j_b

Yeah, right. "Pinkos for Obama"

[video:youtube]SWpADkP4QqY

In the meantime, the pillage goes on uninterrupted. Top Wall Street bankers to receive $70bn pay deals Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/17/executivesalaries-banking

Do you mean that pension funds not only invested in hedge funds but also in private equity funds that both behaved as corporate raiders? Did you also notice I didn't cross all of my t's? Wow, big fucking deal! It sure makes a lot of difference.

Pension Officers Putting Billions Into Hedge Funds http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/business/yourmoney/27hedge.html?_r=1&oref=slogin "Michigan SEIU is urging the state Treasury Department - which has invested $786 million in state pension funds with Carlyle in the past decade - to hold the private equity firm accountable." http://progressmichigan.org/page/community/post/seiuhealthcaremi/VMz etc ... Many hedge funds are corporate raiders and those "different mechanisms" are often not much better than raiding a company to dismantle it. "Morgan Joseph’s report, called “Managing Hedge Fund Activism,” examined 94 publicly waged campaigns by 29 hedge funds between January 2004 and March 2006. Steel Partners, with 15 campaigns, was easily the most active, followed by Relational Investors, with eight, and Third Point, with seven. Of those 94 campaigns, nearly half of them involved a hedge fund seeking a seat on the target company’s board of directors. Remarkably, hedge funds succeeded in getting a spot on the board 70 percent of the time, while companies were able to keep them off the board just 4 percent of the time. (The remaining 26 percent of the campaigns are still ongoing.) About 44 percent of the campaigns in Morgan Joseph’s report involved the hedge fund demanding that the company put itself up for sale. In those campaigns, hedge funds were somewhat less successful. They got their wish 55 percent of the time, compared with a 21 percent success rate for the company resisting the call for a sale." http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/the-new-corporate-raiders/ "Institutional investors also jumped on the bandwagon, beginning with university endowments. The nest eggs of Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Yale, large to begin with, grew to unprecedented levels after investing in hedge funds. Soon some pension funds, which were supposed to be cautious investors, started doing the same." http://www.corp-research.org/archives/jan-feb06.htm "In addition to his position at Praetorian, Daniel Hevesi is now an employee of Third Point Capital, a hedge fund. A portion of the state pension fund was invested with Third Point through what is called a fund of funds in 2005." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/nyregion/05hevesi.html etc ...

Which often entailed investing in hedge funds that take over companies to dismantle them, force layoffs, ship jobs to places without safety net, and do whatever else is needed to make a buck today!

That's rich coming from someone who appears to believe in the tooth fairy.

Retirees Wake Up to a Swindle By Marie Cocco Follow link for the rest of the article: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081013_retirees_wake_up_to_a_swindle/

I didn't say republicans were traitors. I said the GOP betrayed the country's interests and I wouldn't do so if most people didn't think that bankrupting the country in order to benefit personally from it wasn't a form of treason. As to Palin, we had 8 years of Reagan and 8 years of Bush the second in the last 30 years so it's not like we are not used to electing incompetent demagogues.

The God That Failed: The 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult Written by Chris Floyd Follow the link for the rest of the article: http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1627-the-god-that-failed-the-30-year-lie-of-the-market-cult.html

Isn't 'GOP traitors' redundant since the GOP is the party of the greedy fuckers who bankrupted America in order to line their pockets? I mean how can one be a traitor to the party that committed treason?

You guys should try downhill skiing in vintage leather boots to really appreciate lack of support. I learned in leather boots and still, I can't really ski anything harder than perfect conditions in climbing boots. Lowell, did you use custom stabilizers with your mountaineering boots?

Waiting for orwellian media fog to spin this fiasco into "too many regulations were the problem, the market wasn't free enough"

SO, when was the last time the "free" markets showed such enthusiasm for the widespread nationalization of banks?

Free market fundamentalists quickly found out the public wouldn't stand for overt dismantling of regulations so instead, to prevent the enforcement of rules, they installed anti-regulation/industry-lobbyist types at the head of regulatory agencies.

Conservatives try to pin the blame for the subprime mess on Fannie and Freddie but, as you probably guessed, it isn't true. Follow the link for the rest of the article: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

you certainly acted as if it were.

Which places the NYT "never seen it before" in perspective. I know it isn't a very popular thing to say and it doesn't excuse it one bit, but there is little that we haven't seen before despite the amnesia of the corporate media.

What's the problem, son? You needed to pull out the dictionary for a big word that is at the periphery of your knowledge? As a matter of fact, "growing the market forward" may not be possible if we seek sustainability.

Unfortunately, thuggish baiting isn’t new or rare; leftwingers have faced this treatment by rightwing goons for at least 50 years. It happens all the time on this board. During the cold war, liberals were accused of being commies, now they are accused of being terrorists since we are fighting the war OF terror. It’s contemporary McCarthysm with an orwellian twist: a bunch of war criminals and their accomplices who claim that their political opponents don’t respect human life.

Since we have at most a few decades left at this trend of consumption before we witness widespread ecosystem failure, this recession should be an opportunity for us to build a new economy that confronts squarely the sustainability paradigm. So perhaps we should hope for an economic downturn that forces some major changes or most will keep pretending that it is just another cycle that will take care of itself.

Can you believe that according to free market zealots, this incredible display of negligence and fraud argues for more deregulation? Oh yeah, don't forget "war is peace".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States Apart from the cutback in foreign trade (which could still come), the underlying reasons for 1929 seem quite similar to today's.

Sure, my use of neo-liberal may have been confusing but my posts do not leave much doubt about what I think of this economy. This has been a 30-year trainwreck in the making and although it is finally making the headlines, many americans have felt the crisis for a while already. The housing bubble finally brought down this house of card, but we still have to deal with the "limits to growth" issues first raised by the oil shocks of the 70's, except that the situation is much worse now.

It is taking care of itself. Are You Ready For The Great Reset? I know what you mean but per usual the taxpayer is paying for the great reset so the market isn't really taking care of itself. As a matter of fact, they probably will have to nationalize banks soon.