Or, more appropriately, “Where Does the Occupy Movement Go From Here?” I began writing an article on precisely this topic, working myself to the bone and pausing only to get dead stinking drunk for a couple weeks. Upon sobering up I started researching again and realized, to my embarrassment, that I had been beaten to the punch by practically every writer in the US (and some abroad) that follows the movement.

No, really! Type that question into a search engine and you’ll see this.

Well, it is an important question — this isn’t Tunisia or Egypt, one cannot count on the amount of popular support combined with near-suicidal rage necessary for a protest to topple a government. The US is a different animal and this is a different struggle. So what to do?

Miles Mogulescu, over at the Huffington Post, asks some pertinent questions. “It’s time,” he writes, “to ask whether the organizational forms and tactics which birthed the #Occupy mass protests are adequate to building a long-term movement which can change the country and the world.”

That’s something of a dangerous question. Leadership rarely transfers smoothly. He’s correct when he writes that the “open source, participatory, horizontal structure may be one key to its early success, and the ease with which it has been replicated in city after city around the country and the world”, but what will the reaction be when someone suggests changing that? It has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement, something looked upon with pride, something that says “we’ve done something amazing here”.

One may ask “well, why would we want to change that?” In a word: politics.Mogulescu suggests that while the protests are all well and good, it may be that the best way to accomplish something substantial is to engage in the rough and tumble world of politics. And the horizontal leadership that he praised earlier may not be the best tool with which to enter that world.

Michael Moore, well-known author/filmmaker and fan of trans-fats, has gone a step further. He has submitted a “vision statement” to the Occupy Wall Street general assembly, something that reads suspiciously like a wish-list. More useful, to my mind, is the comprehensive list of goals and demands (examples include “Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street where they currently pay 0%” and “Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time”. I encourage everyone to check them out).

Whether you agree or disagree with the items on the list, one has to admit they are significantly better goals and demands than those expressed by some of the protest signs that have been seen in various cities (“Jobs Are A Right” read one I saw, which reveals a frankly staggering ignorance about either the nature of employment or the nature of rights. “End Corporate Greed”, a slogan I heard at an Occupy Chicago event, is almost as bad. Greed is the foundation of the economic system in this country, which in turn drives the world economy. Curtail it? Sure. Maybe make it less short-sighted? Absolutely. Spread around the profits resulting from that lust for money? Great. End it? That statement is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless in this country). More importantly, it seems to suggest something similar to what Mogulescu was saying. After all, to accomplish any of these goals, the movement will have to start messing around in politics.

William Pfaff at TruthDig claims that the Occupy Movement is fighting “the system”, a phrase that always makes me nervous. Look around at the people near you, how good are they at recognizing, manipulating or even consciously and willfully interacting with systems? How can the masses fight a system? The author gives several examples, and you may or may not be surprised to discover that many of them are covered in Moore’s list of goals and demands. Pfaff also notes, though, that none of these goals will be possible unless there is severe campaign finance reform. Until the candidates no longer have to go on their knees to the money-men, the list of goals will only ever be a wish-list.

This, I think, separates the Occupy movement from other successful movements in the U.S.’s history. The Civil Rights movement did indeed combine home-grown protests with political aspirations, and did so successfully. But that struggle was different — they were combating hate and ignorance, which while powerful nevertheless takes a back seat to greed. An example of this principal is the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955. The protest campaign managed to prove that treating a certain portion of society as second class citizens is not a smart business plan, especially when that particular portion of society accounts for 80% of your annual income. Like the Civil Rights movement, the Occupy movement is battling an entrenched power structure committing injustices — but the injustices the Occupy movement are fighting are not, if you’ll forgive the pun, as black-and-white. Hate and ignorance are ugly, and that ugliness was seen by the entire nation in the responses to the Civil Rights movement, in the terrible attacks on the brave people involved in that struggle. Arson and murder will not rally the masses to your cause. Dead children being pulled out of a burnt-down church will not win the hearts and minds of the people. It will, in fact, do the opposite of that.

The short-sighted greed that runs through the reigning power structures cannot be seen as easily, though, and even when examples of it are brought to the public’s attention — the Wall Street crimes, the Super PAC legislation — it can (and has) been written off as business as usual, nothing to see here, move along folks.

So everyone is asking “Where Does The Occupy Movement Go From Here”, and the responses are all pretty similar: Get Political. I’m not seeing too many ideas on how to do that in terms of process, but hell it’s a start. While I’m here, let me add that now is the time to start getting the police on our side. Because what worries me the most is something I predicted a while back, something of which I am a little terrified but at the same time am anxiously awaiting: if and when the Occupy movement gets some real leverage, the shit will start hitting the fan in a much bigger way. When that happens, let’s hope the police are at least a little less willing to crack skulls and squirt pepper-spray down someone’s throat, because someone with a lot to lose will be telling them to do exactly that.

“Seriously, do you expect a better opportunity to extract concessions from your enemies than when they lay begging, bleeding at your feet?” —Liam McGonagle

In case you were in the washroom when ‘Jersey Shore’ was interrupted with this late-breaking newstory:  Ben Bernancke just committed the U.S. to provide the European Central Bank (”ECB”) with an unlimited line of credit.

That’s right, a brand new bailout.  Structurally along the lines that Business Insider had warned us about in September, but much more ambitious; that article had postulated a trifling $1 trillion, not the bottomless pit we’re actually being presented with.

The basic deal is that we hand dollars over to the ECB in exchange for Euros, the value of which, has become highly dubious to say the least. The ECB will in turn invest those dollars in large corporate banks to bolster balance sheets they themselves ruined through reckless underwriting practices and constant pressures for tax holidays and austerity measures.

Boun Natale e felice anni nouvi, Mario!

This is being billed as a stopgap measure to compensate for the fact that the genius architects of the Eurozone couldn’t be bothered to implement a fiscal coordination authority in their new currency. Must have seemed reasonable at the time.  We’d seen the end of history, after all.  Just like American civil liberties after 9/11, all the rules had changed.  The new era of seamlessly integrated global markets had pushed the capitalism’s cycle of inevitable liquidity crises into the dustbin of history, right?

But is it really stopgap? While similarly available currency swap loans had been available for some time previous, the duration of the current arrangement (i.e., a 50% reduction in the interest rate) is through January 2013, and is unlimited in amount. Meaning that the commitment is bounded in no way by the current supply of U.S. dollars.  So, at least theoretically, the U.S. will end up printing the dollars it will be obligated to provide incompetent European bankers.

When the implications of this development had finally settled in, and I’d had a chance to change into a clean pair of trousers and shower up a bit, I settled to thinking. Two paradoxically conflicting corollaries floated to the surface:

1.  Nobody, I mean NOBODY, seems to have learned the lesson of the previous bailout regimes or Quantitative Easing programmes, namely that the size of the money supply in-and-of-itself is of distant, secondary importance to the circulation of currency.  Or, to put it in layman’s language: BANKERS DON’T DRIVE THE ECONOMY, CONSUMERS DO.

2.  The bizarre occurrence of one nation printing money to manage the fiscal problems of another demonstrates exactly the sort of international commitment and cooperation that would be necessary to curb the irresponsible corporate leeching that led to these problems in the first place.  You know what I’m talking about, that old mantra of the defeatist traitor:  “But if we try to regulate corporations effectively, they’ll just pull of stakes and move the show overseas!”

As this incident suggests, it is effective government that provides the necessary stability for corporations to exist. If so-called “populist” Tea Baggers in the House had the brains to realize this, they’d take this opportunity to make corporate elites pay their fair share of the burden:  i.e., more historically reasonable income tax rates and a tax on idle wealth. Seriously, do you expect a better opportunity to extract concessions from your enemies than when they lay begging, bleeding at your feet?

Sadly, neither of these realizations seems likely to amount to much. This is the era of greasy hacks like Newt Gingrich are seen as “transformational leaders” [1] and the worthless empty suit Obama tries to slide turds like this past us whilst simultaneously telling the American people that their “moment is NOW“. To date, the most vigorous response I’ve seen on this issue has been Ron Paul, condemning the Fed for taking this action unilaterally.

Which, quite frankly, whilst being a step in the right direction, is nowhere good enough. Paul was asleep at the wheel on this issue in September, wasting our time with penny-ante Solyndra b*llsh*t. And nowhere do I see him calling for greater international government cooperation to curb the unaccountable multinational banks who are the primary beneficiaries of these abuses.  No mention anywhere of any increased corporate oversight, or fair transaction or property tax on the parasitic financial sector that destroys 80 cents in GDP out of every $1 that we give them.  Overall, even after grading on a curve, I just can’t give Paul any grade higher than a “D-”.  Try harder.

Footnote
[1] Newt’s constant use of the word “transformational” is equal parts insult, comedy and tragedy. There’s one reason that dried up old carpet-bagging whore never got “born again” into the Evangelical movement he so lustily courts on the campaign trail:  He’d leave a toxic oil slick in the baptismal pool.  The only thing Gingrish ever transformed is my dinner into vomit.

Another heaping helping of Hades, from Dystopia Diaries

Photo Courtesy of Chris Hedges

Via Nation of Change:

Chris Hedges made this statement in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on Thursday morning during the People’s Hearing on Goldman Sachs, which he chaired with Dr. Cornel West. The activist and Truthdig columnist then joined a march of several hundred protesters to the nearby corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs, where he was arrested with 16 others.

Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout-related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank holding company under its “emergency situation,” has used billions in taxpayer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. It handed its senior employees a staggering $18 billion in 2009, $16 billion in 2010 and $10 billion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This massive transfer of wealth upwards by the Bush and Obama administrations, now estimated at $13 trillion to $14 trillion, went into the pockets of those who carried out fraud and criminal activity rather than the victims who lost their jobs, their savings and often their homes.

Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president …

More: Nation of Change

The Parable of the Blind. Pieter Bruegel (1568)

In Business Insider, scuttlebutt that German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be softening up Obama, Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner for yet another round of bailouts for the incompetent multinational financial elites.

Awesome! I was afraid that the next round of bailouts would require “patriots” like representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) to take to the floor begging again. I feel so relieved now, knowing that the whole thing can proceed quietly without anyone having to jeopardize their campaign funding.

But where do our other, prospective “leaders” stand on this topic? Hard to say. Irrelevance and opacity seem to be the primary tenets of the major candidates’ PR machines. Here’s what I mean.

Ron Paul’s heart may be in the right place regarding the need to end counterproductive wars and pointlessly intrusive social wedge issues, but his knack for failing to identify urgent priorities remains unequalled. Witness the most recent update to his news page: Paul’s response to the burning issue of a vaguely worded email RECEIVED (i.e., NOT sent) by a third-tier lackey in the slave galley of Obama’s PR establishment. Yeah, I know. $527 million is 0.05% of the $1 TRILLION in bailout money supposedly at stake in the Euro bailout, but Ron’s never claimed to be more than what he clearly is:  an amateur.

Still, it was a bit of a disappointment. Those of us who had taken heart in the earnestness of Ron’s campaign do feel a little saddened by his betrayal of it’s core moral theme, that public figures should take firm stands on what they believe and know to be correct, regardless of the short-term pragmatic consequences. Ron doesn’t have and never had a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning anything other than honorable mention. But his piling on here to the failure of an innovative business venture, and one pioneering a technology that could threaten the petroleum-military complex at that, just feels like he’s gotten himself lost.  Hopelessly lost.

And that was the high ground, folks. The rest of the lot could either bore you with their predictability or make you laugh at their vapidity:

A quick visit to Michele Bachmann’s website yielded only her trumpeted zeal for “politicking” in Iowa. FYI to Bachmann:  You’re from Iowa.  You have home turf advantage. You already won the straw poll there last month.  Time to move on.  There’s another 49 states in the union, some of them with more than 1 electoral college vote.

Rick Perry’s site wasn’t a helluva lot better. True, he seems to have left last month behind him, but devil a word you’ll hear about the impending bailouts. He also spent all his gunpowder in low-grade partisan b*llshitting. G*ddamn it, at least Bachmann gave us a few laughs.  All Perry did was bore me to tears.

Mitt Romney’s response was a little more nuanced and amusing. Yes, no one is surprised that the much-vaunted hedge fund manager uttered not peep #1 about the use of public funds to underwrite his pals’ vacation homes in St. Tropez, or that he cleared his policy platform with these same scum bags. But did you know you could win a once-in-a-lifetime date with this Tiger Beat dreamboat?  I don’t know about you, but his flat, nasal automaton speech and “Reaganesque” elder statesman-y graying temples just make me melt. ‘Specially the way he says: “Corporations are people, too, my friend!”

No, you won’t hear much about Bailout III:  The Re-”Bush”-ening on any administration web site either.  Not the Fed. Not the Treasury. Not the president’s blog. Hardly much of a surprise. Obama’s always been an awkward, “play-behind-the-beat kind” of guy anyhow.  He seems continually caught off-guard by the way his bailouts, unconstitutional wars, plutocratic tax giveaways and civil rights violations have continued to erode the economy and the support of the people who voted for him in 2008.

But shouldn’t we expect more from his “challengers”? There should be no question of pragmatic compromises in order to achieve tactical victories, because going on the 4th year of 10%+ unemployment and simultaneously sky-rocketing unemployment claims and corporate profits, there’s really nothing left to compromise any more. Ergo a complete and overwhelming moral victory seems free for the taking.

Another tidal wave of tribulation from Dystopia Diaries

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after the Norway killings, Alex Jones’ massively-surfed Infowars site already is fronting with the theory that the tragedy was all part of a conspiracy by European elites to deflect populist disgust at bailouts:

The false flag attack in Norway arrives as populism grows in Germany, Europe’s reluctant paymaster for the contrived debt-based economic crisis. Establishment politicians in Germany have balked at a second bankster bailout … The EU and the European political establishment are beholden to the bankers and their “free market” — as in free to loot and plunder — neoliberal policies and have now pulled out all the stops in an effort to crush resistance to endless bailouts designed to crash local economies and destroy national sovereignty.

It is no mistake the corporate media is comparing Anders Behring Breivik to Timothy McVeigh. Hours after the terrorist attack, Norway’s public broadcaster NRK cited Tore Bjørgo at the Police College in Oslo who said the attack resembled the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The 1995 attack blamed on Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people …

For more information, see original article.

Okay, so as a nation we’re totally cool with recasting tribute to greasy financial fat cats as “investment” — even if it doesn’t exactly pay a huge return. [2]

But since “far left socialist” Barack Obama proposed cutting Social Security benefits during recent talks to increase the nation’s debt ceiling (to much Republican enthusiasm), making sure Granny gets her catfood money has also been redefined as “wanton profligacy”.  Ah, sure, the ol’ gal only had another ten years left in her TOPS anyways, right?

America, you are a pack of perverts. [3]

Footnotes
[1] Not a quote from Ryan’s wife, mind you, but my personal interpretation of the guy’s attention span.  Not only does he seem never to have bothered considering the negative consequences of diverting billions from high multiplier government programs to line the pockets of his already bloated buddies at AIG, I’m not sure that he even knows what the term “fiscal multiplier” means.

[2]  The Bureau of Labor Stats today showed that our nation of 300+ million managed to increase jobs by a lousy 18k.  Which I figure is about 80k short of even keeping up with the increase in the work force.  But of course the fantastically inept media will fail to report the numerous predictions that enactment of Ryan and Obama’s tax cuts in December would lead to job losses not gains, so in the public mind the policy’s continued failure will remain a mystery.

[3]  Feel free to let your representatives and senators know how obscene you find highjacking old age pensioners to pay for Goldman Sachs bonuses:  right them NOW.

Another meditations on mendacity from the Dystopia Diaries

There is a new threat to the international monetary system which means Europe May 2010 redux is imminent. US taxpayers: our condolences.

Back in April 2010, before Waddell and Reed sold a few shares of ES, effectively destroying the market on news that Europe was insolvent, we made the following observation: “The IMF has just announced that it is expanding its New Arrangement to Borrow (NAB) multilateral facility from its existing $50 billion by a whopping $500 billion (SDR333.5 billion), to $550 billion.” Little did we know that our conclusion “something big must be coming” would prove spot on just a month later after Greece, then Ireland, then Portugal, and soon Spain, Italy, Belgium, and pretty much all other European countries would topple like dominoes tethered together by a flawed monetary regime. Well, based on news from Dow Jones we can now safely predict the following: “something bigger must be coming.”…

For more information, see original article.

The group explains why BoA is the first U.S. target:

Despite ruining the economy with their reckless greed, Bank of America has consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer. In fact, in 2009, Bank of America actually received a net tax benefit. Yes, last year, the federal government gave Bank of America $2.3 billion. That money alone could almost completely cover the proposed $2.5 billion cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills and affects 34 million households. Bank of America is the largest bank and 9th largest corporation in the country, holding over $2.2 trillion in assets, and yet it pays less in taxes than the average American household, which made between $35,400 and $52,100 and had an effective tax rate of 14.2%.

We pay our taxes, why don’t they?

On February 26th, citizens across the country will be targeting Bank of America branches and peaceably but forcefully showing them that they can’t get away with such egregious tax-cheating.

The U.S. doled out $12.3 trillion dollars to finance bailouts, a figure far higher than what was previously stated.

Go, Wall Street, Go!

Never mind the rise in unemployment and foreclosures. Never mind the folks waiting to know if they will get the benefits they need before they are cut off. Never mind the growing gap between rich and poor, and the rapid spread of poverty. (Did you know that inequality in the US is at the highest level of any industrialised country?)

Does any of this matter?

The idea of equality as a social goal is apparently passé. Christmas has a special meaning on Wall Street: It’s bonus time.

Just five too big to fail bankster companies have stashed $90 billion for payouts to prized employees. They know that the beat on The Street is fading, so it seems to be take the money and run time. Incidentally, that “bonus pool” will rise with end of the year earnings.

Right now, the greedsters have a PR problem — how to transfer all this wealth from the banks to themselves with the lowest possible tax rate and the lowest degree of bad publicity. They also will try to focus the media on supporting their right to such over the top rewards and “incentives” in the name, of course, of fostering an economic recovery.

Read More of Danny Schechter’s op-ed in Al Jazeera:

Examples of traditional "food stamps" that today are distributed on debit cards.

The Boston Globe via Bloomberg News reports:

The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government reported yesterday.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website.

Participation has set records for 18 straight months.

Unemployment in July may have reached 9.6 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the Aug. 6 release of last month’s rate. Unemployment was 9.5 percent in June, near levels last seen in 1983.

An average of 40.5 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.

The figure is projected to rise to 43.3 million in 2011.

Several companies that escaped financial failure two years ago through massive taxpayer-funded bailouts are spending millions of dollars to make donations to political causes and even some candidates’ campaigns.

General Motors, Chrysler and Citigroup are just three of the biggest bailout recipients who have continued to remain politically active, through their political action committees, federal lobbying or direct donations to the pet projects of lawmakers.

The potential public relations disaster for firms spending big dollars on political causes and federal lobbying after being extended a taxpayer lifeline has led some, such as AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to suspend their political activities until they pay the government back in full.

Read More: Fox News

The financial crisis has unveiled a new set of public villains — corrupt corporate capitalists who leveraged their connections in government for their own personal profit. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, many of these schemers were worshiped as geniuses, heroes or icons of American progress. But today we know these opportunists for what they are: Deregulatory hacks hellbent on making a profit at any cost. Without further ado, here are the 10 most corrupt capitalists in the U.S. economy.

1. Robert Rubin: Where to start with a man like Robert Rubin? A Goldman Sachs chairman who wormed his way into the Treasury Secretary post under President Bill Clinton, Rubin presided over one of the most radical deregulatory eras in the history of finance. Rubin’s influence within the Democratic Party marked the final stage in the Democrats’ transformation from the concerned citizens who fought Wall Street and won during the 1930s to a coalition of Republican-lite financial elites.

Rubin’s most stunning deregulatory accomplishment in office was also his greatest act of corruption. Rubin helped repeal Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that banned economically essential banks from gambling with taxpayer money in the securities markets. In 1998, Citibank inked a merger with the Travelers Insurance group. The deal was illegal under Glass-Steagall, but with Rubin’s help, the law was repealed in 1999, and the Citi-Travelers merger approved, creating too-big-to-fail behemoth Citigroup.

That same year, Rubin left the government to work for Citi, where he made $120 million as the company piled up risk after crazy risk. In 2008, the company collapsed spectacularly, necessitating a $45 billion direct government bailout, and hundreds of billions more in other government guarantees. Rubin is now attempting to rebuild his disgraced public image by warning about the dangers of government spending and Social Security. Bob, if you’re worried about the deficit, the problem isn’t old people trying to get by, it’s corrupt bankers running amok.

Find out the other nine on Alternet

Late last night, the U.S. Senate rejected the single most important element of Wall Street reform by a vote of 33 to 61.

The SAFE Banking Act would have forced the break-up of the nation’s six largest banks, and dramatically reduced the political clout of America’s financial elite.

The 61 votes against the measure are votes in favor of Wall Street’s stranglehold on our economy.

No matter what else is ultimately enacted in the name of Wall Street reform, Congress has decided that it will not confront the single greatest problem in the U.S. economy: too big to fail.

On Wednesday, the Senate also voted down a $50 billion Wall Street tax that would have been used to fund the cost of shutting down a major failing bank. By rejecting both the break-up bill and the bank tax, the Senate has punted on ending too-big-to-fail. For now, it appears that Wall Street has emerged from the Great Financial Crash of 2008 with even greater political might than it wielded during the reign of George W. Bush. In the Citizens United era, both Democrats and Republicans have decided they can only get so tough with Corporate America.

Read more on Alternet

Image: ExiledOnline.com

Think that the financial crash has left investment banking hotshots humbler and wiser? Not likely. The National Review blog The Corner has a defiant email that has been circulating over the last couple days among discontented Wall Streeters. Seriously, these people are as douche-y as you imagined:

We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter.

We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?

Know who Frank Luntz is. He manages to influence the public discourse in the United States, on a regular basis:

P.S. It took the Democrats until April 15th to come up with this video? And you wonder why it took over a year to pass bullshit “reform”…

LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH report in the New York Times:

In the years before its collapse, Lehman used a small company — its “alter ego,” in the words of a former Lehman trader — to shift investments off its books.

The firm, called Hudson Castle, played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role at Lehman, according to an internal Lehman document and interviews with former employees. The relationship raises new questions about the extent to which Lehman obscured its financial condition before it plunged into bankruptcy.

While Hudson Castle appeared to be an independent business, it was deeply entwined with Lehman. For years, its board was controlled by Lehman, which owned a quarter of the firm. It was also stocked with former Lehman employees.

None of this was disclosed by Lehman, however.

Read More in the New York Times

What if, after all that panting over Washington’s bailout of the financial system, we learned that it actually worked?

And what if, after all that vitriol over the government’s risking hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue Wall Street from disaster, it turned out that taxpayers might actually lose nothing, or even make a profit?

Could it be? Really?

Every couple of months the Treasury Department takes a moment to strategically leak some good news about the bailouts. It happened again on Monday, when a Treasury official told The Wall Street Journal that America’s coffers would be only $89 billion lighter after all accounts were settled from the rescues, down from an earlier estimate of $250 billion.

It’s enough to make us all feel rich, isn’t it?

Inside the Obama administration, there are whispers of even greater optimism, with some officials suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black.

That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees.

People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the “Death Star”; now it is a “profit center.”

Of course, we’re still expected to lose $48 billion on the government’s rescue of the American International Group. But two people close to the board suggested to me that as the company recalculates the value of assets in its portfolio that were once considered “toxic,” the government could actually claw its way back to even on that investment, if it holds on to its stake long enough.

A year ago, by the way, these same people told me they expected the government to take a “$100 billion bath” on its investment in A.I.G.

And then there are the banks that have settled up with Uncle Sam, like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. We’ve gotten all our money back from them, along with several billion dollars in interest…

[continues in the New York Times]

Aldon O. James, Jr., The President of The National Arts Club, Globalvision Inc. and The Disinformation Company cordially invite

You and a Guest To The Premiere Screening Of Danny Schechter’s New Investigative Film Exposing the Financial Crisis as A Crime Story

PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME (APRIL 29, 2010)

In March of this year, a national poll found that despite all the partisan political polarization, 82% of the American people want a “crackdown on Wall Street.”

Yet to date, a handful of white collar criminals have been prosecuted and jailed for causing the worst financial crisis since The Great Depression.

The film, Plunder: The Crime of our Time is being released in April by The Disinformation Company and will be available on cable systems’ Video-On-Demand, on DVD and via iTunes. It is the first documentary feature to treat the financial crisis as a crime story.

The hard-hitting film features testimony by Wall Street bankers, economists, a convicted white collar criminal, real estate brokers and victims of mortgage scams. It explains how an estimated $197 trillion disappeared because of elaborate and sophisticated financial frauds. Plunder also indicts the media for not warning us or investigating the crisis in a timely way.

“I am grateful to the National Arts Club for showcasing many of my films over two decades,” says multiple Emmy Award winner Schechter, a veteran of ABC News, CNN and CNBC. “This is certainly a most timely and relevant film coming out a time that the country is debating financial reform. It focuses on a subject that has been largely ignored by the news media, which tends to claim that the crisis is a result of mistakes and delusions.”

At 7 p.m. on April 29, 2010 the National Arts Club premieres a new film by Globalvision’s investigative journalist and well known “News Dissector” and truth-teller Danny Schechter (director of In Debt We Trust and WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception).

Danny Schechter’s earlier films have been shown at the National Arts Club to enthusiastic audiences.

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Please RSVP to plunder [at] disinfo.com

The National Arts Club is located at:

15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003
Tel. (212) 475-3424

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About Danny Schechter:

Schechter, a Cornell and London School of Economics graduate, produced the first prime time report on the S&L Crisis in the late ’80s for ABC’s 20/20. He co-produced Globalization and Human Rights for PBS in the late ’90s. In 2006, he was one of the first to expose predatory subprime lending and warn of a credit crisis with the film In Debt We Trust. He has called for a “jailout, not a bailout.”

As a blogger for Mediachannel.org and sites like Huffington Post, he has been covering the financial crisis daily and weekly from an independent perspective. In 2008, his book Plunder warned of a deeper collapse and was published the week before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. His new companion book The Crime of our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail documents the findings of the film and will be published by The Disinformation Company.

The greatest transfer (”theft”) of wealth to bankers in the history of the world has happened, and the beneficiaries are in the heart of Manhattan. It’s great for those folks, but has damaged the lives of many people living outside of that city across the country…

How is it possible that after near three years of economic turmoil, with possibly hundreds of TRILLIONs down the rabbit hole — not that anyone is counting or apparently can count — that the geniuses who run our economy still don’t “get” that the sh*t has already hit the fan? How many more jobs and homes have to be lost?

Michael Moore is not the only one predicting a second crash. Paul Krugman is all out words excoriating the Administration for its tepidness. Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the first meltdown, now says we are in serious danger of a “double-dip,” a lethal combo of rising inflation and deeper recession.

Woe to us if we can’t see the handwriting on so many walls.

The people in the know know that nothing has been fixed, know that all the stimuli have barely stimulated, that the new jobs bill will never generate the number of jobs that are needed, and that the banks have obscenely been raking in oodles of money thanks to all the financing taxpayers pumped into their coffers.

Even as the Obamaites finally get around to proposing a measure to break up the big banks and erode the notion of financial institutions being too big to fail, we have the New York Times telling us that Congress does not have the “appetite” — that’s the word they use — to tackle even modest financial reforms.

The “appetite” is missing. In the real world of appetites, food companies are recalling unsafe products every day because the food we eat is subjected to federal inspections. Not so for financial products.

The reason? Politics of course, but also the jillions that the financial services industry  has “invested” in bill killing, compromise-making, and just plain corrupting the legislative process.

This past week, the Roosevelt Institute sponsored a conference over at the Time Warner Center called Make Markets Be Markets, published a book of essays and heard from a who’s who in the world of influential economists and analysts who gave high powered presentations, one after another, each more lucid than the next.

There was enough brainpower in the room to save the economy but, alas, no one seems to be listening. Some business media was there collecting sound bites but the urgency of the warnings did not transcend  the limits of the bubble of financial journalism.

For a long time, I wined about being ignored in not getting heard on the economic collapse, which of course, I am, but here were people with Nobel Prizes and PhDs and track records of making millions also being dissed and pissed.

Setting the stage was Joe Stiglitz who won a Nobel Prize for his work, and who left the World Bank with disgust over what they do. Stiglitz should be in Obama’s cabinet. Instead he is one of its critics.

The presentations started off with Simon Johnson, the former chief economist the IMF taking about the DOOM CYCLE — how we are just going around in cycles without really addressing the system nature of the crisis. He writes in the NY Times and on BaselineScenario.com which you should read every day. He calls the cycle “unsustainable and crazy” and says that “the destructive power of the down-cycle will overwhelm the restorative ability of government like  it did in 1929-31.”

Translation: Here we go again.

And then there was the super-articulate Raj Date who says we have to get rid of Frannie Mae and Freddy Mac before they get rid of our housing market. His analysis was detailed and textured. His conclusion simple: “they must be eliminated.” What is the Obama Administration doing about this? Nada.

It got better when the only woman on the panel, Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren mesmerized the room. She has become a TV fixture because of how charming, honest and forthright she has been in defending consumers from the rip offs that we are all menaced by. She is the chairperson of the House oversight committee on TARP and a leading advocate of an independent consumer protection agency. She is now watching as Senator Dodd and some of his GOP cronies try to bury it in the Federal Reserve Bank, a move that many of the conference criticized in light of the Fed’s history of doing so little to protect the rights of consumers.

After all the speakers presented their arguments, there were comments by George Soros, who also criticized the economics profession for missing the crisis, and businessman Jim Chanos who finally brought the discussion around to the presence of massive fraud and criminality in our financial markets. I spoke to that issue which I have just written a book on and made a film about when I got a chance to ask a question.

All too quietly, Wall Street firms are being sued for their many transgressions. A study by Gary Null found that over $430 billion has been paid to victimized parties by Wall Street firms in over 1500 cases.

Some examples:

• Bank of America has spent $14.9 billion to settle 15 cases alleging various charges such as securities violations and mismanagement;

• Citigroup has spent over $13.9 billion to settle 12 cases alleging various charges including abusive lending practices and involvement in fraudulent activities;

• Merrill Lynch has spent $12.2 billion to settle cases involving various allegations including negligence and mismanagement of funds;

• Morgan Stanley has spent over $5 billion to settle 11 cases involving various allegations including failure to disclose material information to customers;

• Wachovia has spent over $9.5 billion to resolve allegations including misleading investors and conflicts of interest;

• UBS has spent $19.5 billion to settle 6 cases with various charges including misleading investors.

So much information is now out there but to what effect? What more do we need to know?

There is a time for research and a time for advocacy, a time to try to lobby in the suites and a time for marching in the streets. Students on US campuses and workers in Greece have been battling the effects of the crisis.

It is now time to go after the causes.

The public is open to acting. The most recent Zogby poll reports:

• “32% of U.S. adults say they have “considered moving some or all of (their) banking from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union because (they) are unhappy with the policies or behavior of large national banks.”

• 14% have moved some of their banking in the past year from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union.

• 9% of all U.S. adults have moved some of their business from large national banks as a protest.

People are pissed, far angrier than the media lets on. The lines are being drawn. That hard rain is going to fall.

News Dissector Danny Schechter is a blogger, author and filmmaker. His latest work is Plunder: The Crime of Our Time on the financial crisis as a crime story.

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.

Calling it “basically no more than five rectangular strips of paper,” Fed chairman Ben Bernanke illustrates how much “$200″ is actually worth.

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.”

Read More in the Onion

Americans United for Change and American Family Voices unveiled a new television ad today as part of a ramped up coalitional effort urging Congress to pass President Obama’s financial regulatory reform plan to make Wall Street more transparent and accountable and prevent another financial crisis. The new ad comes as Citi, one of the largest recipients of taxpayer dollars, revealed how Wall Street is fully back to business as usual by announcing plans to create “the first derivatives intended to pay out in the event of a financial crisis.”

With your help, we were able to reach our Kickstarter goal. I’ve been receiving some questions on whether you can still donate, and the answer is a resounding YES!

If you donate $20 or more by February 3rd, you will receive name credit on the “Plunder” DVD and on the film’s website.

So go here to donate, and if you’re still wondering what this is all about, read this.

Wall Street is NOT too big to JAIL.

— Ralph Bernardo, The Disinformation Company

A key question at the heart of the controversial bailout of AIG is just how much money the government lost. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have worked to keep that number secret and to conceal who was on the winning end.

An unredacted document obtained by the Huffington Post list the damage in detail. Goldman Sachs alone, for instance, got $14 billion in government money for assets worth $6 billion at the time — a de facto $8 billion subsidy, courtesy of taxpayers.

The list was produced as part of a congressional investigation led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into the federal bailout of AIG.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by now-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, purchased a slew of souring assets from the world’s biggest banks for 100 cents on the dollar in November and December 2008. A scathing report by a government watchdog held Geithner responsible for the overpayments.

The New York Fed initially pressured AIG to keep the list hidden from investors, regulators and the public. When it was eventually filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC allowed the Fed and AIG to keep the details secret. A heavily-redacted version was made public last March.

Read More: Huffington Post

Watch out, Wall Street, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is going to be writing a report that is due in December.

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their people about $145 billion for 2009, a record sum that indicates how compensation is climbing despite fury over Wall Street’s pay culture.

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal shows that executives, traders, investment bankers, money managers and others at 38 top financial companies can expect to earn nearly 18% more than they did in 2008—and slightly more than in the record year of 2007. The conclusions are based on an examination of securities filings for the first nine months of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end.

The rapid comeback of pay on Wall Street, which will be on display as companies report fourth-quarter results starting with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. on Friday, has exposed the industry to a broadening mix of proposed crackdowns, including a 10-year, $90 billion bank tax described for the first time Thursday by President Barack Obama

In detailing the tax, Mr. Obama aimed some sharp words at bankers.

“I’d urge you to cover the costs of the [financial] rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners,” Mr. Obama said.

Read More: Wall Street Journal