Bailout Oversight

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.

Wall Street's gone wild and Congress seems disinclined to rein it in. The Justice Department may stray slightly from the president's goal of "looking forward, not backward." But there's a weakness in the master plan for Goldman Sachs' domination of the world: Wall Street is in New York State, and the leading candidate for New York State Attorney General is Elizabeth Holtzman.

If Liz runs on a campaign to clean up Wall Street, regulate it, and deter crimes by enforcing laws, she will likely gain the backing of many national organizations, including the labor movement, which share this agenda. And a campaign that garners support, and funding, nationally would add significantly to her advantage, and to our chances of combatting the kleptocracy in courts of law.

By Dave Lindorff

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”?

By David Swanson

If you're like me you find it at least a bit disturbing that we're giving trillions of dollars to save the economy to the very people who wrecked it, and more disturbing that we're doing so without any solid basis for expecting to get much of it back and without making fundamental changes to prevent a repetition. But if you're like me, you also aren't 100 percent certain how a credit default swap works with a cubed collateralized debt obligation, much less whether such a monstrosity needs to be eliminated or reformed. What to do?

Flyers to take to teabag rallies:

Large jpg. PDF. Word. Old Word.

By Dave Lindorff

The accounting profession might seem like the last place that you’d
find serious political hanky-panky going on, and it’s probably not on
very many people’s A-list of fun subjects to read about, but the
Financial Accounting Standards Board, a quasi-governmental body that
has statutory authority to regulate and establish the rules by which
public companies, including banks, do their books, has just caved in to
pressure from those banks and from the large number of members of
Congress who pocket huge piles of campaign swag and perks from those
banks and other public companies, and gravely undermined the integrity
of corporate balance sheets.

By Dave Lindorff

For years, advocates of open government, mostly on the left, but
also on the right, have railed against the growing secrecy of the US
government. But the focus, particularly of left critics, has been on
the Intelligence budget, a $40+ billion “black box” that is completely
protected from public and even congressional scrutiny, and on large
swaths of the Pentagon budget, which are kept hidden allegedly for
“national security” reasons.

For the most part, the American public has adopted an ovine
attitude towards such secrecy, assuming that the “government knows
best.”

Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the 5-member TARP oversight committee, told the Senate Banking Committee that Hank Paulson paid banks too much for their worthless troubled assets last fall. How much too much?

Treasury paid $254 billion for assets worth approximately $176 billion, a shortfall of $78 billion.

In other words, Hank Paulson and George Bush stole $78 billion from taxpayers to directly enrich the banksters. When will the prosecutions begin, and when will we get the stolen loot back?

By Dave Lindorff

The real cost of the Bush Administration’s trillion-dollar bailout
of Wall Street is becoming painfully apparent as the incoming Obama
administration attempts desperately to make a case for its own
$800-billion economic stimulus package, while warning about “trillion
dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.”

To be honest, Obama, you lost me when you voted for the PATRIOT Act reauthorization in 2006. You lost me again when you voted for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amendment in 2008. And you lost me every single time you voted for yet more war funding.

Don't even get me started on your vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

I cast a ballot for you in November, but I just can't share in this moment of collective euphoria over your election.

So, if your transition team really wants feedback on "where President-Elect Obama should lead this country," here's a Top Five list: