Bloomberg reports:

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s... 

The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008. 

Look at the table:

MENDOTA, Calif. — The customer seemed interested in a black blouse offered for $1 at the thrift store. But instead of buying it, she set it on the front counter.

Maybe tomorrow, she told the cashier, she would have the money. Or the next day. But not now.

"That is the way people are now," said the cashier, Alicia Reyes, as she watched the middle-aged woman walk out of the store. "They just come in here and look. They just come in here to kill the time. And then they take off."

Welcome to life in Mendota — the unemployment capital of California. With a 41 percent jobless rate, the town's social fabric is tearing at the seams. Alcoholism and crime are on the rise. To save money, some mothers wash and re-use disposable diapers. Unemployed men with nothing to do wander the streets and sit on benches....

The national Katrina is here and now.

This really, really cheeses me off when I read this McClatchy report:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday will reject requests for almost $22 billion in new taxpayer bailout money for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler, saying the car makers have failed to take steps to ensure their viability.

But..butt-boy Geithner wants this:

March 30 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said some financial institutions will need substantial government aid, while warning against any attempt to tax investors who join a federal program to buy tainted assets from banks. 

Right!  Just because AIG has lost almost 100 billion USD in the last six months and the American taxpayer has bailed out AIG to the tune of almost 250 billion USD in the last four months.

Meanwhile...

GM and Chrysler have already received $17.4 billion in government rescue money. The two companies faced a Tuesday deadline for the government to approve plans they'd submitted weeks ago in hopes of persuading the Obama administration that they could remain in business anad deserved additional money.

I suggest reading "Why GM Matters" and "American Theocracy" to understand that what is happening is the collapse of American industry.  The collapse in no way should be happening except for the fact that the political and mass media systems has been utterly corrupted by the Wall Street Banksters.

Why we can give the crooks and grifters on Wall Street trillions of dollars?  But when it comes to real jobs that create real products there is the "kick in the teeth" for GM and Chrysler?

Why does the economic plans by Geithner trump the ideas that Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have?  Because President Obama picked "Timmeh" Geithner as Secretary of Treasury simply because he was "an insider"?

[BTW- Some wag suggested that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer should be the new Secretary of Treasury!  Why?  Because then we would see real rules and rules that would be strictly enforced for the "Masters of the Universe" who are nothing more than WATB (see this).  For example Spitzer just recently wrote about AIG and not the executive compensation but the billions of dollars that was being paid out by AIG to counterparty foreign banks.}

So, the economists who have some ideas on how to handle the financial crisis are not the ones in charge (Krugman, Stiglitz, and Roubini) but the same people who created or had oversight on the financial "bucket" games going on.

Will Obama fail his Katrina moment?

Remember the big Mid-West floods?  Well there was an underreported story on the affect of flood waters on agricultural lands and the runoff that was loaded with fertilizers.  The fertilizer laced river water that is injected into the ocean causes huge algae blooms such blooms trigger "dead zones" in the ocean.  Dead zones are regions of the ocean which lack oxygen.  However another effect of nitrates and algea is this:

Surface blooms of the algae known as Pseudo-nitzschia can generate dangerously high levels of domoic acid, a neurotoxin blamed for bizarre bird attacks dramatized in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film "The Birds."

Reuters reports that there are two long term dangers the most visible is the above quote.  However the second danger is that particulates with domoic acid sink to the bottom of the ocean.  

They found that large quantities of domoic acid were sinking to the ocean floor, invading the deep-sea food chain.

And the toxin appears to linger.

So not only will we harm life on the surface but all marine life, even life that lives in thousands of feet below the ocean's surface.

What is it with President Obama that he can talk but when it comes to "the walk" there isn't the fortitude?  From the Wall Street Journal (h/t Talkingpointsmemo.com) reports:

President Barack Obama said Monday that he would "pursue every single legal avenue to block" $165 million in bonuses to American International Group Inc. employees who were in part responsible for the insurance giant's near collapse. But hours later, administration officials said the payouts made Friday couldn't be extracted from their recipients without a legal fight that would cost the taxpayers even more.

But wait what does that mean?  Well, AIG produced a white paper about their "contracts" and Emptywheel, Firedoglake.com, provides the understanding:

In other words, I take this to be a threat: "if you don't give us our bonuses, we'll trigger a default event that will cost AIG the US government tens of billions of dollars."  It's just a polite way of saying, "Pay us the $100 million ransom or we start exploding the suicide bomber vests we're wearing."

Terrorists in three piece suits are much worse than terrorists living in caves. 

What!  It was 450 million dollars in the teaser from the Wall Street Journal.  But Talkingpointsmemo says: AIG gives out 1.2 billion taxpayer dollars for bonuses!  [Guess they can afford to get a subscription- thanks Josh!]

So we just keep on giving the Wall Street psychos more of their drug- money.  Without accountability or asking too much because it might upset them because they are blackmailing this nation with fiscal destruction.

AIG and the Treasury Department have both said that they can not stop the bonuses because of their nature of the contracts.

Do you believe that?

Are they willing to have anyone believe in that excuse?

When there is a crisis of such magnitude then the "rules change" because the world has changed.  (Heh!  I remember the monster who said that!)

The real meaning of theft lies with the "big boys" on Wall Street and not with the penny ante thugs and punks in the 'hood.  Chris in Paris writes:

The sense of entitlement among CEOs like Lewis simply does not register with the rest of the country. If the best thing someone can say about you is that "someone else *could* have lost even more money, it's a challenge to see how you can keep your job.

So what is the result of having been done wrong in the 'hood?   Retribution.  The eye for an eye because you have been challenged.  But on Wall Street there are people who are the "masters of the universe" who have paid millions in protection money which is called "donations" for laws to be created to protect themselves from the righteous anger of the people whose money is being stolen.

The war zone in the 'hood, which might as well be in Baghdad, because the two worlds are seperate.

I caught this off Huffingtonpost.com about Jim Cramer and his boasting of what he did as a hedge fund manager:

-On manipulating the market: "A lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund, and I was positioned short, meaning I needed it down, I would create a level of activity before hand that could drive the futures,"

-On falsely creating the impression a stock is down (what he calls "fomenting"): "You can't foment. That's a violation... But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn't understand it." He adds, "When you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment."

Check it out

Josh Marshall, Talkingpointsmemo.com, found this little backgrounder about Tim Geithner:

...Sandy Weill, the guy who in the 1990s built Citi into the mammoth systemic risk Death Star it is today wanted the job [CEO] to go to Tim Geithner.

So if Geithner is ousted from Sec. of Treasury then he could simply jump on the Citigroup ship?   This is what Felix Salmon, Portfolio.com, thinks. 

What a marvelous stinking revolving door.  While we the taxpayers are stuck with people like Geithner who still talk of "free market" and "private companies" as being the be all and end all for the American economy.

BTW- Meanwhile, President Obama thinks of the netroots and bloggers in this light:

And part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other. 

Duncan Black, Eschaton blog, writes:

I find it more amusing than annoying that Obama has joined with many others in employing the rhetorical trick of attributing any views you wish to marginalize as coming from bloggers.

I guess we, the netroots and bloggers, are just too darn new, still!   Perhaps Obama is still an intermediary step in the new political landscape and political process; i.e., Dean for America as version 1.0 then MyBarackObama as version 2.0 but what will version 3.0 look like?

Isn't it about time to have our government start a new financial system?  Bloomberg News has estimated that we are now in debt to the tune of over 11 trillion dollars for bailing out grifters.  The biggest rip off in history.

Sign this to tell Congress no more bailout money for con men.  It is time to start a new financial system.

Firedoglake.com has a petition to sign. 

• The Fed's Vice Chair Donald Kohn has refused to comply with requests from both the House and the Senate for the names of banks receiving federal funds, angering Republicans and Democrats alike.
• Bloomberg estimates that the government has spent more than $11.7 trillion to save the financial system since the crisis began, but Fed has refused to comply with Bloomberg's requests for details under the Freedom of Information Act.
• We know now that $80 billion of the $162 billion used to bailout AIG went to pay off its derivative trading partners at the full value of their contracts, despite the fact that values had tumbled. Economist Nouriel Roubini calls it "a nontransparent, opaque and shady bailout of the AIG counterparties: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other domestic and foreign financial institutions.
• The House passed the TARP Reform and Accountability Act on January 16, which would provide increased conditions, transparency and accountability for Wall Street bailout funds. The Senate is refusing to take up the legislation."

Still living in the past are Republicans when they say this:

President Barack Obama should fill vacant spots on the federal bench with former President Bush’s judicial nominees to help avoid another huge fight over the judiciary, all 41 Senate Republicans said Monday.

Obama should call the party of "No"'s bluff.

Admiral Mullen seems intent on playing up the fears of a nuclear weapon possessing Iran.  In interviews over the weekend he spoke that Iran had enough fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon. 

However Secretary of Defense Gates said that Iran does not have the bomb grade uranium that is necessary for producing a nuclear weapon within a short time period.

Read this LA Times article and come to your own conclusion.

I would say that there are two components to building a strategic weapon- 1). the warhead and 2). a delivery system.

What is lacking is the necessary enrichment production system and a ballastic missile that has the range and accuracy system.

Eventually there will be a MAD doctrine for the regional powers in the Middle East if there is not real diplomatic progress both overall and specifically with the Palestine/Isreal problem.

I caught this off Talkingpointsmemo.com on the secret meetings going on in the Senate:

Many of the parties, from big insurance companies to lobbyists for consumers, doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, are embracing the idea that comprehensive health care legislation should include a requirement that every American carry insurance.

I think that this is shows that all stakeholders are involved in the process but the plain truth is that even though patients do have a voice it could very well be drowned out by the "Big Bucks Boyz" of BigPharma and Big Insurance.

Read the list of who is at the table:

....The 20 people who regularly attend the meetings on Capitol Hill include lobbyists for AARP, Aetna, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, America's Health Insurance Plans, the Business Roundtable, Easter Seals, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the United States Chamber of Commerce....

Tell me if what comes out is what will be good for people or for the bottom line?

I was reading this Yahoo Finance article called, "Credit Card Issuers: Buy Something or Else!" that states the credit card companies are now cutting off your credit card if you don't use it enough.  What really caught my eye was this:

Even years of loyalty and regular spending won't spare some cardholders. David Good of Houston, used to be devoted to American Express, with which he had two credit cards: an unlimited charge account and a $7,500 revolving account. Yet a solid credit score, eight years of on-time payments and fairly frequent purchases on the cards -- including more than $100,000 last year alone -- weren't enough to save his accounts. In December, Good received a written notice that the issuer had closed both due to "low activity in the past six months." "I was shocked," he says. "They lost my trust, totally."

Paul Krugman:

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

Answer: Susan Collins, Ben Nelson and Arlen Specter. And it's Obama's fault for being bipartisan.

If you want to see how Republicans govern during an economic crisis at the state level then look to California.  From Robert Cruickshank, the Courage Campaign, writes:

When we watched the helicopter carry George W. Bush away from our nation's capital many of us hoped we had finally seen the end of lawlessness as governing policy by Republicans in our country. And though President Obama has moved to restore the rule of law in Washington D.C., California Republicans are demonstrating the problem persists here in the Golden State.

David Dayen has written about how Mike Villines' insistence that Republicans would only vote for a budget deal by trading votes on new taxes for votes to gut labor and environmental protections were a likely violation of Section 86 of the California Penal Code

Sign their petition to UpHold The Law.

If news reports are true then this makes a mockery of change and rule of law as reported by AP (h/t to Talkingpointsmemo):

The Obama administration will not prosecute CIA officers who participated in harsh interrogations that critics say crossed the line into torture, CIA Director-nominee Leon Panetta said Friday.

Asked by The Associated Press if that was official policy, Panetta said, "That is the case."

Why?

CIA officers who acted on legal orders from the Bush administration would not be held responsible for those policies. On Thursday, he told senators that the Obama administration had no intention of seeking prosecutions for that reason.

Makes me wonder how Lyndie England and the rest of those low ranking military personnel feel?

If this is true then we, progressives and liberals, have our work cut out for us.

Progressive Breakfast: Light Up The Phones

"Here in Washington, D.C., the word on the street is that the Right is killing us with phone calls to Congress. One congressperson said the calls are running 100 to 1 against the Obama economic recovery plan.

Now is the time to call Senator Udall and Bennet or visit your local Senate office to let them know that we stand for economic recovery by investing in America's future and not the failed economic policy of the past- tax cuts for the corporations and rich.