Dems Tremble At Prospect of Losses in 2010, Jesse Jackson Calls For Bank Protests

January 7th, 2010 - by: danny

LISTEN:
YOUR NEWS DISSECTOR RADIO SHOW REPRISES THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT WITH D’ARMY BAILEY. If You Don’t Know Who He is, Find out

THE FEAR AMONG DEMOCRATS: BIG SET BACK IN 2010
TAX CUTS AND GOP RUTS
JESSE JACKSON CALLS FOR PROTESTS AGAINST BANKSTERS

If you thought the fear produced by the failed Christmas bombing was something, consider the fear in Democratic Party circles as Senators announce their retirement and pundits predict a massive loss in this year’s election.

Clearly the reason is that that the changes so many hoped for worried about, did not occur., and perhaps could not occur. given the balkanized state of our politics, and the way our institutions are captured by special interests. The Party of Hope inspired the counter party of Nope but both played in an era where big money interests run the show.

The Repugs realized early on that the system was really screwed. They knew how bad it was given the fact that they played a major role in screwing it up. They also knew that Obama’s half measures and centrist compromises would produce a stalemate. A cloud of rehetoric had obscured reality on many fronts in the way that that reality TV becomes a substitute for reality.

Go back a year to the excitement of the inauguration. The crowds wee enormous. The expetations higher than high. But Obama was already tacking right with safe appointments and a commitment to entrenched Bush policies favoring the banks and the military. As he took office, he began to neuter the movement that put him there. The base was soon be taken for granted as the weightier affairs of state took priority. Eevrything was measures with pragmatism being given precedence over principles.

The Republicans sized him up and refused to be seduced by his bipartisan gestures and non-partisan posturing. They settled on a strategy of resistance and formed a united front offering nothing od substance but at the same time stealing his hrass roots populist strategy. The hard right saw an opening, with iits inflated attack on socialist spending policies. Never min that it was the corruption of the private section that brought down the economy. They welcomed the crisis that was created as unemployment soared The worse it got, the more they cheered – in private of course – knowing that they could later pose as saviors. Peroccuied with the daily business of attempting to govern and pass new laws,the Democrats did not build their own movement to fight back. The Congressional party took over.

This is an issue that may are addressing like Harold Myerson: in the Washington Post. “Without a Movement, Progressives Can’t Aid Obama’s Agenda/”

“Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson –
Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — has
raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era
of progressive reform. The legislative torrents of the
New Deal and the Great Society — a few brief years in
the 1930s and the ’60s that fundamentally reshaped the
nation’s economy and society — are the templates that
fire the liberal imagination.”

Richard clark writes on Op Ed News: Obama a captive of America’s most powerful banks and corporations?

“There are obvious reasons for preventing commercial banks (now allowed to carry the hard-earned savings of depositors and a federal guarantee of their worth) from engaging in the high-roller risk-taking of investment banks. If even John McCain now understands this, one must ask why doesn’t President Obama? The answer may well be that our president is essentially a captive of the banks that can kill his bid for a second term.”

As for the anxiety over the 2010, election outcome, Credit WriteDowns offered an insightful look at all the Socialist bating on the right:

“Tax cuts are the new mantra of the Republican Party. According to them, tax cuts are the ‘anti-socialism’ way of doing things because more government spending just leads to serfdom, right? But, tax cuts add to the deficit too, if you haven’t noticed. So, let’s look at this ‘socialism’ thing that gets thrown around (Pethoukoukis didn’t use this term; I am just using his piece as a jumping off station. I anticipate he will understand).

If you asked your 80-year old mother whether she wanted the government to cut her taxes, what would she say? Yes? in a heartbeat; who doesn’t want a tax cut? Now, if you asked her the follow-up question as to whether she wanted fewer libraries and swimming pools or fewer garbage pickups and snow and leaf removal, she would ask you what you’re talking about. If you explained to her that these were ‘socialist’ services and they would be cut so as to not increase the deficit, her enthusiasm would dwindle. And I haven’t even gotten to teachers, firefighters and police officers. The fact is people like the services that government provides for them. That’s why it is provided. And while everyone wants a tax cut, most people don’t think socialism when they think of the local bus service or community park. The fact that so many people are yelling socialism these days has more to do with partisan politics, demagoguery and a bad economy than with reality.”

THE NEW JOB NUMBERS (WHICH ALWAYS UNDERSTATE THE PROBLEM)

WP: U.S. employers shed 85,000 jobs in December

Unemployment rate remains steady at 10 percent.

JESSE TO SQUARE OFF WITH BANKSTERS

Last night I went up the Union Theological Seminary to hear Jesse Jackson speak to the Seminarians about the economic crisis. He pointed out that the scuttling of c ivil rights laws started the descent into the subprime disaster. He also noted that this aspect of the dereulation and refusal to enforce laws designed to prevent discrimination led to the targeting of minorities. He further noted that this aspect of the deregulation mania was not covered by media outlets.

Max Wolff of the New School, an economist who appears in my film Plunder and who was with commented on a recent study he did sayin that in the last 9 months we have experienced the biggest transfer of wealth from poor and working people to the rich than in any point n our history. Jackon blamed polices to revive the economy by pouring billions into the banks with any demands for accountability or restructuring. He is putting on his annual Wall Street Summit next week, and it sounds like he is about to launch an activist campaign nationally against one of our “too big to fail” banks. Stay Tuned.

TOP ECONOMIST AGREE: NO RECOVERY ANYTIME SOON

Naked Capitalism: Paul Krugman: “Plunging prices of houses and CDOs Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ don’t produce any corresponding macroeconomic silver lining. Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ This suggests that we’re unlikely to see a phoenix-like recovery from the current slump. How long should recovery be expected to take?

Well, there aren’t many useful historical models. But the example that comes closest to the situation facing the United States today is that of Japan after its late-80s bubble burst, leaving serious debt problems behind. And a maximum-likelihood estimate of how long it will take to recover, based on the Japanese example, is Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ forever. OK, strictly speaking it’s 18 years, since that’s how long it has been since the Japanese bubble burst, and Japan has never really escaped from its deflationary trap.

This line of thought explains why I’m skeptical about the optimism that’s widespread right now about recovery prospects. The main argument behind this optimism seems to be that in the past, big downturns in the world’s major economies have been followed by fast recoveries. But past downturns had very different causes, and there’s no good reason to regard them as good precedents

And today, Simon Johnson said:

The crisis is just beginning [since] we now have a financial system that’s completely based on moral hazard and too big to fail Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ and crazy things happen when you have a financial system like that.

Speaking of government complicity in enriching the greedy, Undernews passes this report on:

GEITHNER’S NY FEDERAL RESERVE BANK FIDDLED WITH AIG’S GOVERNMENT REPORT TO MAKE IT LOOK BETTER

Bloomberg – The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

TELEGRAPH: DOLLAR GOING, GOING

Willem Buiter warns of massive dollar collapse

Americans must prepare themselves for a massive collapse in the dollar as investors around the world dump their US assets, a former Bank of England policymaker has warned

THE TRUTH IS COMING OUT IN MAINSTREAM NEWS: SEVERE UNEMPLOYMENT WORSENS IN CITIES

WILL ICELAND MELT?

FT: Iceland’s president fights to contain fallout by Andrew Ward in Stockholm

Iceland’s president scrambled on Wednesday to contain the fallout from his decision to block legislation to repay Britain and the Netherlands more than Ã¢â€šÂ¬3.8bn ($5.5bn, £3.4bn) lost in a failed bank as the government proposed a date next month for the referendum on the controversial deal.

Do not put Iceland in a debtors’ prison

Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, Iceland’s president, this week rejected a law settling his country’s dispute with the UK and the Netherlands over the sorry Icesave affair. In truth he had little choice: a quarter of this fiercely independent electorate signed a petition against it, a show of defiance no leader can ignore.

MEDIA: JAY TO BE MOVED AGAIN

NBC Plan Would Move Leno to Late Nights

Pressed by affiliates and shrinking ratings, NBC has a plan in the works to radically alter its late-night television lineup, restoring Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 each weeknight, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m.

Check out VillageVoice.Com for Wayne Barrett’s brilliant and blistering expose on How Mike The Billionaire Bloomberg manipulated and bought off his Democratic Opponent in the recent Mayoral Campaign. This investigation shows how our “democracy” can be a sham. It also shows that most of the media was asleep at the switch.

NOTES AND LETTERS

Dau’d X Mohammed: “We’re the CIA. Something always goes wrong.” — The Siege

I watched Body of Lies (the movie) again. Good story, well told on
film, and so synchronistic; as a psychologically experiential
coincidence.

Syriana (the 2005 movie) is as fresh today as the front page of this
morning’s newspaper. Body of Lies feels fresher than Syriana; much like
The Siege (the 1998 “9/11″ movie released three years before 9/11),
written by Lawrence Wright, who also wrote The Looming Tower –
described as the story of “Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and
the FBI’s counterterrorism chief and al-Qaeda tracker John O’Neill, and
his ironic 9/11 death in the World Trade towers.” No different than the
30 December 2009 “synchronistic warfare” demise of the CIA’s Usama bin
Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri trackers at the hands of a Jordanian
Intelligence officer at Khost, who was also working for al-Qaeda all
along – as is more or less explained in Body of Lies (the 2008 movie),
along with who in the “intelligence community” works for whom,
generally.

ON/OFF SUBJECT: Three Days of the Condor (the 1975 movie) asks, “Has he
gone into business for himself? Was he turned around? Does someone
operate him? Homosexual? Broke? Vulnerable? Could he be a soldier of
fortune? Did he arrange the hit? Is that why he’s still in flight?”

And speaking again of the CIA Khosters, Body of Lies says: “Someone has
betrayed you. He works for the head of Jordanian Intelligence… which
means he works for us. Which means you work for us.”

Kevin Keating writes:

Listened to you on Laura Flanders radio show on BAI this morning. Good animated conversation. Why is the C word, or the B word never used to frame and push discussions of the political economy???(That would be Capitalists-Bourgeosie), much less class struggle…

Ron Paul on Rachel last night talking of the roiling energy he sees on campuses, declared we are in pre-revolution situation, job collapse deep, “revolution” coming in a matter of years….Conservative convention in March headlining John Birch Society!!!Teabaggers declared by David Brooks as larger formations then Dems or Republicans…Schwartznwegger attributes shift in CA budget priorities from Prisons to Education, literally cites student activism as major impact…ACORN court case great victory, I’ve been engaged with Bertha throughout. New year, new challenges.

Financial Times on Financial Crime Layest: Former McKinsey tipster took $2.6m

Former McKinsey director Anil Kumar admitted on Thursday to accepting $2.6m for passing along confidential tips to Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon hedge fund founder accused of masterminding a vast insider trading scheme on Wall Street.

Michelle Beck-Hafeez commented:

“I admire u aren’t scared to investigate or say anything!

Speaking of investigations, here are some questions worth pondering:

Patrick Martin, WSWS: Questions mount over attempt to bomb Detroit-bound jetliner

Thanks Michelle and all who write or comment. You can share you views by writing: dissector@mediachannel.org
Have a great weekend.

The News Dissector