Tag: wall street bailout

Thank goodness.  It couldn’t have happen a day too soon.

NBC Nightly News (03-09-09) Tent Cities of Homeless Springing Up In Bad Times



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F94f_Ycsjs

Tent City, USA



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

  President Obama got up on the stage and gave the speech that we all wanted to hear.

 “I proposed a set of reforms to empower consumers and investors, to bring the shadowy deals that caused this crisis into the light of day, and to put a stop to taxpayer bailouts once and for all,” Obama said to supporters. “Today, thanks to a lot of people in this room, those reforms will become the law of the land.”

 It sounds really good. The problem is that it has no relationship at all to reality.

  The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) released a report within hours of the president giving his speech, and its finding portrayed something very different.

 “Indeed, the current outstanding balance of overall Federal support for the nation’s financial system…has actually increased more than 23% over the past year, from approximately $3.0 trillion to $3.7 trillion — the equivalent of a fully deployed TARP program — largely without congressional action, even as the banking crisis has, by most measures, abated from its most acute phases.

  Wall Street CEO’s are deaf to Main Street while awarding themselves record bonuses from taxpayer bailout money.

  Democrats in Congress, in the White House, and regulators in the Federal Reserve who propose a permanent TARP bailout program are also deaf to Main Street.

Corporate Rights and Responsibilities: Restoring Legal Accountability

Dr Dan Plesch & Dr Stephanie Blankenburg

[pg 4]

Giant corporations have the rights of a person, but none of the responsibilities.

Society needs successful businesses, but today business is taking over society.

– 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies are corporations

(Institute for Policy Studies, Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power, 2001).

– 80% of the world’s industrial output is made by 1,000 corporations

(The Economist, 29 January 2000).

https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/570…  (pdf)

Staggering Stats! from nearly a decade ago!

If were not careful, metaphorically at least, that world of Terminator 2 may indeed come to pass … that day “When machines rise up rule the world”.

It may already be too late — despite the Human Face, we like to paint on our neighborhood global Corporate Entities …

The New York Stock Exchange let it be known last week that it would no longer require companies to report all of their program trading–an outrage that enables large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, to shield themselves from public scrutiny.  

Matt Tiabbi  . . .

This is quiet obviously a move designed to make it even more impossible to track what’s going on in the NYSE and shield, in particular, Goldman Sachs.  The move is designed to protect investment banks from bloggers who are exposing the companies’ stock market manipulations.  Goldman Sachs is singled out because the investment bank’s share of principal NYSE trading has gone from 27 percent at the end of 2008 to fully 50 percent of trades in recent months.

For some bizarre reason, Danps at FDL seems to think that Goldman Sachs taking over the Obama Administration and Wall Street and God only knows what else might not be a good development.  He’s asking Is the Left Being Too Easy on the President? . . .

Maybe some of the president’s supporters prefer to turn a blind eye towards a scathing indictment of a company whose employees have lavishly funded the president and with whom he appears to enjoy a warm relationship.  If so it is troubling.

This is far beyond troubling.  But the response of far too many progressives is typical.  The same progressives who opposed Impeachment are blindly supporting Obama and ignoring the reeking stench of Goldman Sachs that’s hanging over Obama’s White House.  They like to call themselves “realists.”  They’ve had plenty of practice at that, it’s been their standard response every time other progressives take a stand for progressive principles and ask them why they won’t.      

Running down around the towns along the shore,

When I was sixteen and on my own.

No, I couldn’t tell you what the hell those brakes were for,

I was just trying to hear my song . . .

Now I’m sitting by the highway,

Down by that highway side.

Everybody’s going somewhere,

Just as fast as they can ride.

I guess they’ve got a lot to do,

Before they can rest assured.

Their lives are justified.

I’ve been up and down that highway,

But no matter what I see,

I can’t help feeling,

We’ll never get where we want to be.

A friend said, close your eyes, and try a few of these,

I thought I was flying like a bird,

So far above my sorrow,

But when I looked down,

I was on my knees.

RePugs said close your eyes, America . . .

And try a few of these tax cuts for the rich, the wealth will trickle down.  And America believed them.  

In Growing Anger in the Heartland, David Sirota writes:

A few months ago I appeared on Fox News and was told by “anchor” (hereby “cartoon character”) Greg Jarrett that “historians agree” that the New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression.  It was a statement so factually inaccurate that it approached insanity.  

Approached insanity?   Countless Friedman Units of full moons have come and gone since Republicans and their propagandists in the corporate media approached insanity.  They approached it long ago.  They went past it like it was standing still and have plunged into uncharted realms of lunacy so surreal and distant from human experience that psychologists can’t even begin to describe what the fuck is going on inside their thick skulls.

Sirota discussed Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero’s recent interview on FOX and observed that Bernero:

represents the boiling anger that’s roiling the country, and made a point that needs to be hammered over and over and over again over the din of Fox News cartoon characters–how can anyone with a straight face demand blue-collar workers take huge pay and benefit cuts at a time those workers’ tax dollars are subsidizing bonuses on Wall Street?  Part of the answer is that we live in a country whose ruling class is deeply insane.  Hardly a day goes by when you don’t see sociopathy packaged as Serious Opinion.

A typical example of this is Chase CEO John Dimon, who derided homeowners who are getting foreclosed on and declared “we should teach the American people, you’re supposed to meet your obligations, not run from them.”

I feel obligated to tell that highly paid hypocrite to shut the fuck up.  I also feel obligated to update him on the economic catastrophe he and his CEO friends on Wall Street are responsible for . . .  

Badgered by lawmakers, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan denied the nation’s economic crisis was his fault on Thursday but conceded the meltdown had revealed a flaw in a lifetime of economic thinking and left him in a “state of shocked disbelief.”

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, describing the current financial crisis as a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” acknowledged Thursday that the crisis has exposed flaws in his thinking and in the workings of the free-market system.

Duh, do you think?   Maybe now we can drive a stake through the hearts wallets of the free market, federal reserve, and Alan Greenspan.