This is a righteous rant pointing out that what we have is a complete fucking fail. It’s a failure of our political institutions, of our financial system, of our economy as structured, of the economics profession, of unelected elite GOP Daddies who are supposed to fix things, of the media, of the whole fucking thing. Extended 9.5%+ unemployment is not ok. It means something is seriously fucking wrong, and the people in charge are unwilling or for whatever reason (including being idiots) unable to fix the problem.

That pretty much sums it up.

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Start with his decision to tap Senator Judd Gregg as his new Secretary of Commerce, a guy who voted to abolish the Commerce Department back when Clinton was President.

So, Judd Gregg will become Commerce Secretary, and a Republican will keep Gregg’s seat in the Senate. Gregg’s lifetime Progressive Punch rating of 10.08 out of 100.00, and 6.91 “when the chips are down,” should make him a much needed right-wing champion for the Commerce Department. Gregg should also be a useful voice during cabinet meetings, making sure that President Obama and the other radical liberals there don’t over-reach.

Then there’s the stimulus bill, where, despite Obama’s willingness to give the Republicans all sorts of concessions, there apparently still aren’t enough votes to get it through the Senate. The likely solution? More concessions, because that’s the bipartisan way.

If that comes out of spending and not tax cuts – and since Republicans and moderate Democrats are driving the boat on this one I assume it will – then the bill will be completely unable to accomplish its goals on job creation. It may provide a temporary boost, but won’t do what’s needed to stop the bleeding. The recession will continue for years and maybe slip into depression.

Lastly, there’s news that Obama and his administration are working on a bailout plan that will attempt to keep the shambling corpses of the big banks moving around for a while longer by letting the taxpayers guarantee huge amounts of toxic paper. No pesky nationalization for him, despite the many studies that show that’s the way most likely to actually work.

The Obama Administration, if the Washington Post’s latest report is accurate, is about to embark on a hugely expensive “save the banking industry at all costs” experiment that:

1. Has nothing substantive in common with any of the “deemed as successful” financial crisis programs

2. Has key elements that studies of financial crises have recommended against

3. Consumes considerable resources, thus competing with other, in many cases better, uses of fiscal firepower.

The Obama Administration is as obviously and fully hostage to the interests of the financial services industry as the Bush crowd was. We have no new thinking, no willingness to take measures that are completely defensible (in fact not doing them takes some creative positioning) like wiping out shareholders at obviously dud banks (Citi is top of the list), forcing bondholder haircuts and/or equity swaps, replacing management, writing off and/or restructuring bad loans, and deciding whether and how to reorganize and restructure the company. Instead, the banks are now getting the AIG treatment: every demand is being met, no tough questions asked, no probing of the accounts (or more important, the accounting).

Oh, wait, there were also the newly-announced executive compensation restrictions, which couldn’t be more obvious an attempt to appease the proles even as billions more of their dollars are spent trying to save zombie banks.

I was hardly expecting Obama to govern from the left, given the fact that he’s a center-right technocrat and all, but this is getting ridiculous and it’s only February.

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

It’s a long read, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there.

Oh, wait, no, my mistake, you made this speech, in which you said the current bill isn’t perfect, but you’re going to vote for it anyway, and maybe someday down the road you’ll work to make sure this bailout for Wall Street doesn’t screw over everyone else in the country.

I think everyone who reads this blog who’s American, first thing on Monday morning, needs to call their Representatives and Senators and say: No. Blank. Checks. For. Crooks.

The current bailout plan, as presented, is a farce. Does something need to be done to keep the current financial system from collapsing under the weight of the failed gambles of the ridiculously greedy financial titans? Probably, yes. You can read more about how we got to this point here (the key phrase is “Gramm-Leach-Bliley”).

That doesn’t mean that the Bush plan is the right plan. In fact, if the events of the last 7+ years have taught us anything, it’s that any plan invented by the Bush administration is almost certainly the wrong plan. As the details of the bailout are released, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current plan is exceedingly flawed. As Paul Krugman says:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

Calculated Risk notes:

We definitely do not want the Treasury to buy RMBS and CDOs at anywhere near the value on the bank’s books. Buying at those prices would help keep the banks lending, but it would also severely impact the taxpayers, it would be a transfer of wealth from the many to the few, and it would also encourage future excessive risk taking.

The bailout plan as currently written would apparently have the government taking on the financial institution’s bad bets (what Atrios refers to as “The Big Shitpile”) at the ridiculously inflated values currently on their spreadsheets, which is nowhere near any sort of fair market value. And it’s now looking like the Treasury would be covering bad bets made up through this past Wednesday (long after it was apparent that the house of cards was collapsing) and possibly those made by foreign banks and even foreign governments.

Glenn sums it all up pretty well (as he so often does):

I don’t pretend to know anywhere near enough — in terms of either raw information or expertise — in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are — yet again — being blindly entrusted to solve this.

He also explains why, once again, the Democratic leadership in Congress is more than likely to prove that they are either willfully complicit in the worst of the Bush administration’s crimes or are simply a bunch of little sheep that will barely even bleat when the Republicans push them around. I recommend that you read the entire post for Glenn’s insight into the whole mess.

William Greider adds this:

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics–exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

As much as I would love to see a major transformation in American politics, bailing out the rich at the expense of everyone else seems like a bad way to get there, so any help the Democrats can get at maybe stiffening their spines is a welcome thing.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” These are words that must be said.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
16 August 1967, Atlanta, Georgia

So, why are gasoline prices going up so quickly? The oil companies are trying to make excuses, and those excuses are being reported as fact by the corporate media, but it’s just a pack of lies.

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights released a new study today of rising gasoline prices in California that found corporate markups and profiteering are responsible for spring price spikes, not rising crude costs or the national switchover to higher-cost ethanol, as the oil industry claims.

The real problem is that the oil companies have realized that they can manipulate the supply of gasoline by selectively closing refineries for “maintenance.” Piling that manipulation on top of oil prices that are already at record highs because of geopolitical tension (like Bush looking like he’s determined to bomb Iran) and speculative trading means that the oil companies are raking in money hand over fist.

Given the current market fundamentals we expect average prices for both oil and gas this year to be significantly above 2005 record levels,” said Fadel Gheit, an energy analyst at Oppenheimer, an investment bank. “As a result, we expect 2006 earnings to be above 2005 record levels.”

Remember, the oil companies aren’t out there paying record prices for the barrels of oil that they’re turning into gasoline. They pump, transport, and refine most of that oil themselves.

It’s not just the Saudi royal family that gets rich when speculators drive up the price of oil; ExxonMobil, which produces more oil every day than Kuwait, has enjoyed profits of $110 billion since President Bush took office. While it costs ExxonMobil about $20 to extract a barrel of oil in Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates or from federal land in Alaska or Texas, the company is selling that oil to the American people for $70/barrel.

That explains why ExxonMobil and other oil companies are posting the biggest profits in our economy’s history. ExxonMobil boasts in its 2005 annual report that it earned a 46 percent rate of return on its capital investment selling oil and natural gas that it pumped out of the ground.

While companies like ExxonMobil are out there making record amounts of money for their shareholders and executives, the rest of us pay the price.

So there you have it. There’s a substantial segment of the population that spends a very big chunk of their income on gasoline, and in the past 12 months they’ve seen gasoline prices increase by 50% — and that’s at a time when household income has been decreasing for five years running and household debt is already sky high.

Notice what the government is doing to stop this? Nothing. That, folks, is the triumph of corporations over people, and the price of having a government that’s controlled by the interests of capital rather than the interests of voters.

I would be duly appreciative if the usual suspects would stop making cautiously approving noises about the New Republican Openness to Helping the Poor. I’m pretty damn tired of repeating history because you idiots aren’t capable of learning from it.

You’re public intellectuals, right? I have to assume you’re trainable. Take a damn course.

Amen to that.

Remember Hurricane will be used to drive out the black poor? Well, the Wall Street Journal has news for you:

The power elite of New Orleans — whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. — insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

“The new city must be something very different,” Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” he says. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”

The Mr Reiss in question is a James Reiss, an upper class resident of New Orleans. “When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.”

10,000 dead, a million homeless, tens of thousands deliberately starved so that the government could send in troops, and the evacuees aren’t welcome back. Repeat after me: America doesn’t have a class system; American doesn’t have a class system; America doesn’t have a class system… No, Toto, we’re not in New Orleans any more.