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Has it started? Waiting for the beginning of the absolute end:
Some real history follows in the wake of the dance of death we recently witnessed among the MSM that the anniversary of the birth of the worst President ever (no, not Dumbya (hard to believe as that may seem)) caused. Yes, Reagan not only prepared the ground for Dumbya's ultimate destruction of the U.S. economy at the hands of the corporatocracy's lobbyists, but he led the way also in the murder of millions of innocents in the 80's (and then the repercussions from those glorious days which added even more hard-to-believe numbers of deaths in the 90's and 00's). Yep. Hooray for Rayguns! (Faux News galore)NY Rep. Christopher Lee abruptly resigns (AP)
A New York congressman abruptly resigned his seat Wednesday, saying he was quitting because he regretted actions that have hurt his family and others.
Reagan Led America Into the Death of Main Street and Middle America While He Championed Their Glory
February 07, 2011 Reagan led America into the death of Main Street while he championed its glory.
He did that by acting the role of the proud defender of "American exceptionalism" and "moral values," while he implemented a policy and mindset that led to the economic decline of "middle America" - and championed death squads and brutal dictatorships abroad.
But his most detrimental accomplishment was ushering in the age of governance by global corporations - who have an allegiance only to profits and manufacturing at the lowest cost (overseas), not to jobs or decent pay in the United States.
Yesterday, BuzzFlash wrote about how this destructive change in America's political prism was exemplified by GE's launching of Reagan's political career, and how GE is still benefiting in the Obama White House.
Journalist David Lindorff trenchantly analyzes how GE's investment in Reagan is still paying off - in the Obama administration - with the cynical appointment of GE honcho Jeffrey Immelt as "jobs czar":
Between 2005 and 2009, according to GE's own 10-K financial reports, the company shed jobs in the US so fast, and added them abroad so fast, that the US employee share of GE's total workforce dropped from 51 percent to 44 percent, a process of job destruction that has continued apace since then. In 2009 and 2010, according to information compiled by the United Electrical Workers (UE), GE closed down 29 manufacturing plants in North America, 28 of them in the US and one in Canada . . . . Meanwhile, Immelt recently told Forbes magazine about his company's plans for expanding jobs ... in India.
It gets worse. GE is a master at using offshore tax schemes to avoid paying its fair share to the help cover for the costs of running America. As Lindorff documents:
The company also likes the idea of lower corporate taxes (for the years 2007 to 2009, according to Citizens for Tax Justice's Bob McIntyre, Immelt's GE managed to finagle a tax rate of -14.1%, which is to say the government gave the company an extra 14.1% over and above its profits!), and of course all kinds of tax incentives aimed at increasing hiring, though these measures, while helping corporate bottom lines, have demonstrably failed to lead to significant job creation.
GE also opposes measures that would punish companies for outsourcing production, or that would make it harder for it to bring in high-skilled workers from abroad to replace educated but higher-paid American workers.
In short, it is now politically acceptable for a Democratic president to appoint a chief adviser on job creation whose major skill set is closing American plants, sending jobs overseas, and not only avoiding his company (GE) from paying taxes, but actually ending up with a US government subsidy.
On the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birthday, this is his legacy. The myth of "morning in America" will endure in Republican fundraisers and fawning corporate media coverage, but the facts speak for themselves - and they are a damning indictment.
Stolen from that Vagabond Scholar with vast gratitude (and, please pardon me, a little editing) - I, of course, wouldn't steal it except it perfectly complements the emphasis of today's essay.
In American politics today, there are five circles of conservative hell. Unlike those in Dante's Inferno, these are primarily states of pain and suffering that conservatives seek to impose on others in this earthly world - or places of torment where they drag their fellow Americans for company. After all, there's no problem in the country that's not made sweeter by domineering spite!Note that these are "conservative" movements, not solely Republican, since the conservative Democrats, the Blue Dogs, are indisputably unrepentant scumbags. That said, it's "movement conservatism" that really excels at toxicity and dumb, destructive authoritarianism.
Please read it all as it's brilliantly written and a precise guide to most of the evil present in our country's leadership today. A knowledge of history is the only credible guide to properly understanding our world and its incredible unbelievably huge problems stemming from past terrible decisions on the part of our "leadership" (over the cliff).
Want to know all the inside reasons why Kissinger should be in danger of prosecution now (as well as all the other war criminals)? Please view this most important piece of history if you have any time at all - it clears up a lot of the compromised-reporting fog, and you've got to ask yourself at least now and then "What does Kissinger Associates really do?" (Emphasis marks and some editing inserted - Ed.)
A Testimony To What Evil Can Do In The World "Lucky" Henry Kissinger?"He cultivated the Press before anyone even knew it was possible to do." - Barbara Howar.
His history of supporting Pinochet's coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, and his reign of terror for 17 years (and being instrumental in the murder of Salvador Allende with CIA-paid assassins ($250,000-payoffs in rubber bands) is documented precisely (as well as the later campaign contributions of ITT and Pepsi-Cola to the Nixon campaign).
Some informed conversation about how these known facts were treated by the Church Committee of 1975 is also included. (And you thought that Nixon was only thinking of Watergate that year. A lawsuit brought against Henry Kissinger for his part in the murders of innocents in Chile was filed on the morning of September 11, 2001, which I'm sure we all heard about.)
Kissinger was instrumental in the financial support of Lon Nol (of the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields) in Cambodia (merely an illegal sideshow to the real war) against the Vietnamese, ultimately leading to the murder of millions of Cambodians who were seen by Nol's murderous thugs as having any involvement in these affairs (creating 10,000+ American soldier's deaths) and the demonstration Christmas bombing ("mass murder from the sky") which was intended as proof positive to the South Vietnamese that Americans would continue to support them after their disengagement (and received exactly the same deal that had been offered before the Election of 1968).
And how Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (the Vietnamese counterpart) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (don't miss Belushi doing the Kissinger role on Saturday Night Live!). And how the hitting of civilians was a strategic goal of Kissinger's plan.
Also why peace talks always collapse and what politicians have benefitted in the past. Seymour Hersh wrote a book, The Price of Power, which documents most of what is contained in the video below. A mixed-emotion Christopher Hitchens wrote a book (on) . . . Henry Kissinger and reports on events in the video.
Don't forget who ran the CIA after Nixon's resignation. (See Russ Baker's Family of Secrets.) Also be sure to view his service to Gerald Ford's (remember Ford's regrets? No?) invasion of Indonesia (massacre of East Timor (like Cambodia's) by Suharto's Kissinger-supported troops - see Greg Shackleton, reporter killed in East Timor).
And no one can access Kissinger's public (government-paid) papers until five years after his death. I understand that psychopaths have no problems with living with their actions.
And don't miss two of the most enlightening comments ever on an article:John:Back in 1982 to 1985, I worked as an Intel analyst for the US government with an SCI clearance. I had an older friend who proofed all studies made by our division before being sent up the chain. This fellow passed away a couple of years ago in FL after reaching his 80's. He was an Army Captain during WWII associated with the OSS toward the end of the war, and was tasked to find all the scientists and engineers in northern Germany where ever they could be found at that time to get them out of Germany before the Russians got to them first.
We ate lunch together most days. He told me that he had run across a German missile plant that was filled with scientists and engineers. He called Frankfurt to let them know of his find and to arrange for their transport out of the area because the Russians were not far from finding the same location themselves.
When he called down to the OSS office in Frankfurt he talked to a Sergeant Henry Kissinger. Yep, same Kissinger with the broken accent and voice. Kissinger told him he'd take care of it and get them out of there.
One day passed by and no action. He called back again and Kissinger told the Capt. that he was working on it. The second day the Russians got to them in force and all those scientists and engineers ended up back in Russia.
My friend told me that at that time Kissinger was suspected of being a double-agent for the Soviets. My question to him was how in the world Kissinger ever make it from that position to where he has been in all the previous administrations, and is still able to stick his nose into things even to this day.
I guess it is the same reason why as the Bush "Family of Secrets" story plays out too. It seems to me that the people literally being lynched up over the last century have been the wrong individuals. Put Noriega in, take him out. Put Saddam in, take him out. Use them for nefarious purposes, and take them out before they blow the cover on those who put them in, and why they were put in.
Daylightbroad:
It is interesting to note that among Henry Kissinger's protégés was Paul Bremer, President Bush's disastrous head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Bremer was an assistant to Henry Kissinger from 1972 -76. In 1981 he was promoted to Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Alexander Haig. Bremer retired from the Foreign Service in 1989 and became managing director at Kissinger and Associates, where he remains today. Scary.
9/11 solved so many problems, didn't it? But who benefitted most? (Not that it matters as the REthugs have proved that the taxpayers are willing to pay almost any amount in taxes to make it up.)
The US Government Can't Account For Billions Spent In AfghanistanKandahar City
In its bid to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s teeming population, the United States has spent more than $55 billion to rebuild and bolster the war-ravaged country. That money was meant to cover everything from the construction of government buildings and economic development projects to the salaries of U.S. government employees working closely with Afghans. Yet no one can say with any authority or precision how that money was spent and who profited from it.
Most of the funds were funneled to a vast array of U.S. and foreign contractors. But according to a recent audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), there is no way of knowing whether the money went for the intended purposes.
“The audit shows that navigating the confusing labyrinth of government contracting is difficult, at best,” SIGAR said in releasing the audit. “USAID, the State Department and the Pentagon are unable to readily report on how much money they spend on contracting for reconstruction activities in Afghanistan.” One large part of the problem is that the United States is not demanding accountability for outgoing funds from U.S. companies which have little incentive to fully disclose where the U.S. money is going.
Add to this the many Afghan companies that have minimal accounting capabilities and you have a recipe for a massive misappropriation of funds. The money flows from Washington to Afghanistan, with little oversight and accountability, and at every step along the way someone else takes a cut.
“There’s no mechanism to track where this money is going,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates government corruption. “Security problems persist and this money doesn’t seem to be accomplishing a real mission.”
As staggering amounts of U.S. tax dollars virtually vanish down a black hole, many of the government projects designed to foster improved relations with the Afghan people and undermine the appeal of the Taliban have fallen far behind schedule or simply aren’t completed.
In October, SIGAR found that six Afghan National Police buildings were so poorly built that they are unusable. They were constructed at a cost of $5 million by Basirat Construction, an Afghan construction company.
Another report found that the United States has spent nearly $200 million on Afghan security service buildings that cannot be used. SIGAR also found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) couldn’t account for nearly $18 billion that was paid to some 7,000 U.S. and Afghan contractors for development projects.
Afghan contractors often pay kickbacks to local warlords, like Ahmad Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and the so-called “King of Kandahar.” Their actions often undermine the work of the coalition.
Botched construction projects aren’t the only U.S. failures. Earlier this summer, coalition forces cleared Malajat, a longstanding Taliban stronghold in the eastern flatlands just outside of Kandahar City. But after they were forced out in September, many of the residents of Malajat remained sympathetic to the Taliban’s cause. In an effort to project provincial and national authority and strengthen Afghan infrastructure, Canada’s Commander's Emergency Response Program and the USAID ordered the construction of four government buildings in Malajat where local residents could meet with government officials to air grievances. The complex was meant to symbolically supplant Taliban power and influence.
In accordance with U.S. General David Petraeus’ plan to expand contracting awards to Afghan firms, Afghan companies were hired late in September. The contractors then hired Afghan subcontractors to begin construction in the shadow of a fortress built by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C. Since then, however, little work has been done and the project has fallen behind schedule. As of early November, Afghans earning about a dollar a day had only dug holes for the foundation of the building complex, which was optimistically scheduled to be completed by July.
Work Habits, Cultural Mandates
Most Afghans do little work in the winter months. Despite numerous inquiries, U.S. and Canadian officials could not estimate the cost of the project.
. . . Projects like the Malajat government building are essential to keeping the Taliban out once the fighting season resumes next spring, especially as the U.S. strategy review has shown tenuous progress here. But there is little confidence among soldiers and development workers that this project will be completed in time. “We can pour as much money as we want into this and it’s not getting done by the spring,” said an official with the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (KPRT), a civilian and Canadian-led organization jointly operated with the United States. “These people [Afghan contractors] have no accountability.”
Thomas Ford, a spokesman for the KPRT project, said he could not reveal the identities of Afghan contractors involved because of security concerns. He also said he did “not have the exact cost figures in front of [him]”and declined to provide them.
Canadian forces, along with KPRT, are scheduled to leave next summer. The United States is expected to assume sole responsibility for their projects. Petraeus, commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. Forces Afghanistan, acknowledged in a September memorandum that the contracting process in Afghanistan has been deeply flawed for years and needed to be changed if the Afghan war is to be won.
. . . As a result of U.S. pressure, the Afghan government recently arrested American Roy Carver, CEO of Red Sea Engineers and Constructors, a company that has received $500 million in Pentagon contracts to construct buildings at U.S. bases. Carver is charged with not paying his Afghan subcontractors. Amey, of the Project on Government Oversight, said the situation in Afghanistan mirrors the U.S. experience in Iraq: Security concerns made it difficult for foreign contractors to work on the battlefield, forcing reliance on local contractors with little accountability.
It’s an endless cycle of frustration and failure. “It seems as if there wasn’t a lessons-learned approach carrying into Afghanistan, which is not to waste federal taxpayer dollars on contracting projects like this,” Amey said in an interview with The Fiscal Times. “We can build an embassy and things can work around that, but what are we doing around the rest of country? If our money is going to security and the rest is going to impractical projects that aren’t being completed, then the government has to reevaluate the model."
So, will the action taken on the bankster baby fraudulent mortgage front signal the beginning of the end? As if it hadn't happened already. Just remember that every time you hear the rightwingnutters yell "Socialism" (or "Communism"), what they really mean is "PRIVATIZATION!" And, please, don't forget how "clueless" Dumbya seemed during the Fannie/Freddie looting by his own people.
From Mark Crispin Miller's informed commentary:
"Only two short years after Wall Street's fraud and gress brought down the world's economy,*a Beltway think tank is proposing to put taxpayers on the hook for mortgages written and administered by the same corporate miscreants.
And that's the/Democratic/ proposal. The Republicans want to double down on a failed strategy of 'privatizing' government mortgage financing, while at the same time cutting back on regulation and oversight* * * "... If we don't see stronger proposals then these in the coming months, this will be remembered as ... the beginning of the end, the moment when the next wave of privatization began and the way was paved for a collapse that may be even greater than the one we're* *in today."* Fannie's Scandalized, Freddie's Dead - And The Next Financial Meltdown May Have Already Started By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Here's an idea: Let's give hundreds of billions of dollars in government-backed guarantees to private banks so they can make a fortune writing mortgages without any risk to themselves. Hey, what could go wrong? The FCIC's recent report illustrated an important lesson from the economic meltdown: Privatization, not big government, ruined Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Running a government program like a private corporation leads to the worst excesses of executive self-indulgence. Fannie and Freddie didn't bring down the economy, as some have claimed, but they were destroyed by the same privatize-and-deregulate philosophy that led to the crisis. Now we're learning that Washington may be preparing to take that destructive philosophy even further. Proposals to "reform" Fannie and Freddie by privatizing them even more aren't just bad, dangerous ideas. Worse, they suggest that we're returning to the blind and mistaken ideologies of the past. If that's true, then it's only a matter of time until the next meltdown comes. Doomsday
Mark your calendars. This may be remembered as the week our next financial crisis began, the moment when the Greenspan Republicans and Rubin Democrats who ruined the economy the last time around regained control ... and the cycle began all over again.
Only two short years after Wall Street's fraud and greed brought down the world's economy, a Beltway think tank is proposing to put taxpayers on the hook for mortgages written and administered by the same corporate miscreants.
And that's the Democratic proposal. The Republicans want to double down on a failed strategy of "privatizing" government mortgage financing, while at the same time cutting back on regulation and oversight. It all boils down to the same thing: bringing back the same sybaritic, taxpayer-backed greedfest that 's already shattered the economy more than once.
Fannie and Freddie are "government-sponsored enterprises," or "GSEs." But ideologues have learned exactly the wrong lesson from the Great Recession. It was the "E" part of these companies, not the "G" part, that caused the problem. The real lesson is that it's a mistake to mix government programs with private-sector-style get-rich-quick incentives. The GSEs failed because they treated their Federal mandate as if it was the key to Fort Knox.
If the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wants to publicize its work more, maybe it should set up a tabloid website like The Smoking Gun, or pitch a TV tell-all scandal show about badly-behaved executives ("VH1: Behind the Mortgage").
Their first episode could feature Daniel Mudd, the former Fannie Mae CEO who bragged that he wrote his own rules with regulators and boasted that "we always won, we took no prisoners." Regulators later concluded that Mudd ran a company with an "arrogant and unethical corporate culture, where Fannie Mae employees manipulated accounting and earnings to trigger bonuses for senior executives."
Mudd ran the company with so much materialistic self-absorption that he might have been starring in an 80's hair-metal video (presumably without Tawny Kitaen on the hood of a Jaguar, but who knows?) His tenure at Fannie was marked by lying, cheating, bullying, and the reckless pursuit of a fast buck. But then, why wouldn't it be? He was compensated like a private-sector executive, but backed by government authority and coddled with taxpayer guarantees. It was all upside, baby, and Mudd liked his upside.
Regulators found that Mudd and his colleagues "manipulated accounting" so that they could keep paying themselves huge bonuses, even as they ran what one observer called "the worst-run financial institution" he had seen in thirty years as a regulator. It worked, too.
Mudd made $65 million between 2000 and 2008. (Hmm ... "manipulated accounting" . . . is that legal?)
Conservatives should be just as outraged as progressives. Executives like Mudd didn't build their businesses. They didn't even manage them competently. They took a free ride with government backing, yet paid themselves as if they were captains of industry. How did this perverse situation develop?
Freddie's Dead (Fannie, too)
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going to die, at least in their present form, as victims of over-indulgence. But they didn't start that way. Fannie Mae was created in 1938 and functioned smoothly for thirty years, all through the postwar housing boom. It was turned into a separate government-sponsored enterprise in 1968 in order to take its large debts off the Federal balance sheet, and Freddie Mac was created shortly afterward (to create "competition").
They're creatures of privatization, and they were encouraged to bring "free market" aggression to their mission.
And man, did they. As FCIC testimony revealed, "The "Fannie and Freddie political machine resisted any meaningful regulation using highly improper tactics ... OFHEO (their regulatory overseer) was constantly subjected to malicious political attacks and efforts of intimidation."
The companies faced a turning point in 2005, when the greed-addled private market was rushing into subprime mortgages and other high-risk loans. A government-sponsored corporation that was true to its mission wouldn't have followed the lemmings, but privatization fever had taken hold.
As a Fannie Mae executive told his colleagues back then: "We face two stark choices: stay the course [or] meet the market where the market is." Ill-advised by architects of calamity like Citibank, they jumped in with both feet despite dire warnings from people inside the organization.
Risk and Reward
Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin both told the FCIC that better corporate risk management will help prevent the next financial crisis. The Fannie Mae story proves how naive that belief is.
Like many financial executives, Mudd's short-term wealth depended on writing more business, whatever the risk. So he humiliated, abused, and ignored Chief Risk Officer Enrico Dallevecchia when Dallevechia warned him of the dangers of writing substandard business. The frustrated Risk Officer finally wrote a memo to Mudd which said that Fannie had "one of the weakest control processes" he had "ever witnessed in his career," and that he was "upset" that he hadn't even known (that) the company was taking on more risk until he saw the announcement. A bellicose Mudd told Dellavecchia to "address it (to him) man to man" and "face to face," rather than by email.
CFO Robert Levin bullied the company's chief analyst in a similar way when he was told that the company wasn't charging enough for its Alt-A mortgages. That's called "buying business," and it should never happen at a government-sponsored enterprise. It means that an enterprise created to complement the private sector is competing with it instead.
Mudd and Levin did what many executives would do in a similar situation: They lowered their underwriting standards, wrote a lot of bad mortgages, and walked away as rich men.
Mudd now lives comfortably in Connecticut with $80 million in earnings, thanks to the American taxpayer, and is a director for an investment fund (Fortress Investment Group - a name we're providing as a public service to unwary investors).
Meltdown II: The Sequel
Arguments over Fannie and Freddie are usually a proxy for ideological differences about the role of government. Conservatives who blame Fannie and Freddie for the meltdown (which they didn't cause but certainly made worse) want to prove that government intervention in the economy is a bad idea. But this isn't a battle between right and left as much as it is between what works and what doesn't.
We've now seen what happens when American-style bankers are given government-backed guarantees and Goldman Sachs-style bonuses. Privatizing to Wall Street is like giving your car keys to a pickpocket.
Nevertheless, Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman Scott Garrett is holding a hearing today on "reforming" Fannie and Freddie, and his witness list contains four names: someone from an anti-government, anti-regulation think tank that's funded by Citibank, the Koch Brothers, Chase, and American Express, along with a variety of oil refiners and pharmaceutical companies; someone from another anti-government group which has received funding from Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, and the California Realtors Association; someone from a conservative think tank funded by Prudential and American Express, among others; and a Democrat . . . from the Center for American Progress, the group that wrote the Democratic "privatize Fannie and Freddie" proposal. In other words, the hearings have been stacked in the banks' favor.
Meanwhile, the Administration's plan for reforming Fannie and Freddie is overdue, but the Center for American Progress is known to be close to the White House.
If that means that its proposal is a preview of Administration thinking, we've got a big problem.
We're told that the White House plan will be released Friday and that it will include three options. One option would have the government withdraw entirely from the mortgage market, but that's likely to be politically infeasible. Neither party wants to explain to voters why they can't get home loans and the price of their house has plummeted. And while specifics weren't provided for the other two, the Wall Street Journal reports that the others would "create a way for the government to backstop part of the secondary mortgage market" like Fannie and Freddie, but gave no specifics.
The Journal also reports that "top administration officials have publicly discussed the merits of a limited but explicit federal guarantee of securities backed by certain types of mortgages," adding: "The housing and banking industries have advanced proposals arguing that such a guarantee is needed to maintain a healthy market, particularly for long-term, fixed-rate loans that remain a keystone of U.S. housing."
The short version: There will be one proposal that's politically impossible, and two others that give banking and real estate lobbyists what they want. Care to bet which one won't make it through Congress?
Yves Smith gave the CAP proposal the once-over, under the heading "Wall Street Co-Opting Nominally Liberal Think Tanks," but our one-sentence summary of their proposal is this: They want to dismantle Fannie and Freddie and let private banks administer their programs backed by by government guarantees. And don't worry, says CAP. Our "chartered mortgage institutions," though "fully private," will have to be "fully transparent" and follow government rules. (They would never, never "manipulate accounting," would they?)
The End
Proposals like CAP's would make Fannie and Freddie's private-sector successors a microcosm for the entire economy under the failed policies of Democrats like Clinton, Rubin, and Summers, as well as Republicans like Greenspan and ... well, all of them.
Executives at these financial institutions would be motivated to cook the books and sell bad mortgages while taking advantage of taxpayer guarantees to consolidate their already too-big-to-fail institutions.
And they'd be recruited from a Wall Street cohort with a documented record of deception and criminality. All of CAP's lofty and well-stated goals are undermined by the identify of the folks doing the lending. As for the Republicans, they don't even bother stating lofty goals.
The government has to work out a way to unwind itself from the mortgage market. The Administration has a proposal to lower the size of mortgages it will guarantee, and that's a good first step. But the previews of their overall proposals seem uninspired and weak, if not outright capitulation to Wall Street's whims and desires. And even capitulation is too mild for the Republicans, who appear to be setting the stage for fiscal anarchy and plunder.
The problem is much bigger than Fannie and Freddie. This real danger is that this could be a turning point, a return to the failed ways of the past. If we don't see stronger proposals than these in the coming months, this will be remembered as the week that the destructive policies of the Greenspan/Rubin crowd came back from the dead. It will be recalled as the beginning of the end, the moment when the next wave of privatization began and the way was paved for a collapse that may be even greater than the one we're in today. (This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project.) _____________________
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