Let the Post Office be a bank or whatever the market will bear

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently wrote:

If the Postal Service offered basic banking services -- nothing fancy, just basic bill paying, check cashing and small dollar loans -- then it could provide affordable financial services for underserved families, and, at the same time, shore up its own financial footing. 

No, this is not just a gimmick to shore up the Post Office's balance sheet, it's about serving underbanked and overcharged Americans, the Little Guys, the ones we're supposed to be worried about (and not the top 20, 10 or 1 percent).  Indeed, as Sen. Warren wrote, "The poor pay more," for basic financial services, which is not only unfair, it's avoidable [emphasis mine]:

According to a report put out this week by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Postal Service, about 68 million Americans -- more than a quarter of all households -- have no checking or savings account and are underserved by the banking system. Collectively, these households spent about $89 billion in 2012 on interest and fees for non-bank financial services like payday loans and check cashing, which works out to an average of $2,412 per household. That means the average underserved household spends roughly 10 percent of its annual income on interest and fees -- about the same amount they spend on food.

Back in 2011, I complained that Congress wouldn't let the USPS offer more innovative services to their clients, including banking.  Here we are in 2014, still discussing the same no-brainer idea that has worked in many other countries, including Japan. In fact the U.S. Postal Service had a banking system from 1910 to 1967 with deposits valued at about $30 billion in today's dollars... until Congress shut it down.  

Congress must stop micro-managing the Post Office and let it compete in new lines of business, while using its inherent advantages, such as convenient locations in thousands of small U.S. towns.  

Post Office Banking Could Be the Start of Something Big

By Richard (RJ) Eskrow

February 5, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1ewCh2f

Media ignored Iceland's people's revolution

(HT: Valery).  This summary of the little-known peaceful revolution in Iceland is must-read material for anybody fed up with bailed-out Wall Street banks behaving badly, and the rich corporations and wealthy donors that own our media and buy our politicians.

This gives us hope that People Power can prevail, if we are united, determined and won't take "No" for an answer!

Why Did The Media Keep The Recent Peaceful Icelandic Revolution Quiet?

By Joe Martino

January 11, 2013 | Collective Evolution

URL: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/01/11/why-did-media-keep-the-recent-peaceful-icelandic-revolution-quiet/#!

Austerity kills

"Austerity was designed to shrink debts. Now, three years after Europe's budget-cutting began, the evidence is in: severe, indiscriminate austerity is not part of the solution, but part of the problem -- and its human costs are devastating."

Europe's public health disaster: How austerity kills

By David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu

September 9, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/09/business/europes-public-health-disaster-how-austerity-kills/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

Fed prez at CPAC: Break up TBTF banks!

The Left and the Right, perhaps for different reasons, may be converging on a consensus that it's time to break up the unmanageable Too Big To Fail banks.

About Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher's critique of Dodd-Frank, I would remind everybody that Congress has been been waiting for more than two years to adopt regulations while banking industry lobbyists have spent $400 million and submitted thousands of pages of comments and suggested corrections. Thus the very banks that say Dodd-Frank is overly complex are the same ones making it overly complex. For a detailed post-mortem of the Dodd-Frank bill, read Matt Taibbi's "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform."

Richard Fisher Says Too-Big-To-Fail Banks Need To Be Broken Up

March 16, 2013 | Reuters

By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa

The largest U.S. banks are "practitioners of crony capitalism," need to be broken up to ensure they are no longer considered too big to fail, and continue to threaten financial stability, a top Federal Reserve official said on Saturday.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed, has been a critic of Wall Street's disproportionate influence since the financial crisis. But he was now taking his message to an unusual audience for a central banker: a high-profile Republican political action committee.

Fisher said the existence of banks that are seen as likely to receive government bailouts if they fail gives them an unfair advantage, hurting economic competitiveness.

"These institutions operate under a privileged status that exacts an unfair tax upon the American people," he said on the last day of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

"They represent not only a threat to financial stability but to fair and open competition (and) are the practitioners of crony capitalism and not the agents of democratic capitalism that makes our country great," said Fisher, who has also been a vocal opponent of the Fed's unconventional monetary stimulus policies.

Fisher's vision pits him directly against Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who recently argued during congressional testimony that regulators had made significant progress in addressing the problem of too big to fail. Bernanke asserted that market expectations that large financial institutions would be rescued is wrong.

But Fisher said mega banks still have a significant funding advantage over its competitors, as well as other advantages. To address this problem, he called for a rolling back of deposit insurance so that it would extend only to deposits of commercial banks, not the investment arms of bank holding companies.

"At the Dallas Fed, we believe that whatever the precise subsidy number is, it exists, it is significant, and it allows the biggest banking organizations, along with their many nonbank subsidiaries - investment firms, securities lenders, finance companies - to grow larger and riskier," he said.

Fisher argued Dodd-Frank financial reforms were overly complex and therefore counterproductive.

"Regulators cannot enforce rules that are not easily understood," he said. 

Justice Dept.: TBTF banks now 'Too Big To Jail'

This is an outrage. The Too Big To Fail banks are now also the Too Big To Jail banks, and that's the official word from America's top prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder:

"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large."

As Borsage notes, Attorney General Holder's statement renders bank supervision and regulation meaningless:

Holder's outrageous admission means that bankers operate -- and know they operate -- above the law. That renders all the argument about regulations and legal limits laughable. Bankers spend tens of millions lobbying to weaken regulations and starve regulators of authority and resources. But when the action gets hot, the bubble starts to inflate, the music keeps playing, they can trample the laws, mislead the regulators and defraud their customers, swathed in the confidence that the laws will not apply to them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, noted the hypocrisy of Too Big To Jail:

"If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're gonna go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your bed at night -- every single individual associated with this. And I think that's fundamentally wrong."

It's Official: Too Big to Fail Banks Are Too Big to Jail

By Robert L. Borosage

March 7, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/13Hlg0I

GOP establishment pundit: 'Break up the banks!'

Here we have none other than George "I do protest too much I like baseball" Will coming out in favor of breaking up the TBTF banks, albeit four years too late.

His coming to Jesus on this issue should give sufficient "intellectual" cover to conservatives to get behind it.

But getting conservatives on board is just the beginning. The real battle is overcoming the lobbying $ might of the TBTF banks, who are like the mythical giant Argus with 100 eyes that never stop watching Congress and bank supervisors for an instant. So far, the big banks have cared way more about keeping TBTF intact than we have about breaking it up. That's gotta change. And we've got to get $ money and candidates behind the effort.

Time to break up the big banks

By George F. Will

February 9, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/XtFxRi

Taibbi on Obama's criticism of RS's bank reporting

Here are the key points from Taibbi's response to Obama's straw-man criticisms of Rolling Stone's financial reporting. First:

But it's still odd that [Obama] would focus so intently on that one point [Glass-Steagall], given that the president himself proposed and supported a sort of new version of Glass-Steagall, called the Volcker Rule. Almost all the pro-reform voices I know on Wall Street and in Washington liked the original version of the Volcker rule, and many would have been content to forget about Glass-Steagall forever had the original version of the Volcker Rule that President Obama himself supported actually made it through to become law.

But it didn't. Instead, the Volcker rule was gutted from within by members of both parties during the Dodd-Frank negotiations, and as we reported on several occasions, it was Geithner and the Obama administration that were particularly aggressive in scaling it back behind closed doors. That was what we criticized the president for – not so much for failing to reinstate Glass-Steagall, but for allowing his own policy proposal to be punched so full of holes that it would never be an effective law.

Years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, even the critically-weakened version of the Volcker rule that did ultimately pass is still not officially federal law, its implementation recently delayed again until at least 2014.

But Glass-Steagall isn't all of this story of failed reform that goes back to the Clinton Administration and his Citibank buddies:

The repeal of Glass-Steagall was just part of the decades-long deregulatory effort that led to this toxic situation. Another Clinton-era law, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, contributed to it as well, by completely deregulating the market for derivatives (which were used to package all of those mortgages, were a major contributor to the collapse of AIG, and also played a huge role in the Jefferson County, Alabama disaster, among other things). Supreme Court decisions allowing interstate bank mergers where before they had been prohibited helped create the Wachovias and WaMus of the world. And a 2004 SEC decision to lift restrictions on leverage for the country's biggest investment banks allowed companies like Lehman to borrow forty dollars or more for every one they actually had.

Collectively, these and other policies created a market where banks were over-large, capital was lethally overconcentrated in the hands of a few huge firms, financial companies were all leveraged to the moon and the fates of federal insurance programs like the FDIC were suddenly tied to the gambling habits of some of the riskiest investment banks in the world. It wasn't just Glass-Steagall – it was Glass-Steagall plus all of this other stuff that made the world so dangerous.

So the first and most critical goal of any reform-minded administration should have been to alleviate these dangers by making things less concentrated, i.e. by making Too-Big-To-Fail companies small enough to fail. And Obama really didn't do that, on any front.

And then there is the issue of Too Big Too Fail, which with troubled bank "shotgun" mergers is now worse than ever:

Finally, Obama had a chance to physically reduce the size of Too-Big-To-Fail companies by supporting the Brown-Kaufman amendment to Dodd-Frank, which would have forced big banks to cap deposits and liabilities to under 10% of GDP. He didn't support that amendment and it died.

P.S. -- Never let it be said that I'm a hack who carries Obama's water.  He had an historic chance to put Wall Street in its place and a real bi-partisan sentiment against the bailouts and TBTF banks -- remember the Tea Parties were and are (they say) against TARP and the other TBTF bank bailouts??  But Obama let his opportunity slip.  Partly due to his inaction, then Occupy Wall Street got involved and the Right knee-jerk reacted against them, conflating OWS attacks against the bailouts and the financialization of the U.S. economy with an attack on capitalism, a reaction which the rightwing media happily helped foment.  Then the selfish, self-righteous Wall Street dickheads like Jamie Dimon who nearly destroyed the world suddenly became John Galt in the Right's eyes.

Obama Defends His Finance Reform Record to Rolling Stone: A Response

By Matt Taibbi

October 26, 2012 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-defends-his-finance-reform-record-to-rolling-stone-a-brief-response-20121026#ixzz2AiFbD7Qe

Why are both candidates silent on mortgage crisis?

President Obama has done almost nothing to help Americans restructure their mortgages.  With HAMP, Obama pledged to modify 4 million mortgages; but in fact "more than 1 million homeowners have been bounced out of the program."  

Meanwhile, about one-quarter of all U.S. houses are still underwater to the tune of about $690 billion.

So why is Romney silent on Obama's failure?

Because Romney promises to be even worse.  He has not made one proposal for re-structuring mortgages to somehow reduce mortgage principles.  Indeed, Republicans believe underwater mortgages are an issue of personal responsibility, a sacred trust between the bank and the borrower into which Big Government shouldn't intrude.

My hero, economics professor Joseph Stiglitz, finds it "shocking" that both candidates have been silent about the housing crisis.  And it has a been "a gross miscarriage of justice" that not one banker has ended up behind bars, said Stiglitz.  Then again, we shouldn't be surprised, since both candidates are in the pocket of the TBTF banks.

Stiglitz: "Shocking" how Obama, Romney are avoiding housing crisis

October 24, 2012 | Reuters TV

Johnson: Raise equity requirements for TBTF banks

Johnson's argument is a bit technical for us non-bankers, but the gist is this: regulators should force banks to hold more "tangible" equity -- meaning real money from investors -- as a share of their tangible assets.  A bank's tangible assets include customers' deposits (which are liabilities the bank must pay back).  

The truth is that nobody has come up with a good way to assess a bank's riskiness when they are so highly leveraged, no matter how much the banks may assure us they know how.  Right now, the banks basically regulate themselves, telling the regulators how risky they are.  This can't continue. 

Big banks resist a higher Tangible Common Equity (TCE) ratio because: 1) they can make a lot more profit using high leverage (over-borrowing) than they can raising equity from investors; and 2) if they make bad bets with borrowed money then we taxpayers will bail them out anyway.

If you're interested in this somewhat abstruse but absolutely crucial issue, you can learn more here.

A Very Strange Way to Assess the Safety of Banks

By Simon Johnson

October 1, 2012 | Bloomberg

URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-30/a-very-strange-way-to-assess-the-safety-of-banks.html

CA city to invoke eminent domain on underwater homes?

If the City of Sacramento, California goes through with this, it will surely drive the banks and libertards nuts, and probably reach the Supreme Court.

Let's remember it was a SCOTUS decision in 2005 that let this genie out of the bottle by giving localities the right to invoke the 5th Amendment eminent domain clause for economic development purposes.

Eminent Domain As Underwater Mortgages Fix: Why Some Cities Are Considering Unorthodox Measure

By Peter Goodman

October 1, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/RuLex7

Labour wants Glass-Steagall for Britain

So liberals in the UK recognize the need to institute their own version of America's now defunct Glass-Steagall Act, but American liberals and conservatives still haven't come around to re-instituting this commonsense measure that was passed in 1933 after the Great Crash to separate banks' customers' deposits from banks' investment activities.

Miliband said: "Either they can do it themselves – which frankly is not what has happened over the past year – or the next Labour government will, by law, break up retail and investment banks."

Hear, hear!  Let's take a lesson from those who have taken a lesson from us!

UPDATE: Ed Miliband is the guy Romney called "Mr. Leader" on his Partial World Tour of Complete Excellence because Romney couldn't remember his name.

Ed Miliband tells British banks: change now or be broken up

Labour leader gives ultimatum to City and says: 'We will split off casino operations'

By Toby Helm, Andrew Rawnsley, Phillip Inman and Daniel Boffey

September 29, 2012 | Observer

URL: http://gu.com/p/3an9y

Private, not public, debt is the problem

Check this out, you deficit fetishists!:

American Private Debt [was] 310% of Gross Domestic Product in 2008, the highest since 1929, the last Great Depression, when Private Debt was 240% of GDP.

Government debt in 1929 was a paltry 40% of GDP. In 1945, when America was financing its participation in World War II, government debt exploded to 120% of GDP. That is the highest government debt has been in America, making the 85% of GDP in 2011 seem almost insignificant.

Government debt vis-a-vis Gross Domestic Product is not astronomical, according to this chart. It was not high in 1929 either, the last time the global economy had a heart attack and died. Public Debt is, in fact, at the time of this chart at least, lower than in 1945, when the public financed American involvement in World War II.

And before you go comparing us to the EU, or misdiagnosing the EU's problem as excessive public debt, read this:

Spain and Ireland were spectacularly successful in reducing their government debt to GDP ratios prior to the financial crisis [emphasis mine], i.e. Spain from 60% to 40% and Ireland from 43% to 23%. These were the two countries, which followed the rules of the [EU] Stability and Growth Pact better than any other country – certainly better than Germany that allowed its government debt ratio to increase before 2007. Yet the two countries, which followed the fire code regulations most scrupulously, were hit by the fire, because they failed to contain domestic private debt.…

So what's the solution?  Debt forgiveness: government regulators should be "forcing big banks, bondholders and other creditors to write down some of their bad debts."

138 Years of Economic History Show that It’s Excessive PRIVATE Debt Which Causes Depressions

By WashingtonsBlog | September 9, 2012 

URL:  http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/138-years-of-economic-history-show-that-keen-and-minsky-are-right-and-all-of-the-mainstream-economists-are-wrong.html

MB360: Commercial bank deposits hit $9 trillion...

... so why aren't banks lending to businesses and consumers?  And how is the Fed's continued zero-interest rate policy supposed to change things if, combined with the bailouts, it hasn't already?  

Says MB360:  "Banks have the means and ability to lend if they only had the desire to do so.  In spite of the US public bailing out the entire banking edifice, they have little faith in the American public."

Zero effective policy and stalling QE3 – Why QE3 will have little financial impact if implemented. Deposits at US commercial banks quickly approaches $9 trillion.

August 28, 2012 | My Budget 360

URL:  http://www.mybudget360.com/qe3-quantitative-easing-3-federal-reserve-total-banking-deposits-zero-interest-policy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mybudget360%2FQePx+%28My+Budget+360%29

Reagan judge: Deregulating banks was 'fundamental mistake'

Said Judge Richard Posner:

I was an advocate of the deregulation movement and I made -- along with a lot of other smart people -- a fundamental mistake, which is that deregulation works fine in industries which do not pervade the economy. The financial industry undergirded the entire economy and if it is made riskier by deregulation and collapses in widespread bankruptcies as what happened in 2008, the entire economy freezes because it runs on credit.

I just want to remind you what Mitt Romney proposes to do on bank regulation: "Repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework."  In fact he's been reticent to discuss exactly what that means.  But it is telling that Romney's advised lawmakers "not to rush" to pass new legislation after bailed-out mega-bank JPMorgan lost at least $2 billion on risky gambling.

Reagan-Appointed Judge: Deregulation Movement Made 'A Fundamental Mistake'

August 24, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/PMYz38

We're so screwed

When our regulators and politicians believe that revealing banksters' crimes is more "dangerous" and "destabilizing" than the crimes themselves, then you know we're totally screwed.

Below the Fold: Rumor Has It We're Screwed

By Richard Zombeck

July 26, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/OM6RnC

Brain science: Why big bankers behave badly

Like most things in life, science can explain why big bankers are sleazeballs.  It's 30+ years of deregulation and financial bubbles that put at least two generations of bankers in permanent "kill" mode, focused on power, conquest and reward, while they're oblivious to risks and downsides.

It's evolution and brain science, folks.  It's incontrovertible.  And if you don't buy it then you're an ideologue.  These sleazeballs need a hard slap of negative reinforcement -- regulation, prosecutions, and jail time -- to re-wire their reptilian brains.

Bankers and the neuroscience of greed

The unconstrained power of bankers acts like a drug on their brains' reward systems, creating insatiable appetites

By Ian Robertson

July 2, 2012 | Guardian

URL:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/bankers-greed-brain-changes

MB360: 'Austerity for you, social welfare for the connected'

Right on, MB360!:

By the time people wake up from this slumber there will be no middle class.  The propaganda on the media tries to program people to feel guilty about having affordable quality education, access to healthcare, and the ability to purchase a home without going into hock for the rest of their lives.  Apparently what was once considered staples of the middle class is now washed away in the honor of "global competition" while major financial institutions are protected under the shield of government welfare and major paydays for CEOs.  Austerity for you and social welfare for those who know how to work the system.  As the net worth data highlights, not everyone is hurting from this new austerity world.

How to lose 40 percent of your net worth in 3 years – Americans see their net worth collapse during the recession. Federal Reserve survey highlights a case of austerity for the masses and social welfare for the politically connected.
June 12, 2012 | MyBudget360
URL:  http://www.mybudget360.com/american-median-net-worth-2012-net-worth-falls-40-percent-grows-at-top/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mybudget360%2FQePx+%28My+Budget+360%29

Hollywood: The good One Percent

An actual restaurant receipt + "tip" left by a literal One-Percenter/banker/asshole

Since Rush Limbaugh started taunting President Obama with the moniker "Barack Hussein Kardashian" I had an epiphany.  True, Limbaugh's criticism is nothing new; he said the same thing about Clinton.  Conservatives have always seethed with jealousy over Democrats' close relationship with Hollywood and the entertainment business... and high culture, and pretty much anybody doing creative work.  And the majority of pro athletes.  (Gee, come to think of it, almost all these beautiful, interesting, smart and creative people are unabashedly liberal for some odd, unknowable reason....)

I admit, I find some of the Hollywood activists like Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, Tim Robbbins and Sean Penn annoying, sanctimonious know-it-all's at times.  In fact I get downright furious when they steal the show at protests organized by normal groups of liberals and give the MSM an excuse to label it a "Hollywood" event, thereby dismissing it.

Nevertheless, I have realized something important: Hollywood actors are the One Percent.  Less than that, actually.  They are the hyper-competitive free market on glorious display.  They call it show business for a reason.  These people are filthy rich because we fork over our hard-earned money to see their shows, year in, year out.  Nobody has given them anything.  And Hollywood has never, ever asked taxpayers for $14 trillion in bailouts.

And so, to the extent they are the One Percent, they are the good kind of filthy rich privileged assholes, if there is such a thing.  Indeed, most of them come from humble backgrounds.  Most know what it's like to be desperate and unemployed in their chosen profession, and struggle to pay the bills for years before making it big.  The Screen Actors Guild claims 120,000 members.  Yet how many of them do you see on the Big Screen, making $ millions?  The few dozens of people we associate with Hollywood are more like the One-Tenth of One Percent, in terms of true success.  And even those big stars who try to push their children into the business (as many sadly do) more often than not fail because -- guess what? -- nobody wants to pay to see their ugly, untalented, uninteresting kids on the stage or screen just because of who their mommy or daddy is.  In fact, it's amazing how few hereditary dynasties there are in the entertainment industry, compared to other sectors of the economy.  Talk about a level playing field!

Perhaps because of all that, many stars seem to have a sense of noblesse oblige, if you will, that is lacking among other private-sector elites, who think they are entitled to their easy wealth and may avoid giving any of it back.  ("Hey, my daddy spent $200 K on my Harvard MBA, I deserve my millions!")  To be sure, there always seem to be cameras around when big stars are donating money, but so what?  If Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein want to build schools in Africa or save Darfur, let them bring their sycophants from CNBC along, no problemo from my side.

Indeed, let's compare the Hollywood One Percent to the Wall Street One Percent.  Both get their money for nothing.  And yet what value do most of these big bankers add to the economy, weighed against the destruction they have waged on the world economy?  Hollywood only destroys the world in make-believe; Wall Street did it for real... and threatens to do it again with their now even Too Bigger to Fail Banks.  Wall Street assholes tell the unemployed to get a job at McDonald's, and take perverse pride in their system of wealth apartheid; whereas Hollywood stars, no matter how rich and famous, are required by their profession to credibly live out the emotional lives of average people.  That's partly why we love them, isn't it?  They don't just tell us they identify with us, they show us.  

By comparison, big bankers don't even try to act like they care.  An air of dismissive arrogance toward average plebes -- even to those lower down in their own companies! (google "Wall Street private elevator arrogant culture") -- is part of the required wardrobe, just like their Hermes ties.

Meanwhile, Wall Street assholes spend their free air time on CNBC, FOXBusiness and at Davos-type events complaining how President Obama doesn't love them enough.  It's not about raising their taxes or regulating them -- Obama doesn't dare do either.  They don't like him because he doesn't bow low enough... even after they destroyed the world financial system.  Being filthy rich, arrogant and powerful isn't enough for them -- they need the President's personal demonstration of respect to feel complete.  What babies!   Even Hollywood elites aren't that emotionally needy!  I mean, if entertainers want Obama's attention, they offer to raise a few million bucks for him, just like anybody in our pay-to-play political system.  

So the next time some conservative or Republican starts criticizing Democrats and Hollywood, you just remind them that Hollywood is the epitome of American free enterprise and free competition; and that they have the constitutional right (thanks, Dubya's SCOTUS!) to give their $ millions to any damn politician they please.  Even better, big stars don't expect anything in return for their donations -- unlike some bailed-out assholes we know all too well -- besides some face time and photo-ops.  If only all filthy rich political donors were so undemanding!  Then we might be able to reform health care, the banking system, you name it, and take our country back from the bad One Percent.

Yves Smith: PBS whitewashed crisis, bailouts

If this is how the "liberal media" (PBS) takes on America's corrupt bankster-regulator nexus, then the conservative media can relax.  The fix is already in.  History has been re-written by the victors.

Frontline's Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis

By Yves Smith

April 27, 2012 | Naked Capitalism

URL:  http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/frontlines-astonishing-whitewash-of-the-crisis.html

U.S. bank profits hit 5-year high -- YAY BAILOUTS!

GM's profits are at an all-time high; and so are the TBTF Wall Street banks'. Connection? They were both bailed out by the U.S. Government!

In fact, the bailout for Wall Street continues indefinitely. It's now at over $29.6 trillion.

On the other hand, the bailout of GM, Chrysler and their suppliers (and by extension, Ford) saved 1 million jobs and an entire U.S. industry from extinction. Detroit has come back leaner, meaner and arguably with better products. Whereas Wall Street has come back with... the same old shit: huge bonuses; millions spent on bribing, er, lobbying our leaders; telling us 99 percenters to get "real" jobs; lecturing us how stupid and anti-business we are for questioning their judgment, etc.

U.S. Bank Profits Hit A Five-Year High In 2011

February 28, 2012 | AP

URL: http://n.pr/x0eqku