Really good, go read it. (via Corrente.)

Ian Welsh:

No, I’m not being sarcastic. I still have little hope for the US, but I am very heartened by what is happening in Europe. The French actions and now the British students rioting. It is, ironically, even more hopeful that the British government wants to try a student for attempted murder for throwing a fire extinguisher off the roof. Next, they’ll be hanging people for stealing chickens. The massive overreaction and the clear double standard, given the war criminals who ran the British government, none of whom have been prosecuted, is the sort of thing which indicates a loss of legitimacy, a loss of legitimacy which often leads to revolution: peaceful or otherwise.

At this point, my best guess is that when push comes to shove in Europe, the left will actually win in most nations. They aren’t wimps, they are willing to fight, they are willing to clash hard with the cops and they are willing to directly attack the interests of the ruling class. Unlike in the US, where the people willing to risk violence are right wingers, in Europe more are on the left wing side.

The economic collapse of the Eurozone, as multiple nations are forced to beggar themselves to bail out bankers and the rich, is similar to what is happening in the US, what is different is that the people in multiple nations are fighting back. I’m hoping the Irish wake up and tell the Eurocrats to go fuck themselves, that the deal of joining the Euro was “we give up a lot of autonomy for a lot of prosperity” but that if they aren’t getting the prosperity, they want the autonomy back. Multiple nations should sincerely threaten to go off the Euro. At this point they are getting economically crushed by being on it and forced to pay off banker’s losses, without the advantages of having their own currency. Right now they are going to take the economic hit they would take by going off the Euro, so they might as well do it.

Odds that the Euro doesn’t exist in 10 years are now, in my opinion, more than 50%. It is not serving the peripheral nations interests, they are being offered a standard of living roughly equivalent to the 50s. (My Eurocrat friends (you know who you are) will tell me this is unthinkable, and won’t happen. We’ll see.)

The pendulum, in Europe, is swinging away from the right. That’s good news.

Matt Taibbi spends an hour in Florida’s mortgage foreclosure court, and learns just how corrupt our banking system is — and how eager the courts are to enable them:

This isn’t some rare goof-up by a low-level cubicle slave: Virtually every case of foreclosure in this country involves some form of screwed-up paperwork. “I would say it’s pretty close to 100 percent,” says Kowalski. An attorney for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid tells me that out of the hundreds of cases she has handled, fewer than five involved no phony paperwork. “The fraud is the norm,” she says.

Kowalski’s current case before Judge Soud is a perfect example. The Jacksonville couple he represents are being sued for delinquent payments, but the case against them has already been dismissed once before. The first time around, the plaintiff, Bank of New York Mellon, wrote in Paragraph 8 that “plaintiff owns and holds the note” on the house belonging to the couple. But in Paragraph 3 of the same complaint, the bank reported that the note was “lost or destroyed,” while in Paragraph 4 it attests that “plaintiff cannot reasonably obtain possession of the promissory note because its whereabouts cannot be determined.”
Continue reading “Too big for fraud” →

Admits that the bankers were criminals:

Matthew Rothschild in the Progressive:

This was timid corporate liberalism, RIP.

Obama was given a mandate for change, and he squandered it.

He never mobilized the base to take on the vested interests.

Example: health care. He didn’t call people to march on Washington for universal health care, or at least Medicare for all who want it. So a few tea party hucksters were able to hijack the debate. He didn’t even push Harry Reid to give the health care bill to Senator Tom Harkin’s committee, throwing it instead into the untrustworthy arms of Max Baucus.

As a result, an inferior law came on the books with some important insurance reforms in it, but it didn’t threaten the private health care providers or the pharmaceutical companies. And it didn’t deliver the immediate relief that most Americans needed.

On the jobs front, he refused to follow the lead of Christina Romer, head of his Council of Economic Advisers, or the recommendations of Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. All three said he needed a stimulus package that was at least 50 percent larger than the one he proposed. Nor did he propose a new WPA, like FDR did when the country faced a similar, if not quite so staggering, free fall. Obama was afraid to come on too strong. So he came on too weak.

Same on the banking front. Obama could have, and should have, nationalized Bank of America and Citibank, or at the very least, compelled them to halt foreclosures and write down the principal on all their mortgages by 25 or 30 percent. But Obama didn’t get anything from the banks in exchange for the hundreds of billions of dollars the Treasury doled out, and the trillions in guarantees. And so the bankers laughed all the way to the vault, and even some Republicans scored by running commercials against Democrats who voted for the bailout.

Same on the environment. Obama sold out the cause at Copenhagen, and with amazingly bad timing he came out for offshore drilling just weeks before the BP disaster, in hopes, again, of getting concessions from Republicans and from industry.

His messaging was as poor as his governing. First he blamed the Wall Street CEOs for their obscene bonuses; then he called them “very savvy businessmen,” adding: “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

Similarly, on the budget, first he argued for deficit spending; then he said we need to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term.

This was confusing to millions of Americans, dispiriting to the base, and diverting to his enemies.

But basically, he didn’t give people enough tangible benefits to say, OK, I’m with him. He’s helped me. I’ll vote for Democrats again.

You can’t tell an unemployed person that you’d have been twice as unemployed without my help. You need to give that person a job now.

You can’t tell an elderly person you’re closing the donut hole on prescription drugs—by the year 2020. You need to close it now.

You can’t tell an adult with a pre-existing condition that you’ll force insurance companies to cover you—by the year 2014, when you may be dead. You need to cover people now.

You can’t tell families being foreclosed upon that you’re trying hard to keep them in their homes. You need to keep them in their homes now.

But to do any of that, Obama would have had to confront corporate power head on. But he, and Rahm Emanuel, and Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner were unwilling to do so and ideologically unprepared to even consider it.

They lived by corporate liberalism. And Democrats around the country died by it.