But this additional outrage is really disturbing! $227 billion is going to tax havens for major banking interests while we taxpayers bail them out ~ which CBS recently exposed in this two minute video.
Frank Rich, New York Times, once again, asks the number one question by Americans that has yet to answered : "Americans are right to wonder why there has been scant punishment for the management and boards of bailed-out banks that recklessly sliced and diced all this debt into worthless gambling chips."
Unfortunately, despite his Clintonesque pep talk last night, I see an unholy Obama allegiance emerging with the Fed and the elite banking interests which Paul Craig Roberts writes of yesterday in ICH ~
How the US Economy Was Lost
By Paul Craig Roberts
February 24, 2009
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22087.htm
Excerpts: "The bald fact is that the combination of ignorance, negligence, and ideology that permitted the crisis to happen is still present and is blocking any remedy. Either the people in power in Washington and the financial community are total dimwits or they are manipulating an opportunity to redistribute wealth from taxpayers, equity owners and pension funds to the financial sector... How long will Americans permit “their” government to rip them off for the sake of the financial interests that caused the problem? Obama’s cabinet and National Economic Council are filled with representatives of the interest groups that caused the problem. The Obama administration is not a government capable of preventing a catastrophe.... The demise of America’s productive economy left the US economy dependent on finance, in which the US remained dominant because the dollar is the reserve currency. With the departure of factories, finance went in new directions. Mortgages, which were once held in the portfolios of the issuer, were securitized. Individual mortgage debts were combined into a “security.” The next step was to strip out the interest payments to the mortgages and sell them as derivatives, thus creating a third debt instrument based on the original mortgages... This was the most shameful and most mindless form of speculation. Gamblers were betting hands that they could not cover. The US regulators had abandoned their posts. The American financial institutions abandoned all integrity. As a consequence, American financial institutions and rating agencies are trusted nowhere on earth. "
And right now we are looking at over 650 trillion dollars in derivatives bets which involves most of the major banks who can not possibly cover that indebtedness.
The first step toward financial recovery is transparency and the truth ~ Obama delivered little of either last night and the stock market and Americans will not be reassured.
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2009/02/25.html
Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
Cartoon courtesy of Pat Oliphant / Washington Post
