I'm just a wee bit perturbed, that's all. That's all. This is a rant, but it has all the links in it to get you just as pissed off as I am. It's very Taibbian, and I will admit I don't agree with everything his latest analysis of the financial system's collapse says. I'll get to that later. But I'm also cheezed I don't know enough to believe that he's wrong about the President's upcoming cap-n-trade plan, which is the biggest "bombshell" of his article, according to him, and has the same crude populist implications as Sarah Palin's latest Flop ed (sic) in the Washington Post this week. And these theories all converge with the Ayn Randian stylings of none other than the fine congressman from TX-14. Ron Paul. Who I would never support. So, yeah. I'm a little sore. The Congressional Budget Office can sit on it. And it all comes together over the jump.
I just want to start off by saying Thanks Matt!! Thanks for getting me into this wonderful head space.
Going back a little bit down memory lane, all the way to 2 weeks ago, there were a lot of concepts in Taibbi's Rolling Stone article, the Great American Bubble Machine, that were hard to stomach, fathom, and generally emotionally work through. It made you wonder how this former pro European basketball player, sportswriter, and Russian dissident press-member got the scoop on us. And the part about last summer's oil hike is colorful, to say the least. But there was one section that was impossible to argue with, unless Taibbi was outright lying. Along with this video courtesy of The Nation. Basically, the thesis is that the Federal reserve has handed out over 8.7 trillion of our money since last October alone, and we're not even allowed to ask who it went to. In fact no one, including Barack Obama, knows where it went. Because it's a secret society. Made of bankers and lizard people. As the video makes quite clear, this is problematic politically for Obama, because he wants to give reserve full regulatory powers to restructure the financial industry.
So, yeah, Mr. President, Mr. Summers, I'm a little concerned.
Then we find out about this effort by the democrats in Congress, diaried here to kill the legislation to find out where that money went. No doubt with the President's support. Having just seen the video above 24 hours prior to this happening, yeah.
You could say I'm a little bit ashamed to be a democrat.
Proud of Bernie Sanders, though. If he agrees with Ron Paul on this one, it must be bigger than any political party.
And that's Taibbi's real thesis about Goldman Sachs (who we now know staff the New York And Washington federal reserve(s), sometimes with their currently employed Managers. From the Rolling Stone piece
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflictofinterest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bankholding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer.
By the way, I gotta say how I just love that he organized that article so neatly into Five nice little bubbles. It makes it so easy to go back and pull up these delicious little nuggets of political fire and brimstone.
Then we find out about the record profits Goldman made this past year. This right after we're still slapping ourselves back to reality over the news that Goldman may or may not be front running the electronic stock market, which would help explain how a record 2/3 of their trading days this quarter have been 100million-plus days. Right? Right.
Today, Matt finally weighs in on his blog. here's the money quote:
So what does this Goldman profit number mean? This is the final evidence that the bailouts were a political decision to use the power of the state to redirect society’s resources upward, on a grand scale. It was a selective rescue of a small group of chortling jerks who must be laughing all the way to the Hamptons every weekend about how they fleeced all of us at the very moment the game should have been up for all of them.
Is he just a republican shill or a wingnut Ron Paul supporter? I submit no, he's just a little bit pissed off is all. And never cynical. Me neither.
Update Basically what his article says is see I told you so. And here's a little extra cynicism with a hint of optimism for the gluttons for utopian daydreams like functional health care.
Update #2! Update #2! As promised, I refute the theory behind bubble number three with this succinct peice from Paul Krugman's Blog. In addition to the lack of inventories argument he makes, the reason we know that the wild speculation last summer was not so much because of any one company like Goldman, but other things is as follows: like world supply being equal to world demand at 87 million barrels/day, right around the time of Hurricane Katrina, which hit oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico hard as you know, causing not only supplier panic but investor possibilities if you were a hedge fund and you had just been granted special permission by the CFTC to speculate on physical commodities. So Taibbi is only half right on that one. And I'm not just some yes man of his, anymore than he's a yes man of Ron Paul's. Just so we're clear.
Update 3 *cough Marxism
Update 4 Fine, here's a little bit of sunshine in our otherwise drab, meaningless little constituent lives. Looks like the AMA might help us force congress to tax the rich for Health care. Let's hope it's not a poison pill in sheep's clothing.
Update #5!!!
Thank you Al Franken. I think Al knows we needed some sleep enhancement.