The world is mad. (Various examples.)

Julian E. Zelizer, of CNN, asks: "Is Obama seizing the political center?" No, Obama is not. He'd have to veer pretty sharply to the left to do that. According to polls, the vast majority of the citizenry is concerned about job creation, not deficit reduction. A centrist would follow the people's will.

On economic policies, Obama has continually surrounded himself with moderate, market-oriented liberals such as Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

No, he has surrounded himself with immoderate, market-oriented conservatives such as Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

The president has continued President George W. Bush's policies that shored up Wall Street following the financial meltdown of 2008.

So following the example of George W. Bush -- the most extreme (and most unsuccessful) president of the modern era -- constitutes centrism?

Perhaps so. Now that the right is defined by the writings of Ayn Rand, Cleon Skousen, the John Birchers and other absurd figures formerly consigned (even by Reaganite Republicans) to the far fringe, where is the center?

During this year's debate over deficit reduction and the debt ceiling, Obama came out with a "Grand Bargain," a debt-cutting package that was far more dramatic than what was being discussed.

The move put him in an excellent position politically. He staked out a position as a deficit hawk, yet he did so through a deal he knew that Republicans were unlikely to accept.

No, he did not stake out a position as a "deficit hawk." Most people in this country have no idea what his position is or was, because perception is controlled by propaganda. If FOX and Rush say it didn't happen, it didn't happen.

Obama made the classic mistake of negotiating against himself. Even Dubya the Dumb was smart enough to avoid that error. At the start of negotiations, Obama made clear that Social Security and Medicare were on the chopping block. He took a Republican position -- and for what? He'll still be portrayed in the media as a high-tax liberal, so what has he gained?

Stupid. Unbelievably stupid.

Speaking of unbelievably stupid: Bernie Sanders' recent call for a primary challenge to Obama got some play on the conservative blog Hot Air. Dig the comments:

Lefties do NOT believe Obama is “too conservative.” How the hell do people keep falling for this sh!t?

Yeah. Right. "Hot Air" readers are your go-to guys if you want to know what "lefties" think.

And after all he has done since he became president, he is still not liberal enough for many leftist Americans. Scary, not Obama so much as those other Americans.

Wow. And just what has he done that was in any way "liberal"? He continued W's policies on TARP, tax cuts for the rich, Gitmo, and warrant-free electronic eavesdropping. His refusal to support a reinstatement of Glass-Steagal put him well to the right of John McCain, who sponsored just such a bill.

But to get elected, Obama had to have a bland, beta-male personality, and that’s what’s driving the left crazy. People like Bernie knew Obama was lying to swing voters in 2008 about being a moderate; they just thought he was also lying to them about being a beta male.

"Beta male..."? Huh? WTF?

I guess with right-wingers, it's all about their insecure male self-images. They see all of reality in terms of their dicks.

Socialist unhappy Obama isn’t pushing a “progressive agenda”?
Hmmmmmmmmmmm!… why do progressives cry foul when they’re called socialists?

Because righties have foisted upon the world an insane new definition of the word "socialist," one that would have had evinced a WTF reaction from every actual socialist from Robert Owen to George Bernard Shaw. Hell, today's rightists would have us believe that Ike was a socialist. Literally!

BTW In what world has O moved to the right? His game is smoke and mirrors, bolstered with bloviating.

I agree. He didn't move to the right; he lives there.

O’s Not communist enough for Bernie….

What’s scary is that the most liberal, the most socialistic and most communistic president America has ever had is TOO FAR RIGHT for Democratic congressmen.

Krugman rewrites history. In an otherwise good post, Paul Krugman writes:

OK, I’ve never won a tough election. But neither has Obama! The 2008 race was looking close until Sarah Palin and Lehman came along.

Actually, Obama did win a tough election -- the primary battle against Hillary Clinton. I suppose he deserves credit for that, if you can use the word "credit" to describe the filthiest campaign in Democratic history.

More to the point -- and this is difficult to admit -- but Palin was actually an asset to McCain. She was much better-liked then than now, especially by the Hillary voters, whom the Obots had been deliberately and systematically kicked out of the party.

On September 8, 2008 -- after the convention -- Gallup had McCain ahead 54-44. At the time, it was universally understood that Palin was an asset to the GOP ticket. Erica Jong explained Palin's appeal with this unlovely phrase: "White trash America certainly has allure for voters." That phrase was characteristic of the Obot campaign strategy: "Insult the electorate, all the way to victory!"

On September 12, 2008, the polls pegged the electoral college numbers at McCain 281, Obama 257. On that same date in 2004, Kerry was well ahead. And let's face it, 2008 should have been a gimme year for the Democrats, even before the Wall Street meltdown.

Progressives should have made an effort to win back female voters. Alas, Obots continued their strategy of "Insult your way to victory!" -- with most of the insults being directed at the Clintons and at women.

On September 16, 2008, the polls were looking very bad for Obama: McCain was catching up with him in New York. Talking Points Memo offered this classic analysis:

On the call, Stan Greenberg, who did polling for Bill Clinton in 1992 and now partners with James Carville to run the Dem polling firm Democracy Corps, gave a presentation to the donors that painted a somewhat bleak picture of the struggles Obama is having with aging white women in battleground states.

Translation: A lot of Democratic female voters would not forgive the insults lobbed at Hillary Clinton. They had been kicked out of the party. No way they would vote for Obama. Moreover, many independent female voters wanted to throw up when they saw all of those Obots wearing "Sarah Palin is a CUNT" t-shirts.

Nobody will admit this simple fact of history, but it's true: What we may call "the PUMA factor" was the only reason McCain chose Palin. Shrewdly, McCain hoped to capitalize on the fact that the Obots had alienated so many women. At the time, little was known about Palin; her rep as a tea party extremist came later -- in fact, she was then considered a moderate.

Progs (who cared more about expressing their Ids than about winning the election) kept piling insults on Hillary Clinton and on female voters -- even after Obama had sewed up the nomination. This was the most flabbergastingly stupid strategy ever devised. And it was the main reason why Barack Obama almost lost an election that any Democrat should have won in a landslide.

In short: Sarah Palin, just by virtue of being female, was an asset to John McCain. I do not enjoy making this admission, because I do not like Sarah Palin. But facts are facts. McCain was poised to win, and Palin would have been the reason for that win. If...

...if the Wall Street meltdown had not occurred.

Alas, the panic started on that same date: September 16, 2008. Bush's hapless response (tax cuts and an upraised middle finger to the evicted) tarnished the Republican brand even further.

Too bad voters paid more attention to their stereotyped perceptions of the major parties than to personal history. John McCain had warned about Fannie Mae's problems as early as 2006. Fannie and Freddie did not cause the meltdown, but they were part of the rot that had set into the system. In 2006, McCain said:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

Barack Obama voted against the legislation. Worse: Newly-minted Senator Barack Obama quickly became the number two recipient of contributions from Fannie Mae. He also received massive contributions from Goldman, Lehman, and the rest of that crooked crew.

And now those same Wall Streeters who paved the way for Obama's victory, the same Wall Streeters who were happy to take government bailout funds, are decrying Obama as a socialist.

The world is mad. The world is mad.

Guilt by association

I was going to make this same point today, but when someone else has already said it -- and said it better -- all I can do is quote:

The New York Times has already started the attack by literally lying, once again, about McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis. The NYT article, in an obviously hysterical attempt to equalize Obama’s already dirty hands with the economic catastrophe that was caused by his close friends in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (who the FBI is now investigating), claimed in a recent article that a few of McCain’s advisers “also” had received money from these entities. Of course, the fact that Obama’s advisers were actual CEOs of Fannie Mae, and not only “lobbyist”, doesn’t seem to faze them one bit.

The problem with the NYT report was that they couldn’t really connect the transfer of money from Fannie/Freddie directly to Davis, as it has been clearly and undoubtedly been done from the same corrupt hands to Mr. Barack Hussein Obama...

Here are a few more fun facts about Obama. The afore-linked article backs up every assertion with links to "responsible" sources, like the Washington Post (which is, incidentally, clearly in the tank for Mr. O):

Obama Ranks Second Among Donations From Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac Among All Members Of Congress Since 1989. Chris Dodd is ahead of him. But Dodd has been there like forever, while Obama has been in the Senate only since 2005.

Obama Ranks Second Among Donations From Lehman Brothers Among All Members Of Congress Since 1989. So says Open Secrets, a source that lefties used to like, back in the days before the left had gone out of its gourd.

Top Executives At Lehman Brothers Are Obama Bundlers.

And then, of course, there is Fannie Mae chairman Jim Johnson, who robbed the place blind. He's an Obama adviser.

The left correctly scores Treasury Secretary Paulson for being part of the problem he says he wants to solve. So what about Barack Obama? You know damn well what Kos, TPM and DU would say about Obama's history if he were a Republican.

You can't say that progressives don't have standards. Double standards.

The Obama trail

I have to write in a hurry, which means that I won't be able to arrange my thoughts properly. If you want a quick-n-easy bottom line, I can't help you -- not right now.

If what you are about to read seems a bit disjointed or odd, consider this post a mere teaser -- a hint of things to come.

I've been looking into Evelyn Pringle's stories about the Illinois "Combine," a criminal/political cartel which includes Barack Obama, along with many other noteworthy figures in Chicago. The links on the left hand side of the page go to her introductory pieces. Her most recent investigations are compiled in a series called "Curtain Time For Barack Obama," which you can find in various places. Rezko Watch is serializing it.

Warning: You'll probably be frustrated with her work. Her purpose is not so much to "get Obama" but to deliver a Cinemascope picture of corruption in Illinois. Obama is part of that widescreen image, though only a part; the close-ups don't make sense without the establishing shots.

If you really must have a bottom line, try this:

Tony Rezko's partner in corruption was Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Patrick Fitzgerald calls their criminal conspiracy "Operation Board Games" because the Rezko/Blagojevich Combine got control of two important boards -- one in control of health services, the other in control of a teacher's pension fund. With the boards in hand, the two mobsters were free to loot and pillage.

The name of their game was "pay-to-play": If you wanted a state or city contract, you needed to pay off certain politicians. One of those pols was Barack Obama, who routinely got between one-tenth to one-third the amounts given to Blagojevich. (Blago was Rezko's first choice to become POTUS. That plan was scuttled when the Combine got into legal trouble.) Obama, listed as "a political candidate" in Fitz's indictment, received $10,000 from the teacher's fund.

How did the Combine get control of the health services board? Through a law created and guided by State Senator Barack Obama.

There was no need for this law. It's sole purpose was to reduce the number of supervisors and to place the board completely in the hands of Blago's creatures. Afterward, Barack Obama got a piece of the action with nearly every crooked transaction.

We'll have more to say about all that later.

Right now, I want to note that I've been looking into various subsidiary aspects of the Illinois Combine scandal -- and I've found that certain names have cropped up in previous stories.

Ask yourself: Just how did Obama become so fantastically well-funded so quickly, once he announced for President?

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street.

We've all heard of the most of those names. For some of you, Citadel will be unfamiliar. The name had previously cropped up in the course of our research in the Gus Boulis scandal.

Boulis, you will recall, was the casino boat owner who was forced to sell to Jack Abramoff. Boulis sold but was not paid. He protested -- and got himself killed, ambushed in traffic. As you will recall, 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was on one of those casino ships shortly before the Big Wedding. In the past, I've theorized that the ships could have been used for drug transactions.

Jack Abramoff coveted Gus Boulis’ casino business in the worst possible way. So he "supposedly” duped an otherwise savvy Chicago hedge fund named Citadel Investment into lending him $32 million to purchase Boulis’ fleet of a dozen unlicensed offshore gambling vessels.

Then, in relatively short order, having been paid no more than a mere pittance of the agreed-upon sale price, Gus Boulis was dead.

Citidel seems to have been awfully understanding, considering the sum of money involved. The fund is run by the secretive billionaire (and noted art collector) Kenneth Griffen, who is all of 40 years old.

Again: I've given you just a teaser. There will be much more to come. Stay tuned.

Various: Hurricanes, polls, Obama-vs-Taibbi, crooked voting machines, conspiracies and more...

Batten down the hatches! That's what I'll be doing today in preparation for Hurricane Sandy. The idea of living on canned food for a week doesn't have much appeal, but the authorities tell us to stock up, so stock I shall.

If the grocery stores lose power, what will they do with the meat? They really ought to give it away...

At any rate, if this blog takes a hiatus, you'll know why.

Lest we forget... Arnold Scwarzenegger's governorship may not have been the disaster that many California liberals feared, but that fact should not blind us to the slimeball circumstances that allowed him to attain office. Jim DiEugenio, of Consortium News, has written a superb account of what really happened, as a corrective to Der Arnold's new book Total Recall (which might better be titled Selective Amnesia)...

The main culprit behind the phony crisis was Enron, the high-flying Houston-based energy-trading company which had been lobbying for a deregulated electricity market in California for years. In fact, in advance, Enron — which specialized in marketing natural gas – had purchased an electricity company on the West Coast, Portland Gas and Electric.

But the deregulation bill was not passed under Davis. It was passed under his predecessor, Republican Pete Wilson, a close friend and colleague of Schwarzenegger.

Very few people understood how a deregulated electricity market worked. But since Enron had helped engineer it, the company assigned an employee to find out how it could be rigged to make huge profits for out-of-state companies...

What happened in 2000-2001 was perhaps one of the most shocking and nauseating examples of private enterprise raping the common good in modern American history. The blackouts started in early 2000, that is the winter months, which should have been an indicator of how phony the blackouts were because in California much more electricity is consumed in the summer due to overuse of air conditioning.

And as many experts in the field have stated, the blackouts were never about a lack of power. As measured in megawatt-hours, California always generated more electricity than it consumed. The shortages were later revealed to be manmade.

At the time, if you dared to suggest in public that the shortages were man-made, respectable people made snickering references to tin-foil chapeaus. The Great Enron Energy Screw is the prime example of a conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true.

Speaking of conspiracy theories... You can write whatever you like about the JFK assassination and receive lots of publicity -- as long as you do not point to American intelligence as the culprit. You can blame the hit on Daffy Duck or Dobie Gillis or the Detroit Tigers, and no-one will insult you -- but if you point the finger at the CIA, there will be hell to pay.

Case in point: This new book, which offers yet another version of the KGB-diddit thesis, previously much beloved of Edward Epstein. (Epstein was a protegee of CIA counterespionage master James Jesus Angleton, whom I consider the actual mastermind of the assassination).

There's no evidence for this KGB nonsense, of course. Lee Harvey Oswald never had any left-wing friends or associates of any kind -- which is just one of many (many) indications that his "defection" was an intelligence ploy. (He wasn't alone. The CIA had set up a "fake defector" program in the 1950s.)

Obama vs Matt Taibbi. Here's an interesting exchange: President Obama engages Matt Taibbi in a "sort of" debate, via proxy. The topic: The Dodd/Frank regulations, which were designed to reign in the Wall Street abuses that created the 2008 mess.

Taibbi has argued that those regs are ridiculously insufficient. (Sure, they're better than anything Mitt Romney would ever sign, but that's not saying much.) In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Obama took pains to "correct" Taibbi's reportage.

Obama:

I've looked at some of Rolling Stone's articles that say, "This didn't go far enough, we didn't institute Glass-Steagall" and so forth, and I pushed my economic team very hard on some of those questions. But there is not evidence that having Glass-Steagall in place would somehow change the dynamic. Lehman Brothers wasn't a commercial bank, it was an investment bank. AIG wasn't an FDIC-insured bank, it was an insurance institution. So the problem in today's financial sector can't be solved simply by re-imposing models that were created in the 1930s.

Taibbi:

Now, it is true that Lehman Brothers was just an investment bank, and not one of those supermarket firms. But Lehman Brothers didn't cause the financial crisis all by itself (more on that in a moment). Moreover, many of the giant mega-merged companies that were spawned by Glass-Steagall did in fact play huge roles in the financial crisis.

For instance, President Obama failed to mention that the company whose merger was only made legal post-factum by Bill Clinton's repeal of Glass-Steagall – Citigroup – ultimately became the single largest recipient of federal bailout funds, taking in nearly half a trillion dollars in cash and guarantees, according to the Congressional Oversight Panel. Citigroup would almost certainly have gone under in 2008 without that massive $476 billion federal lifeline, and had Citi gone under, the impact would likely have dwarfed that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Big problem here: Bill Clinton did not repeal Glass Steagall. Taibbi, brilliant as he is, keeps making this error, and it's really starting to bug me. How many times must I say it? Blame Phil Graham. Gramm created a bill which passed by a veto-proof majority.

Other than that, Taibbi makes sense.

But it's still odd that he would focus so intently on that one point, given that the president himself proposed and supported a sort of new version of Glass-Steagall, called the Volcker Rule. Almost all the pro-reform voices I know on Wall Street and in Washington liked the original version of the Volcker rule, and many would have been content to forget about Glass-Steagall forever had the original version of the Volcker Rule that President Obama himself supported actually made it through to become law.

But it didn't. Instead, the Volcker rule was gutted from within by members of both parties during the Dodd-Frank negotiations, and as we reported on several occasions, it was Geithner and the Obama administration that were particularly aggressive in scaling it back behind closed doors. That was what we criticized the president for – not so much for failing to reinstate Glass-Steagall, but for allowing his own policy proposal to be punched so full of holes that it would never be an effective law.

And that, friends, is the real history of the Obama administration. This presidency foundered because it repeatedly caved under pressure from Wall Street. Yet a ludicrous myth holds that the president is some sort of socialist.

The goddamned polls: Against my will, against my better judgment, against every instinct that yearns for psychological serenity, I'm going to spend much of this day watching the polls (including the scary electoral vote maps like this one and the less-scary maps like this one). You're going to do exactly the same thing, and don't try to convince me otherwise. We're all addicts right now -- pathetic, weak, helpless data-smack junkies -- and only the election (or a hurricane-induced power outage) can yank the needles out of our arms.

Right after this post, I'm hitting Electoral-Vote.com. Gimme some stuff, man.

The best news for Obama supporters is that the president has regained a lead in Virginia. I've been watching that state closely because, unlike everyone else, I take the "crooked Secretaries of State factor" into my calculations.

Most of the elections in swing states are run by scoundrels. They have proven their Republican bias by championing various attempts to keep blacks and Latinos from voting, and you can be damned certain that these rascals will do nothing to impede those who hope to rig the vote electronically. Of course, that kind of rigging must stay within certain limits, or the results will have no credibility. Obama must win Ohio by two points or more if he's going to win Ohio.

I am cautiously optimistic about Virginia's Janet Polarek. Yes, she's a Republican; nevertheless, I think she may have a conscience. Even though she owes her political career to Governor Bob McDonnell, whom I do not trust, I have hope that the voice of Jiminy Cricket will whisper in Janet's ear: "Do the right thing, Janet! Don't let anyone put his thumb on the scale, Janet! Always let your conscience be your guide, Janet!"

More on the Virginia vote: This story bodes ill. Even if Ms. Polarek is honest, she may not be able to stop the scoundrels from doing their dirty work.

The wireless technology is part of the AVS WinVote system, a touch screen voting machine used at 32 of Virginia’s polling localities, where more than a third of the swing state will cast ballots in November. To date, there have been no verified instances of hackers using wireless capabilities to influence the outcome of an election, but advocates – and many lawmakers – believe the potential for such malfeasance combined with the difficulty of verifying vote totals could undermine public confidence in elections.

Epstein, the computer scientist who helped draft the law and co-founded the advocacy group Virginia Verified Voting, testified that wireless technology would make it easier for hackers do more damage and go undetected.

“If you are attacking machines by physically going into a polling place, you have to do them one at a time, and there are opportunities to get caught,” Epstein said. ”Wirelessly you could affect all the machines in a polling place or in a precinct by driving from one location to the next.”

Here's the really freaky part...

The 2007 Virginia law entirely barred voting machines from communicating wirelessly. But with the presidential vote coming in 2008, election officials said the AVS WinVote machines were not able to function if the capability was shut off. Calls to reach Howard Van Pelt, CEO of Advanced Voting Solutions – the Frisco, Texas-based firm that sold the system, found the company’s listed number disconnected. Officials say the company has been non-operational for around four years.

Where did Howie go? And to whom do we complain if things go wrong? Who has the inside dope on how these machines work? Is the software code freely available? Do hackers have it?

According to this 2005 DU page, Howie and his partner at AVS (also called Shoup) were old Diebold hands. One reader's report is worth noting:

Their sales rep, Kimberlee Shoup-Yeahl, was at a Voting System Expo in Wilkes-Barre PA last summer and told me that as a Pollworker I would really like their system because, for example, I could take the machine out to a disabled voter's car (no matter that curbside voting is not legal in PA) and it can "beam the votes" back into the poll.

My own thought was, and still is, if I as a pollworker can beam votes into the poll, who else can???

Not to mention eavesdropping, radio interference, and radio jamming possibilties.

Oh yes, while Ms. Shoup-Yeahl was showing it to me, the WINvote crashed and she had to reboot it. Just for a second, I saw "Welcome to Windows" (I think XP) flash on the screen, so I asked, "oh... so this runs on Windows?" And she looked sort of sheepish and said, "Um yes...." And quickly added, "but we're porting it to Linux -- soon."

Yikes, this is one scary machine.

See also Brad Friedman's reportage here. And yet this thing continues to be used in Virginia.

Sandy isn't the only disaster poised to hit that state.

Speaking of Sandy: Did you know about the Great Hurricane Sandy Conspiracy Theory? The theory isn't fully-fledged yet, but if you want to see a paranoid meme in its gestative state, visit here and here and here.

About 2 weeks ago my mom called me to see if I had a bug out plan, which is interesting because we have never talked about anything like this. We have discussed politics, religion and various other issues, but nothing along the lines of "What do we do if the shit hits the fan?"

Her reasoning behind this is that her best friend of 37 years called her and said that her daughter and son-in-law were called into a private meeting on base regarding a probable evacuation scenario of the East Coast. (Son-in-law is in the Special Forces, apparently high up. I think the base was Ft. McPhearson in Georgia).

From what she said, the daughter and SIL where brought in and made to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying they would tell no one, under the penalty of treason, what they were told during the meeting. They were told that in 4-6 weeks (this was around 9/20) the East Coast would experience some type of disaster that would cause it to be under water. They were also told to make a go bag and be prepared to leave at a moments notice. 

So we're supposed to believe that people with no security clearances would be called into a high-level meeting at Conspiracy Central. Riiiiiiight. Personally, I think we'd get a more honest vote if Sandy knocked out the power grid and forced everyone to use paper ballots. And I see no reason why Barack Obama would want to depress the vote on the Eastern seaboard, which is his stronghold.

The end of the GOP? (Plus: 9/11)

Rush Limbaugh has proclaimed that a Romney loss will mean the end of the GOP. He says...

...that the GOP is not right-enough, that a new, third-party will rise up and embrace right-wing politics, abandoning the Republican party. And he may be right, as polling is indicating that a large part of the Republican base has indeed begun looking elsewhere for their party affiliation. Since polling agencies such as CNN/Gallup and Rasmussen began including 3rd party candidates such as Gary Johnson, Virgil Goode and Jill Stein, Romney’s polling numbers have plummeted.

Limbaugh further explained that conservatives will be held up as scapegoats, that they will be blamed for the failure of a Romney victory.

Also see the Salon story here. Perhaps needless to say, I don't believe any of this.

In the first place, and contrary to most pundits, I think Romney will win this election, since the Republicans have key Secretaries of State "in the bag." In particular, Jon Husted of Ohio seems to be a particularly vile specimen. Am I the only one who recalls 2004?

If, in Ohio, the fix is in, I can't see how Obama has any clear path to victory.

But even if the President does win, the Republican party will endure. I expect the GOP to be alive and thriving long after I'm dead. The purpose of Limbaugh's inflammatory rhetoric is to rile up the troops.

There's a valid point buried beneath Limbaugh's hyperbole. Romney should be winning handily right now, given the many failures of the current administration. I contend that the major factor which has endangered the Mittster's candidacy is the public's discomfort with the extremists who have commandeered his party. The more level-headed Republicans understand that they cannot win if they maintain an implacable opposition to Social Security, Medicare and the minimum wage.

In short and in sum: The rightists have scared the center. The Republicans can't continue to go nuts. They must go moderate.

Are these internecine battles within the conservative movement good news for liberals? Yes, in the short. For example, I feel just peachy about Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson's growing appeal in New Mexico. But if we take a broader view, things look bleaker. As the Republican party morphs into the Ayn Rand Party, the Democrats are fast becoming the new Republicans. And not just on the issue of national security. Michael Lind's must-read piece reminds us that Obama and Romney are both supply-siders, albeit different kinds of supply-siders:

The Obama administration made halfhearted efforts to explain and promote this demand-side agenda and its policy prescriptions. But again and again, Obama and the Democrats settled for a victory on the terms set by Republican obstructionists in Congress rather than risk the defeat of plans that could actually have worked. The stimulus was half the size that Obama’s own economic adviser Christina Romer argued that it should be, half of it was wasted on tax cuts and even that inadequate stimulus was largely neutralized by state and local budget cuts that shrank the economy. Mortgage relief policies have been too little and too late. And the administration’s talk a few years back about doubling exports rings hollow, in the face of its acquiescence in the mercantilist policies of China and other nations that subsidize their industries at the expense of our own.

There is more to this Democratic unwillingness to push demand-side policies than fear of Republican obstruction. The truth is that the post-Clinton Democrats are a post-Keynesian — or rather, a pre-Keynesian — party. Between the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, the lessons that New Deal liberals had learned from the Great Depression about demand-side economics were unlearned. The “New Democrats” of the last three decades adopted a completely new economic orthodoxy: supply-side liberalism.

Lind defines "supply-side liberalism" as the belief that investment in education and innovation will cure all evils. This contention is absurd:

The economy did not collapse in 2008 because the job market suddenly required a much more educated workforce.  Nor did the economy collapse in 2008 because technological innovation suddenly dried up in the fall of that year.  It collapsed because a financial panic, triggered by the demise of Lehman Brothers, created a classic financial panic, resulting in a sharp drop in spending by consumers who were suddenly worried about keeping their jobs and paying down their overhanging debts.

What cures all evils is an increasing number of gummint-created jobs: Teachers, firemen, road workers, bridge builders. If such people have secure paychecks, they will spend their money on goods and services, which will create demand, which will lead to more private-sector hiring.

Obama has made a few stabs at demand-side solutions -- his Jobs Act was certainly a good idea. (And therefore doomed.) But you can't be a Keynesian leader in a country that still views Keynesianism as heresy.

Well, let's walk that one back a bit: Mitt Romney might be able to pull off that trick. There are strong indications that he wants to heal the economy via military Keynesianism. (That's how Reagan did it.) But the Libertarian faction within his party demands less defense spending, and Romney can't expect Democrats to help him enact an unnecessary massive arms build-up.

Even though Romney may have a slightly better chance of implementing a Keynesian solution, and even though there is little chance of a robust recovery in a second Obama administration, I still strongly believe that Romney must be opposed. Why? First and foremost, we must consider the Supreme Court. Overturning the Citizens United decision is of paramount importance, and that goal will become impossible if Romney packs the court with seven Scalia clones. Then there's the abortion issue. Although previous Republican presidents gave little more than lip service to overturning Roe-v-Wade, things are different now. If Romney wants to be re-elected, he will have to follow the directives of his Tea Party masters.

Beyond all of that, of course, is the looming threat of war with Iran. As faulted as Obama may be, I honestly do not think he wants another major war on his watch (other than those quietly horrific drone attacks). Romney, by contrast, clearly yearns to unleash hell.

Let's return this essay to our starting point. Yes, Limbaugh is wrong, but not entirely so. If Romney falls, the Republicans will have to do a lot of soul-searching and self-definition. But so will the Democrats -- whether or not Obama wins.

Liberals must stop thinking in terms of personalities and parties; we need to start waging ideological battle. No future Democratic president will have the political space to function as a Democrat if supply-side economics remains America's unalterable bipartisan orthodoxy.

A note on 9/11. Yesterday morning, I awoke with the intention of writing a commemoration of the tragedy. Ultimately, I decided not to do so.

Why? Because this blog -- for whatever reason -- attracts more than its share of "bombs in the buildings" fanatics. Over the years, those creeps have given me almost as much grief as they've given Matt Taibbi and Daniel Hopsicker.

I stopped printing their comments years ago, but that policy hasn't staunched the flow of irate messages from paranoid pin-heads. They routinely decry my "censorship." To the contrary: They have censored me, and they've imposed a form of censorship on a lot of other bloggers as well. No writer can bring up that tragedy in any way (let alone discuss the many genuine mysteries surrounding the events of that day) without inviting an endless, endless, endless stream of zealots into the hall to screech about all sorts of long-discredited pseudoscientific nonsense. I refuse to spend the rest of my life saying the same damned words to the same damned ninnies about the same damned theories.

And so, years ago, I stopped talking about 9/11 altogether. Nevertheless, on this day -- and perhaps against my better judgment -- I feel compelled to break my policy of omerta in order to make an important point. It's a rather complex point, so bear with me.

For decades, the fringe rightists (by which I mean the Birchers and cognate paranoids) have sought to subvert and recruit ingenuous young folk who might otherwise drift leftwards. Usually, the extremists go about this task by offering conspiracy theories which seem, on first glance, to be fascinating and persuasive. That's the candy these political child molesters use to lure kids into the car.

The CD scenario represents the far right's most impressive effort to seduce the gullible. During the 2004-2007 period, when the "controlled demolition" theory became immensely popular with pseudo-hip naifs who didn't like Bush, most observers could not understand what was really going on. Many formed the mistaken impression that liberals originated the CD theory. A lot of people still think so.

That's not true -- at least, not in the United States. (In Europe, the theory followed a rather different political trajectory.)

The CD theory originated on the date of the tragedy -- September 11, 2001 -- in a post written by David Rostcheck, a Libertarian gun rights activist. His work was soon carried on by a fellow named Peter Meyer, another libertarian, and Jared Israel, a former SDS-er who became still another libertarian. In America, the most prominent minister of the CD gospel has always been Alex Jones, who is nobody's idea of a lefty. (His philosophy might best be described as a mixture of Texas-style fundamentalism, free-form paranoia and Libertarianism.) His comrades in crankishness include such luminaries as Jason Bermas, Eric Hufschmid, the clowns behind the Zeitgeist film, Christopher Bollyn and a host of similarly-minded reactionary wackos. Quite a few Ron Paul enthusiasts -- though not Paul himself -- are also 9/11 "truthers." Many, though not all, of the aforementioned individuals hail from the anti-Semitic faction of the extreme right.

Perhaps I should expand upon that last point. Although I cannot stand Jones and Bermas, I don't think that they are anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. But I do classify them as right-wingers, even if they claim to be above or beyond or outside that label. The record shows that the CD theory is most closely associated with Libertarians of various stripes. Although the Libertarian movement is not monolithic, I contend that Libertarians are always locatable on the right, even though they often pretend otherwise.

How did these Libertarians and quasi-Nazis and neo-Birchers and other far-right fringe-dwellers manage to dupe so many naive young liberals? Part of the answer has to do with the fact that our educational system has become really, really shitty. But a larger part of the answer derives from the fact that the CD theorists targeted George W. Bush. If you grew up seeing politics only in the traditional terms of Republican-vs-Democrat, you had no way of knowing that the Bush family has always had foes on their right.

Moral of the story: The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

Suing the suits: Right move, too late?

From the NYT:

The federal agency that oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is set to file suits against more than a dozen big banks, accusing them of misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities they assembled and sold at the height of the housing bubble, and seeking billions of dollars in compensation.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency suits, which are expected to be filed in the coming days in federal court, are aimed at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, among others, according to three individuals briefed on the matter.

This is right move, not at the right time. Something like this should have happened years ago.

Much the same can be said about the choice of Alan Krueger. Summers and Ghouls-bee are gone. Geithner, alas, is still there.

Is it possible -- is it just possible that the pressure lefties have placed on Obama has started to show some results?

When the Tea Party leaders assail Obama and the Federal Housing Finance Agency for this lawsuit, they will reveal themselves to be the puppets of Wall Street -- even though many baggers joined the movement because they were outraged by the big bank bailouts. Maybe this situation will educate the otherwise ineducable baggers about who is really in charge of their movement.

The impending litigation underscores how almost exactly three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of a financial crisis caused in large part by subprime lending, the legal fallout is mounting.

Besides the angry investors, 50 state attorneys general are in the final stages of negotiating a settlement to address abuses by the largest mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citigroup. The attorneys general, as well as federal officials, are pressing the banks to pay at least $20 billion in that case, with much of the money earmarked to reduce mortgages of homeowners facing foreclosure.

And last month, the insurance giant American International Group filed a $10 billion suit against Bank of America, accusing the bank and its Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch units of misrepresenting the quality of mortgages that backed the securities A.I.G. bought.

The only problem with these lawsuits are the numbers. $10 billion is not going to make 'em scream.

If the banks are ever truly threatened, you'll be hearing a scream like you've never heard before. And suddenly the Republicans will be forced to support Wall Street in very public ways, under the rubric of fighting "socialism." That will demonstrate only the disingenuous nature of their rhetoric.

Incidentally, the guy in charge of the FHFA is named Edward DeMarco. Here's some background on him. We are going to be hearing his name more often, methinks. The politics of the situation are intriguing: He was a Bush appointee who has been at loggerheads with Obama and Geithner So when the baggers slam Obama for the upcoming lawsuits -- and believe me, they will -- they will be slamming someone whom Obama doesn't consider a team player.

So the FHFA lawsuits may be happening in spite of Obama -- who, for his part, is hoping to get some lolly from the Wall Streeters for his relection bid. Even though the bankers have made clear that they hate him.

This could get interesting!

SEC reform. These lawsuits would never have had any need to exist if the SEC had not been corrupt to its core. Matt Taibbi has a great column about SEC reform. Basically, the idea is to stop the "revolving door" practices cold, and to make sure that the SEC has an enforcement division.

The revolving door issue is the big one. As things stand, the SEC can refer cases to the Justice Department. Referrals have gone way, way, WAY done over the past decade or so. And that's yer problem, right there.

Back to Obama. The big question is: Is it too late? For most of my readers -- and, to a large degree, for myself -- the answer will be yes. The pooch has been well and truly screwed. On the other hand, there is this election coming up.

Wavering Democratic voters will face a tough choice: Do they support (with clothespin attached to nose) a bad Dem president who has started to do some of the right things, but only when re-election came into view? Or do they sit this one out and allow someone like the abominable Perry to win?

Laff of the day: On YouTube, the following comment was made about my film "Libertarian Lies":

"Obama put Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in charge of the economy. If that makes him socialist, I'm the King of Peru."

Well then smart guy, by the very implications of your own stupid fucking statement, you must be the King of Peru. Dumbass.

Has anyone seen my pet bear? He used to be around here somewhere. His name is Paddington.

"You really got to go some..."

Here's a reminder of why so many Democrats have turned against Barack Obama and his filthy mob of "progressives." This interview also reminds me of why I respect Jesse Jackson a lot more than I will ever care for Barack Obama: Only one of those two men stood with poor people, while the other prefers the latte-and-biscotti crowd.

I will never -- EVER -- get over the primary battles of 2008. Although I did not begin as a Hillary supporter, I became one after doing daily battle with the crazed anti-Clinton conspiratorialists. RedDragon62 -- who directed my attention to the above radio interview -- displays other videos which relive the horrors of those days. You really should visit his site.

Ever try to convince a Jew-hater that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a hoax? There is nothing more frustrating than trying to talk reason into a hard-core conspiracy addict who ascribes illimitable powers to the object of his paranoia. Zealots committed to a position will presume that any counter-evidence is doctored and that any counter-argument originated in a pay-off.

To this day, Kossacks and Ariann-droids still believe that Hillary controls the mainstream media and the tabloids. They still believe that Hillary sent out "racist dogwhistles." They still believe that Hillary, not Obama, is the one who should apologize. Check it out:

If Obama were to lose because of the democrats not beeing united behind his candidacy , many die-hard Obama supporters( and there are many of them right now in the democratic party) won't ever forgive these "so called" Hillary-supporters and I can't see them rooting for Hill ever.

Why doesn't Hillary ever openly chastise these supporters when they advocate for McCain?

Her silence speaks volumes to me.

Those few dead-enders who say they are voting for McCain (sorry to call your friends dead-enders, but there it is) aren't Democrats and were never voting Democrat this November anyway.

On Lynn Forester de Rothschild:

arrogent.bigoted.b*tch.

Obama is black? That’s just not acceptable at the cuntry club.

Note the spelling. Not an accident.

I am sure it is just "uppity" black people that she does not care for.

She seems to like Appalachian racists

This is actually a dig at Hillary, if you think back to the campaign. It's also an elitist dig at everyone who can't afford to shop at Whole Foods.

A Major Reason I Never Trust Clintons.....Too many of their major backers are anti-worker, corporatist types.

Unlike, say, that staunch "man of the people," Tony Rezko. And unlike, say, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and all the other investment bankers who supported Obama -- and yes, they tossed much more money at the Lightbringer than at McCain.

This woman is a freaking corporatist. (which was how she was able to support Hillary)

It's that your racist you ignorant fuck, and there's nothing more "elitist" than thinking you are better than someone based on the color of your skin.

These idiotic Kossacks automatically presume that anyone who votes against the Lightbringer must be a racist.This form of "racist baiting" is precisely what has alienated so many potential supporters of the current democratic ticket.

Like a Sneeze Out of a Flu Patient Or maybe more like tapeworm out of a body politic that's finally swallowed an outsider remedy, these infestations of Republicans all the way inside the brain of the Democratic Party will be forced to flee as the Party recovers from the Clintonism that traded a few electoral victories for conversion into Republican Lite.

Once again: the prog-monsters consider "Clintonism" the main foe. They don't really care about McCain.

I smell a KO WPITW.

Someone decided not to vote for the Lightbringer? Oh my God! Get this to Keith!

Yes, I'll never forget the primary battle. As the saying goes: The past isn't dead -- it isn't even past.

Although Markos Moulitsas removed the Daily Kos diary about Bristol Palin's child being fathered by a black guy, he still keeps this piece of lying filth about Hillary in the public eye, even though it was utterly debunked a long time ago. Try this experiment: Go to Google Images and type in "Hillary" and "www.dailykos.com." What do you see?

Speaking of the "darkened video" smear, let me show you an image which I just now obtained from Talking Points Memo's front page:

Notice anything? John McCain's skin color here is quite a bit darker than it is in most other photographs of the Senator. Now, some people will try to mislead you by claiming that image darkening can result from the codec used to convert video footage to a lossy format. Nonsense! Only one explanation is possible -- Josh Marshall is trying to make John McCain look African American. JOSH MARSHALL IS A RACIST!

Today's must-read: Obama and the financial crisis

The Democratic party should have been able benefit politically from the current financial crisis. Alas, Obama cannot invoke Clinton's legacy of prosperity, since Obama's legion of zombies spent so much time trashing that legacy during the primaries.

Worse, Obama was funded by many of the ailing and failing financial institutions which got us into this mess:

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street.

All of which brings us to today's must-read story. Obama's finance chair is Penny Pritzker, the former chair of the failed Superior Bank of Chicago.

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,” Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds.”

In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago.

(And before you say it -- yes, I know that other members of the Pritzker family have ties to the Clintons. So, at this point, what?)

If you're looking for a fun, easy-to-follow explanation (illustrated with cute stick figures) of how the subprime crisis destroyed the world economy, go here.

Lynch

Now that Loretta Lynch has been confirmed, let's keep in mind that she was not someone deserving of widespread progressive support. From Naked Capitalism:

The background is that Lynch, as attorney for the Eastern District of New York, led the investigation of HSBC’s money laundering for drug dealers and other unsavory types that led to a $1.9 billion settlement in 2012. That deal was pilloried by both the right and left as being too lenient given the scale of HSBC’s misdeeds.

And now it turns out the great unwashed public was kept in the dark about another set of misdeeds, that of large-scale tax evasion for the wealthy, which Lynch was aware of when she was negotiating the money-laundering deal.

Elizabeth Warren, a stern critic of the HSBC settlement, did not take a stand against Lynch. So even Warren is at least somewhat compromised. In the great pigsty of American politics, everyone gets at least a little bit dirty.

From a Salon story published last year:

But what this says is that she has a long history interacting with a certain class of corporate lawyers and executives, understanding their perspective in critical ways.

That’s further buttressed by a strange detour in her legal career – serving as a director of the New York Federal Reserve Board from 2003 to 2005. Here she worked with people like former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill, ex-Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld and ex-Blackstone chairman Pete Peterson.

The directors of the New York Fed don’t play a huge role in supervising Wall Street banks or conducting monetary policy. But their biggest job is to select the president of the organization. And in 2003, Loretta Lynch had one of six votes in the appointment process that eventually put someone named Timothy Geithner in charge.

I'm disgusted with a whole buncha people right now. The list starts with Obama and includes a lot of "liberals" who turned the other way on the Lynch issue.

The list also includes your humble narrator. I'm disgusted with myself.

Why? Because I didn't feel comfortable talking about Lynch until she had a lock on the gig. If she had not gotten the job, there would have been a great deal of crowing from Republicans whose crows I would rather not hear. They didn't care that she had gone easy on HSBC and helped to make Geithner the Fed chair. Conservatives opposed her because she's black and female. Most of all, they opposed her because they did not want to give Obama an easy time on anything. Or anyone.

So once again, I -- we -- went along with Obama's irritating choice because liberals don't want to give any satisfaction to Obama's foes (who, for their part, didn't want to give any satisfaction to Obama).

That is the purpose of the GOP in modern American politics. They are the crazies who make Democratic "lite" plutocrats and neocons look good.

UBS, Josh Marshall, John McCain and Barack Obama

This is the limit. The absolute limit.

Josh Marshall, in a recent post, castigates John McCain for taking economic advice on the sub-prime mortgage crisis from former senator Phil Gramm. Why? Because Gramm was a lobbyist for the Swiss bank UBS. (Gramm no longer lobbies, but continues to serve as a bank vice president.)

The UBS connection is of concern because that firm is a huge part of the sub-prime mortgage crisis:

Forbes says that UBS is among the banks worst hit by the global credit crisis, particularly in their direct exposure to the US subprime market. According to Forbes, UBS has some $37 billion in write-downs on assets tied to bad US mortgages. In other words, the bank's very life appears to be on the line in how the US government chooses to handle the matter.

(Emphasis added.) Needless to say, I agree with Marshall -- up to this point. What I don't agree with is his hypocrisy, his special pleading on behalf of the Savior From Illinois.

I've used this quote before, but let's trot it out again, since it compresses a whole huge chunk of stinkiness into one small stink-ball:

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street.

UBS is or was Obi's second largest contributor, after Goldman Sachs. We must quickly note that Hillary has also taken lots of money from Goldman Sachs, and from others on this list -- though I've yet to see any evidence of a substantial contribution to her from UBS, the company which (for good reason) has aroused Marshall's particular ire.

Since strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor, I would love to see Marshall defend Obama while attacking McCain on the UBS connection. Could the former King of Bloggers possibly be more hypocritical?

By the way: As I've noted many times, Obama's chief economic adviser is a Milton Friedmanite and free-trade fundamentalist named Austan Goolsbee. In terms of basic economic weltanschauung, the difference between Gramm and Goolsbee is...what, exactly?

Your health and the economy's health

Nice to see Michael Moore finally free himself from his illusions about Barack Obama. Too bad he couldn't give up his delusions about Hillary back in 2008.

On other fronts...

Brad DeLong used to scoff at the suggestion that we could enter a new Great Depression. Now he thinks that such an outcome is possible...

We could cushion the impact of another big downward shock by recapitalizing the banks again. But the failure of the Fed and the Treasury in the aftermath of Lehman to grab a share of the upside from its capital injection and purchase operations for the public in the form of warrants means that there is no coalition anywhere for a repeat or anything like a repeat of propping-up the banking system: the right thinks it is an unwarranted intervention in the free market, the left thinks that it is a giveaway to the undeserving and feckless superrich, and the center is bewildered because it is an enormous and poorly-structured intervention in the market, it is a giveaway to the undeserving and feckless superrich, and the optics are terrible.

So if another big bad shock hits the U.S. economy, what could the Obama administration possibly do?

Nothing. The new president had an enormous opportunity in the first half of 2009, and he squandered it. Future historians may one day recognize Obama's refusal to nationalize the "too big to fail" banks as the greatest mistake ever made by an American president -- greater, perhaps, than Dubya's decision to invade Iraq.

AIG was semi-nationalized, but only as a giveaway to the great Wall Street financial firms. So says Neil Barofsky, the Special Investigator General for TARP:

The SIG TARP report noted that "structure and effect of the FRBNY's assistance to AIG ... effectively transferred tens of billions of dollars of cash from the government to AIG's counterparties."

Barofsky seems to be one of the few officials that has to tell us what we already know: TARP is "almost certainly going to be a loss" for taxpayers and Geithner rolled over for Wall Street in the AIG negotiations.

Krugman sums it up:

Brad DeLong says that the loss of public trust due to the kid-gloves treatment of bankers has raised the probability of another Great Depression, because the public won’t support another round of bailouts even if it becomes desperately necessary. I agree — but I think the bigger cost is that we’ve greatly increased the chance of a Japanese-style lost decade, with I would now give roughly even odds of happening. Why? Because bank-friendly policies have squandered public trust in all government action: try talking to the general public about stimulus, and it’s all confounded in their minds with the deeply unpopular bailouts.

By itself, the AIG story would be damaging enough. But it’s part of a pattern — and that pattern has ended up undermining the economy’s prospects, big time.

Even Krugman doesn't see the irony. It's true that the public no longer trusts government action; what's worse is the public sees that the public sees all action as socialism. So tell me -- in what book is kowtowing to Wall Street considered socialism? Well, maybe in some insane book written by Cleon Skousen and hawked by Glenn Beck. But any actual socialist would have been appalled by Larry and Timmy's scheme of transferring public monies over to the world's worst capitalists.

The noxious aroma created by the bailout now perfumes any moves that could actually benefit the working class. Obama turned an historic opportunity into an epic FAIL.

On the bright side: Goldman Sachs has formally apologized for its role in the crisis. Thanks, Goldman Sachs! It's all better now!

Greece: The way

Marshall Auerback has written what I consider the best single piece on the Greek disaster, which is really a carry-over from the American disaster (which is having disastrous consequences: See the chart at left). A few excerpts:

Maybe Greece should secede from the European Union and default on its euro debt? Or go hat-in-hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to beg for loans while promising to clean up its act? Or to the stronger Euro nations, hoping for charitable acts of forgiveness? Unfortunately, all of these options are going to mean a lot of pain and suffering for an economy that is already sinking rapidly.

Here’s a more appropriate action: declare war on Goldman Sachs and other global financial firms that created this mess. Send the troops, the planes, the tanks, and the ships. Attack every outpost of the saboteurs on European soil. Blockade the airports and ports. Make Wall Street traders and CEOs fear for their lives, or at least for their freedom to travel. Build some Guantanamo-like facility to hold these enemy financial combatants until they can be tried, convicted, and properly punished.

Ok, if a literal armed attack on Goldman is too far-fetched, then go after the firm using the full force of the regulatory and legal systems. Close the offices and go through the files with a fine-tooth comb. Issue subpoenas to all non-clerical staff for court appearances. Make the internal emails public. Post the names of all managers and traders on Interpol. Arrest anyone who tries to board a plane, train, or boat; confiscate their passports; revoke their visas and work permits; and put a hold on their bank accounts until culpability can be assessed. Make life at least as miserable for them as it now is for Europe’s tens of millions of unemployed workers.

Lest anyone believe that Goldman’s executives were somehow unaware of bad deals done by rogue traders, William Cohan (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/the-great-goldman-sachs-fire-sale -of-2008) reports that top management unloaded their Goldman stocks in March 2008 when Bear crashed, and again when Lehman collapsed in September 2008. Why? Quite simple: they knew the firm was full of toxic waste that it would not be able to continue to unload on suckers—and the only protection it had came from AIG, which it knew to be a bad counterparty.

From 2001 through November 2009 (note the date—a full year after Lehman) Goldman created financial instruments to hide European government debt, for example through currency trades or by pushing debt into the future. But not only did Goldman and other financial firms help and encourage Greece to take on more debt, they also brokered credit default swaps on Greece’s debt—making income on bets that Greece would default.

Of course, as far as Greece goes, the claim now is that these types of off balance sheet transactions in which Goldman and others engaged were not strictly “illegal” under EU law. But these are precisely the kinds of “shadow banking transactions” that almost brought down the global financial system 18 months ago. Literally a year after the Lehman bankruptcy – MONTHS after Goldman itself was saved from total ruin, it was again engaging in these kinds of deals.

And it wasn’t exactly a low-level functionary or “rogue trader” who was carrying out these transactions on behalf of Goldman. Gary Cohn is Lloyd “We’re doing God’s work” Blankfein’s number 2 man. So it’s hard to believe that St. Lloyd did not sanction the activities as well in advance of collecting his “modest” $9m bonus for last year’s work.

Greece, Euroland in general, and the rest of the world all need a holiday from the manipulation and destruction of our economies by Wall Street firms that profit from speculative bubbles, from burying firms, households, and governments under mountains and debt, and even from the crises that they create. Governments all over the globe should use all legal means at their disposal to ferret out the bad faith and even fraudulent deals that global financial behemoths are foisting on us.

Yes, I've quoted far too much. This is not a quote blog, most of the time. But this article strikes me as particularly important, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

For me, the bottom line comes down to this: Obama won't clamp down on Goldman because Goldman has so thoroughly infiltrated this administration that it is hard to determine where one ends and the other begins. But why haven't any European politicians had the courage to name the enemy and to engage him on the field of battle?

Two million bucks a month just won't buy what it used to (Updated)

Brad Friedman has an amazing piece up on Chamber-gate. That's my term for the abortive attempt to spy on and smear prog bloggers who have criticized the Chamber of Commerce and its members (including AIG).

Turns out my initial impression was wrong: The folks at HBGary did not want a mere $2 million for their services. They wanted $2 million a month.

It stuns me to think that anyone has that kind of money for such a project. What stuns me even more was the quality of intelligence you can expect to get for that kind of money:

In addition to Barr's email offering personal information on me and my family, the H&W scheme by Team Themis, created for the U.S. Chamber, also included a Power Point presentation in which I am personally highlighted, with photograph, along with my wife "Martha" and "2 boys, James and John Friedman" at our "home at 1055 Raywood Ln, Silver Springs, MD".

Of course, I'm not married and have no children and don't live in MD...

Where the hell did they get this misinformation? Anyone who reads Brad's blog knows that he lives in California; he makes no secret of that fact.

According to WhoWhere (accessible for $0.00), there are several "Brad Friedmans" in Maryland, none of them in Silver Springs. After consulting both Google Earth and Google the search engine, I've concluded that there is no Raywood Lane (or Road or Street or Avenue or Boulevard) in Silver Springs or anywhere else in Maryland.

Looks like HBGary just made shit up. Then they said: "Two million dollars, please." Nice work if you can get it!

The suggested disinfo campaign is particularly disturbing.

The plan also involved creating "two fake insider personas", one at VR and another at the unrelated Change To Win organization, which had employed a coalition of union groups to create a non-profit campaign, some months after VR's, called U.S. Chamber Watch. The plan presented by Team Themis, as the three security firms called themselves, would then use one of the "fake personas" as "leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second" in hopes of publicizing the fraudulent appearance of some sort of "conspiracy" between the various progressive organizations in order to somehow discredit them.

Most of the time, Friedman's writing is admirably lucid -- but on this occasion, the details are a bit hard to follow. Still, one gets the general idea. And there's a definite stench in the air.

It's a familiar smell. Lambert has compared HBGary's antics to David Axelrod's little-known "astroturf" side business, ASK Public Strategies, which helps corporations manipulate public opinion. (More on that topic later.) It's hard to see much moral difference between Axelrod and HBGary head man Aaron Barr.

Readers, can you help me figure this out...? Let's get back to the Chamber of Commerce. One of our readers, Tony Ryals, offered a comment which I found intriguing, albeit very difficult to unpack. There may be a very important story buried here beneath some unfortunate wordsmithing. Let's see if you can help decipher the intended message:

Barack Osama Obama's Chamber of Commerce buddies are part of NTU and Agora Inc. founder James Dale Davidson's and Patrick Byrne's and ex SEC Chair Christopher Cox's and Carl Levin's, et.al.'s 'naked short selling' lie that was used to distract from massive penny stock fraud and later Cox on sec.gov in 2008 claimed even Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bank of America and even Goldman Sachs Sachs weren't just shorted which is what Cox set them up for by making shorting easier when he took over SEC - BUT WERE 'NAKED SHORTED'!

James Dale Davidson's Agora Inc. gold touter recently promoted by scumbag Alex Jones has admitted he and Agora among other billionaire clubs methodically shorted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares themselves!

No doubt they all must have some very fat offshore accounts by now while America is bankrupt.

Alas, Mr. Ryals has presented his information in such a compact and hyperbolic form that I, for one, have a difficult time following his argument. Epic run-on sentences never aid comprehension. And I certainly don't have any sympathy for people who refer to "Barack Osama Obama." Cannonfire is not the kind of blog that prints crap like that -- usually.

Still...my interest is aroused. Provisionally.

After running the above passage by Dakinkat, she emailed the following partial explanation, which I trust she won't mind seeing in print:

Naked short selling means you do a transaction in the futures market without actually owning the asset. You plan to buy it so cheap in the future that when you have to deliver on the contract, you have to buy it then and so you make huge amounts of money on the arbitrage if you're leveraged and have enough contracts out there.

This basically means all these people thought there was a bubble in mortgages that was going to burst because the knew that those assets would be worthless than now. It also could imply they colluded which is illegal.

With regular short selling you borrow the security. Naked short selling is gambling and pure speculation. If any practice should be banned, that one should be. Short selling basically killed Lehman brothers in a very short time. If a bunch of them systemically did this in large numbers with leverage which amplifies the deals, it would basically bring an asset down. If they 'conspired' to do it. It would be illegal.

The trick on this it figure out who did it, if they talk to one another, and the size of the deals. It takes a pretty expensive data base to get to this information. You can get stuff like this through Morning Star or CRSP. The real detail trades have to be done through audits like the SEC would do ...

Okay, so that explains what naked short selling is. But I'm still not sure what Agora has done, or what its relationship to the Chamber of Commerce is.

All I know is this: Any potential scandal that might embarrass both Barack Obama and Alex Jones is bound to make me smile. Please let it be true please please please.

Update: About the "two fake personas" thing. After reading the passage more carefully, I think I get it now. In fact, the trick described here seems awfully familiar. Have we seen this before? A specific example does not come to mind.

Reader affinis (see the comments section) seems to think that Tony Ryals has headed down a dead end research avenue. Perhaps. Let's see what others think.

OWS: Smear, smear , smear

From the Confluence, an excellent report on the "OWS is anti-Semitic" smear...

The occupiers aren’t really into irrational hatred. But Fox News knows how to excite an audience. Hire a few. They don’t have to be ignorant anti-semitic bigots. They just need to play one on TV. Tell them to hang out by the information table. Better yet, send some really bizarre types with tattooed faces. Make them look menacing. Oh and while you’re at it, make little old ladies in NY City feel like the protestors are taking away the cops who keep them from being mugged on the street and killed in their beds.

How do I know conservative operatives are paying weirdos to show up at Occupy events? I don’t but I would if I were trying to discredit my enemy. The occupy events are open to the public, any public. You can walk right in there and set up shop and say whatever offensive thing you want even if it had nothing to do with economic injustice or the 99%. Are you kidding me? It’s the perfect rat-f%^&ing opportunity. I’d like to see them deny it. Over and over and over again.

Too many big names are pushing this smear. An entire organization devoted to this one smear popped up overnight. Breitbart is involved -- heavily. Of course it's a ratfucking operation.

Fortunately, even the Washington Post's Richard Cohen ain't buyin' this one...

This was my second visit to the Occupy Wall Street site and the second time my keen reporter’s eye has failed to detect even a hint of the anti-Semitism that had been trumpeted by certain right-wing Web sites and bloggers, most prominently Bill Kristol. He is a founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has been running cable TV ads alleging a virtual hate rally at the Occupy Wall Street site and calling on President Obama and other important Democrats to denounce what is — as it happens — not happening there. The commercial ran on Fox News the very day I was at the site.

Kristol’s cri de wolf (a French term of my own invention) was taken up by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s conservative blogger, who noted the Kristol group’s “eye-popping ad.” Citing an article from Israel Today that linked a single statement by someone named Patricia McAllister in Los Angeles with some vitriol on the American Nazi Party’s Web site and a reference to the editor of Adbusters, she fashioned a veritable pogrom out of pretty close to thin air and demanded, “Where is the outrage?” I have a better question: Where are the anti-Semites?

The bad guys are also using OWS as an opportunity to smear Elizabeth Warren. This tactic is particularly clever, since some lefties got angry at Warren for previously offering only tepid endorsement of OWS. (Allegedly.) You know the trick: Study, study the enemy and always look for an opportunity to create or expand divisions. From The Hill:

Elizabeth Warren said the Occupy Wall Street protests that have spread across the country are built on her ideas.

"I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do," the Massachusetts Senate candidate told The Daily Beast. "I support what they do."

Naturally, the right-wing bloggers are making much of this.

Maybe she meant to goad hordes of kids into Zuccotti Park with her now-notorious spiel. ”Nobody got rich in this country on his own — nobody!"

"Notorious"? Can one now become notorious in this country for saying that the sky is blue?

Here, Frank Rich and Adam Moss spew their views of how the OWS thing will end.

The Zuccotti Park encampment is frail and may well not last longer, as you say, but in a way, it's already achieved its purpose. And I, like you, walked over to the 9/11 memorial. It — and the whole ground zero site — seemed desolate and a bit eerie next to all the OWS activity so nearby, with only a few tourists venturing over from Zuccotti Park. And yes, there is a larger point. This was the week that Obama announced our final withdrawal from our endless, costly, self-destructive war in Iraq, but his "mission accomplished" barely registered among Americans. 9/11 and the wars it spawned are history. The class war is now.

Nope. They're related. The most obvious linkage is this: 9/11 made the ghastly Iraq war possible. That war is responsible for much of our deficit. If we weren't so deeply in debt, a jobs-creation bill would be easier to get through Congress.

But the tea party became a true force in American politics when we all saw their electoral consequences in the 2010 election. In your essay, you say, convincingly, that the class war won’t resolve in 2012 — the opponents will likely be two candidates of the elite facing off. But short of resolution, how do you imagine the “class war” will play out electorally? Is it ultimately to the benefit of Democrats or Republicans — or do all incumbents just get washed away, regardless of party?

If anti-incumbent fever were the likely result, then Fox News would not be smearing OWS. Alas, too many people on the left have locked themselves into the stance that Democrats have cooties, and that any involvement in electoral politics constitutes co-optation.

That's a profoundly wrong attitude, although I can understand why many liberals feel that way, given the manifest failures of Barack Obama. (Warned ya! Toldja so!)

Like it or not, electoral politics is how one attains power in a democracy. If OWS is to be an anti-democratic movement, count me out. If power is not the goal, then the protesters and their online supporters are just masturbating in public.

The solution is not to shun the Democrat party -- and yes, I know all about their rotten leadership. The solution is to take it over. A takeover is how you solve the problem of rotten leadership.

Frank Rich also has a column which is worth reading:

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-­American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see.

This ties in with the central thesis of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. Was the Wall Street mess was created by people who were not deliberately venal but wedded to impossibly rosy views of the consequences? The thought is appalling, but probably accurate -- at least to a large degree. I've seen this sort of thing happen on a smaller scale, in various workplaces.

Optimism kills, dudes and dudettes. Be thou like unto me: The glass is not half-full. The glass is not half-empty. Presume that any belief that the glass has a measurable amount of water in it must be based on an optical illusion. The glass may have, at most, just a few drops left in it and those drops are quickly evaporating and there is no other water anywhere in the world and so we are all going to die die die in horrifying pain and agony and then we are going to wake up in Hell because there is no heaven just HELL HELL HELL and everything you ever strove for or believed in has always been utterly pointless because we're all going to HELL.

That's the proper attitude, boys and girls!