I cut up my Alaska Airlines credit card today. Which I've had for nine years now, and through which I've accumulated thousands of Alaska Airlines "frequent flyer" miles. One mile is given for each dollar spent with the card. This gave me an occasional "free" flight, first-class upgrade, and MVP status, occasionally.
But it all came at a price. Because that card is really from the Bank of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the World, one that was "too big to fail", even though they were one of the many large players engaging in greedy, exploitative, risky and reckless financial policies which led to the current global depression. They also received many of the 700 BILLION dollars in "bailout" funds given over to them from your tax dollars, as a reward for their criminally greedy and destructive behaviour. This article from Common Dreams today summarises the current situation with Wall Street, "your" government, and where we stand.
Still Doing God’s Work on Wall Street
by Robert Scheer
by Robert Scheer
"Jail, anyone? Perhaps that's too harsh, and at any rate premature, but is anyone ever going to be held accountable for the behind-the-scenes sweetheart deals that passed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through the AIG shell game to the very banks that caused the financial meltdown? Or for the many other acts of double-dealing that left one out of three American homeowners owing much more than their houses were worth while the folks who swindled them were rewarded with hundreds of billions in public money?
Undoubtedly not, since the same folks who are most culpable wrote the laws that made this, and the other scams at the heart of the banking collapse, perfectly legal. And guess what? They're back at work in the government, writing the new laws that will, they claim, prevent us from being had once again. As a telling example of that process at work, check the official response of the Department of Treasury to the devastating report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Neil M. Barofsky, titled "Factors Affecting Efforts to Limit Payments to AIG Counterparties." The main factor was that Timothy Geithner followed the lead of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd "I'm Doing God's Work" Blankfein in crowding the lifeboats with bankers.
Geithner, now treasury secretary, was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), where he negotiated the deal to pay Goldman Sachs and the other top banks in full to cover their bad bets on securitized mortgages. Barofsky's report concluded that Geithner's scheme represented a "backdoor bailout" for the financial hustlers at the center of the market fiasco. Noting that Geithner denies that was his intention, the report states, "Irrespective of their stated intent, however, there is no question that the effect of FRBNY's decisions-indeed, the very design of the federal assistance to AIG-was that tens of billions of dollars of Government money was funneled inexorably and directly to AIG's counterparties."
Not surprisingly, the Treasury Department that Geithner now heads defended his actions in not forcing "haircuts" on the full dollar-for-dollar payoff by AIG to the banks while he was at the New York Fed: "The government could not unilaterally impose haircuts on creditors, and it would not have been appropriate for the government to pressure counterparties to accept haircuts by threatening to retaliate in some way through its regulatory power."
Geithner, now treasury secretary, was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), where he negotiated the deal to pay Goldman Sachs and the other top banks in full to cover their bad bets on securitized mortgages. Barofsky's report concluded that Geithner's scheme represented a "backdoor bailout" for the financial hustlers at the center of the market fiasco. Noting that Geithner denies that was his intention, the report states, "Irrespective of their stated intent, however, there is no question that the effect of FRBNY's decisions-indeed, the very design of the federal assistance to AIG-was that tens of billions of dollars of Government money was funneled inexorably and directly to AIG's counterparties."
Not surprisingly, the Treasury Department that Geithner now heads defended his actions in not forcing "haircuts" on the full dollar-for-dollar payoff by AIG to the banks while he was at the New York Fed: "The government could not unilaterally impose haircuts on creditors, and it would not have been appropriate for the government to pressure counterparties to accept haircuts by threatening to retaliate in some way through its regulatory power."
Nonsense, argues Eliot Spitzer, who as New York attorney general was way ahead of the curve in challenging Wall Street arrogance. Writing in Slate on Monday, Spitzer points out: "Pressuring Goldman and the other counterparties to offer concessions would have forced them to absorb the consequences of making suspect deals with an insurance company that was essentially a Ponzi scheme."
The Ponzi scheme was based on the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in which the bankers traded and which AIG had insured with the credit default swaps (CDSs) that they sold but failed to back with adequate funding. Now Geithner's Treasury concedes that AIG "should never have been allowed to escape tough, consolidated supervision." But none of AIG's scams were regulated, nor were any of the others at the center of the larger financial debacle, because of laws pushed through Congress by Geithner's boss, Lawrence Summers, when they both were in the Clinton administration. Specifically, they prevented regulation of those opaque CDOs and CDSs that would come to derail the world's economy.
As the inspector general's report stated: "In 2000, the [Clinton administration-backed] Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) ... barred the regulation of credit default swaps and other derivatives." Why did the financial geniuses of the Clinton administration seek to prevent that obviously needed regulation? Because the Clintonistas believed the Wall Street guys knew what they were doing and that what was good for them was good for us lesser folk. As Summers, who is the top economic adviser in the Obama White House, put it in congressional testimony back then: "The parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies."
Sounds nonsensical today: The inspector general's report notes that AIG, because of the deregulatory law that Summers and Geithner pushed through, was "able to sell swaps on $72 billion worth of CDOs to counterparties without holding reserves that a regulated insurance company would be required to maintain." But why, then, is Summers once again running the show with Geithner when both have made careers of exhibiting total contempt for the public interest? Because there is no accountability for the high rollers of finance, no matter who happens to be president."
© 2009 TruthDig.com
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle
Below each article on this site, people occasionally write in comments, and we at A.P.R. often do as well! I thought this one was particularly insightful...
"Isn't the myth that unfettered capitalism has made America rich now being debunked by China's regulated capitalism?"
I think this image I included in my last (and most ominous) climate change post presents a good picture of how things are in this country, and in the rest of the "developed" World.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/08/ac-cu-iii-update-it-gets-worse-and-can.htmlhttp://counterpunch.org/lindorff11252009.html
Which is this. These large wildfires, this one behind the major city of Los Angeles last August, are increasing in frequency and intensity globally, thanks to global warming. Which is occurring because our consumerist, capitalist culture is incapable of not "fouling the nest" with greenhouse gasses and other pollutants, without strict regulation and oversight. Oversight, which though desperately needed, will not occur unless strong pressure is applied by great amounts of people, in various ways. Most of these large skyscrapers are owned and populated by the major financial institutions at the heart of all this, in Los Angeles, and most cities world-wide.
One way in which we all can help decrease the importance, influence of, and damage done by these greedy, criminal financial institutions, is to BOYCOTT THEM. Thus, we here at the Alaska Progressive Review, have finally divested ourselves of the last piece of this destructive system today, our Alaska Airlines credit card. Sure, we won't be getting as many free airline miles and trips anymore, but that is a small price to pay, for peace of mind, knowing that we are not supporting these institutions. Now, our mortgage for the Chena Ridge Research Centre, our auto loan, bank accounts, and credit card, are all with local Credit Unions. We implore all of you, to do the same. Conduct all your business with non-profit Credit Unions, and BOYCOTT the greedy large banks. You'll be doing yourself, family, community, nation, and the World a big favour!
I came across this article today in the Counterpunch web-site.
"Working the War Up Since Early 2002"
The Blair-Bush Conspiracy on Iraq
By DAVE LINDORFF
"Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about the country’s involvement in war planning.
Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House of Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade Iraq,” was lying.
Things are likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing testimony. It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top government officials, including Blair himself.
While some American newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, have run an Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the commission, key news organizations, including the New York Times, have not. The Times ignored the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about the British commission that focused entirely on evidence that British military leaders in Iraq felt “slighted” by “arrogant” American military leaders who, the article reported, pushed for aggressive military action against insurgent groups, while British leaders preferred negotiating with them.
While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares with the evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were secretly conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.
Recall that the Bush/Cheney argument to Congress and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq in the fall of 2003 was that Iraq was allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an “imminent” danger of attack against the US and Britain with its alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been shown to have been bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a year earlier, and if no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at that time. Imminent, after all, means imminent, and if Blair, Bush and Cheney had genuinely thought an attack with WMDs was imminent back in the early days of the Bush administration, they would have been acting immediately, not secretly conjuring up a war scheduled for a year later. (The actual invasion began on March 19, 2003).
As I documented in my book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), there is plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney had a scheme to put the US at war with Iraq even before Bush took office on Jan. 20, 2001. Then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in his own tell-all book, The Price of Loyalty, written after he was dumped from the Bush Administration, recounts that at the first meeting of Bush’s new National Security Council, the question of going to war and ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the agenda. Immediately after the 9-11 attacks, NSC anti-terrorism program czar Richard Clark also recalled Bush ordering him to “find a link” to Iraq. Meanwhile, within days, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ordering top generals to prepare for an Iraq invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was heading up the military effort in Afghanistan that was reportedly closing in on Osama Bin Laden, found the rug being pulled out from under him as Rumsfeld began shifting troops out of Afghanistan and to Kuwait in preparation for the new war.
It is nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the British investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being conveyed to Americans by this country’s corporate media—yet another example demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying. It is even more astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here in America is making any similar effort to put America’s leaders in the dock to tell the truth about their machinations in engineering a war that has cost the US over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually when debt payments and the cost of veterans care is added in), and over 4000 lives, not to mention as many as one million innocent Iraqi lives."
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
Once again, we can see how the corporate media in this country deliberately keeps hidden important news like this. There may actually be some accountability demanded from British politicians, for their involvement in the mass-murders of a million or more civilians in Iraq, and thousands of U.S., British, and other nation's, soldiers killed in a war based on lies, conducted for greed, and maintenance of political power.
It's quite clear now that we have two right-wing parties in this country, since the new Democratic administration is continuing the illegal and immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continuing to increase the defense budget, and has staffed all the most important economic and financial posts in it with the same people who were responsible for the current depression.
Thus, we here at A.P.R. feel it is absolutely essential that everyone with a social conscience, OPT OUT of "the system". That is, do not do business of any sort with large corporations, support the commercial, corporate media, and educate yourself and others to the current political/socio-economic situation. Only support political parties like the Green Party, that work for social/economic/political/environmental justice. Our job here at the Alaska Progressive Review, is to provide you with a quick reference, and source for material that can help you understand what is happening in our World, why, and how we can change things for the better. Spread the word!
This does take time, and effort on our part, and we occasionally need a break, to recharge, reconnect with the Natural World, and our place in the Cosmos.
So, for the next few days, we will be in the Alaska Range, heading south down the Richardson Highway,
To ski for miles and miles in and around the mountains, and maybe
even do a little climbing in these beautiful mountains. Alaska is currently in a very mild, southerly chinook flow weather regime. This weather pattern occurs more frequently now, with global warming, and is how most of our greatest increase in annual temperatures manifests. Instead of temperatures in the -15C to -40C range, this pattern brings us mild temperatures of 0 to -15C, perfect for winter recreation of all sorts. But it still can and does get much colder here, especially from now through mid-March, so we have to make most of this warmth, when it does occur. Cheers.
