We've Been Had

When Keith Olbermann breaks ranks with the left to take aim at the same guy Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Beck are taking pot shots at, something has gone terribly wrong. As the Department of Justice moves to quash a suit that would repeal the Bushist policy of unwarranted wiretapping (Jewell v. NSA)the Obama Administration opens itself up to attacks, not only from the right, but from every political axis.

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With the GOP virtually leaderless and clinging to a failed ideology and a Democratic Party promising only more of the same, it is time for Americans to abandon the false dichotomy of the Two-Party System. While the President hasn't failed on all of his promises, he's shown where his allegiances lie, and it's not with the American People. But amid all of the flowery rhetoric, Obama touched on something we have badly needed as Americans: that we are not a Nation where identity politics can trump our national and cultural identity. We are all Americans.

I don't care if you're a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club or a dyed-in-the-wool member of the NRA: when our sharpshooters took out the Somali pirates and rescued our American sea captain of Maersk Alabama, it made you proud of what we are. The olive branch having failed (the ship was carrying aid to Kenya) the arrows were swift and retribution was fierce.

I close with a literary reference. An adolescent boy I know just finished reading Orwell's Animal Farm. He told me he was quite disturbed by the ending (SPOILER ALERT:IF YOU HAVEN'T READ ANIMAL FARM, EITHER READ IT NOW, OR STOP READING THIS POST). As the older animals who remembered the revolution peered through the windows and saw the pigs and the humans quarreling over a card game, they realized they couldn't tell the difference between them. While Orwell was referring to oppression under communism being virtually indistinguishable to what many believed they had suffered under capitalism, I refer to this Orwellian twist for another reason. Having decided the Elephants had violated the Constitution, we placed our faith in the Donkeys. For all of the demagoguery regarding "Socialism," there is no difference between the two: Goldman Sachs has bought and paid for both of them.

How can they look any different in the end?

The Dog and Pony Show: Washington Goes WWF on AIG Largess

In this corner, weighing in at $170 billion in taxpayer revenue, reporting a 3rd quarter profit of $6 million in 2008 (just before the market meltdown) and $1.6 trillion in losses : the Master of Disaster, the Don of Derivatives, the Jihad on Jobs, the Harbinger of Recession, the Bonus Bitch, and the Credit-default Swap felt 'round the World, American Insurance Group!

AND IN THIS CORNER, weighing in with an annual taxpayer budget of $2.7 billion with pay increases on the way, with wins for multinational corporations, foreign countries, the executive branch and, of course, themselves, having been hoodwinked by Hank Paulson, punked by Karl Rove and made into George Bush's bitch: the Counterfeit Chorus, the Feckless Faction, the Guardian of the Greedy, the Corporate Courtesan, the Strumpet of the Stinking-rich and the Rubberiest of all Rubber Stamps, the United States Congress!

Let the WWF Smackdown begin.

Not. Ed Liddy refused to reveal the names of the employees who took bonuses, due to some threatening mail, including a piece he read aloud, indicating that the writer wanted to garrote bonus recipients with a piano string. I could try to explain to Mr. Liddy and his kind, that the reason horse thieves were hanged, rather than simply receiving long sentences, was because horses in the old West, weren't simply draft/transportation animals, they were livelihood; if your horse was stolen or damaged, you might not be able to provide for your family. That didn't mean selling one of a dozen houses or missing an annual trip to Europe, it meant starvation. He, the members of Congress and the media probably wouldn't know what it means to live paycheck to paycheck (in Liddy's case, another year, another dollar), then to get the news that the cycle you depended on has been broken. Your expenses will continue, but your paychecks will not.

The media has started making fun of the outrage shown by Congress to the insurance giant. Funny that they never mention the reason that it all sounds so disingenuous: Congress will be getting yet another raise this year while the taxpayers that support them continue to lose their jobs and homes.

Bernanke knew about the bonuses, but did nothing to block them. Geithner shrugged his shoulders, accepting the argument that the contracts that agreed to the bonuses--under the auspices that 2007's profits were something other than creative accounting--could in no wise be abrogated.

I'm sure this comes as disappointing news to the UAW.

But the hearing was nothing more than a dog and pony show. As with the situation that led to the financial meltdown, it doesn't take a genius to sniff this one out. Anyone who could look at the price of homes in poor and/or working class neighborhoods could see that we were in for trouble: it simply didn't add up. Here are the facts"

• AIG has funneled tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Goldman Sachs, Deutche Bank, others
  
• Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner were both once employed by Goldman Sachs
• Goldman Sachs and AIG were substantial contributors to Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Before some nut job starts frothing at the mouth about a Jewish banking conspiracy, I should point out that the only implication I'm trying to make is that Goldman Sachs' fingerprints are all over the crime scene. Watching Congress and the Obama Administration bungle through the financial meltdown would be like watching Car 54, where are you? or Keystone Cops, if it weren't so obvious that they're ignoring all of the clues left behind by the criminals.

GEITHNER: "A contract? Gawrsh! Did they pinky swear on it and everything?" (shrugging) "Well, shucks. It looks like there isn't nothin' we can do, then." (turning to AIG) "Would you super-nice fellers who were so greedy a year ago that you didn't give a crap one way or 'nother that you might destroy the world economy, mind giving them there retention bonuses back? No?" (turning to audience) "Gawrsh. Guess there's nothin' we can do, then."

We needed Elliot Ness and we got Frank Nitti. Obama made a mistake by tapping yet another Goldman Sachs alum to run the Treasury. He walked into a wall, dislodged the scaffolding above him and wound up covered in paint with a bucket over his head. Once makes for good theater. But there reaches a point, after a dozen or so prat falls that you shut it off, because it's obvious they're mugging for the cameras.

We need FDR, not Charlie Chaplin, and for Obama to be taken seriously, he's going to have to fire Geithner before another series of prat falls obviates what we already suspect. We need a Congress that walks the walk instead of just talking the talk. And we need a media that follows evidence instead of trying to quell public outrage with eye-rolling and cynicism. But that's not going to happen as long as we wait around for someone else to do our work.

Obama was right about one thing: we are the change we've been waiting for.

In Case you Missed it, the Rules have Changed

I begin at 7:27 AM Pacific Standard Time. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up nearly 6/10% from yesterday's close. Ye-haw. Can't wait for that quarterly report on my 401K to see how much retirement I don't have anymore. "Comrade" Paulson defended this week's continuous losses, with nearly 1,000 additional points shaved from the Dow's average, arguing that it's, "too early to look for encouraging signs." He might consider having the new temporary head of his bailout, a 35-year old from--you guessed it--Goldman Sachs, to look into getting some of that $85 billion back from AIG. Oh wait, the Fed's lending them another $38 billion.

It's 8:15 PST and the Dow is down over half a percent. . . .

I'm halfway through my lunch and the Dow has slid almost 3% since opening today. The Senate sweetened up the bailout (AKA "rescue") bill with tax cuts to get the House Republicans on board. How do they think we're going to pay for all of this? The "debt clock" near Times Square in New York had the dollar sign removed from it as another digit was added to our National debt--now over $10 trillion. The debt clock was first installed in 1987 when the debt was still just $2.7 trillion and when Reagan was still in office. Ah, the good old days of "don't tax and spend anyway" Republicanism.

In an oft quoted statement by Michael Hudson, Adam Smith said that no government had ever repaid its debts, and the same can be said of the private sector." For many, the free market system is more than just an economic strategy: it is the American ideal. The idea of the public seizing ownership of these banks which managed to fail--in spite of the hallowed doctrine of Milton Friedman, as espoused by Reagan, Bush and Bush--has the free market purists going insane right now. Most of them would like to let the market select which companies survive and which ones die out. The only problem is that, through a protracted war of attrition by the deregulationists, they managed to get what they wanted. And so, anti-trust violations went uninvestigated. Banks grew in size and dwindled in number. Suddenly we were faced with an ultimatum: rescue the banks--the ones that were allegedly too big to fail--or face a catastrophic economic collapse, the likes of which have not been seen for almost 80 years.

My lunchbreak is over. The market has fallen by nearly seven percent since this morning. My folks lived through the Great Depression. From the way the stock market keeps falling, it looks their kids get to live through one, too. I sure am glad we managed to save the banks though. . . .

It's 5:17 PM PST and I just finished working. The market dropped another 678.91 points (7.3%) today, closing at 8,579.19. An economist who was a clerk/pickup driver for the rental car agency told me that the market doesn't fall usually below the peak of the previous boom. I'm not sure, but I think the rules may have changed. The Dow last peaked at 11,723 in January of 2000 just before the Dot-Com bubble burst. Maybe I misunderstood him and he meant that it never dropped below the previous trough; if that's the case, we've still got another 344 points to go.

I'm optimistic. Those 344 points might just last me through lunch tomorrow.