The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout

[NicholeW.]

The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted March 23, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/132859/the_big_takeover%3A_how_wall_street_insiders_are_using_the_bailout_to_stage_a_revolution/

It's over - we're officially, royally ->-bleeped-<-ed. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline - a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.


While you're at it read the pieces yesterday by Bill Greider and Don Hazen as well.

Nichole

[sd]

Notto undercut the rest of the article, but umm...

That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household

Excuse me?!




As for the article, we are so screwed.

[NicholeW.]

Notto undercut the rest of the article, but umm...Excuse me?!

As for the article, we are so screwed.

You need to make the quote whole, hon,

That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second.

That is so much more clear than what you posted.

N~

[sd]

You need to make the quote whole, hon,  That is so much more clear than what you posted.

N~

No, I was trying to see how they figure that as a median income, not how much they were spending.

[Susan]

My median income is about 3.87 seconds

[NicholeW.]

No, I was trying to see how they figure that as a median income, not how much they were spending.

Leslie,

The median income is apparently 6 x $7,750 or $46,500.

Nichole

[sd]

Leslie,

The median income is apparently 6 x $7,750 or $46,500.

Nichole

Looks like someone attached an extra zero then.

[NicholeW.]

Looks like someone attached an extra zero then.

I don't think so, the median is where the absolute statistical middle is. Half the incomes are higher and half lower than this figure. I doubt there are any extra zeros at all.

Nichole

[tekla]

50K seems to be the median HOUSEHOLD income for 2007.  But the range in states is huge ranging from a high in Maryland of $68K, to a low in Mississippi of $36K, which is a huge difference.

lots of stats here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

[Alyssa M.]

Leslie, you seem to have misparsed the sentence. What the article said was:

1) That's $465,000 a minute,
i.e. 1 minute = 60 seconds = $465,000

2) a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds,
i.e. six seconds = 0.1 min = $46,500 (roughly median income)

3) roughly $7,750 a second.
i.e. one second = 1/60 min = $7,750

There's no extra zero; the $465k figure was for one minute; the $46,500 (median annual income) for six seconds, differing by a factor of exactly ten. It's a poorly constructed sentence in that only after you read the whole thing do you realize that the comma was being used to separate elements in a list rather than to offset a non-essential phrase (which is how you parsed it, and how I did the first time I read it).

Hope this helps.

--

As to the article .... I though the Wall Street Takover was what led up to the current situation, the two decades or more of deregulation since Reagan that have led to what George Soros today called an "abberation," and what most people would call "heyday for the corporate scam artist," culminating with a couple of oilmen in the White House. It just seems odd to suggest that the worlds most powerful people, at the height of their power, are staging a power grab. Maybe it's just because I didn't live through Watergate, but I just don't buy conspiracies, especially when there's no obvious motive and so many inflated egos competing against each other. Basically, considering the competely broken and convoluted situation of the economy, I don't know what policy could ever be considered satisfactory to the writer.

~Alyssa

[sd]

I see what they did now.
That could have been written a bit more clear, but I get it now.

[tekla]

I think its kind of odd that with every twist and turn in the economic programs everyone asks "How does Wall Street feel about this?" when they are the players that got this whole ball rolling downhill in the first place.

And yes, a lot of it started under Reagan, but Clinton signed off on a lot of that crap too.

[NicholeW.]

I think what would satisfy, at least insofar as any of us are ever satisfied for very long, would be an economy built of what we actually, as people, do best: production. Our economy since the late-70s has left off production and gone to finance almost totally. That has been our economy. We make very little at all anymore.

Wealth, sustenance, doesn't come through pixels or numbers, no matter how worthwhile and exciting those things seem to be. But, the push toward where we ahve gone isn't unusual in imperial situations. There's always been the push by an empire to produce wealth for it's leaders and to some extent even for it's citizens.

Roman's baked bread, yes, but they produced very little of the wheat with which the bread was made. The conglomeration of most of the welath in the hands of the few is also an on-going process in most societies. I don't think it requires conspiracy theories to be able to see that.

Nichole

[tekla]

One of my favorite authors James Kunstler, is the author of one of my favorite books, The Geography of Nowhere about how the suburbs were designed to be non-sustaining - as current events are proving.  See:
http://www.alternet.org/story/127395/why_suburbs_may_become_the_next_slums/

His latest book is called A World Made By Hand.  His argument is that as fuel prices and energy costs grow, the cost of production based on cheep energy is not going to be sustainable either.  But such a world depends on skills that a lot of people no longer have.  Thinks like 'management' 'administration' and other such non-productive jobs will shrink, and people who can do, make and create will become more in demand.

Finance is a pretty marginal skill when the money supply crashes.

[Alyssa M.]

The problem is that what you're talking about, Nichole, is a goal and not a policy (i.e., how we try to achieve that goal). The reason I'm pleased about this administration is that, regardless of short-term tactics (which I'm completely unqualified to judge), the long term goals are correct: energy, health care, and education. Health care is a special case in this country -- completely screwed up and a drag on everything else -- but the other two are general problems of how we structure the country and Western economies in general, and have always been the two things I've been most worried about regarding our future, not to mention how our poor education and energy situation tends to be the underlying source of most of how America screws up in the rest of the world. (Energy because we get in bed with the Saudis and jerked around by the Russians; education because, well, democracy relies on education, and produces stupid reckless governments without it.)

I don't know if that gets us back to a manufacturing economy (if that's what you mean by production), but it at least allows the possibility -- if we keep relying on petroleum, we're screwed even without climate change. The one thing that America has always had going for it is the one thing we produce best: food. Any time I hear that America is over, I can just climb up onto the foothills (or Pikes Peak, why not) and look out over the fruited plains. Granted, we overstress the land, but America won't stop producing lots and lots of grain any time soon.

Tekla -- notice I said "since Reagan."

[NicholeW.]

Seeing those fruited plains from where you are is prolly not as majestic a thing as it might be elsewhere. The prairie grew up where it did for a reason. To have plowed it under for grain farming may look majestic, but the damage done always leaves the danger of the soil, once again, blowing away. Three M and Dupont will only be able to replace soil with chemical for awhile before tose fruited plains are just a desert.

[tekla]

Though the notion of 'farmers' is very cute, it's also quaint.  What people do today is more akin to agribusiness than farming.  Its very energy intensive.  I lived in farm country for well over a decade, and though at times it was pretty pastoral and all, there were times when it was as industrial as living in the middle of a drop forge at River Rouge.

[lisagurl]

education because, well, democracy relies on education, and produces stupid reckless governments without it

The corporations have taken over there too. Universities are run like an industrial plant turning out workers. Tenure professors are being replaced by adjunct part time workers without any benefits at low pay.

[tekla]

Tenure professors are being replaced by adjunct part time workers without any benefits at low pay.

Often teaching at several places at the same time, gypsy professors.  Tragic too.  Kids today are not getting near the education I did, and they are getting so much less at such a higher cost.

[Alyssa M.]

There's no such thing as "natural farmland." It's a contradiction in terms. But the Midwest is about as close as it comes (and that includes lots that was never really prairie, but the great and now mostly defunct Eastern Forest; including everything from Ohio to Minnesota and down through Missouri. Overtaxing it the way we have is not sustainable, but we won't have another Dust Bowl, simply because it was largely the methods of the time (very disruptive plowing, no windbreaks) that caused the Dust Bowl of the '30's. Obviously we can't sustain petroleum based agrigulture anymore than we can sustain petroleum-based manufacturing. But even without it, the Midwest can still produce plenty of calories. If you disagree, fine; all you're saying is that the Earth can't sustain this population. That's not a question of societal structure, but of the carbon cycle. The Midwest will always be one of the most productive agricultural regions of the world. And whether the farms are run by charming families with strapping children chasing greased pigs at the 4H club or by faceless multinational corporations doesn't change the fact that it produces lots of food.

We used to be a notion of farmers. Now only a tiny fraction of Americans (including all residents, whether temporary or permanent, legally documented or not) work on farms. That's technology: it takes a lot fewer people to make food. It takes a lot fewer people now to make anything. At some point, we started to be able to make more stuff than we had people to make it; thus the rise of service-based jobs. There's no going back on that, provided we can replace petroleum. That's a big if, but I don't see any problem with a society based on service jobs.

By the way, there's a reason so many people come to America for university education: there are many, many very good colleges here. Most states have state schools with at least some programs that are top notch. American university education is not the problem: it's the absolutely deplorable state of our primary and secondary schools that should scare the crap out of us. Nobody should need any college to get a good job. If anyone does need it, it's because of the failure of their high school (or high schools in general).

Well, that's how I see it, at least in broad strokes. Yes, I'm oversimplifying, but I'm not trying to write a policy paper for the Brookings Institution. Okay, I'll shut up now.