Tuesday, February 14, 2012

OBAMA'S BUDGET: STILL PUNKING US OVER! Social Cuts to Pay For His Criminal Banksters' Crimes!

OBAMA'S OPEN BORDER AGENDA EXPOSED BY WIKILEAKS:

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/02/wikileaks-exposes-obamas-open-borders.html




OBAMA IS STILL PUNKING US!

“Despite this grim reality, the Obama administration has sought to portray its budget as expanding services for working people and imposing greater burdens primarily on the wealthy.”

OBAMA IS NOTHING BUT BUSH’S THIRD, EVEN MORE CORRUPT TERM, AND LA RAZA SUPREMACIST PARTY’S FIRST PRESIDENT!


Obama budget combines austerity and phony populism

By Patrick Martin
14 February 2012

The budget for fiscal year 2013 proposed by the Obama White House Monday is a thoroughly cynical exercise. It calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending cuts, further devastating public services and the living standards of working people.

This is combined with populist demagogy about taxing the rich, although the administration knows full well that no such measures will pass either the Republican-controlled House of Representatives or the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The budget incorporates $1 trillion over ten years in cuts to domestic social spending already agreed on with congressional Republicans in last year’s negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling. To these cuts will be added a total of $638 billion in social spending cuts.

Relatively few details leaked out over the weekend, and a preview document issued by the White House Friday listed only the programs that would receive spending increases, not those being slashed, for which only vague generalities were available.

The largest cutback will be $360 billion over ten years from Medicare and Medicaid, mainly through reducing payments to health care providers, which will have the effect of further reducing the number of hospitals and doctors willing to treat patients on either government program. This cut is particularly pernicious because the Obama healthcare reform program calls for extending Medicaid to tens of millions of additional people in 2014, which will require more and not less funding to cover the cost.

Another $278 billion over ten years will be cut from non-health domestic programs, particularly farm programs, pension plans for federal workers, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures private pension funds, and the Postal Service, which is to phase out Saturday delivery and close hundreds of smaller post offices.

The cut in funding for the PBGC comes under conditions where large corporate employers like American Airlines are proposing to dump their pension plans on the government insurance program, which is already facing a huge deficit. This will mean that tens of thousands of workers will receive much less than they expect, or nothing at all, when they retire.

According to one press account, the agencies whose budgets are effectively frozen for the coming year include the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Indian Health Service, Head Start and the National Institutes of Health.

Despite this grim reality, the Obama administration has sought to portray its budget as expanding services for working people and imposing greater burdens primarily on the wealthy. White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew made the rounds of the television interview programs on Sunday morning, declaring that Obama was proposing measures that would promote job creation and economic recovery. “There is pretty broad agreement that the time for austerity is not today,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

In a similar vein, Obama followed the official release of the budget Monday morning with a speech before a student audience at the Northern Virginia Community College campus in suburban Annandale, where he pledged to increase taxes on the wealthy while making more financial aid and job training available to college-age youth.

The budget document does indeed propose a series of tax increases on business and the wealthy: $61 billion over ten years on the largest banks, $41 billion over ten years by eliminating tax breaks for oil, gas and coal companies, an unspecified amount from the so-called Buffett rule, which would set a minimum income tax rate of 30 percent for wealthy individuals. By adding in the expiration of the Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthy, White House officials came up with a total of $1.5 trillion in tax increases.

This figure, however, is entirely phony, since the lesser tax increase will never pass through Congress, and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts does not take place until December 31, 2012, long after the beginning of the 2013 fiscal year, and nearly two months after the presidential and congressional elections.

(WHILE OBAMA CONTINUES THE BUSH FAMILIES WARS TO PROTECT SAUDIS INTERESTS, HE HAS MADE OUR BORDERS WIDE OPEN TO ASSURE HIS LA RAZA PARTY BASE, AND THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS EASE OVER OUR BORDERS!)

Equally fraudulent is the claim that military spending will be reduced by $850 billion over ten years, because of the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no reason to believe that the vast US outlays in Afghanistan will end in 2014, as the White House projects. And while US troops have been withdrawn from Iraq, they are being repositioned for future wars against Syria, Iran and other targets in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, and ultimately against major powers like Russia and China.

The budget also assumes that Congress adopts in full the remaining elements of Obama’s American Jobs Act. This would include a total of $350 billion in stimulus spending, including a one-year extension of the payroll tax cut, a one-year extension of extended unemployment benefits, a $50 billion infrastructure program, a $30 billion program to modernize school buildings, and a $30 billion program to help states hire additional teachers, firefighters and policemen.

Other than the payroll tax extension, which House Republican leaders support as a means of further defunding Social Security and Medicare, there is little reason to believe that any of these proposals will be adopted. The White House proposed them last fall as an exercise in election-year demagogy.

The only true assertions in relation to the budget are the projections that domestic spending will plunge over the next decade, from 8.7 percent of US gross domestic product today, to under 5 percent.

(PAYING FOR THE CRIMES OF HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS:)

The deficit projected in the 2013 budget is $1.33 trillion, about the same as last year’s $1.36 trillion, and $200 billion more than congressional budget analysts projected last fall. It would be the fourth consecutive annual deficit of more than $1 trillion, fueled by continued record military spending, the collapse of tax revenues because of the economic slump, and the cost of the federal bailout of the banks and other financial institutions.

The staggering rise in total federal debt, from $5 trillion when Bush took office to some $10 trillion when Obama entered the White House, and now approaching $15 trillion, is a demonstration of the colossal scale of the plundering of the US economy and the US Treasury by the super-rich. Both Obama and his Republican opponents agree that the price for the bankruptcy of American capitalism must be exacted from working people, through the destruction of jobs, living standards and social programs.

In his speech Monday to a student audience, Obama made the usual invocations of “shared responsibility” and equal sacrifice, including his now-standard example of how billionaire Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

(“I’m not here to punish banks!” BARACK OBAMA – STATE of the UNION MESSAGE)

But Obama’s top campaign aides are saying something very different when behind closed doors with a Wall Street audience. According to a report by Bloomberg News, Jim Messina, manager of Obama’s reelection campaign, “assured a group of Democratic donors from the financial services industry that Obama won’t demonize Wall Street.”

Among those present last week at the members-only Core Club in Manhattan, according to Bloomberg, were: “Ralph Schlosstein, chief executive officer at Evercore Partners Inc., and his wife, Jane Hartley, co-founder of the economic and political advisory firm Observatory Group LLC; Eric Mindich, founder of Eton Park Capital Management LP; and Ron Blaylock, co-founder of GenNx360 Capital Partners.”

Messina told them that Obama would not target private equity firms in general if Mitt Romney is his Republican opponent. Any criticism of asset-stripping to destroy jobs would be focused exclusively on Romney, “not the industry that made the former governor of Massachusetts millions,” Bloomberg reported.

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Obama budget funds war, repression and Wall Street


By Patrick Martin
15 February 2012

The $3.8 trillion budget proposal issued by the Obama administration Monday is a revealing document, despite the political propaganda being pumped out by the White House, its Republican opponents and the corporate-controlled media to disguise the bipartisan agreement to impose drastic social cuts on working people.

About half of the budget consists of Social Security, Medicare and other so-called entitlement programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid, where the federal government is obligated by law to pay benefits to those eligible. Their ranks are being swelled by the mass unemployment and social misery produced by the crisis of American and world capitalism.

Another $500 billion consists in interest payments on the federal debt, the bulk of which goes to the major banks and the wealthy, constituting one of the principal sources of income for the financial aristocracy. Little or nothing is said in the media or by the White House about this annual tribute to the super-rich, although total interest payments dwarf spending by most federal departments.

The remaining third of the budget consists of discretionary spending that must pass through the annual appropriation process in Congress. The broad outlines of this sector of the budget were laid down in the budget agreement reached between the White House and congressional Republicans last August. This bipartisan deal requires a reduction of $40 billion in domestic discretionary spending for the 2013 fiscal year compared to fiscal 2012 (exempting the Pentagon and other national security/police functions of the federal government).

The budget document represents the Obama administration’s choices on how the $40 billion in domestic spending cuts is to be distributed among the federal departments and programs. This is what remains to be negotiated with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The presentation of the budget plan by the White House and in the media seems deliberately designed to make it difficult to understand the nature of the political choices made by the Obama administration. The budget becomes more comprehensible if one divides it into two broad categories: those functions related to the military, intelligence and domestic repression, and everything else.

This provides a rough means to distinguish between the essential role of the American capitalist state and the domestic programs that were established in an earlier historical period to alleviate social problems produced by capitalism, and which serve to disguise the repressive role of the state and engender popular illusions.

The military and repressive functions of the state account for $901.8 billion in discretionary funding in the 2013 budget. This includes: Department of Defense, $525.4 billion; the war in Afghanistan and other “overseas contingency” military funding, $88.5 billion; Department of Homeland Security, $39.3 billion; intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, $52.6 billion; Department of Energy (largely for nuclear weapons), $27.2 billion; Department of State, $54.3 billion; Department of Justice (including the FBI and federal prisons), $36.5 billion; Department of Treasury, $14 billion; Department of Veteran’s Affairs, $64 billion.

Total non-defense/security domestic discretionary spending comes to $333.5 billion in the 2013 budget: Department of Health and Human Services, $76.4 billion; Department of Education, $69.8 billion; Environmental Protection Agency, $8.3 billion; Department of Housing and Urban Development, $35.3 billion; Department of Interior, $11.4 billion; Department of Labor, $12 billion; National Aeronautics and Space Administration, $17.7 billion; Department of Transportation, $74 billion; Department of Agriculture, $23 billion; Department of Commerce, $8 billion; National Science Foundation, $7.4 billion.

As this summary demonstrates, the intelligence agencies alone account for more spending than all but three of the departments providing domestic social services. The “overseas contingency” spending on the military, by itself, is larger than the discretionary spending for any other non-defense agency.

This nearly 3-1 ratio in discretionary spending in favor of the military-police apparatus over social services actually understates the disparity. Much of the spending on health, education, housing, etc. is really a disguised subsidy to corporate interests, including drug companies, school privatizers, agribusiness, mining companies, slumlords and trucking companies. The amount of money that actually reaches ordinary working people is correspondingly reduced. It is certainly less than half the amount spent each year on interest payments alone.

The Obama administration has proposed $6 billion in cuts in the “core” military budget—not including the war in Afghanistan and other overseas operations. The bulk of this comes from $4 billion in increased health insurance fees to be paid by military personnel and is therefore not a reduction in actual military outlays.

For the agencies that deliver domestic social services there are a few token spending increases, but largely for reactionary political purposes.

Thus, the Department of Education receives a 60 percent increase for the Race to the Top program, which encourages state governments to compete for federal funds by taking the most aggressive approach to attacking the jobs, wages and working conditions of public school teachers, including through school privatization.

Obama is also proposing another $1 billion for a parallel Race to the Top program for colleges and universities. He has proposed in addition an $8 billion fund, including $4 billion from the Department of Education and $4 billion from the Department of Labor, to align community college training programs with the dictates of US corporations. Some of this funding would be shifted from other job-training programs.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development receives a sizeable increase for programs to manage the downsizing of the national housing stock in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage collapse, including efforts to demolish homes left vacant by the housing market crisis.

The most significant domestic spending increase is for roads and highways, where there is considerable Republican congressional support because most of the funds go to construction companies and other private contractors and effectively subsidize the trucking industry. Obama called for a total of $50 billion in transportation infrastructure projects as part of his American Jobs Act last fall, and this is incorporated into the Department of Transportation budget as part of a six-year $476 billion plan.

The Department of Agriculture will be cut by $700 million through the closure of some 260 regional offices in rural areas, part of the continuing reorientation of the USDA to serve corporate agribusiness rather than small farmers. Spending levels for conservation and environmental programs, run by the Department of Interior and the EPA, will be cut slightly.

One of the most significant proposals from the White House is to provide a much larger pay raise for the military, 1.7 percent, than for federal civilian employees, who would get only 0.5 percent after two years with overall pay rates frozen. Since the budget provides for a 1.2 percent increase in contributions by federal workers to their retirement program over a three-year period, the proposed pay increase is given with one hand and taken back with the other.



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OBAMA’S JOBS PROGRAM IS NOTHING MORE THAN TO SABOTAGE E-VERIFY, HAVING HILDA SOLIS, A LA RAZA SUPREMACIST AS SEC. OF LABOR, AND OPEN BORDERS FOR HORDES OF ILLEGALS TO JUMP OUR BORDERS AND JOBS!

“White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew made the rounds of the television interview programs on Sunday morning, declaring that Obama was proposing measures that would promote job creation and economic recovery.”

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JOBS FOR OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE:


 Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a former California congresswoman with close ties to the influential La Raza movement, announced the “We Can Help” project with great fanfare a few days ago.”

FROM JUDICIAL WATCH. org – get on their emails!

Labor Dept. Helps Illegal Alien Workers

Last Updated: Tue, 04/06/2010 - 11:04am

The Department of Labor has launched a special program to assist and protect illegal immigrant workers in the U.S., referred to as “vulnerable” and “underpaid” by the presidential cabinet member who heads the agency.

Hundreds of new field investigators have been deployed to reach out to Latino laborers in areas with large numbers of illegal alien employees. Their message, in Spanish, is “we can help” bring workplace protections to the nation’s most vulnerable and underpaid workers, including those who have no legal right to live in the Untied States.



(THE OBAMA PLAN TO PUT ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS AND VOTING  BOOTHS!)

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a former California congresswoman with close ties to the influential La Raza movement, announced the “We Can Help” project with great fanfare a few days ago. A total of 1,000 investigators from her agency will focus on enforcing labor and wage laws in industries that typically hire lots of illegal aliens without reporting anyone to federal immigration authorities.

(WHO WORKS FOR THE RIGHTFUL JOBS OF AMERICAN CITIZENS? WHO ENFORCES THE LAWS THAT PROHIBIT THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS, EVEN IF THEY HAVE A STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER? NOT THE LA RAZA DEMS, OR HISPANDERING BARACK OBAMA!)

Solis told Latino workers that “your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay, especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours.” She assured illegal immigrants that “if you work in this country, you are protected by our laws.”

The same day Solis publicly announced the Obama Administration’s new project, a Labor Department investigator visited a day laborer center in northern California to promote it. The federal employee actually chatted warmly with the illegal immigrants about how to find jobs without being exploited, according to a local newspaper report. “We’re the feds but the good ones,” he told the day laborers in Spanish. “We’re here to help workers.”

The agency has also launched a Spanish television advertising campaign to spread the word and created a web site. Workers in industries from construction to food service are urged to contact the Labor Department of wage and hour violations. An investigator may be deployed to the work site or the employer may be taken to court.

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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

OBAMA HAS FILLED HIS ADMINSTRATION WITH PRIMARILY LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS.

Here’s his Sec. Labor, HILDA SOLIS:
While in Congress, she opposed strengthening the border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien benefits (including driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty. Solis was steeped in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement in Southern California and was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal aliens regarding fair wages:

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Michelle Malkin

The U.S. Department of Illegal Alien Labor

President Obama's Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is supposed to represent American workers. What you need to know is that this longtime open-borders sympathizer has always had a rather radical definition of "American." At a Latino voter registration project conference in Los Angeles many years ago, Solis asserted to thunderous applause, "We are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not."

That's right. The woman in charge of enforcing our employment laws doesn't give a hoot about our immigration laws -- or about the fundamental distinction between those who followed the rules in pursuit of the American dream and those who didn't.

While in Congress, she opposed strengthening the border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien benefits (including driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty. Solis was steeped in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement in Southern California and was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal aliens regarding fair wages:

"I'm here to tell you that your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay -- especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours," Solis says in the video pitch. "We can help, and we will help. If you work in this country, you are protected by our laws. And you can count on the U.S. Department of Labor to see to it that those protections work for you."

To be sure, no one should be scammed out of "fair wages." Employers that hire and exploit illegal immigrant workers deserve full sanctions and punishment. But it's the timing, tone-deafness and underlying blanket amnesty agenda of Solis' illegal alien outreach that has so many American workers and their representatives on Capitol Hill rightly upset.

With double-digit unemployment and a growing nationwide revolt over Washington's border security failures, why has Solis chosen now to hire 250 new government field investigators to bolster her illegal alien workers' rights campaign? (Hint: Leftists unhappy with Obama's lack of progress on "comprehensive immigration reform" need appeasing. This is a quick bone to distract them.)

Unfortunately, the federal government is not alone in lavishing attention and resources on workers who shouldn't be here in the first place. As of 2008, California, Florida, Nevada, New York, Texas and Utah all expressly included illegal aliens in their state workers' compensation plans -- and more than a dozen other states implicitly cover them.

Solis' public service announcement comes on the heels of little-noticed but far more troubling comments encouraging illegal alien workers in the Gulf Coast. Earlier this month, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, according to Spanish language publication El Diario La Prensa, Solis signaled that her department was going out of its way to shield illegal immigrant laborers involved in cleanup efforts. "My purpose is to assist the workers with respect to safety and protection," she said. "We're protecting all workers regardless of migration status because that's the federal law." She told reporters that her department was in talks with local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who had visited coastal worksites to try to verify that workers were legal.

No word yet on whether she gave ICE her "we are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not" lecture. But it's a safe bet.

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WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE and PRISON SYSTEMS!

“Mexico’s government has provided its nationals with valuable tools to help them cross the border safely but Dominguez is the first American resident, with a salary provided by U.S. taxpayers, to openly promote such a gadget. A few years ago Mexican officials published a 32-page booklet (Guia Del Migrante Mexicano) with safety tips for border crossers and distributed hand-held satellite devices to ensure the violators complete their journey safely.”

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OBAMA IS A GREAT PERFORMER. HE’S BUILT HIS LA RAZA BASE OF ILLEGALS BY INFESTING HIS ADMINISTRATION WITH LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, AND MAKING SURE NO BANKSTER DONOR WENT TO PRISON!


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IN FACT, THE REASON WHY OBAMA WANTED BILL DALEY AS CHIEF OF STAFF, WAS BECAUSE DALEY IS CONNECTED TO OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS, LIKE J.P. MORGAN, AND LIKE OBAMA, IS AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!

I WONDER IF ANY PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS HATED A NATION AS MUCH AS OBAMA?

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Obama attacks banks while raking in Wall Street dough

The Daily Caller – 18 hrs ago

Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street, a study by the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Project shows that President Barack Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other politician over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush.

In 2008, Wall Street’s largesse accounted for 20 percent of Obama’s total take, according to Reuters.

When asked by The Daily Caller to comment about President Obama’s credibility when it comes to criticizing Wall Street, the White House declined to reply.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says the distance between the president’s rhetoric and actions makes him look hypocritical.

“It’s almost as if President Obama won’t cross across a Wall Street picket line except to get inside with [his] hand out, so he can raise money,” Fleischer told TheDC, referring to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who the president has been encouraging over the past week. “That sort of support causes him to look hypocritical.”

Fleischer continued by saying that President Obama and Democrats, such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who has received approximately $8.7 million from Wall Street since 1989, should stop taking campaign donations from Wall Street banks if they are so offended by their actions.

“They can’t say we hate Wall Street, but we love their money,” Fleischer said. (RELATED: White House: Millionaire tax isn’t enough)

Being Wall Street’s campaign cash king is hardly the image President Obama has been trying to project in public, where he has been setting himself up as the champion of the progressive Occupy Wall Street movement and as the avenger of jilted Bank of America customers.

“Banks can make money,” Obama said last week, responding to questions during an interview with ABC News about Bank of America’s decision to levy a $5 monthly fee on debit card users. “They can succeed, the old-fashioned way, by earning it.”

In fact, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks lobbyist spending and influence in both parties, found that President Obama has received more money from Bank of America than any other candidate dating back to 1991.

An examination of the numbers shows that Obama took in $421,242 in campaign contributions in 2008 from Bank of America’s executives, PACs and employees, which exceeded its prior record contribution of $329,761 to President George W. Bush in 2004.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street firms also contributed more to Obama’s 2008 campaign than they gave to Republican nominee John McCain.

“The securities and investment industry is Obama’s second largest source of bundlers, after lawyers, at least 56 individuals have raised at least $8.9 million for his campaign,” Massie Ritsch wrote in a Sept. 18, 2008 entry on the Center for Responsive Politics’s OpenSecrets blog.

By the end of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, executives and others connected with Wall Street firms, such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, UBS AG, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, poured nearly $15.8 million into his coffers.

Goldman Sachs contributed slightly over $1 million to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, compared with a little over $394,600 to the 2004 Bush campaign. Citigroup gave $736,771 to Obama in 2008, compared with $320,820 to Bush in 2004. Executives and others connected with the Swiss bank UBS AG donated $539,424 to Obama’s 2008 campaign, compared with $416,950 to Bush in 2004. And JP Morgan Chase gave Obama’s campaign $808,799 in 2008, but did not show up among Bush’s top donors in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama’s close relationship with JP Morgan Chase was highlighted earlier this year when he tapped Bill Daley, a former top executive with the bank, to replace Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

Wall Street’s generosity to Obama didn’t end with his 2008 campaign either. Wall Street donors contributed $4.8 million to underwrite Obama’s inauguration, according to a Jan. 15, 2009 Reuters report.

So far Wall Street has raised $7.2 million in the current electoral cycle for President Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Obama’s 2012 Wall Street bundlers include people like Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs CEO and former New Jersey governor; Azita Raji, a former investment banker for JP Morgan; and Charles Myers, an executive with the investment bank Evercore Partners.

“When he calls Wall Street bankers fat cats, then his base cheers, so you’ll see him constantly trying to shift back and forth, and keep Wall Street happy at one point and his base happy at another point,” Jim Moorehead, current crisis adviser at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, explained in a July interview with FoxNews.com.

The Republican National Committee echoed Fleischer’s comments in a statement to TheDC, similarly accusing the president of Wall Street hypocrisy.

“The president wants his cake and eat it too,” RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski wrote in an emailed statement. “It’s the height of hypocrisy for President Obama to demonize Wall Street on the stump while looking the other way as they line his campaign coffers.”

Politcal analyst Dr. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics sums up Wall Street’s 2008 infatuation with Obama as having been more about wanting to back a winner than anything else.

“Two things have changed that. First, the economy is still rotten. Obama’s policies just haven’t worked — or at least not so anybody can tell,” Sabato said.  “Second, Obama has to direct the public’s anger and frustration somewhere if he’s to have a decent chance of reelection.”

“There is a great deal of animosity still present in the general public about Wall Street and the banks,” he continued. “The more Obama scapegoats them, the less inclined they are to back him this time. You don’t get the votes and money of people you insult.”

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Co-founder and co-editor, The American Prospect

Obama, Geithner, and the Next Financial Crisis

Over the past few weeks, President Obama has at last "pivoted," in the widely used term, from emphasizing deficit reduction to focusing on jobs and taxation of millionaires. Spontaneous protest has done what the organized left failed to do; it has made Wall Street the appropriate target of diffuse economic frustrations. The labor movement has added its weight and institutional skills to these protests, and even President Obama has had some kind words for them.

Fox News and the Republicans have been usefully flummoxed, since it is awfully hard to rise to the defense of the Wall Street banks that caused the financial collapse and to retain credibility with anyone, even the Tea Party base.

But here comes the next phase of the financial crisis, and it will test President Obama's leadership like nothing else. It will also make or break the faltering credibility of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

In recent days, it has become clear that several large banks, most notably Bank of America, are teetering. Though the backlash against the giant bank's proposed five-dollar-a-month charge for debit cards has gotten the headlines, this is the least of its problems. The profits from this new charge would be chump change measured against the bank's chasms of losses, the legacy of its ill-advised purchases of Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch in 2008.

Worried investors have driven Bank of America stock down to the range of 5 to 6 dollars a share. Bank of America's books are still glutted with non-performing mortgage loans, and a grand solution to the mortgage crisis seems further away than ever.

Meanwhile, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley with their large holdings of Greek government bonds are also in some jeopardy, which adds to the general crisis of confidence. The Federal Reserve has been throwing "liquidity," otherwise known as nearly interest-free money, at the banks as necessary, to keep inter-bank markets from freezing up as they nearly did in 2008.

As recently as three weeks ago, at a "Delivering Alpha" financial conference, Geithner assured his audience that despite the European crisis American banks were in great shape:

Our financial system -- because of the actions we took early in the crisis -- is in a much stronger position to deal with these new risks than it was before this crisis. Much, much stronger position. Way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of making sure they have a stronger financial foundation to handle any type of shock.

This has been Geithner's strategy since the earliest days of the crisis: work with the Federal Reserve to throw money at the big banks, resist fundamental changes in their business model, and talk up their solvency even in the face of contrary evidence.

Given the proprietary data that Geithner surely sees as Treasury Secretary, he must know that these words are wishful at best and downright deceptive at worst. If his assurances turn out to be so much baloney, then Geithner, President Obama's re-election chances, and the economy could all be in big trouble.

The fact is that European banks are functioning only because the European Central Bank in spite of its reluctance has been flooding the system with liquidity, and at least one U.S bank -- Bank of America -- is barely solvent and heavily reliant on the Fed.

If events turn critical again and we face a repeat risk of the seizing up of financial markets as in the fall of 2008, the Obama administration's rhetorical populist turn will be of no use. The president will need to make a fateful decision.

Worst of all would be to let a large institution like Bank of America just fail. Outside of the hard-core Tea Party right, nobody supports this.

The second worst policy would be to just keep throwing money at a zombie institution to keep up the pretense that it is solvent. We tried that policy in 2008 and 2009. It helped entrenched bankers keep their jobs and their outsized profits, but a wounded banking system continued to be a lead weight on the rest of the economy.

So now President Obama, if faced with a repeat crisis of large banks, may get a do-over.
In the spring of 2009, when the leading zombie bank was Citigroup, then chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Geithner took the position that they could not seize, clean out, and break up Citi because they lacked the legal authority or the tools to do it. It's also clear from several accounts, including my own
A Presidency in Peril
and most recently Ron Suskind's new book
Confidence Men that Summers and Geithner did not want to do it. According to Suskind, Obama himself wanted to break-up of Citi as his preferred option, and Geithner slow-walked the president until the issue was moot.

But the Dodd-Frank Act now gives the treasury secretary explicit authority to find that a large, systemically significant financial company is "in danger of default"; to designate the FDIC as receiver; and to seize, break up, and reorganize failing large banks. Though there is surely contingency planning for the collapse of a large bank, Geithner seems loathe to use his new authority.

So, consider three possible scenarios in coming days or weeks.

First scenario: the big banks, thanks to advances from the Federal Reserve, keep barely afloat. Geithner's credibility survives, but the real economy continues to be a shambles. This is not exactly auspicious, either for economically frustrated Americans or for an incumbent president facing re-election.

Second scenario: Investors keep fleeing Bank of America, the giant bank finds itself frozen out of short term lending markets as Lehman Brothers was, and the bank finally turns to the government for emergency aid. There is a new financial crisis in the headlines, and it falls in on President Obama and his Treasury Secretary, who was been reassuring everyone that all is well with the large banks.

Third scenario: President Obama decides to get other opinions besides Geithner's and to get out ahead of the crisis. If things turn critical, he directs his Treasury Secretary to seize the bank, as authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act. Obama tells the citizenry that the alternative was endless bailouts or a Lehman-style collapse (just imagine the right trying to defend either), and that this way those who caused the crisis will be appropriately removed from their suites and bonuses while the bank is returned to health so that the broad economy can prosper.

Serious consideration of this last approach would take much more of a "pivot" on Obama's part than we have seen to date. I recall, in reading biographies of Presidents Kennedy and Roosevelt, how both leaders sought multiple sources of advice. Kennedy would pick up the phone and speak to a relatively junior desk officer at the State Department to get his own information unfiltered by his gatekeepers. Roosevelt made sure he had direct access to multiple advisers who disagreed with each other. But Geithner has been astute at blocking access to the president for others who have different views, and Obama has been startlingly incurious and compliant. The man needs to get on the phone.

It also happens that Bank of America is headquartered in Charlotte, North Caroline, site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and the bank is expected to be one of the convention's top-tier corporate sponsors. Oh, my. Moving to resolve and break up the bank under Dodd-Frank, should it prove to be insolvent, would take uncharacteristic nerve.

In September 2008, the financial collapse fell in on George W. Bush and won the election for Barack Obama. A repeat collapse, if handled badly, would fall in squarely on Obama.

Populist rhetoric when angry people are in the streets demanding accountability for bankers is a start, but talk is cheap. If the banking mess turns critical again, we will see what this president has learned, and what he is made of.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.

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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

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THE BELOW FIGURES WERE PRE-FIRST TERM. OBAMA HAS SO SERVED HIS  CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THEY HAVE PUMPED EVEN MORE OF THEIR LOOTINGS INTO THIS CLOWN!

“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

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An initial term sheet outlining a possible settlement emerged in March, with institutions including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo being asked to pay about $20 billion that would go toward
loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners.

In exchange, the attorneys general participating in the deal would have agreed to sign broad releases preventing them from bringing further litigation on matters relating to the improper bank practices.
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Obama’s budget and the rot of American capitalism

15 February 2011

On Monday, the Obama administration released its proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2012. After committing trillions in federal bailouts to the banks and billionaires, the White House is demanding cuts that will devastate the working class, and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sections.

The $1.1 trillion in cuts for the next decade proposed by the White House is to be only the starting point for further cuts, as spokesmen for both big business parties acknowledge. Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat, declared, “We’ve got to do substantially more than $1 trillion worth of deficit reduction in the next decade.” Republican House Speaker John Boehner said, “There’s no limit to the amount we’re willing to cut.”

Democrats and Republicans agree on gargantuan military spending, an uninterrupted flow of funds to the financial aristocracy, and continued tax breaks for corporate America and the wealthy. As a top White House official told the press at a background briefing on the budget, “The debate in Washington is not whether to cut or to spend. We both agree we should cut. The question is how we cut and what we cut.”

The Obama budget projects that the ten-year cumulative deficit will reach a staggering $10.4 trillion. By attempting to wring such vast sums from the hides of the population, the ruling elite is trying to set American society back to conditions not seen for generations.

Programs to be cut include not only those targeted by Obama and the Republicans in the current budget debate—home heating assistance, Pell Grants, WIC, Head Start, etc.—but the much larger entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, which will face cuts later in the budget process.

The social impact will be incalculable. As hundreds of thousands of people face the bitter cold of winter without heat and gas, Obama is proposing halving the grossly inadequate federal assistance that is available. As students graduate with record debt and no job prospects, the administration is proposing significant cuts in government aid. Such gross indifference to social distress is repeated in every sphere.

Significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare—which amount to denying America’s elderly their right to pensions and health care—would have an even broader impact.

Behind the “debate” in Washington and the media over the budget is a massive lie—the claim that the budget deficits are a product of excessive social spending. Obama’s budget director Jacob Lew summed up this grotesque falsification an op-ed column published in the New York Times February 6, under the headline, “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us.” Lew claimed that the causes of the projected budget deficits were “decisions to make two large tax cuts without offsetting them and to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it, combined with the effects of the recession…”

This list is notable for what it leaves out: the cost of two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, which runs into the trillions; and the bank bailouts, where more trillions in public funds were placed at the disposal of the financial aristocracy, with no questions asked. The military budget by itself accounts for the lion’s share of the ten-year deficit: more than $7 trillion of the projected $10 trillion.

Lew’s more fundamental omission, however, is the grotesque class inequality that pervades American society. The top one percent of the US population owns over one third of the country’s wealth. The greatest wealth, however, is concentrated in an even smaller layer. Indeed, the $1.1 trillion in proposed cuts—which will have a terrible impact on the lives of millions of people—is somewhat less than the combined wealth of only the 400 richest Americans.

The arguments presented by the ruling elite for the cuts are staggeringly hypocritical. As they drown in floods of cash, they insist that no money is available for workers’ most basic needs.

Workers must reject this argument out of hand. They are not responsible for the orgy of swindling and profiteering that produced the 2008 Wall Street crash and pushed the world economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. On the contrary, an essential feature of the speculative binge was that the share of national income received by workers has shrunk to the lowest level in nearly a century.

Underlying the rise of the financial aristocracy—which exercises control over the entire political system—is the failure of the world capitalist system as a whole. In amassing its wealth, this tiny layer of the population, concentrated above all in the United States, has overseen a vast destruction of industry and social infrastructure. The ruling classes of every country now openly proclaim that the maintenance of their system depends upon an unprecedented destruction in the living conditions of the broad masses of the population.

These measures will provoke mass opposition. The revolutionary struggles in Egypt—in which protests and strikes of millions of workers and youth forced the resignation of a US-backed dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years—point to the forms of struggle that will spread worldwide in the coming period. Mass unemployment, record inequality, and the corruption of the political system are common to Egypt and the United States, and are in fact universal. At the foundation of this system is the principle that economic life must be subordinated to private profit and the maintenance of the wealth of those who control the giant banks and corporations.

The working class can secure its interests only through the overturn of the capitalist system as a whole—that is, the reorganization of economic life to meet social need. In every aspect of its policies and of its social being, the ruling class itself makes the case for socialist revolution.

Patrick Martin

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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

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Obama’s Economic Advisers: International Socialists, Union Thugs, NBC Execs, Soros Scholars, Subprime Lenders, Amnesty Shills, and Campaign Cronies


Obama’s Economic Advisers: International Socialists, Union Thugs, NBC Execs, Soros Scholars, Subprime Lenders, Amnesty Shills, and Campaign Cronies

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OBAMA HIRES A HUSTLER...

One day as Wall Street was crashing, President George W. Bush had the temerity to plaintively ask his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson: "How did this happen?" Paulson, who headed Goldman Sachs before taking the Treasury job, remarks in his memoir: "It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked--after all, we were the ones responsible."

That's an honest enough admission about the culpability of the financial community in bundling the toxic derivatives packages still disastrously undermining the economic health of the nation. Even more startling was Paulson's admission in his memoir that he, at the time he was advising the president, still did not know that home mortgages were at the heart of those troubling securities that his former company had marketed to others with such wild abandon.

Were President Barack Obama to ask that question about the origins of this crisis of Tom Donilon, one of his closest aides whom he recently appointed to the critical job of national security adviser, Donilon would find it even more awkward to invoke the defense of ignorance. As the chief lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, he was far more intimately involved than Paulson in the manufacturing of this crisis. He successfully pressured Congress to give Fannie Mae the green light to speed past any sound regulation. Indeed, had Congress endorsed the barest semblance of regulation of the Fannie Mae-led housing scam, it would have been stillborn instead of being a very much alive Frankenstein creation.

Fannie Mae paid Donilon, a longtime Democratic Party operative, $15 million to lobby Congress to gut the power of government regulators to check the scandalous behavior in what would have been judged a crime until a majority of pro-Wall Street Republicans and Democrats in Congress rewrote the laws. He was also a top executive at Fannie Mae during the period when cooking the books to increase executive compensation would later lead to a $400 million fine. In pursuit of those profits, Fannie Mae entered into a partnership with Angelo Mozilo's shady Countrywide Financial, and together they produced the computerized CLUES and MERS credit verification and mortgage registration systems that are at the heart of the housing swindle. Mozilo at least was finally slapped with a huge fine last week, while Donilon has yet to return a penny.

Why in the world would President Obama, whose legacy has been sabotaged by a housing crisis that Donilon helped create and conceal, have hired him to run the most sensitive position of public trust in his administration? Because he is one of the most skilled of the Washington players, and, as this president has demonstrated so often with his key appointments, it's the top hustlers of whom he seems enamored. "He has a probing intellect and a remarkable work ethic," Obama stated this month upon appointing Donilon, thereby reducing ethics to a variant of ambition rather than morality, "although it's one that depends on a seemingly limitless quantity of Diet-Coke." Ha, ha. But of course Obama must avoid questioning the connection of that work ethic to the impoverishment of tens of millions of homeowners. When Donilon first entered his presidential campaign in 2008, Obama knew he had been working as a legal adviser to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, two firms that had to depend on government bailouts to survive a housing crisis they helped create.

Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack. If there was more of the sincere community organizer in the inner makings of this man, he would not have turned to one of the architects of a housing scam in filling a leadership position in his administration. Why assume that Donilon will now run our foreign policy, wrapped as it is in a secrecy that endangers so many, with any greater sense of moral integrity than he employed when he enriched himself by impoverishing so many ordinary Americans not blessed with his political connections?

The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption. Donilon has worked for most of the party's top dogs, including Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Surely the Republican ideologues who want to end all government consumer protections and are quite adroit at lining their own pockets are no better, but that is cold comfort. We are drowning in a bipartisan cesspool of corruption, and the sooner we grasp that fact the better

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Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses



BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY

 Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

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Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.

Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:

* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs, this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

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Praise for Obamanomics

“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author

“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama

“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul

“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guideto American History

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·         Hardcover: 256 pages

·         Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1596986123

·         ISBN-13: 978-1596986121






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