Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Republican senators boycott hearing on Ariz. immigration law - TheHill.com

Republican senators boycott hearing on Ariz. immigration law - TheHill.com

Ouch! Decade of Obamacare Will Cost $1,160 billion - Rasmussen Reports™ AND YES HE DID LIE! OBAMAcare INCLUDES ILLEGALS!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Education Replaces Housing as the Bubble Machine - Rasmussen Reports™

Education Replaces Housing as the Bubble Machine - Rasmussen Reports™

EVEN AS AMERICAN STRUGGLE TO PAY FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, ACROSS THE NATION, THE LA RAZA DEMS ARE HANDING "DREAM ACTS" TO ILLEGALS STATE BY STATE!

YOU WON'T HEAR OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF THE DEMS, A SINGLE WORD ON THE EDUCATION CRISIS! IT'S ALL ABOUT MUCHO DREAM ACTS GALORE: BUYING THE ILLEGALS VOTES!

AND THEN THE JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS!!!





The truth about the DREAM Act






Published March 20, 2012



| FoxNews.com



·Text Size



The DREAM Act has become a rallying cry for President Obama, members of his administration, and liberal Democrats everywhere. President Obama has vowed to “keep fighting for the DREAM Act,” which would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.



It’s true when listeners or those polled don’t know the facts that the DREAM Act has some appeal. After all, we are all naturally sympathetic when children are involved.



But the descriptions of the DREAM Act voiced by President Obama and his cohorts are not accurate. And the consequences are never told.



DREAM Act supporters claim that only children would benefit from such a bill, but the facts tell another story. Under most DREAM Act proposals, amnesty would be given to individuals up to the age of 30—not exactly children. And some other proposals don’t even have an age limit.



These supporters also maintain that illegal immigrants can’t go college without the DREAM Act. But the truth is that illegal immigrants can already go to college in most states.



And ultimately, most versions of the DREAM Act actually don’t even force illegal immigrants to comply with all the requirements in the bill, such as going to college or joining the military. The administration can waive requirements because of “hardship”at its complete discretion.



DREAM Act proposals are also a magnet for fraud. Many illegal immigrants will fraudulently claim they came here as children or that they are under 30. And the federal government has no way to check whether their claims are true or not.


OBAMA and the RICH - BUT HE WORKS HARDEST FOR ILLEGALS and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS!




WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OBAMA AND ROMNEY???



WELL, ROMNEY IS A LIBERAL REPUBLICAN and…

OBAMA IS BUSH’S THIRD TERM….

OBAMA’S PAYMASTERS ARE HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS DONORS. NO ONE HAS TAKEN MORE MONEY FROM THEM THAN OBAMA. HE LOVES HIS BANKSTERS. IF YOU’RE NOT CONNECTED TO THE BIG BANKS… OR A LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, YOU DON’T GET A JOB IN OBAMA’S BANKSTER INFESTED ADMIN.



HERE’S ONE DIFFERENCE:

OBAMA HAS SABOTAGED E-VERIFY AND PUT HIS LA RAZA DEPT. of JUSTICE ON AMERICAN STATES FOR OPEN BORDERS, FIGHTING STATES RIGHTS TO EXCLUDE ILLEGALS FROM VOTING, AND LA RAZA SUPREMACY AGENDA. OBAMA’S OWN DEPT. of (illegal) LABOR IS LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS! VIVA LA RAZA!!!

OBAMA HAS ADDRESSED AN AUDIENCE OF ILLEGALS AT A LA RAZA CONVENTION THAT HE WOULD HELP THEM FIGHT “OUR ENEMIES” (legals).



ROMNEY CLAIMS HE WOULD IMPOSE E-VERIFY NATIONWIDE. SUCH WOULD SEND MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS IN OUR JOBS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS PACKING! WATCH THE MEX CRIME RATES FINALLY GO DOWN!!!

Paul Begala on Obama and Romney: Elitists for President

by Paul BegalaApr 16, 2012 12:00 AM EDT

Which candidate will stoop to connect with the middle class?



And so the presidency of the United States has come down to a choice between Thurston Howell III and the Professor. It’s interesting—and surprising—that in this populist time both parties have nominated leaders from their elite wings.



Carolyn Kaster / AP Photos (left); Evan Vucci / AP Photos

And I mean elite. In Mitt Romney the Republicans have the apotheosis of wealth worship. Romney has amassed a fortune so vast he is expanding his $12 million beachfront mansion and installing an elevator ... for his cars. For his cars, people. If you’re insanely rich, you might have an elevator in your mansion. But a lift for your Lexus? Keep in mind he’s running for office, for Pete’s sake. What’s he going to do if he wins? Use orphans as human golf tees?

Barack Obama is an elite as well. He’s a millionaire author (although Romney could buy and sell him a hundred times—well, probably just buy him once and lay everyone off). But more important, he is the kind of elite that Democrats love: an academic elite. A professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, president of the Harvard Law Review, graduate of Columbia University: the egghead trifecta.

Yes, we Americans admire financial success; we don’t hate the rich. But we resent folks who got rich by rigging the system. Romney made millions in part by loading companies with debt, driving them into bankruptcy, and laying off their workers. The workers who lost their jobs had their health benefits canceled as well—but Romney and his partners made millions. That’s not how Steve Jobs got rich.

By the same token, we admire academic success. Judging by all the bumper stickers that say, “My child is an honor student at John Foster Dulles Junior High School,” we are raising a generation of geniuses. Who wouldn’t want their kid to go to an Ivy League school? But we resent smartypants, pointy-headed intellectuals who look down their noses at us and lack common sense. (As my old friend Zell Miller used to say, “They don’t know gee from haw.”)

Each party has a vibrant and energetic populist movement. The Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left have done the near--impossible: they have moved millions of Americans to get off the couch and vote on something other than American Idol. Each movement has powerful, principled criticisms of the parties’ nominees: Tea Partiers don’t like that Mitt Romney increased the Bay State’s debt by 16.4 percent and increased taxes and fees by $750 million. Occupy lefties don’t like Obama’s refusal to endorse single-payer health care and his increase of troop strength in Afghanistan.

So which elitist can better tap into the populist spirit? So far Romney has had a case of Marie Antoinette Syndrome. Every time he tries to connect with a middle- class voter he makes the Grey Poupon guy look like Joe Lunchbucket. He brags about his friends who own NASCAR teams and NFL franchises. He casually makes $10,000 bets. He says the $374,000 he made in speaking fees isn’t a lot of money. When a kid gives him an origami duck made out of a $1 bill, all he has in his pocket to replace it are hundreds.

Romney apologists will say I’m taking this out of context. Baloney—or rather, Wagyu filet mignon. The context is that Romney truly is out of touch, and middle-class voters may conclude that he is not on their side.

And President Obama? He has at times seemed out of touch as well. Like when he described working-class Pennsylvanians to a well-heeled crowd in San Francisco as if he were Margaret Mead describing the indigenous people of Samoa: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That comment was patronizing and insulting. It was also made four years ago when Obama was in a death match with Hillary Clinton. In the four years since, he has sometimes lapsed into professorial pedantry, but he hasn’t made the kind of belittling comments about middle-class folks that Romney makes almost every week.

While far from an Everyman, Obama does a better job connecting with what Bill Clinton calls “walkin’- around folk”—because beneath that Ivy League ivy there are middle-class roots. His mother struggled, he earned scholarships, and as recently as 12 years ago his credit card was being rejected at the rental-car counter. And there are a lot more voters out there who have been turned down at the rental-car counter than there are millionaires building elevators for their limousines.

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THE LOOTING of AMERICA – THE CRIMINAL BANKSTER ARE SURE DOIN’ GOOD!

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OBAMA CONNED US WITH HIS PERFORMANCES OF “CHANGE” AND BECAME GEORGE W. BUSH’S THIRD TERM. WALL ST PILLAGE CONTINUED, NOT ONE BANKSTER DONOR HAS GONE TO PRISON!

WAR, WAR, WAR OVER THERE, ENDLESS WAR FOR SAUDIS INTERESTS TO FIGHT SAUDIS TERRORIST ENEMIES, WHILE OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX ARE PUSHED OPEN WIDER EVERY DAY!

POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY! NO ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY HAS BEEN INFESTED WITH A FOREIGN INTEREST AS OBAMA’S WITH HIS LA RAZA “THE RACE” SUPREMACIST PARTY!

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“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”

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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).


THE WALL STREET LOOTERS: Tomgram: Ari Berman, The Politics of the Super Rich | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Ari Berman, The Politics of the Super Rich | TomDispatch

Wikileaks to Break 'Bank Blockade' with US Foundation | Common Dreams - WAR MONGER JOE LIEBERMAN AT WORK

Wikileaks to Break 'Bank Blockade' with US Foundation | Common Dreams

Wells Fargo Profiting From For-Profit Prisons | Common Dreams - WELLS FARGO IS BANKSTERS TO THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS

Wells Fargo Profiting From For-Profit Prisons | Common Dreams


OBAMA'S PROMISE TO BANKSTERS: not one will go to prison!

CRIMINAL BANKSTER WELLS FARGO HAS HAD THEIR CALIFORNIA MORTGAGE LICENSE REVOKED SINCE 2003 FOR CORPORATE FRAUD.

WF SIMPLY DELCARED ITSELF ABOVE THE LAW, AND WENT ON TO FUCK OVER MILLIONS OF THEIR MORTGAGE CLIENTS NATIONWIDE.

THEN THEY TOOK THE OBAMA BAILOUT BANKSTERS' WELFARE PROGRAM TO BUY ANOTHER BANK.

FLORIDA MAN ARRESTED FOR REFILLS AT McDONALDS. OBAMA'S CRIMINAL BANKTER DONORS LAUGH THEIR HEADS OFF AND GO BACK TO LOOTING THE NATION!

OBAMA SAYS HIS DEPT. of LA RAZA JUSTICE IS TOO BUSY HARASSING AND SUING AMERICAN STATES ON BEHALF OF HIS LA RAZA AGENDA OF OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, MUCHO DREAM ACTS AND AMNESTY… SO THEY DON’T HAVE TIME TO PROSECUTE EVEN ONE OF OBAMA’S CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS!

GOOD TO KNOW AT LEAST SOMEONE IS MINDFUL OF THE LAW, AND BUSTING PEOPLE FOR REFILLS!

NOW IF WE COULD ONLY GET OBAMA’S WALL ST LOOTERS FROM REFILLING THEIR BOTTOMLESS POCKETS OFF OUR BACK!


NOW OBAMA'S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS HAVE STOLEN HOW MUCH AGAIN?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

AND NOT ONE HAS GONE TO PRISON. IN FACT, BANKSTERS PROFITS HAVE SOARED MORE DURING OBAMA'S FIRST 2 YEARS THAN ALL 8 UNDER BUSH!

SO HAVE FORECLOSURES!


Florida Man Charged With Felony for Allegedly Stealing $1 Cup of Soda From McDonald's


 (Collier County Sheriff Dept.)

A Florida man was arrested and held on $6,500 bond after police in Collier County said he left a McDonald's without paying for a cup of soda valued at $1.

Mark Abaire, 52, had apparently asked staff at the Naples restaurant for a courtesy cup of water, but instead he allegedly filled the cup with soda from the soda fountain and sat outside of the restaurant, according to a story in the Naples Daily News which cited the police report of the Thursday incident.

Abaire allegedly refused to pay for the soda when he was asked to do so, refused to leave the restaurant and cursed at the manager, the Naples Daily News also reported.

Abaire, whose aliases include "Red" and "Clown," has a long list of prior arrests, according to records from the Collier County Sheriff's Department.

He was charged with petty theft, trespassing and disorderly intoxication after the Thursday arrest, and sent to Collier County jail. Petty theft is usually a misdemeanor, but because Abaire has previous convictions for theft, the charge was upgraded to a felony. The trespassing and disorderly intoxication charges are misdemeanors.

Abaire could face five years in prison if he is convicted of the felony.

Records indicate Abaire will return to court on May 14.

 
THE LOOTING of AMERICA – THE CRIMINAL BANKSTER ARE SURE DOIN’ GOOD!
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OBAMA CONNED US WITH HIS PERFORMANCES OF “CHANGE” AND BECAME GEORGE W. BUSH’S THIRD TERM. WALL ST PILLAGE CONTINUED, NOT ONE BANKSTER DONOR HAS GONE TO PRISON!
WAR, WAR, WAR OVER THERE, ENDLESS WAR FOR SAUDIS INTERESTS TO FIGHT SAUDIS TERRORIST ENEMIES, WHILE OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX ARE PUSHED OPEN WIDER EVERY DAY!
POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY! NO ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY HAS BEEN INFESTED WITH A FOREIGN INTEREST AS OBAMA’S WITH HIS LA RAZA “THE RACE” SUPREMACIST PARTY!
*
“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”
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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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THE REASON WHY OBAMA NOMINATED SOTOMAYER WAS BECAUSE SHE IS A L RAZA PARTY MEMBER, AND HAD A LONG HISTORY OF PANDERING TO THE CORPORATE INTEREST. SOTOMAYER REFERS TO ILLEGALS AS “UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS (OBAMA REFERS TO THEM AS “MY LA RAZA PARTY UNREGISTERED VOTERS). SOTOMAYER VOTED AGAINST MAKING E-VERIFY MANDATORY NATION WIDE!
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The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender
28 May 2009
The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.
As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking. Led by President Obama, who based his own campaign on the marketing of a compelling personal “narrative,” Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity. There were tributes to the humble origins of the future Supreme Court justice, noting her hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father when she was nine years old, and even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.
No doubt, it has not been an easy personal journey for Judge Sotomayor, and there can be little doubt that she is as tough as nails. However, amidst all the tributes to Judge Sotomayor’s triumph, one cannot help but think about the conditions that confront the hundreds of thousands of South Bronx residents whom she left behind.
There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.
Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.
Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.
The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney. Barry Ostrager, a partner at Simpson Thacher LLP who defended a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase in a lawsuit over fraudulent pricing of initial public offerings, cited Sotomayor’s role in an appeals court ruling barring the class-action suit. “That ruling demonstrated that in securities litigation, she is in the judicial mainstream,” he told the Journal.
Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. Celebrated as the first African-American president, he has overseen the greatest handover of resources to the billionaires and Wall Street speculators in history. In the restructuring of the auto industry, with ever-escalating demands for cuts in jobs, pay and benefits for auto workers, he has set the stage for the greatest assault on the working class since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and gave the signal for a nationwide campaign of wage-cutting and union-busting. In this, Obama demonstrates that the class he serves, not the color of his skin or his social origins, is the decisive political factor.
The political development of the American working class requires, first and foremost, the direct and open discussion of the class realities of American society. No country in the world is as deeply and intractably divided along economic lines as the United States, where the top 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth and monopolizes 20 percent of the income. Any analysis of the political issues facing working people that does not take these class divisions as the fundamental reality is an exercise in deception and political stultification.
Patrick Martin
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“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”
*
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).

April 1, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
THE Obama administration’s $500 billion or more proposal to deal with America’s ailing banks has been described by some in the financial markets as a win-win-win proposal. Actually, it is a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.
Treasury hopes to get us out of the mess by replicating the flawed system that the private sector used to bring the world crashing down, with a proposal marked by overleveraging in the public sector, excessive complexity, poor incentives and a lack of transparency.
Let’s take a moment to remember what caused this mess in the first place. Banks got themselves, and our economy, into trouble by overleveraging — that is, using relatively little capital of their own, they borrowed heavily to buy extremely risky real estate assets. In the process, they used overly complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations.
The prospect of high compensation gave managers incentives to be shortsighted and undertake excessive risk, rather than lend money prudently. Banks made all these mistakes without anyone knowing, partly because so much of what they were doing was “off balance sheet” financing.
In theory, the administration’s plan is based on letting the market determine the prices of the banks’ “toxic assets” — including outstanding house loans and securities based on those loans. The reality, though, is that the market will not be pricing the toxic assets themselves, but options on those assets.
The two have little to do with each other. The government plan in effect involves insuring almost all losses. Since the private investors are spared most losses, then they primarily “value” their potential gains. This is exactly the same as being given an option.
Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year’s time. The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.” Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!
Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That’s 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest — $12 in “equity” plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan.
If, in a year’s time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that’s left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37.
Even in an imperfect market, one shouldn’t confuse the value of an asset with the value of the upside option on that asset.
But Americans are likely to lose even more than these calculations suggest, because of an effect called adverse selection. The banks get to choose the loans and securities that they want to sell. They will want to sell the worst assets, and especially the assets that they think the market overestimates (and thus is willing to pay too much for).
But the market is likely to recognize this, which will drive down the price that it is willing to pay. Only the government’s picking up enough of the losses overcomes this “adverse selection” effect. With the government absorbing the losses, the market doesn’t care if the banks are “cheating” them by selling their lousiest assets, because the government bears the cost.
The main problem is not a lack of liquidity. If it were, then a far simpler program would work: just provide the funds without loan guarantees. The real issue is that the banks made bad loans in a bubble and were highly leveraged. They have lost their capital, and this capital has to be replaced.
Paying fair market values for the assets will not work. Only by overpaying for the assets will the banks be adequately recapitalized. But overpaying for the assets simply shifts the losses to the government. In other words, the Geithner plan works only if and when the taxpayer loses big time.
Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily “nationalize” the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well. It has even nationalized large institutions like Continental Illinois (taken over in 1984, back in private hands a few years later), and Washington Mutual (seized last September, and immediately resold).
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.
So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it’s the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves — clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization.
But we are already suffering from a crisis of confidence. When the high costs of the administration’s plan become apparent, confidence will be eroded further. At that point the task of recreating a vibrant financial sector, and resuscitating the economy, will be even harder.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2001.

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ARE AMAZED AT HOW UTTERLY BRAZEN THESE CORPORATE OWNED POLITICIANS ARE?
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.


Product Details
           Hardcover: 376 pages
           Publisher: Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)
           Language: English
           ISBN-10: 1596981091
           ISBN-13: 978-1596981096
*
Wall Street demands lifting of pay limits
16 February 2009
A provision restricting executive compensation that was inserted into the $787 billion economic stimulus bill prior to its passage by the US Congress has provoked howls of protest from the Wall Street elite and sent the Obama administration scrambling to emasculate it.
The measure was authored by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, over the objections of Obama and his top economic advisers. Dodd argued that the measure was necessary to assuage public outrage against bank executives who have continued to reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses after their banks received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. He said such action was needed to make it politically possible for Congress to allocate hundreds of billions more to bail out the banks.
The provision goes somewhat further than the token pay restrictions announced February 4 by Obama's treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, which set a base pay limit of $500,000 only on the top executives of banks receiving "exceptional assistance" and did not apply retroactively to banks that previously received money under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Dodd's measure applies retroactively to all banks that have received TARP funds. It sets no limit on salaries, but restricts bonuses to one-third of total compensation. It does not apply to deferred compensation or pensions, and evidently places no limits on stock options.
Since the vast bulk of the stratospheric annual compensation of Wall Street tycoons comes in the form of bonuses, stock options and other perks rather than base pay, the measure, if enforced, could reduce their yearly take to the millions, rather than the double-digit millions to which they have become accustomed. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday estimated that under the new provision, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis's compensation would fall from $16.4 million in 2007 to a "mere" $2.25 million.
Such a fate, the prospect of which sent Wall Street lobbyists descending on Capitol Hill and the White House, would reduce Lewis's income to a sum more than 56 times that of an ordinary American—that is, he would be forced to survive on substantially more per week than the median worker earns in a year.
The outrage of the Wall Street billionaires was immediately translated into front-page headlines in the major US newspapers. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all ran lead stories Saturday on the issue. The Post, the main newspaper in the nation's capital, ran a front-page follow-up on Sunday, bearing the subtitle "Compensation Limits May Backfire."
Only weeks ago, it should be recalled, Congress was railing against autoworkers who make less than $60,000 a year. Obama supported the imposition of drastic wage and benefit cuts, along with mass layoffs, as a condition for emergency loans to prevent the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler.
Judging from the Sunday morning news and interview programs, there was some doubt as to whether Obama would go ahead with his plans to sign his "stimulus and recovery" bill on Tuesday, as scheduled. His representatives felt obliged to affirm that he would sign the bill, but hastened to add that the White House would demand changes in its executive compensation provisions even after it became law.
Senior adviser David Axelrod said on "Fox News Sunday" that the White House would work with Congress to "do something that's workable" about the issue. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," said the administration would seek to "strike the right balance" by discussing changes with House and Senate members.
It is an extraordinary commentary on the reality of class relations and political power in the United States that this issue should figure so prominently in the discussion of what is billed as a plan to rescue the nation from, in Obama's words, a "catastrophe." The narrow and selfish interests of a miniscule fraction of the population weigh infinitely more on the scales of government policy than the needs of tens of millions of people who are being hurled into unemployment and poverty. This financial aristocracy exercises an effective veto power over state policy—exposing the class dictatorship that underlies the increasingly threadbare trappings of democracy.
The real question in the minds of most Americans is why the bank executives who bear direct responsibility for the collapse of their own firms and the economy as a whole—not only in the United States but internationally—are still in their posts. They want to know why there are no serious investigations or criminal prosecutions.
The furor over the bankers' pay also sheds light on the nature of the stimulus package itself. It is a hodgepodge of tax cuts—including tens of billions for big business and the wealthy—and government outlays that will do nothing to solve the economic crisis and little to relieve the mounting suffering of the people.
Moreover, as Obama indicated in his Saturday radio-video address, it is a prelude to another massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street that will reach into the trillions of dollars, to be followed by draconian austerity measures targeting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.
The response of the Wall Street elite to the executive pay provision exposes the cynicism of Obama's talk of collective "responsibility" for the crisis and his calls for "national sacrifice." For their part, the plutocrats have no intention of ceding an inch of their wealth or power, whatever the cost to society.
They have made it clear that if the Dodd provision stands, they will drain their reserves to pay back the government as soon as possible in order to remove themselves from its compensation limits, further undermining the viability of their own firms and threatening an even greater economic disaster for the US and the world. And, as many commentators have suggested, they will evade the restrictions on bonuses by jacking up their salaries. As Nell Minow of the Corporate Library told the Washington Post, "The people who work on Wall Street are motivated by money."
All of the measures proposed to rein in the bankers are utterly inadequate. Over the past decade, they have pocketed—in salaries, bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes, pensions, private jets, limos and other perks—trillions of dollars. Their extravagance has involved a massive transfer of wealth from the working class and played no small part in bringing the US and global economy to the point of collapse.
Their finances should be audited and they should be forced to make restitution. The wealth they have drained from society should be recaptured, transferred to the public treasury and used to finance public works programs to provide millions of jobs rebuilding the schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure.
A rational solution to the crisis is not a technical issue. It is a fundamental class question, and therefore a political and revolutionary question. There is a direct relationship between the forms of the crisis—the parasitism of the ruling elite, the vast growth of social inequality—and the mode of production and appropriation under capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to the accumulation of personal wealth by those who own and control the means of production and the levers of finance.
Their stranglehold must be broken through a mass, independent social and political movement of the working class. The aim of this movement must be the establishment of a workers' government to carry out socialist policies.
The demand must be raised to open the books of the banks and conduct a careful, public examination to reveal how trillions of dollars were squandered and the economy bankrupted. Those responsible must be held accountable, including by means of criminal prosecution.
The banks and major financial institutions must be nationalized and transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working people. Only on this basis can the wealth produced by the working class be utilized and developed to meet the needs of the people.
Barry Grey
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World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
The looting of America
10 April 2009
The New York Times on Thursday published a front-page article that provides further insight into the economic and class interests that are being served by the Obama administration’s economic “recovery” policies.
Headlined “Small Investors May Be Enlisted in Bank Bailout,” the article outlines discussions between the administration and Wall Street investment firms on structuring the so-called “Public-Private Investment Program” announced last month in a manner that will allow people of modest means to invest in the scheme, whose purpose is to enable the banks to offload their toxic assets at public expense.
When the plan was announced March 23 by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, it sparked a wild rally on the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 497 points when it became clear that the government was offering to provide up to 95 percent of the capital, insure almost all potential losses and virtually guarantee large profits for hedge funds and other financial firms that agree to purchase the bad debts of the banks at inflated prices, with the taxpayers underwriting the windfall for Wall Street and assuming virtually all of the risk.
Thursday’s Times article indicates that opening the scheme up to small investors is seen as a way of providing a “democratic” gloss to what is, in reality, a brazen plan to plunder the public treasury for the benefit of the very bankers and speculators who are responsible for the financial crash. Evidently not seeing a contradiction, the article also makes clear that the bailout measures are being drawn up in the closest consultation with the Wall Street insiders who stand to profit from them.
“Some of the biggest investment managers in the United States,” the Times notes, “including BlackRock and PIMCO, have been consulting with the government on ways to rebuild the country’s broken financial markets.”
The article quotes Steven A. Baffico, an executive at BlackRock, as saying, “It’s giving the guy on Main Street an equal seat at the table next to the big guys.” This is true only in the sense that “Main Street” will be given the opportunity to absorb the bulk of any losses while the “big guys” cream off the best assets and pocket the profits.
There are political concerns behind this effort to create the appearance of offering the general public a cut in the winnings. Hedge fund managers are wary that when, as they anticipate, their partnership with the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) pays off with double-digit profits there will be a public outcry, similar to that which erupted over the AIG executive bonuses. This, they fear, might lead to limits on their compensation, higher taxes on their fortunes or similar intolerable infringements.
More important are definite commercial calculations. By opening up the scheme to the broad public, the private firms chosen by the Treasury to operate the plan stand to increase greatly their take from investor fees. As the Times puts it, “For the investment managers, the benefits are potentially large. These big firms can charge healthy fees to investors for taking part.”
There is one particularly remarkable passage in the Times account. “But the comparison one industry official uses to illustrate the mistake that America must avoid,” the newspaper writes, “is the large-scale privatization in Russia in the 1990s, which involved a transfer of entire industries to a few, well-connected oligarchs. That experience tarnished the idea of free-market capitalism in Russia and undermined its program to move toward a market economy.”
The many differences in political and historical circumstances aside, there is a very real parallel between the plundering of Soviet society by the former Stalinist bureaucrats and their domestic gangster and foreign imperialist allies and the current manner in which the economic crisis in the US is being seized upon by Wall Street and its political instrument, the Obama administration, to further enrich the American financial aristocracy. Indeed, the perpetrators are themselves quite conscious that they are engaged in a similar—although much bigger—looting operation.
The scale and character of the operation are further indicated by another New York Times article published this week. This one, authored by Times financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin and published on Tuesday, concerns the role of the FDIC in the new bailout scheme.
The article begins by noting that the FDIC was established 76 years ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, to provide a government guarantee, initially up to $5,000 and now up to $250,000, on the bank deposits of small savers. It describes the transformation of the FDIC, under the toxic asset disposal plan of the Obama administration, as follows:
“It’s going to be insuring 85 percent of the debt, provided by the Treasury, that private investors will use to subsidize their acquisition of toxic assets.”
In other words, the function of the FDIC is being transformed from guaranteeing the bank deposits of small savers to guaranteeing the investments of multimillionaire investment fund managers. And, as the article notes, this is occurring without a vote by Congress.
The FDIC will be insuring more than $1 trillion in new obligations incurred as the government covers the bad debts of the banks. However, the FDIC’s charter limits the obligations it can take on to $30 billion. The Times article quotes one “prominent securities lawyers” as saying, “They may not be breaking the letter of the law, but they’re sure disregarding its spirit.”
What is the significance of this astonishing reasoning? Simply this: The Obama administration, in order to protect the wealth and power of the financial elite, is facilitating and directly perpetrating on a colossal scale the same type of accounting fraud and reckless leveraging that led to the economic catastrophe in the first place.
Who is to pay the price for this looting operation? The answer can be seen in the Obama Auto Task Force’s demands for the liquidation of much of the US auto industry and the brutal downsizing of what remains, combined with the imposition of poverty-level wages on those workers who remain in the surviving plants and the gutting of the pensions and health benefits of retirees. It can be further seen in the administration’s pledge to slash social programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The administration’s “recovery” plan is a barely disguised scheme to preserve the fortunes of the financial aristocracy, whose interests it represents, by imposing poverty and social misery on the working class.
Barry Grey