SCREW ME? 'FRAID NOT, SCREW YOU!

from the "SCREW ME? 'FRAID NOT, SCREW YOU!" department...the debts owe to Goldman Sachs are illegitimate since they were criminal deals. Greece should simply stiff Goldman, nationalize its banking system and establishes its independence from the financial services industry. There is no need to enslave yourselves to pay illegal debts to criminal banksters

Matt Taibbi presents the No-Pay Movement as some crazy idea for Greece that just might work, but it seems that it is the only solution that will prevent the banksters from illegally enriching themselves on the backs and out of the skins of the people of Greece (Argentina did almost the same thing a few years ago, with massive success, gaining time and giving the various debt holders a big haircut, but we're supposed to forget about that!). Just tell Goldman Sachs, the other foreign banksters, and especially the IMF - Argentina was further along the road to servitude and eventually paid off all the IMF loans, although many thought that the IMF payment was wasted capital that should have been kept in the country - to go fuck themselves (and tell that Stasi agent who runs Germany to go fuck herself too). There will be hard times, but not nearly as hard than if you follow the 'responsible' path of paying off the lying and stealing banksters (once they see the lay of the land they will be happy to take something rather than nothing), and at the end of the day you are much, much better off if you haven't given up sovereignty to the gang of criminals who call themselves the IMF (the IMF uses the debt as a weapon to squeeze everybody dry for the rest of time, enforcing extreme right-wing policies on the poor and middle classes). As long as you have a real functioning economy - as Greece does - and have proper tax collection procedures - which Greece needs to work on - and block big outflows of capital - the root of the problem in Argentina, facilitated by some as yet uninvestigated criminal enterprises involving Citibank and others - there is absolutely no need to permanently enslave yourselves to pay illegal debts to criminal banksters. The only reason this financial blackmail is ever paid has nothing whatsoever to so with economics, and everything to do with bribes paid by banksters to politicians.

MATT TAIBBI UNDERCOVER WITH JOHN HAGGEE

"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But there was no turning back.

"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know — whap!"

I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.



So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical course of group-directed confession and healing that began on Friday evening and continued almost without interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed to reveal to one another what our great childhood wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of each to read our work aloud. The written assignments began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing our failure to forgive our tormentors.

Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my "autobiography" describing a period of my father's life when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:
I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.

Again no reaction from the group, aside from an affirming nod from José at the last part — his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.

MATT TAIBI TAKES ON OBAMA

My memory is not so good, but I think I remember Bill Clinton getting a pass on selling out the proles. There was some complaining from a few old Naderite cranks, but they were quickly censored and the majority of the Clintonites got about the business of defending Bill's privates from a Republican assault.

I don’t think Obama is going to get the same kid glove treatment. It’s going to be interesting watching the revolt. Personally, I think Obama has always known the revolt is coming and he has either 1) planned on it and has a strategy -such as a realignment of the political structure, or 2) has been set up by the political elites to be the scapegoat for the chickens coming home to roost from 30 years of neoliberalism.

Some pretty amazing things are already happening

This is Markos Moulitsas, owner of Daily Kos abruptly getting to the point on health-care. I would have figured Markos as one who would say that we have to give him a pass for two years or even that we have to give him a pass for the first term

This is Matt Taibi getting to the point on finance. This piece has gotten wide coverage and is starting to cause some anxiety.

This is Tapped trying to take Taibbi down - very poorly

This is Taibbi taking Tapped down - rather decisively

This is a battle between fact checking and gonzo. I rule in favor of gonzo. Taibbi writes with a kind of hacked-off truth-teller populist-progressive perspective.

This bailout is a massive burden of debt to the middle-class taxpayer; with benevolent bonus to mega financial corporations; and an expose of the Democratic Party as not a party of the people but rather the elite. It was done wrong, and it needs to be spelled out and there is no reason to be polite about it. It is not something that just happened on Obama's watch, he engineered it.

At some point in the piece Taibbi says, "We could have paid off every subprime mortgage in America for about $1.4 trillion and instead shelled out at least 14 trillion to Wall Street and probably 23 trillion, primarily to pay off derivative bets made by bankers on those assets".

Put this in perspective. The annual GDP of the world is 60 trillion. This is the biggest heist in the history of the world and Obama and the Democrats did it. In a normal world these people would already be hanging from the lamp posts.

I think Taibbi may turn out to be a major writer in the Obama era from the muckraking side of the telling the story. There are not many journalists like him, there are probably none. Taibbi has a mild "gonzo Hunter Thompson" style. I first read Taibbi sometime around 2000 in the very edgy Moscow based alternative paper, The eXile. He has toned it down since then. The eXile has since been run out of Russia by Putin. Taibbi captures the insane quality of American politics perfectly. He wrote this piece on Thomas Friedman in '05, and he went "underground" in Pastor John Hagee's San Antonio mega-church to produce this expose. If these two guys annoy you then you will love Taibbi. I dont think he is done with Obama and I think he is going to just get better.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/11/obama/index.html

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/12/taibbi-vs-obama-0

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/obama-and-taibbi-ii.html

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/taibbi.html

MATT TAIBI: OBAMA'S SELLOUT

We could have paid off every subprime mortgage in America for about $1.4 trillion and instead shelled out at least ten times that to Wall Street, primarily to pay off derivative bets made by bankers on those assets.

TARP is just one small slice of the bailout package — most of the bailout monies went out through little-known Fed programs like the TALF, the TLGP, the TIP, the PPI, and the Maiden Lanes. The number my friend Nomi Prins is using now for the bailouts is about $14 trillion in total outlays, and just as Barofsky pointed out, that number could rise.

Most of the bailouts came in the form of very cheap money lent out to the same banks that caused the crisis, who then took that money and lent it out at market rates, pocketing the difference.

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It’s almost impossible to not make mountains of money when your cost of capital is next to nothing because you’re borrowing your money from the government basically for free.

Obama's Big Sellout
TAIBBLOG
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

Obama's Big Sellout
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM