Tuesday - Turning Point

Tuesday September 15, 2009

. . . . . .I know patriotism exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest, but a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward. . . . . .George Washington Commander in Chief of the Colonial Armies and First President of the United States.

. . . .R.I.P. Patrick Swayze. On top of being one romantic dude, and making for more than one enjoyable evening with a loved one with a movie like Ghost, you turned in a couple of hellish performances in Roadhouse and Black Dog. His last TV effort, The Beast on A & E was excellent, and he could still be killer when he had to. (I mean, come on, Roadhouse, one of the Top 10 guilty pleasure movies ever! Sam Elliot as an intinerant biker bar bouncer? How cool was that!)

. . . .Today marks a turning point for me, the current Administration has lost me, and is going to have to work, and work hard, to regain my trust. I cannot support it's current path

. . . .No, it has nothing to do with health care reform; nor "fascism", "socialism", "communism" or any of the other "ism's" being bandied about by fair-weather "patriots" and their tea-bagging-in-one-another's-faces ilk, nothing to do with the tinfoil-hat wearing crowd of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh's Christian Taliban or Alex Jones's sweaty, basement-dwelling, droolers listening on their shortwaves for the apocalypse.

. . . .No, I do not believe we would be better off if John McCain and Sarah Palin were in power, conversely, as a matter of fact, I believe we'd be much, much worse off with them there, given the current paradigm and parameters.

. . . .'S matter of fact, I'll take all of them on a little later in here too.

. . . .I know that most of you think that somehow I'm a supporter of Democrats, or this particular President because he's a Democrat. I'm not. I've been sharply critical of every Administration since Reagan (for a particular reason). From the day I started this column, it didn't matter who was in the White House, nor who was in the Capitol Building, none of them have served the American people, all have betrayed us. The only person that I ever support, out of necessity, is the President of the United States. I am an American, a believer in the Constitution of the United States, and the person who is elected via the process laid out in the Constitution is the sitting President via Constitutional process, and if I love my country and it's spirit, then I am obligated, as an American citizen, to support and respect the office and its Commander in Chief. Period. There's no gray, and it's very clear cut.

. . . . .Regular readers here will not be surprised by the next item, as they well know of my disdain and contempt for Goldman-Sachs and their ownership of the United States Government, and consequently, their ownership of the Fed, the Treasury, and our currency.

. . . . . . .Fortune magazine Managing Editor Andrew Serwer was on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, what he had to say was jaw-dropping:

Asked about Goldman Sachs and their post-TARP fortunes, Serwer used a pretty telling metaphor:

SERWER: I mean, it's amazing to me that as we recover, you know, come out of this financial crisis, you know, you'd expect a company like Goldman Sachs maybe things are improving, make a little money. But they have a record quarter. In other words, they made more money in this three month period than they ever had in any other--

SCARBOROUGH: [archly] But they just made some good guesses, right?

SERWER: Well, I don't know if it's okay or not, but I think what happened is that the government has telegraphed to Wall Street, not only Goldman Sachs but the other firms what it was doing, what was going on, what the program was, and so, essentially, it's like telling a Goldman Sachs, "Hey, put your money on 32 Black" at the casino, at the roulette wheel. And the thing spins and lo and behold, where does it end up, Joe?

SCARBOROUGH: 32 Black?

SERWER: 32 Black.

That's a pretty significant statement from the Managing Editor of a magazine that's going to have Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein present the "Goldman Sachs & Fortune Global Women Leaders Award" at this very Summit. And it's hard to ignore the fact what Serwer describes is a risk-free system of wealth accumulation that bears no real working resemblance to the thing we know as "capitalism."

Remember back to the 2008 campaign, when so many people worried about "wealth redistribution?" Turns out the worry was very real, but the worriers themselves are all making out pretty well!

. . . ..Now, if the Wall Street Journal is the Old Testament of Capitalism, Forbes is the New Testament. For this to come out of the mouth of their managing editor speaks volumes to two things (1) The incredible influence that Goldman-Sachs must have in Washington and (2) The growing contempt that they're held in, and given the fact that Serwer would be interacting with their CFO later on in the day, and how "teflon" they are, and impervious anymore to anything.
. . . .Remember that it was Goldman who held AIG's default credit swaps, so they made out twice on the collapse. Remember that Goldman is the only investment house that also has the same privileges as a Federal Reserve bank and access to that credit window.
. . . Remember Matt Taibbi's brilliant, savage piece of investigative journalism earlier this year in Rolling Stone.
. . . .I referred earlier to the Wall Street Journal, that other, older bastion of capitalism, they've had enough as well, as indicated by this MarketWatch article by Paul B. Farrell:

You better read "The Usual Suspects," Matthew Malone's brilliant article in Portfolio magazine: He "exposed" the "Goldman Sachs 'conspiracy' to take over the U.S. financial system." Read it in this context: America's financial sector has exploded from 19% of corporate profits in 1986 to 41% today, becoming a magnet for every wannabe billionaire. They know why Wall Street must control Washington.

Malone focuses on the incestuous "conspiracy" of Goldman alumni in Treasury, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Citigroup, Washington lobbyists and politicians.

And just in case you think any emphasis on The Hammer's (Hank Paulson) conflict of interest was invented purely to increase drama, please remember that he worked at Goldman for three decades after serving under Nixon. He got $38 million his last year as CEO in 2006 before becoming Treasury Secretary.

Then during the market meltdown six months ago the $700 million personal fortune he built at Goldman was threatened by Goldman's huge $20 billion derivatives exposure at AIG: Suddenly his responsibilities at Treasury merged with a strong self-interest in protecting his personal fortune. AIG was "saved."

There's another equally disturbing expose in "The Quiet Coup," Simon Johnson's great article in Atlantic magazine. A former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, Johnson also warns that America's "financial industry has effectively captured our government" and is "blocking essential reform."

Worse, he says that unless we break Wall Street's stranglehold (unlikely in the new Washington) we will be unable "to prevent a true depression," warning that "we're running out of time," echoing many of our predictions of the "Great Depression II" coming soon. See previous Paul B. Farrell.

Matt Taibbi, author of "The Great Derangement," captured this drama in a Rolling Stone piece, "The Big Takeover, how Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution." A must-read: "As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating a crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. ... in the age of CDS and CBO, most of us are financial illiterates."

Wall Street "used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system -- transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below."

Seriously, here's how bad Taibbi sees it: "Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling interest in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing business."

And let's include $5.5 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wall Street's greed and stupidity resembles the self-destructive reigns of banana republic dictators.

Here's how it worked: The Hammer conned a clueless Congress, then shelled out $350 billion of our taxpayer money (Helicopter Ben Bernanke helped by upping the ante with a couple trillion side-bet), buying toxic debt to save his ol' Wall Street buddies. They stopped lending and used the dough to doctor their balance sheets.

So no surprise that Goldman, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase are now reporting "blockbuster" first-quarter earnings, says the New York Times, while just months ago "many of the nation's biggest banks were on life support."

Get it? They screwed taxpayers and borrowers so they can repay TARP with (you guessed it) our recycled TARP money. Now it's back to business-as-usual, with no restrictions on CEO pay and bonuses ... no thank-yous ... no admissions of guilt ... while some even arrogantly deny that they ever needed TARP money.

Right after the election in November, at the peak of the banking crisis, when Hank, Goldman and the Wall Street mercenary armies were divvying up the $350 billion TARP money, we detailed 30 reasons for the "Great Depression II" likely coming around 2011. We quoted John Whitehead, former Goldman Sachs chairman, former chairman of the New York Fed, former Reagan deputy secretary of state. He warned America's problems will take years, burn trillions, result in massive deficits:

"This is a road to disaster," he said. "I've always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don't see a solution here." He did see a depression at the end of that road, one you can call the "Great Depression II."

But in real life, Hank, Goldman and Wall Street's mercenaries are winning the war. Read and weep Portfolio's chilling finale: "Obama's victory and Geithner's appointment are the completion of Goldman's meticulously crafted plan to become a superpower. The firm now has the clout to impose its will on the financial markets, and the world."

GOP or Dems? Conservatives or liberals? It doesn't matter. We'll all controlled by "The Conspiracy." So why not surrender, let them have the power? The truth is, through their lobbyists and surrogates in Washington, they already rule America. Surrender is a mere formality.

. . . .Bear in mind that Goldman-Sachs was the sole, single largest campaign contributor to Barack Obama's Presidential campaign. We are truly the The United States of Goldman-Sachs. The Trilateral Commission and JP Morgan Chase won.

. . . .Obama has done us no favors at all on the financial front, and appears to be exactly the puppet that Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase needed in the White House. From Nomi Prins column over at The Daily Beast:

Where he missed the mark, though, was the target he went after, in terms of making sure we don’t fall back toward those dark days. Obama talked about “some in the financial industry” falling back into old, risky habits, when calling for a series of wide-ranging, but incremental reforms. First, he should have said “all.” And second, the problem right now isn’t just on Wall Street, but also in Washington, which now essentially owns our banking system, with all its misplaced risk—the exact same system that gave us the meltdown we’re currently enjoying.
Specifically, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have dumped $19.3 trillion into the banking system—$17.5 trillion of which went to financial institutions in the form of capital injections (like an adrenaline shot to the heart of a bank overdosing on its own risk), general market backing, federal guarantees, and cheap loans from eight major new Fed facilities in return for quasi-toxic collateral. That makes last year’s $700 billion in TARP money a mere 4 percent of the full subsidization of Big Finance and the havoc it wreaked on the rest of the economy.

And that means the next financial bubble to burst will be the federal bailout itself.

All these subsidies were supposed to prop up the biggest financial firms in order to keep them from unleashing further devastation on the general economy during last fall’s crisis period. We were told this would stabilize the banks and loosen credit for small businesses and individuals.

The exact opposite happened. Banks continued to go belly up and credit became tighter, “systemically important” banks were consolidated courtesy of the Fed and Treasury Department, and bank fees increased. And the financial goliaths that inhaled our money got their soaring stock prices, profits, and bonuses. But that part is an illusion. Even the profits themselves, announced in July, aren’t what they seem. They came from using federal capital to take more risk.

So the profits reaped by the big banks aren’t likely to be passed on to consumers in any meaningful way any time soon. But the larger problem is, what happens when banks have to pay back the government subsidies beyond TARP? We might discover that there’s even less to these firms than they would have us believe, and find ourselves in the middle of another financial collapse. That bubble burst will be even more chaotic than the current one. Why? Because next time, it won’t just be the capital they raised in the markets on the table—it will be all that federal money they got as well.

And what if the banks don’t pay back their loans any time soon? Stronger banks will chug along while the FDIC keeps shutting down struggling banks, raising debt and trading big on the back of federal capital. Until one of those scenarios plays out, the problems that spurred the crisis—the loan and credit defaults, foreclosures, job losses, and general disparities in incomes—continue to hammer the average American.

But ideas like shuffling some regulatory-agency decks in Washington, when regulators, most notably the Fed, failed to do their job to begin with—isn’t change. And pumping trillions of dollars into the financial sector does not address the banking system’s most fundamental and obvious flaw: Banks are too big and their functions too convoluted and dangerous. When the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, commercial banks were again allowed to take speculative risks with consumer deposits, merge with investment banks and insurance companies, and load up debt based on weak assets. All those pools of money were allowed to mix and the financial system devolved to the freewheeling mentality that existed pre-Great Depression. That’s when the current economic crisis really began.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Churning federal capital, big trading risks, and less competition created the illusion of improved bank profits following a horrendous 2008. At least before the meltdown banks were ostensibly creating their own capital, borrowing from each other or their investors. Now they’re playing with the taxpayers’ stash. We don’t have to look into the future to find the next bubble—we just have to take a look around now. The brewing bubble comes courtesy of this federal bailout. So will the next burst.

. . . . The American people, the citizens of the Republic, have been had, just as they were during both Bush administrations, the Clinton administration and Reagan's.

. . . .How's this for being had folks? I know many of you pinned your hopes on the House of Representatives bill, America's Health Care Choices Act of 2009, but you were being jobbed. It was a head fake, a feint and designed only to get you looking the other way while Max Baucus, the Democratic puppet of the health insurance companies got his "Gang of 6" working on the bipartisan bill, sure to benefit only health insurance companies, and big greedy Senators like Max, Enzi and Olympia Snow. Baucus claims that his bill will be ready by Wednesday morning. Got news, it's gonna suck and in the end, it will not have a public option and it will include mandatory coverage for everyone, with subsidies for those who can't afford it, in other words, a health care insurance companies dream bill. Just who's going to pay for those subsidies?

. . . . .So, anyhow, don't get all worked up on me. And don't go congratulating me on joining any Tea Party, Birther or Turfer ranks. Personally, I have no use for you as a political animal if you count yourself among those.
- If you weren't out protesting and having Tea Parties as George W. Bush expanded the Federal Government beyond anything in history
- If you weren't out protesting as he turned the largest budget surplus in history into the largest deficit in history, and left the sorry damn financial mess that Medicare Part D is, the true "straw that broke the camel's back" behind health care reform.
- If you weren't out holding up posters comparing him to Hitler, and calling him a fascist and a communist for suspending the Bill of Rights, for invading a sovereign country under false pretenses, for abandoning the hunt for bin Laden to do Cheney's bidding so he and Aramco could get their hands on the trans-Iraqi pipeline
- If you weren't out calling George Herbert Walker Bush a socialist for crafting and signing NAFTA and using the phrase "New World Economic Order"
- If you weren't doing any of that, and thought all that was just nifty and OK, then keep on moving and don't even stop to pass the time of day, I don't have the time, and in my mind, you're nothing but a poser, a dilletante, a hypocrite and pretty damn ignorant and late to the whole "I'm a patriot" party.

. . . .From Rod Dreher, via Andrew Sullivan, over at The Daily Dish:

Despite what Sam Tanenhaus says, conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead. The conservative movement is herking and jerking like a zombie, dedicated to little more than frenetic gestures execrating Obama, and to regaining power. To what end? Given that they're birthing a conservative party whose instincts are dictated by loudmouths, reactionaries and crackpots, and overseen by cynics, it's dispiriting to contemplate.

Where can those who wish to think and debate clearly about a serious politics of the right go? The degenerate form of populism now dominant on the right loves to praise "freedom" - but it has no use for freedom of thought, or thinking much at all. In turn, increasing numbers of thoughtful conservatives have no use for it.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell