Thursday, May 10, 2012

Notes on the social crisis in America - AS OBAMA'S CRIMINAL BANKKSTERS' PROFITS SOAR!

Notes on the social crisis in America


OBAMA, nothing but a continuation of BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH’s war, job giveaways to illegals, and transfer of the economy to WALL ST. banksters, drugsters, and anyone with a bribe to tuck in their dirty pockets!

The banksters caused a global economic meltdown, and now have been paid bonuses of massive no-strings welfare and promises of NO REAL REGULATION by the actor in the White House.

BANKSTERS used their bailouts to buy other criminal banking operations.

BANKSTERS now reporting massive profits from current pillages

BANKSTERS making big profits off the very foreclosures they caused.

BANKSTERS said hell no to any credit card loan shark fee regulation.

BANKSTERS said hell no to any phony OBAMA –Geithner regulation.

BANKSTERS said hell no, we won’t go to prison!

BANKSTERS said hell no to mortgage modification.

ALL THIS GAVE THE DRUGSTERS MASSIVE BONERS. OBAMA and his harem of corrupt dems, are now servicing them.

After the OBAMA and the dems cram through welfare  for DRUGSTERS, it’s AMNESTY FOR 38 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS!



FOR AMERICANS:

50% OF THE HOMES IN AMERICAN ARE UNDERWATER!

1 IN 10 HOMES ARE IN FORECLOSURE.

FOOD PANTRIES ARE EMPTY

I IN 7 AMERICANS ARE ON FOOD STAMPS

NO LEGAL NEED APPLY HERE SIGNS ON ALL BUSINESSES.

HEALTH CARE IS REALLY EXTENDING HEALTH CARE FOR ILLEGALS FOR THEIR ILLEGAL VOTES.

AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS FORCED TO PAY THE TAXES THAT SUPPORT WALL STREET PILLAGE, AND THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE FOR “CHEAP” LABOR THE DEMS DEMAND.


Truly “change” that our actor OBAMA promised, is just the kind that Wall Street buys!

*

US corporations squeezing more output from workers and paying lower wages

By Patrick O’Connor
12 August 2009

US Labor Department data released yesterday showed productivity up 6.4 percent in the second quarter, the largest gain since 2003 and higher than economists’ forecasts of 5.5 percent. Over the same period, workers’ compensation fell sharply.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics explained that productivity—which measures hourly output per employee—increased “due to hours worked declining faster than output.”

In other words, big business is using the rise in unemployment to extract greater output from employed workers through speedup and other forms of intensified exploitation.

Nonfarm productivity rose 6.4 percent as a result of output declining by 1.7 percent and total hours worked plummeting 7.6 percent.

Data also showed that real hourly employee compensation fell by 1.1 percent in the second quarter, or by 2.2 percent on an annualized basis. The combined impact of declining wages and rising productivity brought unit labor costs down by a huge 5.8 percent in the three months from April to June.

In manufacturing, quarterly productivity rose 5.3 percent, a result of output falling by 9.9 percent and hours by 14.4 percent. In the durable manufacturing sub-category, the output and hours decline was even greater—16.5 percent and 19.6 percent respectively.

The recent productivity boost, unlike that seen in previous periods, has involved no developments in productive technique. Mark Vitner of Wells Fargo Bank told Dow Jones Newswire that the second quarter gain “is almost entirely the result of cost-cutting, not improved ways of producing goods and providing services.”

Several commentators frankly admitted that the productivity boost was the product of intensified pressure on the working class. In a comment for Dow Jones’ MarketWatch, Tom Bernis wrote: “Anybody lucky enough to hang onto his or her job in this recession is working flat out to keep it. That’s one take on the latest US productivity numbers...

“The severity of the recession has pushed the hours worked to levels not seen since the mid-1990s, even as units of output have risen nearly 40 percent. So, with the economy essentially in ‘idle,’ it takes far fewer workers to keep things moving than nearly a decade-and-a-half ago. That’s good news for profits, but not so good for the unemployed.”

Ian Shepherdson, chief domestic economist for High Frequency Economics, added: “These are spectacular numbers and help explain why so many recently reporting companies have beaten earnings estimates.”

Bloomberg News highlighted DuPont, the third-biggest US chemical company, which last month announced a better-than-anticipated $417 million second quarter profit. This was achieved after outlining a strategy to cut fixed costs by $1 billion, partly by laying off 2,500 permanent workers and 10,000 contractors. “Our aggressive actions to improve productivity and reduce costs across the company are paying off,” Chief Executive Officer Ellen Kullman declared.

According to Time magazine’s Justin Fox, a recent report by the Goldman Sachs portfolio strategy team compared current corporate profits with previous periods. In an extraordinary finding, the researchers concluded that if financial companies, auto producers and utilities are excluded, corporations in the S&P 500 index had higher profit margins during the worst of the current crisis than they did during any point of the mid-1980s economic boom.

This conclusion points to the class character of the Obama administration and the social interests being served by its policies.

The economic policies advanced by successive Democratic and Republican administrations over the last three decades produced significant productivity increases at the same time that average real wages stagnated or declined. This led to an unprecedented shift in national income distribution, away from wages towards corporate profits, massively increasing social inequality.

These tendencies are accelerating, with the Obama administration, on behalf of the major corporations and banks, advancing a sweeping economic restructuring agenda aimed at permanently driving down workers’ wages and conditions. Every aspect of the administration’s agenda—from the bailout of the banks, to mass layoffs and wage and benefit concessions in the auto industry, to sweeping cuts in health care for workers and retirees—is directed towards protecting the ruling elite’s wealth at the expense of the majority of the population.

Obama sent a clear signal to big business with the restructuring of the auto industry. The federally supervised bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler involved the destruction of large sections of each company’s productive capacity, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, and the imposition of wages and conditions equivalent to those last experienced in the industry in the 1930s. This set the stage for an economy-wide corporate offensive against jobs, wages, and conditions, the initial results of which are reflected in the latest productivity and labor cost data.

*

Economic Policy Is Working, Obama Says
Administration Says Recovery Effort Has Moved From Rescue Stage to Rebuilding

By Scott Wilson and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 4, 2009

In public appearances this week, President Obama will attempt to regain the initiative on the economy after what one senior administration official called several "rocky" weeks of declining support for the president and his major policy efforts.

He and his Cabinet advisers will fan out across several swing states to declare that the recovery has moved from the rescue stage to rebuilding, even though unemployment continues to increase and his advisers have been making contradictory statements about whether the administration may need to consider a tax increase for middle-class Americans.

Obama's insistence that the first phase of the recovery is over amounts to a strong defense of his intervention in the private-sector economy -- and of the administration's overall competency -- as lawmakers head into their August recess with the fate of health-care and energy reform still undetermined. But many Republicans and some Democrats say the administration may be misreading the pace of the turnaround and, in effect, celebrating too soon.

"Is this what economists call an inflection point? Probably," said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House. "To what extent has administration policy contributed to this? I would say substantially in the case of rescue, but not much, if it all, in slowing the rate of decline."

Galston warned that "the administration is sailing into some pretty stiff headwinds," citing the still-sluggish credit markets and, more important, the fact that "households have experienced a shock, even more to their wealth than to their income, that will take some time to get over."

But with the national unemployment rate still rising, the strategy holds some risk for an administration worried that a recovery in that area may shadow next year's congressional elections.

Some economists predict that the next quarterly report will show growth, ending a recession that officially began in December 2007. But Obama and his senior advisers have been careful to note that the economy will continue to shed jobs, perhaps into next year.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said Monday in a statement that it is "baffling that administration officials would celebrate a bloated, ineffective trillion-dollar stimulus that hasn't produced the jobs nor the immediate jolt to the economy that they promised."

According to the Labor Department, 144 metropolitan areas reported jobless rates of more than 10 percent in June, a huge increase from the six metropolitan areas that had rates that high the previous year. The national unemployment rate for that month rose to 9.5 percent. Such figures for July are scheduled to be released Friday.

The stimulus plan provided money to extend the time unemployment benefits can be collected, but advocates for the jobless are urging the White House and Congress to grant another extension. Nearly 1.5 million people are likely to run out of unemployment insurance by December, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of workers.

Obama also has yet to outline how he intends to reduce long-term spending, which as of now would require $9 trillion in new borrowing over the next decade. On Monday, his administration appeared to rule out a middle-class tax increase that many economists say is the only way to address the nation's precarious long-term fiscal condition.

The president pledged during last year's campaign not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year, and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Monday that he would keep that commitment. The comments came a day after Lawrence H. Summers, a top Obama economic adviser, said "it is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out no matter what" when asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" whether taxes would go up for middle-class Americans.

"I think the president has backed himself into a corner here," said Marc Goldwein, policy director of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "He wants big spending on health care, energy and education. And you can't get that from taxing only the top 5 percent of income earners. That makes it difficult to do tax policy."

Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, McCain's former economic policy adviser, questioned whether the economy had responded to the stimulus measure's public spending and tax cuts. Although the economy as a whole contracted more slowly than expected, he noted that some sectors that were expected to benefit most from the legislation continued to suffer.

"We do need to look for future growth from businesses, not households," he said. "But what they are calling 'rebuilding' is only a policy change that fits with what they want to do, not a necessity to fix a broken economy."

*

Wsw.org… get on their free daily emails

US payrolls fell another quarter-million in July


By Patrick Martin
8 August 2009

The US economy shed another 247,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, marking the 19th consecutive month that nonfarm payrolls declined.

Manufacturing employment fell by 52,000, service employment fell 119,000, construction employment fell 76,000, and retail trade fell 44,000. There were small payroll increases in government, tourism and healthcare.

Of the 271 industries tracked by the Labor Department, 70 percent are cutting jobs, while only 30 percent are adding jobs or maintaining existing employment. That figure is an improvement from the 80 percent cutting jobs during the first quarter of 2009, but still indicates an economy mired in a deep recession.

The official unemployment rate actually dropped slightly, from 9.5 percent in June to 9.4 percent, but this actually reflects an aspect of the worsening job market, not an improvement. Some 422,000 unemployed people gave up looking for work in July and were no longer counted officially as jobless. The proportion of the adult population with jobs actually fell from 59.5 percent in June to 59.4 percent in July.

The unemployment rate was much higher for the traditionally more vulnerable groups: 12.3 percent for Hispanics, 12.6 percent for single mothers, 14.5 percent for African-Americans, 23.8 percent for teenagers.

The manufacturing decline was somewhat steeper than shown by the Labor Department figure, due to another statistical aberration. The agency reported that jobs in auto production increased by 28,000, on a seasonally adjusted basis, despite the virtual collapse of the industry. Keith Hall, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, explained, “Because layoffs in auto manufacturing already had been so large, fewer workers than usual were laid off for seasonal shutdowns in July.”

The White House, Wall Street and the corporate-controlled media lauded the jobs numbers as a signal that the economic slump in the United States has bottomed out. President Obama went before television cameras barely an hour after the numbers were released, pointing to the overall unemployment rate and the slower pace of job losses, from 700,000 in January to 467,000 in June and 247,000 in July.

It is only by comparison to the past eight months that July’s number could be portrayed as “hopeful.” In any year before the present, there would have been no White House photo-op to celebrate such a dismal employment report.

The stock market surged Friday to a new 2009 high. But the nearly 50 percent rise in the Dow Jones average since March is due not to a recovery in the labor market or the broader economy, but rather to the multitrillion-dollar bailout of the banks and financial institutions by the US Treasury.

Despite the statistical oddity of a drop in the unemployment rate, both the actual number of jobless workers and the duration of unemployment are increasing. The US economy has lost some 6.7 million jobs since the official start of the recession in December 2007.

According to Labor Department figures, 14.5 million Americans were out of work in July, another 8.8 million were working only part-time when they wanted full-time work, and 2.3 million had become “discouraged” and were no longer looking for work. This brings the combined total of unemployed and underemployed to 25.6 million, or 16.3 percent of the work force.

Long-term unemployment continues to rise month by month. According to the Economic Policy Institute web site, the number of workers unemployed for more than six months increased by 584,000 in July to nearly 5 million, so that now one third of those officially unemployed have been out of work more than half a year, a record since such data was first collected in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed has jumped from 2.6 million in February to 4.9 million in July, an increase of nearly 90 percent in only five months.

As of July 25, 6.31 million people were collecting long-term unemployment benefits, according to Labor Department data. All told, about 9.9 million people were collecting some form of unemployment benefits in the week of July 18. It was reported earlier this week that tens of thousands of workers are already running out of extended benefits, and by the end of the year that number will rise to 1.5 million.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that 550,000 workers filed new claims for unemployment compensation in the week ended August 1, a drop of 38,000 from the previous week, but still far above the 250,000 to 300,000 figure that typically characterizes a stable US labor market. Among states in the industrial Midwest, the jobs crisis was reflected in Wisconsin, which reported that initial jobless insurance claims through last week were 80 percent higher than at the same point last year.

The Obama administration’s response to the unemployment figures demonstrates again that its real constituency is Wall Street and the financial aristocracy, not working people. Obama declared in his brief appearance—without taking questions—that the jobless figures showed “the worst may be behind us” and “today, we’re pointed in the right direction.”

“We’ve rescued our economy from catastrophe,” he said, referring to the bailout of the banks. He hailed the run-up on the stock exchange, while trying to put a populist spin on it, saying that “a rising market is restoring value to those 401(k)s that are the foundation of a secure retirement.”

In fact, retired workers are being systematically robbed—like tens of thousands of General Motors retirees cut off from medical benefits and facing drastically reduced pensions—but Wall Street is celebrating higher stock prices with huge bonuses.

Meanwhile, the bankrupt insurance giant AIG revealed that it has set aside $249 million for “retention bonuses” for executives for the second half of 2009. This includes $93 million for AIG’s Financial Products division, whose speculation in derivatives led to the company’s near-collapse last year and a federal bailout of more than $182 billion.

*

Whose recovery?... WALL STREETS!!!

6 August 2009

As the Obama administration and the corporate-controlled media tout the supposed signs of an economic recovery, American workers confront a worsening job market, declining real incomes, and the spread of poverty and social deprivation on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

The New York Stock Exchange cracked the 9,000 mark on the Dow-Jones Industrial Average in late July for the first time since January 2, profits for banks and other financial institutions are up, and Wall Street has begun a new round of seven-, eight- and even nine-figure bonuses, with $100 million set aside by Citigroup to reward a single trader in energy futures.

The moneyed elite suffered a severe scare, particularly in the period between September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and March 6, 2009, when the Dow hit a low of 6,547. The all-out mobilization of US government financial resources behind Wall Street, with a total potential liability of $23.7 trillion, has at least temporarily restored confidence in the financial markets and pushed stocks up 40 percent. But there has been no bailout for working people.

Unemployment has surged to a 27-year high, with the Labor Department expected to announce another new high Friday for the month of July, approaching an official figure of 10 percent out of work. The consultant firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that big US companies announced 31 percent more layoffs in July than in June. The 97,373 job cuts announced in July brought the total this year to 994,048, 72 percent more than in the same period in 2008.

The payroll firm ADP reported Wednesday that private employers overall cut 371,000 jobs in July, which the company called a “notable improvement,” since it was the smallest such total since last October. But ADP warned, “despite recent indications that overall economic activity is stabilizing, employment, which usually trails overall economic activity, is likely to decline for at least several more months, albeit at a diminishing rate.”

On top of outright layoffs, employers have imposed wage cuts (20 percent of big companies, according to a recent survey) and shorter working hours or furloughs (another 16 percent, by the same study). The combined impact on working class living standards is devastating. The Labor Department reported Tuesday that personal income fell in June by 1.3 percent, the largest drop in four years.

An even more ominous measure was the Labor Deployment’s Employment Cost Index, which includes health benefits and 401(k) contributions as well as wages. It showed a 1.8 percent rise for all workers, private and public, in the second quarter of 2009, compared to the year before, well below the rise in consumer prices.

For private-sector workers, the rise of only 1.5 percent was the smallest yearly increase since the government began collecting these statistics in 1980. Benefits for private sector workers were particularly hard hit, up at an annual rate of less than 1 percent—meaning that workers are bearing nearly the entire burden of soaring health care costs, which rose 10.6 percent in 2008.

A study reported in the New York Times Tuesday pointed to longer-term effects of mass unemployment on incomes and consumer spending. It found the long-term earnings of workers who lost their jobs in the recession of the early 1980s—the deepest slump since World War II, until the current one—never recovered to pre-layoff levels.

The study by Columbia University Professor Till von Wachter found that “even 15 to 20 years later, most on average had not returned to their old wage levels. He also concluded that their earnings were about 15 percent to 20 percent less than they would have been had they not been laid off.”

The slide in jobs and incomes, with its devastating impact on spending for consumer goods, undercuts the prospects for a significant upturn in actual production—as opposed to the parasitic and socially retrograde operations of the financial markets. The service sector, by far the largest component of the US economy, declined in June, according to Wednesday’s report by the Institute for Supply Management.

The ISM index, in which 50 marks the boundary between a shrinking and a growing economy, fell from 47 to 46.4. June was the tenth straight monthly reading below 50. Manufacturing activity was up 0.4 percent, but much of that was the result of higher prices for the products of oil refineries.

As for the housing market, where runaway financial speculation helped trigger the collapse, there was a slight slowing of the plunge in housing prices, and sales of new homes have leveled off. But the long-term outlook can only be described as catastrophic. A Deutsche Bank study issued Wednesday predicted that the percentage of US homeowners owing more than their house is worth on the market will leap from 26 percent in March of this year to 48 percent in 2011. In other words, about half of all US homeowners will be “underwater.”

When Obama & Co. boast of a recovery, they are speaking not about the vast majority of the American population. They are talking about a recovery of profitability for Wall Street and the corporate elite, who are their real masters.

More than any previous administration in US history, the Obama administration is pursuing an openly class-based economic policy. Having shoveled trillions of dollars into the coffers of the banks and other financial institutions, the administration is now proclaiming the virtues of austerity and “fiscal discipline” when it comes to programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, on which tens of millions of working people and the retired depend.

The disparity between the vast sums plundered by the financial elite and the token amounts offered to working people was on display Wednesday as Obama visited Elkhart, Indiana, an industrial city battered by the slump, with an unemployment rate topping 16.8 percent. He announced $2.4 billion in federal contracts to GM and other companies to make components for a future electric car, spread over locations in 25 states. This is exactly one-one thousandth of the amount already pledged by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board to insure the profits and bonuses of the Wall Street oligarchy.

Every aspect of government policy, from the bank bailout to the restructuring of the health care system, serves the same class purpose: to boost the wealth and profits of the ruling elite at the expense of the vast majority of the American people. The “recovery” hailed by the spokesmen for big business is a permanent reduction in the living standards of the working class and the destruction of what little remains of a social safety net. This is the deliberate and conscious aim of the Obama administration.

Patrick Martin

*

Wsws.org… get on their free daily emails

Obama mortgage plan aids banks, not homeowners


By David Walsh
6 August 2009

The Obama administration’s home mortgage modification program, launched with great fanfare earlier this year, has assisted a mere fraction of those in danger of losing their homes, and the outrage of homeowners is growing.

According to a US Treasury report August 4, mortgage servicers, under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), have offered to change 406,500 loans and have actually modified, on a three-month trial basis, only some 235,000, just 9 percent of delinquent borrowers.

A number of banks that have received billions in taxpayers’ money, such as Wells Fargo, Wachovia and Bank of America, have modified even a smaller percentage of mortgages (6 percent or less).

These derisory figures come in the face of what a representative of the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), in testimony before a Senate committee July 23, called “a foreclosure tsunami, which threatens to destabilize our entire economy, devastate entire communities, and destroy millions of families.”

In her comments, the NCLC’s Alys Cohen noted that Goldman Sachs estimates that starting from the end of the last quarter of 2008 through 2014 some 13 million foreclosures will be initiated. The Center for Responsible Lending “predicts 2.4 million foreclosures in 2009, and a total of 9 million foreclosures between 2009 and 2012.”

Equifax and Moody’s Economy.com calculate that 1.8 million foreclosures have already been tallied in the first half of this year, and Realtytrac reports that 300,000 homes go into foreclosure every month. Banks have repossessed 386,800 properties this year, 64 percent more than the total of mortgages modified under the government program! An estimated 15.4 million homeowners in the US currently “underwater”—i.e., they owe more than their houses are worth.

Even if the Obama administration met its goal, under HAMP, of assisting in 3 million to 4 million mortgage modifications by 2012, which would mean doing some 20,000 a week, and it is not close to being on target, that would “address no more than one-third of all foreclosures,” Cohen commented July 23. She noted that the HAMP loan modifications, in any case, “are still only trial modifications, with no assurance that they will lead to permanent modifications.” The modifications, she argued, “have not made a dent in the burgeoning foreclosures.”

The HAMP program, under which certain borrowers who are at risk or in default may lower their monthly payments to no more than 31 percent of their pre-tax income, was never designed to resolve the foreclosure crisis. Like all the current administration’s “reform” measures, the program was crafted with the interests of corporate profits carefully in mind. Nothing could be done to impinge on the earnings of the banks, mortgage companies and other financial institutions whose reckless policies created the crisis in the first place.

The program is entirely voluntary, and as commentators (and many angry homeowners) point out, the various mortgage servicers are consistently ignoring government guidelines, stalling and, in some cases, deceiving borrowers, and generally doing what they can to obstruct the loan modifications process.

A July 30 New York Times article suggested that lenders “have little incentive to help homeowners.” It notes that the main impediments to a greater number of loan modifications are not staff shortages and logistical issues, as the mortgage firms claim, but their reluctance “to give strapped homeowners a break because the companies collect lucrative fees on delinquent loans. Even when borrowers stop paying, mortgage companies that service the loans collect fees out of the proceeds when homes are ultimately sold in foreclosure. So the longer borrowers remain delinquent, the greater the opportunities for these mortgage companies to extract revenue—fees for insurance, appraisals, title searches and legal services.

“ ‘It frustrates me when I see the government looking to the servicer for the solution, because it will never ever happen,’ said Margery Golant, a Florida lawyer who defends homeowners against foreclosure” and used to work for a major mortgage firm, Ocwen Financial.

The Times observes that mortgage companies are paid to manage pools of loans owned by investors and typically collect a percentage of the value of the loans they service. “They extract their share regardless of whether borrowers are current on their payments. Indeed, their percentage often increases on delinquent loans.”

A recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston concluded, “The rules by which servicers are reimbursed for expenses may provide a perverse incentive to foreclose rather than modify.”

As Cohen of the NCLC indicated in her Senate testimony, “Their [the mortgage servicers’] entire business model is predicated on making money by skimming profits from what they are collecting.... Servicers make their money largely through lucky or strategic investment decisions: purchases of the right pool of mortgage servicing rights and the correct interest hedging decisions. Performing large numbers of loan modifications would cost servicers upfront money in fixed overhead costs, including staffing and physical infrastructure.”

A former governance project manager at Countrywide Financial and Bank of America, Rich Miller, told the Times that “Bank of America had been reluctant to modify loans, which hurt the bottom line. The company has been waiting and hoping the economy will improve and delinquent customers will resume making payments, he said.”

Meanwhile, the banks are making money hand over fist, with the connivance of the Obama administration.

*

GET THIS BOOK!

Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies

by Michelle Malkin

Editorial Reviews

In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.

From the Inside Flap

The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.

Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:

* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily

* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide

* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration

* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons

* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power

* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.

           Hardcover: 376 pages

           Publisher: Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)

           Language: English

           ISBN-10: 1596981091

           ISBN-13: 978-1596981096




No comments: