RL has been beyond hectic, so I hope people will forgive me for outsourcing my blog post, but Yves Smith nails not only Wall Street but the media coverage of it (today it is the NYTs, but they're hardly alone in avoiding certain words like fraud and looting). Read more…

Or at least he pretends to be:

"In the macroeconomic sense, foreclosure reduction is an essential part of getting us out of the problem we're in," House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., said Wednesday. "The refusal so far to use the money to that purpose has been I think a violation of the intent and undermines the ability to get the votes in this Congress to do things in the future."

You know, Barney, if that's how you wanted the money spent, then you should have said so in the legislation. Take it away, Factesque's mick arran: Read more…

That's a quote from William Buiter, courtesy of naked capitalism. You should read the entire naked capitalism post, but a couple of things in it got me thinking about this interesting discussion between ohio and badger on the idea of bubbles in essential goods and services (like housing, energy) as opposed to bubbles in non-essentials (like tech stocks). And about how we decide in times of crisis - or collapse - what we save and what we don't. Read more…

Unity is its own virtue. It does not matter whether it leads to good things or bad things, just having a Government of National Unity is itself a good thing. How do I know this? NPR just told me so.

I'm driving home and make the mistake of turning on the radio. NPR is interviewing a historian (Robert something or other) to discuss the issue of whether all the Clinton "retreads" are really the change Obama promised.* After all, when John F. Kennedy came in he brought a new generation of advisors and (mostly) did not rely on Truman appointees. The historian does a generally good job of pointing out that the Clinton people are still a change from Bush, but then goes off for a ride on the Unity Pony and rides straight into stupid. Read more…

That's where we seem to be headed. Masters of capitalism, my ass. These folks are parasites. But you knew that already.

Via Calculated Risk, four insurance companies are seeking to buy thrifts so they will qualify for bailout money, Yes, that's right, they have money to buy thrifts, but we still need to bail them out.

American Express is now a bank. At least for bailout purposes. Not for regulatory purposes, I'm sure.

The Government is insuring debt issued by GE to the tune of $139 billion. Read more…

At least 1,000 people showed up today in Pasadena, California for the Join the Impact protest against Proposition 8. There were rallies held all across the country as part of the protest against marriage discrimination. The big California rallies were in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but Pasadena's rally had a pretty good turnout given that the effort to put it together didn't start until Wednesday. Read more…

The economic meltdown isn't limited to the bailout. We're going to be paying for the risks taken by banks and insurance companies in lots of ways. Such as having to pay off 30 year bonds in 10 years. That will cost you. And I do mean you. (The cuts in programs are just starting.)

Here's how it works. Read more…

Campbell Brown: And for those people who have been worried about the possibility of one party controlling Congress and the White House, the last president to do that was?

John King: That was Bill Clinton and--

Campbell Brown: --Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton had Democrats in the House and the Senate?

John King: Very briefly.

Campbell Brown. Very briefly. It didn't go so well.

John King: No it didn't. Read more…

Buried in the onslaught of economic bad news is word that the British Amabassador to Afghanistan has predicted that the war against the Taliban will fail and that what needs to be done is to prepare the public to accept a dictator in Afghanistan because that's the best option:

"The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust,” the British envoy, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was quoted as saying by the author of the cable, François Fitou, the French deputy ambassador to Kabul. Read more…

Jonathan Weil at Bloomberg explains why we're getting such a terrible bill everyone knows won't work (emphasis mine):

That brings us to this question: Why would a smart guy like Hank Paulson -- the former boss of Goldman Sachs -- advance such a dumb, shady plan? Let us count the reasons:

No. 1: It delays our national reckoning until after the presidential election. Read more…

Clearly I - and the many others who have opposed the bailout bill - have failed to communicate at a level our "leaders" can understand our concerns about what's wrong with their Wall Street giveaway. So let me dumb it down so even an elected official can understand: Read more…

"It would be my hope that this could be resolved today, that we'd have a day for the American people and members of Congress to review the legislation on the Internet,'' said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. "One thing is for sure, we are not leaving until this legislation is passed." Read more…

Finally, Krugman comes out and says what he's been dancing around for a week, which is that the Congressional Dem plan is nothing but lipstick on the GOP pig:

The Dodd-Frank changes make the plan less awful, mainly by creating an equity stake. Essentially, this makes it possible for the plan to do the right thing through the back door: use toxic-waste purchases to acquire equity, and hence inject capital after all. Also, the oversight means that Treasury can be prevented from making the plan a pure gift to financial evildoers. But it’s still not a good plan. Read more…

In an earlier post, I wrote about a number of places across the United States where people were suffering economically and asked where their bailout was. It's not just that the people in these places suffer. They suffer while others flourish. And nobody flourishes more than the Village. The top three richest counties in the country are outside Washington, D.C., and D.C. suburbs account for five of the top ten and nine of the top twenty.

As a reminder, the county with the lowest median income in the United States is Kalawao County, Hawaii. It had a median household income of $9,333. Read more…

Senate Finance Committe Members Rockefeller and Schumer in May:

“We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a Finance Committee member and an Obama supporter, referring to the presidential candidates’ healthcare plans. “What they are doing is … laying out their ambitions.” …

… Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership and a key Hillary Clinton ally who also sits on the Finance Committee, said he is “not sure we have the big plan on healthcare.” Read more…

As we seem to be moving inevitably towards helping out some of the richest Americans to protect them from the consequences of their fraud actions, I thought it might be useful to take the time to remember who isn't being helped by the Government and who won't be any time soon because, while there's at least $700 billion for Wall Street and unending resources for Iraq, we do not have the money to help someone who earns $5,000 a year. Just because we can afford billions, doesn't mean we can afford thousands. Read more…

Courtesy of Rodney Crowell (who doesn't have an official video for this song, this is the only one I could find, but the song is awesome and captures a lot of our elite):

I can search for truth some other time

Right now I just want to get what's mine

You know I was unsettled when my house price dropped. I was scared when I saw the Wall Street firms collapse, but now we've got CEOs sounding like chicagodyke?* Time to be terrified. Want to join me? Read this email sent to Arthur Silber (who knows the identity of the author, but is protecting it): Read more…

Via Susie Madrak, Columbia Journalism Review has a humdinger of an article about what we do know about the various financial institutions' behavior and how the media should be telling us even more. This didn't all just happen to us. From the article, a little quiz, match the financial institution with the allegation:

Allegation

1. Handed out copies of the movie Boiler Room as a training tape

2. Partnered to sell its “PayOption Arms” with a brokerage owned by a five-time felon, whose convictions included gun-related charges

3. Forbade loan officers to check borrower income on certain loans

4. Ran an “art department” in its Tampa office, where documents were altered Read more…

Obama finally talks about the economy in his latest ad (below), which I generally think is a good idea. The substance is fine, but the framing is for shit, IMO. He still can't say the D-word or even the R-word. The problem is not Washington. It is not the "outworn ideas of the Left and the Right." It is Republicans. That is the problem. And Democrats are the solution. At least I thought that would be the Democratic message. Instead, the message is that Obama is the solution and Washington is the problem. Then I guess we should all vote against our incumbent Democratic Congressmen since they are equally to blame as the Republicans? They are Washington, no? Read more…

We don't have a foreign policy crisis, we have a political crisis. We don't have a budget crisis, we have a political crisis. We don't have an environmental crisis, we have a political crisis.

All of the problems we're having stem from the same underlying problem - a political system that is broken. The mortgage meltdown, Iraq, budget deficits, climate change, and the oncoming recession all stem from this problem, but fixing only the crisis du jour, ignores the elephant in the room that ensures more shitpiles to clean up - the political crisis. Read more…

After listening to the Moyers podcast of his interview with Anthony Bacevich, I went tooling around the PBS archives and found this interesting report on the growing business of targeting poor people as a customer base. One poor person doesn't have much money, but as wages have stagnated, we now have a large pool of people who individually are poor, but together have hundreds of millions of dollars. Dollars a lot of businesses seek by charging these folks more for services and products than other Americans pay.

This goes for everything from cars to healthcare. On healthcare: Read more…

Possibly a crazy idea, but I was struck by it after reading BTD's post on how happy the Obama campaign is with Hillary Clinton's work on its behalf and wondering if she would be rewarded. Now, I'm not sure AG would be an adequate reward, but I think floating the idea could help Obama politically in a number of ways:

- It ends the meme that he and Clinton are feuding once and for all;

- It makes it more likely instead of defending Palin from sexism, the GOP engages in their typical Clinton-bashing sexism, which can only help with independent and blue collar voters; Read more…

Now here's the GOP I've come to know and loathe. After that recycled Alan Keyes bullshit I was worried that this country had fallen so far that the GOP couldn't even manufacture a decent smear campaign. But I see now that other GOP fundamentals remain strong:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day. Read more…

For those who might have missed it last week we invaded Pakistan. Afterwards, the Pakistanis, led by their new President, Asaf Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower, cut off the Khyber pass to briefly stop our using it to resupply Afghanistan (aren't we happy that we got NATO to piss off the Russians, our only other options for resupplying Afghanistan? But, hey, we're all Georgians now (by which I mean governed by an increasingly authoritarian, incompetent government)): Read more…