There may be acts that are more indecent than destroying a homeless person’s shelter, but shredding the tents of homeless people living under a fucking freeway and rifling through what pathetically meager belongings and comforts they rely upon is really kicking them when they are down and putting the boot to the neck of an already beleaguered humanity.  Such mindlessly horrific coercion of the weak and dislocated by the powers that be, in this case, local “peace officers,” is really emblematic of what our country has become.  First, alienate people and push them to the fringes of society, take away their jobs and homes, then destroy any remaining belongings and remnants of social support they have at the edge of life itself.  I’m sure many more of us will be enjoying such fruits of economic apartheid in the years to come.

It’s Sunshine Week.

In a statement, President Obama applauded his administration’s efforts to become “the most open and transparent ever.”

“We came to Washington to change the way business was done, and part of that was making ourselves accountable to the American people by opening up our government,” Obama said.

The President then made a sweeping gesture to the heavens, noting the Moon in the Seventh House and Jupiter’s alignment with Mars, adding:

This is the dawning of a new age.  Peace is guiding the planets.  Love is steering the stars.  Let the sun shine, let the sunshine in!

No one is satisfied with the FBI investigation into the anthrax terrorism case following on the heels of 9/11.  Not Congress, not the National Academy of Sciences, not Lawrence Livermore Labs, not Sandia Labs, not the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, not Dr. Meryl Nass, not Glenn Greenwald, and not me.

Bush-hating Obama-bots, please explain why Obama wants to quash any new investigations into Amerithrax.  With such determination that he would deny funding to the entire intelligence budget.  Golly, I thought we were still in a state of national emergency concerning terrorism.    

The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2009, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.

Obama will take away funding from all intelligence agencies just to prevent this case from being further investigated.  Unprecedented transparency in government, my ass.

March 15 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, an administration official said.

A proposed probe by the intelligence agencies’ inspector general “would undermine public confidence” in an FBI probe of the attacks “and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions,” Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

And why the fuck is Peter Orzag of OMB even commenting on this?  No one can now claim that terrorism is a budgetary waste, not after we have re-committed ourselves to inordinately expensive Bush-era war policies and re-declared national emergency states.   Did Peter Orzag suddenly develop expert biological insights into bio-terrorism?

Maybe we can no longer afford “to keep Americans safe” from bio-terrorism, because of stupid wars and bailing out capitalist crooks.  If so, just say so.  We’ll understand.  We’ll buy some fucking duct-tape and plastic.

Nope, doesn’t smell like dead rats to me.  We’re officially back in “black helicopters” territory.

Dylan Ratigan & Eliot Spitzer plainly explain the fraud that occurred at Lehman.  Ratigan hands Spitzer collateral (a trash can), and Spitzer hands Ratigan cash.  Lehman “pawned” its garbage in exchange for short-term loans to spruce up the quarterly books with “more cash, less trash.”  This is the “repo 105” fraud everyone is talking about since the release of the bankruptcy examiner’s report.  Please watch:

CEO Dick Fuld alone made half a billion bucks off this fraud.  He remains a free man today.  As Spitzer said, the accounting firm Ernst & Young, the Fed, and the Treasury were also involved in this fraud.

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.”

And Spitzer concludes: “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?”

Eric Sprott recaps the last financial decade as a prelude to the future:

To stem the flow of money out of US-based money market funds, Paulson had to provide an almost instant guarantee on all money market funds held within the US. Kanjorski recounts, “If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2pm that afternoon (September 18th), $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, [which] would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. We talked at that time about what would happen if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”7 Further details of these meetings have been provided by Senator James Inhofe, who recounted that Paulson had warned of martial law and civil unrest if the TARP bill failed.8

We were literally hours away from worldwide financial collapse, civil unrest, and martial law, but Hank Paulson somehow managed to leave those flashbulb memories out of his “memoir.”  Sprott, among others, predicted it all, from the NASDAQ bubble collapse, the evils of the subsequent “lending mania” in the years afterward to “ease the pain,” and which led directly to the housing bubble, and current housing collapse itself.

Some say the world will end in default

Some say by printing.

From what I’ve heard about the vaults

I hold with those who say default.

But if I could go broke minting

I know enough of fear

To say that for destruction printing

Is always near

And equally unstinting.

Timmy “sizzle chest” G, also known as “Timmy the Moocher,” “Two-timing Tim,” “Hey, you little bastard, where’s my wallet,” “Timmy the Stress Test,” “Timothy the Treasury Mouse,” “Hey, who stole my cheese?” “Geithner the Purse Lightener,” “‘T’ that rhymes with ‘P’ that stands for ‘pool,'” “Gangsta Rap,” “Who stole the cheese?  I wanna know who cut the cheese!” “The Invisible Regulator,” “G is for Growth,” “Fake it ’til you Make it,” “Tricky Tim,” “Humbug Jive,” “Shell Game,” “Dirty Trick,” “Swindler’s List,” “The Fiddling Fed,” “The Treasurer’s Measurer,” “Bill O’Goods,” “The Two-Fer Spoofer,” “Run Around Tim,” “Too Money,” “Fictional Assets,” “Mark T. Fantasy,” “Timmy Too Bigs,” “Turbo Tim,” “Timmy the Greek,” “Fail-safe,” “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Chopper Pilot,” “Flim-Flam,” “Shock Doc,” and “Jelly, You Broke My Heart, Geithner…”  Smack!  Smack!  You wanna fresh one?  –  was apparently over-seeing financial fraud at Lehman before they went kaput.

Tangled webs make us sad and frustrated.  And vengeful.

Update

Oh, fun.  A plug for Yves:

Update 2: Hell, just go read bobswern for content:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

How bizarre.  About 8 in 10 Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street’s fraudulent behavior?  

Someone needs to help me understand what in blazes is going on here.  82% is a scary big super-mega-majority.  Where does a really big percentage, like 80% plus, come from?  Did someone pull it out of a hat?  Did someone conjure it from a lamp?  A crystal ball?  Ouija boards?  Playing cards?  Who in the heck is reading the coffee grounds around here?  Where on gawd’s green earth does a number like that come from?

I am appealing to you, the inside dopesters having a strong strain of frustrated idealism and just the right touch of hard-boiled cynicism, to lend me a hypothesis, a conspiracy theory, if you will, of who “we,” the 80% are, and who “they,” the other 20% might be.  Please try to cast your theory in a form that makes it virtually impossible to disprove.  

This could have implications for democracy, and who rules America.

Well, bless my stupid little heart!  Simon Johnson says what we need is  a good speech:

For nearly two years now we have waited for a speech. We need a simple speech and a direct speech – most of all a political speech – about what exactly happened to our financial system, and therefore to our economy, and what we must do to make sure it can never happen again.

So, Senator Ted Kaufman delivered a speech.

It was the speech we have been waiting for – Financial reform, repeal of old regulation, the growth of mega-banks, the failure of regulators, fraudulent securitization, recipes for disaster, too big to fail, the concentration of wealth, Wall Street versus Main Street – yep, pretty much what we needed, simple and direct, and political.

I’m sure the Wall Street lobbyists are totally blown away, like that pigeon that flew in front of Ted Nugent’s Marshall stacks.

Thanks also to Senator Shelby for issuing a statement.  I’ll put that political repartee on my dinner plate next to Ted Kaufman’s speech.

Ladies and Gents, the corridors of power have been foundationally shaken.  You folks living near the coast are on a tsunami alert.

I say this with all the passion, moral rectitude, and foresight of Ben Stein: There will be justice.