The NYPD scooped up Chris Hedges and 15 other protesters on Thursday. Meanwhile, Lloyd Blankfein and his fellow rats remained free and presumably busy in their gilded sewer, where they package shit and call it securities. More here.
Category: Worshipping Mammon
What did Bloomberg’s buddies do? The shadow knows
How long will this smooth-talking, well-groomed little monster allow the Zuccotti Park protesters to persist like a shadow on the people who wrecked the economy, and to remind Americans that he, the “independent” Mike Bloomberg, condones and defends what they did? More here.
In Mammon we trust
Instead of addressing the jobs crisis, the despicable corporate whore Eric Cantor — that’s as politely as I can describe him — has helped push through a resolution that reaffirms ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto of the United States.
All together now: Let’s break BofA
Matt Taibbi explains, in his inimitable way, how the sneaky bastards at the Fed will continue to put taxpayers on the hook for bad bets made by gambling degenerates in the banking world:
The government’s patronage of the bank was never clearer than in recent weeks, when B of A quietly decided to move trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) in risky Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts off Merrill’s books and onto the books of the parent/retail arm, Bank of America.
This decision was done at the behest of counterparties to those transactions, who wanted those contracts placed under the aegis of Bank of America, whose deposits are insured by the FDIC. The move was made, according to reports, so that Bank of America could avoid posting $3.3 billion in collateral to satisfy the company’s creditors. In other words, Bank of America just got You the Taxpayer to co-sign as much as $53 trillion worth of dicey derivative contracts.
Not ‘basically insane’ — just flat-out corrupt
Everyone knows what would be the first and most important step toward campaign finance reform. The question is whether there are enough honest people in Congress to make reform a reality:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Wednesday night slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision and supported legislation to overturn it.
Mr. Mitt goes to Washington? Let’s hope not.
The pious Mitt Romney lied about where he stands on workers’ bargaining rights? Say it ain’t so…! On the other hand, what do you expect from a guy who made a fortune helping to put thousands of people out of work? More here.
Instead of New Deal, we got No Deal
Here’s Robert Scheer’s reminder that we need a president whose policies help the 99 percent of Americans who are hurting, not the one percent who are extremely wealthy:
… To accomplish that, we need a moratorium on bank-ordered evictions, along with a government-funded program to aid the underemployed that is as robust as the trillions spent to save the Wall Street swindlers who caused all of this trouble.
Instead we are left with a Democratic president who soothes our rage with promises of decent-paying jobs that in actuality are being vigorously exported from our shores by the president’s top corporate backers. That absurdity was marked by Barack Obama’s choice of Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric—a company that has shifted to foreign countries two-thirds of its workforce and 82 percent of its profits—to head the president’s job creation council.
Obama has failed not because he is a progressive in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt but because he is not. He has blindly followed the lead of George W. Bush in bankrupting the nation by throwing money at Wall Street while continuing to fund wildly expensive and unneeded wars…
Bringing in butchers to help heal the sick
Obama says he’s working with a job creation committee. What he’s really doing is telling job seekers they’ll have to play ball with his corporatist pals and routinely accept jobs that pay less and involve fewer benefits than their parents enjoyed. More here.
Romney is in a cult, but it’s not Mormonism
Don’t worry about whether Mitt Romney wears magic Mormon underwear. Worry that he believes in corporatocracy, the system of government in which corporations are in control. More here.
When did Tom Friedman become a robot?
Friedman is the corporate media’s foremost cheerleader for the brave new world of downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring and clusterfucking that has decimated the American workforce, and he thinks this is a good thing. More here.