The Orange Loser Authorizes Yet More Lubeless Fucking of the White Working Class

You're getting just exactly what you voted for, motherfuckers.  Don't you ever let us hear you whining about it. 

 

Charlie Pierce:

Those nice white "forgotten people" will now be free to have their pensions swindled out from underneath them by sharpies whose bonuses depend on how much money they can steal. They will find themselves paying usurious interest rates on their credit cards because of a clause written in Swedish, in .00009 point type, on the back of their monthly statement. And then, when it all comes crashing down again, they'll have to look for somebody to blame, and it won't be them, and it won't be the charlatan they elevated to the White House. And someone else will run for president, and give them the proper scapegoat, and Tom Brokaw will ask all the wrong questions of all the wrong people again.

It's morning in America.

The "toughest Wall Street reform in history" is nowhere near enough

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.

Rich White People Are Evil in So Many Ways

Think about it.  Every single terrible thing that has happened in this country has been perpetrated by rich white people, from slavery and native genocide through 9/11 (yes, bin Laden is the spawn of an obscenely rich white family), the Iraq Catastrophe and the Great Wall Street Economic Fuckery.

Chris Hedges at TruthDig:

Michael Kraus, Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, social scientists at the University of California, did research that led them to conclude that the poor have more empathy than the rich. The poor, they argued, do not have the ability to dominate their environments. They must build relationships with others to survive. This requires that they be able to read the emotions of those around them and respond. It demands that they look after each other. And this makes them more empathetic. The rich, who can control their environments, do not need to bother with the concerns or emotions of others. They are in charge. What they want gets done. And the longer they live at the center of their own universe, the more callous, insensitive and cruel they become.

The rich white family has an unrivaled aptitude for crime. Members of rich white families run corporations into the ground (think Lehman Brothers), defraud stockholders and investors, sell toxic mortgages as gold-plated investments to pension funds, communities and schools, and then loot the U.S. Treasury when the whole thing implodes. They steal hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street through fraud and theft, pay little or no taxes, almost never go to jail, write laws and regulations that legalize their crimes and then are asked to become trustees at elite universities and sit on corporate boards. They set up foundations and are admired as philanthropists. And if they get into legal trouble, they have high-priced lawyers and connections among the political elites to get them out.

You have to hand it to rich white families. They steal with greater finesse than anyone else. If you are a poor black teenager and sprint out of a CVS with a few looted bottles of shampoo, you are likely to be shot in the back or sent to jail for years. If there were an Olympiad for crime, rich white families would sweep up all the medals; blacks would be lucky to come within a mile of the first elimination trial. I don’t know why black people even try to compete in this area. They are, by comparison, utter failures as criminals. The monarchs of crime are rich white people, who wallow in their pilfered wealth while locking away in prisons a huge percentage of poor men of color.

Rich white families are also the most efficient killers on the planet. This has been true for five centuries, starting with the conquest of the Americas and the genocide against Native Americans, and continuing through today’s wars in the Middle East. Rich white families themselves don’t actually kill. They are not about to risk their necks on city streets or in Iraq. They hire people, often poor, to kill for them. Rich white families wanted the petroleum of Iraq and, by waving the flag and spewing patriotic slogans, got a lot of poor kids to join the military and take the oil fields for them. Rich white people wanted endless war for the benefit of their arms industry and got it by calling for a war on terror. Rich white people wanted police to use lethal force against the poor with impunity and to arrest them, swelling U.S. prisons with 25 percent of the world’s prison population, so they set up a system of drug laws and militarized police departments to make it happen.

 Read the whole amazing thing.

Cops and Bankers

Down with Tyranny: 

I suppose it was smart of Jen Sorensen to include "A pre-emptive alert for the satire-challenged":

This strip is obviously not endorsing violence against bankers. It is saying that many in the financial world are real thugs who are never treated the way police often treat black citizens in Ferguson and many other places. The devastation caused by white-collar criminals — the loss of so many people’s homes and life savings, leading to broken families, poor health, depression, and suicide, has caused suffering on an immense scale. Yet bankers have to try very, very hard to get themselves arrested, and even then they usually aren’t successful.

With this cartoon, I am also trying to show just how annoying and unreasonable Ferguson cops must seem to people who live there.

Of Course AynRandy Is Taking Wall Street Money

Just like his hero greedily grabbed Social Security while condemning government welfare.

Rube-gulling hypocrisy: it's the repug way.

Dawn Kopecki at Bloomberg News:

Sen. Rand Paul has preached the political peril of being too close to financiers as he gears up for a likely 2016 presidential bid.

"We cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street," the Kentucky Republican told the audience at the Freedom Summit in New Hampshire in April. "Corporate welfare should once and for all be ended."  

 At the same time, the founders and employees of Mason Capital Management, a $13.6 billion New York hedge fund, have become leading contributors to Paul's political aims. The hedge fund has offices in London and San Francisco and offers clients offshore investments through a limited partnership in the Cayman Islands, among other strategies.

Kentucky's Pension Cesspool Sucks In Another Lawsuit

Anything with the potential to force open that self-dealing pit of vipers is welcome, but the local government angle doesn't touch the state government corruption.

John Cheves at the Herald:

A Northern Kentucky city sued the Kentucky Retirement Systems Monday over what it described as "illegal and imprudent investments" involving hundreds of millions of dollars in public pension money.

In its lawsuit, filed in Kenton Circuit Court, the city of Fort Wright said KRS violates the law with risky investments in hedge funds, venture capital funds, private equity funds, leveraged buyout funds and other "alternative investments" that have produced small returns and excessive management fees, possibly in excess of $50 million over the last five years.  

SNIP 

The pension system for local governments is in better shape than the system for state workers because local governments, unlike the state government, have been making their annually required contributions. The largest pension fund for state workers, which covers more than 90,600 current and former state workers, has $2.6 billion in assets and $11.3 billion in assumed liabilities, making it only 23 percent funded. By contrast, the largest fund for local government workers is 60 percent funded. 

As the condition grows more dire for the plan covering state workers, every KRS participant is being forced to contribute more money and watch their investments go into riskier ventures in the hopes of a bigger payoff, Miller said.

"It's a sinking ship over there," Miller said. "My argument is, let's cut our losses and separate CERS from the rest of the system and let CERS be managed more prudently, using plain-vanilla investment techniques instead of these risky equity funds that have enormous fees."

Fort Wright's suit is only the latest blow to KRS.
 On Friday, a federal bankruptcy judge in Louisville cleared the way for a nonprofit mental-health agency, Seven Counties Services, to leave KRS and escape its soaring pension contribution rates. The decision — likely to be appealed — would mark the first time a KRS participant was allowed to quit, and it could set off a rush for the exits by dozens of quasi-governmental groups, potentially leaving KRS with an even worse unfunded liability.

If Occupiers Had Been Armed, Would the Cops Have Backed Off?

Yes, of course she was convicted. They weren't protesting the federal government; they were protesting the obscenely wealthy criminals of Wall Street.  And refusing to submit to their deserved beatings. That cannot be permitted.

Digby:

Chris Hedges catches up with the Occupy protester court proceedings:

Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

I wonder what the defenders of Cliven Bundy have to say about this? My recollection is that they complained a lot about cleanliness. I don't recall any right winger stepping up to defend the right of these people to protest --- and I haven't heard a thing from the "tree of liberty" folks about the legal system dealing with peaceful protest in this way. I guess if you don't have a gun in your hand you just aren't worth defending.

My personal feeling about Bundy is that the Feds and the cops did overreach -- they could have found a less confrontational way to deal with collecting the fines. I suspect they simply lost patience and wanted to make a point. That's usually how these things go. But the armed response by right wing militias and so-called "oath keepers" is even more dangerous. Let's just say it's pretty clear these folks weren't defending my freedom. And they never will.

Meanwhile, peaceful protesters are being harassed by the police and prevented from defending themselves through legitimate legal means by authoritarian judges.

Where do you suppose all this is going to lead?

Here's a Death Penalty I Can Justify

Firedoglake:

- Vietnam has a harsh response to bankers who engage in illicit activities: the death penalty.

Iceland Let the Banksters Die, and Now the Country's Thriving

What are the chances that throwing Jamie Dimon into solitary confinement would create jobs? If there's even a one percent chance, I say let's give it a try.  At worst, it couldn't hurt. And it would make millions of people so very happy.

Digby:

At one time there was a big debate about whether or not Iceland came out on top during our current depression, largely due to it's hard core treatment of its banks. It was always pretty obvious that they made the smarter decision.  It looks even more obvious today:

Iceland let its banks fail in 2008 because they proved too big to save.

Now, the island is finding crisis-management decisions made half a decade ago have put it on a trajectory that’s turned 2 percent unemployment into a realistic goal.

While the euro area grapples with record joblessness, led by more than 25 percent in Greece and Spain, only about 4 percent of Iceland’s labor force is without work. Prime MinisterSigmundur D. Gunnlaugsson says even that’s too high.

“Politicians always have something to worry about,” the 38-year-old said in an interview last week. “We’d like to see unemployment going from where it’s now -- around 4 percent -- to under 2 percent, which may sound strange to most other western countries, but Icelanders aren’t accustomed to unemployment.”

The island’s sudden economic meltdown in October 2008 made international headlines as a debt-fueled banking boom ended in a matter of weeks when funding markets froze. Policy makers overseeing the $14 billion economy refused to back the banks, which subsequently defaulted on $85 billion. The government’s decision to protect state finances left it with the means to continue social support programs that shielded Icelanders from penury during the worst financial crisis in six decades.

We, on the other hand are making nearly 7% official unemployment (along with many millions not even being counted) the new normal. And we're slashing our meager safety net, even food assistance. But our megabanks are doing very well which is what matters.

Latest Theft of Middle-Class Earnings by the Parasitical Rih

A single mother on welfare does more to "earn" her tiny benefit check than a hundred stock owners counting the obscene profits from exploiting serfs on minimum wage.

Paul Buchheit at Nation of Change:

It was shown in a recent report that the richest Americans have made millions from their stock holdings since the recession.

It's getting worse. The facts are summarized here and presented in greater detail at Us Against Greed.

1. Just 13 Americans Made More from Their Investments in 2013 than the Entire SNAP Budget
Some wealthy Americans like to refer to themselves as "makers," and food stamp recipients as "takers," even though most of the latter are children, the elderly, or low-wage workers. Many of the top 13 on the Forbes list did not make anything of significance in 2013. Yet by being heavily invested in the stock market they were able to take $80 billion among them, more thana year of food stamps for almost 50 million people.

2. The Richest 400 Took $300 Billion in 2013, Approximately the ENTIRE Safety Net
The total budget for SNAP, WIC (Women, Infants, children), Child Nutrition, Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Housing is less than the $300 billion 'earned' by the Forbes 400.

SNIP

Capitalism is supposed to provide everyone the opportunity to benefit from our country's productivity. But it hasn't worked that way for the past 35 years. Today only the people who already have money can increase their wealth. Congress doesn't seem to recognize, or doesn't care, that the system is horribly distorted in favor of a small group of people who need to do very little to take most of the wealth.

Literal Dictatorship in Detroit a Test Run For the Rest of the Country

Under a "law" rammed through by repugs, elected officials in Detroit have no authority to stop Wall Street from stripping every public asset - including utilities and the retirement checks of police and firefighters - and leaving the citizens of what is no longer a democracy to starve naked in the dark.

John Nichols at The Nation concludes his must-read article with:

Too many American cities face financial challenges similar to those that have destabilized Detroit. Snyder’s anti-democratic “answer” could well become the model for a response to those challenges that begins by blaming the victims and ultimately denies them a full and effective franchise.

“I believe Detroit and Michigan are ‘test cases’ for certain right-wing agents who want to do all they can to control future elections for this nation’s highest office and other posts,” says Watson. “Voter suppression, including the Supreme Court’s role in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are not incidental to the myriad of malevolence in Michigan.”

There is a lot more at stake in Detroit, and in Michigan, than one city’s balance sheet.

Our understanding of democracy, itself, is being subverted.

The voters of Michigan sent a clear signal last fall. They rejected emergency-manager authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, a federal bankruptcy judge has sided with a governor who could not win an election in Detroit and an approach that Detroit voters rejected.

This has nothing to do with budgeting, debt or broader fiscal matters. Those issues could, and should, be addressed by an elected mayor and city council.

This has everything to do with allowing unelectable and unelected officials—and the interests they serve—to achieve political results that could not be secured at the ballot box.

You really think a repug governor couldn't do this to Louisville or Lexington or Covington? You really think the white, rural legislature would even try to stop him?

The Public Pension "Crisis" Is Just the Latest Unprosecuted Wall Street Crime

There is no repository of public funds that the banksters have not looted with impunity so that taxpayers have to not only suffer the loss of their money, but pay double to replace what Wall Street stole.

In Kentucky, nonprofit agencies lured into the state pension system are filing suit to get out before they lose every last penny.

Mike Wynn at the Courier:

Two more quasi-governmental agencies have filed suit to pull out of the state’s troubled retirement system, arguing that they should have never been allowed to join the pension plan more than a decade ago.

Frontier Housing in Morehead and Housing Oriented Ministries Established for Service in Whitesburg filed the joint complaint in Franklin Circuit Court last week.

They are asking a judge to declare them ineligible to participate in the County Employees Retirement System, which faces more than $6.2 billion in unfunded liabilities.

SNIP

CERS is the largest of several pension plans at Kentucky Retirement Systems — the pension program for state and local workers that has $17 billion in unfunded liabilities and administers one of the worst-funded plans in the nation.

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explains how Wall Street is stealing funds for public pensions.

Or watch the video as Matt Taibbi joins Amy Goodman, and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! to discuss his new article.

Matt Taibbi: "The primary focus of my piece, there were a couple of things. Number one, how did these funds come to be broke the first place? I think everyone realizes that states are in fiscal crises or having trouble paying out their obligations to workers. One of the reasons is that at least 14 states have not been making their annual required contributions to the pension fund for years and years and years. So essentially, they have been illegally borrowing from these pension funds, sometimes going back decades. Another focus of the piece was the solution that a lot of sort of Wall Street funded think tanks are coming up with now is to get higher returns by putting these funds into alternative investments like hedge funds. In a lot of cases what I’m finding is that the fees that states are paying for these new hedge funds and these new types of alternatives investments are actually roughly equal to the cuts that they are taking from workers. Like in the state of Rhode Island, for instance, they have frozen the cost of living adjustment and the frozen cola roughly equals the fees that they’re paying to hedge funds in that state. So essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops, and firemen to billionaire hedge-funders."

 Time to face facts: Wall Street is no longer an asset to the U.S. or world economy, if it ever was.  It is now a monster liability that we can no longer afford.

Imprison everybody involved in financial speculation, confiscate all their assets, burn Wall Street to the ground and salt the earth so nothing rises there again.

Just Stop Cutting Spending

It's a shame that we have to keep repeating the economic fact - proven repeatedly over the last 80 years - that government spending grows the economy. The more people struggle because of high unemployment and high poverty, the more government needs to spend to create jobs and eliminate poverty.

We have to keep repeating that fact because for the last 80 years, conservatives have been repeating the lies - proven to be lies repeatedly over the last 80 years - that government spending on jobs, supporting the middle class and raising people out of poverty harms the economy.  Although government spending on handouts to rich people and corporations and on warmaking is always good.

That Wall Street is choking on record profits while Main Street is still starving is entirely the consequence of cutting government spending.  The fault entirely of austerity.

Digby:

Krugman looks at the numbers and tells us what he sees: the moribund American economy is due to austerity:

[H]ow much of our depressed economy can be explained by the bad fiscal policy?

To a first approximation, all of it. By that I mean that to have something that would arguably look like full employment, at this point we wouldn’t need a continuation of actual stimulus; all we’d need is for government spending to have grown normally, instead of shrinking.

Here’s a comparison of two series. One is actual government purchases of goods and services since the Great Recession began (this is at all levels; most of the fall has been state and local, but the Federal government could have prevented that with revenue sharing). The other is what would have happened if those purchases had grown as fast as they did starting in the first quarter of 2001, i.e., in the Bush years.

As you can see, the gap is large and has been growing rapidly; it’s currently at about 400 billion 2009 dollars, or more than 2 1/2 percent of GDP. Given reasonable multipliers, this suggests that real GDP is somewhere between 3 and 3.75 percent lower than it would have been without the austerity. And given the usual Okun’s Law rule of half a point of unemployment per point of GDP, this in turn says that without the austerity we’d have an unemployment rate well under 6 percent, maybe even under 5.5 percent.

I don’t want to pretend to spurious precision here. Instead, I just want to make the point that given what we know and have learned about macro these past five years — and given the modest recovery that has taken place — we’re now at a point where, to repeat, to a first approximation the depressed state of the economy is entirely due to destructive fiscal policy.

Read the whole thing for Digby's revelation of just who these dastardly austerians are.

Let Them Eat Shame

Repugs know damn well their proposed $40 billion in cuts to food stamps will never fly. They don't care.  Because the immediate cuts are not their goal.  Their goal is demonizing people so poor they can't afford to eat. Their goal is shaming people whose two minimum wage jobs do not provide enough income to feed their children.  Their goal is to ensure that the unemployed victims of Wall Street greed get all the blame for the economic devastation caused by rich people.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The next time someone talks about how food stamps create a "culture of dependency", remind them almost half of the people on SNAP, otherwise known as the food stamp program, are children. And nearly half of those kids belong to parents who have jobs, but are in poverty anyway.

SNAP provides families with an estimated 22 million children with resources to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet. This represents close to 1 in 3 children (29 percent) in the United States. Almost half of all SNAP recipients are children (47 percent), and an additional 26 percent are adults living with children. (See Figure 1.) Forty percent of all SNAP recipients live in households with preschool-age children (ages 4 and below). 

Over 70 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with children. In 2011, SNAP provided an estimated $51 billion in benefits to families with children, over half of which went to families with preschool-age children.

SNAP families are low-income. A typical family with children that is enrolled in SNAP has income (not including SNAP) at 57 percent of the poverty line. For a family of three, 57 percent of the poverty line corresponds with an annual income of $10,785 in 2012. A typical family with children on SNAP spends close to three-quarters of its income on housing and/or child care costs. Families with children currently receive an average of $420 a month in SNAP benefits, or about $5,000 a year. 

SNAP benefits help working families support their children. Nearly half (48 percent) of children who receive SNAP live in low-wage working families. A typical working household with children receives an average of $400 a month in SNAP benefits, representing about 30 percent of the family’s average income.

This is not a rational disagreement about public policy. This is a gulf of basic decency, a demand by fearful people for the sacrifice of innocents to sate a perversely sadistic form of cosmic justice.

Interestingly, most people demanding the starvation of children so that billionaires can buy more yachts call themselves Christian. Perhaps they're reading a Biblical translation that calls for blood sacrifice of innocents so that the rich may enjoy more fruits of Mammon. I missed that part in my copy.

 Sorry, David, but the problem is not their failure to read their Bronze Age mythology correctly. The problem is the ubiquity of religions that prevent the poor from killing the rich.

Ellison: "Food assistance for working families fulfills a promise we make to each other: if you fall on hard times, your neighbors, friends and fellow Americans will help you get a meal. Eighteen companies dodged $92 billion in taxes last year, which is more than double the cut passed by Republicans today. Let’s cut corporate waste, not meals for our nation’s children."
- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/#sthash.IHdWWTJW.dpuf

Eat the Rich. Do It Now.

They are parasites, gorging into financial obesity on the economic blood they suck from the workers who create the wealth the rich steal.

Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

The top ten percent of earners in the United States took home more than 50 percent of all income in 2012, the highest amount ever recorded since data was first collected in 1917, according to an updated report from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.
While the wealthiest took a big hit during the financial crisis, they’ve almost fully recovered.

Last year, income for the top 1 percent of earners “increased sharply,” the report notes, growing by nearly 20 percent, while the bottom 99 percent only saw money rise by 1 percent. “In sum,” the authors write, “top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover.”

This follows a trend since the recovery officially began. From 2009 to 2012, income for the 1 percent grew by 31.4 percent, while everyone else only saw it grow by 0.4 percent. That means the 1 percent “captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery,” they write.

SNIP

The U.S. suffers from particularly drastic income inequality. It is worse here than in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.

SNIP

And U.S. policy is mostly to blame. The deregulation of Wall Street meant huge profits in the sector, attracting the 1 percent, whose incomes then took off from everyone else’s. Changes in the tax code for capital gains income, or money made through investment rather than salaries, is one of the largest factors. 

The filthy rich are not just clear and present danger to the economic survival of the nation, they are escaping justice for the crime of causing the 2008 economic meltdown that destroyed 10 million jobs and left millions of formerly middle-class families homeless, unemployed and impoverished.

Alan Pyke at Think Progress:

Five years ago this week, the investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. declared bankruptcy and triggered the financial collapse that brought us the Great Recession. Things have turned out quite well for former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld and four other industry executives whose work contributed substantially to the cycle of subprime lending and financial swindling that caused the crisis. Fuld and his colleagues haven’t just avoided legal repercussions for the crisis. They’re also among the wealthiest people in the country. 

As part of a series commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published a look at Fuld and executives from Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Bank of America on Tuesday. Here are three infuriating facts CPI unearthed about the masters of the financial universe.

1. Dick Fuld walked away with half a billion dollars and three homes.

SNIP

2. The former Bear Stearns CEO who walked away with over $300 million plays high-stakes bridge in retirement.

SNIP

3. Three bailed out CEOs whose “golden parachutes” were worth a combined $272 million are doing just fine.

SNIP

While these stories of huge personal success in the face of clear business failure are infuriating, they are far from exceptional. Fully one-third of the highest-paid financial industry CEOs of the past two decades have been fired, bailed out, or busted for fraud.

Meanwhile, 11.3 million Americans remain unemployed, with tens of millions more having dropped out of the workforce or struggling to survive on low-wage part-time service industry jobs. Those who do have work are earning less than they did prior to the crisis, and American workers as a whole have experienced a lost decade in wage growth despite boosting their productivity substantially. By contrast, the financial industry that caused the crisis has bounced back rapidly, with record profits and near-record bonuses for its executives.

CA Repug: Murder, Rape, Arson, Theft and Assault Should All Be Legal If You Don't Use a Gun

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.

What's Good For Wall Street is Catastrophic for Main Street

and vice-versa. The question is how to make what's good for Main Street the priority and let Wall Street suffer the consequences for a few decades.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

If helping Wall Street doesn't actually help Main Street, then the foundations of the capitalist economy are shaken to their roots. Capitalist economics is supposed to be a virtuous circle: companies generate profits which generate reinvestment, which generates employment, which boosts demand, which in turn generates higher profits. When certain industries take on too much weight or grow obsolete, or when supply outstrips demand, there are temporary but necessary corrections called recessions that keep the system in check.

But what if profits don't generate reinvestment and companies simply hold onto the loot? What if "reinvestment" takes the form of financialization rather than real product development? What if boosting productivity means mechanization that leads to job losses, rather than job gains? What if the few job gains that do accrue, happen in countries with such depressed wages that middle-class workers in advanced economies (the ones who create the demand for high-cost, profitable products) simply cannot compete?

And what if, in order to disguise this phenomenon, policy makers attempted to bribe the public with free trade agreements that lowered the cost of imported electronics and plastic toys while quietly destroying domestic jobs? What if policy makers' next step in a failing wage environment was to boost asset prices like housing so that the currently middle-class homeowner could feel artificially wealthy, all while obliterating any prospect that the next generation could afford even a modest home in areas with strong job markets without help from their parents? What if the low-skill job market deteriorated to such an extent that young people needed an outrageously expensive college education or more--and only in the "right" fields--to attain any sort of job security, all while policymakers refused to lift a finger to help make that education more affordable? And what if policy makers made it easier for underwater Americans with failing wages to take on debt via credit cards, while doing nothing to prevent predatory lenders from taking advantage of them?

In that world, the virtuous circle of capitalism becomes a death spiral. Recoveries become shorter and more jobless. Recessions and depressions become longer, even as asset markets remain curiously "healthy." This happens a few times until eventually supply-side Wile E. Coyote runs out of demand-side cliff and comes crashing at terminal velocity into the canyon below. At that point all it would take is a few terrorist acts or natural disasters to tip much of the industrialized world into darkness and collapse.

That sounds too bleak to be true. But again, consider the trendlines. Even if jobs start to slowly return in the short term, the next recession will see even sharper job losses, with muted financial sector effects. We're already supposedly a long way into the current "recovery." How long until the next recession, even absent Congressional budget shenanigans this fall?

This is not a question anyone wants to think about, because it would require reorienting the entire perspective of the economy. How do you keep people fed when there are no jobs for which they qualify? How do you run an economy when qualifying for jobs requires going $100,000 into debt? What happens when mortgage costs severely outpace rental costs, even with tax incentives? How do you secure wage increases when companies can increasingly hire overseas and even relocate in another country for 1/20th the cost? What do you do when companies can increasingly make products faster and cheaper by firing workers rather than hiring them? What do you do when the hottest new up-and-coming companies valued at hundreds of millions of dollars or more, only actually hire a few hundred or maybe a few thousand employees at best? How do you hold the financial sector accountable when Wall Street's cold is Main Street's flu, but Wall Street's vigor doesn't improve Main Street's condition? And how do you manage it all when robots are getting smarter and smarter, people are living longer and longer, and the world is getting flatter and flatter?

No one wants to even try to answer these questions, because the answers--be they conservative (let the weakened many die and the strong few survive) or liberal (much more centralized, regulated global economies)--are each scary and radical in their own ways. There is a reason that politics here and around the world are becoming more divisive than ever. There are very serious problems that are frankly only being addressed by the "extreme" ends of the political spectrum, even as the neoliberals and corporate conservatives continue to attempt the maintenance of the status quo hoping that we can go back to late 20th century economics and everything will be fine.

We're well past the point of no return on that one. It's a brave new world that demands brave people creating untried solutions. Unless the neoliberals hold their ground all the way to collapse and social unrest, one side or the other is going to take the reins. It's just a question of which one, and whether alternative solutions are implemented in ordered or disordered fashion; with empathy and justice, or greed and social darwinism.

Only one thing is certain, however. The link between Wall Street and Main Street has shattered. The virtuous circle has been broken. Those who choose to ignore that fact and its consequences do so at their own peril.

How Ayn Rand Killed Sears

This makes me sad.  One of my first jobs was at a huge mall-anchor Sears in the mid-'70s.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

In case you thought the cult of hedge fund Objectivist free market libertarianism was just destroying government and the social fabric, never fear that it can destroy companies as well. Just look at what has happened to Sears after it hired insane free market hedge fund libertarian Eddie Lampert to run their company:

SNIP

In the weeks leading up to Black Friday in 2011, Sears discovered that some of its rivals planned to open on Thanksgiving at midnight. Sears executives knew they should open early, too, but couldn’t get all the business unit heads on board, according to former executives. (A Sears spokesman says the decision “was not contingent on the business unit structure.”) Instead, the stores opened early the following morning. One former vice president drove to the mall that night and watched families pack into rival stores. By the time Sears opened, he says, cars were leaving the parking lot.

A month later, Sears announced that its performance during the holidays was poor and it was closing more than 100 stores.

As Sears’s sales declined, its business units found themselves fighting over a shrinking pile of money. Last year less than 1 percent of Sears’s revenue went to capital expenditures, much less than most retailers; even thrifty Walmart invested 2.8 percent of its sales.

SNIP

I think a lot of progressives don't understand that we're not just dealing with a bunch of big money boys who want to destroy government and social safety nets to benefit business interests. We're dealing with a full-fledged cult that is just as willing to destroy business as it is to destroy government.

It would actually be more comforting to believe that economic self-interest is driving all this foolishness. Self-destructive religious cults are much, much scarier.

On a happier note, Kentucky's second Costco is under construction in Lexington, scheduled to open in October. .

How to Save Your Town By Cock-Blocking Wall Street

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.

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.”

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.

The Technical Term is Parasites

Just one of the parasitic rich does more harm to the economic and social fabric of the nation than every recipient of food stamps, unemployment compensation, welfare and public education put together.

They are a clear and present danger and must be denied access to financial tools of destruction.

Via Digby:

In a recent defense of the 1 percent, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw admitted it might be bad if the rich got richer by sucking cash from the economy without giving any value back. A new study suggests many of the rich -- especially bankers and CEOs -- are doing just that.

Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argue in a study responding to Mankiw that most of the rise in income inequality over the past few decades is due to the soaring pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers who are milking money from the markets rather than generating much in the way of economic production.

"A substantial part of the extraordinary rise of top 1 percent incomes is not a result of well-functioning markets allocating pay according to value generated, but instead resulted from shifting institutional arrangements leading to shifting of rents to those at the very top," Bivens and Mishel write.

The technical term for this is "rent-seeking." Mankiw, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, suggested in his recent paper, "Defending The One Percent" that there wasn't much of this going on, that the 1 percent are just richer than you, and getting even richer all the time, because they are better than you.

But he does admit that rent-seeking could be a problem:

If the top 1 percent is earning an extra $1 in some way that reduces the incomes of the middle class and the poor by $2, then many people will see that as a social problem worth addressing. For example, suppose the rising income share of the top 1 percent were largely attributable to successful rent-seeking. Imagine that the government were to favor its political allies by granting them monopoly power over certain products, favorable regulations, or restrictions on trade. Such a policy would likely lead to both inequality and inefficiency. Economists of all stripes would deplore it. I certainly would.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what has happened in the past 30 years, as Bivens and Mishel show, with numbers.