Search This Blog

Search This Blog

Wikipedia

Search results

The Pentagong Show

The Pentagong Show
United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Friday, January 29, 2010

AIG: Americans' Income's Gone. Now THAT's Class Warfare.

Following President Obama's speech, we heard the usual Republican accusations that the President was provoking "Class Warfare". But isn't that what the USA's vile version of Capitolism is? Can't even the tunnel-visioned GOP see that the Supreme Court had just crowned The Superclass's victory with their adjudicated laurels by granting money the status of speech, the Corporations with the status of "persons", and then declaring that said persons could not be constitutionally limited in their "speech", ie spending?

The true captured nature of the Democratic Party, in not crying this blatant contradiction from the rooftops, is thus made manifest.

Meanwhile, even as the Supremes call money speech, and the near collapse of a number of financial institutions, brought about by the Superclass's reckless asset-striping, and insane leveraging and transformation of the Fed into a shill for their mantra of "housing prices never go down", resulting in the near-collapse of the entire global financial system and unrepairable damage to the reputation of the US banking system, and leaving the working class without jobs, the secrecy behind the decision to bail out AIG is allowed to fester.



Free speech is now sacrosanct for the Corporations, but the rest us have to pay for it . Just as the "Free"market, means one in which the Superclass gets to arrange the economic system so as all its profits flow to them, they decide what is free speech and what is not. And, as the revelations about the legerdemain and financial shenanigans that went into the federal government commitment of billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars into making good AIG's speculative bets on debauched financial instruments they still cynically refer to as "securities", is most decidedly what is not. To get that information is going to cost plenty.

David Reilly at BusinessWeek in an article entitled: Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows, and referenced on http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/, details the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's role in what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed’s involvement in the attempt to cover up AIG buyout details and obfuscate the identities of the parties who benefited.

But we are at War. Pursuant to the Patriot Act, any citizen, or newspaper, that gives solace to the enemy, (and investigating the financial system that supports the Corporations that provide the wherewithal to support the troops and provide the armament for them to kill our "enemies", is doing exactly that), is suspect at best; treasonous, if they persist. So Corporate bribes, now considered free speech, since they grease the wheels of commerce and helped bring the system from the brink of global financial collapse, are most definitely under the rubric of "National Security", no matter how you cut it.

Get used to it. Americans' Income's Gone. And if you try to expose exactly why, you may just find out how, although physically incapable of actually being a patriot, a Corporation is much better situated to put on a Patriot act than an individual trying to do his patriotic duty and expose the malfeasance of those who can afford legions of lawyers to line up against him.

So in a sense the Repugnicans are correct. When one side has been so thoroughly routed, the War is over. And because the War's over there is no longer a Class War, so President Obama is inciting Class Warfare by rubbing salt in the wounds of the completely prostrate losers, since the Superclass has already won, and there's nothing the other side can do but utter a feeble denouncement of "no fair".


Thursday, January 28, 2010

Financial Planning in the Cigarette Economy.


Financial Planning now amounts to no more than fueling the Wall St. Superclass that's been empowered by Washington to control your money until you need it, when it becomes obvious it is actually their money, always was.... Like health insurance that you pay for at work, for thirty years, which, once you're in your 50's, you're laid off (part of the plan, BTW), the health care ends, and that tens of thousands of dollars You've sunk into insurance is just vapor: the money's gone, the insurance's gone, and soon you're gone. Perfect financial planning ... Wall St.-style.







From financial experts and economists of real brick and mortar, not the Bernanke-type academics who have a formulated plan that no amount of real world data will change, the consensus is that the deleveraging of America and much of the global economy will trump everything else. So any financial planning that you do on a personal basis is doomed from the start. Think of it this way: a citizen of the Soviet Union in the 80's could do as much planning as she wished, but when the US decided to destroy the economy of that Communist nation, in order to gain access to the (Way overestimated) resources of the Caspian region, it destroyed all the hopes and financial planning of every Soviet citizen.

Today, having fallen into the same trap, which it now boasts it used to bleed the Soviet economy: an endless quagmire of War in Afghanistan, with a dollop of Iraq, and soon to be Pakistan and Iran, for extra measure, the US has dug itself into the same pit, and has neither hope nor plan for escape. The difference is, of course, that the US entanglement was/is a planned entanglement devised by a deranged Superclass of elite oligarchs of self-appointed CEO's of defense Industry (which now includes Burger-King and Starbucks, as they rake in billions from lucrative contracts on US military bases) and Financial TBTF conglomerates and Pentagon Generals.

So, think of the "New Economy" as the "Cigarette Economy": sucker your citizens while they're young into consumption that feels good and gives them a rush for the moment but sucks away at any hope of healthful longevity, leaving a populace that gets to their 50's and then rapidly dies off as they're thrown out of jobs, off health care rolls, and whose pension plans dematerialize into bankruptcy before their eyes.

Perhaps the only way out is to make yourself into a business. Even as the atmosphere has turned decidedly deadly for individuals, it is extremely pro-business. Find out what you're good at, (or bad at for that matter: can you say GM, BofA?), and incorporate. Since all the growth in the economy now comes from The State, make it a product or service that the State needs, the most profitable and lucrative are those bent on destruction, and grow from there. Then just light up and inhale the deadly fumes ..... ahhh now You too are Milken it.

Friday, January 15, 2010

What was the Real Third Target on 9/11?

Worldwatch Institute's president, Christopher Flavin, as quoted in an article in the Guardian, entitled "US cult of greed is now a global environmental threat", writes: "As the world struggles to recover from the most serious global economic crisis since the Great Depression, we have an unprecedented opportunity to turn away from consumerism. In the end, the human instinct for survival must triumph over the urge to consume at any cost."

First of all, it is only NOW an environmental threat? Helloooo!

But mostly, his, one can only assume, cynical, statement, that we have an unprecedented "opportunity to turn away from consumerism", is hilarious. Every step taken on every continent on the globe, has spurred the productive capacity of the underlying private enterprise infrastructure to force the hand of every human on the planet to greater and greater consumption. What does Mr. Flavin think "government stimulus" is meant to stimulate? Intellectual discourse? Art appreciation? Love of nature, or love of books or love of the study of the wonderful variety of creatures that co-inhabit our globe? These are all faggie, commie, pinko, pursuits long derided and severely punished by social isolation and ridicule by the great consumer machine called the USA.

Upon visiting the Phillipines, the investor adviser Tony Sagami, of Uncommon wisdom, raved, "The 12th most populous country in the world is dotted with skyscrapers, BMWs, Starbucks, construction cranes, and luxury stores." If this is how success is measured by someone from the Empire, that's how Everyone, especially poor Pillipinos, are going to measure it.

“China’s retail sales grew at the fastest pace in more than two decades in 2009 as government stimulus spurred demand for home appliances, cars and electronics in the world’s most populous nation."

NO demand increase for books, art supplies, hobby and crafts paraphernalia. The entire push of the stimulus from governments everywhere are for energy-intensive manufactures, not only in the production of the products themselves, but energy intensive in their use. Big-screen TV's eg, often use at least 4X's the power of the ones they're replacing. Utter passivity and nonchalant laziness are signs of prosperity and success, while actually working is seen as an indication of failure and stupidity (who but poor, stupid Mexicans would actually go out and work in fields sowing, tending and picking food?).

As the British elderly start buying encyclopedias, to keep warm by burning them instead of logs in their fireplaces (another increasing source of sequestered CO2 being released to the atmosphere), it's totally ignored that the "there is no such thing as Society" attitude of the Reagan-Thatcher Mafia of plundering the resources of ones country as a right, using taxpayer dollars for exploration, then shuttling all the profits to a smaller and smaller "entrepreneurial" elite of criminals, just fell to the ground with a resounding crash.

Thus has the North Sea been left with dwindling oil reserves now that the price of that resource fetches north of $80/bbl. But it was sold off, the new supply having flooded the market thereby dropping the price to $10/bbl, where it was when GW Bush took office, leaving Great Britain scrambling for resources and capital now, a mere generation after having tapped a bonanza in its own backyard.

Any attempts to slow the extraction of the North Sea oil would have been/were crushed. We couldn't be left dependent on a bunch of sheiks. No. How much more intelligent to sell off at a discount the entire legacy so as to enrich the aristocracy and then leave the rest of the non-entities, for if there's no such thing as society, that's all we are, to be dependent on that same bunch of sheiks, whose reserves would now have been that much smaller, and the UK's that much larger.

The effect has been to allow, per Max Keiser (“Goldman Sachs Are Scum” | zero hedge.) :“They are literally stealing a hundred million dollars a day. Goldman Sachs is stealing every day on the floor of the exchange. They should be in the Hague, they should be taken on financial terrorism charges. They should all be thrown in jail”. (http://www.smirkingchimp.com/author/matt_taibbi)

He declares during his jeremiad that the crash on Wall St has caused, continues to cause, more collateral damage than the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

In other words, what Keiser is saying, that no "patriotic" American wants to hear, is that the attack gave the US denizens a chance to see exactly what was being done to them and by whom. Instead, they watched, no cheered, as the very enablers of the attacks literally wrapped an enormous flag around themselves and the NYSE. As patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, Wall St. brazenly announced their true nature, and all were blind to it.

"Yes, we're scoundrels, but we're YOUR scoundrels," that flag screamed, as they feverishly set out to step up, aided and abetted by their lapdogs at the Fed, their War against the Dollar and the American people. Because, yes, that was the third target of the terrorists on that sparkling day in September. The third undemocratic institution they targeted was the FED, not the Congress or Whitehouse, which at least keep up the facade of democracy. But Wall St, the Pentagon, and the Fed are completely unanswerable entities, with their own cultures, all sharing only one thing: complete disdain and contempt for the masses they purport to serve. All three of these completely undemocratic institutions serve only the Superclass. And given their position on top of the power pyramid, that means, so do we.

So as Max Keiser shouts that Goldman Sachs steals every day, his words'll fall on deaf ears, and the response from GS'll be a nonchalant Cheney-esque shrug of their shoulders ("So?"), as they ask, "Well, what did you think we were doing? That's what Capitalism is you fools."

And, no, Mr. Flavin, the human instinct for survival will NOT triumph over the urge to consume at any cost, because the power to change that is not in our hands. It is in the hands of the Superclass ( David Rothkopf's "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making") that'll be meeting soon in Davos again, to celebrate another year of their ascendancy over the rest of the cowering, blighted, mass of humanity whose ability to do anything else but consume has been all but destroyed.

The twin tower of government deficits and massive misallocation of private capital will continue to dwarf any attempt to change them until environmental degradation and resource constraint brings them crashing down on our heads, while the Superclass sips their martinis and shuts the gates of their tax-payer-funded guarded compounds until the dust settles and they venture out for their next bout of pillaging.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Big Ben's Time is Up: selected quotes from Ben "The Dice-Throw" Bernanke.

Bernanke's logic is the Best Argument for Abolishing the Fed. Big Ben "The Dice-Throw" Bernanke: "the magnitude of house price gains seems too large to be readily explainable by the stance of monetary policy..."Yes Ben, that's why it's called the baby BOOM generation. Because of the MAGNITUDE of the demographic. That alone would suggest that reducing the interest rate on their safe allocation of funds was/is (as stated by your own Fed in explaining it's current 0% policy) engineered to force them out of those safe instruments, in a scramble for yield by fund managers, into more risky assets, then, by describing those risky assets, both housing and equities, as safe ("house prices have never gone down on a national scale", except during the great depression", now that ends with an 's').

“The Federal Reserve did not do all that it could have (ie did NOTHING) to constrain excessive risk-taking in the financial sector in the period leading up to the crisis,”

"U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years," noted Bernanke, while chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs (there was in fact, no growth in jobs), incomes (ditto - no growth, all the growth in the economy was coming from people taking out HELOCs to draw the "ghost equity" out of their homes, much like borrowing on margin as the value of the stock market rises, and a strategy highly recommended by the Fed who, of course, knew the extreme risk involved in transferring that strategy to an asset such as property which is much harder to sell into a deflating market, hence the cheer-leading of the Goldilocks Economy where house prices never go down) and the number of new households (another figure bloated by ever more people being encouraged to take out loans to become members of "The Ownership Society").

So even as Benron decries Congressional oversight for the oligarchy known as the Fed:

Ben S. Bernanke does not think the national housing boom is a bubble that is about to burst, he indicated to Congress last week, just a few days before President Bush nominated him to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday that there will be "significant losses" associated with subprime mortgages but that these losses should be regarded as "bumps" along the road of market innovation.... AhHAHhAHAHA. Let's read Galbraith: "All financial innovation involves, in one from or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser (do you think we could say 'subprime' would mean lesser?) adequacy by real assets."

"The DiceThrow": "Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Benron: “By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also REDUCE THE VALUE OF A DOLLAR in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.”

Let's ask Galbraith again: "When banks (in this case, Fed Chairman, "The DiceThrow", Bernanke) discovered that they (He) could print bank notes and issue them to borrowers in a volume in excess of the deposits in the banks' vaults, there was no seeming limit to the debt that could be leveraged on a given volume of hard cash. A wonderful thing." Yet we think we're in a position to call China a currency manipulator?

Ben "The Dice-Throw" Bernanke told lawmakers Tuesday he expects the downtrodden U.S. housing sector to improve by the end of the year,

"We will continue to formulate policy to guard against risks to our dual mandate to foster both maximum employment and price stability.” Continue? When did the Fed, during "The Dice-Throw"'s tenure, do either?

"The civilian unemployment rate is expected to finish both 2007 and 2008 around four-and-a-half to four-and-three-quarters percent."

Feb '08:

"I expect there will be some failures” of smaller banks. “Among the largest banks, the capital ratios remain good and I don't anticipate any serious problems of that sort among the large, internationally active banks that make up a very substantial part of our banking system."

"Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."

"Many homeowners might have saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate mortgages during the past decade, though this would not have been the case, of course, had interest rates trended sharply upward" ... the Fed shortly thereafter started their "baby-step" interest rate increases to as high as 5 1/2%, intending, per "The Dice-Throw"'s statement in defense of his idiocy, to raise them, as the "Taylor rule" suggests, to 7 or 8% before stopping.

As the master of “activist” monetary management, Mr. "The Maestro" Greenspan’s reign at the helm of Fed oversaw a move into uncharted territory with respect to marketplace interventions and manipulations. What was the instrument of this manipulation? Interest rate policy, the only lever available to the Fed that Benron now denies has any effect.

"A particularly important protective factor in the current environment is the strength of our financial system…our banking system remains healthy and well-regulated,…"

"I have no particular regrets. The housing bubble is not a reflection of what we did, as it is a global phenomenon."

Alan "The Maestro" Greenspan, November 23, 2007

“I was not going to be the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over the second Great Depression,” Ben Bernanke told PBS .... note that's in the past tense.

"It wasn't to help the big firms that we intervened," argued Mr. "The Dice-Throw" Bernanke as he discussed intervening to help the big firms.

This would be funny if it weren't so dire. But let's look at the irony instead. The Fed has a dual mandate: full-employment and keep inflation from destroying the monetary system. It long ago gave up on full employment, as it is inflationary, and it is now actively working, by its own admission as justification of its 0% Fed funds rate, to create inflation. In other words, there is no need for the Fed, by its own logic it should be abolished. But as Galbraith says, "Those who are involved never wish to attribute stupidity to themselves."

Let's get it straight, since we're stuck with idiots in high places. When the Fed keeps interest rates at 1%, while inflation rate is even a modest 4%, that's a negative 3% on savings accounts. Meanwhile, that same policy that keeps savings accounts paying Real negative rates, pushes nominal housing appreciation up by 25% in 2 years. What that does is force people to take risk they otherwise would not, as it makes saving money for your retirement absolutely hopeless. Every dollar you save starts losing its value immediately. The only way to have any growth is to take those savings and plow them into an asset that appreciates over and above the inflation rate. Because, as Einstein said, “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”, but he forgot to mention that the most powerful countervailing force in the universe is compound inflation, that sucks the value of your money toward zero by the time you go to spend it (as we'll all see in the not too distant future).

"The Dice-Throw" Bernanke is a liar. If interest rates had nothing to do with the housing bubble then, then they have nothing to do with housing prices now, and so they should be raised. What do you think the odds of that happening are? The banks should be required to pay an interest rate to their depositors of at least what the Fed's paying them to park their reserves. If this a "free market" economy, can you please tell me where I can put my savings outside of the banking system, besides under my mattress? Why is there no competition for the most fundamental of needs: a safe haven for one's savings? Instead we are left with "The Dice-Throw" economy lorded over by a liar and a fool whose sole intent is to force savers to take their money out of bank accounts and place them into the Casino known as the wailing Wall St. Wall St. then takes those funds and does, guess what? Invests in the regions of the world that they know are experiencing stronger economic growth than the U.S.:
46.0% South Korea
53.4% Thailand
57.9% Vietnam
58.3% Singapore
74.2% Taiwan
74.3% China
76.3% India

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Excerpt from Thomas Wolfe's "You can't go Home again"

Reading Matta Taibbe's excerpt from Edward Harrison's of Credit Writedowns that was posted on http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ :

"Everyone had a hand in the bubble, from the congressmen who killed regulatory initiatives to the regulators who snoozed at the wheel to the GSEs to the Fed to the banks to the ratings agencies to the lenders. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that, but it does seem like there’s an argument brewing about what that across-the-board complicity means."

I couldn't help remembering an excerpt from Thomas Wolfe's, "You Can't Go Home Again", that I read in 2005, in the midst of the mania that precipitated the financial collapse, that had sent a tingle down my spine:

"Remember What?"

"Remember when you established what you boasted was 'the fastest-growing bank in all the state - and weren't too particular what it grew on"?

"Remember when one of "the boys" borrowed money from 'the fastest growing bank' to buy 200 acres on that hill across the river - he turned to the Mayor - and sold the land to the town, for a nice profit, for a new cemetery?"

"Remember what?" - the voice rose suddenly high and sharp. "Do I remember how You've run the town through all these year? Do I remember what a good thing You've made of politics? You've never aspired to public office, have you, Parson? Oh , no - you're much too modest. But you know how to pick the public-spirited citizens who do aspire, and whose great hearts pant with eagerness to serve their fellow men. Ah, yes. it's a very nice little private business, isn't it, Parson? And all 'the boys' are stockholders and get their cut of the profits - is that the way of it, Parson?

"Remember what?" he cried again.

"Do I remember how the broken fragments of a town that waits and fears and schemes to put off the day of its impending ruin? Why, Parson, yes I can remember all these things, and how I was satisfied with, say, a modest 5%. So I am not in the big money Parson. I remember many things, but I see now I have spent my substance, wasted all my talents in riotous living - while pious Puritans have virtuously betrayed their town and given their whole-souled services to the ruin of their fellow men."

Again there was an ominous pause, and when he went on his voice was low, almost casual in its toneless irony:

"And do you think you can go home again?"

Then, as if to emphasize what I have constantly argued, but always to have fall on deaf ears, about the fact that Schumpeter's so-called, much-heralded, "Creative destruction" is always preceded by a mad, always-denied, Destructive creation, Wolfe goes on to describe to a "T", the frenzied, self-congratulatory zeal of the world of finance as it hails its own cleverness and superiority over the re-invention of the wheel yet again, in its ever more unstable form, as Wolfe uses literature to describe what John Kenneth Galbraith would later detail in his, "A Short History of Financial Euphoria", as "the vested interest in error that accompanies speculative euphoria":

"Everyone bought real estate; and everyone was "a real estate man" either in name or practice, the barbers, the lawyers, the grocers, the butchers, the builders, the clothiers, all were engaged now in this single interest and obsession. And there seemed to be only one rule, universal and infallible - to buy, always to buy, to pay whatever price was asked, and to sell again within two days at any price one chose to fix. It was fantastic. Along all the streets in town the ownership of the land was constantly changing; and when the supply of streets was exhausted, new streets were feverishly created in the surrounding wilderness; and even before these streets were paved or a house had been built upon them, the land was being sold, and then resold, by the acre, by the lot, by the foot, for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"A spirit of drunken waste and wild destructiveness was everywhere apparent. The fairest places in town were being mutilated at untold cost. In the center of town there had been a beautiful green hill, opulent with rich lawns and lordly trees , with beds of flowers and banks of honeysuckle, and on top of it there had been an immense, rambling, old wooden hotel.

It had been one of the pleasantest places in the town, but now it was gone. An army of men and shovels had advanced upon this beautiful green hill and leveled it down to an ugly flat of clay, and had paved it with a desolate horror of white concrete, and had built stores and garages and office buildings and parking spaces - all raw and new - and were now putting up a new hotel on the very spot the old one had stood. It was to be a structure of sixteen stories, of steel and concrete and pressed brick. It was being stamped out of the same mold, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels, that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country....

Regional Mall Vacancies in U.S. Rise to Record on Unemployment

U.S. Office, Shopping Center Construction Spending May Fall 13%

If Fed Missed This Bubble, Will It See a New One?

And all we can think to do is try to recreate the destructive, manic idiocy that preceded the bursting of the bubble, as shovel-ready projects stand poised to destroy anything that's still standing that has one iota of grace and beauty and to ravish whatever's left of the countryside to despoil it with more monstrosities no one wants and no one needs. This is what we call progress and what we now force down the throat of the rest of the world at the point of a gun and then get our skirts in an uproar because one madman objects so strenuously to this mayhem that he's willing to blow himself to pieces to try and put a stop to it, or, to at least perhaps, cause a lull in the wanton mayhem we insist is "progress".

At some point someone has to stop us, but since we've decided that full-spectrum domination is our god-given right, no one can. So when our world comes crashing down around us, again brought down by our own blindness and hubris, you can be sure we will have "shovel-ready" scapegoats whom we will blame. That is why Bernanke can be re-appointed with barely a whimper of protest. He best epitomizes the Spirit of the USA: Deny culpability for the consequences of our own actions and shuffle the blame onto someone, anyone, else. The USA is now simply a Greek tragedy and we have now all become Oedipus: willfully blinding ourselves as we fearfully await the third act.

Friday, January 1, 2010

The government Is the free market.

"Throughout the year – and despite global market and economic recoveries – the Federal Reserve held short-term interest rates down at near zero. Importantly, Fed holdings of mortgage-backed securities ballooned from nothing to end the year approaching $1.0 TN. This unprecedented monetization reliquefied markets, pushed mortgage borrowing costs to record lows, fueled a refinancing boom, and worked surreptitiously to transform hundreds of billions of problematic “private-label” mortgages into (market-appealing) government-backed securities."

As stated above by Doug Noland of Prudentbear.com the government is the Market for MBS, which should now be more-accurately referred to as GBS.

Right now, eg, there are people with 2-income households, no kids, yet so hopelessly underwater they've stopped paying the mortgage. This results in a $50k interest deduction for which they are no longer eligible .. the banks may not be getting their money, but guess who is? The Federal govt and the States. The real ($$$) reason for the Fed's forbearance of accounting legerdemain.

In a quote by Andrew Jackson posted on the IRA's web-site (http://us1.institutionalriskanalytics.com/pub/IRAMain.asp), the crux of the crooks' methodology is revealed to be as old as what used to be referred to as "the Union":

"Experience should teach us wisdom. Most of the difficulties our Government now encounters and most of the dangers which impend over our Union have sprung from an abandonment of the legitimate objects of Government by our national legislation, and the adoption of such principles as are embodied in this act. Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union. It is time to pause in our career to review our principles, and if possible revive that devoted patriotism and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution and the fathers of our Union. If we can not at once, in justice to interests vested under improvident legislation, make our Government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and system of political economy."

Google shut down another financial blog, while Bernanke, the high priest and prophet of the insanity of waste Capitolism has descended to, referred to the "savings glut" again... ie we peasants are no longer allowed to have savings accounts, but are instead advanced "credit", the terms of which can be changed at any time, for any reason, by the credit-issuing institution, granting the government, which now runs these same institutions, co- conspirator status with banksters, whose now-obvious odious intention is to enrich themselves and utterly impoverish their customers by confiscating their wealth via usurious interest payments, and other financial hidden traps, cogently referred to as "innovations", that lie waiting like beartraps, armed with brutal teeth and buried out of sight in small print, to tear the flesh and break the bones of their clientele.

Meanwhile, in The Huffington Post, a "Move Your Money" campaign has been initiated, in which, working with the IRA (institutional risk analytics), a list of more than 5000 banks is used to encourage flocks to move their savings to fundamentally sound institutions and away from money center banks, the true scope of the disaster that continues is made apparent. The one great innovation of the aughts was the ATM, but, of course, the smaller banks don't have the financial clout to have any. Every single one listed for the zip code I plugged in, which was in a major metropolitan area, necessitated a trip downtown whenever I should need cash, as they had no other branches.



Of course, that's only one problem. The main one being that, like all industries since the rise of the internet and financial computerization, should those banks become profitable, the well-financed mega banks will simply buy them up, since they have unlimited access, via the largess of their friend Benron, to the printing press of the US government.

Because without Capitolism, there is no capitalism. What the debacle should have shown us is that without the government's presence in the markets, chaos reigns, and as Martin Wolf stated, we can not "even take the survival of civilisation itself for granted."

Yet, as he goes on to say, "the financial system remains damaged. Not only does it still own vast quantities of the “toxic assets” its “talented” employees created, but the world is not addressing the structural causes of the crisis. In some ways, the oligopolistic banking system that has emerged from the crisis is riskier than the one that went into it."

It is with this backdrop that we blithely re-appoint the smug, over-confident, self-congratulatory fool that presided over the entire globe's slide into a chaos so stark that the survival of civilization itself was in question. To repeat the same actions and expect different results is the very definition of madness. Remember this when the government is incapable of stopping the slide to catastrophe when the next crisis, engineered by the same crooks and charlatans, aided and abetted by the same fool, strikes again.