to meet its obligations, TBO was in an unsafe and unsound condition to transact the nation’s business,” the OTS said.  

In an attempt to make large-scale farming easier, and corner the seed markets, Monsanto inadvertently engineered “Round-Up-resistant weeds.”    

Roundup – originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate – has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.

Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Sowing the seeds of one’s own destruction does not take that long.

Joe Lieberman (Quisling-CT) thinks American citizens should be stripped of their citizenship and constitutional rights if they are accused of being a terrorist.

Some of us have started to talk about it here, which is that there is an existing law – which hasn’t been much used – that says if an American citizen is shown to be fighting in a military force that is an enemy of the United States, then that person loses their citizenship and they no longer have the rights of citizenship. That’s an old law that was adopted during a very different time of conflict.

I think it’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship, and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act.

Lieberman’s suggestion goes much further than the Alien and Sedition Acts signed into law by John Adams during the undeclared “Quasi-War” against the French.

Distrust in democracy and “the common man” is used as a rationale for having different classes of people invested in different “grades” or “tranches” of truth.  The belief that commoners can’t handle the truth is probably the central dogma of modern politics.  The belief is to some extent real, as self-deception is critical to credible lying, but primarily serves to mask the deep conflicts of interest of those holding power.  The dogma is frequently presented in a way to suggest that truth is imminently dangerous to national security concerns, justifying the invocation of state’s secrets.  One version of this “Father knows best” attitude was famously articulated by Irving Kristol:

“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

Irving’s taxonomy of people according to grades of maturity and education, which I read as code words for “ideological intelligence” is almost diabolically funny, in retrospect.

A guy walks into a bar with a handful of shit,

The empire is really sucking bilge water when they start firing key propagandists!

Job cuts at ABC leave workers stunned and downcast

Photo: Good Morning America hosts demonstrating happy-happy-joy-joy to Disney-berg villagers.

If “Good Morning America” or “World News” look any different in the coming weeks, it might be because ABC News is employing nearly 400 fewer people.

Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff. The cutbacks promise to change ABC both on- and off-camera.

The business of news is a particularly ugly one these days, and news outlets across the country have trimmed their staffs. But it is exceedingly rare for a newspaper or a network to shed a quarter of its employees all at once, as ABC has done.

For viewers, the effects will be felt on the individual broadcasts, like “World News with Diane Sawyer,” which lost two of its six senior staff members to buyouts. They will not be replaced.

In the future, more segments will be reported, filmed and edited by jacks-of-all-trades, called digital journalists, internally. They may lack the polish that a traditional four-person crew can provide, but they are much less expensive. Sometimes two of the digital journalists will team up for reports.

Hell, just sign up for an account at Docudharma!

And drop a nickel in the kitty.

Senator Levin got testy with Goldman execs for peddling, in their own words, what they knew to be “shitty deals.”  Of course, when you collapse the global financial system, it stands to reason that more than a few “shitty deals” by more than one shitty organization were involved.  

When 93% or more of 2006 vintage AAA-rated subprime mortgage-backed securities are now rated as junk, that’s an impressively high rate of “shitty deals going bad.”

Not to be out-done on crafting “shitty deals,” 99% of Goldman’s ABACUS deal CDOs are now junk.

At failures rates approaching 100%, the SEC and credit rating firms had to be cutting “some pretty shitty deals” themselves to fail to see the rising risk in mortgage products.  

There was and continues to be a “shitload” of collateral damage to the rest of us from “Wall Street’s shitty deals” which will be with us for a long time, as we have 103 months (8.6 years) to clear housing inventory at the current rate.  That’s a lot of “shitty deals hitting the fan” for “a long, shit-flinging time.”

General McChrystal admits stunning defeat.

via bagnewsnotes

Fraudensheude means “No, we are not all responsible.”

“Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease, but the very existence of a society.” Samuel Johnson

As the hearings and scandals progress, and the revelations and charges start to cut closer to the heart of the credit swindles, inevitably there will be a movement [led by Barack Obama] to say, “We are all responsible. Let’s allow bygones to be bygones, it was all a misunderstanding. Let’s move on to something new. Justice is not important, and cannot be done.”

There will be long accountings of how the problems arose, and how changes in the banking laws, broker deregulation, and the erosion of elite privileges compelled the Wall Street banks to take more and greater risks, to violate unspoken understandings about customer relationships, to take great risks, to bend the laws, to use money and influence to suborn perjury and the breaking of oaths, and to generally undermine the fabric of government.

There will be long analyses that suggest that trust has been lost, the trust that binds the social and financial interactions of people. And there will be an effort to regain that trust, to promise change and reform, and of course, justice.

As for justice they will say, but aren’t we all responsible? Didn’t we all believe the promise that ‘greed is good?’

No.

In contrast to schadenfreude, which means “taking delight in someone else’s misery,” Fraudensheude means, “No, we do not accept responsibility for your acts of fraud.”

Goldman Sachs’ fraud epitomizes everything that is wrong with America: “the haves” repeatedly screwing “the have-nots,” not by being better or smarter, but through sheer, premeditated criminal fraud.

Goldman’s e-mails sound all too reminiscent of the criminal disregard for humanity at Enron before they collapsed (via Mish Shedlock, emphases mine):

Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive director facing a fraud lawsuit in the sale of a mortgage-linked investment, said an index that facilitated derivatives trading in the market was “like Frankenstein.”

The so-called ABX index is “the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a ‘thing,’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?'” Tourre said in a Jan. 29, 2007, e-mail released yesterday by Goldman Sachs. Watching the index fall is “a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor.”

In a March 7, 2007, e-mail Tourre describes the U.S. subprime mortgage market as “not too brilliant” and says that “according to Sparks,” an apparent reference to Daniel Sparks who ran Goldman Sachs’s mortgage business at the time, “that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last too long!!!”

A few months later, a June 13, 2007, e-mail shows Tourre claiming, “I’ve managed to sell a few Abacus bonds to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic ABS CDO2,” using short-hand for asset- backed collateralized debt obligations squared, or CDOs made up of tranches of CDOs containing asset-backed securities.

Of course they knew their financial products were 100% crap.  Such criminal fraud is at the very heart of Wall Street’s booms, busts, and bail-outs.  What in hell is Obama thinking?  Having the nation bail these criminal pricks out is beyond moral hazard.  Maybe like Bush “The Haves” and “The Have-Mores” constitute Obama’s “base,” as well.  His economic strategy sure looks that way.

Here’s one of many dogs that did not bark in Obama’s speech on financial reform:

You see, there has always been a tension between the desire to allow markets to function without interference and the absolute necessity of rules to prevent markets from falling out of kilter…blah, blah, blah….

….And I read a report recently that I think fairly illustrates this point.  It’s from Time Magazine.  I’m going to quote:

 “Through the great banking houses of Manhattan last week ran wild-eyed alarm.  Big bankers stared at one another in anger and astonishment.  A bill just passed… would rivet upon their institutions what they considered a monstrous system… such a system, they felt, would not only rob them of their pride of profession but would reduce all U.S. banking to its lowest level.”  

That appeared in Time Magazine in June of 1933.  (Laughter and applause.)  The system that caused so much consternation, so much concern was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, also known as the FDIC, an institution that has successfully secured the deposits of generations of Americans.

Amid the laughter and applause, did you hear the silent dog?