Fact-esque

Panic on Wall Street

The Masters of the Universe on Wall Street are shivering with fear, something M's of the U rarely experience, certainly not more than 3 or 4 times per each 4-hr day. Is this because:

1. They have finally realized that the endgame of the economy-theft they've organized will be a disaster for the planet as a whole?
2. Their economic forecasting models are predicting a massive stock slump next year?
3. They can't add?

The answer is, indeed, number 3.

"I'm sorry, what?"

It's Illegal to Be Homeless Near DisneyWorld

Just about a year ago, a Deutchebank analyst figured out that by the end of this summer, more than half the mortgages in the country would be underwater. That process has begun. In May the mortgage delinquency rate - which the Masters of the Universe and their media puppets insisted would decline - rose almost 10%. (Via Avedon)

Sestak, Critz & Financial Reform: Sense From Nonsense

A week or so ago I suggested in response to Chris Bowers that there was as yet no evidence of a progressive swing in the electorate though there were "indications".

That was last week. This week we have some real live evidence. Joe Sestak beat Arlen Specter to be the Democratic Senate candidate from PA and Mark Critz won a special election to replace the deceased John Murtha in Westmoreland County. Neither was supposed to win, neither could win, according to the Usual Pundits. Right-wing ex-Pub and avid Bush Baby Specter was welcomed into the BD Democrat party primarily on the strength of a conservative-spun rumor that nobody could beat him and it was the only way to keep PA in the Dem column. Sestak, they said, was yet another Quixote-ish librul loser tilting at windmills he couldn't possibly knock over and it was a waste of time for SERIOUS PEOPLE to work for his campaign or even talk about it.

Uh-huh.

Media (Finally) Notices That Psychotics Run the Economy

For those of us who have for 30 or so years been watching the take-over of the economy by drunken psychotics whose only touchstone is bottomless greed and a vicious drive for the power money buys to create more money, it is mildly amusing to notice that in the last few weeks the same media that spent those 30 years boosting, protecting, defending and admiring Wall Street greedheads and Corporate America Moloch-followers busily swallowing their own tails once they'd devoured everybody else's, have now begun to acknowledge that the Masters of the Universe are, like, crazy . I mean, like, clinical crazy.

Will the Fed Get Audited After All?

It seems that for once - and I do mean once - my pessimism may have led me uncustomarily astray. It appears that the White House, Wall Street, and conservatives are actually going to lose the battle to make sure the Fed stays unaudited and therefore unaccountable in every way. According to both TPM and the NYT, Bernie Sanders' amendment is now expected to pass.

Really.

Saturday Palin: Sarahcuda's Ghost on Goldman

Matt Taibbi is all taken with Sarahcuda's "clever" Goldman/Dem propaganda. (Via Norwegianity)

The Republicans...are in the difficult position of trying to sell Wall Street's position on the Regulatory Reform bill to their base. That might not sound so very difficult, given that the Tea Partiers in particular continue to oppose further government regulation and have used the idea that Barack Obama's government is "taking over the banking sector" as a rallying cry. But Wall Street isn't exactly popular with the Tea Party, either, so selling their side of the debate on this bill is a bit of a sticky thing.

Leave it to Sarah Palin to come up with the solution. This is from a post on her Facebook page. I advise everyone to read it, since it's a highly amusing piece of propaganda:

The current debate over financial reform demonstrates what happens when political leaders react to a crisis with a raft of new regulations. First off, the people involved in writing government regulations are often lobbyists from the very industry that the new laws are supposed to regulate, and that's been the case here. It should surprise no one that financial lobbyists are flocking to DC this week. Of course, the big players who can afford lobbyists work the regulations in their favor, while their smaller competitors are left out in the cold. The result here are regulations that institutionalize the "too big to fail" mentality.

Moreover, the financial reform bill gives regulators the power to pick winners and losers, institutionalizing their ability to decide "which firms to rescue or close, and which creditors to reward and how." Does anyone doubt that firms with the most lobbyists and the biggest campaign donations will be the ones who get seats in the lifeboat? The president is trying to convince us that he's taking on the Wall Street "fat cats," but firms like Goldman Sachs are happy with federal regulation because, as one of their lobbyists recently stated, "We partner with regulators."

Sometimes it's hard not to admire Sarah Palin.... It's clever, you have to admit.

It might be. Maybe it is clever. But it isn't Sarah. I mean, c'mon. Look at those two grafs. Sarah couldn't have written them. I'm not sure she could read them without somebody having to explain them using words at the Green Eggs and Ham level.

C'ing the D's: In the Mortgage Crisis, Everybody Was Involved

The more that comes out about the origins of the economic crisis the banksters created, the more we find out that nobody on The Street was innocent. Back at the beginning of the month, we talked about Moody's being pretty deep into enabling Goldman Sachs to pull off its betting scam. Now we're finding out it was way more than that. Moody, S&P and Fitch all sent execs to work for investment houses so they could help The Street play out the biggest con game since Henry Gondorff retired.

SEC Charges Against Goldman Strike Spark

The shocking news that the SEC was actually going to charge Goldman Sachs with criminal fraud, a move most of us had long ago given up expecting, was so well-received that it seems to have galvanized rank-and-file Democrats.

Obama v the Banksters: Is This a Real Fight or Just More Kabuki?

Hmm. The LAT is reporting that President Obama is acting like he's ready for a fight with Timmy's Wall Street Buds over financial reform. One would like to believe he means it but we've been here before only to discover he didn't. Still....

The (Wall Street) Beat Wriggles On

Two things have become crystal clear in the past year or two.

1. Conservatives, GOP and conservaDem, don't really have any problem with income re-distribution. What they have a problem with is income that is re-distributed down to us instead of up to Wall Street.
2. They don't much care how it gets re-distributed as long as it's flowing in the right direction.

We know this because over the last three decades the conservatives who run both parties (ie, the single corporate party that has split into two factions that spend most of their time pretending to be, you know, different) have been a big help in arranging this:

They've done it in principally 3 ways:

1. They wrote laws highly favorable to corporate, especially banking, theft.
2. Even in cases where banks and corpo's obviously, even flagrantly, broke the law, there have been NO consequences - no penalties, no jail time, nothing.
3. When the plutonomic economy they'd created fell apart, their govt representatives handed them $Trillions$ of our money so they wouldn't suffer the extreme deprivation of having to sell one of their 8 vacation homes or trade in that comfortable 6-seater LearJet for a less comfortable 4-seater.

So not only did the banksters and CEO's steal all your money, leaving you with a mortgage you can't pay because they gave your job to a prisoner in a Chinese slave labor camp for pennies a day, but the govt representatives they'd bought helped them to do it and then absolved them of all responsibility and/or accountability for both the theft and its destruction of your life.

Even that wouldn't be as bad as this: they're still doing it. The banks have no intention of letting one single victim of their scam off the hook for the full amount the bank managed to steal. The contract is sacred even when the contract was a fraud. And where, pray tell, is the Justice Dept while all this raucous law-breaking is going? Good question.

I don't know how you keep hearing these stories of fraud - accounting fraud, investor fraud, what have you - without the Justice Department getting involved. We want to make banking boring again, and the simplest way to do that is by making absolutely clear that anyone who takes these kinds of risks and plays these kinds of games will go to jail for a long time. If we had a culture of accountability in Washington that would already be happening.

But instead, financial reform will rely on regulators. The very ones that failed the nation during the last crisis.

Because we can't punish people when they're paying us not to.

And so it goes.

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