Taken Hostage
The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system.
It is a system that remains in place to this day.
A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.
A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.
It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.
A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.
And most stunningly — it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.
~snip~
Why is this? Who does our Government work for? How much longer will we as Americans tolerate it? And what, if anything, can we do about it?
Questions we ask ourselves here all the time. Questions rarely shown asked on the MSM. The answers are too long in coming.
![Project Gutenberg](http://<imgsrc="PG_Button_104x40.gif"width="104"height="40"alt="GoToProjectGutenberg">)
CEPHALOBLOG 
Good interview with Taleb: here
Yes, a year after Lehman we see the same risk taking and same bad behaviors and instruments allowed. Same old, same old and the swan will come out swinging somewhere down the road.
It’s all about the unfettered and excessive risk, corruption and the digitization of the panic reaction.
That was a good interview. I liked the part in the intro where they mention that Taleb thinks banks should be run as a public utility. I agree, especially since bankers aren’t lending out their own hard earned cash which was earned by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps – they are lending out your and my money with some more fiat money the Fed had printed out. There is a need for currency and credit and banks unless we want to go back to the barter system which isn’t a realistic option in this day and age. But we shouldn’t have a few people deciding how much currency and credit is needed and then rigging the system so they can take huge chunks of the cash for themselves. I wouldn’t mind if we had some well paid officials keeping track of the money supply. Maybe they could be paid a few hundred thou or even a couple million to keep things running smoothly, but what we have now is beyond the pale. People are being paid hundreds of millions while not running things smoothly at all and putting everyone at risk except themselves.
I also got a chuckle from the end of the interview:
Another interesting piece from the Globe
Kafka and Eraserhead can make you smarter
Hmmmm. Could the same be said for a liking for psychotropics? :)
It may be true for Kafka or Dali or Magritte, but David Lynch will definitely not make you smarter :P Never could stand that guy for some reason. I think it has to do with him not giving the audience enough credit for being able to figure out what’s going on which is how I felt about Blue Velvet and the one that hammered you over the head with the allusions to the Wizard of Oz that I forget the name of.
Your last line reminded me of a band I haven’t listened to in a long time called “The Big F”. They had the ear and scissors from a Bosch painting on the album cover and a line in one song that said something like:
Here’s a song from them, although not the one with that line in it.
Another new one for me! Thanks.
I think the film you were referring to was Wild at Heart with Laura Dern and Nicholas Cage. I prefer the films of Herzog and Fellini to Lynch myself, but given the context of his work I think he does a pretty good job of illustrating the surreality of America, particularly during Reagan’s 80’s.
Yeah that was the one – Wild at Heart. I got the Oz metaphor he was going for but he kept hammering away at it to the point of having the good witch come down at the end which I thought was a bit much. I only saw Blue Velvet once while in college and I was deeeeeeeeeeeee- runk when I watched it. But even so I remember it being a pretty decent movie until Laura Dern’s character showed up every half hour or so to ask the male lead what was going on. The whole purpose of her character seemed to be just to give an excuse for a plot recap in case people were too dumb to get what was happening. Maybe I should watch that one again and see if my perceptions of it have changed in the last 20 years, but I guess what I’m getting at is I’d prefer a little more subtlety. David Cronenberg is another one who gets raves from the cult film fans that I just don’t like. I thought “Crash” was awful. I’m with you in preferring Herzog, who I could watch all day long. I’ve only seen a couple by Fellini but I liked them as well.
Oh and by the way, kudos on the latest surreal photoshop. Very nice. You could teach David Lynch a few things :)
That is no photoshop. I wish I was that good. That is a real 6 ft Pacific octopus playing with his favorite toy, Mr. Potato Head! Really!
Ha! And I found this video in the comments of that article which our fans of classical music might enjoy:
The Larry Summers economic externality plan for Africa has gone very wrong on the Ivory Coast.
How UK oil company Trafigura tried to cover up African pollution disaster
Disgusting. Do they have pirates on the western coast of Africa too? If so, fuck ’em up pirates.
Looks like the recently released shoe throwing journalist was right to leave the country for a while. Another guy threw a shoe at US troops and was shot dead. Very short article and I couldn’t find anything with more detail, but it does say the now dead man was insulting them before throwing the shoe, so you’d think they’d have had time to size up the situation before opening fire. Must have gotten confused by all the shoe-shaped grenades the Iraqis have been using lately.
Here’s a bit more detail from Reuters
Iraqi man shot by U.S. forces after throwing “shoe”
Tragedy compounded by tragedy. I wish we would leave the Iraqis alone and get out of their country. This story makes me feel so sad.
Good op-ed from one of my favorites who I haven’t heard from in a while – Chris Cooper with Once Again The Animals Were Conscious of A Vague Uneasiness.
Also enjoyed the little bio at the end:
Make that two residents.
“We were desperate for a leader; we got a motivational speaker.”
That was a great read. He ties it all up perfectly and succinctly. A kindred spirit suffering the malaise of the neo-feudal corporatocracy that we call America.
Jeremy Scahill wonders why Obama continues to pay Blackwater millions on the second anniversary of the massacre they committed in Iraq. Difficult to read his description of what happened there two years ago. Even more difficult to understand why this company still exists.
The government plan for carbon offsets explained simply.
Poor wabbit! He should have used one of my rattuses instead. ;)
CROC is right, alright.
Couple of interesting posts from Zerohedge today.
First, this one which argues that the stock markets are rising on hype from cheerleaders alone in the last few months because there is no economic recovery for the vast majority of people.
Second is the short, mind numbing post where some financial type or another seems to think that potential bankruptcy is now a good reason to invest in a company.
More stupid from republicans- Dana Rohrabacher wonders why Iraqis aren’t more grateful.
In this era of shoes – flinging, flying, shot, and dropping – there are two more in process of explosively hitting the fan in slow motion that belie the premature verdentjaculations of the officialdom of government and their bankster masters.
Wells commercial real estate ticking time bomb and coming cre woes
and
“Option” mortgages to explode, officials warn
Slow motion detonation of dropping shoes. Sounds rather recession inducing if not outright depression conducive. And yet the risky business behaviors goes on and on all the while cheered by the pirates and technocrats.
Amazing how so many can have their heads in the sand and continue cheerleading. But the cheerleading seems to be the only way the banksters can find new sheep to fleece.
Here’s another kind of funny real estate related piece on the situation in one Florida over-development and attempts by voters to stop the developers from their continuing stupidity: The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies .
The price being paid by the workers for the cheap technology we use to text and twitter. Or – the Larry Summers externalities plan implemented in China.
China’s “cancer villages” bear witness to economic boom
I was surprised to read that these people are having to cover their own medical costs for the cancers. I would have figured that a commie country would have socialized medicine, but I thought wrong. China is definitely going to be another explosive shoe to drop. It makes sense why they slaughter bad managers violently.
Check out this website of a portrait artist, Geoffrey Raymond, who focuses on the worst of the hostage taking banksters and pirates: Hank Paulson, Dick Fuld, Bernanke and the Elvin One all in red.
Year of Magical Painting
I saw a blurb on him on PBS. He sets the portraits up on Wall St, outside of Lehman Bros location, to let passers by sign them with messages. If you click on the images on his blog you can read them.
Here’s the whole portfolio
His prints are available for sale at zerohedge, see top post there.
Good stuff. I like the “annotated” idea of letting people make comments on them. The one of Bernanke called “Big Ben-We’re totally Screwed” was good too :)
Here’s a little bit of good news from Obama – plans for the stupid missile shield that were pissing off Russia have been canceled, which has republicans who need their wargasms foaming at the mouth.
Of course sanity hasn’t really prevailed as the article mentions some ambiguous plans to build some different kind of missile defense in pretty much the same location.
How about if the Europeans are really so worried about Iran, they build their own damn missile shield? Of course that would mean it probably wouldn’t be built because left to their own devices without Uncle sugar egging them on, most of the European leaders don’t seem to feel Iran is an existential threat to their countries. And think of the poor defense contractors who’d have to go without if that happened.
Interesting blurb I ran across at the Harper’s website which shows the lack of understanding W had about the bank bailout he was signing on to (big surprise there!) .
I read the entire article after clicking on the GQ link and found out it was an excerpt from that new book written by a republican speechwriter about the inner workings of the Bush administration. Now I realize that when writing speeches for Bush he may have had to dumb things down a bit, but this article (and I’d imagine the rest of the book too) read like it was written by a 9th grader. Not sure if it is representative of the intellect of the writer or whether he was dumbing it down for his presumably republican audience. I’m gonna take a stab and guess it was the former.
Reading the tea leaves on Justice Sotomayor – this sounds encouraging.
Chris Dodd has some legislation he’s about to unveil to rein in bank overdraft fees. I’d like to see some details before getting too excited about it all – hopefully it won’t just be a requirement to increase the small print from a 36 font to a 32 like they did with some of the credit card “reform”. But judging by past performance it probably will be once the lobbyists have told Dodd what he really thinks.
And you have to wonder whether the bankster-enabling Dodd would have bothered at all if there weren’t so many people calling for his head and lining up to run against him like Peter Schiff.
He is in the hot seat. Even the current CEO of the WWE is looking to get that seat. It will be interesting to see if the banksters throw him overboard or fight to keep him. Isn’t that what it is all about these days? I imagine if he drafts any legislation that has actual teeth, he’ll be swimming with the fishies.
Good post by Chris Floyd about the rise of a new liberal social justice party in Germany called “Die Linke” and the lack of a real liberal opposition to the oligarchs here. he quite justifiably takes Michael Moore to task for some of his recent remarks which I found mind boggling coming from Moore when I first read them a couple days ago.
Moore seems to be suffering from the delusion that if all the liberals just hope hard enough, Obama will eventually start listening. Fuck that. Liberals gave small contributions to Obama by the millions and backed that up with their votes. It was made quite clear that the majority of this country wanted a change of course from the disastrous policies of the Bushies, not a continuation of them. And yet when the liberals in Congress balk at his policies that aren’t liberal at all, they are the ones who are taken to the woodshed and threatened by the Obama administration while the Blue Dogs and frothing at the mouth republicans are coddled.
It’ll be interesting to see if Moore backtracks at all from those statements in the run-up to the release of his new film. If not, he may lose a lot of respect from some of his strongest supporters.
Floyd has another good post about the murder ordered by Obama earlier this week and how not many have even noticed or seen anything to make a stink about if they did. I didn’t catch it either until Floyd brought it up.
We are truly governed by monsters.
Explains why Squo won’t seek justice for the war crimes of the last administration, doesn’t it. The super Executive with all of Cheney’s acquired powers is now a permanent fixture. Welcome to the new normal. Same as the old normal but Chicago style.