Mainstream Media Begins To Pick Up On "Occupy Wall Street"

Kudos to Lawrence O'Donnell and MSNBC for being the first Mainstream Media outlet to give a good airing to Occupy Wall Street:

Dylan Ratigan: "Why Are Our Politicians So Desperate To Perpetually Protect The Banks . . . ?" Interview With David Stockman

David Stockman, former Budget Director for Ronald Reagan, says he believes Ben Bernanke is finished, done. He says we need to address the disastrous problems in the banking system, not print more money which has only enriched Wall Street and encouraged massive speculation in commodities, derivatives, etc.

Stockman says it was an Urban Legend that Wall Street's problems in 2008 could have resulted in a Great Depression should the bailout have never happened. He also says the thing to have done would have been to allow the banks to sort out their own problems and restructure after certain of them failed.

Possibly the most contentious example which Stockman describes was what should have happened to GE. Stockman says the blame for GE almost going under rests on the shoulders of CEO Jeff Immelt. Instead of a bailout by the government for GE Capital, Stockman says GE should have been allowed to force their shareholders to take a massive hit, that GE should have gone back to the markets with secondary offerings for their errant behaviour in investing in massive derivative schemes to boost profits.

Jim Rogers On Dylan Ratigan's Show - June 16, 2011

Jim Rogers warns the next Recession will be worse if we don't write down our debt.

David Stockman Tells Dylan Ratigan What The Biggest Fiscal Mistake In US History Is

David Stockman, former Director of OMB during Ronald Reagan's administration, and Dylan Ratigan discuss the Tax Cut deal between Republicans and Democrats. Stockman calls the Bush Tax Cuts "the biggest fiscal mistake in history."

As Ratigan points out in the segment's beginning, the defecit has been a problem for the better part of 30 years. In 1981, under Ronald Reagan, our debt was 32% of our GDP. When Reagan left office, our debt/GDP ratio had grown to 52%.

Today, our debt is 94% of our GDP.

Ratigan and Stockman talk candidly about the reasons we are in this sad state of burgeoning debt and shrinking revenues.

As Stockman so succinctly says, "We are destroying the Economy on Uncle Sam's credit card. And the idea that (the extended Bush Tax Cuts) this will cause consumers to spend for some more junk from Home Depot that's going to be made in China . . . to me . . . doesn't make any sense at all."

And toward the end of this interview, Stockman let's loose with this:

"In January 2000, there were 72 million middle class jobs . . . manufacturing, construction, finance, insurance, real estate, the professions, transportation, distribution and so forth. Today, a decade later, there are only 65 million (middle class jobs). We've lost 10% of our middle class family supporting jobs, and we've only created temporary, part-time jobs, so there's been no real growth. What we've had instead is a Fed engineered serial bubble that's created the appearance of wealth, that has caused people to consume beyond their means through borrowing and that has flushed the income and the wealth of our society up to the top as a result of the Fed turning the financial markets into a casino.

These are pure casinos. They are NOT capital markets. They are not adding to the productive capacity of our Economy. They are simply a bunch of robots trading with each other by the millisecond as a result of the Fed giving them Zero Cost overnight money and giving them all kinds of hand signals on what to front run.

This is a very bad mess and we're not going to get our Economy solved until we get a totally new policy at the Fed and a clean up of this whole casino that used to be called Wall Street."

Matt Taibbi On MSNBC's "Young Turks" On "Foreclosure Fraud"

Watch the video, then read the link from Taibbi's latest piece in Rolling Stone Magazine




Here's Taibbi's latest piece in Rolling Stone Magazine's November 10th issue:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611

Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.

Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff." Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn't be that bad. It isn't Indonesia. Right?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611

Sarah Palin Twists Logic . . . And Her Panties . . . In Her Recent Tweet About "Drill, Baby, Drill"

Check this out: Sarah Palin says the oil spill is the fault of Progressive environmentalists.

See, Sarah Palin leaves this tweet on Twitter yesterday:

"Extreme Greenies: see now why we push "drill, baby, drill" of known reserves & promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?"

While Sarah was tripping over her tongue with her panties down to her ankles, leave it to Rachel Maddow to wade in to explain what Palin is trying to do: Palin wants to blame the Deepwater Horizon Disaster on Environmentalists. (By the way, this is the new meme of the Republican Shout Radio and Shout TV Machine.)And her tweet implies the disaster would not have happened had we listened to her and simply "drilled, baby, drilled" onshore in say ANWR.

But that's where Palin, once again, becomes separated from the truth.

Let's briefly set you up for the clip you are about to see and which will make you shake your head, yet again, at the hypocrites in the GOP . . . especially Sarah Palin . . .



Rachel Maddow starts out this video clip with a great edited speech from President Obama who tells it like it is when he talks about the agenda pushed by his opponents, ". . . more tax breaks for the wealthy, and fewer rules for corporations."

President Obama says, "If you are a Wall Street Bank, or Insurance Company, or an Oil Company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else."

The President continues, ". . . And now we have a choice as a Nation: we can return to the failed Economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future. We can go backward, or we can keep moving forward." After which the President says he wants to keep moving forward, and he believes Americans wish to keep moving forward. When his speech concludes, you hear moronic booing in the background.

As Rachel Maddow points out, when you are no longer the party in power, you don't really have one figure head to counter a President who speaks so well. But as Ms. Maddow points out, the Republicans do have Sarah Palin and her twitter account.

At which point Maddow shows a shot of the actual Palin tweet on her monitor. Right afterwards, Maddow deciphers how Palin is telegraphing how she, Palin, was all for drill, baby, drill on land. And then Maddow simply plays one video clip after another which totally destroys Palin, and John McCain, and Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani . . . all of whom, Ladies and Gentlemen, left a trail of videotaped speeches where they all, time an again, said America should be "drill, baby, drill" not only on land but offshore and even "deep waters" offshore.

Just watch the video. Let's see Palin back away from her own videotaped speeches on the campaign trail. And let's see Romney, McCain and Giuliani all shed more crocodile tears for the Gulf of Mexico residents suffering because the GOP, the Party Which Wrecked America, would not regulate the Big Oil companies which pimped their Party.

How The Oil Spill Has Turned Hypocritical Republicans Into New Age Pro-Environmentalists, Pro-Regulationists, Pro-Big Governmentalists, Etc., Etc..

See the hypocrites run like little piggies to the Mainstream Media Trough and claim the territory which used to belong to Progressives.

One of my favorite utterances in this video clip was the line, "There are no Libertarians in a crisis."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Big Oil's Groundhog Day of "Deja Vu Land" As Produced by Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow completely destroys Big Oil's claim that they've gotten better at drilling for oil offshore. Maddow and her production team put together video clips from a big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico during 1979. The similarities between it and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Catastrophe of today will make you shake your head in disbelief.

Maddow asserts at the close of her show that oil companies have gotten better in only one respect of drilling: going deeper. The 1979 rig blowout in the Gulf was only in 200 feet of water. On the other hand, Maddow says Big Oil has gotten no better at containing the risks of an oil rig failure, as they are still using tried and failed methods from 31 years ago to try and stop today's leak which is 5,000 feet below the surface.

Must see TV:

Dylan Ratigan: Grand Theft Geithner

"A crime has been committed against America and its taxpayers. And right now, you sir, Tim Geithner, are standing at the door of the crime scene refusing to allow anybody in to even see any of the evidence. Show us you are not involved, Mr. Geithner. Prove the White House correct in defending you. All we're asking for is the transperency promised by the President you serve."

-Dylan Ratigan's closing words from a broadcast yesterday on why AIG emails should be made public

Walk Away From Your Mortgage!

From the New York Times Magazine article "Walk Away From Your Mortgage" which this video is referencing:

John Courson, president and C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association, recently told The Wall Street Journal that homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.” Courson was implying that homeowners — record numbers of whom continue to default — have a responsibility to make good. He wasn’t referring to the people who have no choice, who can’t afford their payments. He was speaking about the rising number of folks who are voluntarily choosing not to pay.

Such voluntary defaults are a new phenomenon. Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials. Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. declared that “any homeowner who can afford his mortgagepayment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator — and one who is not honoring his obligation.” (Paulson presumably was not so censorious of speculation during his 32-year career at Goldman Sachs.)