With all of the news today about the latest Bankster Bailout (aka 50 State Settlement – just read David Dayen’s articles from today at FDL News as well as this and this from Cynthia Kouril and this from Scarecrow), I don’t need to say too much more on the topic.

But what the hell, I might as well offer up a few examples of the Banksters and 1%ers working the refs (the TradMed and low info voters), even as they get their own way.

Today’s banksters are direct spiritual descendants of the mentality that gave us the Great Depression.

OK, so you might have noticed a few headlines the last few days talking about how the economy is getting better, unemployment is dropping, and we’re all going to win Powerball tonight and retire tomorrow with our sparkly ponies.

So here we are, the week between Christmas and New Years. This is a slow news time (as David Dayen noted here), yet it is a classic time for “take out the trash” type news dumps.

Today however, we have someone like Donald Trump claiming to be worth $7B, with $3B of that being his “brand.” Yeah, that’s right. The guy whose combover has been likened to a dead raccoon claims a worth nearly double the generous estimates provided by Forbes. I guess The Donald must subscribe to the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” theory since a recent Fox Poll (via Media Matters) showed a Trump endorsement would be received positively by 6% of those polled versus negatively by 31% of those polled.

The NY Times continues its policy of affirmative action for people ignorant of the world by allowing Thomas Friedman to write two columns a week on whatever he chooses. Today he talks about the job crisis.

One of the on-going arguments across the blogosphere and even the entire world is whether the economic problems of the last ten years are more related to incompetence or basic corruption. I must say, just the last week has offered plenty of evidence for both views. For example, we had this article from Bloomberg yesterday (Tuesday, November 29) about how then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson met with his hedge fund buddies and gave them the first class insider information on his plans to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into “conservatorship.”

New York Times reporter Robert Pear and his editors try to resurrect a zombie proposal by the anti-Medicare zealots to displace the guaranteed benefits structure of Medicare. Its just another attempt to push Paul Ryan’s voucher system that would systematically reduce benefits and shift rising health care costs to individuals, despite the fact this flawed [...]

So there I was this morning, having completed my daily check for jobs in my chosen field of Software Quality Assurance and Testing (I do wish it would take longer than five minutes as that would mean there are actually some improvements in the economy but such is life), when I reached the NY Times and saw this article with the headline from Mayor Bloomberg that “‘Tent City’ Goes Beyond Free Speech”:

Jobs.

Although the official time frame for “The Great Recession” was December 2007 through June 2009, for the millions of long term un and underemployed, the daily reality is that not only has the recession never ended, it is more applicable to The Great Depression than it is to any of the various acknowledged recessions since the end of WWII. One of the articles of faith from the always surprised Economists is that job creation lags other indicators, yet here we are, over two years since the “end” of the last recession and the official unemployment rate is still at 9.1% with the underemployed figure at 16.2% for August 2011.