I just read Danny Schechter's latest, "The Crime of Our Time," which ads to his latest film, "Plunder," and a series of related books.
It's useful to remember that Congress and the presidents bailed out with our money people who appear guilty of serious crimes, and is now debating whether to slightly regulate their ongoing crimes, but criminal prosecutions are still not flowing down like waters into Wall Street.
Schechter's book reads like a long blog entry blockquoting numerous other blogs. It's not an indictment, but a wakeup call to prosecutors and to the rest of us.
The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.
Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.
You know, the year 2009 started out kind of nicely. We watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, serenaded by the awesome Aretha Franklin (wearing her awesome hat), after first hearing Pete Seeger sing the real Woody Guthrie verses to "This Land Is Your Land" on the steps of the Lincoln Monument.
If you google “recession easing,” you will find articles all the way back to April quoting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as saying that the recession is easing, and that the economy is “improving modestly.” Newspapers too, on their own, have written rosy-tinged stories about how things are bad but getting better.
Spins get put on every hint of good news, as when last month “only” 11,000 jobs were lost (a story that was quickly followed by an “unexpected” jump in new unemployment claims by 474,000 in early December.
I once wrote an article
about former President George W. Bush saying that he was a perfect
Manchurian candidate. That is, if his missing year when he was supposed
to have been flying fighter jets with the Texas Air National Guard was
actually spent in the former Soviet Union being reprogrammed as a
covert KGB agent whose job it was to go back to America, win election
to the White House, and proceed to destroy the US, he couldn’t have
done a better job than he actually did.
Now I wonder whether President Obama might not be a perfect
Manchurian Candidate of the Republican Party, or perhaps of some
nefarious foreign entity—perhaps the China or the always-enigmatic Al
Qaeda. How else to explain policies that have wreaked such destruction
on the Democratic Party in Washington and on the nation at large.
If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.
It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.
So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program
(TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets
had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he
extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new
President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of
the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?
Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.
Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.
Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.
My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice—I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that “we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling.”
