By Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their
heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that
unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a
record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists
had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a
percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are
a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall
economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring
waiting until a recovery is well underway.

By David Swanson

Michael Moore's movie motivated me to bring this out. Here's a theme song for Capitalism that I wrote at the time of Paulson's Plunder. Here it is sung by Timbrewolf:

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?

By Dave Lindorff

Six months after the failed Bush administration effort to "rescue"
the US financial system, and after two months of failed efforts by his
own new administration, at an expense to the American public of several
trillion dollars and counting, the Obama administration is announcing
plans to blow another $1 trillion in a massive taxpayer giveaway to
investors who will be subsidized in an effort to get them to buy the
so-called toxic assets on the books of the nation's biggest banks.

The problem with this plan is that its goal--getting these zombie banks to start lending again--is not going to work.

I received this link from my cousin in England. Appears to have
generated a lot of controversy over there for the Christmas season.
With only 5 days left until Christmas let's get the ball rolling here -
better late than never.

This is a take off on the Christmas time song of "Feed the World."

Click to view: http://www.bleedtheworld.com/

By Dave Lindorff

A brief conversation I had earlier this week with a car dealership
executive while standing in a post office line demonstrated simply both
why the bank deregulation and consolidation process of the past two
decades has been a screw job for ordinary people, and why the
Washington bailout has been both a taxpayer rip-off and a failure (if
it was even intended to work!).

I was chatting with the guy standing behind me who works at one of
the 14 dealerships in a Philadelphia-area regional family-owned chain
of GM dealerships called Bergey’s. Noting that a number of big dealers
like Knopf (a Chrysler Dealer) and McGarrity’s (Ford) had been closing,
I asked this Bergey’s manager if the problem was that the banks had
frozen lending, making it hard for people to buy new cars.

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will
vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle
involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it
will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were
going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and
supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed,
a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high
gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that
reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car
market wither.