nodrama,

I think he’s Eddie Haskell, Wally’s friend and smarmy kiss-ass in Leave It to Beaver.  Geithner’s behavior nowadays is one of the natural developments after juvenile smarminess.

Once in a while the MSM media airs a show that hints at something very sinister in its subtext.  Last night 60 Minutes had a piece about the World Savings mortgage fiasco. CNBC, a little later, had on a documentary about the sale of mortages, I can’t remember the name of it.  It amazed me how similar the behavior of the players seemed as it was described in all these stories. It all points to a master plan or a conspiracy.  Something that should be investigated using the RICO statutes for organized crime before another dime is given out to any of these banks under any circumstances.

wadosy,

I just got a chance to read your post. Very insightful! I have been telling people for years that the war in the middle east and the subsequent worldwide, US caused recession was part of the massive big business plan to take the publics eye off the ball that was peak oil and the immense global consequences it was to bring.

While gas has fallen to two dollars a gallon, and our homes are being forclosed upon, all us short sighted americans seem to have forgotten that the oil is still running out. And that the entire world economy currently runs on a resource that will disappear in the next 40 years. Genius!

Timothy Geithner has a doubles partner.  It is none other than Ben Bernanke, or “Helicopter Ben” as Kevin Phillips points out in “Bad Money.”

When Ben Bernanke was head of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, the same position held by Tiny Tim before he moved to Treasury Secretary, he said that he’d drop money on Wall Street from a helicopter if he had to.

As Dylan Thomas said, “Do not go softly into that good night.” 
It’s the principle of the thing!

Tim Geithner’s “message” is the same as all the other wannabe owner/operators’.  The first-class “passengers” and the “officer corps” who serve them have already taken to the “lifeboats.” Everybody else can just “sink-or-swim.”  Thing is, the I-me-and-mine bunch are still too close to their Titanic “global eCONomy” to be sure their hired “security” thugs will be able to fight-off hordes of desperate swimmers who try to reach and board the rafts.  So they keep saying there’s still a chance to “Save Our Ship,” knowing full-well it’s neither true nor any of their intentions to do so, even if it was still possible.

Looks like it’s time for our tame Sisters and Brothers to, in the famous last words of ferryman Sidhartha, slipping from the breaking-up boat and into the rippling River, “Remember yourselves as Fishes.”  “Or,” as his Yin companion urged rising into the Air on wings of pure Love, “as Birds!” 

Why all this angst over the loss of a CONtraption that is only ruining your lives anyhow?  Why so desperate to to keep afloat up Shit
Creek a wastepaper canoe you long since lost the means to paddle and steer?

Our Mother Earth is reclaiming from the tormentors everything they took in their vain attempt to force upon Her an un-dead apparatus intended to degrade all Her Natural Vitality into various kinds of degenerate “energy.”  Those among the domesticated Humans who’ve most IDentified with the invaders, and so have vainly emulated their methods hoping to secure for their own counterfeit “selfs” the same kind of idiotic insulation from the free wild Song ‘n’ Dance of Life Herownself, seem not to’ve figured-out that “impregnable” is just another word for STERILE.

Let the damned thing go….the death-trap “lifeboats,” too.  It’s all going to be sucked-under, anyhow, when Davey Jones claims his due.

HokaHey!

The rerun of Geithner’s appearance before the Senate is now on C-SPAN.  The closing remark before the questioning was that they’ll continue until it’s fixed.  In light of what happened to the first $350 billion followed by the revelations that these banks are insolvent already, to the tune of hundreds of trillions of dollars, the words of Moe Howard came to mind, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking till you do suck seed.”

suppose entity X saw peak oil coming.

suppose entity X decided an appropriate response to peak oil would be to grab the remaining oil at gunpoint.

suppose entity X realized that grabbing oil at gunpoint would be politically impossible, so a pretext would have to be arranged to provide justification for grabbing the oil.

suppose entity X realized that, sooner or later, peak oil would become obvious as a motive for staging their pretext, if business continued as usual.

suppose entity X deliberately lent trillions of dollars to marginal borrowers with the intent of crippling the global economy as peak oil became obvious, thus destroying the possibility of business as usual, thus destroying demand for oil, thus obscuring the fact that global oil production had peaked, thus obscuring peak oil’s function as motive to stage the pretext that provided the justification for the oil acquisition project.

GMAC, ditech, and greenspan…

dots.

President Obama at the beckoning of his financial Czar Geithner opposes the “freezing” of bonuses to top employees of banks that receive TARP money because it may cause a “brain drain”. What brains?

The notion that the economy will recover because “it always has” is not a prescription for policy but is a form of religion hence is totally unreliable.

No recovery will be meaningful in the long term until a strong and renewed labor movement arises which divorces itself totally from the corrupt Democratic Party and which replaces the equally corrupt union-movement that exists today. It can encompass all people that must work for pay or else starve. It can unite the overwhelming majority of “we the people” in a totally different brand of uniting/solidarity than the horrible Obama miscreant named bipartisanship. It is also the only road to a new political party. Class war? What do you mean class war? If you do not understand that the American brand of class war has brought on the current disaster you, your children, and grandchildren will continue to suffer recession after recession after depression.

I tend to think that Geithner’s vague and unenlightened news conference was more a product of not doing his homework before speaking rather than being intellectually or ideologically challenged like Paulson before him.

I would guess that Geithner’s fault was too much arrogance, an underestimation of public rancor over bankers using us and too much overconfidence.

It’s high time we get an intelligent and prepared executive leadership.

et tu Eugene?

My goodness, what is it with you media types? Timothy Geithner’s “debut” this week was his first address as the new Treasury Secretary of the Treasury, speaking to the Department of the Treasury!

As I recall, they were quite impressed!

Maybe the problem is, you, like altogether too many in mainstreammedia thought he was talking to YOU, and explaining his plan for recovery to YOU. He wasn’t. I guess with a few possible exceptions I was the only commoner out here that understood what he was saying, and was actually impressed! But then I didn’t make a point of watching so I could see how he was going to save me. I made a point of watching to see how the guys mind works!

Geithner did not roll out the Obama administration’s financial rescue plan! I’m beginning to wonder if any of you will be able to comprehend it when he does! I’m beginning to think you probably wont, since you seem to think he already has!

Maybe you’ve all been spoiled by so many years of Bush/Republican leadership, where they delivered neat little sound bites with a few words you understood, that rarely made sense, but made it possible for a simple mind to fill in the blanks and come with anything necessary to satisfy the instant news thing.

Yeh, that must be it. Geithner was far to intelligent, far to thurough and far to unruffled by media histeria. The nerve of the man. He should know by now mainstreammedia calls the shots, right? I mean how can we possibly expect the instant news consumers to understand dry, witless and lengthy facts?

You “don’t know how he could get much worse”?

What’s the problem Eugene, you were you expecting a rock star maybe? Or are you just a little bent out of shape because all the HYPE you media folks created announcing Geithner was going to unveil Obamas financial rescue plan was just that. So much media hype! No plan.

Darn, you didn’t get your scoop of poop, so you had to create some! And judging the public reaction from the media addicted, they’re just as happy with the poop as the scoop.

Man what an easy job!

Are you kidding me? I don’t see how Geithner could have been any more clear in telling Congress, “Do your job!”

Everything he said was perceived by those who understand the gravity of this crisis as indicating Treasury fully understands no magic wand, no bad bank, can turn this around. It’s bankrupt. Without saying so, the Treasury Secretary said nothing else.

Where did you get Treasury saying, “Trust us, we’ve got this?” If they did, don’t you think they’d have the details of a plan? No plan = there’s no solution short of bankruptcy.

Geithner does not have nearly as tough a job as Congress. First step, get rid of that worthless Speaker, Pelosi. She’s clueless and she is unfit for the job.

I will save this piece to find out how good of a “predictor” Mr. Robinson is. I suspect that he will be marooned on an island like his namesake.

Meanwhile on the “stimulus front”. The poor, deluded Obama-swooners do not realize that the safest “stimulus package” is still to come and on that one most democrats AND republicans will vote aye in a bipartisan love-fest. I am talking about the defense budget (Obama will make absolutely sure that it is huge and is not called “stimulus package”!). In the land of “stimulus” it does not matter what the money is spent on. The best “stimulus” is appropriating funds which are spent almost immediately and without much protest from politicians or the American public. By implication the defense budget and its pernicious “supplementals” fit the demands to a tee. Even Senator Obama kept saying that “we must support our troops in Iraq and elsewhere”. Hence the acme of “stimulus packages” is to keep as many soldiers as possible at war and far away from our shores such that their support remains happily expensive. “Stimulators Unite” and fight for the passage of the next defense appropriations bill at the tune of at least one trillion dollars!

I am noticing blogs which demand that President Obama write all bills and force the Democrats in Congress to accept his versions or threaten with a veto. Wow! These are the same people who castigated President Bush for doing exactly that. Folks, the legislative is in Congress and not in the White House and let’s keep it that way. There is no clause in our Constitution that “the President must get it his way”. We have enough “Czars” and do not need another one.

Re godistwaddle’s Post: “How to get banking reform.”

A pretty good plan, godistwaddle, but I do see a couple of hurdles. A lot of Americans don’t believe in the death penalty.  Perhaps, we should develop a more centralist plan like giving these bankers life sentences on sort of an “O Bankers Where Art Thou” chain gang? 

And if real reform and justice is to occur, we can’t forget the role that “deregulation and financial liberalization” played in this crisis, which means all those Washington politicians who set up in the frame work for this crisis should go to work on the chain gain as well.

Financial masters of the universe (FMU), i.e., Wall Street bankers, private equity and hedge funds had a once in a century party and invited Washington politicians and the real-estate industry to their festivities. The party’s bill is $3.6 trillion dollars, and rapidly climbing, of which the FMU paid themselves many hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. The FMU convinced their Washington political stooges to see if they could get the people, who weren’t even invited to the party, to pay for the debauchery, the Congressional lackeys readily agreed. If Washington D.C. wasn’t such a stinking cesspool of corruption, these Wall Street crooks would be in jail now along with the Enron crook Jeffrey Skilling.

The US is way over-banked with approximately 8,000 institutions, we would not miss 25 percent of them during this downturn, consequently, let failed banks go bankrupt. The Fed/Bernanke is trying to save all the politically connected bank directors/managers/stock and bond holders and equating that with saving the financial system, which it isn’t. Also, the Fed/Congress is not investigating what went wrong during this financial crisis and how to fix it, e.g., what do we do with credit default swaps (CDS), (answer: naked CDS should be illegal because they are “bucket shop” contracts), lax regulations (they should be beefed up but which ones and how should they be better enforced) and phony accounting rules (how was Lehman Brothers ever a sound business with a $100 billion dollar hole in their balance sheet).  Doing more of the same and expecting a different outcome is the height of irresponsibility, but obviously the slimy-on-the-take politicians, i.e., Geithner/Summers/Bernanke/Schumer/Dodd/Frank, subscribe to the Bernie Madoff swindling school of investing and believe the American people can be conned, yet again. President Obama, where are you.

The problem is not bad public relations by Timothy Geithner.  The problem is Geithner’s “plan” makes no sense unless he is just trying to save the bankers’ jobs and their stockholders.  It is pouring more money down a rat hole.

The bad banks need to be audited and declared insolvent.  The government needs to replace the management, write down the bad loans, then sell the banks off.  The obvious solution is what was done years ago in the savings and loan meltdown.

Geithner is trying to protect the rich and is costing taxpayers a bundle.

How to get banking reform:  1. Obtain rope. 2. Obtain banker. 3. Hang banker. 4. Post video on Youtube. 5. Observe and monitor banking reform. 6. Repeat as necessary.

If 50 Million people put up $1.00 each we could hire the top 10 legal minds and their respective crews to pursue a class action suit against the whole lot of the financial miscreants. It would take years we might not get any Money but it would surely leave them with less wealth and thats what they live for. Hell I would put up $20.00 for the tickets to that show.

Great idea, Eugene. As it just so happens, I have a few “living room” questions that I would love to ask our Washington “leadership” . . . and I would expect the answers to have a little substance:

1st Question - If U.S. soldiers can be called to serve and asked to put their lives on the line for the sake of our country, why can’t Wall Street be called to serve and be asked to place their “loophole-free compensation limits” aside for the sake of our country? 

2nd Question - If the leadership in capitalistic countries like Japan, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Taiwan can provide affordable and bankruptcy free healthcare systems for their citizens, why can’t the leadership in the U.S. do the same for our citizens?

3rd Question - Why is the employment rate growing faster in Europe than in the U.S., especially since Europe has a lower rate of population growth? Is it because the leadership in Europe is more effective than the leadership in the U.S.?

Americans are Sick of Watching WallStreets Temper Tantrums on the Boo Woo-O- Meter. Close down WallStreet for at least a day when the Adults must discuss how to clean up their split milk and shitty diapers!
Wall street Continues to prove they have no impulse control, or any Sense of the disasterous reality they have inflicted on US.What would it hurt to give them a ‘time Out’, to stop their ‘Sell, Sell,Sell’ stupity. Might help US who’s pension and annuities are being held hostage.
As for Geithners speech, I don’t think it was inteded to appease the Wall Streeter, but a way to talk to US who have suffered under their reign of terror and who are now asked to foot the bill.
I wanted not only an apology, but also a guarantee that the Admin understands that We are Pissed and very likely going to scream if one more red cent is handed to Wall Street without Serious restraints being imposed. I don’t need the gorey details. No Doubt Geithner was also bracing US for the reality this hole is bigger than the 700 Billion Christmas gift the Repugs handed over within a week of that 2 1/2 pageDeath threat Ransom note Paulson Scribbled out 6 months prior in crayon.Funny the Repugs couldn’t kick down any funds for US when the biggest Shopping Season was right around the corner. Funny they couldn’t put together a stim package for US in their ramaining 4 months of absolute power. Funny they couldn’t create 6 Million jobs in 8 years with their Tax cuts.Funny they had no concept of ‘fiscal conservativism’ when they granted Liberties to the financial industry. Funny the ignored ‘Fiscal Responsiblity’ When they were Pilfering our Money at 10 Billion a month for an ill fated illegal invasion and occupation.Funny how Exxon could earn the Highest Profits in history when the costs to US in fuel prices were as historical.Funny how Repugs still cry for more Tax cuts for Corps. 
Do I trust Geithner? not particularly. But who really trusted Sammy the Bull when he brought down the Teflon Don? But he Delivered Gotti on a silver platter, didn’t he?
“Public Executions” ..Make sure the guy who tied Saddams Noose is available and a Defibulator so we can kick start All the ‘Dick’s, and hang ‘em again!