President Obama: Wake up!

President Obama is in a death spiral, a flat spin which is taking the country down with him
This will be a blog with images of important dangerous economists who have brought this country to its knees and the few economists who have tried to prevent this economic depression. I'll give you a hint:the economists who ruined this country pictured to the left have Y chromosomes. The woman economist is Brooksley Born who tried to stop the madness being hatched by the pictured economic thugs while serving as commissioner of the CFTC. She was crushed by Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Al Greenspan in the 1990's when she had the temerity to question the emerging cancer of unregulated derivative banking. Sadly, she is gone, flattened by the Wall Street Banking steamroller . The pictured bully boys are still atop that steamroller and now they have finally aroused the ire of Main Street, and are back on their heels fighting for their survival. Tim Geithner was shredded in front of a congressional panel last week and at one point he lost all cool and had the chutzpah to blast a republican congressman from Texas for causing the current unregulated banking debacle . The preposterous irony of course was that the debacle happened on his watch when he was the head of the NY Fed, the one person who could have done something to mitigate the disaster. He engineered the enormous bailout of AIG which had the effect of funneling taxpayer money straight into the coffers of Goldman Sachs and other huge investment banks who had made bad derivative bets both here and abroad . His crime was that he allowed GS and the others to get 100 cents on the dollar, courtesy of the taxpayer. Worse, he lied about the whole process from beginning to end. The tens of billions that went to Goldman Sachs will allow them to pay out $30 billion to their greedy executives this Christmas. Fed Chairman Bernanke has an op ed in this Sunday's Washington Post angrily denouncing the congress for even thinking of oversight and regulation of the Fed, which the Congress itself created in 1913. His is a sample of some of his outrageous assertions:

“Now more than ever, America needs a strong, nonpolitical and independent central bank with the tools to promote financial stability and to help steer our economy to recovery without inflation,” he said.

And when it comes to monetary policy, he said, “independent does not mean unaccountable.” He said the actions of the Fed were already thoroughly reviewed and needed to be protected from Congressional influence, “which would undermine the confidence the public and the markets have in the Fed.”

This is ridiculous, absurd, self serving nonsense. The public has no confidence in an organization that is the defacto 4th branch of the government which you could easily argue is by far the most powerful and fully unaccountable branch of government. The Fed and Treasury are dominated and influenced by the Wall Street Banks and large corporations who are confident that Treasury and the Fed will take care of them to the detriment of the country. It is the Treasury and the Fed who decide how and when to raise and print money and who gets it on what terms, not the President, the congress or the courts or of course, the people. It is no accident that Treasury Secretaries, economic advisers and Fed officers are of , by, for, and from the big banks. That these men should be sacked goes without saying, but replacing them from the same pool of Wall Street Banksters changes nothing. They should be investigated and if found guilty of indictable offenses, sentenced and imprisoned. Ex Wall Street bankers have no place in a presidential cabinet. There are many qualified folks in academe and government who could be independent and non partisan. Paul Volker demonstrated vast independence which is why Reagan and Wall Street had him replaced. Brooksley Born, Elizabeth Warren, and Gretchen Morgenson are brilliant articulate women with a proven grasp of economics and finance and who appear to be tools of no one. The obvious political problem of Obama sacking an entire economic team and Fed Chairman and cabinet secretary would make it appear that he has blundered in his choice of advisers.

In fact, that is exactly what he has done, but keeping them would be the greater blunder. These men along with dozens of others are and have been tools and leaders of Wall Street and worse, victims of their own faulty neoclassical economic philosophies and Keynesian fallacious delusions . They have perverted capitalism into a ugly mutant blend of socialism for the rich, financial fascism, arrogant imperialism all designed to achieve total economic control over the society by subverting and destroying the free market and the currency of the United States. In this they have succeeded and now that the serfs are getting restive, they are starting to fight back and crush this mini rebellion before it gets a head of steam. One little statistic I read to give a little context: the average Goldman Sachs employee earned $770,000 last year. There are over 30,000 of them. 49,000,000 Americans are hungry and 3,000,000 are homeless and over $160,000,000,000 will be paid out in bonuses to banksters this year by banks who received BILLIONS from Treasury and the FED courtesy of the taxpayer who resisted those payouts but who could do nothing about it because a tiny minority of the super wealthy corporate bankster barons now tell the people and the government representatives when to jump and how high. Change at the Congressional and Senate level to at least audit and make accountable the FED is a necessary first step. Republican Ron Paul has over 300 members of the house who have signed on to his bill to do just that. If your representative is among the 150 odd who did not, find out why.