By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

By Dave Lindorff

The people who pose as journalists in today’s corporate media are
in awe and in love with the rich. How else to explain their fatuous
praise for the likes of Warren Buffett, who on one hand bets $5 billion
on Goldman Sachs shares, and on the other, posing as a disinterested
wise man and patriot, publicly advises Congress to go along with
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s
$700-$1-trillion bailout of Goldman and the rest of Wall Street?

Buffett, whatever else he is, is no fool. He looks at Goldman
Sachs, its shares knocked for a loop by the current crisis, but about
to become a merged entity—bank and investment bank combined—with
government backing to unload its bad credit risks—and he buys $5
billion worth of it, and then turns around and tells Congress to step
up and vote for a bailout which would double his money almost instantly.

What a guy! A true hero.

By Dave Lindorff

What nobody in the corporate media is mentioning amid all the
blather about the $700-billion Paulson bailout proposal is the impact
it will have on the US dollar.

We are told that this huge gift to the financial sector—the
assumption, at top dollar, of all the bad debt they’ve piled up--will
be at taxpayer expense, but that’s only the half of it. (Really only
the quarter of it because since the US government is technically
bankrupt already, spending more than it takes in each year, all that
money will be borrowed, and will be added to the national debt, meaning
that just as the real cost of the $500-billion Iraq War is closer to $2
trillion, the real cost of the $700 billion bailout will be more like
$1.5-2.5 trillion.)

by Dave Lindorff

When the financial markets started coming undone earlier this week,
the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve stepped in, and with $85
billion of our money (actually our children's money,
since they borrowed it from China and Saudi Arabia), bought foundering
AIG, the world's largest insurance company, and assumed its colossal
pile of crap debt.

That didn't help, and the stock market crashed further, falling to
levels not seen in three years. Banks, meanwhile, stopped lending,
figuring to just hold onto their money and try to weather the crash.
The US Treasury and the Fed stepped in again, this time pumping nearly
$300 billion more of our money into foreign money markets, and getting
European and other governments to do the same in an effort to get the
credit markets open again and to stop the stock market swoon. That was
on top of some $700 billion already spent on bailouts.

Atrios is shocked at the absurdity Of CNBC:

The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they're lamenting the possibility of more regulation... People who prattle on about "the free market" are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the "rules" had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc... etc..., did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.

So why do conservatives want to make all these crucial rules, regulations, and laws disappear? What would our financial system look like without them?

By Dave Lindorff

With the government now having spent over $800 billion in less than
a year shoring up tottering financial companies that had become little
more than casinos (and rigged ones at that), America is looking
increasingly like China, a country where the state has been gradually
getting out of the business of directly owning companies.

At this point, with the US government owning 80 percent of the
world’s largest insurance company, AIG, and essentially owning mortgage
firms Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as bankrupt Lehman Brothers,
and with the nation’s two largest automakers in line asking for $25
billion in government loans, one would be hard-pressed to spot the
difference between the two systems.

By Dave Lindorff

I was a speaker last night at an anti-war event sponsored by the
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County, Progressive
Democrats of America and Democrats For America in Lincroft, NJ, near
the shore. It was a great group of activist Americans who want to see
this country end the Iraq War, turn away from war as a primary
instrument of policy, and start dealing with the pressing human needs
of the country and the world.

Yet even in this group of committed people, one woman stood up
during the question-and-answer session and said, “I want to get
involved in writing emails to members of Congress urging them to cut
off funding for the war and other things, but if I do that won’t I end
up getting put on a `watch list’” or something?”

By Dave Lindorff

We Americans got a graphic illustration of the demise of any
independent American corporate news media these past few days as the
coverage on TV and in print was saturated with reports about John
Edwards’ infidelity and, equally important, Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.

So many diversions, so little time! That is part of the strategy, of course. Impoverish people so they must work harder to maintain their daily lives, while simultaneously overwhelming them with info overload and ersatz news. Decentralize the crimes themselves through a network of events and operatives over a time continuum, and choke off government scrutiny and regulation by reduced funding. Buy off the people's government. Throw in classic disinformation methods, and wrap it all in the cross (invoking religious endorsement) and the flag (inferring without actualizing authentic patriotism).

Blend, at a moderate but continuously increasing pace, with intermittent but increasingly harrowing instances of terror.

This has long been a topic of interest for me -- how prison labor is farmed out to corporations. I have been especially intrigued in how the War on Drugs fits into all this. Basically, the Powers-that-Be work both sides of the WOD -- the supply side (for example Contra-Cocaine) as well as working the anti-drug side -- not just law enforcement, but also in profiting off of prison labor, especially for-profit prisons, such as those run under Bush crony George Wackenhut. Caroline Winter writes for Mother Jones,

Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor. Here's a sampling of what they make, and for whom.