The Big Takeover, you really NEED to read this!

On the heels of my post about “Economic Terrorism”, I see this article by Matt Taibbi, (who I hold in high regard for his temperament, intelligence, and willingness to call assholes “ASSHOLES” to their face), describing the same thing, but from different angles, and in MUCH better depth and articulation. If you don’t understand what’s happening with the “Bailout”, you will after reading his article….maybe after you read it twice, it’s DEEP…..

Here’s a brief bit of it to give you the taste of what he’s onto…

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.

And…

…..”They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately.” The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can’t raise that much. And the bailout was on.

And…..

The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize “toxic” risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

And…..

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn’t like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include “deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters.” The exemption, as Foss notes, “basically includes everything.” According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

And….

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. “I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money,” he says.

I urge you to read this….because no matter how pissed off you are, it’s not enough. If people were angry in the amount that this crime requires, there would be no physical place these criminals could hide that would stop the crowds from finding and punishing them.

Yes, I mean that.

And by the way, Obama is NO Liberal, he’s helping these guys as we speak – read this for more info. I still like him and he’s GOT to be better than what we had, but a lot of people are making a mistake about who he is, and they need to look a little closer. HE never said he was anything other than what he’s turning out to be, it’s everyone else that’s putting that on him.

The public record shows Dodd authored an amendment that would have prevented “any bonus” being paid to top executives of firms getting bailout money. It was the White House and the Treasury Department that insisted Dodd’s amendment be watered down to apply only to bonuses paid under agreements signed in the past five weeks. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has taken public responsibility for that.

You HAVE to read the article.