Get mad as hell!

From a Rolling Stone article that should be required reading:

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

...

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

This is OUR MONEY.

Wait, no. This WAS our money.

It bears repeating

AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. From Andrew Sullivan:

Just to recap: the last president believed that he had the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth amendments, he had the power to seize anyone in the US or world, disappear and torture them, and ordered his legal goons to come up with patently absurd legal rationales for all of it. And much of official Washington carried on as normal - and those of us who actually stood up and opposed this were regarded as "hysterics".

Something is rotten in a country where this can happen with such impunity - and when, even now, highly regarded and respected journalists and commentators simply move on or roll their eyes or sigh world-weary sighs.

What we just lived through was an attack on the Constitution of the United States, conducted by the president and vice-president and an array of apparatchiks.The theory undergirding it renders the entire constitution subject to one man's prerogative. The conservative blogosphere - who resolutely ignored this in deference to their Caesar - now bleats about Obama's alleged threat to the constitution!

The one thing this reveals is the need for more information. The Obama administration did us a favor by releasing these memos. Release more. An Accountability Commission needs to get to work as soon as possible so that we can at least know what was done to the Constitution in the name of "security."Sunlight,please. More of it. The precedents that have been set are deeply dangerous to the survival of core American liberties. And if there were a conservative movement worthy of its name, it would be in the vanguard.

Source/My emphasis.

Why is it difficult to get up in arms about this? Because we're worried about the economy and all the other stuff that's going on right now?

I'm surprised there aren't protests in D.C. and Texas calling for W's head.

This makes sense...

I'll be posting a link later that's relevant to this link. In the 3rd segment, John Stewart is interviewing Joe Nocera of the NYT. Joe wrote an article about AIG, apparently--the reason AIG is in trouble is because, in addition to bad investments, it INSURED and RATED the COD's. There sure are a lot of layers to the financial markets, and it makes you wonder why some of these shenanigans are allowed.

The Credit Bubble Pops

In an effort to understand the economy's decline in the last ~8 months, I'm posting links to articles are stories that help clarify matters. Here's one key I've heard about - a risk-assement equation used by many investors on Wall Street. They used this and nothing else, apparently, even when the academic who developed it said, in effect, "It's in beta!"

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/03/036223