The Great Swindle

Ben Bernanke's tenure as Chairman of the Federal reserve has been a disaster. Ben is either a lying shill for big money or the most incompetent fool in Federal Reserve history.

U.S. home prices almost tripled during the bubble, while real income for most Americans fell. The real estate bubble was obvious to many, in fact, it was a classic textbook example of an asset bubble. Many had forecast the bubble's bursting including, most notably, the economist Dean Baker. As the bubble peaked, Bernanke said the U.S. economy was in its "Goldilocks phase" and prices would continue to rise. Even after it was clear things were unraveling in real estate, he said the damage would be limited to a few sub-prime lenders, and no damage would result to the broader economy. How could he have possibly believed this, given that this was one of the biggest bubbles in financial history and he is a "renowned Depression scholar"? The answer is that he was lying. Or consider the flip side, that he really believed this hooey. Then one must conclude that he is a numbskull, having missed the bursting of this huge bubble and not knowing what the effects would be. Either way he is a poor Federal Reserve head and an obvious "tool" of Wall Street.

Recently, Obama praised Bernanke. This probably means Bernanke will be reappointed for a second term, but its a sign that Obama himself is hostage to Wall Street. Why else would the government have handed out so much money with so little observed benefit to the nation and the economy as a whole? Well, the answer to this is that the entire bubble and the resulting bailout was one giant swindle and the government was in on it. Both the Bush and Obama administrations.
See this Bill Moyers interview with William K. Black, a former Federal regulator on the collusion of government and banking.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

Goldman Sachs Sucks

Last week Goldman Sachs and several other banking titans including B of A, and JP Morgan Chase announced huge profits for the last quarter. In the case of Goldman Sachs the profits were over 3 billion dollars. How did they do it? They are such smart guys, right? Yes, they are smart but evil. Here is what they did. They took the bailout dollars first, then they sold all their toxic assets to the government using the toxic relief program. What they did next is amazing. They bought back the toxic assets from the government, at least the ones they wanted, and paid pennies on the dollar for them. Then, of course, they repackaged and resold these assets and made a killing.
This makes me want to see angry mobs with pitchforks and torches raging through the Hamptons. Perhaps a guillotine set up at the end of Wall Street? Will any of this happen? No, because the media isn't really reporting it, and people are too freaked out and scared to care. It will be another interesting chapter to history though, when the real story of Depression 2.0 gets written.

Depression 2.0

Why, oh why, does the media persist in calling the current economic malaise a "recession"? It's pretty clear to me, having lived through a whole lot of garden variety recessions, that this is no "recession". It's much deeper, longer lasting, and severe. It deserves the term depression. If you look at charts of GDP over the last century, the current crisis has actually seen a steeper fall off in GDP than in the Great Depression. So this qualifies our current "downturn" as a depression, and I've got a name for it: Depression 2.0. You know, we're here in the 21st century where everything needs to have a cute techno name, so what better name than Depression 2.0? Doesn't it feel more spot on than "the current recession" or "downturn" or whatever other euphemism the media and government have been using? I like it, and I'm going to use it from here on out.

Cheney's Death Squads

The New York Times just reported that Leon Panetta, the current head of the CIA, had this week informed Congress of an intelligence activity that has been going on for 8 years. NYT doesn't say what it is, but they report that Panetta just found out about it himself. This intelligence activity has apparently been discontinued by Panetta and he wanted to let Congress know that what the CIA has been doing for the last 8 years is no longer happening. But what is it?

The Huffington Post gives us a possible answer:

Another theory being bandied about concerns an "executive assassination ring" that was allegedly set up and answered to former Vice President Dick Cheney. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, building off earlier reporting from the New York Times, dropped news of the possibility that such a ring existed in a March 2009 discussion sponsored by the University of Minnesota.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it," he added. "It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."

So is this just the latest revelation to come from the Bush Administration's War on Terror? The latest in the history of U.S. intelligence murdering political opponents abroad in defiance of international law? In this case, the story is a bit more sinister because this particular unit was unknown even to the head of the CIA, but was under the direct control of Cheney's office. The Bush years were indeed ugly: torture, secret surveillance, and now, secret death squads payed for by our tax dollars.
Will Congress continue to shirk its duties to oversee the intelligence community which has clearly been running amok for years?