A few notes on the financial front...

1. As you've no doubt read by now, Barack Obama recently sat at the head of a long mahogany table and told all the representatives of Big Finance that “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

From yesterday's WP:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.

Wow. That's an awfully short distance between "pitchfork protection" and "massive pay-offs."

2. Chrysler received about $6.8 billion worth of loans from various big banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Now, in order to stay alive, Chrysler wants to cut a deal with the banks, transforming a large chunk of that loan money into stocks.

The banks won't play ball. Let the workers starve. There's no place for sentimentality in business.

The J.P. Morgan position, said these people, is that concessions by Chrysler's creditors should be treated as they would be in a normal bankruptcy -- meaning the billions of dollars of government debt and the UAW retiree health-care obligation should be wiped out before the secured lenders lose anything on their $6.8 billion.

Here's the kicker: These are the same banks that received, are receiving, and will continue to receive untold billions of your taxpayer money. You will owe that money for the rest of your life and so will your kids.

But how can you pay if you don't have a job?

Marcy struggles to find the words:

There's a lot that needs to be said about this: that if Treasury can't get JP Morgan to cooperate here, then it must write off JP Morgan as a good faith partner going forward. That this just shot to the top of the list of most loathsome actions among the banksters.

But frankly, all I can summon at this point is a long string of profanities that I'll spare you.

3. Bill Moyers interviewed William K. Black, the former Savings and Loan regulator, on the current Big Bailout. Here's the video and here's the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: How do they get away with it? I mean, what about their own checks and balances in the company? What about their accounting divisions?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: All of those checks and balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes bad, all of the checks and balances are easily overcome.

The Bush Administration essentially got rid of regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were able to do this with impunity and that's exactly what happened. Where would you look? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans... Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again, as you say, this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.

All of which brings us back to point one. When Obama says that he is protecting the bankers from pitchforks, he means that he won't use the FBI to investigate crime.

A refusal to investigate and prosecute constitutes complicity. In a small town, if Sheriff Sam Shady won't shut down the "miracle healing" tent show, you can be pretty sure that Reverend Quackenbilker has made the necessary pay-off. The same shit happens in D.C. and NY.