The extent to which the banks own Congress

To what extent do the banks own Congress? Paul Blumenthal reports at Huffpo:

When Washington puts policy on the auction block, bankers are consistently the highest bidders. The industry's most striking victory has been the watering down of post-financial crisis reforms, to the point that banks are now bigger than ever and the bonuses keep flowing. But Wall Street's campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them. Why hasn't the government done something about outrageous ATM fees? Or credit card interest rates up to 30 percent? Bankers' clout is such that common-sense pro-consumer legislation is presumptively dead on arrival at Capitol Hill if it threatens banks' revenue streams.

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The breadth of the corporate state

Chris Hedges explains that the corporate state has not merely confiscated our political system. It stretches much further into our lives. See the following video starting at minute 5:30, where Hedges explains that affected systems include communication, education and culture. In fact, there is an assault upon liberal institutions that once made meaningful political reform possible, such as labor unions and our great universities, the latter of which are oftentimes run as corporate entities uninterested in teaching the humanities and extolling an artificially narrow analytic view of what it means to be "intelligent." What modern education excels at is training up systems managers who strive to be hyper-deferential to authority. Modern education no longer strives to teach students how to think, but rather what to think. Hedges has a "dark" view of what's going on, essentially that the corporate state is "harvesting" what is left to be had of America "on the way out the door." (min. 28:00). At this critical time, there is no mechanism for changing the system by way of voting--Hedges argues that there is no way, in light of the corporate loyalties of Barack Obama, to vote against Goldman Sachs in the upcoming presidential election, which is using tax money to re-inflate the bubble before the next crash. Lawrence Lessig prefers to use all of our resources for reforming the system, "even if there is zero chance of success." Both men are big supporters of the Occupy movement.

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Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

There is only one thing the President should talk about in his State of the Union and that is Jobs. If we look at what President Obama inherited, the GW Bush administration had eight years of private sector job losses and only had a net job increase due to government hiring The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that private sector employment decreased by 673,000 over the eight years of GW Bush, while public sector employment increased. Total jobs created under the eight years of the GW Bush administration totaled 1.08 million. Ironically, increased public sector employment allowed for the Bush administration to not be the first to have net negative employment over its term since Herbert Hoover. Total private sector jobs created since 2010 by the Obama administration number over 2 million (more than the total for the eight years of George W. Bush). President Obama has cut public sector employment by over 357,000 since taking office. President Obama’s initial 2012 budget, despite yowling from the right that he never submitted any for a vote in 2011, was rejected in the US Senate at the same time as the Senate rejected the US House Budget plan drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI). But, the US House Budget plan passed through the House on an almost party-line vote and supported by all the GOP Senators was projected to cost as many as 800,000 jobs and a 2% decrease in GDP in 2012. The next jobs effort of the Republicans was to foment a false debt ceiling “crisis” which if the US had defaulted on its debt would have been catastrophic in causing a 5% GDP drop in 2012 and a loss of some one third of the value of US equities. [More . . . ]

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David Stockman comments on Mitt Romney’s version of capitalism

Appearing on Dylan Ratigan’s show today, David Stockman, an ardent traditional capitalist, criticized the leveraged buyouts engaged in by Mitt Romney at Bain, labeling this behavior speculation, crony capitalism and “an inside job.” Stockman served as Director of the OMB. during Ronald Reagan's Administrations. Stockman hammered Obama as well, based on Obama's acquiescence toward out-of-control Wall Street banks. He points out that the elephant in the room is the Federal Reserve, which is churning out endless money, thus bloating the financial sector.  Stockman urges that we need to bring back Glass-Steagall as the starting point for a solution to this mess.   Stockman also sharply criticized Newt Gingrich's claim that he served as an "historian" for Freddie Mac.

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