http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1006/S00117.htm

Wednesday, 16 June 2010, 7:58 pm, BY Michael Collins

British Petroleum has operated as though it were a sovereign state since its
inception. When they blew the well at their Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of
Mexico, it never occurred to them that they would have to take orders from
anybody. But that may change largely due to their inability to stop the flow
of oil after nearly sixty days of gushing.

President Obama was clear in his speech last night. If any entity is going
down as a result of the catastrophe, it will be BP. Today, Obama meets with
BP's Chairman of the Board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, and the man he told the chairman

Yesterday it was Alabama. Next Tuesday it will be Arkansas.

The well-mannered person adheres to the proposition that "if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all." As a result, Republicans, and Senator Judd Gregg in particular, have gotten the benefit of Democrats' forbearance, even as they denigrate their "opponents" every chance they get. Moreover, ignoring their rudeness does nothing to tamp down an aggressive stance. Rather, given an inch, the intentionally anti-social will go for a mile or the whole globe. Perhaps, like other addicts, the abusive person has a bad habit and requires an intervention to make it stop.

At least, Gregg's escalation of his antagonism towards socialism into what he now calls "pandering populism" needs to be called out. His own words are rather damming:

Now we have this huge populist movement here and I'm trying to think, what is the rationale here other than just rampant pandering populism? A vote occurred in the Budget Committee last week, which I happen to be Ranking Member of, that crystallized the situation for me. Senator Sanders from Vermont, who I consider a friend and I enjoy immensely, a great guy with a great sense of humor, but we disagree on a lot of things as he runs as a socialist and I run as a conservative. Senator Sanders offered an amendment which said that the government has the right to break up large corporations.

SOURCE: Housingwire

Where Did the $2trn Bailout Go? Amendment to Dodd Bill Wants to Know

by DIANA GOLOBAY

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010, 3:16 pm

....

The Senate shot down with a 37-62 vote an amendment by Sen David Vitter (R-LA) that would have allowed the GAO to examine monetary policy decisions at the Fed.

“Senator Vitter’s amendment, unfortunately, has as its basic purposes the disassembling of that independence,” said Sen Judd Gregg (R-NH), on the Senate floor today. “It would have the Congress the authority through the GAO to go in and investigate what happens with the open market community.”

He warned the proposed amendment could have impeded the Fed’s decision-making process.

“It would influence their ability to make decisions in the sense that they would be concerned about Congress coming in and investigating,” Gregg said.

Political subdivisions are corporations, artificial entities that carry out public functions--i.e. public corporations. We create them to spread/share risks and responsibilities and protect individuals from personal liability. In exchange for that protection, the powers of our public corporations are strictly limited and the members may only perform the tasks that have been authorized.

Private corporations are just as artificial. However, while they offer the same protection from liability and risk to the participants, instead of being strictly limited, private corporations have been allowed to act with the freedom to act which the natural person enjoys--i.e. to do anything as long as it causes no obvious and intentional injury to another person. (Destroying other artificial person is, however, permitted--i.e. the private corporation enjoys more license than the natural person who may only destroy in active self-defense or defense of another natural person).

So, in brief, we have allowed monsters to be made --monsters that are virtually immortal (unlike all natural persons) and virtually inviolate from control or restriction even after they have been proved to cause significant injury to man and nature (fines of money are not significant when the payer is otherwise immortal, infallible and immune).

Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
The White House
April 17, 2010

There were many causes of the turmoil that ripped through our economy over the past two years. But above all, this crisis was caused by failures in the financial industry. What is clear is that this crisis could have been avoided if Wall Street firms were more accountable, if financial dealings were more transparent, and if consumers and shareholders were given more information and authority to make decisions.

But that did not happen. And that’s because special interests have waged a relentless campaign to thwart even basic, common-sense rules – rules to prevent abuse and protect consumers. In fact, the financial industry and its powerful lobby have opposed modest safeguards against the kinds of reckless risks and bad practices that led to this very crisis.

The consequences of this failure of responsibility – from Wall Street to Washington – are all around us: 8 million jobs lost, trillions in savings erased, countless dreams diminished or denied. I believe we have to do everything we can to ensure that no crisis like this ever happens again. That’s why I’m fighting so hard to pass a set of Wall Street reforms and consumer protections. A plan for reform is currently moving through Congress.

Monica --

It has now been well over a year since the near collapse of our entire financial system that cost the nation more than 8 million jobs. To this day, hard-working families struggle to make ends meet.

We've made strides -- businesses are starting to hire, Americans are finding jobs, and neighbors who had given up looking are returning to the job market with new hope. But the flaws in our financial system that led to this crisis remain unresolved.

Wall Street titans still recklessly speculate with borrowed money. Big banks and credit card companies stack the deck to earn millions while far too many middle-class families, who have done everything right, can barely pay their bills or save for a better future.

We cannot delay action any longer. It is time to hold the big banks accountable to the people they serve, establish the strongest consumer protections in our nation's history -- and ensure that taxpayers will never again be forced to bail out big banks because they are "too big to fail."

HIR was the warm-up act. Financial Reform is the main event. Meet one of the chief protagonists.

SOURCE:Rolling Stone

The Watchdog: Elizabeth Warren

She may be the only person in Washington who stands between us and Wall Street's next meltdown

TIM DICKINSONPosted Apr 14, 2010 11:23 AM

With the stock market on a roll and employment beginning to pick up, it's easy to think that the economy has finally turned the corner. Leading bankers and politicians assure us that the financial crisis is behind us – and the reckless gambles that cratered the global economy will never be repeated. But Elizabeth Warren, Washington's top financial watchdog, has news for you. The economy may be growing at long last – but unless Congress gets serious about reforming our financial system, we're doomed to repeat a catastrophic cycle of boom, bust and bailouts. "We have one slim chance, right now," says Warren, "to put the too-big-to-fail genie back in the bottle."

Here's a quick analysis of the possible impact of the USDOJ antitrust decision:

The acquisition by ES&S of Diebold's Premier Election Solutions has been (supposedly) nixed by the US Department of Justice on antitrust grounds.

However, the DOJ erred by not acting promptly to protect the Premier Elections operation from being gutted by ES&S.

The Dept. of Justice claims that the deal flew under the radar so they couldn't stop the pillaging of Premier in time. That's not the case. The records will show that the Dept. of Justice had received -- and acknowledged -- formal complaints in time to put a protective halt on the mass firings of Premier employees.

HERE'S WHY THIS ERROR IS SO SIGNIFICANT:

The USDOJ failed to act to protect the assets of Diebold's Premier Elections unit, resulting in the problem that they now cannot mandate full divestiture of Premier by ES&S, and instead have ordered ES&S to remove itself from Premier's current locations only partially -- or perhaps, not at all.

First Iceland, then the World

Written by Michael
Collins

SOURCE: DailyCensored.com

Michael Collins

The public is angry. Why should the public pay for the bankers
mistakes. Iceland
blogger Halldor Sigurdsson

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt
then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The
sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn’t fall on the citizens.
By a 93%
to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt
incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks. Covering the debt
would have cost Iceland’s 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

Iceland’s national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of
any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

As citizens voted, Iceland’s Prime Minister was dismissing the
importance of the vote and promising to negotiate a payment scheme obligating
citizen subsidies for bad debt created by Iceland’s beyond-bad bankers.