kleptocracy

Journalists in the service of Pete Peterson

January 16, 2013 — Each spring since 2010, some of Washington’s A-list politicians assemble in the capital to submit to questions from some of the media’s A-list journalists on the future of the federal fiscal policy.

Read below the fold...

The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.

--The Lord Chancellor, Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan

[Welcome, 4closureFraud readers! Welcome FDL readers! --lambert]

We can look at the foreclosure crisis as the pre-emininent law enforcement crisis of our time: Elite impunity for crimes committed and still being committed by lenders and servicers (“banksters”) on a massive scale. We can also look the foreclosure crsis as an issue of jurisprudence, where a revolutionary oligarchy seeks to change the nature of law itself.

Let’s start with “Code is law,” a terrific meme successfully propagated by Lawrence Lessig in the '90s. From The Industry Standard: Read below the fold...

The claim of Austrian school economists that "there is no macroeconomics" because the political-economic system at the macro level is explainable in terms of the aggregated attributes and activities of political-economic agents at the micro-level of that system is false, silly, and ignores the findings of many other sciences! That's because macro-level behavior includes structural and holistic properties of these systems that are not explainable by individual level phenomena or aggregations of them. Read below the fold...

John Carney commented on a post by David Brooks and a follow-up by Randy Wray. Brooks says that a tax credit is essentially the same as Government spending and used an example from David Bradford, a Princeton economist, of the Pentagon wanting to acquire a new plane and paying for it with a tax credit.

Randy comments on the idea this way: Read below the fold...

Fool us once blame you. Fool us twice and then again and again and again?

Obama is being credited due to the usual bureaucratic numbers twisting that though he hasn’t been able to increase jobs, he has at least arrested job losses. This is profound bullshit.

Hugh has done the real math which deserves a serious read. He has dug into The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September jobs report with its “undercount” and unearthed the real and horrifying dimensions of disemployment in America. He has also explained just how pathetically and grotesquely inadequate Obama’s and the Dem’s faux-emergency solution to the jobs crisis actually is.

Hugh: Read below the fold...

When I survey the economic and political scene, I see parallels between the current kleptocracy and totalitarianism as written about by Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism: Read below the fold...

New York State Dept. of Education Awards $27M No-Bid Contract to Murdoch-Owned Wireless Generation

Reminder, New York has a Democratic Governor. Read below the fold...

So Jared Bernstein has a blog now that he has left the White House. Bernstein was Joe Biden's chief economic adviser. Over at FDL, Marcy Wheeler and David Dayen have both hailed the debut of his blogging career.

Why? Read below the fold...

Check out this transcript from a show run on November 16th of this year:

JIM LEHRER: In the worst-case scenario, the panel says courts could block foreclosures. Banks would be left holding bad mortgage loans that cost them billions of dollars. That in turn would deepen disruption in the housing market.

But, in the best case, the Oversight Panel acknowledges, concerns about mortgage documents may prove to be overblown, a view embraced by the financial industry. This afternoon, executives from two major lenders, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, appeared before the Senate Banking Committee.

Read below the fold...

According to Footnoted, "Even execs worry about health care (sort of)":

The recent weeks brought a flood of quarterly reports as companies on calendar years rushed to file their 10-Qs with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In that welter of documents, one thing stood out: Even executives are worried who’s going to pay for health care.

An example:

Read below the fold...

Last Tuesday, 2 November 2010, was the day the Free and the Brave had pledged to "Re-Elect Nobody" and "throw the bums out" of Washington. Instead, with their woolly heads filled with billions of dollars worth of political propaganda, half-truths and outright lies paid for in no small part by foreign and anonymous corporate donations legalized by the Supreme Court's "Citizens United v. FEC" decision, the American Sheeple voted as programmed and--despite the largely-manufactured dissent and highly-publicized victories of a few billionaire-funded AstroTurf Tea Party candidates--dutifully re-elected the incumbents in 83% of the Senate contests and 86% of all House races. Read below the fold...

I think it is good for a liberal Democrat, like Joe Costello, to make this kind of critique.

“Make no mistake folks, there’s a criminal element atop our financial industry, who operate with both the complicity and culpability of much of our political class.”

I would just point out that it is incomplete. It is not “an element” that is criminally minded and acting. It is the whole shebang. Our financial industry is a criminal enterprise. But it is itself only part of the larger criminal enterprise that is kleptocracy and encompasses all of our elites: financial, political, industrial, governmental, legislative, judicial, academic, lobbyist, military, and media. It is a collaborative effort. All of the checks and balances have been removed or turned to kabuki. Read below the fold...

HOW WE LOST AMERICA :: A Brief History in Ten Points (Linked Version)
Copyright (c) 2010 Bruce Arnold. Republication with attribution permitted. Read below the fold...

Foreclosuregate has focused attention yet again on the scams and frauds of the banks. And with it has come a revisiting of all the other scams and frauds the banks ran, and in most cases are still running, in the housing bubble and its aftermath, in CDOs and CDSs, in the greater world of derivatives, and in markets and the economy generally. But will it last? Will it lead to effective action? I don't think so. For there to be an effective response there needs to be a reasonably complete understanding of the problem. And I don't see that happening. Read below the fold...