Some comments from Huffington post...Think people are pissed?

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Infinite cap on Freddie and Fannie.
And Geitner needs to be held accountable for it and his dealings with AIG.
New York Fed paid AIG billions and was told to keep it secret. He needs to prove who's side he's really on.
Show us or step down.

The Fed: A conspiracy of silence. A conspiracy to defraud taxpayers and keep us forever in the dark. Git yer pitchforks. It's time the banksters learn the meaning of a few words, such as fear, retribution and expropriation. They need to be brought low, which, after all, is their natural station. Rough justice is better than none.
I guess the powers that be think it is none of our business where OUR money went. Then these people wonder why they are despised by almost everyone.

MALIGNANTLY Corrupt to the CORE. The massess are helplessly languishing, due to excessive abuse of the top 2 percent. The nation is withering. The collapse of a Super Power ! All rooted from GREED. GREED.GREED. MORE YACHTS, BIGGER YACHTS. MORE MANSIONS. BIGGER MANSIONS. bIGGER JETS, LARGER FLEETS. i' am BIG and I CRUSH you.

We're all serfs now and Barak Obama and his bipartisanship fetish is helping make it all possible.
audit audit audit !

They are all closing ranks now. Anyone outside of Wall Street believing that Obama is still going to protect their interests is delusional. If he were, Geithner would have been gone LONG ago. Never hired in the first place. He wants Bernanke reaffirmed. He's in collusion with them.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness

We are at that point, I believe.

Surprise, Surprise!! NO NEED TO KNOW, JUST PAY! Or what is to KNOW, no small print contract clauses - just a SWEAT DEAL for the ones that CAN!

What could possibly be gained by getting this information from the Fed. People might find out that Goldman got money from the government. Come on. It's a waste of time congress should focus on something worthwhile.

Blind robbery of the American taxpayer is something important. It sucks that you don't think so, but everyone is entitled to an opinion.

I remember Obama promising transparency during the campaign. I also remember the day last fall that Obama invited all the banksters and their lobbyists down to the White House for a walkthrough and sitdown over some kind of presidential lunch and I remember The bank presidents and managers going in and coming out. And the press who were there--CNBC was the only cable channel that even bothered to cover this momentous event--was set up at a small table along the walkway leading to and from the White House entrance the banksters and their lobbyists were using. And the questions were so softball and the answers so banal that it reminded me of that scene in the Bush campaign film made by Alex Pelosi in which Bush tells her about his shirt,his pants, his belt and his cowboy boots. Then Obama later talked about the meetings and discussion in meaningless platitudes and spoke of a "frank and open discussion"!

True transparency that!!!!

I decided then, that I couldn't always get all of my money back, if I put it in a bank, but, I could always get my money back, if I had some stash.......,[please take note of my slightly 'conservative' conclusion on how to deal with this. See? I'm not always a liberal, i been saving $ on my own]....., : )

Who would like to see Bernanke, Summers and Geithner put in stocks with a bushel of rotten tomatoes?

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ATTN: Employees of Goldman Sachs

We did it. Bottom of the ninth, down by three, bases loaded, and we cranked another grand slam to the moon. They may have shot Lennon, but nothing can kill the Beatles.

I admit things looked bleak for a minute there. We had to convert to a bank holding company and were forced to accept a taxpayer bailout. It felt un-American. Terribly unbanksmanly. But we accepted the money, knowing that we could magically weave it into a much larger mountain of money.

We had a few hard months there, didn’t we? They regulated our corporate jet so that we could no longer use it to fly from hole to hole on the green. Dave had to drain his money pool to half capacity. I stopped injecting gold into my blood. They don’t call it a recession for nothing. One day, we’ll look back on the year we received only five-figure bonuses and laugh.

Wanting to celebrate our renewed success is natural, but it’s important that we don’t go crazy here. Remember, ten per cent of the non-bank country is unemployed, and even those who are working have “real” jobs, where payment is proportional to the creation of a “product” or a “service.” Those poor bastards. So I ask that, in celebrating our raping of the stock market, we show restraint in the following ways:

    * Please limit high-fives and chest bumps to a dozen a day.
    * Don’t wear your crowns, except around the office.
    * Stop paying for things in Monopoly money—I understand it is the same as real money to us, but there have been some complaints.
    * For now, let’s take down the giant scoreboard that reads “Main Street: zero. Wall Street: a billion gazillion bajillion.”

Furthermore, to avoid drawing criticism from the press, this year the bonuses, expected to be comically large, will be distributed in blood diamonds, which can be easily concealed in a briefcase so it looks like we’re working.

I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible—for a second time. Respect to President Obama for keeping us in the green. Thanks to the big guy upstairs (me). And let’s not forget all the ordinary Americans, who, for some unfathomable reason, have refused to put us behind bars. We are literally taking money out of their wallets. Seriously, with these returns we are making Madoff look like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. Amateur!

Yours in money,

Lloyd Blankfein, C.E.O., Goldman Sachs

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Glenn Greenwald

Saturday April 4, 2009 08:35 EDT

Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government

White House officials yesterday released their personal financial disclosure forms, and included in the millions of dollars which top Obama economics adviser Larry Summers made from Wall Street in 2008 is this detail:

Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations. . . .
Financial institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.

That's $135,000 paid by Goldman Sachs to Summers -- for a one-day visit.  And the payment was made at a time -- in April, 2008 -- when everyone assumed that the next President would either be Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and that Larry Summers would therefore become exactly what he now is:  the most influential financial official in the U.S. Government (and the $45,000 Merrill Lynch payment came 8 days after Obama's election). Goldman would not be able to make a one-day $135,000 payment to Summers now that he is Obama's top economics adviser, but doing so a few months beforehand was obviously something about which neither parties felt any compunction.  It's basically an advanced bribe.  And it's paying off in spades.  And none of it seemed to bother Obama in the slightest when he first strongly considered naming Summers as Treasury Secretary and then named him his top economics adviser instead (thereby avoiding the need for Senate confirmation), knowing that Summers would exert great influence in determining who benefited from the government's response to the financial crisis.
Last night, former Reagan-era S&L regulator and current University of Missouri Professor Bill Black was on Bill Moyers' Journal and detailed the magnitude of what he called the on-going massive fraud, the role Tim Geithner played in it before being promoted to Treasury Secretary (where he continues to abet it), and -- most amazingly of all -- the crusade led by Alan Greenspan, former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin (Geithner's mentor) and Larry Summers in the late 1990s to block the efforts of top regulators (especially Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission) to regulate the exact financial derivatives market that became the principal cause of the global financial crisis.  To get a sense for how deep and massive is the on-going fraud and the key role played in it by key Obama officials, I highly recommend watching that Black interview (it can be seen here and the transcript is here).
This article from Stanford Magazine -- an absolutely amazing read -- details how Summers, Rubin and Greenspan led the way in blocking any regulatory efforts of the derivatives market whatsoever on the ground that the financial industry and its lobbyists were objecting:

As chairperson of the CFTC, Born advocated reining in the huge and growing market for financial derivatives. . . . One type of derivative—known as a credit-default swap—has been a key contributor to the economy’s recent unraveling. . .
Back in the 1990s, however, Born’s proposal stirred an almost visceral response from other regulators in the Clinton administration, as well as members of Congress and lobbyists. . . . But even the modest proposal got a vituperative response. The dozen or so large banks that wrote most of the OTC derivative contracts saw the move as a threat to a major profit center. Greenspan and his deregulation-minded brain trust saw no need to upset the status quo. The sheer act of contemplating regulation, they maintained, would cause widespread chaos in markets around the world.
Born recalls taking a phone call from Lawrence Summers, then Rubin’s top deputy at the Treasury Department, complaining about the proposal, and mentioning that he was taking heat from industry lobbyists. . . . The debate came to a head April 21, 1998. In a Treasury Department meeting of a presidential working group that included Born and the other top regulators, Greenspan and Rubin took turns attempting to change her mind. Rubin took the lead, she recalls.
“I was told by the secretary of the treasury that the CFTC had no jurisdiction, and for that reason and that reason alone, we should not go forward,” Born says. . . . “It seemed totally inexplicable to me,” Born says of the seeming disinterest her counterparts showed in how the markets were operating. “It was as though the other financial regulators were saying, ‘We don’t want to know.’”
She formally launched the proposal on May 7, and within hours, Greenspan, Rubin and Levitt issued a joint statement condemning Born and the CFTC, expressing “grave concern about this action and its possible consequences.” They announced a plan to ask for legislation to stop the CFTC in its tracks.

Rubin, Summers and Greenspan succeeded in inducing Congress -- funded, of course, by these same financial firms -- to enact legislation blocking the CFTC from regulating these derivative markets.  More amazingly still, the CFTC, headed back then by Born, is now headed by Obama appointee Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive (naturally) who was as instrumental as anyone in blocking any regulations of those derivative markets (and then enriched himself by feeding on those unregulated markets).
Just think about how this works.  People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting.  When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal.  Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government.  Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced.  This corruption is so tawdry and transparent -- and it has fueled and continues to fuel a fraud so enormous and destructive as to be unprecedented in both size and audacity -- that it is mystifying that it is not provoking more mass public rage.
All of that leads to things like this, from today's Washington Post:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials. . . .
The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials. . . .
In one program, designed to restart small-business lending, President Obama's officials are planning to set up a middleman called a special-purpose vehicle -- a term made notorious during the Enron scandal -- or another type of entity to evade the congressional mandates, sources familiar with the matter said.

If that isn't illegal, it is as close to it as one can get.  And it is a blatant attempt by the White House to brush aside -- circumvent and violate -- the spirit if not the letter of Congressional restrictions on executive pay for TARP-receiving firms.  It was Obama, in the wake of various scandals over profligate spending by TARP firms, who pretended to ride the wave of populist anger and to lead the way in demanding limits on compensation.  And ever since his flamboyant announcement, Obama -- adopting the same approach that seems to drive him in most other areas -- has taken one step after the next to gut and render irrelevant the very compensation limits he publicly pretended to champion (thereafter dishonestly blaming Chris Dodd for doing so and virtually destroying Dodd's political career).   And the winners -- as always -- are the same Wall St. firms that caused the crisis in the first place while enriching and otherwise co-opting the very individuals Obama chose to be his top financial officials.
Worse still, what is happening here is an exact analog to what is happening in the realm of Bush war crimes -- the Obama administration's first priority is to protect the wrongdoers and criminals by ensuring that the criminality remains secret.  Here is how Black explained it last night:

Black:  Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.
These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...
Moyers:  What do you mean?
Black: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator. . . .
The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation?
What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. . . .
Moyers: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
Black: Absolutely.
Moyers: You are.
Black: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. . . . What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG.
Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.
Moyers: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.
Black: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.

This is exactly what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson warned about in his vital Atlantic article:  "that the finance industry has effectively captured our government -- a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises."   This is the key passage where Johnson described the hallmark of how corrupt oligarchies that cause financial crises then attempt to deal with the fallout:

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large. . . .

As much as he campaigned against anything, Obama railed against precisely this sort of incestuous, profoundly corrupt control by narrow private interests of the Government, yet he has chosen to empower the very individuals who most embody that corruption.  And the results are exactly what one would expect them to be.
* * * * *
I was on the Moyers program last night after the Black interview -- along with Amy Goodman -- discussing the media's role in this establishment corruption (that segment can be viewed here), and yesterday morning I was on C-SPAN's Washington Journal with the primary topic being this blatant, sleazy oligarchical control of both the Executive and legislative branches (which can be seen here).

UPDATE:  Just to get a sense for how propagandistic, sycophantic and fact-free are the most extreme Obama worshippers in our "journalist" class, consider this recent article from The New Republic's Noam Scheiber in which he urged the White House to "free its economic oracle" -- Summers -- and defended and praised Summers on the ground that "his exposure to Wall Street over the years has been limited."  As Jonathan Schwarz asks, citing the massive compensation on which Summers engorged himself by feeding at the Wall Street trough last year:  "I wonder what would have constituted 'significant' exposure to Wall Street? Maybe if he'd worked for D.E. Shaw full time? (Amazingly, Summers was paid $5.2 million for a part-time position.)"

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For some of us.

It's time to recognize what it means to be part of the billionaire-bailout nation. Citizenship comes in three distinct flavors.

If you are wealthy, it's fantastic to take part in the resurgent Wall Street boom. You are thrilled to see the trillions in taxpayer dollars successfully prop up the financial sector. After all it's not really your money -- your tax shelters take care of that. You love the rise in the markets. You are now reaping the rewards of investing in a sector that rests firmly upon government welfare, and in which the largest institutions are guaranteed from failure. It feels good to see double-digit returns again, which you feel you truly deserve. The gap between your wealth and the average American's is utterly fantastic. Life is good.

If you have a job, you are feeling better than a year ago. Your 401k is coming back from the dead. The stimulus program seems to be helping with your employment. You may even get some relief from health care reform. But you are not seeing your wages increase. (Overall the average production workers real wages are down more than 18 percent since the mid-1970s.) It's not easy to maintain a middle-class existence or get anywhere near one if you're not already there. Layoffs might be slowing down but you are still petrified that your job will soon disappear. You are unsure you can provide for your children's education and your own retirement. The future seems much less secure than it did for your parents' and grandparents' generations.

If you don't have a job you're in deep trouble. You are a "lagging indicator." You are one of the 29 million who are without work or forced into part-time jobs (the BLS U6 Jobless rate stands at 17 percent). You are gobbling up what savings you have or already digging a deep hole of debt. You are hoping other family members can keep the ship afloat until you find employment. You've worked hard all your life only to watch your industry pack up and leave or shut down all together. You've drawn the short straw.

Well so what: life is unfair. And maybe there's nothing we can or should do about it. Then again it's very hard to make the case that we've tried all that hard. Here's the scorecard:

Too big too Fail? The top 20 or so financial institutions got even bigger. No effort is being made or even being contemplated to break them up so that they are small enough to fail.

Risky Derivatives? Still totally deregulated and poised to re-emerge. Bank lobbyists are working hard to block serious reforms. Keep your eye on high fee, high profit specialty derivatives which are likely to remain deregulated forever.

Executive Pay? The Pay Czar has limited powers and seems ineffective. He's even having a tough time reigning in AIG's Financial Product group's bonuses, even though that group was responsible for sinking AIG and costing the taxpayer more than $150 billion in bailout funds. (See New York Times and Wall Street Journal "Wall Street on Track to Award Record Pay.")

Shrink the size of Wall Street? President Obama said last May that he wanted a smaller Wall Street with lower pay so that the best and the brightest would be lured into science, medicine and education rather than into concocting new casino games. Fat chance. Record profits will lead to higher pay, which in turn will draw more talent into fantasy finance. PS. Andrew J. Hall, the oil speculator, will get his $100 million payday.

Windfall Profits Taxes on Wall Street? Forgetaboutit. Now that we've given Wall Street upwards of $13 trillion in taxpayer funds and guarantees, they are keeping the profits. Neither the White House nor Congress has the stomach for taxing it away.

Progressive income taxes on the super-rich? Off the table. We have the worst income distribution since 1929. The Eisenhower era 91 percent marginal tax rate on incomes over $3 million (today's dollars) is far too radical for our billionaire-bailout nation.

Programs to employ our people after the stimulus ends? Nada. The unemployed will have to fend for themselves in the marketplace, while the super-rich feast on the Wall Street bailout bonanza. We could go a decade before we come near full-employment again. In fact look for the economics profession to redefine full employment as 7 percent rather than 4.5 percent.

Won't it all work out as long as the markets keep improving?

I think we played that song again and again over the past thirty years. It's a mirage. We deregulated just about everything, crushed the middle class and crashed the whole shebang.

But, complaining about the billionaires and the bailouts (which perhaps was greatest transfer of wealth since slavery) just isn't good enough. We need to recognize that underlying all of these problems is the lack of a progressive response.

Unless I'm missing something, almost all the pressure on Congress and the White House is coming from the right: from banking community and from those who detest government intervention in the economy (which is easy to do, now that such intervention seems to have saved it).

The progressive community has developed no coherent voice, no national movement, no effective lobbying. We are tied up in a myriad of important, yet isolated issues, and seem to have forgotten what a movement looks like. Populism belongs to the tea baggers, not the populists of old. When it comes to finance, the very heart of our economy, we seem to be waiting for Obama to do it all for us. No such luck.

Yet most Americans understand that something has gone terribly wrong. They truly sense that Wall Street is running away with our nation's wealth. It's a precious organizing moment.

We're at the fork in the road: Either we build on this moment to dramatically change the way the super-rich dominate our economy or we'll be leaving to our children a billionaire-bailout nation with a hollowed-out middle class.

Hopefully, we still have a little moxie left in us.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/stop-whining-wall-streets_b_321964.html

ATTN: Employees of Goldman Sachs

We did it. Bottom of the ninth, down by three, bases loaded, and we cranked another grand slam to the moon. They may have shot Lennon, but nothing can kill the Beatles.

I admit things looked bleak for a minute there. We had to convert to a bank holding company and were forced to accept a taxpayer bailout. It felt un-American. Terribly unbanksmanly. But we accepted the money, knowing that we could magically weave it into a much larger mountain of money.

We had a few hard months there, didn’t we? They regulated our corporate jet so that we could no longer use it to fly from hole to hole on the green. Dave had to drain his money pool to half capacity. I stopped injecting gold into my blood. They don’t call it a recession for nothing. One day, we’ll look back on the year we received only five-figure bonuses and laugh.

Wanting to celebrate our renewed success is natural, but it’s important that we don’t go crazy here. Remember, ten per cent of the non-bank country is unemployed, and even those who are working have “real” jobs, where payment is proportional to the creation of a “product” or a “service.” Those poor bastards. So I ask that, in celebrating our raping of the stock market, we show restraint in the following ways:

    * Please limit high-fives and chest bumps to a dozen a day.
    * Don’t wear your crowns, except around the office.
    * Stop paying for things in Monopoly money—I understand it is the same as real money to us, but there have been some complaints.
    * For now, let’s take down the giant scoreboard that reads “Main Street: zero. Wall Street: a billion gazillion bajillion.”

Furthermore, to avoid drawing criticism from the press, this year the bonuses, expected to be comically large, will be distributed in blood diamonds, which can be easily concealed in a briefcase so it looks like we’re working.

I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible—for a second time. Respect to President Obama for keeping us in the green. Thanks to the big guy upstairs (me). And let’s not forget all the ordinary Americans, who, for some unfathomable reason, have refused to put us behind bars. We are literally taking money out of their wallets. Seriously, with these returns we are making Madoff look like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. Amateur!

Yours in money,

Lloyd Blankfein, C.E.O., Goldman Sachs