Tag: Wall Street

David Swanson’s review of TruthDig.com’s Editor in Chief and veteran journalist Robert Scheer‘s new book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street”:

Here’s the short answer that Scheer provides: Reagan announced the robbery but couldn’t pull it off. Clinton robbed us blind. Bush Jr. and Obama drove the get-away car, with Obama disguised as a security guard.

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Candidate Barack Obama campaigned for the restoration of Glass-Steagall, and then put in place all the same people who’d destroyed it. He’d been made an insider. The day after a special election in Massachusetts to replace Senator Ted Kennedy, President Obama briefly pulled out his old rhetoric. Wall Street immediately shifted its “donations” from Democrats to Republicans, and that settled that. Obama pushed corporatized “health insurance reform,” which distracted from his absolute subservience to Wall Street on matters financial. He drew on the “expertise” of those who’d created and collapsed these mega-corporations in building on President George W. Bush’s accountability-free bailouts at public expense. It was the same pattern Obama followed in every department: Where he didn’t leave Bush’s people in charge he brought back Clinton’s. Anything to be an insider.

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“The dispiriting lesson of both the Clinton and the Obama White Houses is that the Democrats proved to be as eager to please Wall Street as their Republican rivals. The influence of big corporate money far overwhelms that of labor, environmental, consumer, or grassroots organizations, making a mockery of the American ideal of self-government when it comes to reining in the antics of the largest conglomerates of wealth.

read it all here…

Peter Orszag, the former White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), now a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow” at the   “Council of Foreign Relations,” launched his debut in the New York Times yesterday.  

Orszag’s found a cure for his personal employment prospects:  put himself out for hire to continue the Bush Years deficit spending.

In typical neocon- liberal fashion, he admits there is a problem, and them offers a “compromise” which is supposed to be a concession, which actually does not nothing but continue the current status quo, because it doesn’t really happen.  Orszag writes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09…

” Yet no one wants to make an already stagnating jobs market worse over the next year or two, which is exactly what would happen if the cuts expire as planned.  Higher taxes now would crimp consumer spending, further depressing the already inadequate demand for what firms are capable of producing at full tilt. ”

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” …. extend the tax cuts for two years, and then end them altogether.  Ideally, only the middle class tax cuts would be continued for now.

Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the the high income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it. ”

On consumer demand, they spend on shelter/utilities and food and then transportation, clothes, and finally luxury goods.  Shelter- we have a housing glut, and don’t need to produce any in the immediate future.  Food- no shortages yet, thankfully, only HUNGER, aka “food insecurity,” whereby the millions of jobless and underemployed are relying on food stamps, food banks, and charities to feed themselves and the school lunch program to feed the kids.  Transportation, ie gasoline prices, are not spiking, but public transportation maintenance is lagging, and even the interstates are literally crumbling in hard hit states, such as CA.  Manufacturing for clothing and consumer goods for things like appliances and electronics, we outsourced overseas in the name of stockholder’s profits.  

Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

WASHINGTON-The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.

“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this-this so-called ‘money’-really matters at all.”

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, “Oh my God, he’s right. It’s all a mirage. All of it-the money, our whole economy-it’s all a lie!”

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Twenty months after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. congress is moving ahead with its financial system reform. In the following weeks, the Senate and House bills will be combined. While many details are still to be ironed out around issues like derivatives and consumer protection, it is clear that the legislation will not break up the massive banks that are blamed with the crisis. President Obama says the legislation will ensure the U.S. taxpayers never again bailout Wall Street, but Public Citizen’s David Arkush says that until the banks influence on Capitol Hill is broken up or countered, there is no way to guarantee an end to bailouts.

MAKING MONEY!!!!

And that’s ALL, that’s what the whole business economy is geared to and who pays when they aren’t regulated and that creates huge problems, like the criminal enterprises many have become, everyone does but them and their investors!

And it’s not only what’s going on in the Gulf and oil companies and their so called best of the best…………………………… executives, it’s across the board in every big industry and big business model, MONEY is their only concern and not long term growth, getting as much as they can as quickly as they can and hope for the best and when something happens blame everyone else for their extreme failures!