Apr 15 2009
Tuesday ANKOSS wrote here in Obama’s Capitulation Statement that we have arrived at a point of “Capitulation complete; surrender accomplished. The banks are running America, and Obama is now their top PR man“.
These two short videos from Pepe Escobar should help to put that statement into the broader world context that wraps it…
Real News – April 14, 2009
Welcome to the new “New World Order”
Pepe Escobar Pt1: A tsunami of hype around another New World Order
Mar 31 2009
Hat tip to Armando this morning…
Eugene Robinson writes in an op-ed piece at WAPO today:
Both the credit crunch and the reluctance of consumers to spend what money they have left are the direct result of Wall Street’s atrocious misbehavior. Yet the administration’s plan for rescuing the banking sector involves generous inducements, big subsidies and the opportunity for wealthy investors to become much wealthier while assuming very little risk. There are reasons for structuring the bank bailout this way, and there are reasons to take a get-tough attitude with the auto companies. But the juxtaposition is galling — and, for many autoworkers, potentially devastating.
“We cannot continue to excuse poor decisions,” President Obama said yesterday as he laid down the law to Detroit. But it’s hard to reconcile that declaration with policies that seem to excuse, if not reward, unspeakably poor decisions made on Wall Street.
I can’t argue with the administration’s decision to force GM chief executive Rick Wagoner to resign. It was encouraging, even, to see the White House employ that kind of muscle, given the fact that the president now has to oversee so much of the economy. But shouldn’t the first public flogging have involved one of the bankers who got us into this predicament? On Friday, the day when Wagoner got his walking papers, the biggest cheeses on Wall Street went to the White House for a cordial meeting. All still had their jobs when they left.
[snip]
Our tough-love message to the banks: Would you mind, possibly, lending some of that money we gave you? If it’s not too much trouble, that is. And would you like another pillow?
Mar 30 2009
Crossposted from Antemdius
Political Economist F. William Engdahl is author of the book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.” Mr. Engdhahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Mr. Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Asia, Inc, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine; Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland respectively.
On Sunday Engdahl spoke with Real News CEO Paul Jay about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s so-called “Private Public Partnership” plan to rescue the financial institutions in the United States, explains what Geithner is not telling you, says the plan does nothing to address the concentration of financial power in the United States that is based in the five major financial institutions that compose what we refer to collectively as “Wall Street”, and describes the Geithner/Obama plan as a “band aid for a bad hemorrhage”, a hemorrage that will exponentially increase over the next two or three years and mushroom into something much worse than the 1930’s depression.
Real News – March 30, 2009 – 11 minutes 58 seconds
Geithner’s Oligarchs
Engdahl: Obama must confront the oligarchical power of Wall Street to solve crisis
Mar 28 2009
Real News – March 28, 2009
Obama held hostage by PPPIP
Pepe Escobar: If Geithner’s plan does not work, the President sinks
President Obama’s destiny – more than his foreign policy decisions – will be sealed by how he deals with the US financial crisis, argues Pepe Escobar.The verdict of top economists on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new PPPIP (Public Private Partnership Investment Program) has not been auspicious.
Some speak of taxpayer rip-off while Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman foresees a “lost decade of zombie banks”.
The President has been trying to appease Wall Street while at the same time appeasing America’s anger directed at anything bank bailout-related.
On a global level the Chinese have made it known their patience with America’s addiction to debt has limits.
The upcoming G-20 meeting in London is bound to discuss more radical steps, while back in the US some already dream of a new saviour, post-Geithner.
Geithner’s Treasury $500 Billion to $1 Trillion Plan to Purchase Legacy Assets PPPIP Whitepaper is here (.PDF)
Mar 24 2009
Cross-posted from Passive Ranting.
Here’s the summary:
The crisis surrounding the American International Group was a near-tragedy that underlines the need for broad new government authority to regulate or even take control of financial institutions other than banks, the government’s top fiscal officials told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Geithner claims that if this power existed back in September, current measures such as endless bailouts and seven-figure bonuses for mentally-questionable financial fuck-ups would not have happened.
Mar 19 2009
If you’re anything like me and I suspect like most of us, you know about the scandal surrounding AIG’s bonus payouts to the same company employees in their London operation that were at the center of the Credit Default Swap scheming that triggered the current global financial meltdown, but also like me you’re probably no economist nor expert in financial matters and are having a difficult time wrapping your head around what, exactly is going on, how we got here, and why our economy seems to be collapsing.
Sharona Coutts is a law graduate and an honors graduate from Columbia Journalism School’s investigative seminar and now writes for ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom in Manhattan that produces investigative journalism and describes themslves as “producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them”.
Sharona has put together a very good Q&A piece that helps in understanding what exactly is going on with AIG. She has also produced a very good related piece: Timeline: AIG and Their Bonuses that she quotes in the Q&A article reproduced here.
AIG’s Bonus Blow-Up: The Essential Q&A
by Sharona Coutts, ProPublica – March 18, 2009 5:12 pm EDT
Monday marked six months to the day since AIG’s first bailout, but it wasn’t until news of executive bonuses over the weekend that public fury truly focused on the hemorrhaging insurer.
President Obama told Americans he was “choked up with anger” over bonus payments to executives at AIG’s Financial Products office whose bad bets pushed the company to the brink of collapse. The administration is worried about public anger turning against it, not just the company.
In some respects, the sudden anger is mystifying. After all, there’s nothing new about the bonuses except that a portion of them – $165 million – were actually paid on Friday. Contracts instigating the bonuses were made a year ago, and they’ve regularly been in the news in recent months.
And the amount involved is dwarfed by the tens of billions that flowed to banks and hedge funds.
AIG’s plan to pay bonuses have been public knowledge for more than a year. Why is this blowing up now?
Mar 18 2009
The news that AIG executives were to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses (maybe as high as $450 million!), even after a $170 billion dollar bailout, has fueled a populist revolt not seen since the initial shock of the economic crisis hit Americans last October. When Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told American Insurance Group CEO, Edward M. Liddy, that government loans to AIG might be renegotiated as a result, Liddy responded with “grave concern” over the firm’s ability to retain “talented staff.”
Talented in rip-off, that is. But former New York governor and supposed scourge of Wall Street, Elliot Spitzer, is reporting over at Slate that the outrage in the media over the bonuses is a diversion. (H/T Inky99 at Daily Kos.) Not that they aren’t an outrage, the scandal misses the larger crime: the siphoning off of billions of taxpayer dollars to a handful of companies, who insured their highly risky investments with AIG. These companies have received hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money. Now they are to receive 100% on the dollar reimbursement for their losses from AIG. Spitzer comments:
Feb 22 2009
(crossposted from Cobalt6)
Yes that’s right. There never was supposed to be another great depression. It was never gonna happen. The rich guys were way too smart to ever let anything like that happen. This was part of the first advice I ever received about how to plan my finances for life. Sitting on the front porch in Bridgewater in the Spring of 1975 at the ripe age of 23, my new financial guru, kindly providing his services as a benefit of my employment, went on for quite a while about how the bankers and politicians had learned their lesson very well and that there would “never, no way, ever, be another Great Depression.”
He is in grave danger of being wrong. Thirty-three years later we find ourselves at the precipice. We are in an economic crisis that is looking so deep and so wide that no one really understands it, and no one knows how to get us out of it. Our leaders have a plan and they are trying to implement it but the going is slow. Will the new law now going into affect slow the fall enough so that we can pull ourselves out of it? The reviews are mixed. There is a lot of debate and shouting on both sides. Can we spend ourselves out of the ditch we’re in?
Feb 13 2009
I have but one question for the Obama loyalists. Do you guys ever get tired of saluting the flag? Just because we support Obama and all agree he was 1,000 10 times better than anyone else running doesn’t mean we have to put our brains on a shelf.
Why did he lie to us, and why aren’t the Democrats holding him accountable? We are not stupid. We can see what is going on. All this distraction about bi-partisanship as if millions of unemployed, broke, and homeless middle class Americans care.
No salary caps for CEOs. No torturers, war profiteers, or WS crooks going to jail. Just lots of hot air surrounded by smoke and mirrors.
How about a truth commission on the bailout?
I shouldn’t be surprised by now. But I still was when I read the article this morning in the Washington Post explaining that the cap on executive pay has been removed from the stimulus bill. I knew what Congress was doing yesterday by bringing the Wall Street executives in and scolding them in public was a dog and pony show. But I had not realized how profoundly full of shit these politicians are.
Nationalize the damned banks already. They’re stealing us blind. Geithner is a WS insider, and the wrong man for this job. If we aren’t getting tax dodger and Republican appointments, we are getting the cat assigned to guard the canary. If I have to bailout their sorry asses, I want to own them.
While we are at it, who did us this favor?
A Sanders-Grassley amendment to demand TARP recipient banks stop firing U.S. workers and replacing them with foreign guest workers was ripped out of the bill.
Last but not least, what’s all this noise about Obama and Social Security? We can pay for the Bush war profiteers and the ongoing WS bailout of Washington’s financiers and cronies, but they, by god, are going to save us from the burden of social security.
You have no idea how bad Democrats are starting to look on the heels of all that campaign rhetoric. Change my ass! I am getting sick and tired of all of them and the horses they rode in on.
Feb 01 2009
The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.
The figures are significant because they show that the bailed-out banks, being kept afloat with U.S. taxpayer money, actively sought to hire foreign workers instead of American workers. As the economic collapse worsened last year – with huge numbers of bank employees laid off – the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP’s analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.
Jan 30 2009
Casey Research, of Vermont, has analyzed the costs of the government bailouts of the housing crisis, the credit crisis and others and has concluded that the total is $8.5 trillion, which is more than the cost of all US wars, the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the NASA Space Program combined. According to CRS, the Congressional Research Service, all major US wars (including such events as the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the invasion of Panama, the Kosovo War and numerous other small conflicts), cost a total of $7.5 trillion in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars.
http://www.rockcreekfreepress….
hat tip to Ilargi.
Jan 17 2009
The Goverment Accountability Office (GAO) released a report (pdf) on Friday detailing how the biggest U.S. companies are using offshore tax havens to avoid being responsible corporate citizens. The GAO summary explains:
Many U.S. corporations operate globally and have foreign subsidiaries… In some cases they may be used to reduce taxes…
Eighty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations in terms of 2007 revenue reported having subsidiaries in jurisdictions listed as tax havens or financial privacy jurisdictions. Sixty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. federal contractors…
Not only that, but many of these corporations have received billions in federal bailout money and Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Carl Levin (D-MI) estimate this corporate tax exploit shifts $100 billion tax responsibility to other taxpayers in the form of loss tax revenue.