President Obama Gives Good Speeches!

President Obama has become a huge disappointment when it comes to saving the country from itself. We had hopes that he would live up to his promise of Change We Can Believe In. It has morphed into more of the same stuff that Little Boy Bush left behind.

The new book series he is writing has been titled, “I Left It Behind”. Harry Truman entered the Oval Office scared out of his mind. He had a nation to attend to. He rolled up his sleeves and placed a sign on his desk, which read, “The Buck Stops Here!”

After attending the inauguration ceremony in the bitter cold, on January 20, 2009, we all had hope for real honest to goodness change. That day, millions of us felt we did the right thing by voted for this guy. We defended his inexperience, his message, and his call for change, but now I, and many other progressives, am heavily disappointed. I have become so disillusioned that I have coined a new name for President Obama. I am now calling him President Peacock because he has begun to strut his colorful plumy feathers in full display for all to admire and applaud. I could forgive a president who struts his stuff about town, such as when he flew into New York City---Manhattan, where he and his misses attended a show, dinner and the splendor of the city that never sleeps. Good On Ya Barack, but Harry Truman would not have done that until he felt the nation’s suffering citizens were willing to say, ‘You deserve it now, Mr. President. You really busted your butt for all of us!”

We had Little Boy Bush riding the jet plane to Crawford, Texas in order to play in his brush pile, wear his cowboy hat, and his fancy boots driving around the dry, acrid and arid shrub plain where he could talk “Texan” and not look so stupid. A war had emblazoned around him, and the economy had seriously begun to show signs of crumbling, yet he took more time off than any president in his first term. So, really what is there to complain about when Mr. and Mrs. Obama decided to fly, not halfway across the country, but just over the state line? Little Boy Bush logged more Air Force One frequent flyer miles than anyone in history.

So lately, President Peacock has been out-sourcing himself in the Middle East giving great speeches about reconciliation, communication, respect for religious beliefs, tolerance, the strength of the U.S. economy and the resiliency of the American people, as well as the goodness of good people, while doing the work to achieve peace along with extinguishing the threats of terrorism and fanatical extremism. Who can argue with those talking points? Yet, Mr. Peacock, what is the best way to achieve those lofty goals of yours, but for the United States to be an example of those goals, and for the president to correct the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, along with dismantling the evils of the Cheney-Bush legacy. Unfortunately, China is laughing at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner for claiming the U.S. believes in a strong dollar, as President Obama considers Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as his chief economic regulator. So, President Peacock hires the Wall-Street pyromaniacs to replant the burned out forest, but then, asks the senior fire starter, Ben Bernanke, to guard the matches. These actions by President Peacock show Americans, and the world that he is not Harry Truman, nor Franklin D. Roosevelt during the nation’s most critical, and dangerous times.

Since last year, and on into this current administration the focus has been on rescuing the greedy bankers who stole the economy from everyone else, and various bankruptcies that ensued the nation while sucking out of the treasury $14 trillion, as the real economy was engulfed by an economic firestorm. Beginning in 1999, as the Clinton administration waned furthering the Royal Scam upon the country with the construction of the Future Commodities Modernization Act of 1999, making it illegal to regulate the private investment scam artists and the shadow banking industry located within every major crime syndicate financial bank, which was signed into law by the administration of Little Boy Bush, which allowed for a massive financial heist of America’s middle class wealth concentrating it within the confines of our corrupt Wall Street institutions and then, grabbed by the top executives running those companies. And, of course, there was the shelving of the Glass-Steagall Act, as well, no longer placing a firewall between savings banks and the financial casino-like institutions, such as Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers.

As the Wall Street pyromaniacs began to experience the rapid fire storm sweeping subprime mortgages, 401Ks, foreclosures, unemployment statistics, then on into the prime mortgage market, pension funds, personal portfolios, and more, these banksta gangstas sitting in the executive suites of the biggest financial institutions were still buying their second and third homes, luxury cars, yachts, airplanes, condominiums, collectible art, country club memberships, and stashing their liquid wealth into accounts opened in places like the Cayman Islands, and other tax haven hideaways.

As Pam Martens tells us Sandy Weill, for example, the former CEO and chairman of Citigroup, walked away from his job with $1 billion in ill-gotten gain. What did he actually create at Citi? Did he create a company with sustainability, job security, or tangible products, like shampoo, or dog food? No! He walked away from a burned out company that he set on fire through “creative” gambling securities scams, through the hocus pocus of imaginative and make-believe AAA rating agencies, credit default swaps, and other bogus scams.

And now, because of the erosion of the Glass-Steagall Act, defining the boundaries between banks and financial institutions, the data released from the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC), on March 31, 2009 revealed “there are 8,246 FDIC insured institutions with total assets of $13.5 Trillion and domestic deposits of $7.5 Trillion. Four institutions, Bank of America Corporation, JPMorgan Chase and Co., Wells Fargo and Co. and Citgroup Inc., four institutions out of 8,246, control 35% of all the insured domestic deposits and 46% of the assets according to the March 31, 2009 figures from the FDIC.”

Ms. Martens went on to report that Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve has not done anything to reduce this massive concentration of wealth into the hands of a very small portion of the population, and the collusion to corral more government funds to stuff in safety deposit boxes and fatten up balance sheets, since the crisis began, but has encouraged this concentration allowing these monopoly banks to absorb their financially wounded competitors at Blue Light Special prices. Such actions create even bigger “too-big-to-fail” behemoths that when found dying in their insolvency holes drowning in stale champagne, will ask Congress twice over for trillions more treasury minted dollars calling out once more that the sky will turn black, and the country will face mortal danger if they are not rescued again.

The Wall-Street taxpayer bail-out amounting to $14 trillion far exceeds the mere $500 billion offered up to Main Street’s real economy. The Wall-Street bail-out is 25 times bigger than the Main Street offering. Now, had this been reversed, we would be seeing a resurgence of new manufacturing jobs sweeping the work force, no doubt, contributing to a Green economy that would be exportable reducing the trade deficit, stimulating consumer spending, stabilizing the housing market, and replenishing the lost retirement dollars. But, President Peacock, and his flock of financial fundies have not moved toward such sensible solutions.

Part of the national bail-out is the U.S. government’s 60% investment in General Motors, which according to Robert Reich, the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and professor at the University of California-Berkley, GM will eventually be no more. The only reason for the $60 billion rescue package is “designed to give the economy time to reduce the social costs of the blow” when its assets eventually get sold off and the company no longer exists. Dr. Reich went on to say that the $60 billion would have been better spent had it been allocated to retrain auto workers, as well as to give them extended unemployment insurance as they become retrained for other jobs.

As we recall, GM was able to retool during the build up to World War II in order to manufacture tanks and other war machines, therefore, why cannot GM retool to manufacture high-speed rail cars for the development of intra-city transportation corridors? Or, electric cars, such as the Aptera. But, President Peacock has stated that we, the investors who now own controlling interest in GM will say nothing about the products this dying automaker will manufacture. It appears that the GM brand name will eventually be sold to China, as has gone the Hummer.

Dr. Reich wrote that GM was once the nation’s number one private employer with strong middle class jobs paying $60 per hour to workers not requiring a college education. Today, Wal-Mart has replaced GM with their $10 per hour jobs. This is part of the new American paradigm shift the nation has been willing to accept over the last 30 years. Sit down, hold on, and shut up seems to be the mantra of Wall-Street to Main Street.

The real economy jobs are disappearing. Credit is not flowing. Borrowing has narrowed. The economy has contracted more than 6% average annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2008, and first quarter of 2009. From December 2007 through April 2009, the economy has burned up 6 million jobs. Dr. Morici has estimated that the economy will likely have lost more than 8 million jobs as the recession wanes.

The editor note on the website layoffdaily.com has calculated that “we would need 48 straight months (4 years) of 350,000 jobs added a month to reach January 2008 employment levels [which had been 4.9% and considered full employment]. Keep in mind that to get there, we need every last one of these rosy projections to happen [create 7 million jobs to get back to 4.9%, adding 137,000 new jobs to keep up with the pace of working-age population growth], plus a sustained job growth rate unseen in our lifetime, plus no worsening or new financial crises, no additional sector collapses, no double dip recession, and no black swans.” Wow! Now that is a tall order for President Peacock!

According to Tyler Durden of zerohedge.blogspot.com, it seems that credit default swaps, those bets that specific stocks will drop in value, continue to be purchased in the billions of dollars every month in nearly every sector. He wrote that the “net notional value change [with JPMorgan] was an almost record $2.1 billion in the name alone (on $52.1 billion in gross) on a ridiculous amount of contracts.” The gambling continues. The real economy suffers. And, Ben Bernanke, Timmy Geithner, President Peacock and Congress sit on the sidelines doing nothing to control such stuff.

Bernanke had spoken about keeping mortgage interest rates down in order to encourage home buying, but he has been buying up mortgage backed securities, and treasury issues that he has been printing up, which has driven up mortgage interest rates, and not dropped them. It just seems Bernanke has been saying one thing to the homebuilders but doing another to sabotage their survival.

There is good reason to be disappointed in President Obama. What he has done is just not good enough. It seems he was promising us more, but it appears we misunderstood those great speeches he gave us. The motto, “Change We Can Believe In” was just part of a darn good speech.

Thanks for reading, Jerry

The October Surprise-The Final Bailout, a New Faith-Based Initiative

Barack Obama demonstrated an observation John McCain had made of him, although for a  different reason one might expect. McCain called Obama stubborn. How right he was! Obama had stubbornly given McCain too many passes during the debate. For one thing, McCain needed to be called on his view that the surge had worked, therefore the war in Iraq strategy was correct. Wrong, John! The reason the surge had quieted the bloodshed is not a result of the troop increase but because Muqtada al-Sadr declared a ceasefire BEFORE the troops landed on the ground. Al-Sadr will likely make a run for Iraq's prime minister position, therefore he wanted to quiet the resistance.  In addition, the Pentagon paid the Sunni Awakening Council millions of dollars to resist shooting at our soldiers, while we occupy Sunni territory. But the original mission of the surge was to give "breathing room" to the Iraqi parliament so they all: Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias could come to a power-sharing agreement. This has not happened; and, a year has passed! Therefore, the mission for the surge has failed.

A second Obama "Rope-the-Dope" opportunity missed was McCain's "love for the troops" statement, and how his "take care of them" line was false. McCain has not taken care of them. He voted against increasing funds, early on and before the outrage over the lack of protection for soldier safety, which Rumsfeld failed to deliver. The nation's anger over the lack of body armor, and inadequate Humvee plating became a huge outcry. Plus, soldiers were calling for additional time off between deployments, and "Stop-Losses". Soldiers were not even offered the same G.I. Bill that McCain was offered; nor were soldiers receiving timely medical and psychiatric care; injured soldiers even had to pay for their own clothes and phone cards while in the hospital; and, we all recall the deplorable conditions that Walter Reed Hospital had fallen into. All of these examples were not championed by McCain- the Change Candidate, the Maverick, the Outspoken One; and, he had to be led kicking and screaming to "take care of them". McCain did not vote for additional down time between deployments. His reason to vote against the upgrade to the G.I. Bill was because he felt soldiers would not stay in the service long enough for his liking. He voted with the president over 90% of the time. 

Obama needs to get-up-to-speed and utilize every defensive and offensive strategy available, otherwise the mentally-ill Republicon candidate will, once again, frame the debate. 

Also, it is OK to acknowledge specific points that you and your opponent agree on, but limit them to one or two. Keep the rest to yourself, Barack!

If Obama has not realized that McCain is a mean, angry, and mentally-ill individual, at this point in the race, then he has a real problem. When McCain got up on stage to debate Obama, he fell back into his months as a POW mustering his deeply rooted survival mechanisms needed to resist the physical and mental torture laid on him by his Vietcong captors. McCain has never resolved those psychiatric problems, and therefore, would use them as president, negatively impacting upon his decision-making, if elected. In addition, his judgement is impaired. Just look at his choice of a running mate. What was wrong with Olympia Snowe, John? Not dumb enough? Too much experience? Not a strong enough Hillary vote grabber? Oh, Olympia couldn't see Russia from her house! And, did not have a witch-doctor for a pastor; or read too many newspapers; or could recall more than one Supreme Court case. And, of course, did not look like Tina Fey!

As Michael Whitney ( Counterpunch.org) described in his article, (of which I will add literary color!), Hank "The Paulie" Paulson staged a take over of the entire financial system not unlike a small time crime boss gathering forces to overthrow a kingpin crime mobster's money laundering business. Whitney said, "He rose to power in a stealthily-executed Bankster's Coup in which he, and his coterie of dodgy friends declared martial law on the U.S. economy while elevating himself to supreme leader." This even held true on 10-1-08. It is Paulie's October Surprise, aided and abetted by the Congress, and his side-kick Bada Bing Bernanke. These two cranks held the congress at gunpoint threatening to blow the lid off of the entire pop-stand if they didn't turn over the money. "Give me the money or the whole place will go up in smoke." Then he turned to the knee-shakin' bankstas, and said, "I own ya know, boys!"

Mike Whitney went on to write that "the days of the republic are over." Section 8 of the first bailout bill said that--

                 "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of the Act are non-reviewable                      and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law                      or any administrative agency."

Does this sound like a democracy? Neo-fascism has now been passed into law by Congress. This is a milestone moment. The Republicons, and assisted by Democons, have moved for the legalization of corruption and to be directed by a unitary executive Treasury Secretary, assisted by the Federal Reserve chairman! The foxes are now in charge of the henhouses. "No one comes in or goes out without see us first, hens!"

Obama voted "yes". It is all about the bankstas, who have brought nothing to economic growth but a financial tsunami, while abandoning a national economic CPR plan which would begin to improve economic growth. Peter Morici, Noriel Roubini, Dean Baker and others have outlined a plan that would not reward the fraudsters on Wall-Street. Unfortunately, Obama is not listening to them, either. Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jared Bernstein are at the bottom of his advisory list, and these two should be at the top. Peter Morici's article describing how we got to this point, and his excellent solution to the crisis can be read here.

There was no Democratic congressional outrage over the Putin-style takeover of the private financial system by the Treasury and Fed, enriching these corrupt Wall-Street CEOs who will show gratitude by writing large campaign contribution checks to the Republicon Party. Will the capitulating Democons be left out? "Oh please, throw me a bone!"

The Act stated this: "designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Government, and they shall perform all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them." I guess this means that loans will be dished out as dictated by the Government! Only those who give sizable campaign contributions are allowed into the newly established Mr. Paulie's Credit Club House.

There it was laid out by the kleptocracy that the U.S. government now controls the financial institutions, which will be paid for by the taxpayers. Don't you feel excited to be part of the game now?

According to a highly respected economist, Michael Hudson, the Treasury will use $800 billion from the Social Security Administration's account to bail-out/buy-out the Banksta Gangsta fraudster's over-leveraged, under-capitalized, and value-less toxic derivatives sitting on their balance sheets. Go ahead and use the middle classes' freshly withheld and hard-earned social security contributions. Steal from the poor and give to the ultra-rich who gambled it all away and now want a government handout so they don't miss payments on their existing vacation homes, or luxury cars, or Radcliffe tuition payments, or Lear jets, or Italian vacations, or 500 karat diamond necklaces. These bankstas are very likely Republicons who don't even pay a fraction of their incomes into social security, while most of us pay 100% of our incomes into the fund.

Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, and now, Obama, and McCain, along with their human side-arms, held a gun to the heads of millions of Americans, making up a majority of them, called, emailed, protested in the streets, and faxed their voices by bellowing out that they do not want to take the poison pill, which they were told was the thing to do for the country. They are all like the preacher, Jim Jones, who told his cult followers to take the Kool-Aid suicide drink for the good of the cause.

I cannot even recall Bush or his crime family henchmen ever doing ANYTHING for the "good of the country" unless it involved a Lie-Based Initiative Greed Program. Read the Act here. Dig more here.

Are you happy that the Royal Bank of Scotland and every other foreign central bank in the world holding bad debt will get a chunk of bailout money by selling it to the Treasury, and in return will receive bailout taxpayer money? Why? To keep them from dumping dollars on the open market? Now, it could also be to allow those banks to freely obtain Treasuries which could later be used to BUY Treasuries, next year, to help pay for an increasingly rising budget deficit. Today it is $410 billion. Will it be higher for 2009, and not lower as Bush has projected? 

The Russian president, Medvedev has said today in the Australian News that U.S. economic hegemony is coming to an end as he spoke before a Russian-German development forum. "We must work together towards building a new and more just financial-economic system in the world on the principles of multi-polarity, supremacy of the law and taking account of mutual interests." Does it really matter exactly why we got ripped off other than we got ripped off? It has been done. Here is another tidbit about the bailout. Banks can hold as little as ZERO reserves to cover deposits.  How about that? This bailout has nothing to do with Main or Side Street as the Bush Crime Family and their congressional surrogates have led us to believe. It is about protecting the Crime Family and those linked to it worldwide. It is about protecting the wealthiest among us and keeping their purses full. No bankruptcy courts for them. No transparency for their balance sheets or debt valuations. No indictments.  Steely Dan wrote a song in the 1970s called Royal Scam; and that is what we now have before us!

Obama said today, 10-1-08, that if he becomes president, he will thoroughly examine the bill and make sure the taxpayers are paid back in full. Oh yes. Don't you feel better already? Once the house catches fire, in a few months, he will come back with the fire extinguisher. 

Barack,  you really give me comfort.

Thanks for reading,  Jerry

TIDBIT: McCain says that because Sarah Palin was a PTA member helps make her qualified to take the seat of the president, if need be. He went on to say she has experience, yet Obama doesn't have experience? Is McCain of sound mind? Watch the clip here.  Watch the entire 9-30-08 Des Moines Register interview here.

POSTSCRIPT: We have been saying all along that we don't need these big financial institutions to function as a nation! Watch the Dr. Dean Baker video on the next page. I agree with his assessment that we don't need these banks. Only the shareholders, and CEOs want this bailout! Just tell the depositors to remove their life savings and redeposit it in their local and regional banks.

Toxic Banking Bailout- The September Surprise!

The political system is once again, creating a new quandary for our nation due to its failure to build a transparent government. Without appropriate supervision of its operations, and a necessary level of regulation to make sure the system responds to its own best interests and practices, and not for a select few, our democracy cannot work effectively.

This is how the derailment occurred under the direction of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, our nation's central bank dating back to 1913. Along with a capitulating series of presidents, who followed the prescribed philosophy of unbridled and secretive capitalism under a trickle-down theory through a pyramid-style economic methodology. Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Phil Gramm, and many within the Republican and Democratic Parties have presented us with the unbelievable meltdown we are all witnessing.

The late John Kenneth Galbreith, claimed that the trickle-down theory was responsible for the Panic of 1896. It was called by the elites of the time "The Horse and Sparrow Theory", meaning that if you fed the horse enough oats, the horse would pass on its good fortune to the sparrows hanging out along the road. No Sh*t! There is absolutely no example of trickle-down theory working anywhere in the world, as far as I have found, that would justify continuing it, beyond this point in time. It is only an idealistic, pie-in-the-sky theory.

I am no economist, but only a lay person intrigued by the crime story that has surrounded the privileged elite controlling the credit markets starting with the most powerful on top and moving on down to those who wanted to buy a piece of the wealth-accumulating dessert. 

This 30-year run has led us to where we are today. 30 years ago this crime story began establishing its foothold, building its operations and soldiers creating a cyber-wealth empire, which has amounted to somewhere between $450-500 trillion in worldwide toxic derivatives now woven throughout the fabric of foreign central banks, financial institutions, private equity funds, hedge funds, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. Now this cyber-wealth is on the verge of melting down exposing deceptive, secretive, greedy, and extremely under-capitalized practices. 

What has been uncovered is that President Reagan's free market, trickle-down economic express-train policy, driven by his senior engineer Alan Greenspan, has finally hit the inevitable wall. Its theory was to let those at the top of the pyramid acquire all the wealth they could, and through its basic fundamentals trickle-down as a stimulus to those "sparrows" hanging along the roads of Main and Side Street. We just saw that it failed. Those 10% at the top have acquired massive amounts of wealth, while the economy has failed leaving the middle class to suffer with foreclosures and the shrinking of real wages. What we also witnessed was the top of the pyramid collapse, and and the top-tier wealth accumulators seeing their lending financial institutions fall into conservership, insolvency or bankruptcy because of their trickle-down principles. These institutions have ended up holding toxic debt that was virtually worth-less requiring them to activate their distress calls to congress and the White House. "Help, help. Save our wealth."

Now the Treasury, Fed, and President have decided to create a new Pyramid Scheme but not molded out of private free market theory, but from a socialistic, unitary executive model, which would allow the Federal Reserve, a private entity, to use taxpayer funds to buy private corporations, as they consolidate power over the private economy. 

By infusing the largest failing financial institutions with the previous recipients of the Fed's 2% open window, we will witness over one trillion dollars of taxpayer-treasury funds being given out to the Bush "Haves and Have-Mores". In addition, the Fed has provided foreign sovereign wealth funds, and foreign central banks with taxpayer-treasury funds because they're angry over their losses resulting from the Pyramid Scheme, since they ended up buying leveraged-out, AIG insured (through credit default swaps that are worth-less), and collateralized debt obligations made mostly out of mortgage debt. YIKES! Those countries took a major wealth-loss hit and want the U.S. government to bail them out, too. They seem to have forgotten that such investments are NOT safe, nor guaranteed by the U.S.  government, but risky. This has been the Great Unwinding for those at the top, or close to the top of the Pyramid Scheme. If you were not such a big player, you ended up drowning. As with the Titanic, only the elite and privileged got to the lifeboats in time leaving those in steerage to meet their fate. Remember, they all were told that the Titanic was unsinkable. That was what Greenspan and the financial institutions told their trickle-down investors, as well. SOL, as they say.

The new trickle-down fundamental is to privatize the earnings and socialize the losses. This is what McCain means when he says the fundamentals are good. They are good for the wealthiest 10% of Americans, not the many who have seen a $300 per year loss in real wages.

So how will it all unwrap over the next month, three months, 12 months? If I knew, I would be a rich guy, too. I'd be on Letterman, Oprah, Leno, and Larry King. O'Reilly would be begging me to go on his show, but I would refuse and call him a jerk on the phone. I'd be on a big-time tour, with Bono, and Krugman, and Roubini, giving out advice and selling my book and Internet newsletter. I'd have a cottage by the lake, and a loft in the city. I'd be sitting pretty during the Great Unwinding. There would be groupies wanting me to analyze their investment portfolios. You know the schtick.

But based upon my gut intuition, the Bush Bailout Plan is unsustainable. The Bush Crime Family Conspiratorial Mothership has one goal in mind, and that is to retain power for their constituents at the top of the Pyramid. The only way to do this is to get McCon elected. If and once elected, the Bush/Cheney crime bosses will hop off the White House grand cruise ship and onto their exiting water craft for safer ground. McCon and McPalin will be left to drift in the dangerous economic waters for 4 years as they so desperately campaigned for.

What the McCons don't realize is that the U.S. does not have any money of its own left to spend, therefore, they must print more for the Grand Infusion. They rely on foreigners to supply us with funds to shore up and patch up a leaking dyke. Will there be a time they will curtail their generosity toward a nation who has squandered it for "more wars, my friends", or the Halliburton/Blackwater/etc war machine, or the huge spying enterprise, or the aggression and hostility directed toward others? There is a strong possibility of it ended up backfiring into their faces affecting their own self-interests. Can the dollar improve under this new socialized economy? Or will we see that these emperors, in fact, have no clothes, as the credit market fails to loosen up out fear as cash-strapped consumers put up the duct tape and plastic around their lives waiting for the economic fallout to pass further freezing up the economy. Does this sound like 1931?

Deflation is not to be disregarded. Nor is inflation, for that matter, as it impacts upon many life-sustaining essentials. A value-less dollar is a possibility. Can banks go under while holding on to their government/taxpayer-paid-for and issued treasury life preservers? Yes! How can the U.S. repair and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan while we, too, crumble under the tribulations of war right here at home? I don't see much time left.

The top-tier banksta gangstas wanted a guarantee that no "economic insurgents" would fire upon their financial institution's value, which remains weak, rotten, and vulnerable. Plus, these CEO administrators want to make a ton more money by wagering on themselves without the threat of the big, bad "economic insurgents" betting against them. This is how neo-fascism works. The government protects its own and, in this case, it's the big political party supporters and holders of the oligarchy's wealth. It all comes at a price! The Republicon Party and those making up the Demo-Con sub-party capitulators, such as Lieberman, will see bigger and fatter contributions fill their purses unless congress stands up to the Paulson/Bernanke/Bush/Banksta criminals.

The Bush administration responded to those he refers to as "my base" who wanted to protect themselves form the "economic insurgents", who are also known as "short sellers". These are investor/traders who bet that the stock price would fall because the company's fundamentals are not strong. Short selling has now been declared illegal for 800 chosen stocks, including G.E., allowing the "haves" to bet on themselves without the fear of the "insurgents" coming after their unbridled speculation.

Bush once said, "we fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here." But the war is right here in America and most people don't realize it, although it has been very clear to many more of us this week. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan was partly created as a distraction from the economic war right here in America brought to us by the Wall-Street Gangstas, and their crime bosses. There is a war between Wall-Street, and those living on Main and Side Street. Protect Wall-Street first. They get the U.S. backed Protection Service. March forward and manipulate the heck out of the markets. Give protection money to foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds to keep them from dumping their U.S. Treasury bills and bonds, or dollars on the open market. By showering them with bailout funds, Hank "The Paulie" Paulson, and "Bada Bing" Bernanke, along with the White House crime bosses, have encouraged those international bankers to continue to fund our debt, USING OUR GOVERNMENT ISSUED BAILOUT MONEY. WOW! What a deal!

I believe if the government wants to socialize these financial institutions, then take them over. Cut the investors out. Let them take their hits. Replace the greedy CEOs. Remove their golden parachutes, bonuses, salaries, stock options and send them home. Raise taxes on the top-tier wage earners. Carve up these mega-financial institutions into smaller, more controllable, transparent and regulated entities. These corporate thieves, foot soldiers and "benefactors" must feel the pain and not the middle class who were victimized by their rise and fall.

In addition, we need to realize our hegemonic failure in the Middle East and shut the wars down. Leave the bases and stop the human and economic losses. Orchestrate a massive industrial rebuilding movement that would focus on alternative energy and re-engineer an alternative energy grid. And finally, provide single-payer health care allowing workers to move between employers, or start their own businesses without the fear of losing coverage,  and remove the heavy health care burden experienced by businesses, which drains valuable capital needed for expansion. 

You have just read my views from only one set of eyes and one mind.