you can't have a war against drugs if you support them, both financially and politically. If 80% of Americans ate Doritos, and then suddenly the gov't outlawed them, I'm sure there would be black market Doritos smuggled into the country. Especially when a percentage of the smugglers were government employees a la CIA.

Mexico has severe poverty, and no amount of war on drugs will cure it. Neither will building the new Berlin Wall. Although, if there were predator drones flying over my border onto my property, I would be the first to shoot it down, and send it back to you, so you could use it to patrol the Mexico border for those evil poor people looking for a place to earn money to live.

There was a report slamming him for NOT having his cabinet full.. Now you are saying he has it full of Citi employees...

Where is the truth.. and where is the proof... Back up your claim please.

If I were employed by a PR firm hired to prop up the image of Rick Santelli, I wouldn’t find it necessary to defend EVERY negative post and comment. I would quietly post replies to criticism and defend his point of view randomly in order to quell an outpouring of disgust. If I replied to EVERY post and comment, I would be worried about over-exposure, and concerned about being, well - exposed.

Did you know that the bank Indy mac in California, one of the first to fail in the crisis, was taken over by the government, "repaired", and sold back to the SAME group of investors and owners it had when it failed. That had me scratching my head. I'll try and find the link but don't believe any of these crooks are actually "fixing" the banking system for anyone but them selves.

I believe that Citibank is owned by Arabs. Let them pay to clean up their own mess.

Good for you, savannah. At least you're paying attention.

The Arabs are not willing to accept ANY losses, that is why the Citibank 800 pound gorilla is still walking around the room.

Until ALL the losses on Citibank are realized, nothing the government does with regard to loosening up credit will have any effect. Citibank has the biggest portfolio of SHIT...BILLIONS.

We the people are gonna buy common stock? For what? As a food supply? Wallpaper our bathrooms?

Here's the facts. Citibank has NO VALUE. The common stock price represents basically the worldwide brick and mortar, their international business and deposits.

The investment portfolio is CRAP. It's SHIT. It's worthless. It's loan book is SHIT...it's CRAP.

This is a great..incredible post by Selise over at FDL about Citigroup, the history of Glass Steagall. Worth reading the whole article quite a history lesson. Pass around if you please

http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/3828
Which Idiot Decided to Repeal Glass-Steagall?
By: selise Sunday February 22, 2009 7:28 pm

Note: In a previous diary on OTC Derivatives (Which Idiot Decided Not to Regulate Credit Default Swaps?) we looked at the legislative history of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Today's topic is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall—a part of the deregulation story of how our banks got "too big to fail." For additional details and reference links see my Financial Regulation Timeline.

From Stiglitz's 2003 book, The Roaring Nineties (typos are mine):

For more than half a century, commercial banking, which takes deposits from households and firm and makes conventional loans, had been separated from investment banking, which helps firms issue new bonds and shares. The same company could not lend money and also sell securities, in other words. The Glass-Steagall Act, which barred this, was one of the reforms put in place by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, in response to the wave of bank failures that had followed the Great Crash of 1929. But the ideas behind Glass-Steagall went back even further, to Teddy Roosevelt and his efforts to break up the big trusts, the large firms that wielded such economic power. TR and the Progressives of the early twentieth century were alarmed not only about the concentration of economic power but about its impact on the political process. When enterprises become too big, and interconnections too tight, there is a risk that the quality of economic decisions deteriorates, and the "too big to fail" problem rears its ugly head. Expecting to be bailed out of trouble, managers become emboldened to take risks that they might otherwise shun. In the Great Depression, when many banks were on the ropes, it was, in effect, the public that bore the risk, while the bank got the reward. Wen banks failed, the taxpayers paid the price through publicly funded bailouts.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 addressed a very real problem. Investment banks push stocks, and if a company whose stock they have pushed needs cash, it becomes very tempting to make the loan. The U.S. system worked in part because under Glass-Steagall the banks provided a source of independent judgments on the creditworthiness of businesses. When a "full-service" bank makes most of its money by selling equities and bonds or arranging "deals," issuing loans becomes almost ancillary—a sideline.

With Glass-Steagall, the United States rejected the course followed by other nations, such as Japan and Germany, that did not separate commercial and investment banking—I believe to our evident benefit. But American banks themselves saw Glass-Steagall as reducing their opportunities for making profits and not surprisingly began to insist that the rules separating commercial and investment banking had become passé. In an age of free-floating capital and giant multi-national companies, they argued, banks had to be integrated, to make advantage of what are called "economies of scope"—the benefits that businesses can reap by working in many different areas at once. Global competition was too intense for bank concentration to be a serious worry (though in fact, many borrowers, especially small and medium-siaze firms, have access only to a few potential lenders), and Glass-Steagall supposedly put American banks at a disadvantage.

In the mid-nineties, the banks mounted a concerted campaign to have Glass-Steagall repealed. The conditions were favorable. Prosperity made the notion of bank failure seem very remote (though the S&L crisis of the eighties ought to have been a caution).

In late 1986 and early 1987 Glass-Steagall restrictions on commercial banks were beginning to be successfully challenged in the courts, with the New York State Banking Department and with the Federal Reserve. At the end of April and again in May 1987 the Federal Reserve Board voted 3-2 to permit commercial banks to engage in some limited securities underwriting over the objections of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker who opposed the change. In June, soon after Alan Greenspan publicly backed the Treasury Department's new position on the creation of a few very large banks saying, ''I do not have a fear of undue concentration of banking powers," the Reagan administration announced its choice of Greenspan to replace the retiring Volcker.

it's only money.

I say call their bluff...tell them no more money...then watch the GOP start screaming about how the money is needed to save the country!!