Bernanke Knows It's Comin'!

Bernanke more than likely knew that the economy would be headed toward a major free fall, although much of it has not yet arrived. Being the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, and surrounded by many of the nation's smartest MBA's, and economists from very prestigious universities, knew that Bush's "Ownership Society" was a scam designed to put lower and middle class working stiffs into harm's way.

As Dean Baker continuously hammer's home by repeating to us, that if your plan is to buy a house that has a 20:1 ratio of a house sale price to available rent cost, then forget buying it. If one is going to end up paying 15 or 20 times more in homeownership expenses than what it would cost to rent a comparable house, then one might eventually put themselves into harm's way.

Bernanke knew this. They had to have known! Why else would they not? This is not complicated. Bernanke is a scholar on the U.S. depression, and Bush has an MBA from Harvard. They cannot be that stupid! Or are they? Their plan was to keep interest rates low during a major housing bubble to sucker workers into buying subprime mortgages just so those mortgages could be bundled up into MBSs (mortgage backed securities) and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). 

By creating these off-balance sheet, shadow banking sites that originated the debt based securitized obligation bonds, which were undercapitalized, yet "insured" (credit default swaps) in order to bring on those suckers, oh, I mean worldwide buyers, who would very happily buy up these snake oil-styled artificially safe investments. Many were worldwide investment funds, such as sovereign wealth funds (government funds, such as the country of Dubai).

The purpose behind these home loans and the garbage securities game was to create very large pools of liquidity, even though there was very little capital to shore up the house of cards. The private equity funds, such as Apollo Management, TPG Capital and the Blackstone Group ("Crisis? What Crisis", Julian Delasantellis, asiantimesonline) with a minimum deposit of $1M to join in the game, often were buying up publicly-held troubled companies, while, at the same time, taking them off the exchange boards, gutting them, improving their balance sheets by firing employees and instituting restructuring measures with the end-goal of selling them again for a substantial profit. The dividends were terrific.

The sole objective was to exploit middle and lower income wage earners, pursuing an American dream of homeownership so the richest Americans could get much richer from what would eventually happen. And that was foreclosure. Now there are some 2 million homes in foreclosure.

This was the plan. This demographic was the only one left out there with some available cash, which could be leveraged to make all the others at the top of the pyramid-scheme much richer.

All the other wage earners stuck in the middle were maxed out on credit. The only group left were those at the bottom. 

Bernanke knew that if the "Bubble" broke, the government, in other words, the taxpayers, would bail the rich out making sure they wouldn't lose a penny of their private equity fund investments. Protect the rich under any and all circumstances. That is the neo-con Bush-McCain mantra. Keep the tax cuts permanent, even though he, McCain, voted against it. He just didn't comprehend within his little mind how devastating the entire domino affect would be.

Bush and Bernanke are keeping the federal funds rate (interest rate banks receive and lend to each other) as low as possible, so the drowning financial system can exchange their Monopoly money for government Treasuries in order to attract private equity fund groups to buy back their entangled MBS and CDO losses, which were how they got leveraged in the first place so they could borrow billions to buy those failing companies. They got stuck with subprime and defaulted loan obligations, too. So now, they get their bailout. Can't let the richest Americans suffer any squeezing. Therefore, for all essential purposes, it was planned that their risky investments would be "guaranteed" by the American taxpayers. Privatize the winnings; socialize the losses. Nationalize the banks, if need be.

Private equity used their relatively small amounts of capital, probably hundreds of millions, to borrow billions to buy a company. More than likely, they bought CDOs and CDSs to hedge their loans, too. It sounded so good! And so did the investment banks in order to turn that loan paper over to get cash so as to allow the private equity fund to buy that specific company. The bank more than likely needed to raise the cash that they loaned out to the private equity fund group. Turning the loan obligation paper over quickly, which they bundled up with a variety of loans, such as subprime, prime, corporate, auto, commercial, was the way to get the needed cash. 

They were all told that that these collateralized loan obligations and CDSs were nearly risk free. They bought into it. Why not? The stock market has been flat for years.

But not before too long, the rotten stink rose up to the top of the masqueraded perfume bottle and the holders of the soured derivative bond obligations saw their ultimate fate---huge losses. Through that sweet smell of Chanel was a putrid stink.

But the Bernanke-Bush plan was always a bailout, but they were not sure when it would happen. Bear Stearns rang the starting bell and the new bailout game was rolled out of the gate. Call in J.P. Morgan-Chase.

This became the Economic End Times Rapture. If you were not part of the exclusive revelatory membership of the holy converted mega-ultra-super rich, you did not rise to Bernanke Heaven with the Bush Godhead passing out newly printed Monopoly dollars.

The reason the equity groups and banks fall into this rescue relationship is that they help each other. The equity fund group increases their balance sheet with more infused capital on hand in order to attract more investors. The bank gets a reliable customer to clean up their books through the help of the Fed and Bernanke transfusing the bank with taxpayer dollars.

Now, they can go outside the country and get into the hot food commodities market, as well as other types of natural resources, such as industrial and precious metals (gold, silver, palladium, copper, uranium) and oil. It is clear that Bernanke and Bush have created this upward movement in food costs by keeping the dollar valued at rock bottom pricing.

Americans pay inflated prices for food and everything else, as well as spend all their available wages on paying bills, while the rich private equity fund groups are bailed out, which creates further enticement of the rich to jump right back into such privileged fund groups buying those ever lucrative investments.

Bush knew this would happen. Bernanke knew this would happen, too. Americans are the sacrificial lambs while the rich feast from their gluttonous wealth platters.

Bush, Bernanke, and the rich, including McCain, are contributing to current worldwide economic destabilization and the "unraveling". They knew it! They brushed it off.

Rice, wheat, soybeans, and oil have all become the new gold standard. If you hold these commodities and resources, then you have power and wealth. China is hoarding their rice and not exporting it. They are importing it from everywhere else with the gobs of U.S. devalued dollars. They are buying rice up at auction in order to spend down their extraordinary quantities of U.S. dollars. They feel there is not much else to do with them as they further descend into the abyss of a further devalued American dollar. The Chinese use dollars received from what we import from them, creating a massive trade deficit, which ultimately, hurts our economy because they have less to spend on items other than food, fuel, roof and energy. 75% of our GDP is made up of consumer spending. Bernanke and Bush and McSame, oh, I mean McCain, slow the economy and negatively affect working America's budget just so the rich can earn more millions by reaching into our wallets; therefore, we spend less to support the economy. Inflation grows higher.

McCain wants this plan to continue, since he has been a part of it for the last 8 years, and even longer going back to Reagan. He believes the richest people in American deserve a $325,000 tax rebate through instituting a permanent tax cut agenda. McCain told a group of Youngstown, Ohio displaced workers, just the other day, that their jobs were gone forever, that NAFTA was worth defending, and these trade agreements are an overall plus for the U.S. economy, even as he conceded that wage discrepancies and product dumping have hurt U.S. workers. He continues to live in the dark ages by saying such things as, "workers need to get retrained", and "we are in an information technology revolution". Is he brain-dead? Trained for what? The economy is tanking and workers have been getting retrained for 30 years! We have been in the information technology revolution for over a generation. And so has been the rest of the world. They are competing with us and continue to undercut our jobs! He really is McSame or McCan't.

This is John McCain's neo-con revolution: since 2000, oil has cost us over 300% more; the euro to dollar exchange rate has increased by 85%; and gold Troy ounces have gone up in value 245%. Over the past year, rice is up nearly 150%, and only 7% of the world's rice is exported.

This is McCain's political party. This is his legacy and vision for America. John McCain is our regressive political candidate running for president. We have no other choice but to support the Democratic nominee, whoever that person may be.

Shame On You Hillary Clinton!

Shame on you Hillary Clinton! And, of course, John McCain has no shame, either. McCain may not hear the votes on earmarks because he turns off his hearing aides (those congressional gophers that listen for him to tell him what he is supposed to do.) As he said, he knows nothing about economics and has to be told what it all means. Poor guy. If it wasn't for his elite status, he might actually be a working class stiff, like the rest of us.

Let us look at the elitist presidential candidates and rank them. 1. And 2. McCain and Clinton. 3. Obama.

How could McCain bring up the word elitist without including himself? Here he is born into social status and economic prosperity. After dumping his first wife, he then married into even more social status and even greater economic prosperity. Does McCain socialize with the working stiffs of Arizona or Washington? I doubt it.

Hillary also is an elitist. After law school, she found her way into the arms of Sam Walton. Not of John Boy fame, but of Wal-Mart (de)-fame. She was on the board of Wal-Mart. It does not get more elitist than that. Next, she moves to the governor's mansion and begins to cloak herself around the State of Arkansas' most elite high rollers. Did she make regular pancake breakfast jaunts, on those pleasant Sunday mornings, with the New York Times in hand, to clank coffee cups with Betty Mae over at Juniors Juke J0int Breakfast Haunt, and share dem stories about the best fishin' holes? I doubt it.

How did Barack get started in law? He was spending his time in Chicago doing hometown work. Not too elitist from what I can gather. So, shame on you Hillary Clinton!!

It is too bad that Hillary has shown what she really is and could very well be a  compulsive liar and one not to be trusted with anything she says or pledges to the American people. I believe she is compulsive or delusional.

She began her decent into the cushion of the psychiatrist's couch when she told us of her great trip to Bosnia with Sinbad, the comedian, as they flew to the war zone in March of 1996. She dodged sniper fire as she stood for photo shoots with a few groups of people, hugged a local school girl, while hanging out with the troops. WOW!! She Bad!! Don't mess with this gal 'cause sniper fire don't mean shit to her. She brushed those bullets off like they were packing popcorns. Mr. Bill's womanizing was a heckuva lot worse than sniper fire. That visit was a walk in the park!

Next, was her story about this pregnant woman losing her baby, as well as her own life, because she could not afford the $100.00 hospital bill. Another fairy tale lie to sweet talk the American voter into believing that she is credible, trustworthy, and human? It appears not to be so. The American people are not so convinced that she fits any of those three descriptors.

And then, she wants us to believe that she does not support free trade nor the Columbian Trade Agreement. Back in 1992, President Clinton pushed the Republican driven trade agreements--NAFTA and GATT--down our throats making the American worker believe that it would be good for us. Hillary supported those agreements by going around the country and stumping for their passage. 

Next, President Clinton and Congress passed the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, which basically took all significant regulation away from the financial sector allowing the banksta gangstas to sell debt for huge profits off the books and take the nation into the massive credit bubble we are submersed in today.

She says she is not for the Columbian Trade Agreement, yet her top campaign strategist, Mark Penn, stepped down although not fired and still working for her, because he had been lobbying on behalf of the corrupt president of Columbia, through the Columbian embassy in Washington, to get the trade agreement passed in Congress. He is the CEO of the very powerful firm named Burson-Marsteller. They are a big player in the peddling of the "influence" game so often written about in Washington. Penn's subsidiary, BKSH, has their dirty PR hands in Blackwater USA, too, as well as with other major multi-national corporations contracting with the Pentagon and the war.

Now, if this wasn't enough, she claimed that she had a significant role to play in the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement. She admits she did not sit at the negotiating table, but, nevertheless, "played an instrumental role". I guess she played bagpipes and pan flutes.

Finally, there are her votes for the surge and the Iraq war. She told a crowd in Texas as she headed into the primaries, that the United States had given the Iraqis "the gift of freedom, the greatest gift you can give someone. Now, it is up to them to determine whether they take that gift." HUH? After we killed 1-2 million Iraqis (depending on who you read), displaced another 2 million, and replaced their dictator with a powerful occupying force that represents all the values they don't want for themselves, she actually believes they have freedom and now it is up to them to make it happen? She is NUTS!! She has shown herself to be a full-blown elitist and totally out-of-touch with the real world; and, not Obama.

During and after her 2005 trip to Iraq, she said she did not believe that we should develop a timetable to exit Iraq because it would give "signals to the terrorist and the insurgents that all they have to do is wait us out." "I don't believe we should tie our hands or the hands of the Iraqi government." Then she later said, "There can be no doubt that it is not in America's interests for the Iraqi government, the experiment in freedom and democracy, to fail."

So I guess she and McCain have a similar view--100 more years in Iraq in order to make sure that democracy and freedom prevail, so a Shia government will never materialize. UH? That is what is over there now! The last time I looked Nouri al-Maliki is a Shia, and the Parliament is made up of sectarian fundamentalists from various tribal regions of the country that are battling it out for ultimate power. There is no democracy and there is no freedom. So Hillary, after nearly 6 years of war and occupation, when will the experiment begin?

*************************************************************************************

McCain has come out with a stale bunch of ideas:

-----The gas tax idea--I guess he has forgotten that gas taxes, most often, go to repair our

        transportation infrastructure, which is badly in disrepair.

-----Earmarks--He said he will veto any bill with earmarks stuffed inside of it. I guess he 

        forgets that many earmarks are dollars going back to home states and districts to fund

        many necessary projects, such as public infrastructure. Yes, John, there are those earmarks

        that are ridiculous, and they should be canned. Therefore, how about making earmarks 

        fully transparent and attached to bills presented on specific dates of the year.

-----McCain was key in the de-regulation of the financial sector bring about the financial crisis

       we are presently engulfed in now! And then, he was involved in the Keating 5 scandal.

-----McCain wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, yet he voted against it when Bush got

        them passed. So, why now? I guess he wants more big fund raising contributions from

       the billionaire elites and Bush elite supporters. (I talk in the video blog about how much               the rich will get in tax cuts. They will get nearly 400,000 per person!)

-----McCain continues to vote against our soldiers. He now will vote against them getting

        a full GI-bill for a college education. He feels they don't deserve a full ride through school.

        I guess, they did not sacrifice enough for him!

-----McCain has been critical of China for killing 100 Tibetans during the uprising, and 

        apparently objecting to their occupation of Tibet; yet, he says nothing of our occupation

        of Iraq and all the destruction that has been done.

Hillary voted for the following:

------She voted for the use of cluster bombs in Iraq, which is a reason so many civilians have 

         been killed, especially children.

-----She voted to give the Telecom industry no immunity from prosecution for giving up OUR

        identity to the government so they could spy on us Americans.

-----She supports giving voters payolla for her support. 

The Federal Reserve Mob Is Killing America's Economy

"Bugsy" Bernanke has been exchanging Wall Street banker's Monopoly money (mortgage backed securities that are worth-less) as the lender of last resort, but to the banker's delight, it has become the lender of first resort become the lender because of the cheap 2.5% interest rate. With the lending occurring daily at the Fed's get-it-while-its-hot Drive-Thru Discount Window, Bugsy has been handing it out at an astounding rate of $39 billion per day. Plus, Bugsy is offering $200 billion per week at his weekly auction facility. These transfusions of diseased collateral for healthy, fresh Treasuries will continue for, as far as we know, the next 6 months. When you add up the total, the American taxpayer will watch $5 trillion of OUR $17 trillion federal budget being handed over to a collective bunch of gambling shysters, who betted away other people's money and now want the Fed to take the secondary mortgage backed security junk bonds, which are worth a small fraction of what they originally were worth, off their balance sheets and replace them with currency that is actually worth something! Does this sound like a form of money laundering?

Bugsy takes a form of stolen money, which I say is stolen because these banksters knew they were selling mortgages to people who could not keep up with ballooning interest payments yet made huge fees and bonuses off those mortgages in the secondary investment market selling to investors who were lied to and told these collateralized debt obligations were virtually risk free and held the highest ratings by bond raters. Another big fraud. 

Fees, bonuses and big sells were all that these high-rolling fraudster bankers cared about. Therefore, the term stolen money is not used loosely. Mortgages that were bundled and wrapped up and sold, or gambled on, a couple times over began to show signs of rot. These Wall Street banks and the spider web tying them to the shadow banking companies that sold the secondary securities began to lose their capital foundations. They went to the Fed hoping that which still remained on their balance sheets could be salvaged and saved from further big losses in value after their mortgages and debt obligations began to default, foreclosure or found abandoned, would be worth something again. 

The Wall Streeter Bankster Gangsters were left holding considerably worth-less paper and saw their bank's balance sheets become top heavy and go upside down. Since the banks did not have enough capital to back up their newly acquired losses, and could not sell the once valuable on-paper debt obligations, they ended up going down with the Drano. Now, the richest of Americans are crying and want to be bailed out and have the American people tighten their belts and eat the losses for them so they can keep their lavish lifestyles. Don't you love it!

Our $17 trillion yearly national budget has 1/3 of it being handed over to the Pentagon (44 cents of every dollar), with much of it going toward the money pit called Iraq and Afghanistan, 1/3, it appears, will be handed over to the Wall Street shysters, who now have healthy capital placed magically on their tattered balance sheets so they can lend to each other in order to "creditize" (Did I make this word up?) this nation into a deeper and longer credit debt crisis. Are we not in in enough debt? We have a federal budget deficit approaching $500 billion, and a national debt of $10 trillion. Americans have absolutely no money saved, and their buying power is falling because the Dollar is evaporating in value by the day.

In many cases, these investment banks don't want to lend because they are trying to build up their capital so they have a nice cushion once commercial property defaults and credit default swaps, which I wrote about last week, begin to slap at them like a loose tarp tied up at only one corner as a gale force wind blows in.

Bugsy Bernanke and Paulie Paulson both feel that by unlocking the current credit freeze-up, a $5-6 trillion defrost is all we need to take the country out of recession and back into prosperity. Some are saying only a one trillion dollar thaw will be felt. I guess, that could then be viewed as only pocket change. No country has ever borrowed themselves into prosperity!

So, where do they buy this hallucinogenic Kool-Aid? Are there enough rich slobs out there wanting to buy more stuff? Are there enough rich Wall Streeters to pull us out of recession if they buy an extra beach house and yacht?

We have just seen four airlines roll over dead. Washington Mutual will be laying off 3000 employees and will close 190 of its 336 loan centers. Las Vegas is beginning to fall. 232,000 American jobs have disappeared since January. More lay-offs are in the works. Restaurant, services, and temp jobs are drying up (the last hold out in employment statistics).

Bugsy and Paulie, the monetary mob bosses, are hoping that business will borrow and expand during a time of recession, consumer inflation, jobs losses, and deflating dollar value. Who are these two guys listening to? Could it be a bunch of Republican Regressives who preach that letting the markets do their thing, but without regulation, and of course, with a government-socialized-bailout, is the best cure for such ills?

Dimwitted Bush and his minion of menacing marauders don't really want to do what is needed and will not disappoint the Wall Street mobsters, although they have already sold them out by devaluing the dollar so much that those Americans still holding out for a stable stock market valuation will only cry when they find out that the current Dow Jones figure is not what they think it is. The Regressives are really the Great Kreskin, full of illusions.

Kevin Phillips, wrote in his article, "The Destructive Rise of Big Finance", 4-4-08, www.Alternet.org; www.Huffingtonpost.com, "In fact, phony Washington statistics and warped market measurements make it doubly hard to tell. The Federal Consumer Price Index is already regarded by many Americans as a con job, and the press periodically quotes investors who state their belief that current U.S. inflation is really 6 to 9 percent a year, and not the 2-4 percent the government alleges. I agree. On top of which, because the value of the dollar has dropped so far, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the end of March was not really 12,200, a number barely up from its 11,700 peak in 2000. If you measure the Dow in Swiss francs or euros, two strong currencies, it has already lost some forty percent of its value. Too many Americans live in a dream-world of economic misinformation."

WOW! Does that mean that our Dow is really at 7400 due to the deflationary factors pushing down the value of the Dollar? And Mr. Phillips is a reputable writer and researcher. Have you finally woken up yet?

A barrel of oil is $110 when bought with dollars because that has been the currency used to trade in oil. The reserve currency of choice (dollar) may have reached the end of its life. Yet now, as the dollar deflates, it takes more dollars to buy one barrel of oil. What happens when the world no longer decides to use the dollar to trade in oil because of the deflated value? If we were another currency, that same barrel of oil may only cost $75 or $85.

What happens when the world decides that dollars are not worth having anymore, and countries begin to dump them on the street in auction just to get rid of them? Look out. A depression would sweep over us like a dark cloud just before a tornado.

The Fed is planning to further deflate the dollar on April 29, 2008, when it again lowers its discount interest rate below the current 2.5%.  I really cannot see it working. Bugsy, Paulie, and Dimwit's monetary policy should scare us all. Their belief that Americans will begin to miraculously borrow, once again, occurs in children stories from the 1950's. They believe they are the goose that laid the golden egg. But, as we know, it was only a fairy tale.

************************************************************************************

A Post script: Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling fact in a speech he gave around 4-4-08, that the NSA failed to eavesdrop on an Afghan terrorist calling a terrorist in the U.S. prior to 9-11, which may very likely be related to the 9-11 attack! His NSA (Condo Rice) just did not go forward to listen to this key page turner. Now, the 9-11 Commissioners are mum and will not speak about it and will not say if they even were given this information during their investigation!!! This is chilling. Did Dimwit Bush and the Evil Chenster hold back this cover up? Listen to a more expanded discussion of this impeachable, and probably, criminal act on the video or podcast. 

The New Government Wise Guys: Bugsy and Paulie

(To all those who hoped to see our latest video broadcast, you will have to wait a week. There is no new show this week.)

President Bush has consistently told the American worker, who was laid off by a company that decided to outsource all their jobs, that they needed to get retrained for the New Economy. What new economy? Does he mean the socialist new economy, for the wealthiest of all Americans? Does he mean the fascist new economy, whereby there is an interweaving of corporate and government interests solely to take care of each other?

If that is so, then why are we NOT sick of a pandering and protectionist policy that embraces Wall-Streeters who have driven their banks to financial ruin and then get hooked up to the Bush and  "Bailout" Bernanke Socialized Reform Policy in order to keep them deep within their riches-fix by supplying them with Treasury bills. If the economy is only hitting a bump in the road, then why do they need to get bailed out of their disasters? 

I guess Bush and Bugsy Bernanke are dealers. Bugsy is part of the Bush crime family supplying his boys with their Treasury bill fix in order to keep those Republican Party contributions pouring in. So, in other words, there is a direct line between Treasury, the Fed and the Republican National Committee. You get cheap bailout money; then you give payola. I think they call that quid pro quo.

Have we had enough of being told that "we" working class Americans need to be responsible by getting retrained for the tough new world economy, while the filthy rich banksta gangstas get to exchange their garbage Monopoly money (those nearly worth-less junk bonds called mortgage backed securities--MBS, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps) for low interest, 2.5% government T-bills? These slap happy banker CEOs, CFOs, and executives then go back out into their investment world to further their money making acquisitions that support their yacht and beach house habits. All these bankers, and even non-bankers (broker dealers), have to do is drive up to Bugsy's Federal Reserve Discount Window in their high end luxury cars, roll down their hand washed car tinted window, give over a bag full of Monopoly money and, in return, get brand spankin' new Federal Reserve money at a wholesale price. "Let me give it to you wholesale." Then Bugsy Bernanke, with his helmet on hoping no hopeless foreclosed citizen throws a brick at his head, says out the darkened sliding Discount Window, "Do you want fries with that?"

Mr. Danny Schechter, in his article, "Fed up: The Bush-Paulson Financial Reform Plan is a Bogus Scheme", 3-31-08, Alternet.org, wrote about the history of the Federal Reserve. "...the Fed is a private agency with no Constitutional authority run by bankers for bankers. It is a privately owned central banking system. Bankers sit on its many boards. The banks in turn get to borrow money at rates the Fed sets, and tack on interest and fees for loans. The Bank is there to do their bidding, and save them from themselves. When they run into trouble, they are then often bailed out."

He further writes, "On December 23, 1913...President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Wilson would later express profound regret over his decision, stating, "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation is, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, and one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world--is no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

I gather what he meant by dominant men were the Board of Governors, and, later, the more recent Plunge Protection Team members. Is this scaring you yet?

So, why has not Bush been impeached yet? Oh, yes. The cowardly Democrats are still around drinking from the public Kool-Aid trough. Did they forget that they were voted in for a purpose other than to make friends with lobbyists, capitulate to Bush and the Neo-con Regressives, and fear a few of their oppositional constituents? My mistake.

It was reported that 25% of all mortgages in the nation are upside down!!!!! And, there are 2 million foreclosures working their way into our future. 

Now, as Bush says to the banksta gangstas, "Go forward my good men and privatize the profits, and we will socialize the losses." So much for Limbaugh's mantra that "Roosevelt is dead. His memory may still live on, but his policies are dead." Limbaugh must be mainlining Oxycotin knowing he is wrong. Bush has clearly channeled FDR. We now have a socialized monetary policy. For a small fee all one has to do is put up garbage securities, and pseudo-insurance policies called credit default swaps ($500 Trillion) that cannot be sold to anyone and use it as collateral. In exchange, the winner gets freshly minted T-bills, at a cheap rate, so the banksta gangsta can go out and buy Swiss Francs or Euro-based bonds, which are worth more than dollars, in order to build up their bank's capital, increasing its overall wealth and stock price, and ultimately, the banksta sees a boost in his vested holdings. WOW!!! Does it get any sweeter? Do you see that the free market philosophy is a scam?

The heck with your vested pensions from your outsourced industry/factory job. Bugsy Bernanke and his wise guy pal, Hank "Paulie" Paulson never thought you were worth any assistance. Oh yes. I forgot. Get retrained!

Tell me why these fraudsters, who ran these tinderbox Wall-Street banks, which are and will likely be going up in flames unless a good trillion dollars or more of monetary policy hoses them down, were not told that if they wanted to obtain government T-bills they needed to attend the Fed's auction (TAF-Treasury Auction Facility) and put up real capitalized collateral if they want a few billion at the 2.5% interest rate? Why were they not told to sign up at the big tent, get a number, and bid for OUR money along with the other banksta sharks? Because none of them had enough capitalized collateral to put up. Their pockets were filled only with Monopoly money from the selling of leveraged debt obligations and credit default swaps (a form of betting). And most of those bets went so far out in the stratosphere that no one knew what they were holding or what they were really worth. As the subprime mortgages went down, the rest of the space debris fell upon their capital wiping much of it out. Holding 32 dollars of junk to 1 dollar of capital is not a good business practice from a Wharton School of Business graduate or one from Yale or Harvard. They all knew what they were doing. It was only about greed. And still is! There is no payback to straighten up these suits.

This is what the Fed should have done. They should have told those bankstas to go back to their offices and work out refinancing arrangements with the homeowners who needed it. But, they did not have to. These were not the rules, because there were no rules. Now Bugsy and Paulie are giving lip service to establishing some smoke and mirror regulatory rules. Paulie is handing over the regulatory policy to Bugsy, who is not a government employee, but a private officer whose sole purpose is to look out for the bankstas. It is like putting the fox in charge of the other foxes who want to continue to raid the hen house.

Does anyone trust this president to do anything right for the nation? He has not done so yet, so why start now. Why ruin his track record.

Finally, can anyone tell me what is up with this week's stock market surge? These Wall Street bankstas cannot help but to rub their giddy exuberance over all of us who work for a living. They bolster the stock prices and the market heads upward, while the rest of America, those of us who do our own grocery shopping, and own used cars, wonder in dismay just what is going on? Yet we see UBS write down $19 billion; Toyota and Ford auto sales decline by 10% and 14% respectively. Chrysler and GM take bigger hits. Even Honda sales dropped by 3%. Construction activity--down. Manufacturing Index is 48.6, the biggest drop in 5 years. 80,000 jobs lost over the last 3 months. And, millions of Americans are now receiving more food stamps than ever before. Now, Great Britain is reporting a recession about to hit their shores. So who's zoomin' who?

QUESTION ASKED TO GEORGE BUSH: "What's your advice to the average American who is hurting now---facing the prospect of $4 a gallon gasoline..."

BUSH: "Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4 a gallon gas? There's a lot [of] economic uncertainty. If you're out there wondering whether or not--you know, what your life is going to be like and you're looking at $4 a gallon, that's uncertain. In the long run, our economy is going to be fine. Right now we're dealing with a difficult situation."

Like I said, who is zoomin' who?