Category: Class War

Taking it to the streets

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Our nation could learn a thing or two about independence from these Brits:

Britain’s fastest-growing protest movement is to target scores of high street banks in the next stage of its campaign against government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

Activists from UK Uncut have, over the past five months, caused the temporary closure of more than 100 branches of high street stores accused of avoiding millions of pounds in tax.

The group will stage its first national day of action against UK banks on 19 February.

“The idea this time is not to shut these places down but to open up high street banks, occupying them and using them for things that may be more useful for the community,” said Daniel Garvin from the group.

He and other protesters have mobilised thousands of activists using the Twitter hashtag #UKuncut since the group was formed in October.
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Dylan Ratigan

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Talks to Alan Grayson:

DYLAN: Couple of last questions and then I will let you go. One thing that came out in the FCIC report and Bill Greider did a great job of highlighting this — was the explicit introduction of known to be fraudulent mortgages. They have been audited by Clayton Holdings which is one of the bigger auditing firms if not the biggest auditing firms of these documents. They were knowingly and knowingly insofar as they had been reviewed by Clayton Holdings, then installed inside of investments and sold to pension funds, et cetera et cetera, where then the banks would go out and buy insurance on that that obviously paid a lot of money when the government stepped in to bail out AIG who was one of the big insurers.

How is it that after the Great Depression, there were blue sky laws that said it is illegal to sell a worthless piece of paper as if it is stock in the company if its just Alan Grayson and Dylan Ratigan have gone downtown with a piece of paper with their names on it and they are selling it for money even though there is actually no business. We created laws to prevent people from doing that sort of thing. And yet we found here that mortgages that have been deemed by some official authority — an auditor in this case — as nonconforming, will not get paid back, noncompliant with illegal investment standards for you, American pension fund, for you American mortgage buyer, Fannie Freddie etcetera, and then the FCIC comes out, shows that these fraudulent mortgages were being packaged and sold by Goldman, Deutsche, Morgan, the list goes on and yet, we have yet to see a single meaningful fraud investigation. I mean these guys makes Bernie Madoff look like Romper Room.
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Silliness

~ susie

Of course, he’s too polite to point out who’s spreading the silliness. Robert Reich:

The reason we have continued sky-high unemployment has nothing to do with excessive regulation. There was no sudden outpouring of federal regulation in 2007 before the economy tanked and millions lost their jobs.

If anything, the economy unraveled because of too little regulation. Wall Street went on a binge, remember? The Street could get almost free money from the Fed (which had reduced interest rates to near zero) and do just about whatever it wanted with it. Thirty years of deregulation, culminating with the dismantling of Glass-Steagall and the abject failure of regulators at the Fed and the SEC to use the authority they still had, enabled the Street to make bundles of money and expose the rest of the economy to unprecedented levels of risk.

The Fed had slashed interest rates in the early 2000s, by the way, because the corporate looting scandals at Enron, Worldcom, Sunbeam, and other major corporations had sapped investor confidence. Those scandals themselves wouldn’t have happened had securities regulations been stronger and better enforced.
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Energy cuts

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

For the poor? Am I misreading this?

Or is this some tactic to wear us down to get us to accept other, “less” drastic budget cuts? (You know, like Social Security and Medicare.)

John Kerry is asking Obama to reconsider. During a Depression and a brutal winter, we have to beg a Democratic president not to cut heating subsidies for the poor?

I mean, WTF?

Economist Mark Thoma:

Don’t you feel sorry for the energy companies since they can’t cut power on deliquent bill payers during weather emergencies? Private business should have a right to freeze people to death if they fall behind on their payments. Especially when there is a recession making it hard for people to get by and a lack of social support to fill the gaps in household budgets.

As for the “subsidy to energy companies” argument, pretty much any spending on the poor can be recast as a “subsidy” to someone. For example, giving people food to prevent starvation is nothing more than backdoor support for those greedy farmers who already get enough help from the government.

Update: I should have also knocked the administration for this move. There are ways for the administration to show it is “serious” about deficit reduction besides going after the poor with cuts that are a drop in the bucket relative to the size of the deficit problem. I’d be much more impressed for example if the administration demonstrated its seriousness by going after powerful vested interests rather than those least able to defend themselves within the political arena.