No, Mr. President: As long as Wall Street exists and its criminals walk free on the earth, "reform" is not working. That's because you can't "reform" a criminal enterprise with no reason for existing except to steal every last penny from the working people of the national and the world. You have to kill it. Burn it to the ground and salt the earth so nothing rises there again.
Full transcript here.
Yes that is too exactly what he said.
Think Progress:
There’s no such thing as financial crime, according to Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA).
At a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills, California on Tuesday, a constituent asked McClintock for his “stance on Wall Street criminal practices.” The congressman responded, “Well first of all, for a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It’s pretty simple.”
There's video.
This is FUN, people! Watch the banksters' heads explode!
From The Nation:
In almost every part of the country, entire neighborhoods—and in some cases, whole cities—are underwater. They are not victims of natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Like the Conways, they are drowning in debt, victims of Wall Street’s reckless and predatory lending practices.
Since 2006, when the speculative housing bubble burst, home prices have plummeted; homeowners have lost more than $6 trillion in household wealth. Many now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Despite rising home prices in some parts of the country, more than 11 million American families—one-fifth of all homeowners with mortgages—are still underwater, through no fault of their own. If nothing is done, many will eventually join the more than 5 million American homeowners who have already lost their homes to foreclosure.
SNIP
The problem is contagious. Communities with many underwater homes bring down the value of other houses in the area. Foreclosures alone have drained at $2 trillion in property values from surrounding neighborhoods, according to a Center for Responsible Lending study. The resulting decline in property tax revenues has plunged some cities into near-bankruptcy, lay-offs and cuts to vital public services.
SNIP
Faced with this quagmire, a growing number of cities—with the support of community groups and unions—are taking things into their own hands. Thanks to a legal strategy initially formulated by Cornell University law professor Robert Hockett, city officials have discovered that they can use their eminent domain power—which they routinely use to purchase property for sidewalks, infrastructure, school construction and other projects—to buy underwater mortgages at their current market value and resell them to homeowners at reduced price and mortgage payments.
Richmond (CA) is the first city to pursue this strategy. Its city council—with the support of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which for years has organized homeowners against predatory banks—recently voted 6-0 (with one member absent) to make offers to buy underwater mortgages. If lenders refuse, the city will take them by eminent domain and work with a group of friendly investors (Mortgage Resolution Partners, or MRP) to refinance the loans with the Federal Housing Administration.
SNIP
If banks reset Richmond’s underwater mortgages to fair market value, homeowners would save an average of over $1,000 per month on their payments. If those savings were spent on local goods and services, it would generate about $170 million in economic stimulus and create at least 2,500 jobs.
SNIP
Wall Street is up in arms. Since several cities began discussing this strategy last year, industry lobbyists have been fighting back. In a coordinated effort involving letters, phone calls and meetings, some of the nation’s most powerful lobby groups—including the National Association of Realtors, the American Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders, American Securitization Forum, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)—have tried to dissuade local officials from pursuing the eminent domain strategy.Fuck Wall Street. Fuck the bankster. Fuck the Fed. Take back your house. Take back your neighborhood. Take back your town. Take back your country.
In April, for example, SIFMA officials Kim Chamberlain and Tim Cameron traveled from New York to Richmond to persuade Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and her Council colleagues to back off.
“We’re not going to be intimidated by these Wall Street folks,” said McLaughlin, a former teacher who has been mayor since 2006. “It is pretty outrageous to hear them opposing this. They’re the ones who caused this crisis in the first place. And they don’t have a solution. The city has every right to do this.”
Charles Pierce, in re the bankruptcy of Montgomery, Alabama:
The inclination of many people, of course, is to read no further than "crooked local pols." What gets missed then, of course, is how these minor crooks got played by the big-league crooks in the financial-services sector, who look at other people's money the way other creatures look at carrion, and who look at people outside their industry as prey. Of course, Morgan found Jefferson County. It smelled easy money the way sharks smell blood, and of course it drained Jefferson County dry and threw away the husk. That is the system we have learned to tolerate, and even, in many cases, applaud. There is no excuse for the local pols. There is even less for the people who preyed upon them. The only sympathetic characters are the citizens of Jefferson County, the true marks, because what happened to them is what happens when you turn the country's economy into a casino and the country's governments into chips. This is also what happens when you look forward and not back.Burn Wall Street to the ground and salt the earth so that financial speculation can never grow again. And put everyone who ever made a dime off a derivative in prison.
Because she's on to the motherfuckers and she's going to put a stop to their criminal enterprise.
Digby:
Here is an excellent profile of Elizabeth Warren in today's LA Times. Seems she's causing quite a bit of agitation among the financial elites. I couldn't be more delighted:
The attention Warren is drawing — video clips of her first Banking Committee hearing went viral on YouTube — could catapult her even further. Some liberals have begun touting her as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.Oh, boo fucking hoo. The poor put-upon bankers and master of the universe just cannot get a break. Well, except for their ill-gotten billions, but other than that it's been just hell.
"She has maximized the influence and attention that a freshman senator can get," said Jaret Seiberg, a senior policy analyst with financial services firm Guggenheim Partners. "Now, when we look at issues of too-big-to-fail and of consumer protection, people want to know what Elizabeth Warren has to say."
The fast start by Warren, one of the few politicians to embrace the Occupy Wall Street movement, has confirmed the fears of some in the financial industry that she wouldn't hesitate to criticize them from her new, higher-profile position.
Warren's sharp rhetoric is "certainly harmful to our industry," said Ballard Cassady, president of the Kentucky Bankers Assn.
I am hearing lots of "questions" from establishment liberals about Warren's aggressive style being unhelpful because it's ginning up populist resentment (and lord knows, we can't have that!) My answer to that is, "yeah, whatever." The centrist Democrat experiment in "market liberalism" and appeasement politics has been shown to be an epic failure. We are on the verge of losing the American middle class and have succeeded in growing poverty. Well done, all around.
It's time to change direction and Warren is one of the few who both personally understands the issues and the politics of this new era. If that doesn't go down well among many of those who have invested their lives in the idea that left populism is dirty (or even that straight-up liberalism is a big fat political loser) well, too bad. As far as I'm concerned, she is the future. Get on board or get out of the way.
This is precisely the shit that Martin Luther used to bring down the catlick church, and it's going to be the doom of the Obama administration if it doesn't cut it the fuck out.
Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:
Time for a little stroll down memory lane. This is what I wrote about Penny Pritzer, Obama's just-announced appointee as Commerce Secretary, back in February:
Penny Pritzker, union buster.No, it was not. Okay, just kidding. Yes, it was. The joke's on us. Ha, ha!
Penny Pritzker, sub-prime lender who drove Superior Bank into the ground.
Penny Pritzker, Chicago Board of Ed members who thinks your children only deserve enough education to make them a member of the workforce.
Penny Pritzker, billionaire tax dodger.
Penny Pritzker, potential Secretary of Commerce nominee? Is this a joke?
(MoneyWatch) The position of U.S. Commerce Secretary has often been a political plum for top fundraisers, so it was no surprise that President Obama continued that tradition today when he named Penny Pritzker, the Chicago billionaire heiress to the Hyatt fortune.
Said to be worth nearly $2 billion, Pritzker put together nearly $800 million for Obama's presidential campaigns.
Pritzker's appointment shows that the administration is abandoning even a fig leaf of a relationship with labor unions -- Hyatt has had many run-ins with its work force, and Pritzker herself was deeply unpopular with the Chicago Teachers Union during her tenure on the Chicago Board of Education.
The appointment also suggests the administration is betting that people don't care much anymore about the subprime meltdown that succeeded in bringing the world to the brink of financial ruin.
Her role in the banking business may startle those not familiar with the history of the subprime meltdown.
The Pritzker family, along with a partner, bought the failed Lyons Savings Bank in 1988 for $42.5 million, getting $645 million in tax credits in the process and rechristening it Superior Bank. Under Pritzker, who served on the board, Superior bought Alliance Funding, which moved aggressively into subprime lending.
No, of course the Senate repugs are not going to filibuster her; she's the kind of anti-worker, anti-middle-class, tax-dodging filthy-rich parasite they already work for. That she's also the likely source of scandal that the administration has so far avoided is just gravy.Bert Ely, an independent banking analyst who testified about the failure of Superior, noted the garish pitch the bank was making at the time. "I remember the basic message to mortgage brokers: 'Send us the applications that no one else will accept.' "
As one of the earliest pioneers of risky loans that were then bundled off and sold as securities, Superior was also one of the practice's earliest casualties: The bank collapsed in 2001. "The kinds of lending they were doing were outrageous," Ely said. "But what was also outrageous was that when Superior failed -- there were a lot of uninsured depositors who took losses. It was more outrageous given the wealth of the family, which may have walked away without any losses."
Tim Anderson, a retired banking consultant who has written and testified about the failure of Superior, said Penny Pritzker played a direct role in persuading people to park their money in a bank that was taking wild-eyed risks. He points to a letter she wrote in May 2001 to bank employees and managers, assuring them that the bank was being recapitalized. But while that pledge of support may have convinced people that the bank was sound, the recapitalization never occurred. In fact, the bank failed two months later.
The letter was also indicative of the approach the bank was taking, and of Pritzker's hands-on role in strategy. "Our commitment to subprime has never been stronger," she wrote.
Yes, of course I'm talking about that most arrogant subset of the rich: Wall Street banksters.
Digby:
Thank you Bernie
.... for saying it:
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came to Capitol Hill this week to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As Congress and the White House are negotiating a year-end deficit deal, Blankfein sought to “lower people’s expectations” about their retirement and health care. He spoke with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year.
“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system and now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working families,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a Senate floor speech.
Iceland holds some key lessons for nations trying to survive bailouts after the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said.There's an economist who's been begging the U.S. government to do the same thing - repeatedly over the last four years. I think he got some kind of prize for his work.
Iceland’s commitment to its program, a decision to push losses on to bondholders instead of taxpayers and the safeguarding of a welfare system that shielded the unemployed from penury helped propel the nation from collapse toward recovery, according to the Washington-based fund.
“Iceland has made significant achievements since the crisis,” Daria V. Zakharova, IMF mission chief to the island, said in an interview. “We have a very positive outlook on growth, especially for this year and next year because it appears to us that the growth is broad based.”
Iceland refused to protect creditors in its banks, which failed in 2008 after their debts bloated to 10 times the size of the economy. The island’s subsequent decision to shield itself from a capital outflow by restricting currency movements allowed the government to ward off a speculative attack, cauterizing the economy’s hemorrhaging. That helped the authorities focus on supporting households and businesses.
“The fact that Iceland managed to preserve the social welfare system in the face of a very sizeable fiscal consolidation is one of the major achievements under the program and of the Icelandic government,” Zakharova said. The program benefited from “strong implementation, reflecting ownership on the part of the authorities,” she said.
Possibly in reaction to J.P. Morgan losing $3 billion on the bank equivalent of slot machines, repugs in the Senate approved two nominees to the Federal Reserve. That makes this week's appeal from President Obama to Congress to do something slightly less than usually ludicrous.
Full transcript here:
Bloomberg and his Wall Street henchmen were always going to destroy Occupy Wall Street, of course, and their excuses for doing so were limited only by how blatantly they could lie before their tongues flipped right off their rollers.
But I really think what pushed them over the edge was the bicycle generators. Right there in the middle of Manhattan, a block from Wall Street, directly in the faces of the fuckshite Masters of the Universe, Occupiers were living off the grid.
They had all the electricity they needed, and used it to power the very latest in high-tech communication tools - without paying a single penny to a utility company, an oil company or any energy company that holds a knife to the throat of civilization.
OWS beat the motherfuckers right in their own front yard and that could not stand.
I have no idea what's going to happen now. Maybe it will strengthen Occupy in New York and across the nation and the globe. Maybe it will propel Occupy to the next level.
Regardless, I trust Occupiers to make the right decisions. They've won every battle since they started on September 17, and I doubt Mayor FuckShite's little temper tantrum is going to stop them now.
Join your local Occupation today.
I really hate the "battered spouse" analogy for Defeatist Democrats in Congress, but the only other explanation is that they are actively working to destroy their own party - along with what remains of the American Middle Class.
Digby, on the "Sacrifice Scam:"
Oh spare me:To underscore the fact that GOP’s intransigence on taxes is the source of the gridlock, the committee’s Democratic co-chair confirmed that Democrats are willing to make the sort of deep cuts to entitlement programs Republicans are demanding — but only if Republicans abandon the pledge.
“It’s not enough for either side to simply say they want to reduce the deficit—now is the time when everyone needs to be putting some real skin in the game and offering serious compromises,” Murray said at the hearing, in her most pointed public comments to date. “Democrats have made clear we are prepared to do that. We’ve said we are very open to painful concessions and compromises if Republicans are as well—and we have put forward serious ideas that reflect this. But these concessions would only be made—and only considered—in the context of a balanced deal that doesn’t just fall on the middle class and most vulnerable Americans—but that requires big corporations and the wealthiest among us to share in the sacrifices.”
No, corporations and wealthy people will not be "sacrificing" anything. They won't even notice it. Corporations are nothing more than a legal construct so they don't have the capacity for "sacrifice." And Paris Hilton will still be able to buy anything she wants.
I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but I'm telling you, they are selling the American people a bill of goods that's so breathlessly cynical I can hardly believe what I'm seeing. The only people in this entire scenario who are going to be "sacrificing" are the most vulnerable people among us. The idea that this is a fair trade is simply obnoxious.
Here's a little reminder of just what a crock this all is:
Al Jazeera English' Bob Abeshouse and Yasmeen Qureishi have put together an investigative report on the out-sized influence of the Koch Brothers on American democracy. The documentary premiered on AJE this week, and both starts and ends with the "Secret Koch Tapes" we exclusively published last month in a series of articles at Mother Jones and here at The BRAD BLOG.
There are a number of noteworthy points in this investigative look at the Kochs, co-owners of Koch Industries, the nation's second largest private corporation (the giant oil conglomerate inherited from their father), and how they are spending just some of the extraordinary $18 billion increase in personal wealth they've enjoyed over just the last three years under the tyranny of the Obama administration.
But among the interesting points revealed here, is the fact that this detailed exposé, a behind-the-scenes examination of two of the most powerful puppeteers behind American democracy, comes not from the far larger and better funded corporate news networks here in the U.S., but from from Al Jazeera. Go figure...
Recently one of the cable snooz shows interviewed some Occupy protesters and asked one woman didn't she want to be one of the one percent herself. She gave a long answer that wasn't really wrong or inappropriate, but neither was it concise. How about this next time:
"The one percenters get there only by cheating. I don't cheat and don't tolerate those who do."
Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone reminds us the real problem is not that capitalism sucks or is incompatible with Democracy but that Wall Street refuses to play by the rules.
When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.
Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy.
Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?
The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we've obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.
Moreover, the worse the economy got, the more being a millionaire or a billionaire somehow became a qualification for high office, as people flocked to voting booths to support politicians with names like Bloomberg and Rockefeller and Corzine, names that to voters symbolized success and expertise at a time when few people seemed to have answers. At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.
And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.
In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs – not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.
That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.
All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:
SNIP
These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.
Well of course they were more polite than that, but I'm sure Goldman heard it as an obscenity.
From Think Progress:
Goldman Sachs Withdraws From Credit Union Fundraiser After Learning Occupy Wall Street Was Being Honored Too
Earlier this month, the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City held a fundraiser to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It just so happened that this the credit union many of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) were using to store funds — and the protest group became an honoree at the dinner. When Goldman Sachs found out that OWS would be at the dinner, it pulled out of the event, along with its $5,000 donation. Despite the threat from the mega-bank to pull its money if OWS would be honored, event organizers decided to go ahead anyway. “Their money was welcome, but not at the price of giving up what we believe in,” said Pablo DeFilippi, associate director of member development at the National Federal of Community Development Credit Unions. “We lost their $5,000, but we have our principles.”
Used to be you had to be an unscrupulous hauler of hazardous chemical waste to be caught dumping poison on public property.
Now all you have to be is a giant unregulated bank with too much bad debt on the books.
Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:
And this is why we've been screaming about regulating derivatives! I kind of think that the Occupy movement is going to have something to say about this corporate sleight of hand that came to light earlier this week. Do they really think we're going to look the other way and let them stick us with a $74 trillion bill -- just to let good old "too big to fail" Bank of America off the hook? I don't think so:If you have any doubt that Bank of America is in trouble, this development should settle it. I’m late to this important story broken [...] by Bob Ivry of Bloomberg, but both Bill Black (who I interviewed just now) and I see this as a desperate (or at the very best, remarkably inept) move by Bank of America’s management.
The short form via Bloomberg:Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation…
Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.
That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
Now you would expect this move to be driven by adverse selection, that it, that BofA would move its WORST derivatives, that is, the ones that were riskiest or otherwise had high collateral posting requirements, to the sub. Bill Black confirmed that even though the details were sketchy, this is precisely what took place.
And remember, as we have indicated, there are some “derivatives” that should be eliminated, period. We’ve written repeatedly about credit default swaps, which have virtually no legitimate economic uses (no one was complaining about the illiquidity of corporate bonds prior to the introduction of CDS; this was not a perceived need among investors). They are an inherently defective product, since there is no way to margin adequately for “jump to default” risk and have the product be viable economically. CDS are systematically underpriced insurance, with insurers guaranteed to go bust periodically, as AIG and the monolines demonstrated.
The reason that commentators like Chris Whalen were relatively sanguine about Bank of America likely becoming insolvent as a result of eventual mortgage and other litigation losses is that it would be a holding company bankruptcy. The operating units, most importantly, the banks, would not be affected and could be spun out to a new entity or sold. Shareholders would be wiped out and holding company creditors (most important, bondholders) would take a hit by having their debt haircut and partly converted to equity.
This changes the picture completely. This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral.
But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough indeposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.
One of the many problems with putting the plutocratic one percent in public office and in charge of public services like banking is you get public policy being made by people who have no concept of "work" beyond what they get out of their personal servants.
David Atkins ("thereisnospoon") at Hullabaloo:
Mayor Bloomberg:"What they're trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city," Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show, adding that the protests "aren't productive" and weren't good for tourism.
"If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city -- the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy -- go away, we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean our parks or anything else."
You know what else creates lots of jobs? Prostitution. It's the oldest profession on earth. Also, heroin and meth sales. Lots of heroin addicts out there, and I hear business is booming. Child porn, too, employs all sorts of people directly and indirectly. People like Chris Hansen would be sadly unemployed, but those freeloading tweens stealing our tax dollars with their taxpayer-funded school lunches and socialist educations would finally become a productive part of the economy. If only Big Government would step aside and allow those industries to thrive and help pay for municipal employees and clean parks, think what a wonderful world this could be.
Of course, any one of those professions would be more productive and less damaging to society than any industry that ever was involved in selling credit default swaps. But you know what they say: if you ban collateralized debt obligations, only criminals will sell collateralized debt obligations.
I've been bank-free for 17 years, having switched to a credit union in 1994. They can be annoying at times (the new ATMs don't have the features I liked best in the old ATMs) but the free checking, free debit cards and plain savings with interest more than make up for it.
Lisa Derrick at Firedoglake:
Money-movers, who advocate changing from large corporate banks to credit unions or small local banks, are calling to make November 5 a nationwide Bank Transfer Day.
Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will ALWAYS remember the 5th of November!!
• Open an account with a Credit Union
• Transfer your funds to the new account (online or in person) by 11/05
• Follow your bank’s procedures to close your account
To find a credit union near you: Find a credit union.com
Wire transfers cost $35, can take three to five days to clear, and require an existing account in which the funds will land. A better plan may be to simply go to the bank and close your account in person, ask for cash or a bank check, trot over to a credit union and open an account. 11/5/11 is a Saturday so make sure your bank is open that day! Most credit unions are closed on Saturdays. Don’t forget to change any automatic bill pays, etc to your new account–and don’t forget where you hid the cash or bank check over the weekend!
Two Kentucky counties occupied; 118 to go.
From the Courier:
The Louisville demonstrators said they intended to “occupy” the grassy space across Fourth Street from the Kentucky Convention Center indefinitely — 24 hours a day — like their New York City counterparts have done with Zuccotti Park.
Curtis Morrison planned to pull an all-nighter — and more — for the protest, which may relocate at nights to the Belvedere before returning to the space at Jefferson and Fourth this morning. “Congress needs to look at this,” said Morrison, an organizer of the still-organizing demonstration. “They need to make some reforms or there’s going to be a revolution.”
About 140 protesters were present at 2 p.m., but Morrison said the group peaked earlier at roughly 200. The Occupy Louisville protest didn’t have a principal organizer, instead coalescing through word-of-mouth and social media.
Separate groups met at the Belvedere and at Fourth and Jefferson. Within an hour, the Belvedere protesters marched to Fourth and Jefferson, toting signs that said “Stop the War on Workers” and chanting, “The banks got a bailout, we got sold out.”
“I’m here because our federal government has sold us out,” protester Meredith Dooley said, holding a sign. “It’s government of the money, for the money, by the money. I hope people get greater awareness that their government is not representing them. People should be outraged by the inequality of wealth.”
At this point the entire advanced world is doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says it shouldn’t be doing: slashing spending in the face of high unemployment, slow growth, and a liquidity trap. It’s a global 1937. And if the result is another recession, the witch-doctors will just demand more bleeding.
Yes, of course it's bullshit and of course S&P is a bunch of criminal incompetents who embody the worst of the financial industry.
But the downgrade is also evil and dangerous, as Ian Welsh explains:
Aside from hysterical laughter, here are the key points:
1. Obviously the US isn’t even close to insolvent. The gold in Fort Knox is held on the books at $37/ounce, for example. Most Federal lands are held on the books at 19th century valuations. Not to mention that the US’s debt is denominated in its own currency, which means it could simply be printed, and that the US government has a lot of unused room to tax, should it ever deign to use that on people with money, as opposed to those without.
2. As everyone is pointing out, the idea that S&P, who rated all the subprime trash as AAA, has any credibility, is a joke.
3. However, Obama and Democrats refused to destroy S&P when they had the opportunity and every reason to do so. The submprime crisis could not have been nearly as bad without S&P and the other rating’s agencies rating trash AAA so that investors who must buy AAA by law could do so. To put it simply, S&P engaged in systematic fraud. They, like everyone on Wall Street and in the major banks, have not been indicted for this. The choice to not indict is policy. Obama’s policy.
4. If Obama did not want this to happen, it would not happen. Could you imagine what LBJ, Nixon or Truman (or, hell, Bush Jr.) would have done if a rating’s agency tried this? The President has the necessary tools to utterly destroy S&P and every senior analyst working for them. You could use terrorism statutes or RICO, just as two examples. Send the FBI into their offices, seize all the assets of both the company and everyone working for it, and then got through their records. I guarantee, as absolutely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that there is enough evidence of fraud in those records to put them away for life. In the meantime, RICO laws are used to seize all the assets of everyone involved, meaning they will be using public defenders (don’t like a bad law? Use it against real people.) When S&P informed the White House they were going to downgrade, the White House could have quietly let them know what the consequences would be.
5. The US has effectively unlimited drawing rights from the IMF. Those drawing rights mean that if any of the core economies have an AAA rating, in effect, so does the US. (ie. if Germany is AAA, so is America.)
6. S&P knows all this. They are doing this because they know the President and Congress and the real people in the oligarchy want it done. Remember, a downgrade increases rates, and that is a direct increase to their income. And they know the US can pay, they aren’t fooled by idiotic talk about a default. The US may default at some point, but that will be a political decision.
7. This is another manufactured crisis, on top of the original manufactured debt ceiling crisis. The oligarchy wants the opportunity to buy federal assets at dimes on the dollar. They believe they don’t need the poor or middle class anymore, so they are good with getting rid of SS and Medicare. And Obama is, as he always has been, onside with this.
These people, are, however, playing with fire. Just because it’s a crisis that didn’t have to happen, a crisis, that is manufactured as another looting opportunity, doesn’t mean that it won’t have real consequences.
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