Tag: Bailouts

  If you follow the financial news you will find it using temporary excuses for every set-back.

For instance, every year there will be several bad economics reports blamed on the weather. As if every winter storm is “unprecedented”.

 Likewise, all efforts by the government and Federal Reserve at fixing an economy are temporary as well. Which is all fine and dandy when the economy is suffering from something that is indeed temporary. Remember how 9/11 got blamed for a recession that was already 7 months old?

 But what if the problems with the economy are not temporary? What if they are structural?

How many years of extremely expensive “temporary fixes” must we endure before we take a good, hard look at the basic assumptions of the current economy? Two years? Three years?

 We are currently approaching the four years mark for “temporary” fixes in the credit markets with no end in sight.  

Laura Flanders of GRITtv talks once again with Truthdig.com’s Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer, author of “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street“, about Barack Obama’s economic policies and team, about the blackmailing of you and the country and the world by Wall Street, about the financial industry lately booking two thirds of all profits produced by all economic activity in the United States, and about the parasitical mindset that now passes for “success” among the ultra-wealthy and their political servants in a morally warped empire in decline…or in freefall?

“Wall Street was blackmailing us,” says Robert Scheer of the bank bailouts, “And we got nothing in return.” It’s not news to any viewers of GRITtv that Wall Street’s tentacles ran throughout our election, but now that the election is over, we turn again to the running of government. Scheer joined us in the studio recently to discuss his new book, The Great American Stickup, and we asked him to give us some thoughts for after the election as well. Most pressing of all, he asks if either bankers or politicians are capable of thinking in anyone’s long-term interests.

  There has been a lot of talk about a double-dip recession recently by people like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, how to define it, and what it means. What is missing from these discussions is the most obvious question of all: why won’t the economy recover?

  Capitalism is supposed to be self-correcting – or so we’ve been told – and a recession like the one we’ve had is supposed to be that reset button. So why aren’t businesses hiring?

  I’m going to try to answer that question in the simplest way possible.

 There are two primary reasons why the economy isn’t recovering, one reason is cyclical, the other is secular.

  The IMF has been making a lot of noise recently, but their biggest move almost managed to slip through completely unnoticed.

 The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today approved a ten-fold expansion of the Fund’s New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) and the transformation of the Fund’s premier standing credit arrangement into a more flexible and effective tool of crisis management. The NAB will be increased by SDR 333.5 billion (about US$500 billion) to SDR 367.5 billion (about US$550 billion), representing a major increase in the resources available for the Fund’s lending to its members.

 This IMF program didn’t even exist until a year ago, when the IMF began issuing SDRs for the first time since the 1970’s. The IMF has only sold SDRs in times of global financial stress.

  It makes a person wonder “Why now?” Why is the IMF suddenly tripling its lending facilities? What do they know that we don’t?

 To answer that, let’s look at the announcements of the past few weeks.

“White House to Main Street” Town Hall: Elyria, OH

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

A recent change of the guard in the Massachusetts Senate race force the President to reveal he is working.  We, the American people, are waiting, just as we have been for months and months.  For a full year, countless citizens have felt as though they were patient.  Yet, the President did not seem to have their interests at heart.  True change has not come.  Countless constituents anticipate none is forthcoming.  Three hundred and sixty five plus have gone by and the American people are tired of being patient.

By now it should be pretty apparent to all but the most ignorant (this means you Birthers)that the only type of change that has come to America courtesy of the Obama administration is chump change. Oh, the Wall Street financial mafia, especially The Great Satan (Goldman Sachs) has seen plenty of change for the better (with the government assisted hit job of rivals Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) and bonuses for the parasitical scum will be approaching record levels this year while the a good amount of the rest of the populace is still jobless, homeless, hungry and fucked but hey..is this a great country or what?

In fact, what really has changed from the more honest version of Fuck You, I Got Mine attitude of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil? Obama’s Chief of Staff, a foul-mouthed, ass-faced, stab you in the back little swine named Rahm Emanuel has come out and called ads by liberal and progressive groups against the corrupt Blue Dogs as “fucking stupid”. Now this has naturally incurred the wrath of many bloggers and justifiably so, Emanuel is nothing but a malodorous, dual loyalist agent of supreme corporate corruption, think Al Capone was a bad dude, well he had nothing on Rahm Emanuel when it comes to being a Chicago gangster. I remember a few years back when our local entrenched Republican, C.W. ‘Bill’ Young was ripe for a takedown during the 2006 mid-term elections and was being challenged by a scrappy insurgency by a very progressive, anti-war, independent minded ‘democrat’ named Samm Simpson. At that time, the vermin Emanuel was head of the DCCC and didn’t give her one fucking dime, not a fucking dime choosing to instead stay with the Republican more in line with corporatist values.

Quite a good article posted at www.CommonDreams.org that sums up my feelings about the state of our Country some 8 months after we had been promised “change” (and voted for it).

See: Hey, Did You Hear That Democrats Won The Election?”

Some excerpts:

I’m not shocked that he’s not FDR. But why is this guy carrying water for George Bush, covering up his worst crimes?

Why are his civil liberties positions so bad that one attorney described them as “the good old Bush-Cheney inherent presidential power theory” all over again?  

Why is he working so hard to make sure Wall Street sucks every drop of blood it possibly can out of the pale-white corpse of the American middle class, even while it ruins the global economy in yet another get-rich scam, then turns to the government for a bail-out when it all comes a cropper, all the while – and without a hint of irony – still loudly singing its effusive praises of Ayn Rand?

I might also add, why is he so personally heavily invested in the legal protection of Dick Cheney?

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. ”

– Charles Bukowski



The dazzling propaganda onslaught conducted by the financial sector has been shock and fucking awe as the amazing resuscitation of the FIRE industry roars into the next quarter. A dirty as a pig in shit corporatist media waged total war against reason, morality, facts, history and the law itself in allowing the treasonous looters from Wall Street bounce back off of the ropes and reassert their control over the government and the country at large. Now under the cover of the saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson freak show (I doubt that I will see this shit end in my lifetime) the still annoying little trickles of doom, like the impending implosion of Arnoldland are stomped on by gatekeepers who just play another card from the Whacko Jacko deck of jokers. Face it people, we are fucked! With the celebrity infatuated lemmings in this rotting from the insides empire it is only a matter of time until they start seeing the great one’s ghoulish visage appearing on tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches. If there were such a thing as a truly American Jesus it would be Michael Jackson. Neverland will become the bastardized equivalent of Lourdes, Jerusalem and Graceland uniquely spliced together to resemble our sick, twisted and mutated national DNA.