George Carlin on Our Owners

If ever there was a time to be reminded of this, it's now, during Obama's corporate-sponsored Cave Week (Lame Duck Edition). We've posted this routine before, in a different version; but now seems just right for putting it up again.

George Carlin on the "American dream." But his real subject is Our Owners. Hammer, meet nail; this is why the elites hate the hippies, cause the hippies saw this years ago.

Audio NSFW:



Cave Week, brought to you by Citibank. We're laughing through tears. Note the implied backward reference to Reagan, the father of it all.

(If YouTube, in its infinite Google-owned goodness, disappears this vid, here's a Facebook link, thanks to commenter MG1 via email.)

GP Read More......

Big Finance borrowed $9 trillion during the crisis

People should remember that number as we have the discussion over tax cuts for the top 2%. That Obama and some Democrats are even considering is pathetic. Even during their darkest hours, they still managed to find the cash to lobby against reform. The bankers have no shame and will never be happy until they have everything. Heck, they're almost there already since they own the US and other governments.

Everyone likes to think that the only number in the discussion is the TARP money, but it was so much more than that. Click through to see the numbers for each bank, but you better be sitting down. Besides the big US banks, you might not even recognize some of the foreign banks that also borrowed money to stay afloat. Next time, let this group of assholes crash and burn. And I say this as a person who felt that the banking system needed to be rescued. But as always, the devil is in the details.

The eye-bulging total amount that PDCF lent to banks is $8.95 trillion.

The Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) was an overnight lending program set up by the Fed to help banks manage short term liquidity issues during the financial crisis.

The numbers cited here for that program represent the total amount banks received in aggregate—not the amounts outstanding at any point in time. (For example: If a bank tapped the PDCF for a million dollars five days in a row, it would be represented here as $5 million in total borrowing.)

Read More......

VIDEO: Put a camera on a remote control plane and fly it over NYC.. cool

(Hat tip, HuffPost Hill) Read More......

Conflicts of interest with financial rescue?

With the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street as active as ever and with politicians receiving millions of campaign dollars from Wall Street, why should we be surprised? Anyone who argues against more openness in the system is kidding themselves that elected leaders and the Federal Reserve are not all about protecting the powerful interests over the rest of us. Whether it's the lawsuits demanding details of the bailouts or the WikiLeaks information, the public deserves to know the details.

It's people like Joe Lieberman, Mike Huckabee and even the more mild critics who are the problem. For these people, it's OK to move back and forth between government and the deepest pockets in industry yet it's somehow a problem for people to see what is happening behind closed doors. It's those people who detest freedom. How far off are we from "United States of America, sponsored by Citibank"? Bloomberg:

Later, the Fed set up the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, to keep consumer credit flowing. It hired Pimco, manager of the world’s largest bond fund, and BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, to provide analytical help, according to a November 2010 report by the Fed’s Office of Inspector General.

“Any situation where the potential exists for a conflict of interest is concerning,” said Kurt Bardella, spokesman for Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who will become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee next month. “This really brings into focus one of the unintended consequences of institutionalizing the federal government picking winners and losers while those entities are partaking directly and indirectly in what should be exclusive government functions.”

And here is one of the better summaries of the financial rescue. Talk about entitlement, this dwarfs them all.

“It seems clear that the biggest beneficiaries were the insiders,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “We have a huge pinata here. The question is whether we had insiders deciding who would get the candy or was everyone in the same boat? Think of the people who get upset about the government giving a homeowner some help. Now multiply the sums by about 100 million. We should care.”

Read More......

Robert Reich on The Big Economic Story and how Obama isn't helping

If anything, Obama is playing right into the hands of the Republicans and losing the debate before there's even a debate. Obama and his team somehow think that with a few minor tweaks here and there (mostly on Wall Street) everything will magically bounce back and we will see Clinton-era economic growth. It's not going to happen for quite a few years. Much more on the subject from Robert Reich.

Quiz: What’s responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?

A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.

B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.

These are the two competing stories Americans are telling one another.

Yes, I know: It’s more complicated than this. In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand – the result of the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don’t spend as much of their income as the middle. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn’t had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change – along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery.

So B is closer to the truth.

But A is the story Republicans and right-wingers tell. It’s a dangerous story because it deflects attention from the real problem and makes it harder for America to focus on the real solution – which is more widely shared prosperity. (I get into how we might do this in my new book, Aftershock.)

Read More......

Feds tracking American's credit card and travel purchases

And yet some people think WikiLeaks is the problem? No, it's programs like this and an out of control government that is the problem. Transparency and accountability is a good thing. Let's talk about who is the real rogue and who hates freedom.

Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows.

The document, obtained by security researcher Christopher Soghoian, explains how so-called “Hotwatch” orders allow for real-time tracking of individuals in a criminal investigation via credit card companies, rental car agencies, calling cards, and even grocery store loyalty programs. The revelation sheds a little more light on the Justice Department’s increasing power and willingness to surveil Americans with little to no judicial or Congressional oversight.

Read More......

GOP against internet privacy for consumers

Go figure, another step backwards for consumers. Is it ever possible for them to side with consumers over business?

Republicans, who will control the House of Representatives in January, greeted the idea of Internet "do not track" legislation coolly on Thursday, expressing concern that hindering advertiser access to consumers web browsing habits would slow innovation.

Their opposition bodes badly for the Federal Trade Commission as it promotes a plan to allow consumers to bar data and advertising companies from monitoring what websites they view and what content they download.

Representative Ed Whitfield, the ranking Republican on the House consumer protection subcommittee, expressed concern that the free services now financed by advertising would be hurt, and that consumers would lose access to ads they want to see.

Read More......

Krugman: Democrats 'will have to look elsewhere' for leadership

Paul Krugman weighs in on the Cave Week theme. There are a lot of ways to see the message of this column. One way is, Here's what Obama is made of:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

It gives us exactly no pleasure to acknowledge this stuff.

Another way to slice through this column is via the pay freeze. For Krugman, Obama did exactly the wrong thing, a meaningless gesture that nevertheless conceded the Conservative narrative. "[F]reezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. ... The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit."

Contrast the meaningless federal pay freeze with the actual hit the deficit will take if (when) Obama caves in on the Big Boy tax cuts: "Meanwhile, there’s a real deficit issue on the table: whether tax cuts for the wealthy will, as Republicans demand, be extended."

In other words, Obama could have used the pay freeze as a way to emphasize the hard line on real deficit reduction. Did he?

[H]e didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have [my emphasis].

Krugman then asks the inevitable — Why? What on earth is the White House thinking?

He offers several possible answers. For example: It's almost as if Obama's systematically trying "to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake". Ouch. (The Professor misses the obvious answer — the White House does what Our Owners want them to do — but hey, we're all guessing here.)

Regardless, for Krugman as for others the new bottom line is the title of this piece. The Democratic party can no longer look to Obama for leadership; it has to look elsewhere. For Krugman, that means Congress, at least for now.

Me, I'll need to see it; after all, it is Cave Week.

GP Read More......

What was the President thinking?

In the six weeks that Marine Commandant General James Amos has been on the job, he has twice publicly embarrassed his commander in chief over his (Amos') opposition to the repeal of DADT. How did the President choose a new Marine commandant who is so violently opposed to one of the President's own top priorities? Did no one in the White House, the President included, understand how weak it continues to make the President look having his military commanders undercut their own boss on national TV, over and over again? They couldn't have chosen a Marine Commandant who agreed with the President on this issue? And more generally, do they not see how weak it makes the President look to constantly be challenged by others, and have them get away with it, time and again?

I think re-election is going to be very difficult if the public starts to believe that the President is a pushover. Yet that is the theme that this White House seems intent on promoting. At some point, this is going to catch up with them - and it just did, a few weeks ago, during the elections. Americans don't vote for people they think are weak. Read More......

WikiLeaks domain name goes offline, then moves to Switzerland

Is that Joe Lieberman again destroying freedom of the press or would that be others in power who are unhappy about American citizens knowing more about their democracy? The Guardian:

Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

After the initial disruption, WikiLeaks has now moved the domain to Switzerland. Read More......

'Disappointing' job growth as unemployment rate increased to 9.8%

November job numbers are out and they're not as good as expected:

In a significant setback to the recovery and market expectations, the United States economy added just 39,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the Department of Labor reported Friday.

Included in the latest report were revisions from previous months. The agency now says that the economy added 172,000 jobs in October, instead of the 151,000 jobs previously reported.

November’s numbers were far less than the 150,000 jobs forecast. More than 15 million people remain out of work, and 6.3 million of them have been unemployed for six months or longer.

Not good. Yet, Republicans, who created this crisis won't help the unemployed. It's sickening. Read More......

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Round 2 of Senate Armed Services Committee on the Pentagon's DADT report. Today's witnesses are the Service Chiefs. Over the past couple days, Secretary Gates has said the Service Chiefs are more "sanguine" about the report. And, Marine Corps Commaandant, General Amos, has been particularly outspoken. John McCain is salivating at the opportunity to get the Service Chiefs on his side. Boy, McCain put on a show yesterday. What an ass. A homophobic ass. Watch the Jon Stewart segment on it, which I posted here. We'll have a livechat going on the hearings at AMERICAblog Gay, beginning at 9:00 AM ET. - It's live now.

All day yesterday rumors were flying around about the White House cutting a deal with Senate Republicans on the tax bill, START and other key issues, like funding the government. The thing is: No on is surprised or shocked by rumors that the White House will cave. It's sadly expected.

The Catfood Commission will vote on its report today. The panel needs 14 of its 18 members to support the report for it to get a vote in Congress. That's apparently not going to happen.

Should be another fun-filled day... Read More......

WikiLeaks: Afghan VP arrived in Dubai with $52 million

Yet another reason why we need to declare victory and move on. Immediately. Especially with all of the financial problems at home, Afghanistan (and Iraq) are little more than money wasters. Whether it's the leaked cable about the Afghan VP or others in power, the story remains consistent. What American would prefer throwing more cash at Afghanistan than helping fellow Americans through a very challenging economy? As for the US political leaders who are complaining about WikiLeaks, doesn't the public have the full right to know about this alleged corruption? It may not be good news or comfortable news, but the taxpayers who are funding this ought to know.

It's a massive cash grab and we're footing the bill.

The cable adds: "Many other notable private individuals and public officials maintain assets (primarily property) outside Afghanistan, suggesting these individuals are extracting as much wealth as possible while conditions permit."

Two other cables provide graphic detail of such "wealth extraction" on the part of the governors of key provinces in eastern Afghanistan. Usman Usmani, governor of Ghazni, and Juma Khan Hamdard, governor of Paktiya, are accused of systemic corruption, theft of public funds and extorting money from construction contractors on a regular basis.

"Credible sources indicate that some of the most senior government officials in [Ghazni] province have chronically engaged in significant corrupt acts: embezzling public funds, stealing humanitarian assistance, and misappropriating government property, among others," one cable says, basing its conclusions on interviews with a wide range of law enforcement officials and other citizens.

Read More......

Nigeria to file bribery charges against Dick Cheney

Now this is shocking. Not the charges, but that someone is serious about pressing charges against Cheney and that Interpol will issue a warrant.

Nigeria will file charges against former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from five foreign companies including Halliburton Co. over a $180 million bribery scandal, a prosecutor at the anti-graft agency said.

Indictments will be lodged in a Nigerian court “in the next three days,” Godwin Obla, prosecuting counsel at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said in an interview today at his office in Abuja, the capital. An arrest warrant for Cheney “will be issued and transmitted through Interpol,” the world’s biggest international police organization, he said.

Peter Long, Cheney’s spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately comment when contacted today and said he would respond later to an e-mailed request for comment.

Read More......

AFSCME defends public workers

AFSCME is pushing back against the right wing attacks on public workers.

Read More......