High Noon: Tim Geithner Meets The Banksters-- High Fives All The Way Around

The Bush Regime, with its last dying breathe disbursed over $300 billion to a gaggle of larcenous banksters-- with no strings and no accountability, and precious few records. It was another in a serious of outrageous heists from the most crooked regime to ever seize power in the United States. So far we know that virtually none of the money went into what Congress thought it was going for-- thawing the credit freeze that is strangling the nation's economy-- and that at least $18.4 billion went directly into the pockets of the banksters in the form of "bonuses." No one is in prison-- not one single bankster and not one single Bush Regimist. In fact, not one single penny-- let alone-- billion-- has been recovered.

But yesterday President Obama told us that "even as they [the criminal banksters] petitioned for taxpayer assistance, Wall Street firms shamefully paid out nearly $20 billion in bonuses for 2008... [Americans will not tolerate] such arrogance and greed." I'm so glad to hear that; I was afraid we would tolerate it, just as we tolerated all the crimes perpetrated by the Bush crew and their allies. So, how is our refusal to tolerate the theft going to manifest itself? I certainly hope Bush will be tried and not summarily executed (although, speaking personally and not for anyone else associated with this blog, I'd be less scrupulous about the details of what happens to Cheney). And the banksters? I assume the money they stole has already gone back into the treasury and they have been fined for their total net worths and are now learning what it is like to be on the other side of the class war, right?

Not exactly. President Obama, post-partisan that he is, is talking about how "We’ll help lower mortgage costs and extend loans to small businesses so they can create jobs," and make sure that CEOs are no longer "draining funds that should be advancing our recovery,” and that assistance to the financial system would be accompanied by “unprecedented transparency, rigorous oversight and clear accountability, so taxpayers know how their money is being spent and whether it is achieving results.” That's good. But is that before or after Bush is drawn and quartered and John Thain is offered a blindfold and last cigarette?

None of that but there is a discussion going on that may possibly someday lead to restrictions on executive pay. Maybe Obama will have Judd Gregg make the judgment calls. And then they'll give the banks another $350 billion... take that, you naughty, naught boys!

I say lock them all up in Guantanamo-- and let Marcy Kaptur decide what stress positions would be most useful towards restoring all that they have stolen.

Buying A Home In The Midst Of The Bush Depression-- And The Squatting Option

Marcy Kaptur-- a voice for Americans who can't afford to rent a lobbyist

My friend is a school teacher in Compton. He makes around $55,000 a year, give or take. It's never (at least not since the Republican takeover of government) been enough to buy a home in L.A. and these days of frozen credit the dream of home ownership is further away than ever-- even as home prices drop down to more affordable levels. Banks just will not lend-- even to the most qualified buyers with steady, tenured jobs. The Bush Regime shoveled $300 billion-- no strings, no adult supervision, no accountability-- at the banksters and what happened was predictable: some of it went to scooping up other, more distressed banks and related businesses and some of it was simply stolen (in the form of self-awarded "bonuses" for... jobs well done? Rudy Giuliani may think $18.4 billion in taxpayer money to crooked, grasping millionaires (like himself) is a perfect way to get the economy moving-- in essence that is the heart of the GOP trickle down theory-- but most Americans are howling mad and want the stolen money returned. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill would go even further.

Sen. Claire McCaskill has delivered a sharp threat to the wallets of corporate executives who took large compensation packages even as their companies accepted government bailout funds. Things, she warned, are going to change.

"I've been mad for a while," said the Missouri Democrat. "When we passed the initial half of the TARP money, [there were] rumors about bonuses, the fact that too many of these guys were holding onto the jobs even though they were running these companies into the ground. Reality didn't seem to be the order of the day."

So McCaskill took to the Senate floor on Friday to put an end to the surrealism. In a bill that came to the surprise of reporters, her colleagues, and the White House alike-- there was no coordination with the Obama administration, she said-- the Missouri Democrat called for compensation for employees of bailout recipients to be capped at $400,000 a year.

"They don't get it," McCaskill said on the floor. "These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses... What planet are these people on?"

Planet Republicana, of course. And we elected Democrats, by substantial margins, to save us from that deadly, toxic, sociopathic planet. And that brings us back to our topic of home buying.

My friend found a house in the Glassell Park neighborhood of L.A.-- a changing neighborhood-- that has been hard hit by the foreclosure mania. A hard working man who speaks little English had literally been tricked into a complex variable rate mortgage that he was assured was safe for his family of six. The house is beautiful and he got it for around $500,000 with 5% down (around $25 grand). It was a stretch but he was able to make all ends meet for two years, in the meantime upgrading everything in the house-- electric, plumbing, a guest cottage, a gorgeous garden... And then the full force of Bush's Republican Economic Miracle hit. His mortgage payments more than doubled. He had just been able to make things work before this inexplicable rise in his payments. Now he couldn't. The bank was willing to renegotiate, but not substantially. He faced foreclosure and the complete destruction of his credit-- let's hope Vice President Biden takes an active role in reforming the disgraceful bankruptcy law he helped Bush shove through Congress for his pals in the banking community now that he's in charge of that middle class task force-- and he realized he'd have to sell the house. Unfortunately, houses aren't selling-- at least not at the prices people paid in the last 15 years.

He put his house on the market as a potential short sale for $250,000, half what it was valued at when he bought it. If the bank approved-- and ate the loss-- he would be able to save his credit. My friend the school teacher saw the house and offered $270,000 in cash (borrowing money not from a bank but from a friend). The deal was approved by the homeowner's bank. But then the homeowner realized he had nowhere to go with his family. After spending months looking for a place to relocate-- even out in the dreary desert communities between L.A. and Las Vegas-- he realized that unless he was willing to split his children up among relatives, he couldn't leave the home he could no longer afford to pay for.

Legally, my friend the school teacher could have forced him out at this point. Escrow was about to close and he was entitled to pay the agreed amount and take possession. Ethically... well, how do you evict a family from their home? Instead, we found him another home (in Hollywood), and we suggested the Glassell Park guy follow the advice being offered by Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving Democratic woman in the House: squat in his own home.

Rep. Kaptur, who is being mentioned as a replacement for retiring Republican incumbent George Voinovich-- the GOP is putting up a hapless and pathetic Bush clone, Rob Portman-- is, like many Americans, steaming. She's angry because the federal government has squandered the TARP funds without helping out homeowners. Her area of northwest Ohio has been hard hit, like southern California. Her advice is startling-- and not exactly what Americans are accustomed to hearing from Inside the Beltway or from the Establishment's media: "Unless [you] have good legal representation do not leave your home because remember possession is 90 percent of the law." The revolution has started?

"So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes," said Congresswoman Kaptur before the House of Representatives. "Don't you leave."

She's called on all of her foreclosed-upon constituents to stay in their homes and refuse to leave without "an attorney and a fight," said CNN.

"If they've had no legal representation of a high quality, I tell them stay in their homes," Kaptur told Griffin.

Kaptur is a high-profile advocate of an increasingly popular mode of fighting foreclosures best known for it's key phrase: "Produce the note."

By telling a bank to "produce the note," a homeowner can delay foreclosure by forcing the lender to prove the suing institution is actually the same which owns the debt.

"During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as securitized packages on Wall Street," explains the Consumer Warning Network. "In the rush to turn these over as fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage. This is the key to the produce the note strategy."

Watch the CNN video to get a better idea about why Kaptur is so angry at the banksters and how to hold the vultures accountable. She says if you can't afford to hire a lawyer, legal help is available through a number of organizations including legal aid and Advocates for Basic Legal Equality.

Will Pot And Hookers Help Rescue California And Nevada From The Bush Economic Miracle?

Morning in Vegas: end of the hooker shift

Jim Gibbons, Nevada's Republican Governor took the "No Tax Increases" pledge before being elected and would rather ask already underpaid teachers to take a 6% pay cut and to lop over one-third of the support Nevada gives higher education off the state budget than go back on his pledge. Problem is, of course, the mortgage crisis, which hit Nevada's once booming housing market harder almost any other state, combined with a rapidly drying up tourist market-- both part of Bush's Republican Economic Miracle-- has left Nevada with nearly a $2 billion budget deficit this year. California, which also has a dunderheaded Republican governor, has a far worse crisis-- an $11.2 billion deficit-- headed towards $20 billion. Both states, though, have opportunities, unorthodox ones, to plug the financial holes and stimulate their economies. In Nevada's case it's prostitution and in California's it's marijuana. The question in both states is whether or not there is the political will to go for it. Both states have legislatures controlled by the Democratic Party so at least there's a chance, no matter how slim.

Nevada should be easy. Prostitution is already legal and taxed, right? Well... kinda/sorta. It's only legal (and taxed) in counties with fewer than 400,000 people, so not in Las Vegas or Reno, the places with the tourists. Oh, there's plenty of prostitution in both cities, but it's illegal and untaxed. And even in the places where it is taxed, the state, for some arcane, hypocritical, self-defeating, later-day puritanical reason (also Latter Day reason) doesn't tax prostitution. The legal prostitution business brings in around $50 million a year. The brothels have actually volunteered to pay their fair share of state taxes too. But the state is standoffish and-- at least the governor-- feels cutting teachers' salaries is a better idea.

Even the Democrats aren't free of hypocrisy, many afraid to embrace the one-eyed aunt in the squeaky rocker up in the attic. The rational solution would be to legalize prostitution across the state and close the budget deficit-- not to mention boost the tourist trade-- by taxing it like any other normal business. In fact, they could also legalize male prostitution at the same time, something else that isn't legal. Las Vegas' mayor, Oscar Goodman, is a big advocate of legalizing brothels in the city and says most tourists already think prostitution is legal statewide anyway,

“They tell me we’re missing tens of million of dollars that could be used for the school system, to keep jail guards employed, to provide mental health services,” Mr. Goodman said.

“I also believe that by regulating and controlling this business, we could make it much safer for the customers as well as the prostitutes. We kid ourselves and we’re very disingenuous if we pretend that there isn’t rampant prostitution now that is unsafe for which we get no tax revenue.”

Northern California gold rush

California has a tougher row to hoe-- but, potentially, a far more lucrative one. Like prostitution in Nevada, marijuana is kinda/sorta legal in California. Medical marijuana is a prescription away from anyone who wants it enough to find a doctor who is willing to write one. But the state's cowardly politicians don't seem to have the will to jump to the next step and legalize the gigantic marijuana industry in the state.

California NORML estimates that a legal market for marijuana could yield the state $1.5 - $2.5 billion. A basic $1 per joint excise tax would yield about $1 billion to the state, while the state would save over $150 million in enforcement costs for arrests, prosecutions and prison. Additional benefits would accrue from sales taxes and spinoff industries. Total retail sales of marijuana would be on the order of $3-$5 billion, with total economic impact of $8-$13 billion including spinoff industries such as coffeehouses, tourism, and industrial hemp.

...California NORML's analysis of the benefits of marijuana legalization are as follows:
• An excise tax of $1 per half-gram joint of marijuana would raise about $1 billion per year, as much as the current excise tax on cigarettes.
• Retail sales on the legal market would range from $3 - $5 billion, generating another $250 - 400 million in sales taxes.
• Legalization would save over $156 million in law enforcement costs for arrest, prosecution, trial and imprisonment of marijuana offenders. Intrusive CAMP helicopter surveillance would also be eliminated.
• Based on experience with the cigarette tax, total revenues of $1.5 - $2.5 billion might be realized.
• Based on experience with the wine industry, the total economic activity generated by legal marijuana could be nearly three times as great as retail sales, around $8 - $13 billion. Amsterdam-style coffeehouses would generate jobs and tourism. If the marijuana industry were just one-third the size of the wine industry, it would generate 50,000 jobs and $1.4 billion in wages, along with additional income and business tax revenues for the state.
• Industrial hemp could also become a major business, comparable to the $3.4 billion cotton industry in California.

I'd say the chances of any of this getting into Obama's Stimulus Package--regardless of how beneficial it would be to turning around California's catastrophic economic situation-- are pretty much zero. And this president admits he "inhaled... frequently; that was the point." Hypocritical Puritanism is still strong, even in California. But with a flood of foreclosures and a steadily accelerating unemployment rate shaping up for 2009 is it too much to ask our leaders to stretch a little, even to stretch outside of the traditional comfort zones we've created for ourselves? Maybe. After all, if they can't even make good on promises they've made for actions that have proven effective-- like re-strengthened the labor movement that has been devastated by Republican political operatives over the past 2 decades-- how can we expect anything really innovative. I mean, watch these guys and then keep in mind all the excuses we're hearing now about not offending Big Business, the Chamber of Commerce and the new Post-Partisan Order that is a figment of certain peoples' imaginations.

Meet Washington State Senator Linda Parlette (R), Corporate Shill

GOP electeds like Parlette (right) should start keeping still and try learning from people like Dan Gelber

I haven't heard much outrage about banksters and other corporate paragons absconding with multi-million dollar "performance bonuses" as they bailed from their sinking companies. Today there was even a report that the crooks at Bank of America, preparing to ask for more taxpayer billions have just bought a fancy new $50 million jet. Well thank God, one of our eager beaver legislators has a solution to all this: crank up the war on working American families. Meet Wenatchee, Washington's worst wingnut, state Senator Linda Evans Parlette.

If nothing else, Ms Parlette is the very embodiment of the Republican spirit. Her solution is to freeze the state's minimum wage. As Warren Buffet explained this spirit to Republican Party propaganda agent Ben Stein: "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Parlette has never had any confusion about which side she's on in that war-- and it isn't Washington's working families. She's just introduced Senate Bill 5362 to freeze the minimum wage, which is at least not as drastic as what the last failed GOP gubernatorial candidate, Dino Rossi, actually proposed: lowering the minimum wage!

Just by chance, when this news broke I was on the phone with another state Senator, Dan Gelber, the former Democratic House leader of Florida who was elevated to the state Senate in November. Dan is in many ways the polar opposite of Parlette. If she's a nightmare for working families, Dan's entire career as a legislator has been all about championing the aspirations of working Americans. Watch Dan on video to get an idea about what a legislator should be:



I was on the phone with Dan today because every person I know in the state of Florida has been trying to persuade him to run for the Senate seat being vacated in 2010 by Mel Martinez. I feel confident that there's going to be some good news on that front tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, this was Dan's verbatim reaction when I told him about Senator Parlette's proposal to freeze the minimum wage:

I disagree with that. You want to talk about "stimulus" and getting money into the economy, the only group of people guaranteed to spend every dollar they have, unfortunately, are people making minimum wage. They are usually living hand to mouth and those are people who, when they get paid, they spend it. She's a little wrongheaded if she's saying that these corporate bigwigs, whose salaries and benefits are being, to a great extent, being subsidized by taxpayers through these huge bailout packages, are going to put their benefits back into the economy. And she wants to take people who are on the edge of poverty and cut their salaries? Because that's what you do when you freeze something and the cost of living still goes up. There's a psychology to getting money into the community. If you take money away from working people on minimum wage, that's not going to help anything, other than move them into poverty and stop them from spending money on necessities.

Stirling Newberry On America's Progressive Movement Vs Neo-Conservative Washington-- The Cold Hard Facts

DWT readers who browse the progressive blogosphere are probably already familiar with Stirling Newberry, one of the most respected voices examining economic, military, technological and political issues from a progressive perspective. He is a business and political consultant and a composer. His work has been a major inspiration for both Ken and myself and we invited him to do a piece at DWT elucidating on his premise that ideas make the Progressive Movement the most dangerous force in American politics. "While much of America is in a euphoric post-Bush haze," he wrote, "the Progressive Movement has already set to work. However long the race, victory in politics is to ideas winged with optimism, and not to polls or even pictures." We are really very proud to present Stirling's latest work here:

Progressivism is now the most dangerous force in American politics, and everything that is being done is being done to push its ideas to the margins, while claiming to be doing something about the problems that those ideas address. At this point Washington DC and the old system have exactly one idea, and that idea is raid social security. The progressive movement is now the movement of ideas, and everyone else is simply trying to figure out how to get to the end game of taking payroll taxes and using them to pay back the bad bets of banks.

That's the only wedge they have to run, because it has sunk in that the Chinese are not going to start consuming quickly, and even Chuck Schumer has gotten that message. Prior to the credit crunch there was 
some vain hope of that. Now, it is clear to the inside that is not going to happen, because the Chinese have no interest which is served by it happening.

What we are going to see until then is an inside that wants a redo on the last decade. Because, while the outside wants different policies, the inside is desperate to prove that the problem is not the Suburban-Industrial Complex and it's politics that alternates between arrogance and terror, but simply that George W. Bush could not manage it very well. Since the Suburban-Industrial Complex is not financially viable, this effort is destined to fail and people should now be thinking long term. Bush was stupid done stupid, now we get stupid done smart.

Obama is not a progressive, and while I don't know about never was, he now never will be. He is not a reactionary as Bush was, and will be better on a host of small issues, but no more than that. He will not appoint the grossly incompetent, he will not let cities sink beneath the waves. Obama's America, is a better, smarter, more robust and honest America. These mark a start, but not sufficiency. It is not enough to do stupid, smarter.

The older generations will give up when they have converted the last rock of coal, into the last barrel of synfuel, to drive the last SUV, to the last development, with the last super-sized order of processed food substitute to bring home to their obese kids. People need to realize that we are riding this bucket all the way down, and that only once there has been a catastrophic freeze over of the financial system, one that cannot be fixed by printing paper money for banks to sit on, then there will be change. They will never give up their suburban-industrial complex where God, "G" essential, put oil on this earth to be turned into green lawns in the land casino.

Presently the larger economic problem is simple: for a generation America has relied on the "paper for oil" economy. America buys oil, turns it into goods for suburbia, and then sells paper backed by the future earnings of the efforts of those suburbanites. This burned through the credit built up by the generation after World War II, and required that the US pursue a global policy of development arbitrage-- we would lend money to developing countries, and use the brute power of the dollar to collect it. The same countries that sold us resources held their own peoples back, and kept their own populations in political darkness.

However, there were two deep flaws in this system The first is that the oil economy cannot, could not, and will not, go on forever. The other is that those buying the paper wanted a greater return on it than the market would allow. And so, four times, we created games that were rigged in favor of those buying the paper. Each time the game broke, and the public was called upon to bail out the game. Each time pain was spread thinly to bail out, but it was noticeable enough to stifle hope and growth.

The first bailout was from the 1970's inflation game. The cost was raising social security taxes, a regressive tax, and cutting domestic programs. We were told there was a social security "surplus," but, in fact, that money was spent like all other money: on tax cuts and tanks.

The second bail out was from an era when we overpaid on treasuries, and allowed a oil, insurance, and export bubble to burst. This came tumbling down on a dark day in October of 1987, even though it had been unraveling for two years before. The cost was a massive binge of debt for a war in Iraq, and the "Savings and Loan" crisis. We are still paying that one off. Social Security was shaved by understating inflation, domestic programs were cut. However, in return, Clinton released defense technology into the wild. This created a new bubble: in the internet, and on globalization based on telecommunications.

When this burst, the bail out of those  who had had a great deal of money in the stock market was accomplished with Bush's tax cutting program. Bush's bubble was to be in US real estate, where we sold mortgage backed paper at interest rates higher than what treasuries could pay, but winked and promised them to be as good as gilt. Combined with a war for oil to drive US manufacturing, the Bush bubble deflated with a long whizzing sound in a "surge" combined with a deflation of housing prices. The third bail out: cheap Fed money, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a war and land bubble. This too collapsed, as the funny numbers, and faith based policies crumbled under the weight of reality.

So now we are at the fourth bailout of the neo-conservative era, Obama is in charge of this bailout, and whipped for the TARP bill which is at the center of "stabilizing" the banking system, and the question is how to pay for it. Before even economic recovery and restructuring are on the agenda, the question of how to pay for buying off the toxic assets of TARP has slammed to the top of Washington DC's agenda. The initial hope was to get China and countries in the Middle East to spend more. When financial types talk of "global imbalances" that is what they mean: Saudi Arabia and other oil rich, people light countries, and China, sell more to the rest of the world than they buy.

However, the very willingness of the previous era of globalization to do business with closed societies means that the US and Europe have no leverage. China also knows that while it has 2 trillion in currency reserves, it needs 40 trillion of infrastructure investments. China runs a yearly surplus, but is deep in the hole of underdevelopment. Thus China told Hank Paulson rather bluntly when he last visited that the bank bail out will not be on the back of Chinese ambitions.

That leaves only one idea in neo-conservative Washington: "entitlement reform" which means regressive taxation to pay for the toxic waste. This idea is Hooverism: telling people in a down turn that their wages are going down, and their risks are going up.

This is not an idea, but the act of a desperate junkie that has always been able to find a way to make the public pay for private mistakes before. This is why the upper echelons have suddenly become enthusiastic about a "carbon tax." The amount budgeted for decarbonizing the American economy is tiny, but the amount that could be made from harvesting another regressive tax is large. In India, the British taxed salt, because nothing moves under the hot sun, without salt.

By contrast the Progressive movement has put forward two simple ideas. The first is that a vast percentage of American GDP funnels into control over the country, rather than for the good of the country: Health insurance profits, neo-colonial wars, subsidies for corporations, and excessive profits for financials. Shifting this from waste to productivity would save 10% of GDP. The second is that the public is as able to determine the course of the country as a cadre of bankers and billionaires who have just created the fourth bust in as many decades. The fear of "Nationalization" is a fear of the few, of the many.

That Washington has not accepted these ideas can be seen by cold hard facts. TARP does not give the government voting control over the banks it has bailed out. At the time of the bail out, the progressive  answer, pushed by economists such as James K. Galbraith and others, was to give the money, not to the treasury, but to the FDIC, and have the FDIC take over banks and open them for lending. It worked for FDR, it can work for us.

That Washington has not accepted these ideas can be seen by cold hard facts. Any universal system of health care will have to have far more doctors and nurses. And yet, the stimulus bill does not have large grants for training new doctors and nurses. It takes roughly 7,000 in tuition for a state nursing school. Even with a 15,000 dollar stipend paid for by doing Nurse's aid work during classes, that is 44,000 dollars over two years for a nurse.

That Washington has not accepted these ideas can be seen by cold hard facts. Last spring, the man who is now director of the OMB testified to Congress about the size of infrastructure spending that could be justified purely on cost benefit considerations in the present. The stimulus bill falls far short of these projections.

That Washington has not accepted these ideas can be seen by cold hard facts. The stimulus bill provides for some renewable energy, most of which is ethanol subsidy. The amount for wind is touted as "doubling" and yet wind provides only a fraction of even the total renewables. Bush's energy department stated that wind could provide 20% of America's electricity by 2030. The stimulus bill falls short of even the Bush Administration's projects of what could be bought and installed without any bottlenecks at all. That is, even the Bush energy department, said this was a no-brainer.

That Washington has not accepted these ideas can be seen by cold hard facts. One road to universalizing care is expanding, not contracting, Medicare. And yet, Obama's first important order of business is to cut, not expand, Medicare.

That Washington has not accepted these ideas can be seen by cold hard facts. Broadband speeds in the US are 1/10th of what they are in tiger economies, who use broadband to save on energy. The stimulus bill provides less for broadband that the coming budget does for F-35 fighters. America just put a down payment on a new nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and ordered a wave of laser guided bombs.

If there is to be a second American Century, it will have to be a Progressive Century, and it will have to be a century of ideas. One cannot cut one's way to prosperity, any more than one can drink one's way to sobriety. What America needs is not to do less, but do more, and do more well.

The Progressive movement is the most dangerous force in American politics, precisely because Progressives are the party of ideas in American politics. These ideas are clear, and effective. Many have been tested in countries around the world, and in states across the nation. The countervailing forces of cost cutting and cramming down, have been tried, and already failed by their own measurements.

California Financial Crisis Mirrors What Bush Is Leaving Obama

I've already acclimated myself to the reality of a Schwarzenegger financial disaster in California not unlike Bush's in the rest of America. I'm not getting a state tax refund this year; just an IOU. The state Controller, a good guy, John Chiang said he's got no choice but to suspend $3.7 billion worth of tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants and other payments owed to Californians starting Feb. 1 because of the cash crisis the state is facing. There's a $42 billion budget deficit.

I can handle not getting my tax refund. I feel a lot less comfortable about the $300 million in cash grants for needy families and the aged, blind and disabled and $13 million in grants for college students. With unemployment soaring and with more and more families using up their unemployment insurance-- even with the extension-- a strong safety net is more needed than normally. But there isn't one.

Any why not, you wonder. In today's Washington Post there was a report by Carol Leonnig about how some of our biggest corporations avoiding their share of taxes by using off shore banking havens. "Some?" Well... actually most.

A majority of America's largest publicly traded companies and the U.S. government's largest federal contractors-- including some receiving millions in federal bailout money-- use multiple subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to conduct business and avoid paying U.S. taxes, a new report finds.

The new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, released today by Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), lists Citigroup and Morgan Stanley as having set up hundreds of tax haven subsidiaries, along with American International Group and Bank of America. Also in the tax-haven list are well-known companies and such federal contractors as American Express, Pepsi and Caterpillar.

How big of a deal are we talking? Dorgan and Levin estimate this crap is costing the federal government around $100 billion each year. Now you know me with the capital punishment. But I swear, shoot a couple banksters and CEOs and this just will stop happening. Oh, and confiscate all their assets too. You remember the Members? They warned us back in 1978 with this Steve Lillywhite-produced song, written by Jean Marie Carroll, a former banker himself:



Thanks to David B in comments-- we have an updated version by Carroll.

Bush Economic Miracle: International Art Market Collapsing-- Along With Every Other Market

Damien Hirst's "Adam & Eve Under the Table." The seated lady isn't part of the exhibition

Sunday I was laughing about some of the Times' top 44 tourist destinations for 2009, especially how they crowned Marrakech the world's primo culinary offering and Doha the place to go for culture. Doha? Yeah, it's in Qatar. Qatar? Yeah it's on the Arabian Peninsula, jutting out into the Persian Gulf and Al Jazeera is based there. You know, one of the United Arab Emirates. And the Emir's 26-year old daughter, Sheikha al Mayassa, recently bought up $160 million worth of Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. Voila! That and it's own Tribeca Film Festival and an I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art and you can forget Paris, London, Rome, Istanbul, Cairo, New York, Mexico City... Doha's where it's at for the culture thing.

Except... today's Times has some bad news for all Damien Hirst purchasers. His edgy art may have been a better investment before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection (the same day his work peaked at a Christie's auction). As we reported last fall, the Bush Economic Miracle is flushing art prices down the toilet along with the price of homes, stocks and everything else. Christie's is starting to lay off employees.

In the last months, auction prices dropped together with financial markets, ending a decade-long boom in the art market that was buoyed by record bonuses paid to financial executives.

Lehman plans to sell about $8 million in artwork to help pay its creditors, but if a recent auction by the bank’s former chief executive and his wife is anything to go by, it might be a challenge to attract buyers as many still wait for bigger bargains. Richard S. Fuld Jr. and his wife, Kathy, sold 16 drawings for $13.5 million through Christie’s in November in New York, below the $15 million low estimate.

...Its rival, Sotheby’s, said in December that it planned to reduce costs by $7 million in 2009 by cutting jobs and salaries, citing an “uncertain and challenging macroeconomic environment.”

Initial predictions by some art investors last year that oil-rich Arab countries, Russia, India and China would continue to spend on art, even as the United States and much of Western Europe stumbled into a recession, proved too optimistic.

A two-day sale of paintings and jewels in Dubai by Christie’s in October yielded only about half of what the auction house expected. A sharp drop in the price of oil since its peak in July made the region, identified by Christie’s as a growth market, less open to investing in art.

At an auction in New York in November, almost a third of the pieces remained unsold, including a self-portrait by Francis Bacon.

And if Bacon is selling low... it's all over. Cancel that trip to Doha.

And you know what? It could be worse. Imagine you were stuck in an accelerating recessionary trend, with unemployment spiraling out of control and... your unemployment insurance dries up. And you don't have a Hirst or Bacon to sell even at reduced prices. These aren't people who expected to ever go on welfare, but that's what's coming next for a couple hundred thousand people in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania and 20 other states across the country.

Obama asked Bush to request the rest of the bailout money ($350 billion) from Congress to stabilize the financial system. But I don't see banksters loosening up the credit market. I don't see them as part of the solution. I think they are the problem. The money should go to trickle up programs (an idea that banksters and their well-paid Washington shills abhor), not more failed trickle down programs. Screw the banksters; they screwed the whole country world.

Obama began calling lawmakers, promising to respond to their intense criticism of the financial rescue program by expanding its scope to aid struggling homeowners, small businesses and others. His top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, sent a three-page letter to congressional leaders, vowing to better track how the money is spent and bolster oversight.

The president-elect plans to appear today at a luncheon in the Capitol where he will ask Senate Democrats to stand with him on an issue that is shaping up as an early test of his ability to build bipartisan consensus. Yesterday, he was forced to relent to skepticism on a separate politically complicated initiative, the economic stimulus package, by dropping his proposal to give businesses a $3,000 tax credit for every job they save or create.

Will Obama Be Able To Do Anything About The Banksters Who Are Wrecking The Economy?

Today's NY Times has some ostensibly good news: at 5% the average home mortgage rate is the lowest in decades. It's a nice announcement. But Times writer Tara Siegel Bernard asks the wrong question as a follow-up: "What is not clear, however, is whether rates are attractive enough to lure a significant number of home buyers back into the ailing housing market." The home buyers are not the problem. The irrational unavailability of credit-- or more specifically, banksters-- is what the problem is.

Combine the lowest mortgage rate since 1971, when Freddie Mac started tracking them, with yesterday's announcement of a deal between Congress and Citigroup to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms, and it looks like everything's comin' up roses. Not so fast, amigo.

The other day the realtor who's helping my friend Roland buy his first home told us that two-thirds of the houses that go into escrow are falling out. He's been dealing primarily with bank-owned properties for the last year. But it isn't any better on the top end of the market either. In Los Feliz, the L.A. neighborhood where I live, homes have been on the market for over a year-- some for way over a year. And foreclosed homes are starting to sell for startlingly low prices. One of my friends in a similar neighborhood found a buyer for his 8,000 square foot suburban home for $2.4 million. The well-heeled buyer offered to put up 30% in cash and he was certainly qualified in every way from here to Sunday. Except the lending-shy bankers didn't see it that way-- Loan Denied. No sale.

The government infused billions and billions of taxpayer dollars into the banking system. What are the banksters doing with the money? That's not rhetorical. I really would like to know. Meanwhile members of Congress are congratulating themselves on their deal with Citibank, calling it a "breakthrough" and pledging to add something like it to Obama's economic stimulus package as part of forecloseure-prevention.

Although the support of the banking industry would not guarantee passage, they said, it would go a long way toward breaking down opposition among Republicans and "moderate" [Blue Dog and other right-wing hack] Democrats who torpedoed the idea in the Senate last year. And lawmakers have yet to win the support of the Mortgage Bankers Association, a large lobbying group that has previously helped defeat the change.

...Industry officials fought off the legislation, but the political calculations have changed. President-elect Barack Obama has said he supports the change, Democrats have a larger majority in Congress, and banks that have accepted federal aid are facing pressure to do more to help homeowners. Citigroup, for example, received about $45 billion in government assistance last year.

Also, the foreclosure crisis has worsened in the past year, and industry and government efforts to keep people in their homes have had little impact. If the legislation passes, it could secure the kind of concessions the government has not been able to get from the industry through various voluntary foreclosure-prevention efforts.

Let's hope E.J Dionne is correct that Obama is playing this right and bringing conservatives, particularly right-wing Democrats, along.

The effort to win over the more conservative Democrats is working. On Wednesday, for example, Rep. Jim Cooper, also of Tennessee and a leading advocate of entitlement reform, praised Obama for insisting that "we can stimulate the economy and address our long-term problems at the same time."

Obama may also face a conflict between getting his package passed fast and having it contain the most effective proposals. Many economists, particularly but not exclusively liberals, argue that government spending programs stimulate the economy more quickly than tax cuts. Recipients of tax cuts might choose to save rather than spend the money they get back or use it to pay down debt.

Obama solves this problem in part by focusing much of his tax relief on middle- and low-income Americans, who are more likely to use the money for consumption. And the bulk of the package involves new spending, particularly on infrastructure and new environmental and technological investments. He is also pushing programs especially important to liberals: increases in unemployment benefits and food stamps, and fiscal relief to states for Medicaid and education expenditures.

..."Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy," Obama declared yesterday. Considering how profoundly this view contrasts with the old conventional wisdom-- "the era of big government is over," "government is the problem"-- it may be worth making a few concessions to put the country on a very different path.

He's not as savvy as Dionne but this morning my mortgage broker sent me these tragic tidings of the reality of 8 years of Republican misrule:

• 5 million seniors live on less than $10,000 annually

• 29% of Americans skipped treatments, tests or prescriptions because of costs.

• 25% of seniors survive on social security alone.

• An estimated 5 million regularly sacrifice food to pay bills.

Democrats Indicate A Pulse-- Some Will Not Be Rubber Stamps For Obama When He Leans Too Far Towards Bad Republican Ideas

Obama and Conrad

With extreme right wing loons demanding that "their" congressional delegates adopt their own 100% obstruct-obstruct-obstruct posture towards Obama, Limbaugh and other Republican propaganda agents are already claiming the impending Bush-GOP Depression is Obama's fault-- just as they always claimed that FDR caused the Great Depression. The latest from the Bush Economic Miracle: a 7.2% unemployment rate (highest in 16 years), spiraling out of control as the effects of Republican economic policies settle in. Another 524,000 jobs were lost in December, a number likely to be revised to over 600,000 in a few weeks. Total job losses for 2008 is 2.6 million. That's conservative economic and financial policy in action.

Now today's Obamacrats are apparently going to try and Hooverize President Bush in an effort to shield themselves from the potential political fallout of a prolonged recession. It will take years to fix the American economy, Obama says, and years of trillion-dollar budget deficits to do it. And everyday it seems that Team Obama tries to lower economic expectations, such as bearishly predicting that unemployment would hit double-digits.

The not-so-subtle message in the middle of all these pessimistic prognostications: When ya'll go to vote in 2010 and 2012 and a) unemployment is still as high as it's been in decades, b) income growth is sluggish at best, c) the budget deficit is running at a trillion bucks a year, and d) stock prices remain stubbornly low-- hey, don't blame us, you can't rebuild Rome in a day or even in a first term. Remember, Bush really left us a mess.

Sounds reasonable, right? Not to the dogmatic right. They're already brainwashing the easily brainwashed and brain-dead who make up what's left of the Republican Party base. Crackpot wingnut James Pethokoukis asks "how can Obama avoid taking responsibility when he will be so actively meddling in the economy? It will be his decision to forego deep and permanent new tax cuts, his decision to not extend the Bush tax cuts, his decision on how to spend the remaining $350 billion in TARP money, his decision to quasi-nationalize healthcare, his decision to push a cap-and-trade carbon emission program and his decision to spend hundreds of billions on a 'green' industrial policy. It might even be his decision to try and reunionize the American laborforce. Obama will 'own' the battered economy, perhaps almost literally, given Uncle Sam's bailout binge."

The Republican Party has proven, once again, what their sick, selfish ideology does when given a free rein. Eight years of Bush and even more years of GOP domination of Congress has driven the country to the brink of disaster. As Ken pointed out so eloquently yesterday, it's time for the grownups to take over and for wingnut obstructionists to shut the hell up.

I fear that Obama's obsession with compromise is the wrong way to proceed. In the name of some kind of unattainable bipartisan consensus he is rolling over of virtually everything that comes up. Fortunately we are starting to hear rumblings from the committed defenders of working families that Obama show some backbone in dealing with the Republican obstructionists. Today, for example, Speaker Pelosi urged him to repeal Bush's economy-crippling tax cuts for the wealthy.

Pelosi supports Obama's push to include $300 billion in middle-class tax relief but she has long been a critic of Bush's cuts for families making over $250,000 a year.

Obama said he would get rid of the cuts during his campaign, but has softened his stance in recently weeks, saying the dire state of the economy could force him to abandon the idea of quickly repealing them, for fear of worsening the contraction.

Earlier on Thursday, the speaker told reporters the Bush cuts were "the biggest contributor to the budget deficit" and said the threshhold for a prospective House repeal would be in the "$250,000 to $300,000 [family income] range."

And on the Senate side, it looks like populist champion Kent Conrad is also going to hold Obama's feet to the fire when he leans over too far in placating the far right idiots who authored the nation's financial catastrophe. "[S]enators emerging from a private meeting of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday said that tax portion of Obama's stimulus plan is unworkable. They were especially critical of a proposed $3,000 tax credit for companies that hire or retrain workers. Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota described it as 'misdirected.'" Conrad is correct in pointing out that all these tax cuts for businesses will do more harm than good for the economy.

"I don’t think it works,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), a member of the Finance panel and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “I don’t think it will give much lift to the economy.

“If someone offers you several thousands of dollars in tax credits when your product is not selling, are you going to hire someone?” Conrad asked rhetorically.

Obama surprised his colleague earlier this week by floating the idea of combining several hundred billion dollars' worth of tax cuts with the economic stimulus.

Conrad said economists learned from the Great Depression that marginal incentives are not effective “when the economy is falling away from you.”

“People use it to pay debt or to save — that’s human nature,” he said.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), another member of Finance, voiced skepticism.

“I’m not that excited about it,” Kerry said. “The creation of a tax credit for hiring isn’t going to make up for the lack of goods being sold."

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), another Democrat on the Finance panel, which has primary jurisdiction over the stimulus package, said that infrastructure spending is more important.

“In tough times, people don’t respond that well to marginal changes,” Wyden said.

Conrad, Kerry and Wyden have had far more progressive voting records in the Senate than Obama and have acted as defenders of working families much more frequently. And on another Obama mistake-- his desire to appoint celebrity talking head Sanjay Gupta Surgeon General-- Rep. John Conyers is working to whip up some Democratic opposition to this ridiculous choice. I'm relieved that Democrats don't plan to take on a rubber stamp posture the way Republican members of Congress did with Bush.


UPDATE: OH, GOOD-- OTHERS NOTICED AS WELL

In this morning's NY Times Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn point out that Democrats aren't happy that Obama's bold talk is amounting to some rehashed and discredited Republican nostrums for economic recovery, namely more tax cuts and not enough job creation and infrastructure building. Obama is going to have to learn-- and learn fast-- that playing footsie with Republicans, as though they were men of good will, will only wreck his plans to rescue America from the mess they have made.

“There is only one thing we have got to do in the stimulus, and that is how can we create jobs,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, as he left the meeting. “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle-down, if we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down. A number of people in there said, ‘Look, we have got to have programs that actually create jobs and put people to work.’ ”

Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, said lawmakers and the incoming administration had differences over how to focus the huge federal spending in a recovery bill. “Investment, investment, investment has got to be the central focus: energy, roads, bridges, waterways, housing,” he said. “Job creation is Job One.”

Mr. Conrad, who described the meeting as extremely positive, said Mr. Summers ended it by telling the senators, “Message received, loud and clear.”

OK... now let's see what they do with it. Like John Judis I'm worried that Team Obama's actions may not be nearly as bold as candidate Obama's promises. And there is only one way to deal with reactionaries: a steamroller.

Does Obama Have What It Takes To Rescue America From The Bush Economic Miracle?

Yesterday and again today, Paul Krugman, warns about the dangers of the Bush Economic Miracle actually turning into a full-fledged Great Depression. He thinks Obama is understating how badly the underpinnings of the economy have deteriorated under the Bush Regime.

The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.

So will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening? We’ll soon find out.

...[P]olitical posturing has already started, with Republican leaders setting up roadblocks to stimulus legislation while posing as the champions of careful Congressional deliberation-- which is pretty rich considering their party’s behavior over the past eight years.

More broadly, after decades of declaring that government is the problem, not the solution, not to mention reviling both Keynesian economics and the New Deal, most Republicans aren’t going to accept the need for a big-spending, F.D.R.-type solution to the economic crisis.

The biggest problem facing the Obama plan, however, is likely to be the demand of many politicians for proof that the benefits of the proposed public spending justify its costs-- a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts.

So far Obama has shown himself to be a wimpy compromiser who is absolutely unwilling to stand his ground on anything. The Republicans and the reactionary Democrats allied with them are certainly planning to take advantage of it-- in the most brazen partisan fashion-- and slow down and shred his plans for an adequate stimulus package. He's offering them a mammoth tax cut program, all $300 billion of which they're reluctantly willing to accept. The ideological mania that dragged the country into the mess we're in says more tax cuts are the key to get us out of that mess. That's wrong-- and Obama should fulfill his promise to act boldly and swiftly to bring real change to America-- not play footsie with American's domestic enemies. Again, Krugman:

Let’s lay out the basics here. Other things equal, public investment is a much better way to provide economic stimulus than tax cuts, for two reasons. First, if the government spends money, that money is spent, helping support demand, whereas tax cuts may be largely saved. So public investment offers more bang for the buck. Second, public investment leaves something of value behind when the stimulus is over.

Today Obama is meeting with congressional leaders, Pelosi and Reid for sure, maybe with the disloyal opposition-- obstructionists all-- as well. He's probably be better off figuring out how to ram through the economic proposals of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is thoroughly explained by Katrina Vanden Heuvel in the new Nation. They make it clear that Bush's mess doesn't need tinkering around the edges, it needs a major recovery program, one that will cost at least a trillion dollars "to kick start the economy, invest in sustainable, long term growth and target individuals and communities that are most desperate for resources."

In addition to much needed investments which have already been laid out-- like the extension of unemployment insurance while joblessness soars, increasing food stamps, and assisting cash-strapped states with Medicaid-- the CPC plan goes a step further. It takes a holistic approach to economic recovery and the needs of ordinary Americans by addressing infrastructure, human capital, keeping people in their homes, job creation, fiscal relief for state, local and tribal governments, education and job training and tax relief for lower-income families.

There are smart commitments in the CPC plan that deserve real attention, such as:

• A percentage of the infrastructure work would be performed by veterans, low-income and homeless individuals, out-of-school youth, and others facing multiple barriers to employment.

• Green technologies to weatherize the nation's homes and small businesses.

• Grants to neediest schools for modernization, renovation, energy efficiency, and investing in educational technology.

• Construction of libraries in rural communities in order to expand broadband access

• Capital improvements and short-term operating funds for federally-qualified health centers.

• Boost funding for National Health Service Corps to produce more doctors, dentists and nurses to provide health care in underserved area.

• Expand sustainable food systems at local community level.

• A moratorium on home foreclosures.

• At least $100 billion allocated to "green jobs creation," including at community level and in Indian Country.

• Creation of a new energy block grant to transition to green energy sources

• Re-establish Youth Conservation Corps to eliminate backlog of work projects in national, state, and local parks.

• Federal Arts and Writers Project to create jobs for American artists, writers, editors, researchers, photographers, and others.

• Triple funding for Community Development Block Grant Program

• Make the child tax credit fully refundable, lifting 2.7 million people--including 1.7 million children--above the poverty line.

• Expand the earned income tax credit for families with three or more children.

"The Progressive Caucus is determined to bring justice and prosperity to the American economy, and this proposal does both," CPC Co-Chair, Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona, said in a released statement.

How Much Of Your Money Do You Want To Give To The Poor Millionaires Who Were Greedy Enough To Fall For Bernie Madoff's Siren Song?

Instead of a bailout, how about the death penalty?

At one time Bush and Cheney were calling their program for fleecing America The Ownership Society. A more accurate moniker would have been The Entitlement Society. But the latest manifestation of the Bush world view is the demands that Bernie Madoff investors-- all millionaires and billionaires-- are making on the rest of us to make them whole. And why not? It fits right in with the whole Bush Economic Miracle that has virtually destroyed the American working class painstakingly built up since the early 1930s.

Yesterday's Guardian reports that taxpayers are already on the hook bailing out Madoff's rich (and formerly rich) investors and that they're complaining that more taxpayer funds are needed.

Lawyers representing the victims of Bernard Madoff's alleged $50bn fraud are calling on the US government to bail them out with billions of taxpayers' dollars.

They say the government should bolster the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which helps creditors of collapsed brokerages.

The SIPC has little more than $1.6bn of funds and has promised $500,000 to each Madoff victim who had an account with his firm in the past 12 months. Losses in the Madoff affair are estimated to be between $30bn and $50bn. Michael Sirota, a lawyer representing KML Investments, a firm claiming to have lost $80m, said: "What if SIPC needs $15bn to compensate all the victims because this fraud is bigger than anything they imagined could happen? The government should step up with funds like it has for the banking sector and the automotive sector."

This, of course, fits in perfectly with the Bush Regime's vision of financial policy and economics in general: Privatize the profits; socialize the losses. That's George W. Bush's idea of the "free market."

I'm sorry Madoff's clients lost $50 billion. They should have been more careful about the risks they were taking in their lust for greater rewards. It's the first rule of investing. Perhaps they thought they were getting away with insider trading and offshore banking shuffleboard to evade capital gains taxes. And they expect hardworking Americans to subsidize this?

Between 1950 and 2006 (56 years), the S&P 500 moved either up or down by more than 5% during a trading day exactly 34 times. Last year (2008), that happened 44 times, half of them since October 1. That's what you call volatility. Volatility is risky. Take big risks and one of two things happen-- you make a fortune or you lose a fortune. You think Madoff's investors planned to hand outsized profits off to the American taxpayers if things had worked out the way they planned? No, neither do I. But they now claim we should cover their recklessness.

SIPC does not have enough money to pay out all the claims that are sure to come from one of the biggest fraud cases to ever hit Wall Street. Securities attorneys say the organization has a reputation of being tough to squeeze money from, and each investor is only entitled to a maximum payout of $500,000 if a claim is approved.

SIPC officials say the books of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC are in complete disarray and could take six months or more to piece together. With bills piling up and her bank account vanishing, the one thing Ambrosino and others caught in the alleged $50 billion fraud don't have is time.

...The government created SIPC in 1970 to reimburse investors duped by brokerages in areas such as unauthorized trading or theft. SIPC is set up to cover losses of up to $500,000, and $100,000 of that amount can be claims for cash holdings that were lost.

The scope of what SIPC covers, however, can be limited. SIPC, for example, typically won't cover claims for cases involving stock manipulation or investments made into hedge funds.

How about we all take a pledge to vote against every elected official who votes in favor of spending taxpayer dollars to bailout these people?

Somehow Ken forgot to post this on December 24 while I was in Bandgiagara and Sangha. It still works:

Trapped in the meltdown (continued): As the Bush economic miracle plays out, we have deeper and wider cutbacks, and nonprofits in freefall

“When [Milton] Friedman’s Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed -- whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization.”

-- Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago emeritus professor of anthropology, quoted by John Lippert in a Bloomberg piece on the apparent collapse of "Chicago School" socioeconomics in its nest

by Ken

Am I the only one who's creeped out when Chimpy the Prez (you remember him, don't you?) emerges from his rathole and blithers about the non-existent "free market" and sneers sanctimoniously at "failed companies" that under normal circumstances should be allowed to fail? Is this the Twilight Zone, or what? George W. Bush pointing a finger at failed companies? Have we all taken leave of reality? This is a dunderhead whose history in business consisted of turning one company after another to a pile of shit. Anyone who would listen to anything he has to say about business or the economy should be in a straitjacket.

And so, given eight years at the helm -- and boy, do the people who voted for him have a lot to answer for -- of course he's done what he always does: turned everything around him to shit. With, true, the small exception of the family, friends, and cronies who piled up fortunes as immediate beneficiaries of his blithering incompetence. (In fairness, some of these must have been the same people who kept bailing Chimpy out of disaster after disaster through his so-called "business career," who may be presumed to have done so as an investment in the future, or rather their future.)

It still boggles my mind to think that so many people could have been so knuckle-draggingly stupid as to fall for a creature whose every cell screams out, "Fraud!" But more importantly, at least some of those people have to learn that the moronic bullshit he poured down their throats is in large measure the same bullshit that's been fobbed off on them for generations by "the business party."

Yessiree, what we needed to do was throw off all that awful regulation, which was holding business back and preventing us from achieving real prosperity. The reality, of course, was that all that regulation, by creating in some measure at least a sort of level playing field for business and providing for some of the basic needs of society, made possible both sustainable prosperity and a measure of civilization.

Business, of course, always wants the shackles removed. And when they get it, the result is always disaster, because there's no one to protect them from themselves. This time, with Cheney the war-maker (and war is always good for business) and regulation-stripper they bought themselves the pro-business government to end all pro-business governments. And naturally the result is economic catastrophe unprecedented since the Great Depression -- and we're still counting.

It's what doomed the McCranky campaign, though there are much better reasons why that campaign should have been routed. But in the end, it really had nothing to do with the lies and imbecilities Young Johnny was spewing. Voters just knew instinctively that the people in power had to be gotten out of power. It remains to be seen what happens once they discover that President Obama can't wave a magic wand and make everything OK. But will they look in the mirror, those people who voted for a lying simpleton not once but twice, and see the people who hate America so much that they twice voted for a man whose life's work was to destroy it?

Undoubtedly a lot of the people who voted to put Chimpy in the White House are now paying the price. After all, it's only the people who engineered his career and bankrolled his candidacy who made out like bandits from it. It would be nice to think that at least some of those people have come to understand what they did, in the hope that they won't be such easy prey the next time some huckster tells them what we really need is a government that's good for business. (There's some consolation in that at the academic level "the Chicago School" -- the slash-and-burn school of Friedmanite economic and social policy -- seems finally to have come into disrepute, as recorded in the Bloomberg piece quoted up top.)

And sad to say, we no longer have just one "business party." The lesson that Democrats like Rahm Emanuel have learned since the Dems were unceremoniously dumped out of power is that it's important to show those corporate wheelers and dealers that Democrats can be just as good friends as Republicans, maybe even better.

So now we survey the wreckage, as we wonder how much worse it's going to get. And how are we feeling the pain?

Here are some headlines pulled off the New York Times website which seem to speak for themselves:

* Home Sales in November Fell at Faster Pace Than Expected

* In Budget Crises, States Reluctantly Halt Road Projects

* As Economy Dips, Arrests for Shoplifiting Soar

The Washington Post, meanwhile, has a story that shouldn't surprise anyone, on the crisis facing charities and nonprofits generally, with a disastrous dropoff in giving. It begins:

For Charities, a Season of Need
With Donations in Free Fall, Groups Try to Capture Holiday Generosity

By William Wan and Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; B01

In the world of philanthropy, December is everything. It's the one month when people are at their most generous, when procrastinators rush to beat the year-end tax cutoff for donations, and when charities count on collecting as much as a third of their annual contributions.

This year, with rising unemployment and a tanking economy, donors have already informed at least one-quarter of nonprofits in the Washington that they will be giving less, according to the Center for Nonprofit Advancement. As a result, more than 40 percent of nonprofits plan to reduce programs or cut staff, and most are reevaluating the way they do business to weather the year ahead.

The piece surveys a number of D.C. charities and nonprofits that are scrambling desperately this month to make up for gigantic shortfalls in their operating budgets, without a great deal of success. However --

Earlier that day, in Northwest Washington, organizers of another kind of event were suffering the opposite problem: overwhelming interest.

Washington's top nonprofit leaders had called an emergency meeting downtown to try to figure out how to survive the economic crisis. It was supposed to be an intimate gathering of a few dozen leaders, but so many nonprofits registered that organizers had to create a waiting list. The meeting was dubbed "Nonprofit 911."

At times, the 500-person town hall meeting resembled tent revivals of old. There were prophecies of doom, messages of hope and testimonies from people struggling in hard times.

"If you think it's a storm, you just batten down the hatches and wait for it to pass," another said. "But this is more like climate change . . . like the coming of the ice age."

"As bad as this year has been," the Post writers write, "experts say, 2009 might be worse."

"No one knows what's going to happen, the kind of choices we're going to have to face," said Adam Tenner, director of Metro TeenAIDS. For weeks, anxiety over his group's finances has gnawed at him so much that his stomach started hurting.

"When the choice becomes which service we're going to cut, who we're going to stop helping," he said, "any choice is going to be a bad one."

The Post also has a piece that attempts an overview of the deepening recession:

Deeper Cuts, Widespread Pain
Few Industries Are Immune as Companies Shed Jobs in 'Serial' Downturn

By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; D01

Recessions can be notoriously uneven. They can wreak havoc with the livelihood of factory workers but not that of bank tellers or nurses. Whole industries can see jobs washed away forever, while others hum along and even grow.

This time, however, the pain is more widespread, economists say, affecting the investment banker, the auto worker, the warehouse manager and the toy store clerk.

So far this year, companies have announced layoffs that affect more than 1 million jobs, according to job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Bank of America, the Dow Chemical Co., Anheuser-Busch InBev, General Motors and Circuit City are among the growing number of companies that are letting people go.

Another key difference with past recessions has been the downturn's "serial nature," said Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist with the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In other words, the recession has not affected industries and regions at once, but has rolled out in spurts.

Industries with some of the steepest job losses include construction, financial services, retail and manufacturing. The regional differences in job losses reflect how large a role those industries play in a given area's economy.

Among the states most immediately and devastatingly hit have been California, which was hardest-hit by the bursting of the housing bubble (we haven't talked about their impending state-government crisis -- I assume everyone has been tracking that story), and Michigan and the Midwest, Ground Zero for the domestic auto-industry collapse. Shin notes:

Many of those who have been or are about to be laid off will have to find a new line of work, several economists said, because they won't be able to go back to their old one.

The construction industry has shed 780,000 jobs since September 2006 according to the BLS, and it isn't likely to go back to bubble-like levels any time soon, experts said. Further, an anticipated decline in the construction of office buildings, apartments and shopping centers is likely to spur more layoffs in 2009.

Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said she expects manufacturing jobs to keep vanishing steadily from the U.S. economy, including in the auto industry. "It's been a downward trend since the late 1970s," she said. "They are not coming back by and large."

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Does the Bush economic miracle have you looking for cheap entertainment for your holiday get-togethers? Play Buzzword Bingo!

by Noah

During the holidays, most of us get together with our families, extended or otherwise. Many of us find ourselves in a room with relatives we ordinarily wouldn't speak with or maybe not even let into our homes if they were not in our families. Indeed, many progressives suffer the shame of having a Family Republikook -- possibly related by marriage, or maybe even a blood relative!

We wonder why, if they consider us so liberal, un-American, and unpatriotic, they even want to enter our homes. Are they just looking for a handout? The horror of having such a family member may best be dealt with by extreme measures. Perhaps the Family Repug is kept in the basement or in an upstairs closet with minimal food, drink, and Left Behind books slid under the door as an act of conservative-style compassion. Perhaps the F.R. has to eat outside at the backyard picnic table, regardless of the weather, fending off animals that are slyly pretending to be endangered.

In any event, as soon as we let such weirdos into our homes, it's only a matter of time before certain words or phrases come out of their foaming mouths. For this, I offer Family Get-Together Buzzword Bingo, designed to add a little fun to what is often a real exasperating day. I made it myself.

FAMILY GET-TOGETHER BUZZWORD BINGO

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Right Wing Economic Orthodoxy Brings Death And Destruction To Africa

For over a hundred years the American Republican Party has embodied right wing economic fundamentals-- basically, the Law of the Jungle. One of its premises is that business regulations just hamper economic development and personal freedoms and that it's all so unnecessary because everything rights itself in the end without government intervention.

So, for example, if an airline company, eager to fatten the bottom line-- and make the managers wealthier-- starts cutting back on "needless" maintenance procedures and, as a result, its planes start falling out of the sky, investors-- and eventually perhaps even informed consumers ("informed" being key here)-- will not want anything to do with the company. Meanwhile unregulated insurance companies, or even the semi-regulated ones we have now, won't suffer unduly because no one will force them to pay for the hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Hey, a plane falling out of the sky? What could be more an act of God rather than an act of GOP? Just ask Donald Trump.

Anyway, I dare anyone to find a more fitting place to set the Law of the Jungle into stone than Nigeria, an authoritarian hellhole beloved of plutocrats and wingnuts the world over. Right now, by chance, I'm reading a powerful and brilliant book, cleverly disguised as spoof, by investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, Turkmeniscam-- How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship. And the key isn't Stalinist really, but "dictatorship." The model for the entire Inside the Beltway lobbying "industry" and how it sanitizes even the world's most despicable regimes-- for a price-- is Ivy "Poison Ivy" Lee, "the father of modern public relations," whose most notorious crusade was favorably influencing American public opinion on behalf of Big Business and their pals, the Third Reich.

This kind of endeavor is completely bipartisan, I'm afraid, with Democrats proving themselves not one bit more ethical or less morally bankrupt than Republicans. There are a quarter-million parasites working in this criminal sector, and it isn't one likely to be hit by layoffs, neither by the economy nor by the ascension of Democrats to power. And among the most beloved and well-served clients are brutal, oil-rich fascist regimes in Africa, particularly Equitorial Guinea and Nigeria, two of the most corrupt places on earth.

Improved technology has improved oil production in sub-Saharan Africa, but the boom there has bred massive government corruption. "Global oil is a mixed picture, predominantly negative, and African oil is the most negative of all the stories," David Gordon, head of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, said at an energy conference... Gordon, who had recently traveled to Nigeria, said that the consensus among people he spoke with was that the country would have been better off if its oil had been left in the ground. That is a reasonable conclusion when one considers that Nigeria had exported more than $200 billion worth of oil during the last few decades but the overwhelming majority of its people live in poverty.

Extremely well paid lobbyists, devoid of any sense of moral bearing whatsoever, have set out to create an image of a vibrant free economy coming along just swimmingly. And it's a very deceptive image indeed that these politically connected slimebags have concocted. A month after a gaggle of lobbyist-paid opinion-making junketeers returned from Lagos singing the praises of Nigeria's vicious Orwellian dictatorship-- of which one wrote that there is "no evidence of a dictatorship"-- their hosts hanged a well-known democracy advocate, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight other would be reformers. Meanwhile, despite "no evidence of a dictatorship," there were no elections in that country until after the dictator, Sani Abacha, died one evening in 1998 while enjoying two prostitutes. The average Nigerian subsists on $1 per day.

So... Nigeria, 2008. Like corrupt, bribe-loving politicians in Chicago, Houston or anywhere else-- and particularly "free market" fanatics and die-hard rightists-- the Nigerians aren't keen on meaningful regulatory agencies. Republican Party polemicists should go live there. Their "free market" fanaticism has been so successful that yesterday the news across Africa was about dozens of children who have died because of unregulated pharmaceuticals. In one case, infants were given anti-freeze by their parents, said parents thinking they were administering teething medicine to their babies. It was pure, unadulterated poison under the consumer-friendly name MyPikin.

Probably no one-- at least no one who hears about this tragedy-- will buy MyPikin in the future, proving, presumably, how wonderfully the "free market" works. And the company executives may be fined. No businessmen nor their political enablers, however, were lined up against any walls and shot.

Most counterfeit drugs come from those burgeoning exemplars of "free market" greed and selfishness capitalism, China and India. Their counterfeit pharmaceutical exports will reach $75 billion by 2010, worth 50 percent more than Bernie Madoff swindled under the benign good graces of Bush's toothless, Nigerian-style regulatory agency in charge of protecting the public from ruthless predators like him and his friends and family. No one has been put up against any walls and shot in that case either, but Madoff is reported to be under electronic survellance and under house arrest in his $7 million dollar Manhattan apartment.

And SEC chief Cox and Bush and the bureaucrats in charge of preventing this sort of thing? They're shocked and dismayed... and unpunished.

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