Quote of the Day: Wall St. Bankers & Fraud

A huge portion of Wall Street’s earnings were built around the model of ‘I’m going to bet against my clients. I’m going to regard my clients not as clients — and you can hear it in their language, but as counterparties.

- Edmund Clark, Chief Executive Officer Toronto-Dominion Bank, "No Trading for Dimon Principle With CEO Clark: Corporate Canada"

Spanish society in freefall...

Spain currently has a mass unemployment rate of 24.1% and youth unemployment rate (15-24 y/o) that exceeds 50%, up from 18.2% in 2007.  In comparison Italy's youth unemployment is 29%; Portugal is 30%; and 24% of young people in France are without employment.  The Spanish economy has been contracting each of the past two quarters and is officially back in recession.  As the financial sector attempts to wade through the morass of over-development, massive consolidation of the banks and the crippling of credit has occurred.

The root cause of much of this disaster lies in the corrupt nexus between local bankers and regional politicians, which happen in many instances to be one and the same.  Lax lending standards, cheap foreign labor, and easy inflows of European capital all lead to a massive over-development.  The days of cheap credit ended with the financial crash of 2008.  Private debt was absorbed by the balance sheets of the state and ultimately the collective nations of the Eurozone.

Whereas the chicanery that lead to this bloody mess is a story that needs to be told, I'm interested today in discussing the impact on real people and the current generation of people who will have to pay for this economic catastrophe for the rest of their lives.  The decline and hopelessness felt across Spain has been chronicled in a number of newspapers and journals.  Here are some of the highlights.

In the Spanish daily La Pais, a 9-March article titled Generation Nimileuristra described the lives of young people who see opportunities denied and their lives stagnating with either low or no paying jobs.  

In 2005 youth unemployment was about 20%. Now [reaching] 50% while doubling the European average (22.4%) . The best educated generation has the worst outlook since the transition and feels a victim of the excesses of others...

In Spain there are 10,423,798 people between 18 and 34... Their average net income (including the unemployed), is 824 euros per month. And those who are working earn on average 1,318 euros a month (data from the Youth Council of Spain)...  Professions that seemed safe... are not. The Polytechnic University of Valencia followed the first steps in the process of engineers and architects who graduated in 2008: one in four did not reach [jobs with salaries over 1000 euros/month]. And what is worse: the [educated with jobs with salaries under 1000 euros/month] had advanced by 8% compared to graduates a year earlier.

In many cases youth are forced to abandon independence and relocate into their family's homes.

It has been established that even small levels of protracted unemployment in developed countries can have serious implications for the unemployed.  Those include reduced lifetime wages, reduced employment opportunities, and higher mental health issues.  With respect to society at large, depressed wages will promote educated youth emigrate to other jurisdictions, resulting in a brain-drain to the nation.  Undereducated and unemployed male youth on the other hand are statistically more likely to participate in criminal activity.

In many OECD countries the unemployment rate is substantially higher than the general population. An Economist article from Sept-11, 2011 discusses the various disadvantages and impacts under-employment and unemployment will have on these people.

Unemployment of all sorts is linked with a level of unhappiness that cannot simply be explained by low income. It is also linked to lower life expectancy, higher chances of a heart attack in later life, and suicide. A study of Pennsylvania workers who lost jobs in the 1970s and 1980s found that the effect of unemployment on life expectancy is greater for young workers than for old. Workers who joined the American labour force during the Great Depression suffered from a persistent lack of confidence and ambition for decades.

The implications of this situation are severe.  Not only will youth not be entering the work force, they will not be participating in the economy and doing normal things, such as buying cars, homes, furniture. So there is a negative cascade felt across the nation on all levels. Secondly, since they will not be paying taxes, who will bear the burden of maintaining the welfare state that Europeans are so proud of?   As fewer people are contributing to these pay-as-you-go programs, older generations will see a reduction in benefits.

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The financial crisis has lead to governments across Spain to drastically cut programs, services, and cash transfers to lower levels.  A New York Times article elaborates:

Just as Spain’s national and regional governments are struggling with the collapse of the construction industry, overspending on huge capital projects and a pileup of unpaid bills, the same problems afflict many of its small towns.

One town's mayor discusses his small community's problems:

“We lived beyond our means,” Mr. García said. “We invested in public works that weren’t sensible. We are in technical bankruptcy.” Even some money from the European Union that was supposed to be used for routine operating expenses and last until 2013 has already been spent, he said.

The banking upheavals have brought similar troubles to small and medium scale businesses, which represent "60 percent of the economy, and 80 percent of the jobs".  The vicious cycle has resulted in the shuttering of more than 500,000 small business according to the NY Times.  

“The cuts in credit have been so abrupt that some businesses not only lost specific projects they were working on,” said Carlos Ruiz Fonseca, the director of economy and innovation at Cepyme, Spain’s association of small and medium-size companies. “Some companies have just gone out of business.” 

How is any of this supposed to engender confidence in the international markets?  The same banks which are cutting credit lines, reducing exposure to risk, and contracting their businesses are simultaneously being downgraded by the various credit agencies.  Billions of Euros are being requested by the financial sector to keep these debt ridden entities from further collapsing and imploding the entire Spanish economy.

The net result of all these events is a society that is in freefall.  If these trends continue, not only will Europe have generated legions of angry, unemployed persons, they will have created the same foundations that gave rise to the extremists of the last century.

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Update: video link about squatters taking over an vacant apartment complex, built during the construction boom, in Seville

Chomsky on the Wall St. protesters, Bin Laden, & Israel

In this interview with Russia Today (RT) television Noam Chomsky discusses three main topics:

1. The current protests occurring in New York across from Wall Street and spreading throughout the world
2. The legal framework and international norms associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder
3. The current international versus American-Israeli perspective on the emergence of a Palestinian state.

For the most part I think what Chomsky has to say is true.

Criticisms leveled by Chomsky regarding economic matters and the control of the legislative process by corporations has been shown by this recent depression to have been wholly correct. America's political system is so badly broken that not even the greedy politicians can claim that the system works for anyone other than Goldman Sachs.

***

What I found disappointing about this interview is Chomsky's rather weak argument that America is a lawless country because it assassinated Osama Bin Laden, invaded the sovereign nation of Pakistan, then dumped Bin Laden's body at sea. Unlike a great number of person on the left, Chomsky has never claimed that there were grand conspiracies at work during the 9-11 attack. What he does do is make the rather odd legalistic argument that everyone under American jurisprudence is entitled to the claim of being "innocence" until found guilty. That statement is true, but misleading. Bin Laden was never after 9-11 a conventional criminal. Rather, Bin Laden was the leader of an international organization whose purpose was to engage in terrorism that indiscriminately killed as many people as possible to draw America into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Bin Laden freely admitted and repeatedly boasted of his multiple attacks on American assets abroad and on 9-11. If we are talking about US law, under public law 107-40, the US Congress authorized the president of the United States “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Equally, under international law the UN charter provides nation states the right to use lethal force in individual and collective self-defense.

Second, Chomsky makes the error of claiming that the assassination has inflamed Pakistan's civilian population and enraged the quasi-military rulers of the state, thus exacerbating US-Muslim tensions and further destabilizing the Middle East. What Pakistan or its illiterate masses thinks about American killing of Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders on their territory is irrelevant. Pakistan exists because the United States for decades has been propping up this little Islamic wasteland run by kleptocrats and military dunces. The country is a failed state that exists as the central exporter of international terrorism across the world. What has become completely evident after the assassination is that individuals within Pakistan and its government have been hiding and protecting Bin Laden for years. Given the overall lawlessness and criminal actions of the Pakistani state, there is little reason anyone should consider anything that this country wants as legitimate.

Chomsky further states that Obama has become even more reckless than Bush in using drone attacks on targets. The problem with this statement is that is exactly what Obama didn't do when he sent military personnel to kill Bin Laden. Today Bin Laden's family members that were hiding with him in Pakistan are alive and not dead.  Something that Bin Laden's victims cannot claim.

I for one am in complete agreement with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who said

“The death of Osama bin Laden … is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism…Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done.”

For all his faults, President Obama did the right thing and all civilized people should applaud his actions, instead of trying to score cheap rhetorical points in defending the indefensible.

What she just said...

Occupy Wall Street protestor using something other than a manila colored pizza box to denounce the corrupt state of affairs that is now America's corporate plutocracy.

***

The topics inveighed by the left are vast and given the MSM's collusion in disseminating propaganda and controlling the public narrative on subjects of interest to the corporate state, usually very little coherent messaging makes it into the public consciousness.  However, people across the world, not just in authoritarian countries, are protesting en mass to the reckless and destructive practices of our authoritarian and/or corporate overlords.  Unlike the bullshit machine during the Iraq invasion where the venal and pliant press stenographed the Bush imperium's falsehoods on Iraqi mushroom clouds and fantastical weapons of mass destruction, the fruits of our economic discord are apparent for all to see.  The nations of the world are sliding into a new period of stagnation and decline.  Unemployment, social mobility, declining wages, and reduced prosperity are evident for all to see.  While society crumbles, multinational corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars of liquid capital, financial houses are given nearly unlimited protection by the state for their incompetence, and the wealthiest beneficiaries of the past 30-years of deregulation and financialization of western economies bemoan any increase in their tax rates.

The elite are firmly aware that for them to stay in power demands that the masses are fully unaware of how dire a situation they are in.  Institutional propagandists denounce the protestors as "dangerous" and predicated on mob rule.  Many are asking what the objectives of the movement are about (psst... its about greedy stupid bankers and their congressional whores, motherfucker!).  Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic is already calling the protests a waste of time, given that they are unfocused, the financial industry owns congress, and of course the big lie, that America really, really needs behemoth "to big to fail" monstrosities like Bank of America, Citibank, or Goldman Sachs, because as he states, the rest of the economy is just useless unproductive crap. To enforce the objectives of the corporate state, NY city police department was more than happy in assaulting, brutalizing, and arresting innocent civilians who exercised their first amendment rights.  This is nothing new for the NYPD, which has a long record (i.e. the 2004 Republican presidential election convention) of crushing pubic dissidence and violating the civil rights of protestors.

Many people realize the system is fundamentally rigged against them and the composition of the protestors and their supporters reflects this fact:

The crowd—while represented widely in the media as white, liberal college kids—is surprisingly diverse, including raging grannies, street kids, union workers, professors, ex-bankers, longtime activists, human rights lawyers, Native American band members and ex-military. Political views span the spectrum, from anarchist to right-wing libertarian—complicating efforts toward any kind of unifying objective or mantra.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author, had this to say about the occupation:

The real people who are scared are the power elite. Of course, they’re trying to make you scared and us scared. But I can tell you, having been a reporter for the New York Times, that on the inside they’re very, very frightened. They do not want movements like this to grow, and they understand on some level — whether it’s subconscious or, in other cases, even overt — that the criminal class in this country has seized power.

I am not optimistic that any particular resistance to the corporate state can succeed in changing the current trends.   If history is a guide, it is more likely that the people will turn on those protesting and disclosing the rampant corruption, rather than on their own imbecile leaders.  As long as people remain confused, uneducated, and ignorant to the current situation, the crypto-fascists, corporate fraud-mongers, and militarists driving policy will remain in the driver's seat.

Europe's inverted socialism

And most Northern Europeans also seem to believe that the bailouts have gone to lazy Southern Europeans. In fact, their purpose has been to shore up the fragile Northern European financial systems. German banks are among the weakest in Europe; some of them (especially the state-owned landesbanks) are effectively bankrupt. If they were forced to mark down their Southern European debt, they might well collapse in a heap, and the European financial system could grind to a halt. Just as in the United States, the real impact of the European bailout has been to shore up the continent’s banks – not to help the continent’s debtors. The recent downgrading of two of France’s most important banks, due to their holdings of Greek debt, reminds us of how exposed Northern Europe’s financial systems remain. And rumors of a recent IMF report that European banks are over $270 billion short of the capital they need to confront their current problems served to drive the point home.

- Jeffry Frieden, "Europe's Lehman moment"

Europe's financial problems have escalated to the point where a world-wide contagion has become again possible.  Economists and international leaders are sounding alarms that have rarely been spoken in unison, since the inception of the 2008 financial crisis.  Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said "We have entered into a dangerous phase of the crisis." Her words come at a point where the Greek debt crisis appears to be reaching its climax.  Moody's Investors Service downgraded two of France's top banks, Societe Generale and Credit Agricole, stating that it had concerns about the two banks funding and liquidity profiles, due to their exposure to Greek debt.  A recent analysis indicates that 43 large European banks hold debt in the PIIGS equivalent to 65% of the book value of those institutions. Gretchen Morgenson of the NY Times explains the current situation:

Some of these [European] banks are growing desperate for dollars. Fearing the worst, investors are pulling back, refusing to roll over the banks’ commercial paper, those short-term i.o.u.’s that are the lifeblood of commerce. Others are refusing to renew certificates of deposit. European banks need this money, in dollars, to extend loans to American companies and to pay their own debts.  

As a result several central banks have mounted a coordinated effort to inject US dollars into the financial system to stimulate market confidence.  The Guardian newspaper elaborates:

The Bank of England joined the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan on Thursday to announce that they would flood money markets with dollars over the coming months.

Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody's Analytics, states "The big question is: is this enough in the short term to get us to a longer term solution? There is a potential for a really huge financial crisis in Europe. Things are bad now, but they could get a lot worse."

Many observers are looking at the current European situation and seeing similarities between Lehman Brothers demise and the 2008 crisis.

Adding to the peril is that these banks are funded primarily by short-term investors, like buyers of commercial paper, rather than by depositors, as is more often the case with American banks. This was the same problem faced by Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which collapsed after short-term lenders fled in panic.

Economist Barry Eichengreen says that, "The euro’s survival and, indeed, that of the European Union hang in the balance."  He says long term proposals on restructuring Europe's sovereign debts are not of immediate concern, rather the continent needs to act decisively in stabilizing its banks.  The European Financial Stabilty Facility (EFSF) and even the IMF should be used to re-capitalize Europe's weak banks.  The second move should be to give Greece sufficient room to maneuver by asking its creditors to relax its fiscal targets.  Third, governments need to end this futile dalliance with austerity and proceed with stimulus projects that would create real growth.  He states, "Without growth, tax revenues will remain stagnant, and the capacity to service debts will continue to erode. Social stability, similarly, depends on it."

Economist Paul Krugman at the beginning of this week had some serious words for European governments.  He states, "We’re not talking about a crisis that will unfold over a year or two; this thing could come apart in a matter of days. And if it does, the whole world will suffer"  Likewise, he is telling Europe to use the ECB to continue buying up Spanish and Italian debt to contain the risk of default. The moral argument for inaction or worst punishing Europe's peripheral nations and the Mediterranean nations of Spain and Italy, will drive the continent -if not the world- into another economic abyss.

The reality is Greece's debt problems have been growing and not diminishing over the past two years.  The country is not in any position today or in any foreseeable future to repay the totality of its debt.  Under the current regime imposed on the country, Simon Johnson a former IMF chief economist concludes that "The tax revenue needed to service [the Greek] debt would burden businesses and households for decades – enterprising and productive people will move their fortunes and their futures elsewhere in the euro area or to the United States." Throwing billions of dollars at the nation, only to prop up banks in the northern economies of Europe and hoping that the situation will be resolved at a later date, has now been shown to be an unfeasible and irresponsible position.  Europe needs to first stabilize its banking sector immediately and then proceed in an orderly default of Greece's debt. An unorderly default will plunge the entire Eurozone into chaos.  Spain and Italy will face unprecedented pressure, whereas the remaining nations of Portugal, Ireland, and Greece may well face economic collapse.

Krawcheck Down at BofA

I'm not a finance specialist, so I didn't know who Sallie Krawcheck was until today.  According to her online resume, she has had a fairly storied career given that she is only 46.  Until this week she held the position of Chief Executive Officer at Merrill Lynch.  Previously, she was formerly CFO at CitiCorp and Chairman and CEO of Citi's Global Wealth Management.

In an article on her and BofA in the NY Times Dealbook, it states that Ms. Krawcheck distinguished herself early in her career

as a stock analyst, covering securities companies. Early on, she made headlines with some of her bold calls, notably upsetting Wall Street executive Sanford I. Weill when she criticized the acquisition of Salomon by his firm the Travelers Group. Shortly after Alliance Capital Management purchased Bernstein in 2000, she was named chairman and chief executive.

My first thought, was how does someone at that age usurp so many people within the dog-eat-dog world of  finance to achieve so many senior positions at such an early age?  What happened to all the people who were in their 50's and 60's at the time she received her postings, who had been working in the industry before her?  The situation leads me to ask, what is it that these people are doing that is so valuable in these executive suites?  According to published articles on her, she was profiled in Fortune magazine titled, "Looking for the last honest analyst."  Krawcheck was brought into Citigroup in 2002 when its former chief Sandy Weill wanted to clean up the reputation of its tarnished Salomon Smith Barney division.  As Citigroup's CFO she used to work just down the hall from the company's former CEO Charles Prince, who was forced to resign his position at the end of 2007 as the credit crisis from the housing market emerged.  In an article in Fortune magazine in 2006, a year prior to the start of the Great Recession, she said, "The consumer doesn't seem stretched. I wouldn't bet against U.S. consumers. They're pretty rational folks."  That statement as we know today, four years into the Great Recession, is just rubbish.

Maybe this line of thought isn't germane to the actual point of  this post, but the personality based politics of  these financial firms strikes me as odd.

The point of this post is that Bank of America after hiring Krawcheck just two years ago has decided to terminate her.  Zerohedge blogger is calling her the first sacrificial lamb to be used by Bank of America in its attempt to re-organize its top management.  Consider this section of the NY Times article on the restructuring:

Since her arrival, the wealth management group has posted steady results, even as the broader market has been battered by billions of dollars in losses. In the second quarter, the division earned $506 million, down slightly from the previous period, but up from $329 million in the second quarter of 2010.
In particular, the Merrill Lynch brokerage force has been a surprising bright spot for the troubled bank, increasing its client base since the 2009 takeover by Bank of America.

Does firing the the head of one of the few divisions that does make money for the organization make sense to you?  I suppose it does if one assumes that Merrill's wealth management division no longer operates for the primary benefit of its clients, but for the shareholders of Bank of America instead.  Felix Salmon thinks:

that wealth management at BofA, then, is going to act a bit like dialup revenues at AOL: a steady and dependable revenue stream, in long-term secular decline, which can be used to fund investments in the rest of the business.

Whatever is going on at BofA suggests that this overstuffed Frankenstein operation is heading for even more serious problems than is currently being discussed publicly.  More than just management changes need to be imposed on this To-big-to-fail loser.  The entire beast needs to be cut up and sanitized for the good of the global economy.

A decade of hell and the fall of America

The above chart (h/t Economist's View, "How long will it take for the economy to recover?") issued by the CBO describes what should be the central discussion amongst Americans.

While the developed world was on summer vacation, the economies of Europe and America have begun to decline in an alarming fashion.  Europe is scrambling to stabilize its weak perpherial economies. The march of the PIIGS has expanded to the point where Spain and Italy are no longer just question marks.  European banks are seeing formidable potential losses arise from sovereign debt issues.  Credit is tightening up and these same European banks are looking to national governments and the EU for assistance. Indecision amongst Europe's prominent leaders and a growing populist revolt across the continent have contributed to growing unease in the markets. The breakup of the entire European economic union and the failure of the Euro currency is now seriously being considered.

In America, zero jobs were added to the economy last month. Growth for the second quarter (Q2-2011) was revised to 1% (annualized).  Financial institutions like Bank of America are in trouble and Warren Buffett has again been brought, as the non-governmental creditor of last resort, to prop up the ailing bank. The Republicans have inflicted serious damage to the American economy, in their traitorous advancement of no-taxes and no-growth governance.   Obama is floundering in his dismal attempt to appease his corporate backers, while carving out a middle path for his own election.

The above chart should make you terrified.  Although the rose-colored glasses of 3.5% annual growth is being portrayed, it is the green line with 2.5% growth that is most alarming.  The difference of 1% means that America effectively will lumber along for the next decade with little to no growth, unemployment will remain obscenely high, structural unemployment and a permanent underclass will arise, the deleveraging process will take longer, and governments will be unable to adequetely deal with further social or economic problems effectively.  This is the best case scenario we are working with at the moment, taking into account the data and Rogoff and Reinhart's post-crisis modelling.

Now consider that the world heads into a protracted recession, with China crashing shortly afterwards -taking those countries like Canada and Australia that have been dependent on commodity exports with it- and you've got a recipe for global armageddon.  The world stops growing and economies across the planet try to dig themselves out of this hole.  Here too the data suggests as in the case of the Asian and Latin American crises, that a ten year window will be required to get back any reasonable trendline.  The implication is an entire generation of workers see reduced income, mounting debt, and insufficient job opportunities.  How are these countries going to pay for the benefits sold to the baby-boomer generation, when the children of the boomers are unable to find long-term jobs and thus fund those liabilities?

We have come to the end of the line.  All the major economies of the world are now posed to fall and in that cataclysmic descent, we shall venture hopelessly through a decade of stagnation, decline, and possible collapse.

Quote of the Day: Felix Salmon on the Plutocrats

When it comes to US plutocrats, most of them are very similar to the Russian oligarchs who seized their country’s natural resources — they’re bankers and hedge-fund managers who seized their country’s financial resources. They produced no goods, and they created no jobs — quite the opposite. And so it makes sense for Americans who have lost their jobs and their hope to reclaim those financial resources, through mechanisms like a wealth tax or a financial transactions tax. The Silicon Valley elite would happily pay such things. And if the angry bankers went off to destabilize some other financial system, they wouldn’t actually be missed.

- Felix Salmon, "How to deal with the plutocrats"

America's bankers, partying like it's 2007!

They're back on top of the world! 

The same lot who who nearly destroyed the global economy, are back to their old habits and spending preferences.  The New York Times reports on the behavior of the denizens of Wall Street and the chieftains of American commerce.

Two years after the onset of the financial crisis, the stock market is recovering and Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again. And this means in some cases they are spending again — at times cautiously, but sometimes with a familiar swagger.

The article lists that business is booming at plastic surgery salons, buyers are "pouring" into art auctions, high end restaurants are flooded with patrons, and there is a bidding war for summertime rentals in the Hamptons.  Given what their friends in Washington have done for them, the top earners believe their own economic situation is secure and are confident that their corpulent existence will not be interrupted soon.

It is precisely because of this behavior why we will continue to suffer crisis after crisis, until the whole wretched state collapses.  Unlike rational people, who assess their moral failings, personal faults, and actions that have hurt greater society, these people are sociopaths who are never held accountable for their actions.  Their only devotion is to the mighty dollar and indulging in materialistic shit.

Just consider some of their "efficient" economic activity:

Ms. Killoran, who runs a Brooklyn-based insurance company, says that over the last two years she cut her annual spending on cosmetic surgery in half, to about $3,000. She is now spending at pre-2008 levels. “I have to meet a lot of people, and this is part of investing in myself,” she said.

Or this tidbit of stupidity:

A Morgan Stanley trader recently tried to hire a dwarf for a bachelor party in Miami, asking the dwarf to meet him at the airport in a “Men in Black” style suit, according to e-mail exchanges.

At the end of the they day, the moneyed elite couldn't fucking care less about you.  As George Carlin said, "They don't fucking care about you! They don't fucking care!"

• Have basic services such as police, firefighting, and ambulance services in your city have been cut because of state and municipal fiscal problems?  This isn't a problem for those Americans living in gated communities with private security and emergency health services.  Stop wasting their time, because there's a sale at Barney's they have to attend.
• If you lived in NY city and wondered why your roads or sidewalks weren't recently cleared of snow so you can go to work, you can thank Mayor Bloomberg for cutting services and refusing to tax the these rich motherfuckers; out of fear that they may move the whole industry to New Jersey or Hoboken, PA!
• Your employer cut your wages and benefits, stopped making 401k payments or nuked your pension, or forced you to pay more for health care insurance. Not a problem for the folks vacationing in multi-million dollar homes in the Hamptons.  Get a second job you bum!
• Lost your job because these fucktards were scheming with other high-end crooks and blew up the economy in the process. Hey freeloader, talk to the hand, because they pay taxes too; although one has to go back decades to find a time when they were paying less.
• Can't afford to send your kids to university!  Serves them right for wanting to attend those bastions of fucking liberalism.  Bloody hippies and communists!

This is the antithesis of a just and fair society.

Wachovia Bank accused of facilitating Ponzi scheme

In my books, Wachovia is a poster child for banking malfeasance and fraud.  In a previous post, I discussed Wachovia's involvement in laundering drug money from Mexican gangs.  This particular situation forced the bank to forfiet $110 million dollars in profit associated with the money laundering operations and pay another $50 million in fines to the government.

McClatchy press has an article, where one,

George Theodule lured hundreds of people to invest with him, using his heritage, a network of churches and his radio show as bait, the bank through which he operated his massive Ponzi scheme looked the other way, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this month.

Between 2007 and 2008, Theodule manipulated investors from Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey to deposit money in so-called investment clubs.  The majority of those duped out of their investments were "working-class Haitian Americans who lost everything on the promise they would be guaranteed returns."

The lawsuits are pursued by a Miami based firm on behalf of Mr. Thoedule's clients.  The basis of their lawsuits is that Wachovia should have "determined that the transactions Theodule was conducting were inconsistent with any legitimate business."  The article points out that WaMu, Mr. Thoedule's former bank, discerned that his activities were not proper.

Federal regulations require banks to know the true identities of their customers and their customers' businesses, and banks must have systems in place to counter money laundering, said Kevin Mukri, spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The regulations are extensive...

Banks must verify the source of money coming into accounts, monitor transactions and determine if they are suspicious -- and report them and if necessary close down the accounts.

This isn't a matter of managerial oversight or the incompetence of employees within Wachovia.  This was standard operating procedure for this bank, which has shown on multiple occassions it was more than happy to deal with criminal enterprises as long as they were getting part of the action.

The revolving door between Government and Big Business

The New York Times reported earlier in December that Peter Orszag, Obama's first budget director, joined Citibank's investment banking group as a vice chairman.  Mr. Orszag joins a long list of former White House officials who have moved from government and into the board room's of America's largest corporations.

Mr. Orszag’s actual duties are murky at best. He is expected to draw on his deep knowledge of public sector financial issues and his experience overseeing the federal budget to counsel Citi’s clients on various policy actions. He is also expected to be something of a corporate rainmaker.

The Economist magazine evaluates the transaction and considers the entire situation an unsuitable arrangement that enforces perceptions of Washingtonian corruption.

Not only is the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street unseemly, its frictionless gliding action suggests corruption is built right into the interface between our government and our great profit-seeking institutions.

James Fallows over at The Atlantic magazine is quoted by the Economist and relays is own thoughts on the matter.

But in the grander scheme, his move illustrates something that is just wrong. The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution—and then, less than two years after his Administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the Administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service—this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life.

When we notice similar patterns in other countries—for instance, how many offspring and in-laws of senior Chinese Communist officials have become very, very rich—we are quick to draw conclusions about structural injustices. Americans may not "notice" Orszag-like migrations, in the sense of devoting big news coverage to them. But these stories pile up in the background to create a broad American sense that politics is rigged, and opportunity too.

The system as I have elaborated in a number of previous posts (ex. here, here, here, here, and here) is corrupt.  Here is a man with all the necessary knowledge on how to circumvent and manipulate whatever limited and existing impediments there are and will use that to his new employer's maximum benefit.  Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton, joined Citibank to become a senior adviser and board member, with a $10 million a year paycheck with no management responsibility.  Carlos Gutierrez, a former commerce secretary under President George W. Bush, will join Citibank alongside Mr. Orszag, "to counsel Citi’s clients on various policy actions."

It is clear that the government is run by persons whose only interest is in using government to get rich quickly. We need to stop wasting our time asking whether the system is broken; it is.  The real question is how much worst is it going to get before the whole corpulent mess implodes?

A Government for, by, and of the Corporations

Bloomberg News has an end of the year article ("Out of Lehman's Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants") and an interview with its lead author,  Christine Harper, on the subversion of  the financial industry reform and the underlying power of the banks over Washington DC's political class.

The past two years have seen the worst economic turn down in the American economy since the Great Depression.  The origins of this downturn emanate nearly exclusively from America's financial industry, which manipulated legislators in the 1990's to abandon historic safeguards and firewalls and then engineered novel methods to expand and grow their balance sheets.  The result was a global recession that destroyed trillions of dollars worth of capital, reduced nations like Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia into economic wastelands, and has crippled growth across the Western world. However, in that same period, the same institutions that caused so much damage and harm to the world have grown richer than ever.

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses -- six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The article elaborates on how the Obama administration, from its very inception, was uninterested in challenging the banks. The inclusion of former Clinton era deregulatory stalwarts, like Lawrence Summers, and persons directly responsible for the financial crisis, such as former president of the Federal Reserve bank of NY, Timothy Geithner, lead Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, to conclude “that the banks were going to get a free pass." Reformers were politely ignored and persons that significantly challenged the status quo "were dismissed as unrealistic, misinformed, advancing ulterior motives or damaging to U.S. competitiveness."

The too big to fail (TBTF) banks are now even bigger and the legislation crafted by congress is incapable of deterring these monopolies from engaging in even more disastrous swindles.  Meaningful changes, such as the re-introduction of Glass-Steagall or even what became known as the Volcker Rule, which would "ban proprietary trading at regulated banks and prohibit them from owning hedge funds and private equity funds" was water-downed, gutted, and then abandoned altogether.

Attempts to reign in the excessive salaries and bonus structures at the big banks were immediately defeated by representatives from both the corrupt Republican and Democratic parties. 

71 percent of Americans said big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts, and 17 percent said bonuses above $400,000 should be subject to a one-time 50 percent tax. Only 7 percent of the respondents said they consider bonuses a reflection of Wall Street’s return to health and an appropriate incentive.

Even though a clear majority of citizens wanted the plutocrats pay to be cut for their egregious mishandling of the economy, congress in collusion with the robber-barons would have none of it.

To ensure that none of their paid whores in congress would go off message or engage in populist pandering, lobbying efforts during the 2010 election period were thrown into overdrive.

The biggest financial companies increased their spending on lobbying in the first nine months of 2010 as they sought to influence the legislative outcome, according to Senate records. JPMorgan’s advocacy spending grew 35 percent, to $5.8 million from $4.3 million, while Goldman Sachs’s jumped 71 percent to $3.6 million.

The Dodd-Frank Act for financial industry reform was eventually passed, but:

The law won’t prevent lenders with federally guaranteed deposits from gambling in the derivatives markets, though it will place restrictions on some types of contracts and require more transparent trading and central clearing. It does little to solve the danger posed by leveraged firms reliant on fickle markets for funding.

Two decades of legislative changes have given the banks and the financial industry everything they wanted; yet that was not enough.  Today every American citizen, through the generosity of their political representatives in Washington, is forced to subsidize the incompetence and greed of the bankers.  In return you, joe-public, are given a moribund economy, marginal economic growth, reduced benefits, no retirement, a society with high structural unemployment, and the comforting thought that all those rich motherfuckers on Wall St. are enjoying their vacations in the Hamptons on your dime.

BofA forecloses despite not a single payment missed!

The illegal and criminal machinations of the American banking industry continues to be exposed on a daily basis.  Consider this latest hor d'oeuvres that the media has overlooked.

[Bank of America] earlier this month notified Shock Baitch and his wife Lisa (Friedman) Baitch that foreclosure action will start today – Christmas eve – unless the couple agrees to put their home up for a forced sale. As of Thursday night Bank Of America has not backed down from its foreclosure threat.

Why?

Because another unit of Bank of America erroneously reported to credit agencies that the family was seeking a loan modification, ruining their credit rating and as the result putting their mortgage into default.

All this is happening even though the bank – after admitting it erred and sent a letter of apology in September – handed this case to a special unit at Bank of America that is charged with dealing with severe customer issues. It promised to notify the credit reporting agencies that the couple were not deadbeats, but were good credit risks.

This isn't some South Florida wasteland, where automated robosigners operating 24/7 are churning out bogus legal documents without any oversight.  The case in example is in Hartford, Connecticut, the historic international center of the insurance industry and thus a city and state steeped in the rigors of proper accounting and legal procedures.  As Barry Ritholtz of the "Big Picture" blog stated on this subject:

This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize what is going should be ignored. This is about fundamental property rights and the Rule of Law in the United States — nothing less.

Listen to what the homeowners in this particular case have to say about the useless bags of corrupt corporate shit that is Bank of America:

“Bank of America lied and submitted fraudulent information to the credit bureaus and now I am literally and financially paying for it,” Baitch said. “I looked into help with a consumer counseling service, but we can’t participate because our income is too low to meet the payment requirement. I looked into bankruptcy, but we have too much equity in the house. I cannot meet the minimum payments now on the credit cards and may have to default. I am in a situation that I should have never been in since [the bank] destroyed our credit and ability to refinance. All our debt should have been consolidated and I should have positive cash flow monthly not negative.”

Where is the great socialist Barack Obama on this matter? According to the press, the Obama administration is very, very mad at the perceived fraud undertaken by the banks, but on the other hand "the administration had yet to find anything fundamentally flawed in how large banks securitized home loans or how they foreclosed on them."

Well, Mr. Obama, I have for you a very real and obvious case of how the banks foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed and illegal. So while critics bloviate about the man's so-called socialist policies, he continues to carry water for the banks and refuses to hold his biggest corporate donors accountable for the their illegal behavior.

Charlie Rose interviews Charles Ferguson of the "Inside Job"

http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11321

The above link is to a recent interview (29 November 2010) between Charlie Rose and Charles Ferguson who produced the well reviewed documentary on the origins of the financial collapse of 2008 and the subsequent global bailout of the financial industry by governments across the world.

He states specifically, "the film is about the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption."

In the interview Ferguson makes it clear that the corruption of America and its legislative and regulatory processes are profound.  He makes the case that much of what happened would not have occurred if the businessmen behind these monolithic investment banks were not so incompetent and blinded by greed and the US government had not abdicated its role, as an agent for fairness, in properly regulating the whole industry.  The actions taken by the government was to save the banks and the elite bankers, while allowing the rest of the population to fend for itself.  The bankers, with the exception of Lehman Brothers, were not made to make any sacrifices.

Ferguson further contends that "massive criminal fraud" was undertaken. Despite the nauseating proclamations by the financial industry and their media stooges, it is clear that both government and the largest corporations in America engaged in what may stand as the largest criminal event of the past quarter century. The reality is that none of these people, given the political climate and entrenched corruption of government, will be held accountable for their actions in destroying trillions of dollars of wealth, eliminating millions of jobs, and pushing families off the cliff.  When ordinary people lose their health care, lose their homes, lose their life savings, and end up destitute, the same people who caused this mayhem will snicker and call the rest of the population parasites!

I've said it numerous times on this blog, that only when people recognize the true nature of corporations in their society and begin to combat the force of coruption through monied politics, will things change.

Matt Taibbi talks about the Tea Party, Palin, & the Banks

I really hope if you have an opportunity to watch Eliot Spitzer on his CNN news-talk show, Parker-Spitzer.  The man always impresses me when he's debating friend or foe, with his enormous knowledge of governance, financial affairs, and the inherent corruption that exists between government and big business.  There really isn't any other show on the MSM cable channels, in America at least, that I think is worth watching.  Even if you're into liberal talk shows, MSNBC's lineup tends to be a little repetitious and self-serving when it comes to engaging in substantive issues. 

The above video post is another with Matt Taibbi, who grouses on the media obsession with Caribou Barbie and the Tea Party movement, the criminality of the banks, and the incompetence of Tim Geithner and Alan Greenspan.  Spitzer and Taibbi unleash a real pummelling on the ass-clowns of casino-capitalism!

Matt Taibbi explains the Financial sector's hold on Democrats

I personally think the reason Rick Sanchez got cut from CNN was that he rubbed some of the MSM top honchos the wrong way during his time at the anchor desk.  Populism is fine for the plutocrats when it works to their advantage, as in the case of the ignorant and deranged Tea Party advocates.  However, when discussions of the collusion between those at the top of the economic pyramid (i.e. the banks) and government officials begin, which leads to the magnification of the nexus of institutional corruption, the grand-poobahs get antsy. 

Consider the above video with Sanchez and Rolling Stone magazine contributor and author Matt Taibbi, where the discussion veers into understanding the basis of the 2009 financial sector bailout pursued by the Obama administration. In it, Sanchez makes the connection that Washington DC is effectively corporate controlled territory. He notes that Goldman Sachs and other bankers wield inordinate levels of power over the legislative and executive branches and control the system through campaign contributions to both parties and the installation of their people into key government portfolios. There was no requirement for Obama to bring people like Larry Summers, who had been an architect of the deregulatory fiasco of the 1990's that lead to this current economic malaise, into the fold.  There was no requirement to appoint Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury or to re-appoint Ben Bernanke, other than it appeased the poobahs on Wall Street.

For all the talk of change, the Obama administration made sure that corporate America knew that the new sheriff in town was going to be the same as the old one.  They let it be known that "Greed was still good," and regardless of how the economy reacted, all the merry sociopaths, looking down at us little people from the glass towers in the Financial District, would still get all their bonuses that would allow them to feed their insatiable want for coke, hookers, and good times.

All this nonsensical talk that Obama is somehow a socialist is the musings of truly stupid people.  The facts are plain to see that this administration is not terribly different than any of its Republican or Democratic predecessors.  The facts are also clear that it is the greedheads at the top of the financial food chain who have been the winners for the past 30 years.  When the next economic calamity arises in the near future, we'll see who gets saved again and who the ignorant masses will blame for it.

Galbraith on why the Democrats lost the Election

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

James K. Galbraith, professor of economics, offers his summation on why the Obama administration and the Democrats in congress, failed to obtain better results in last week's election.

A few commentators, like Kevin Drum over at MotherJones.com, do not believe that even if Obama had pursued a strategy where the economy was this Administration's central objective, that the Democrats would be substantially better off.  Given the people who Obama sought consul from, it seems entirely correct to me that the Democrats would still have lost the house of representatives to the Republicans with such a strategy.  

As a corollary to Drum et al's sentiment, Galbraith elaborates in his opinion piece that Obama upon entering office had a limited understanding of economics, and coupled with a desire to pursue a centrist-right policy that maintained the status quo as much as possible, through the appointment of Clinton leftovers and Wall Street yes-men,  he essentially abdicated the mantel of being an agent of change and became an enabler of of Wall Street's mismanagement.

The obvious conclusion is that if Obama had pursued, as soon as he arrived in office, a bank nationalization program or something more similar to what the British engaged in and what the Swedes did in the early 1990's, he would have been able to dismantle the banking-congressional lobbyist nexus and create national banks capable of effectively lending money to both businesses and the American public a short time after.  Make no doubt that the process would have been bloody, but through inflicting maximum pain on the management and shareholders of the corrupt banks and insurance companies -something that was universally desired by the American public- Obama would have consolidated his record of being a giant-killer and a vanguard for the "little guy."

Instead, the timid and frustratingly feeble performance of Mr. Obama and his pro-business acolytes in the White House, have left his administration and the Democrats vulnerable to attacks from multiple fronts and potentially dead in the water for the next two years.

Glenn Greenwald on why the Democrats lost

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown.  Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating.  Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests).  They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront.  They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces.  And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles.  Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality.  And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

Glenn Greenwald in a blog post at Salon.com, takes on MSNBC commentator Lawerence O'Donnell in his assertion that the Democrats lost because they are too "liberal" and the country simply prefers "conservative" candidates and governance.

Over the past decade, I too have excoriated those who babble about the fundamental divide between philosophical and political liberalism and conservatism in America.  The terms in themselves are inexhaustibly used incorrectly by both sides to impugn their opponents and distort the overall discussion.  Virtually no credible conservative government has existed at the federal level in the past forty years in America.  Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Dubya were pro-corporatist presidents who advanced statist agendas.  Government under each of these men was widely expanded; the national debt ballooned; war and the invasion of numerous countries in violation of international law was conducted; treaties were maligned and rejected at whim; established precedents in US constitutional law were regularly dismissed and abrogated with presidential approval; corporate take over of the executive and legislative branches was perfected under Republican rule over these decades.  At what point did the fanatics of conservative causes rally against these changes?

The pro-corporatist Democrats have always used the excuse that they could not execute a liberal agenda, that was and is favored by a majority, because of the stalking horse of conservatism amongst the population.  People now realize that because of gerrymandering, corporate donations and special interest meddling, and a two-party system that invalidates third party politics, that there is very little that they themselves can do to upend and change a system.  America has for the past decade not been a democracy, but  a plutocracy governed by people who are servants, not to the constitution or the people, but to multinational corporations: including bankers, insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, oil companies, and a bevy of special interests that are more than willing to bribe politicians into executing their agenda.

O'Donnell represents the liberal version of a cultural manager; a person who nonchalantly bemoans the tyranny of the left-wing of the Democratic party, but refuses to address the perennial failure and Pavlovian response of the Democratic party hierarchy in pursuing Republican-light policies once they are elected.  Clinton was elected to improve the economy, introduce health care, and end the brutal twelve years of Republican mismanagement.  Instead, he pursed a strategy of triangulation and capitulated to conservative policies of energy and financial deregulation, which has left the American economy broken and on unsound footing.  Obama in the face of aggressive citizen support has sought legislative capitulation to the banks, big oil, big-pharma, insurance companies, and the Military-Security state.  Obama's claims which he made during the 2008 election, of attacking special interests and the oligarchs appear little more than pleasant lies told to naive children.

Gretchen Morgenson: Untangling The Complex Foreclosure Mess

Gretchen Morgenson, who writes a must-read weekly column in the NY Times business section goes on NPR to discuss the complete mess the banks and mortgage lending agencies have gotten the entire American economy into, through their initial mortgage securitization programs and now with their shady and illegal foreclosure practices.  To underline the severity of this situation, all 50 states have launched criminal investigations into the unsavory foreclosure activities committed by the banks.  Ms. Morgenson, unlike the hacks at the Wall St. Journal's op-ed pages, is an intelligent and informative journalist, who has been at the forefront in explaining the Great recession and the corpulence underlying America's corporate misdeeds.
 
NPR begins with the following introduction:

Since the housing bust two years ago, when millions of homeowners fell behind on their loans, the foreclosure industry has grown into a multibillion-dollar business. To deal with the thousands of defaulted loans needing to be processed, banks relied on thousands of temporary employees who often had little experience and training to handle the foreclosure paperwork.

This resulted in many mistakes being made throughout the foreclosure process. Reports of sloppy documentation — including the questionable notarization of documents, the loss of key paperwork needed to begin foreclosure proceedings and missing paperwork on original mortgages — temporarily halted foreclosure proceedings across much of the country in early October. It also triggered at least five separate federal investigations into the ways mortgage lenders have handled foreclosures.

The entire broadcast can be heard or downloaded here.

The degree of duplicity, fraud, and ineptitude exhibited by the major players in this decade long fiasco, should make everyone who has a stake in the viability of the American economy, to demand that everyone -politicians, corporations, bankers, loan agents, bond rating agencies, economists, and homeowners- all pay a severe penalty for engaging in what is likely the world's largest instance of criminal fraud.  Nothing else is acceptable, because these same devious pick-pockets will only re-emerge emboldened and unleash another wave of catastrophe upon the financial world if left unpunished.

Open Advice to President Obama

Dear Barack,

I know you don't care what I think, with all those high-paid clowns dispensing all that brilliant strategy to you on how to piss-off those loser hippies who funded, supported, and fought for you across America in 2008, but here it is.

You're a bit like Bubba, in that despite all those flowery speeches about hope or being from a place called hope (who can get it straight anymore) you've given over the past few years, we really don't know what you believe.  I mean, the nihilists and brain-dead masses think you're a Marxist Fascist with ties to Kenyan revolutionaries.  I don't know what that means either, other than interpreting it as an odd way to just call you a nigger.  I've never really thought you were the second coming of FDR, but you were a better option than the Queen corporatist Madam Clinton.  People liked what you had to say and what you represented, but back then it mostly was about voting against eight hard and dismal years under the Bush junta.  However, you waffled and instead of steamrolling what remained of the right wing yahoo's and pushing through a progressive and liberal agenda, you coddled and capitulated to their bizarre demands.  Let's recap:

• Did exactly what Bush said he would do in ending the Iraq war; that being leaving 50K troops to babysit the Shia thugocracy in Baghdad.
• Escalated the Afghan war, which everyone has already admitted is lost.
• Caved into special interests in the health care bill, by eliminating the public option and preventing the  importation of drugs from Canada.
• Created a health care bill that would force individuals to purchase lame health care coverage and subsidise the crooked insurance companies.
• Pushed through a special debt committee, filled with right-wing ideologues and hacks demanding that Social Security be privatized under the guise of bi-partisanship.
• Bailed out your friends and big-donor buddies in the banks, but left the rest of the nation submerged with debt and ever-expanding (and now illegal) foreclosures
• Failed to prosecute any of the major players in the Bush junta for war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Constitution, and numerous illegal acts and unethical behavior
• Advanced the post-911 security-surveillance state to new levels
• Advanced the military-industrial complex in the face of mounting debts and limited resources
• Let Israel make a complete mockery of you, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and your entire administration relating to the Palestinian issue
• Allowed the minority blue dog Democrats to dictate the terms of major legislation, so they could retain their congressional seats (which as every poll indicates, they won't)
• Put in charge Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, effectively creating what others have referred to as Bush's 3rd term with respect to governmental regulation and resource management of public assets
• Colluded with BP to lie to the public on the scope and severity of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

People who voted for you, in the deluded belief that government could mend it ways, are looking at a moribund economy, a Democratic Party that is incapable of defending themselves against corrupt Republican and Tea Party slander, and a crypto-fascist uprising funded by the same assholes whose jobs and balance sheets you saved from complete Armageddon.  A lot of people said early on that you were playing three-dimensional chess and were way smarter than the rest of the dolts on the Hill.  It's pretty clear that not only don't you have game, but you're really not as bright as those Harvard and Columbia degrees might imply.

So Barack, if you want to do something meaningful, do yourself a favor and grow a couple, because this nonsense you've been pedalling for the past 21-months is getting tired and no one is going to vote for you if you keep selling the same recycled shit that Bush left behind on the White House's going-out of business sale in November 2008.

Fuck-you very much.

The Lifer.