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Watch Now! Rolling Stone Exposé Overshadowed By Too Much MJ Coverage!

Bankster – A financial elitist who manipulates the government through the manipulation of money. A Bankster can be a campaign contributor, lobbyist, etc., or can even be the politician/high ranking official itself.

The coverage of Michael Jackson’s death is another great example of the media pushing the distractions, when people are really interested in the real news. One blog poll showed that a whopping 87% of people polled thought there was too much MJ coverage by the Main Stream Media (MSM). I personally can’t stand watching all these vultures circling around MJ’s coffin, trying to soak up all the echo fame they possibly can. It turns my stomach to see all these greedy flies using the opportunity, like some weird sacrifice ritual glorifying his death, for the sake of prolonging the attention.

The story I want to bring to your attention is Matt Taibbi‘s latest in Rolling Stone:

THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE

“In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on “the Wall Street Bubble Mafia” — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi’s piece is “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories” and a spokesman adding, “We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good.” Taibbi shot back: “Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it.”Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi’s piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.”

Amy Goodman interviewed Taibbi on Democracy Now back in late March, 2009 for the preceding cover story The Big Takeover:

“AMY GOODMAN: You write in your piece, “In 1997 and 1998”—so like ten years ago—“the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm’s fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone—then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee—collected $2.6 million in [only] five years. The law passed”—not close—“90-8,” you say, “in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you:”—you write—“Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.”

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right. I think one of the things that people don’t understand about this crisis is they—we always have this instinct in America to blame one side or the other for any political problem. You know, people on the left want to say, “Oh, George Bush did it,” and on the right they always want to say, “It was Clinton.” Well, this is as purely a bipartisan problem as we’ve ever had in this country. This was absolute unity on the part of both parties. They both were absolutely complicit in passing these deregulatory moves.

You know, in the instance of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, that was sponsored by Phil Gramm and by the Republicans, but it was very, very enthusiastically supported by Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, and it was signed into law by Bill Clinton and passed with the support of all those very powerful Democratic senators. And this continued to be the case throughout late ’90s and throughout this whole decade, and that’s why we’re in the situation that we are right now, because nobody is really, you know, representing the other side.”

You can watch that interview at the end of the first playlist above.

I’d like to point out here what the definition of fascism is, and why it is so important that we take care of this problem, and not let it get swept under the rug and forgotten like most truly important stories. The videos included in this blog helped me finally gain a real grasp on the economic meltdown, and how to fix it. And it doesn’t involve another $13 trillion going to the banks.

“Fascism, pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/, comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology.”

In laymen’s terms, fascism is the highjacking of Corporations by Government. I think this scenario would be better called Corpratism, since it’s the reverse. Wall Street has hijacked Washington.

In the Big Takeover, Taibbi says: “People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.”

The connection between Wall Street and Washington must be severed. Both political parties are infected with this disease, but We the People are the ones who suffer the symptoms. Now that we’ve heard how Giethner was the one who made sure WS got its bonuses, on top of all his other failures, he should be let go. I’m not going to fall into the left right trap of “Well we automatically have to defend him because the Republicans are attacking him!”, or vice versa. He’s snarky, if you ask me, and he needs that smirk wiped off his face. “I used Turbo Tax”, really? Even I can do my own taxes dude.

Author Nomi Prins is also covering this story on Mother Jones.com.

The writer of the book It Takes a Pillage does a great job breaking down the complex issues in an understandable way. Especially when it comes to the new policies being proposed by Timothy Giethner and the Obama Administration.

“In the meantime, average Americans, who don’t have a $13 trillion federal insurance policy to fall back upon, have fared poorly. Over the past three months, unemployment has hopped a full point, to 9.4 percent—nearly double what it was one year earlier. For the third straight month, home foreclosures have broken the 300,000 mark, with the defaults reaching well into the prime loan turf, and home prices are still falling.

Considering the true size of the bailout, the continued loan deterioration, and the weakness in the overall economy and job market, the economic signs simply aren’t that positive. For Geithner to pretend that a few banks paying back federal money with other federal money is an encouraging sign is to miss all of them.”

And here she breaks it down well in another DN interview:

“While the treasury secretary conveyed to the senators some understanding of the plight of the rest of us, this show was all about Treasury and the banking sector. Geithner praised the government for pulling off stress tests of the 19 largest financial institutions last month. “The clarity and transparency provided by the tests,” he said, “has helped improve market confidence in the banks, making it possible for them to collectively raise nearly $90 billion through private equity offerings, bond issuances without government guarantees and sales of business units.”

But Tim’s not playing it straight,” Prins continues. “The fact that most of these banks passed their stress tests would only have mattered if the tests had any value. As I discussed when the tests were first unveiled, these tests were designed in tandem with the banks, the evaluations were provided by the banks, and some of the assumptions they were based upon—such as where unemployment would be—had been exceeded before the test results were released.”

Secretary Geithner is quickly proving to be the “Heck of a job Brownie” of the Obama Administration.

He’s a Corporatist Bankster in my book, and at the very least he’s an idiot who got laughed off the stage on his trip to China. By a bunch of economic STUDENTS, no less. This is NOT the best guy in America for the job.

Why is Obama clinging to these Wall Street Banksters, and giving them such high ranking positions? Why is he relying on Goldman Sachs? Where is the accountability for this crisis, which more and more seems to be entirely manufactured by the Banksters? How bad does it have to get before Americans wake up and smell the coffee?

Obama better take a broom to these crooks before the American people do, or he’ll get swept right out the door with them. This is why we need to support Ron Paul’s bill HR 1207 to Audit the Federal Reserve! Let’s open the books on these crooks, and clean up our government so we can really get the change we need, and that we deserve dammit.

I’m not going to hold my breath though, this 2008 article in the New York Times reports that Goldman Sachs was one of Obama’s biggest donors:

“When you break it out by individual companies, you find that employees of Goldman Sachs gave more to Obama than workers of any other employer. The Goldman Sachs geniuses are followed by employees of the University of California, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard and Google. At many of these workplaces, Obama has a three- or four-to-one fund-raising advantage over McCain.

When he is swept up in rhetorical fervor, Obama occasionally says that his campaign is 90 percent funded by small donors. He has indeed had great success with small donors, but only about 45 percent of his money comes from donations of $200 or less.”

This is finally catching fire in the blogosphere, but how long will it take for the MSM to get mad and start sticking up for the little guy? I guess that’s means its up to us to fend for ourselves till more brave journalists like Taibbi start to stand up too.

I’ll try to end on a more upbeat note. Getting through all this information can certainly feel like a chore, but I don’t know of any way to fix our economy, and government without understanding more. Go ahead and tell the people about Tiny Tim, Lady Sings the News!