After listening to Professor Ravi Batra predict a depression by this fall and reading this article along with the posts, the path leading up to this whole economic situation seems too pat for me.  I fell it wasn’t brought about simply by greed.  It’s all happening by design.  I fear what we are witnessing is the destruction of the capitalist system of the United States of America and the advent of neo-fascism.  (I’d prefer Socialism.)
Democrats say that FDR saved capitalism when Republicans criticize the New Deal.  Democrats say that we were headed for a communist revolution and FDR’s programs avoided that. 
Well, I think they have engineered this debacle, and it’s going along swimmingly.  Since Reagan, this ploy seems to be an economic brinksmanship.  The next step is the depression creating such desperation except instead of turning left this time, the ones in power will take a sharp turn to the right. 
It remains to be seen how they’ll move to a fascist economic system, but I heard slight hints of it in an interview with Phil Angelides, the guy who ran against Arnold for governor of CA, in an interview on NPR.  He was touting some kind of “Green” jobs proposal.  He pointed out that experienced engineers and tradesmen were not needed because they would need to be broken of bad habits and ways of going about solving problems.  Instead, he insisted the new Green workforce would have to be young with fresh minds and the new way of solving problems.

Barack Hussein Obama ~ Il Duce

The way that malevolent rulers protect themselves from those they rule over, is to set up a bureaucracy.

Just think of our government as a bureaucracy set up to protect our rulers from our wrath.

The President is like a CEO. He doesn’t make policy—the largest stockholders have their Board of Directors to do that, but he gets paid well for taking the heat and being the public face of the corporation.

Congress is like a combined public relations/complaint department. If you don’t like what the corporation is doing, you are welcome to complain to Congress. They have no power over the Board of Directors or the big shareholders.

They are NOT our representatives. The elites decide who will get the major party nominations, how much and what type of media coverage to give them, and which one the voting machines will allow to “win” the “election.”

In ‘06 when several Democrats were the victims of stolen elections and filed complaints with Congress, Congress dismissed all complaints without investigating them and swore in the fraudulently “elected” Republicans immediately. I recall Pelosi explaining in one case that the people needed representation, which was the height of chutzpah because the people had elected a Democrat who was anti-war and pro-impeachment, and got a Republican who was pro-war and anti-impeachment. It was Pelosi who needed that Republican vote to keep the wars going and keep impeachment off the table.

Don’t vote. It only encourages them. As long as you continue to delegate your power to people you cannot hold accountable, you will have the tyranny you consented to.

My comment: “They are depriving us of a much needed vote and this vote affects us ALL….. especially after Reid decided to go down in history as a traitor.”

I would like to correct this, of course I MEANT to say Specter, NOT Reid.

I apologize Sen. Reid.

That should have read:
“They are depriving us of a much needed vote and this vote affects us ALL….. especially after SPECTER decided to go down in history as a traitor.”

What is there to do? If it isn’t obvious enough that what most of the 3 ring circus features we are treated to everyday, sometimes many times a day, about how congress(what sad sad joke)is ‘going to get to the bottom of this and fix this thing’ are a charade to distract attention from the real problems then we will get nothing but the same. And we get what we have asked and paid for from our electorate in washington d.c., the state legislatures and county and city commissions because we voted for them. Then we have to figure just how those lobbyists have more influence($$$) with the electorate that we voted into office, well, we voted them into office and once in their loyalty goes to the highest bidder.

The infection of our government with the ‘best and brightest’ who when they are closely scrutinized are very motivated criminals that are doing a bang up job of grand larceny and manipulation of what was OUR democracy but is anything but that then just expect the same until maybe the people will eventually wake up and realize that those they voted into office are NOT doing what is best for the people. As far as the federal level is concerned, I would think when they are on the ballot, to vote them out or get some investigation by an unafilliated group to find real criminal activity that will get them convicted and thrown in jail where they will not be able to serve(I don’t really know if that is possible since the senate figured that most of their members were criminals anyway but don’t have to step down). At the state level, recall elections are a good answer for those crooks and that is what we need on the federal level.
Otherwise, just lump it!

A word on Pawlenty:

“Strangely, I would say I was more overtly political at the time. We all identify with our heroes, after the fact or before the fact. This might be too trite a conclusion, but I would almost say I was a Wellstone to his Coleman. And by saying these things, I’m not saying I’m trying to put myself on a par with Tim, but let’s say where I would set up alternative fundraising so that the kids that didn’t sell enough fruit to go on band tour could go on band tour, and get in trouble for it because it put ripples on the pond because maybe the teachers didn’t want certain kids to go on the band tour, [Pawlenty] gave no indication—you know, without blowing up my own balloon—of being concerned with the less fortunate, within even our own school.”

http://www.citypages.com/2004-01-28/news/a-portrait-of-the-governor-as-a-young-weenie/

There is this too:
“Pawlenty has worked closely with local religious right groups when implementing public policy. In the 2008 legislative session, he forced lawmakers to meet with representatives of the Minnesota Family Council, a group that advocates for an abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum, while they were considering a comprehensive sex education program for Minnesota’s public schools.

“We were told by the governor’s staff that the Minnesota Family Council would have had to sign off on whatever negotiated agreement we have,” Sen. Sandy Pappas said at the end of the session. “I was unaware that the Family Council had an election certificate.”

It goes on….
“Pawlenty courts the religious right in Minnesota albeit on the down-low. He’s made appearances at anti-abortion rallies, and was a featured speaker at the Minnesota Family Council’s Legislative Insights Luncheon in early 2007. A member of that group asked him, “Do you think you would have won without the faith-based vote?” Pawlenty quickly responded “No,” and was greeted with laughter and applause.

The Evangelical First Lady
Mary Pawlenty’s evangelism was the subject of much attention during her husband’s first term, and she is responsible for his conversion from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity. Mary’s a Sunday school teacher at Wooddale. A Dakota County District Court judge until 2007, Mary was frequently asked about her faith.”

And,
“In a later interview with the Star Tribune, she offered clarification that she would never compromise her role as a judge by evangelizing in court. “I don’t find myself having that kind of dialogue or public setting. But if someone asks me, ‘Do you have a faith relationship with Jesus Christ?’ The answer is ‘Yes.’ It’s impossible to have a relationship with Jesus Christ and not have it impact how you make decisions.”

http://minnesotaindependent.com/4736/vp-or-not-vp-a-pawlenty-pick-leads-mccain-to-30-million-evangelicals

Sooo…. we need to ramp up this thing.  These are CRAZIES attempting to deny the American People our senator.

Check this out, @ RawStory (via The Boston Globe):

“Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.

Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds. ...”

It continues:,
“Notes Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz: “A finance professor who had previously advised the agency not to make the switch away from bonds compared the move to an insurance company writing policies to cover hurricane damage and then investing the premiums in beachfront property.”

“One of the big drives behind Social Security privatization was the desire to find more money—in the case of Social Security, a lot more money—to keep the fires burning on Wall Street,” he adds.”

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/03/pension-fund-shifted-billions-into-stocks-just-before-crash/

BTW, where’s the TAX on derivitives….?  From Nader.org:

” Another huge source of revenue, with very little if any fallout on the average taxpayer, would be a Wall Street sales tax on speculative derivatives (not stocks or bonds). With an estimated $500 trillion traded in such bets on bets or bets on debts last year, a 1/10th of 1% sales tax could bring in $500 billion yearly.

Consumers pay sales taxes in most states of 5 to 7 percent on necessities, while Wall Street’s casino gamblers buy trillions of dollars in derivatives and pay no sales tax. Unfair! Also such a transaction tax will help tamp down wild and destabilizing speculation, which has already pushed our economy to its knees.”

http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2108-Paying-for-the-Deficit.html

They are just stealing, lying and conniving left and right here folks…!  We need to start seeing some heads roll…. and but quick.

And another thing, Obama needs to talk/beatthehelloutof/strangle Gov. Pawlenty about that “little matter” regarding Coleman and his bastard backers.  We need Franken to take his RIGHTFUL senate seat.  They are depriving us of a much needed vote and this vote affects us ALL….. especially after Reid decided to go down in history as a traitor.

Sort of a take-off from KISS - Our democratic election system merely entertains us with the trappings of a contest between different people for the same power.  So our elections boil down to selecting the same or a different ‘face’ to, in the end, have access to and wield the same power.

re: psickmind fraud

Pointing out this latest fraud reminds me of KBR’s motto in Middle Eastern operations: don’t worry about it, it is all cost plus. No matter how many people point out the element of fraud in this “rescue” scheme, it goes on because the news chooses to report this as a personality clash between Timothy Geither and Paul Krugman, instead of the power grab by the ownership elite to control the financial system for themselves.
Of course President Obama could not take the scrutiny applied if this issue was seriously examined. More than likely he would choose to say something brusque with controlled contempt, about knowing what he is talking about before he says anything.

In the last week, Counterpunch.com has published a number of articles on the current economy.  Paul Craig Roberts asks if the bailout is brewing a bigger crisis, with an answer you might guess.  Michael Hudson points out the scam aspect of the bailout:
Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.       

Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.       

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.

Wouldn’t it be great to see Obama and Geithner sit down in front of a panel of economists and answer their tough questions?

Could this be the possible start of investigations….?  Or am I wishing too hard.

The WSJ reports:
“The OTS, a division of the Treasury Department, has come under fire after it was revealed last year that the agency had allowed IndyMac Bancorp Inc. (IDMCQ) to backdate a May 2008 $18 million capital infusion to the first quarter. IndyMac failed a few months later, a collapse that cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $10.7 billion, the costliest failure in U.S. history.

A subsequent review of the issue by the OTS uncovered four other cases of backdating by banks, cases which the agency said in a January letter to U.S. lawmakers “were not acceptable to current OTS standards.” Allowing the banks to backdate capital infusions to earlier quarters could allow firms to avoid regulatory penalties for having too little capital.”

AND,

....“Polakoff also has come under fire for the agency’s inability to prevent the problems at American International Group Inc. (AIG). The OTS was a top regulator for the giant insurance company, which eventually needed a huge government bailout.

Polakoff increasingly has been the public face of the OTS, appearing in recent weeks before multiple congressional committees and speaking to bankers around the country.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090326-718651.html

From WaPo:
“One of the nation’s chief bank regulators has been placed on leave pending the results of an investigation into his agency’s role in allowing several banks to falsify financial statements.

The Treasury’s inspector general is investigating a number of instances in which OTS employees allowed banks to exaggerate their financial health in required filings by including money they did not receive until after the reporting period.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/26/AR2009032603264.html?nav=rss_business

Reuters:
“We were doing a (material review) on IndyMac last summer ... In the course of that audit work, our auditors found an instance at IndyMac where there was backdating and it appeared an (Office of Thrift Supervision) official had allowed that to happen,” Delmar told Reuters.

“We did some further work and found other instances where OTS had been aware of and blessed backdating and we wrote ... a memo to the secretary around Christmas saying that this is an issue.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE52Q6MF20090327

Did you notice that comment, “In the course of that audit work”....audit work…audit work….AUDIT WORK, yep… I like the sound of that.  Now if we could shout this from the “her purple mountain majesties above the fruited plains”.....

Afriend’s comments in response to Kiss.

“1- No advertising = no freedom of speech.”
“2- All statements under oath = a police state.”
“3- Equal time = wide spread social engineering.”

Could number 1, really be truth in advertising, then number 2 could be eliminated, of course then all advertising would come under question, so capitalism would suffer from the third degree burns of social engineering.

Accountability and integrity should never be required of our politicians or lobbyists running the halls of Congress would be joining the rest of Joe public out of work.

KISS,

Concerning your three suggestions: This is the United States of America. This is not Cuba, Venezuela, China or Egypt.

1- No advertising = no freedom of speech.
2- All statements under oath = a police state.
3- Equal time = wide spread social engineering.

We don’t need a revolution in the type you describe. There are already places on earth like that. The U.S. is a far better place to live than what you so desire.

A candidate should be able to say and advertise anything they wish. And no media source should EVER feel compelled to air a candidates words. Ever!

The responsibility is yours and yours alone. Listen carefully, do your homework and vote your choice in or out.

thebeerdoctor,

Appreciate your comments on Paul Krugman, he seemed to be tooting his own horn, let’s face it, economists offer only guesstimates, a science worthy of becoming a religion on its own merits.

Matt Taibbi’s work reflects my feelings very well, which includes the accurate need to use the word ass holes, among others. Elite entitlements demand blind acceptance from the ignorant masses on the street, so calling names is not nice.

Accountability in politics, is on holiday with integrity.

For those who advocate for Paul Krugman to be part of the solution, you might want to think again. In a recent interview with Amy Goodman he was asked about his support of the North America Free Trade Agreement, which he was completely unapologetic for. I guess he adheres to the neoliberal stupidity that free markets alleviate poverty when in fact, much of the corporate globalization movement has destroyed local agriculture in country after country. Like others of his ilk, he exists in the rarefied air of academic policy discussion, so it was not surprising to see him look quite at home on the Sunday morning talk show, yukking it up with likes of Cokie Roberts and George Will. No, his half ass analysis pales in comparison to Matt Taibbi’s work in The Big Takeover, investigative (they use to call it muck raking) journalism that would make the ghost of Ida Tarbell proud.
Taibbi gets to the point that this is not about the money, but about the power. How a select number of well connected men can steal trillions from the national treasury and con the public into thinking it is their own best interest, with the dutiful assistance of television news, President Obama, and a lying sniveling congress whose main concern is to cover their own backsides.

Start the inquistion on those in the halls of Congress who not only allowed- but encouraged this economic meltdown.
there was no flawed logic- no misunderstanding of ramifications when they systematically removed every safeguard/stop gap developed after the last time Wall Street Screwed this country (and now the World)
Start with those who aided Greenspan Inc in re instituting the fuedal system of Trickle Down economics- follow up with prosecuting Clinton for Signing the well foreseen disaster of the ‘modernization act’.Follow the Web of corruption and treachery Where ever it leads. Even prosecute those now long dead in absentia. Go after the Academic institutions who failed to teach the basics about what the economic factors were that sparked the Revolutionary War- It was essential ‘Trickle Down’ Economics- hoarding wealth by the upper echeleon and starving out and abusing the producing majority. This economic meltdown was not a result of some ‘flawed’ logic, it was a stratedgic insideous method to undermine the true American Ideology of a Free market (also to be ‘For and By the people’ - not family crests, insignia Or Logo’s).
The Stark bulb of inquistion should not solely be directed at the profiteers, but kore importantly those who granted such Liberties over and beyond that which the Constitution protects (US) and which they were to defend through legislative and Oversight powers.
Just as those Spanish inquistioners were committing for more atrocities than those they falsely accused, Our Public Servants have committed far greater crimes than those they are questioning now. If you had not undermined the long standing regulations, and adhered to your oathes Our country would not be in this clusterfuck Now!

I was (still am) living in Japan in 1999 when Krugman launched an eerily familiar diatribe of Japanese Govt. policy. They didn’t listen to him either. Now 10 years of Zombie Economy later I’m leaving. Broke and busted. Sure, sure, some of it is my fault, but take my last interview (at Merrill Lynch). I was mildly hectored with the question why I hadn’t progressed further up the ranks for my age. My reply was prepared; When I came to Japan in 1997 the price of a can of Coke was 110 yen. Sales tax was increased then from 3% to 5%. Now that can of Coke is 100 yen. Krugman’s prediction had come true and Japan and everyone in it lost the last 10 years. They didn’t get my point and I didn’t get the job. I hope Obama get’s the message from Krugman though.

The Democrats are doing exactly what they are paid to do.  Go take a look at how much Wall St money came to Obama and the Democrats in the last elections.  Given that Wall St gave them millions, who in their right mind would expect the Democrats to bite the hand that pumps money into their pockets.

If you wanted real change, voting Democrat was not the answer.

Here’s the rule American voters need to run. The candidates with all the money are not on our side.  They are on the side of the people who gave them all that money.  The candidates that the corporate media touts are not on our side.  They are on the side of the corporate CEO’s that own the media companies.

The candidate to vote for is the one that has to ask his supporters for rides to and from the airport, and who is either ignored or ridiculed by the corporate media.

We are in the midst of a fatally flawed society based upon extreme self interest.  I have to admit after reading how other societies crumbled I am fascinated to be amidst a crumbling one.  The signs are present everywhere, financial mismanagement, wars, corruption, moral decay, drug addiction epidemic, culture wars, gender wars, death everywhere on the big and small screens, unsolved problems building ever larger, political and economic elites creating private armies, failing cities, failing businesses, massive foreclosures and homelessness, printing incredible amounts of money, and a federal government with a one note solution:  Save the Banks to the tune of fifteen to twenty trillion dollars in grants, loans, and guarantees.  So, tell me again how a collapse can be avoided?  All you have is yourselves, your families, and your neighbors and they are in a blind denial because the thought of the worst is beyond their willingness to face and endure.  Blind happiness is mere rationalized hopelessness.  What will you do now?

How come theamericanpeople don’t see that all this official “bumbling ineptitude” is today’s equivalent of “The-Writing-On-The-wall”?  The “message” is sure plain enough to us surviving Savages here in Indian Country.  It is simply this:  It is foolish to look to institutions, and those who “man” them, for remedies to the ills plaguing you as “individuals” and as a society.

Your difficulties are not, at their roots, “political” or even “economic.”  So expecting papered professional “experts” in these make-believe fields to come-up with effective solutions is itself a bound-to-prove-fatal (if persisted-in) exercise in F-U-tility.

Your gangbanging “global enterprise” has put you at-odds with the Living Arrangement of our Mother Earth.  You go-on with this idiotid WAR at-your-peril….the particulars of which are becoming more-and-more obvious (even to the media-addled masses) every day.

Your only hope of survival now lies in your surrendering unconditionally to the responsibilities of your organic function as components of Her immune system.  To fulfill it you must throw-off the deadly delusion that is your “individual”-ity, and reFORM your own pathetically insufficient “selfs” into the Genuine Living Communities our Lakotah Cousins call Tiyoshpayes. 

Everywhere you look the structural apparatus of “the-establishment” is collapsing, while its sole beneficiaries (the two-legged tools of our tormentors) put on a display of panic-ridden scrambling (with their political retainers pulling rear-guard duty) to escape with as much “wealth” as they can carry-off.  Let ‘em have it!

What you really need right now is right where you live-and-breathe….or it is nowhere at all.  Looking to Washington for salvation, or to some preacher’s “promised land,” is to squander your precious attention on flickering false images that will fade-out, anyhow, the moment they no longer serve the parasitic purposes of your exploiters.

Better get TOGETHER, Sisters and Brothers.  Otherwise you will most certainly be hung-out separately….to-dry and twist lonely in-the-wind.

HokaHey!

All these bankers are crooks, instead of our on-the-take politicians bending over backwards to help them, lets put a few in jail.

The B Frank committee blustered, bumbled, effused, and spent an hour for five minutes worth of substance. Bernanke and Geithner looked on, saying it wasn’t our fault usually. We need some real power in investigation.

Try this:

http://nikkialexander.wordpress.com/

After hearing about the republican budget with no number amounts and their only idea is more tax cuts for the rich this past week, I feel they should not only not be paid for this inept attempt to tell Obama look, “here is our no-budget budget”, they should all be fired. They repugs are totally unqualified for the position they currently hold, and have obtained their jobs under fraudulent conditions. Boehner-boner, Steele, Cantor and Bachmann are only the most recent loud mouth know nothings to spew their idiocy and those less enlightened people who voted them in office should loose their voting rights.

the beer doctor:
As for Obama propping up the ownership/elite ruling class. Remember when he said that in order for the top to be strong, you have to made the base(us) strong first and that he was going to help rebuild the base first, otherwise everything else collapses?
ANd he also has now involved us in the Pakistan war against al-queda.

This is not what I was hoping for when the change theme was playing out. We need less war and involvement interfering with other countries. Didn’t the Constitution say we should not get involved in wars with other countries? Charity begins at home and if home is in need of charity in many situations we have let fall behind the last 8 years, we need to correct that first. If we cannot help ourselves fix the problems at home, and there are many,(thank you bush/cheney corp for that) we can be of no help to anyone else.

Machille Bachmann in her call for violence against this government-presidency, has proven she is a traitor and should be made to vanish, just as Bush had people who he deemed a threat, go missing into his prison camps. She is almost as bad as Sarah Palin, whose speeches during the campaign tried to incite riots, violence and even death to others. Is this some kind of a mental defect seen only in the republican party? Only those who are mentally disturbed(like Bush) need apply to runs in the republican political field?
AND FOR THIS THEY ARE GETTING PAID?

I want a refund.

I found this article interesting. But I also found the authors historical time-line to be failing in one very important fact!

Watergate stands out as the time in recent history when a congressional investigation actually was an investigation. When an investigation actually made a profound difference.

But why was that? Because of the war in Vietnam? Because of the break-in? Because the Congress was comprised of better and more dedicated folks?

No. There is absolutely only one reason why! Because the people, all the people demanded it!
And why was that?

Because they KNEW about it!
And why was that?

Because back in the day, there were still honest to goodness investigative journalists working on honest to goodness NEWS papers, who WANTED to dig out the truth and PUBLISH the truth! And there were honest to goodness journalists working on networks owned by PEOPLE who honestly wanted their staff to report NEWS!

And Congress was forced to respond to the demand.

Compare that with the past eight years. When the so-called liberal New York Times covered pre-Iraq and the beginning of that folly, did they hunt for an honest to goodness investigative journalist who would dig and dig until they found the truth? No. They went with the journalist who was already “on the inside” who guaranteed to report the Adminstration line! When the Seattle PI had the guts to defy Administration orders and put a picture of the returning caskets on their front page, did the “news” world jump to their side and demand the right to give the dignity of recognition to those returning dead? NYT ran the picture in their next issue, then they all caved. Ask yourself. Had we been allowed to see that every night, night after night, would Congress have reacted differently when the newly controlled House of Representatives tried to bring an end to the war? I think so, because there would have been far more people demanding an end to the war. Even those on the right would be under the kind of pressure that comes from angry constituents.

I knew that newscasting was beyond doomed the day CNN added someone from the National Enquirer to their editorial staff. That was about the time Bush was being selected to run the nation. That was also about the time I decided CNN was no longer worth watching.

We have Amy Goodman and Greg Palast and a host of other honest to goodness investigative journalists. But most of them are not on prime-time. And few of them are syndicated across the print world. And believe it or not, there are still millions of people out there who don’t have regular access to the Internet. Besides, a great many “news” reporters on the Internet rely heavily on published news to get their news! So we are caught in that space between the collapse of the news-print industry, the rise of the internet as news-casting and [with a few notable exceptions] a bunch of really bad TV networks!

And all of this can be blamed on corporate America, who decided keeping the corp happy was far more important than covering the news. Makes it possible to get away with some really nasty stuff, ‘cause nobody knows. Besides, it’s far cheaper, and easier to pay someone who loves to blabber [think O’Reilly] to create news, than pay a staff of honest journalists to go out and find news.

And speaking of news. Will all you many thousands on Obama’s mailing list please tell him to quit pre-selecting reporters at his news conferences. It makes it look like the questions are pre-selected, and that looks an awful lot like Bush. I think it’s kinda like that outside insurance thing for the Vets that got floated around for a while. Once the Vets let Obama know what a bad idea that was, it got dropped. I mean we can’t expect him to read our minds. We need to let him know!

No, this is what the campaign contributors pay Congress for.  Our contribution is just pocket money.

Congress and the President should be working for $1/year…hell, that’s a lot more than most of them are worth anyhow.

“elephantine proportions and its festering internal rivalries”. Apt description.

One, Two party gridlock seems the order of the day, gridlock all the same.

I would have liked Stanley Kutler to spend more time on what he didn’t like about NOW in Congress, specifics.  The history is good, but how many people know the “Borscht Belt”? (comedy circuit for new comics, many many were Jews, who worked in the hotels in the Catskill Mts. of NYS; long gone)  You’d need to be as old as some of us older folks online.

President Obama and Congress simply can not get hold of the idea that the system they dream of saving is entirely broken. George W Bush’s administration saw to it and broke the republic, not only financially, politically and ethically too. The gigantic banks with their gargantuan problems need to be out of business, not pumped up with more money. Since Wall Street has given Obama money, he feels obligated to provide these owners with a “soft” landing, that will keep their fool’s parlor tricks game going. President Obama must decide, does he represent the people, or the ownership class? His faith in his economic team reveals who he really cares about. His escalation of the war in Afghanistan, reveals a blatant disregard for the lives of his fellow citizens and their money.

Like all of you I had a choice in this last presidential election. I could vote for an old white slimeball that is a shill for corp. Amerika or I could vote for a young black slimeball, also a shill for corp Amerika. I chose the latter.
Until we enact 3 changes in our election campaigning I see no difference in the coming.
1- No advertising, Nada, zilch, NONE, period.
2- All statements made by a candidate will be under oath and legally accountable later if he/she wins.
3-Equal time will be given all candidates by the media to be able to state their views and message to the public.Any breach of any of these laws will be 5 years jail time and a $100,000.00 fine with no exceptions.
I see this never happening until a revolution occurs, so in the mean-time the flea circus will continue and the true believers will eat the pop corn and continue to believe how wonderful this experiment in democracy is.

RE STANLEY KUTLER: “Congress, with its own expertise, might prod the executive into accepting alternatives. But given its present reactive, blustering responses, it is now merely a pathetic giant.”

Blustering is certainly an apt description.  Some of these people on Capital Hill are also sort of out there in a scary sort of way, especially that Republican Congresswoman Bachmann. This woman’s rhetoric is totally irresponsible. Everyone appears to be completely oblivious to the fact that the crazies as well as children are being exposed to her reckless incendiary propaganda.

I very much agree with Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, “incendiary rhetoric like this leads strange people to do strange things,” and if some tragic incident does occur as result of her reckless and incendiary conduct, I believe Congresswoman Bachmann should be held legally accountable:

“Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) . . . appeared on a radio show earlier this week, describing elected Democratic officials as the “enemy” and encouraging her constituents to be “armed and dangerous.” Soon after, appearing on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Bachmann went even further. . . “

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

After reading Krugman’s column, today, I’ve come to the conclusion, that we’re headed for 4 years of a flat line economy, with only Bread and Circuses, and deteriorating social and economic conditions for the masses.

If anyone can read Krugmans column, and come to another conclusion I’d like to know, because it scared the hell out of me.

For a little while, after Obama was elected I had some hope that things would get better, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen now.

I wonder what will happen when the rest of the nation realizes this, and how long it will take.

Politically, other than posturing, it seems like neither the White House nor Congress wants to tangle with Wall Street skullduggery and power.  The idea seems to be to quietly offload the banks’ bad debt onto private investors at discount prices and move on.  They call it, looking forward.