Binyamin Appelbaum Interviewed by Terry Gross, on Fresh Air

What the financial reform bill did and didn't do. Listen, and decide for yourself.




This next interview is about Wikileaks discussed with Philip Shenon, journalist, contributor to The Daily Beast. Very interesting! What is Wikileaks, what do they do, and how the US government is worried about it.

The U.S. Con Game Continues

The United States is engaged in a giant con game. President Obama continues to tell Americans, as he stump-speaks around the nation, that he is doing everything he can to bring back employment. This is a giant con game. This is not true. It is a distraction from what is exactly happening.

It is becoming more and more accepted by experts that another major recession is heading our way. We had a stimulus but it has now begun to fizzle and did not jumpstart our economy. It was just too small, and was not followed by additional stimulus packages at various intervals. Our Congress only debates the merits or lack thereof, but did not take it upon themselves to design and implement stimulus packages to further feed the economy with jobs and wages.

Instead, what we have are more and more workers falling off the edge who are no longer included in the jobless figures. Millions of Americans are unemployed, and millions more are underemployed. And, there are millions of unemployed workers no longer being counted. There are 400,000 more added to the list of No-Longer-Being-Counted. As more workers find their wages buying less than they bought last month and the months before, they will become a measured consumer pull-back of non-essential purchases. This will slow businesses, and even shut them down. This will be a significant drop in demand, and demand is what stimulates the economy, and increases the GDP. That will lead to more unemployed workers, more foreclosures, fewer homes purchases and an economy slipping deeper into recession.

The Repugnicons and Democons are preaching austerity to the victims of the economic abusers—the corporate capitalistic elite, who have drained our real economy of liquidity and capital in order to replenish their balance sheets that are attached to trillions of dollars of underwater derivatives, which they have not unwound and remain as a toxic risk upon the economy.

The Con Game’s bottom line is that both Congress and Barack Obama talk the talk but are failing to walk the walk with any credibility. There is absolutely no reality to their recovery scenario. They have failed to move fast enough to prevent it from really taking hold. They have allowed the predatory abusive financial rapists from giving restitution to their real economy victims. The way this should have been done was for Congress to have forced the TARPed and bailed out investment bankstas to take their profits and funnel it back into the real economy through available lending, which would have been the needed private sector stimulus to bring forth jobs and wages. But no, Congress has allowed the Financial Reform bill to end up as becoming a mediocre fix. Derivatives are still allowed to exist without transparency or traded on an open exchange, and left within the confines of the banksta’s grasp and not moved into a separate facility. In addition, they will allow the top 6 financial investment bankstas to remain TBTF. The TBTF banks will eventually weaken whereby one or more will require another bailout.

David Michael Green summed it up in his piece, “How That Recessioney Thing Working Out For Ya?”. “Here’s the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory over-class has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class [with] vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage, and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.”

Economics professor Michael Hudson in his piece “EU Today, US Tomorrow Europe’s Fiscal Dystropia: The New Austerity, when writing about Greece and Europe’s economic crisis and austerity programs, wrote “…creditors can get paid only at the economy’s expense. The remaining stimulus must go to them, not capital investment, employment, or social spending.” This sounds like the US today.

He went on to say that “a balanced budget in an economic downturn means shrinkage of the private sector.” “The New Fiscal Conservatism aims to corral all countries to scale back social spending in order to “stabilize” economies by a balanced budget. This is to be achieved by impoverishing labor, slashing wages, reducing social spending and rolling back the clock to the good old class war [days] as it flourished before the Progressive Era.” “The problem is that there is not enough economic surplus available to pay the financial sector on its bad loans while also paying pensions and social security. Something has to give. The commission is to provide a cover story for a revived Rubinomics, this time aimed not at the former Soviet Union but here at home. Its aim is to scale back Social Security, while reviving George Bush’s aborted privatization plan to send FICA paycheck withholding[s] into the stock market—that is, into the hands of money managers to stick into an array of junk financial packages designed to skim off labor’s savings.”

“What really is causing the financial and fiscal squeeze, of course, in the fact that government funding is now needed to compensate the financial sector for what promises to be year after year of losses as loans go bad in economies that are all loaned up and sinking into negative equity.”

Therefore, we are being conned into believing that the economy is in a slow paced recovery, when it is not true, since the financial sector has been bathed in the nation’s wealth at the expense of taxpayers and the real economy.

The administration continues their con game as BP continues to kill the Gulf of Mexico.

The world is engaging us into accepting their big con game. It was revealed, during the Canadian-Toronto G-20 summit that police disguised as Black Bloc anarchists were destroying property so their real police comrades could move in and make arrests. BO has touted great changes coming in the new financial reform bill, while derivatives, which were alchemized in Shadow Banks, can still go forward. Too many compromises spoiled the stew.

The corporate capitalistic oligarchs are in control. BP had stated that the Macondo well, back before it exploded, had 50 million barrels down in the cavern. At the rate it has been erupting, that well should have gone dry. Therefore, these oligarchs of oil have no idea how to accurately measure a damn thing, how to clean up an eruption let alone a large spill, or how to safely engineer a deep water drilling project. All they care about is cutting corners for profits and shareholders.

If a developer built homes that systematically collapsed months after the owners moved in, the developer would be arrested. Yet, Donald Vidrine, BP’s well site leader aboard the Deepwater Horizon well, has been placed on leave-at home. Why isn't this guy being questioned in a jail cell? It has been reported that BP appears to be covering oil-covered beaches with new sand in order to sweep the oil under their sand “rugs”.

We can thank the Oilygarchs, Ken Salazar, the MMS, BP-of course, Bush-Cheney, and Donald Vidrine, along with Barack Obama, as well as all the Oilybots running around who keep wanting to drill-baby-drill in the gulf without a deepwater drilling moratorium in order to make darn sure that any drilling is done right, and with transparency and competent regulators. Yet, what is now coming forward is that arsenic is rising to dangerous levels in the gulf because oil in the water keeps the natural arsenic levels from being filtered out. This could impact the added dangers filling up the Gulf of Mexico, and, in the future, as the gulf ocean drift currents head into the Atlantic Ocean contaminating the Atlantic marine life and beaches.

The extremely toxic dispersant, Corexit, is horribly dangerous!!! If it gets on your skin, it goes right THROUGH the skin. It ruptures red blood cells, causes internal bleeding and liver and kidney damage! All it has to do is splash on you and you can experience headaches lasting weeks, heart palpitations, muscle spasms, and even, bleeding from the rectum. Corexit can take the oil right into your organs!

The government and hired guns flying planes that are spraying Corexit dispersant in the heat of the night, is very likely to drift onto the land surrounding the shore, as well as kill the Gulf of Mexico’s marine life. This Corexit might actually be getting on the things you touch, the air you breathe, the soil you work with in your garden, if you experience the ocean air currents drifting over head.

This Corexit prevents oils from bonding to itself. We are made up of oils, therefore, Corexit, if it penetrates your body, will keep YOUR oils from bonding to itself, ie, red blood cells. This is a BPFrankenstein experiment with long term dangers that are being kept from the American people.

This is, no doubt, why there is a military lockdown in the effected zones, yet we are all kept from this information. And, obviously, the workers who are not allowed to dress in Hazmat suits don’t know, either. There is a blackout of real information.

Now, the Obama administration has turned the Gulf into a war zone restricting access to reporters, filmmakers, and others arresting “violators” who want to report on this horrendous story and the worst oil spill in America’s history. The transparency promised by Obama has turned into the secrecy policies of LilBoyBush and Cheney.

Another con job is the retention of our current Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar who, in April 2009, “allowed the MMS [Mineral Management Service] to approve—with no environmental review—the BP drilling operation that exploded on April 20, 2010 killing 11 workers and pouring millions of gallons of oil [and methane gas] into the Gulf of Mexico.”

Here is more from the Firedoglake piece written by Jacob Freeze “Obama Could Have Prevented the Deepwater Horizon Disaster: “ PB submitted the drilling plan to the MMS on March 10, 2009. Rather than subject the plan to a detailed environmental review before approving it as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the agency declared the plan to be “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis because it posed virtually no chance of harming the environment.”

More con jobbing went on at the Canadian-Toronto G-20 as the oligarch’s chief executive officers-- the world leaders of the various nations attending-- discussed how to screw the victims who were caught in the destructive webs of the financial predator spiders as they sucked the wealth out of the wallets of working people. They substituted the word screw with austerity.

With European austerity, so goes the private sector exports produced in the US. Then, so goes the US private sector economy, since there will be fewer peoples available to purchase what they produce.

What appears to exist is the preservation of Reaganomics. The neo-liberal, laissez-faire trickle down corporate oligarchy model of economics is what must be preserved proclaimed the financial crime syndicate bosses from within the White House and throughout the G20 conferences.

Nothing is really going to change for a long time as the whole economic cloth begins to tear. All that is being done is the allocation of needles and threads to try and patch it up. But the yarns are threadbare and lack the strength to hold and repair the economic cloth before it rips and shreds again and again.

The problem remaining is that many Americans would rather trouble themselves with what type of snacks to eat while watching Reality Television. The austerity iron fist is coming our way, even during prime time broadcasts, or should I say programming. It is about programming Americans to accept what they innately know not to be true to actually be true for them.

The mediocre health care bill and the financial reform bill are basically about giving Americans a slow dose of valium-like reforms. Just shut up and take this medicine. It won't really work too well but it is good for ya. Youbetcha!

It is not about change but about Reaganomics, trickle down, laissez-faire capitalism for the elite who use the government to further their wealth as they sacrifice the real economy, jobs, employment, opportunities, middle class personal and home wealth values.

And, at the same time the oil oligarchs had known the dangers of drilling off of the Louisiana coastline because of the mega-amounts of methane gas they had detected at the drilling site, as well as for miles around the site, since it had been seeping along with the oil from the sea floor. Was this a planned demolition of the Gulf of Mexico, killing it all for themselves? Possibly.

The President could care less what the people think. That was clear after he took office and moved 180 degrees from his semi-populist message during the campaign.

It IS all about jobs, President Stupid. Yes. It IS all about jobs. Stop conning us into believing you are doing everything you can to bring back jobs. No you are not! But this president is committed to listening to the Reaganomic neoliberals who sold out our jobs, as they did the Soviet Union economy under Robert Rubin, and moved US jobs elsewhere making the US the world's largest debtor nation and importer of finished goods and exporter of raw materials.

When austerity hits the US working classes, and the Eurozone, there goes even more jobs. As Americans have to live on even fewer dollars, there will be fewer shoppers, then there will be fewer workers serving the shoppers, and fewer businesses as a result of fewer consumers frequenting those businesses; and then, there will be fewer tax dollars entering the local school districts, local community budgets, state treasuries, and the federal treasury.

Professor Paul Krugman is very likely correct when he speaks of another depression heading our way.

As the corporate capitalistic financial elite robbed Americans of good jobs by outsourcing them to countries that offered cheap laborers, they turned skilled organized U.S laborers into janitors and service workers reducing their incomes while pushing them into becoming heavier debtors. Now the same thing is happening as a result of BP’s incompetence and criminal negligence. They are turning independent fisherman, guide boat operators, and others working independently in the business of fishing, seaside recreation, and the seaside way of life into service workers controlled by the corporate elite as they persist in turning the nation into a feudalistic country.

Barack Obama and the Congress are killing America. There are legislative bills, such as the financial reform bill, that are only about making it appear that there is real reform coming. The Geithner Spin is in! But the fact is that the investment banking syndicate is still allowed to brew up more derivatives through their shadow alchemy programs. Full transparency is not allowed.

This is more of the same garbage we had beginning in 2000. But now, the world is on fire, the Gulf is drowning, and working people are sinking.

thanks for reading, jerry

http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com

The 50 Ugliest Facts About the Economy

John Wathen's Incredible Video of a Dying Gulf of Mexico

http://bpoilslick.blogspot.com

Keith Olbermann Interview with John Wathen

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