Will the GOP continue touting the failed policies of the past in 2012?

[Guns Guns Guns]

GOP = Greedy One Percenters, aptly represented by the "conservatives" on the right who think the key to prosperity is still more tax cuts for the super rich....


You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police.


You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have.


You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck.


And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.


And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.


The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters.


The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.


An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...age-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hej0DtEA

 

[The Dude]

Will you have a post in 2012 not representative of a low class wage earner 100 percent far left?

 

[Guns Guns Guns]

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks?


Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done.


Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break?


Guys like Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.


Some of these people take that idea a step further.


J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him.


What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.



And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he helped orchestrate a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns.



You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout.



Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?



Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.


Hmm.


Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...age-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hekQO8Yx

 

[Guns Guns Guns]

Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.


That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.


Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill.


As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.


Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County?


Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?



Doubtful.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...age-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hepgGC9W

 

[Guns Guns Guns]

People like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country.


They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.


Just look at how banks like Chase behaved in Greece, for example.


Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” countries like Greece and Italy mask their debt problems for years by selling a similar series of swaps to those governments.


The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs (who were also major purveyors of those swap deals) to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.


In other words, banks like Chase and Goldman knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.


Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?


Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors.


At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes.


Millions more will be ruined financially.


But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people?


Do they have any skin in that game?


Of course not.


We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...age-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1heq9zKDJ