Opinion-Columns.com

"Having Been Unable to Strengthen Justice, We Have Justified Strength"

That's a quote concerning justice and strength from the dim past of 350 years ago--another proof that not much changes across the pages of history--by philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal, dead since 1662.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes in the Huffington Post; "The Democrats are feeling empowered -- in part -- by the resounding echoes of change that is ringing in their ears."

That would be a hopeful message, if it were true. But what is more likely to be ringing in their ears is a phone call from Squibb or Martin-Marietta. Meanwhile, what rings in the ears of the electorate (the 55% that is left of it) is the apathy and incompetence  of the long-awaited congressional control by Democrats.

Ehrenreich is not easily dismissed. She was a regular columnist for Time, currently contributes regularly to The Progressive and has written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, Salon.com, and other publications. Author of some 20 books. The lady knows the territory and, to her credit, has not become inured to echoes of change ringing in ears.

We've seen the first act of the play yet to come, titled "Democrats Back in Charge." It's had a bunch of bad 2006 reviews. Spencer Tracy had it right about stage presence; "learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture."

Thus far, Democratic control has yet to achieve either goal. At a time when Democrats need desperately not to act like Democrats, Harry Reid tries to morph from wrestling-coach to statesman. It's just not in the man from Nevada. The hand is a bust. Pelosi, all wriggly and giggly from her moment of fame has shown herself to be too partisan a dominatrix of House discipline to serve her country in time of need. 

• We are no closer to getting out of Iraq than before
• The uncontrolled (and disastrously un-admitted) real estate bubble has imploded in a mire of  fraud and conspiracy
• Health care is an issue for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
• Impeachment of the most criminal administration in the history of the country remains 'off Nancy Pelosi's table.'
• A small and unheralded, largely unseen military dies on a daily basis to prove the unprovable staying of a headstrong president's course
• This new and toothless 'Congress of change' can't even enforce its will to bring testimony from a successfully defiant executive branch

Pelosi and Reid are terrified, not of impeachment (or the fantasy that it will complicate election 2008), but of their personal roll in the Democratic complicity that an impeachment trial would reveal. Every single step of the way, the Bush administration's murky wreckage of American ideals was approved by Democrats.

The ongoing whine that Pelosi & Co just can't get past a need for 60 votes in the Senate is ample evidence. Republicans were in exactly the same position. Had Democrats the will, had Pelosi and Reid the guts, Bush would never have been able to run off with the country.

Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay at least had the guts not to give a shit. They stood there, guns blazing and dressed the theft of American politics as a Contract With America. Had Bush and Cheney not been so heavy-handed, the Gingrich-DeLay legacy would not yet be at risk.

American government has been on the take for decades, mainlining the intravenous drip of special interest money until the body politic tumesced from bloat. Democrats were (and are) in on the deal, a consideration that sets the stage for massive disappointment once November has come and gone. (Which November of which year has recently become a question, since we seem to have gravitated toward multi-year campaigns)

"Change" is a feel-good, but meaningless word. Defined as "Become different in some particular way, without permanently losing one's or its former characteristics or essence."

Parse that, baby. Become different (Democrat rather than Republican) without permanently losing former characteristics (power, greed) or essence (the best government money can buy). Justice doesn't happen to be a part of change in this context and we are full-circle, back to the brilliant observation of Pascal that in the absence of justice, strength will suffice. Or the promise of strength, the hope of strength, the vision or the image of strength, when strength itself has proven too costly.

This self-servingly constructed framework of government under whose foot we find ourselves has to be ripped apart and reconfigured to serve society. We need to pull the money out of legislating and I don't see a program (or even an admission such a thing exists) on the part of national or regional candidates.

I am uninspired that the very legislators who have pounded together these lobbyist- congressional- military- industrial- pharma- agri- oil complexes (nail by nail, like Jesus on the cross) are the ones upon whom we must rely to tear it all down. Don't ask a theologian to tear down the church.

Barack can't do that, nor can Hillary or John. Only citizens in the streets can do that and they are busy at the moment, lowing like cattle behind the fences government has erected for them. Unless.

Unless it all comes down on their (and our) heads in a massive failure of the American and world economies, a financial disaster of the breadth and scope of 1929. That would, essentially, change all the rules as it did in the aftermath of the Hoover administration, a time not too unlike our own.

There's little purpose in speculating on that scenario. If it happens, it will not be a subject of speculation, but one of reality and the cards will fall as they may--but certainly, they will fall.

I find it personally interesting that, in the wake of the most frightening upheaval Wall Street has faced in recent decades, that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke have contrived (some might say conspired) to keep the Dow-Jones happily above 12,000. They have done that by irrationally, unsettlingly and without precedent, opening the money pumps to private investment banks. The money in that pipeline does not exist. They printed it.

Your and my house, car, furniture and lawnmower is worth half today of what it was when George Bush took office.

You will not be aware of that, because it is not likely you have reason to keep up with international currencies. Within the United States, all seems well. The waters are quiet. Outside America, a financial tsunami has taken place and the dollar is on the brink of collapse. No one wants our currency. No one wants our debt. No one wants much of anything America has chosen to export in the past seven years.

It seems that, having failed to strengthen justice, we have pulled off the double-whammy of failing to justify strength as well. Meanwhile, the two candidates upon whom we pin our faintest of hopes in the most perilous of times, have descended to a controversy over which among them is or is not elitist.

The government we demand is, unfailingly, the government we deserve.
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Media comment;

• USA Today-Poll shows no change in Pa., Clinton up by 6
• Kansas City Star-Obama, rivals spar over 'elitist' remarks, but voters see nuance
• CNN-Congress wants to jolt economy - again
• Spiegel Online-Germany-The Madness of Ben Bernanke
• EuroNews.net-France-G7 finance chiefs push for financial market transparency

Conversations With the Clueless; (a discouraging look at where the Fed is taking us)

The Washington Post headline is Stocks Surge as Fed Offers A Boost and it’s written by T. M. Tse and Neil Irwin, who are staff writers and may be forgiven their sins. Certainly they are not Steven Pearstein (probably one of the finest business-writers extant today) even though he too is beginning to waver on Fed actions that ‘may prevent a serious meltdown.’

Serious meltdown is what we need, Steve. It may in fact be our only hope.

Unfortunately, no politician likes to see SM (sado-masochism or serious meltdown, take your pick) on his or her watch, and so we’ve had a half century of transgressions patched over and forwarded to the next bunch coming in. Getting down to the nitty and the gritty;

NEW YORK, March 11 -- The Federal Reserve took bold action Tuesday to revive the economy's ossified credit markets by offering to take over the risk of spurned mortgage securities, igniting a rally on Wall Street that sent stocks to their best performance in five years.

It annoys me when a national newspaper, ostensibly of some repute, characterizes an inflationary printing of money as bold action. It’s not. Bold action would be letting the fraudulently inflated markets take their well-deserved bath, while still preserving the value of the dollar. That's the job of the Fed, defending against inflation and supporting the dollar.

Ben Bernanke has failed miserably at both. I don’t damned doubt a rally was ignited, as Wall Street dodged another bullet and went out to celebrate.

When your securities stink so badly that no one will touch them, it’s a relief to have the Fed come along and haul your ashes. Ossified indeed. The credit market is road-kill, lying there with all four legs in the air, body swelling with the rot of gigantic fraud.

Setting aside earlier reservations, the Fed essentially made itself the lender of last resort to investment banks squeezed for cash by offering them up to $200 billion in new credit against their holdings of highly rated mortgage securities that no one else is eager to buy. This move, coordinated with four other central banks, was the most aggressive step the Fed has taken to address the spreading credit crisis.

Nice try, Tse and Irwin, but no home run there either. The Fed has not made itself lender of last resort, it has made the American taxpayer lender of last resort, without ever checking in to see if it was OK. The Revolutionary War was begun over just such an issue. Christ, that argument was over tea.

The Federal Reserve doesn’t have $200 billion, nor does it have the additional $100 billion it has promised each and every month until the cows come home (or don’t, in which case they become someone else’s cows) The Fed is

• watering your currency,
• destroying what little credibility the dollar has left,
• making every single thing you own worth less,
• shooing off any foreign interest in financing our astounding national debt
• and getting the Washington Post to present it to you as an aggressive step to address the crisis.

Does anyone ask any questions, or do Tse and Irwin just jot it all down in their notebooks?

Bernanke and Co. are doing this treasonous damage to the American economy in order to keep the Dow Jones Industrial Average up in the vicinity of 12,000. Their reasons have nothing at all to do with the integrity of markets. That went down the drain decades ago.

They are doing it to protect the assets of the CEOs on top, keep the hedge-fund shenanigans in play and let President Bush flee his office with the myth intact that he is not actually President Hoover reincarnated.

The Dow Jones industrial average of 30 blue-chip stocks responded to the morning announcement by jumping 250 points within the first moments of trading and ended the day up 416.66 points, or 3.5 percent, to 12,156.81. 

Another rabbit will have to be dragged out from yet another hat. At $100 billion a month, rabbits are easily come by.

But while the Dow's percentage gain was its steepest since 2003, the rebound in trading still left markets below where they'd been just a week ago. Nor did the move by the central bank address the underlying weakness of the economy triggered by widespread exposure to failing subprime mortgage loans, though the initiative did blunt the immediate threat: a run from even the safest high-grade bonds.

Underlying weakness. There you have it, you intrepid reporters. Even a blind pig occasionally finds a peanut and Tse and Irwin have found theirs, but misnamed it. Failing sub-prime mortgage loans should more properly and accurately read 'fraudulently packaged and mis-represented hedge-fund derivatives.' These bonds have already been declared AAA. The so-called (by crooked bond rating companies) safest have failed.

Now it gets complicated, but only slightly. In the rest of the world—that strange and romantic, dangerous and chaotic place outside America—the value of the dollar has dropped by half during this administration. Your
house, car, savings and hopes are all worth half what they were six years ago . . . and no one told you.

The Cliff Notes are that galloping federal debt ($3 trillion increased to $9 trillion), a savings rate that is less than zero, a huge buildup of personal debt, tax giveaways to the rich, an unfunded war and oil prices goosed by that war ($31 suddenly up to $104 a barrel) have made us a bad bet for the loaning of money.

Unfortunately, our thirst for debt is $1.5 billion a day. Uncle Sam has become a profligate uncle. Somebody has to come up with the dough or else the world is going to make us turn in our credit card.

Mostly, it’s been the Chinese. But understand this. A $100 Chinese investment in ten-year U.S. Debt, paid into our Treasury in 2000, is now only worth $50 and there are still two years to go on the loan. Foreign investors are less and less willing to fund us at that kind of loss, especially when they can buy us up at bargain-basement prices—as the Chinese and Dubai princes have been doing.

So much for blind pigs and peanuts, at least for the moment.

Until Tuesday, the central bank had been unable to reverse the downward slide of the U.S. economy despite a series of interest rate cuts and other steps to introduce liquidity into the system. The series of cuts to the federal funds rate had threatened to stoke inflation and, by driving down the value of the dollar, contributed to price rises in oil and other imported commodities. But these moves had done little to restore the confidence of banks, which have increasingly tightened the credit they offer to businesses and home buyers, even those with excellent credit.

Bingo. What might have restored confidence would be federal indictments, lengthy trials into the lending conspiracy and prison terms for some $100 million executives. Unfortunately for them, the prison terms would have been fairly evenly distributed among the CEOs of mortgage banks, investment banks, bond rating firms and hedge funds. Thanks to Bernanke, those are the very co-conspirators who are celebrating having just dodged the bullet of accountability.

The peanut again. This time under a shell in an economic shell-game (noun; A swindling sleight-of-hand game; victim guesses which of three shells a peanut is under).

All this was choking off already anemic economic activity. The government reported last week that the economy shed jobs for the second consecutive month. Consumer spending has softened, corporate profits have flagged, and both residential and commercial real estate have displayed new signs of stress.

In the past week, the vicious cycle accelerated. Bankers demanded that hedge funds and other investors holding troubled securities put up more cash to back them, prompting a sell-off of high-grade securities such as those issued by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to raise the money. Some investment funds, like one run by Carlyle Group of the District, could not meet these margin calls, and they defaulted. Rumors of trouble at one of the largest Wall Street banks, Bear Stearns, and speculation that other banks would soon disclose new, staggering losses, added to the mounting panic.

Some call it a vicious cycle, others characterize it as chickens home to roost or the horse gone after the barn door is closed. We have destroyed American agriculture by abandoning it to corporate interests, but the metaphor of the barnyard has not yet left us.

So the Fed moved Tuesday to auction up to $200 billion in Treasury securities, which will be available to large financial institutions if they put up collateral including highly rated mortgage-backed securities. The aim was to make Wall Street firms more confident about buying and holding these mortgage investments and provide an outlet for them. This could free up money for banks to lend.

Choke that one down, if you are able. Here you are (pretending to be an investor), holding junk bonds that were presented to you as AAA bonds. It said so right on the investment documents (a fraud by the bond raters) and here they are today, not worth a fart in a whirlwind (a compounded fraud, perpetrated across state boundaries, making it a RICO offense).

The Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is going to take them off your hands--as collateral--for billions of dollars. You laugh hysterically and put the money under the mattress. This is supposed to make you more confident about buying and holding these mortgage investments, but you’re not fool enough for that, thank you very much. As for freeing up money, that’s safely under your mattress until your heart rate slows down and you venture forth yet again.

Helping liquidity? Forget about it, this shell game is about helping greedy investors who have done exactly as greedy investors are supposed to do—lost their investment.

After the announcement, the market for these highly rated mortgage securities showed signs of improvement.

I’ll just bet it did.

Economists and analysts largely praised the move, saying it goes further in directly addressing current problems than simply cutting a short-term interest rate, which adds to inflationary fears.

"They may have hit the right spot in the marketplace where the help was needed," said Bill Tedford, fixed-income strategist at Stephens Capital Management.

Cutting short-term interest rates is inflationary, but somehow printing $1 trillion a year is not. And Bill is right. They hit Bear Stearns exactly in the right spot, that spot that keeps them from going bankrupt as they deserve to do.

"The mortgage market has just been locked up," said Craig Elder, fixed-income senior analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. "I'm not sure if it solves all of the problems, but I think it should free up a considerable amount of liquidity."

What we have (thus far) failed to lock up is the crooks and liars who created this mortgage market.

In announcing the program, the Fed also extended agreements with central banks in Switzerland and the European Union that allow them to borrow billions of more dollars from the Fed and inject this money into their financial systems.

What, me worry? Hey--it’s party time. Does the NATO Alliance extend to bailing out millionaires and billionaires? Unfortunately, Tse and Irwin had only analysts and strategists available for interview. Their analysis was understandably a little on the ‘wasn’t our fault’ side and their strategy leaned heavily on the ‘money under the mattress solution’ before the pension trusts find out their money is under that other shell.

Do not leave this Conversation With the Clueless without watchingThe Last Laugh--George Parr—Subprime on YouTube. It is not to be missed and explains the whole sorry mess in a mere nine minutes.

Enjoy.

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Media comment;

• Guardian-UK-Federal Reserve leads world central bank move by injecting $200bn
• Reuters-Economy.com says Fed action helps but not enough
• Wall Street Journal-Euro Hits Another New High As ECB Hints at Holding Rates
• Reuters-US STOCKS-Wall St slips on rethink of Fed plan, oil over $110
• The Age-Australia-Did Bernanke do it for Fannie Mae?

Smash the Presses Before Ben Bernanke Starts Printing

In about a year it will be the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the nickname for post-WWI Germany and a moniker forever connected with the hyper-inflationary economy of Germany. That circumstance lead directly to the democratic election of Adolph Hitler and WWII.

In 1914, the German mark was worth about 25 cents, or four to the dollar. Nine years later in 1923, Germany had printed itself enough marks to make 50 million of them worth exactly one dollar.

Fed to Make $200 Billion Available To Lenders
Bank Seeks to Loosen Credit
(Neil Irwin and David Cho, Washington Post Staff Writers, March 8, 2008)

The Federal Reserve took strong action yesterday to restore order to frazzled lending markets while a new report showing unexpected job losses underscored the toll that credit markets are taking on the economy.

The world's financial plumbing is so clogged that the central bank sees a need for new steps to clean it out to prevent severe damage. Mounting panic in the credit markets is making it harder for Americans to get mortgages and is increasing the rates they must pay on credit cards and auto loans. Even solid businesses are finding it difficult to raise money to expand.

Ben Bernanke, who is the current chairman of the Fed is hardly a plumber. One can only wish he was.

Under his tutelage, we may as well take the book from the left hand of the Statue of Liberty and replace it with a can of gasoline. A torch in one hand, gasoline in the other, the perfect metaphor for an American economy so distorted and so finance-driven, it hardly deserves the name.

"Send us your investors, your huddled capital funds"

We are no longer a capitalist society and have not been one for some years now. We are an interest-rate dependent consumer society and the sole, wheezing, smoking engine left to support that house of cards is consumer confidence. Essentially, the American dream has become a confidence-game (noun: a swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to buy worthless property).

The immediate problem is that a massive sub-prime mortgage fraud has sucked us dry of the basic fuel necessary for staggering on--confidence. There ain’t none left. The tank is dry.

Ben Bernanke is going to fill ‘er up on money. He and George Bush and Henry Paulson have connived between them a ‘stimulus package to bolster the economy.’ If you look up ‘bolster,’ one meaning is to support and strengthen and another is to add padding. I leave it to your judgment which definition most closely defines giving each taxpayer $300 to $1,200 of his own money to goose the economy in the sole interests of the above-named public officials' personal friends.

None but the Washington Post (deprived in these days of cutbacks of any true financial writer other than Steven Pearlstein) could possibly swallow without a fit of coughing, the swindler’s excuse that ‘the world's financial plumbing is so clogged that the central bank sees a need for new steps to clean it out to prevent severe damage.’ Who on earth fed WaPo that line? Certainly it was not vetted by Steve. I don’t doubt he choked on his coffee when he saw it.

The Fed said it will make $200 billion available to financial institutions in an effort to ease a crisis of confidence that is making it harder for families and businesses to borrow money.

"They're recognizing that financial markets aren't functioning well, and that that creates risks to the real economy," said Vincent Reinhart, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former senior Fed official.

Where do they get these people? Can I get a job at the Fed?

Financial markets have been looted, Ben. Wake up. This is not about families and businesses, this is about pumping up the worthless investments hedge-funds created. It’s about papering-over the hole in the missing billions before their major institutional investors sue them for fraud and send the whole crop of $100 million a year criminals off to Sing Sing.

Bernanke’s $200 billion is merely the camel’s nose in the tent. He proposed to create (read that print) $100 billion a month to prop up the banks for at least a year, but essentially for as long as it takes. Another ‘surge’ in an unwinnable war--anything it takes to get George safely back at the ranch before this whole swindle collapses on his head. Every 12 months (unless it’s not enough), Bernanke proposes to add $1.2 trillion to a money supply that totals approximately $7 trillion.

And the sworn duty of the Fed is to prevent inflation. Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

The dollar this administration has contrived to devalue by approximately half during its brief term in office, is now to be further demolished by stimulating, diddling, futzing with and printing their way over the edge of the cliff.  The printing press is to monetary policy as Viagra is to maintaining an erection. The one gives you a sore dick, but the other turns the United States into Argentina.

"A lot of what we've done has been mostly just to offset the tightening of credit that has arisen because of the financial situation," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in congressional testimony last week.

Instead of simply cutting interest rates further, the Fed responded to this latest crisis yesterday with carefully targeted measures. The central bank said it will auction $100 billion to financial institutions, injecting money into the banking system by trading cash for troubled securities. The Fed will also make another $100 billion in cash available in exchange for securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, trying to restore confidence to the market for home mortgages.

The problems are the latest wave of a crisis in debt markets that began in August and reappeared again in November and late February. This crisis is one major factor in a pullback by consumers and businesses that has driven the economy to the brink of recession, or possibly over it.

• Lie #1: Offsetting the tightening of credit is (for Ben) easier than tightening the handcuffs on the criminals who profited from this fraud on the taxpayer.
• Lie #2: Measures were not carefully targeted, but recipients were. Wall Street will get its plumbing unclogged and you, dear taxpayer, will get the bill for it. (Before all this manipulation was factored in, your personal share of ‘unfunded debt,’ including tax breaks to the rich and an untaxed war, is—as of 8pm today-- $30,967.40. Family of four? Pony up $123,868.96.)
• Lie #3: No one is injecting anything. They are not ‘trading for troubled securities,’ they are buying bad debts with your tax money. They are bailing out criminals, so that no one will call them at their game, which has been to fleece the American public and blame it on ‘market conditions.’
• Lie #4: Bailing out Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae does nothing to restore confidence to the market for home mortgages, it merely supports fragile government backed institutions, who have been part of the game—again, with your dough. The same money you don’t have to pay child-care and health-insurance.
• Lie #5: There was no August crisis in debt markets. In August, we had the first indications of a purposeful financial fraud, committed against investors by a consortium of co-conspirator mortgage salesmen, mortgage bankers, bond rating companies, investment banks and hedge-funds. This will probably turn out to be the largest and most damaging Wall Street fraud ever to bring down an economy—far larger than the 1929 crash.
• Lie #6: A misnamed and lied-about ‘crisis,’ cannot possibly be a factor in anything other than the continuing cover-up of massive financial fraud.

Six lies is a lot of lies to pack into three paragraphs and 161 words. Amazingly, the WaPo failed to call a single one of them. No major newspaper in the United States has been carrying this as the widespread crime that it is. Steven Pearlstein has come the closest, which is why he no doubt spit coffee all over his office when he read the piece.

There is a cure for all this sickness and greed and fraud, but it will not be found in the halls of Congress, the meeting rooms of the Fed or within a new administration, no matter how much ‘change’ is promised.

Attempting to repair a half-century of financial malfeasance is as dreary a chore as trying to ‘fix’ communism. Just as Ronald Reagan never ‘won’ the Cold War (the wheels finally came off, while he happened to occupy the office), Bernanke, Paulson and Bush haven’t a clue about what to do. Other, that is, than run around with a torch in one hand, gasoline in the other, trying to calm crooked markets.

"The Fed has been running around putting fingers in dikes," said Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial. "Without that, the dike would have imploded, and water would have been spilling in."

Diane is closer to the truth than any of them. The dike will indeed implode and therein lies the only viable cure. An international crash.

The world danced around the Argentine problem, the Mexican difficulty and the Asian unpleasantness, but the financial capitals of the planet are not strong enough or flexible enough to waltz their way past an American crash.

From the ashes, we may be sufficiently humbled and perhaps even wise enough to do the things we haven’t courage enough to accomplish now;

• Oversee the absolutely uncontrolled hedge-fund industry that triggered this mess
• Disconnect business and industry from the IPO as a borrowing mechanism and send them back to traditional loans at traditional banks
• Do away entirely, completely and irrevocably with leverage
• Disabuse the investor of the charming fairy tale that uncontrolled growth is anything other than the definition of malignancy
• Return corporate stock certificates to their intended purpose of investment, rather than speculative instruments
• Make criminal the offer of stock options as incentives to management
• Consider laws initiating minimum-term (3-6 month) investment requirements to reduce the volatility of markets
• Tax capital gains as ordinary income
• Do away with the income tax
• Re-institute logical trade tariff policy

Those would be a few things that could be successfully accomplished following a crash. Add to those massive government investments in infrastructure, schools, public transport, alternative power sources, the de-corporatizing of agriculture and re-planning of our auto-centric and dehumanizing suburban sprawl.

Taking back control of the investment community would prevent the flight of scarce capital from the have-nots to the haves. Infrastructure investment, reorganizing agriculture, instituting tariffs and killing off the income tax are positive ways of creating good jobs at good wages. There is simply no political will to accomplish any of these goals, otherwise they would hardly have gained the half-century momentum that set us up for the current financial landslide, avalanche, tsunami or metaphor of your choice.

Meanwhile, someone please take the keys to the currency-printing presses away from Ben Bernanke.
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Media comment;

• Bloomberg-Most Read on Bloomberg: Carlyle; Bernanke on Mortgages; Ambac
• New York Times-When Ben Bernanke Speaks
• Financial Times-UK-Mortgage principal forgiveness will meet resistance from servicers
• Bloomberg-Paulson Says Deal `Very Close' With Congress on Housing Bill
• Wall Street Journal-Trichet Urges Dollar Unity

Elite? You Got a Problem with Elite?

Immigration—everybody’s hot-button issue--and America is once again arguing across the metaphoric back-fence and having the very devil of a time trying to balance fairness and equity.

The End of War

Not the end of conflict, certainly not the end of fighting . . . but it is worth considering that as we blindly multiply our efforts toward a supremacy-gap between ourselves and the rest of the world in military hardware, the enemy is dissolving before our eyes. What can we possibly be thinking? More to the point, what can the rest of the world possibly think we are thinking?

HAMAS AND THE TALIBAN--WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS ON A BUDGET, WHILE WE PISS AWAY BILLIONS

Just when you think every possible outrage has been committed in the name of George Bush's policy of pre-emptive war, something more comes from the blind-side to knock the wind from an already winded American experience.

BUSTED--THE COMING CREDIT-CARD MELTDOWN

A brutally frank and honest assessment of our past 30 years would make the argument there is little hope for the credit-addicted working poor but a '29 style crash. An entire nation has been sold down the river of hopeless wages and easy credit.

DEFINE 'GRAPPLE.' DEFINE 'STIMULUS.' WHAT THE HELL, DEFINE 'WHITE HOUSE!'

What a hoot.

Congressional lawbreakers and the pResident in the Ovalist of offices are all standing around the flattened body of the U.S. economy, run down like an errant rabbit by the 16-wheeler fraud that came roaring out of both parties.

The Grapes of Wrath, 2008

After 30 years at a factory making truck parts, Jeffrey Evans was earning $14.55 an hour in what he called “one of the better-paying jobs in the area.”

Wearing a Harley-Davidson cap, a bittersweet reminder of crushed dreams, he recently described how astonished and betrayed he felt when the plant was shut down in August after a labor dispute. Despite sporadic construction work, Mr. Evans has seen his income reduced by half.

So he was astonished yet again to find himself, at age 49, selling off his cherished Harley and most of his apartment furniture and moving in with his mother.

Thus are we introduced to Jeff Evans in Erik Eckholm’s New York Times article. He calls it "Blue-Collar Jobs Disappear, Taking Families’ Way of Life Along" and the final ‘along’ strikes me as superfluous and possibly anti-Strunk’s Elements of Style.

But you damn sure can’t argue with the premise that thirty years to less than fifteen bucks an hour isn’t a journey for which you need a Harley.

Astonished indeed. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Living in Europe, I find myself astonished that the American dollar (upon which I depend) has dropped by half in value as well. While the financial pages debate whether or if a recession may or may not be on the horizon and what that means or doesn’t mean, Jeff and I are hip-deep in it.

Middle-aged men moving in with parents, wives taking two jobs, veteran workers taking overnight shifts at half their former pay, families moving West — these are signs of the turmoil and stresses emerging in the little towns and backwoods mobile homes of southeast Ohio, where dozens of factories and several coal mines have closed over the last decade, and small businesses are giving way to big-box retailers and fast-food outlets.

Tom Joad’s sharecropped land simply dried up and blew away in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Jeff Evans’ sharecropped employment fell to the planned, methodical, Harvard-bred maximization of quarterly profits. That fool's errand has wrought as much havoc on the American working environment as the dust-bowl thirties did, drying up and blowing away a fertile Oklahoma agricultural environment.

Two sides of the same short-sighted nickel.

Here, where the northern swells of the Appalachians lap the southern fringe of the Rust Belt, thousands of people who long had tough but sustainable lives are being wrenched into the working poor.

The region presents an acute example of trends affecting many parts of Ohio, Michigan and other pockets of the Midwest.
Slammed by the continued decline in the automobile and steel businesses, Ohio never recovered from the recession of 2001-2, and blue-collar families who had made it partway up the economic ladder find themselves slipping back, with chaotic effects on families and dreams.

Poetic language, swells lapping fringes.

It would come as a further shock to an already wounded Jeff Evans, that America’s ‘continued decline in the automobile and steel businesses’ was a put-up job. Mainstream media, including newspapers in Ohio and Michigan that owe it to their readers to look deeper, simply accept the clap-trap of continued declines as if they were seasons of the year.

The demise of Ohio truck parts production was engineered at a time when automobile and steel production were thriving in a country six and a half thousand miles away. A country with high wages and benefits, a nation with no natural resources such as iron and coal.

That country, of course, is Japan and it continues to kick our American ass in auto and steel production, even as Jeff Evans moves in with his mom.

What Japan does not lead America in, is the destruction of its industrial base by the weapon of quarterly profit. The Japanese were found during the fifties, cameras hanging from necks, at American industrial trade shows. They took our engineering expertise home with them and honed it, polished the product and called it Komatsu, Mitsubishi, Toyota and Honda.

Then they gave it back, while Detroit looked the other way.

(Business Week) Nandra Barnes knows about dead-end jobs. For seven years, the single mother of three labored as a welder at an air-conditioning factory in Grenada, Miss., a gritty job that, at $11.50 an hour, left her living paycheck to paycheck. Job security? Forget it. With every dip in orders, the factory would lay off more workers. "It seemed like there were always cutbacks," she recalls. Barnes was fearful of the day she would get the tap on the shoulder.

So when Nissan Motor Co. (NSANY ) opened a sprawling $1.4 billion assembly plant in nearby Canton, Barnes jumped at the opportunity and was lucky enough to snare one of the 4,200 jobs at the plant. Today, Barnes makes bumpers for Quest minivans and the four other models Nissan produces at the factory, where she earns more than $20 an hour -- a princely sum not just for rural Mississippi but for almost any U.S. blue-collar worker these days without a union card or a college degree. Barnes, 39, even has enough money left over after paying the bills to give her three kids things that she never had -- including, she hopes, a college education.

"With this job I finally feel secure that I can take care of my family," she says. "I plan on retiring from here."

Not only has the Harvard Business School model failed us, but the very companies who kicked us out of our own industries are now coming back over to give Nandra Barnes the job American business schools took away from Jeff Evans.

Nissan, Toyota and Honda don’t pay their senior executives to bet against the firm. You won’t see a Japanese CEO baited with stock options that reward the destruction of jobs in order to to juice a quarterly dividend. The $100 million bonus for off-shoring jobs, downsizing payroll and eliminating R&D (research and development) does not exist outside of the American business template.

Modesty does not prevent me from naming the murderer of America’s industrial and business base; it is without the slightest doubt the Harvard Business School and other university business schools who copy and promote that same viral infection. Of what possible benefit has it been to

• Create a business elite at the cost of a ravaged middle class?
• Trade Main Street for fourteen billionaires in Bentonville, Arkansas?
• Fast-food our mom and pop restaurants out of existence?
• Destroy the energy of small and mid-town America?
• Become a nation of consumers instead of producers?
• Concentrate our wealth and decimate our grandeur?

The benefit is only at the top and, even there, the Ted Turners and Warren Buffetts of the country are uneasy with what has been thrust upon them. We are better than hedge-fund managers earning $100 million yearly and complaining about their tax bracket. As once we were shamed by our uncaring attitude toward migrant workers, so we have become the shamed, victims of a capitalism gone nuts.

What worked when it was nourished by long-term investment, has been ravished by the winner-take-all race to quarterly profit. What thrived under owner-managership is destroyed by the hired-gun CEO, thirsty for personal gain. What was once the envy of the world as an entrepreneurial model, has declined to the loss-leader status of third-world economies. The planet’s leading producer nation, Marshall Plan savior of post-war Europe, is reduced to beggary and the combined goodwill of those who pity our credit-card mentality.

We have no dreams left, merely variations on self indulgence. None can afford the business schools that tear us down, save the rich who profit from the destruction. Reading of the Jeffrey Evanses, forced to move in with their mothers, our collective reaction is “loser.”

We are the losers. We, who had it all and, like Tom Joad, watched helplessly as it blew away.
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Media comment;

• New York Times-Blue-Collar Jobs Disappear, Taking Families’ Way of Life Along
• Atlanta Journal Constitution-State officials travel to China to sell Georgia
• MSNBC-HUCKABEE TRUMPETS BLUE-COLLAR APPROACH
• Herald-Tribune-For Clinton, Government as Economic Prod
• Detroit Free Press-Fix economy with manufacturing jobs

"Free Speech" Winnows the List of Candidates

Winnow (noun) The act of separating grain from chaff.

If we are indeed winnowing, then America has been winnowed into three guys left standing on the Republican side and two Democrats. Something like 5 out of 24, depending on who you count. Whether they are wheat or chaff depends upon your point of view.