Ian:
What happened to Walker? He was pretty decent when he was working for the Gov’t. Maybe he was hiding it until Petersen employed him. Or maybe it took the financial crisis to really expose Walker. Either way, Petersen is the lowest of scum.

I believe that it was paulson that said that if any strictures, such as salary limits or taxing the pay of the ceo group, were placed on the money that was to be poured down this rat hole, the bankers and business leaders would not agree to take the money. So what could be done except to give in to the business leaders since they were in a position of strength.

Suggesting cuts in health care and social security after giving bankers trillions is so deeply wrong it borders on evil.

So?

Galbraith is right about those Pete Peterson fuckers — they were awfully quiet while the banking crisis was looming:

Peter G. Peterson is one of the leading figures on Wall Street. Isn’t it reasonable to ask, that if he and his team wish to be taken seriously on matters of public finance, that they should have shown some leadership, some wisdom, some insight and some foresight on the disaster brewing in their own backyard?

The Peterson bullshit will be used as a justification for the Blue Dogs and insurance companies to go all “pay-go” and block meaningful healthcare reform.

Stupid or evil, it’s hard to tell.

Stupid or evil, it’s hard to tell.

may i suggest both?

The next shoe do drop right on the heads of the working class.
Something is going to give eventually, after all, one single straw broke the camels back.

what walker is talking about sound just like the prescription the imf gave countries in trouble in the ’90s – and every time it either made a recession worse or a bad recession into a depression. i’d seriously like to know how many people died because of bullshit “advice” like that.

there’s a great stiglitz quote on this, i’ll go see if i can find it.

Thanks Ian.

digg

OT – but as if anyone really needed another reason to hate Pat Buchanan, he just came out on a special Sunday night Hardball and flat out said that Powell’s endorsement was only because Obama is black.

yo, MSNBC, can you fire him *now*, please?

“the IMF riot”

a small part of it, from palast, in 2001: The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold

my bold

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, “confidential,” “restricted,” and “not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization.”

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a “Country Assistance Strategy.” There’s an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank’s staff ‘investigation’ consists of close inspection of a nation’s 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a ‘restructuring agreement’ pre-drafted for his ‘voluntary’ signature (I have a selection of these).

Each nation’s economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.

Step One is Privatization – which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, ‘Briberization.’ Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders – using the World Bank’s demands to silence local critics – happily flogged their electricity and water companies. “You could see their eyes widen” at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest ‘briberization’ of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. “The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don’t care if it’s a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin” via kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Chairman of the President’s council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia’s industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.

After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is ‘Capital Market Liberalization.’ In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the “Hot Money” cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation’s reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

“The result was predictable,” said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.

At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, “The IMF riot.”

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,” as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples – the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You’d almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, “confidential,” “restricted,” “not to be disclosed.” Let’s get back to one: the “Interim Country Assistance Strategy” for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states – with cold accuracy – that they expected their plans to spark, “social unrest,” to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That’s not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador’s currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank “Assistance” plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, “political resolve” – and still higher prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it’s bright side – for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia ’subsidizing’ food purchases, “when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome.” The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia’s financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges.

A pattern emerges.

Shock Doctrine pattern.

I wanna see if KO will make Buchanan one of tomorrow’s Worst Persons

For all intents and purposes all of that money is going to rich people. It is all going to the financial sector to bail out people who paid themselves billions and billions of dollars of bonuses and salaries, who continue to do so, who have no shame, and who, while paying themselves that much money. destroyed the world financial system and are taking the world economy into a very very bad recession as a result.

I’m going to flourish in the coming year, I’m opening up a chain of Torch-n-Pitchfork stores…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the ultra-rich are TRYING to destroy America. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union and how the wealthy became plutocrats. Imagine Sarah Palin as the Queen of the Nation of Alaska (or “Aliaskia” in her parlance).

Or just extrapolate the Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’ to its logical extreme.

The rich are plundering the ship as it sinks.

I wanna see if he’s on Rachel’s show, and if he’ll try that line in front of her. I hope so – she’ll rip his lips off.

ding, ding ding!!!

The IMF should be re named the UFIA.
( Uninvited Finger In Ass)

H/T Fark.com

Or just extrapolate the Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’ to its logical extreme.

not extreme. this is what has happened in country after country. it’s been done by our elites (bipartisan all the way) and now it looks like they trying it here.

the only differences are that they are bringing it home, and that we’ve had a very mild version so far. but it looks like there’s going to be an attempt to go all the way.

What else can be expected of sociopaths?

don’t know… but one thing i think needs to be stated up front: when this was being done to all the other countries? it was the clinton administration doing it.

i say this not to give people grief, but as fair warning about what we should expect from the neoliberals. they are not our friends.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Clintons – people who are tight with the Rothchild’s can’t be real progressives – just a fact.

As long as the underlying problems which caused the housing bubble and financial meltdown remain unaddressed, all this money, huge though it is, will be wasted and the final price tag will only increase. And I should emphasize again that not one of them has been addressed: distressed homeowners, bank insolvency, deregulation, and derivatives. Trillions have either been spent or are committed but so far for nothing, except for the increasingly dubious strategy of kicking this disaster down the road and into the next Administration.

OT – but as if anyone really needed another reason to hate Pat Buchanan, he just came out on a special Sunday night Hardball and flat out said that Powell’s endorsement was only because Obama is black.

yo, MSNBC, can you fire him *now*, please?

I can’t remember who it was, but someone on MSNBC said Buchanan’s idea of a fun evening was to rent “Roots” and play it backwards.

Kinda funny, but probably kinda true.

I’m going to flourish in the coming year, I’m opening up a chain of Torch-n-Pitchfork stores…

Now that’s funny!

Please sell maps to Phil Gramm’s house, as well.

See my comment at 18.

not one of them has been addressed:

indeed there appears to be a real reluctance to do so.

Ramblings

The United States Federal tax system needs to be over hauled. We need to look at all those non profit organizations, political organizations and religious mega churches who have now become an arm of political organizations. Before we look at changing Social Security. Lets look at the Federal tax system.
Too many people making hundreds of thousands of dollars leave political offices and open non profit organizations. We need to discuss the lost tax dollars here. We all have been going over our budgets and making sacrifices at home. Now the Federal government needs to have people go over it’s budget.With our country in the shit kicker we need to do this quickly, like starting Jan 21, 2008.

About the US economy’s is in the shit house and it’s the average citizens fault is bull shit! I am so tired of it’s your fault because you don’t save money in bank accounts and you mortgaged more than you can afford and charge more than you need. Bull shit!

We did save money. We worked and we paid our taxes. We paid taxes on our earnings. We paid taxes on interest. We saved money in saving accounts, bonds, CD’s just like our parents did. Then LobbyistCongressPresidents made new laws and taxed our interest in those saving accounts.

Then we were InticedBrainwashed that Social Security was going to go broke and we needed to put our money from our savings accounts into retirement accounts and investment accounts and later college accounts to avoid more new taxes that LobbyistCongressPresidents had put into laws.
These investments accounts would later charge large fees if we wanted or needed to withdraw our own money before we reached retirement age. And LobbyistCongressPresidents made more new laws and raised the amount of taxes on those accounts. And later financial institutions would move to states with lax laws on the books so they could become loan sharks with our mortgage interest rates and fees from our credit card holders and Payday loans. And soon they became the new loan sharks on the block, legally. At this point LobbyistCongressPresidents does not make any new laws to protect it’s citizens from those banking thieves.

Twice in the past 10 years the stock market has crashed and our savings were gambled away. When the banks closed during the 1930’s our parents and grandparents put their savings under their mattresses. No CEO, who is only one individual, should ever make 1,000 and more times then the workers doing the actual work in a company make. How much better our country would be served if workers got paid better. You could collect more taxes, that should make you happy campers. Clearly the huge difference of wages between the CEO”S and board members and employees has helped get us into this financial crisis.

We have been forced into debt because of greedy financial institutions leaders decisions and board members decisions and LobbyistCongressPresidents laws and their tax laws. People made these decisions in making mortgage rates and credit card companies and pay loan companies rates and fees so high. People in those companies have responsibility and accountability. We should call them loan sharks and throw them in jail.

The past 8 years of higher prices of gas, heating oil, electricity, high health care rates, high (gov enforced) car insurance rates, high (gov enforced) mortgage home owners insurance rates, loan shark Pay loan institutions, allowing charge card companies to charge interest rates depending on weather we paid our electric or water bills a few days late, etc is part of the reason we don’t have much in savings now and why we have charged so much on our credit cards. I believe it was in the republican controlled LobbyistCongressPresidents controll that made new laws that made it more difficult to go bankrupt. They said screw you again to it’s citizens.

Many people lost their money before the market crashed and they may never know it. There money was gambled away on nothing but weather the stock price of a company would go up or down. Not even a product just a prediction. We the people didn’t know these companies had found another way to steal our money by overcharging us with the money we borrowed so they could literally gamble huge amounts of our money.

The poor have been hurt the most in all of this. If you are listed at poverty level then interest rates and fees should be lower not higher. You tax them at a lower rate because they are poor and then companies turn around and have higher interest rates because the are poor and have bad credit. Shameful! Something about charging the poorest people higher fees just doesn’t seem right.

What have we learned? The tax system should be completely overhauled. We pay too much in taxes to the Federal government and they start wars and that gives their friends millions with non bidding contracts. It is just a way for the Federal gov to make wealthfare for the wealthy rather than welfare for the poor. And State governments are going broke because the Federal gov takes so many tax dollars and do not put them back into our own states. Schools are closing. People are thrown out of their houses and living in their cars.

I posted parts of a very informative article and I hear oil, oil, oil, gulf region. I recently read US Nellis air force base having the large Federally tax funded solar powered system and I wasn’t aware of it till 2 days ago. Did they build the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan solar powered, wind, geothermal powered? Are our military bases here in the US being converted over to clean renewable energy? Did the Federal Gov give any money to states to build schools with clean renewable energy. If not, why not? All that money for war and more war to hold power over a region that has oil when we could have spent the $650 billion on clean renewable energy technologies and research in our country?
The market wouldn’t have crashed, our retirement and college accounts wouldn’t be broke and we would have had cheaper energy costs along with many new enviromentally safe jobs.

I said before clean renewable energy will get us out of this recession that bush caused on purpose. With all that military money going instead into clean renewable energy oh my goodness, the new advances we could have made in the last 8 years with electric cars, solar, wind, etc.
All that money on war………argggggggg

From wiki on Nellis Air Force Base

After 23 years in the Army, the West Point graduate retired as a colonel and has been teaching international relations and history at Boston University. Bacevich has published several acclaimed books, including this one, THE NEW AMERICAN MILITARISM. His latest, published this week, is THE LIMITS OF POWER: THE END OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM.

…

On April 23, 2007 construction was started on a 140 acre, 70,000 solar panel power generation system. The installation on the west side of the base was completed in December 2007. The 14 megawatt system is expected to provide 25% of the base’s power requirements.[8

]

BILL MOYERS: You say, “U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price for the nation’s refusal to confront our domestic dysfunction.” What are we not confronting?

ANDREW BACEVICH: The most obvious, the blindingly obviously question, is energy. It’s oil. I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970s, came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, comprised our freedom of action.

How every President from Richard Nixon down to the present one, President Bush, declared, “We’re gonna fix this problem.” None of them did. And the reason we are in Iraq today is because the Persian Gulf is at the center of the world’s oil reserves. I don’t mean that we invaded Iraq on behalf of big oil, but the Persian Gulf region would have zero strategic significance, were it not for the fact that that’s where the oil is.

The silver lining in this black cloud that has become our economy is that people are waking up to the reality of income distribution and political power. A lot of us forgot, especially those of us who are economists, and who focused on economic growth (which we thought was the ‘big thing’ that really mattered), or if we were anally retentive, focused on efficiency (those little Harberger triangles). People are now seeing how the economy really works.

It took me a long time to see this. It must have been only towards the turn of this century that I began to get a grip on how badly the distribution of income had been tipped against people like me. To his credit (once again), Paul Krugman told me in the late ’70s that he thought income distribution was still a real issue worth thinking about. That’s why he’s a Nobel and I’m not. I only saw it when I saw assholes with MBA’s drawing 7 figure bonuses.

This brings me to Joe the Plumber. I have been trying to get my mind around the phenomenon of poor whites not from the South voting against their economnic interest. I think it might be the casino mentality. Adam Smith wrote about it. People think they are luckier than they are. Joe thinks he’s going to strike it rich, and doesn’t want the government to tax his lucky strike. That he has about as much chance of making it in the plumbing (or any other competitive) business as he does with the one-arm bandit hasn’t dawned on him. He’s going to be poor the rest of his life, unless he takes to pimping, and that’s a dangerous trade.

It’s a shell game. We’ve all been conned in one degree or another.

It’s a shell game. We’ve all been conned in one degree or another.

yes.

and one of the cons is that the dems don’t represent the working class anymore. this was apparent during clinton’s presidency (i don’t know about before that) and it certainly is the case now.

one of the problems with accusing people of voting against their economic interests is that they have to have an alternative that does represent their interests. and right now there isn’t one.

Here’s the link. This book may have already been discussed here but it is new to me. Lots of good info here.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/jour…..ript1.html

Ian, are we 100% sure there is a financial crisis? Don’t we have to see the books to know for sure. And the WH owns the bookkeeping books now. The Bush adm has been known to put out false reports before. Why should we take their word for it?

You are far too modest in your proposals, Ian. I would suggest tripling the capital gains and dividend taxes, eliminating the cap on payroll taxes, raising the inheritance tax to 50% on estates over $1 million and 90% on estates over $5 million, denying corporate tax deductions for executive compensation in excess of $250,000 total, and raising the maximum income tax rate to 50% on incomes over $250,000. (Oh, and let’s nationalize Walker’s “think tank”). Let the bastards eat cake.

We won’t get change as long as the republicans are successful at blaming the victim, my Oxdown diary.

Oh, thanks. Now I’ve “wasted” half an hour and I have a headache.

Democracy rests on the proposition that its fate lies in the hands of its citizens. Too many people wave off these heavy duty think pieces and throw up their hands. Well, dammit, democracy is hard work. And if you don’t like it, someone will be glad to hand you some fascism.

Shorter Bacevich: We have met the enemy, and he are us.

Bob in HI

After WWII there was a move to “free the world for Democracy and Capitalism”. In short, they had to be free to do business everywhere and not just in the United States. There was the beginning of this in many countries during the Carter administration (late ’70s). It expanded after the fall of the Soviet Union. A great expansion in world wide trade began and NAFTA was their flagship legislation on the matter.

What happened after that is quite interesting.

They began to ’ship jobs overseas’ and pay lower wages to those workers, import the goods here and charge perhaps slightly lower prices, but still close to what it had been before.

The upshot of this is that they began to make tremendous profits as one always does when you can manufacture cheap and sell at high prices relative to cost.

But, they also eliminated some very good paying jobs for Americans, so for many Americans their incomes dropped by about half. Now you have a couple working 2 or 3 jobs to make the income one man (usually) did before 1980. And, with the lower incomes they began to use credit cards more and to slowly sink into debt. The 1980s saw a lot of violence and depression because people lost jobs by the tens of thousands and their pensions went out the window.

With lower wages Americans were on the precipice and some were falling off the edge (being pushed really).

Now what do we have?

All that wealth which had previously been created by American workers has been going into the pockets of Wall Street and typical Americans finally being pushed over the edge because of bad mortgages. Worse yet, there are people who found a way to gain advantage, to make money by pushing them over.

This all has created the largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the uber-Rich that has ever occurred in history. Yet the Rich beg for help from the government and perhaps threaten to stop the economy if they don’t get it while keeping their golden parachutes.

So, fixing the credit crisis is essential to keep things going. But, more than that, the trend before the crisis was for more and more personal failures and more credit card disasters and bankruptcies. That means we need what Barack Obama and Joe Biden are calling for…a rebuilding of the middle class and an end to the huge unhealthy(!) wealth redistribution to the wealthy, the one John McCain wants to continue by renewing the Bush tax cuts to the rich.

Not only can we not afford John McCain, but to allow him to continue the wealth distribution will by force destroy our economy. It’s inevitable.

There must be enough money in the real economy for people to buy the goods they need and deserve. We cannot let the Rich tell us we don’t deserve a better standard of living and that we need to get a home equity loan to become enslaved to them.

They’re stripping America of it’s wealth while paying workers much less.

To fix these problems we need Obama-Biden AND we need the international trade revolution to somehow work while not destroying us. We need CHANGE.

I don’t know how much of the new financial industry wealth is strictly related to their work on international trade. But, one fundamental which must be adhered to is that new wealth has to reflect real production, real wealth. Another, as I said, is that Americans must produce and be rewarded to enjoy the high standard of living we deserve. Another is that we DO want to expand international trade for everyone’s benefit. If it’s done right Americans will benefit more and more.

We need to know what the reality is with regard to Wall Street profits and fraud. How much was real and related to international trade and how much was just gimmickry?

We need to know how to grow the domestic economy and how to raise American wages (again).

And we need to know how to integrate the world economy sufficiently to benefit everyone while making it more possible to regulate and contain problems (like this recent crisis).

We need CHANGE.

I can’t tell if your call for Obama-Biden is satire or not?

Other than in rhetoric, where is this portrait of this staunch and capable reformer of establishments and reframer of debates?

FISA? Bailout? 233% more money from the financial sector than even Mr. McLobbyist?

You’re right that we need “CHANGE”, but on the Obama ticket it’s branding, and on the McCain ticket it’s bullshit.

October 18, 2008
More W.Va. voters say machines are switching votes
In six cases, Democratic votes flipped to GOP

http://www.sundaygazettemail.com/News/200810180251

We could start with clean renewable energy union workers. Do they have a union now? If not lets get it started. All those new jobs should be union workers.

They should be fairly paid and respected workers, regardless of whether or not they’re in a union.

It seems somehow antithetical to progress to bar companies from participation who don’t have union workers because they’ve made it part of their corporate edict to treat their employees fair and good; such that they haven’t seen fit to unionize against their management.

Thank you, selise, for your post and the link to Greg Palast’s interview with Joseph Stiglitz.

Palast’s column, IMO, runs in total agreement with the book and video, CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN by John Perkins, copyright 2004 and the book’s sequel, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, copyright 2007.

These references have given me a clearer understanding of America’s meddling into South America’s problems, our relationship with Saudi Arabia, the real reason we are in Iraq (EHM failed to seduce Saddam and the Jackals failed to assassinate him so military brought in), etc.

They also opened my eyes as to the real operations behind the masks of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

After I watched Paulson’s conduct at the Senate hearings I could not keep from thinking: Is he the biggest Economic Hit Man of all??

Ian, another fine article! I would love to see you write on the two books I reference above.

To see the video just Google: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man