President Obama delivered a strong populist, pro-middle class speech last night. And being a strong populist pro-middle class kind of guy, I naturally liked it a lot. I wasn’t the only one: voters loved it. Check out this dramatic overnight report from Stan Greenberg . The numbers jump off the page at you, with improvement scores on all kinds of key measures going dramatically higher. So it was a very good night for the President, and a good night for Democrats like me who really hate the idea of either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney being the guy giving the State of the Union speech next year. Obama set up the frame for all of 2012 extremely well, and Democrats go into the election year with a fighting chance in spite of a bad economy.

But underneath the surface, below the headlines, something else incredibly important happened last night, and in the days leading up to the speech- something that I believe will have a lot more to do with the President’s re-election than the SOTU speech. If he wants to run against Wall Street in this campaign, he needs credibility to do it, and he took a big step toward getting it last night.

The key word of the day is accountability. The progressive movement in this country came together to firmly and aggressively hold this President accountable, and he responded by announcing something that has the potential to finally- finally, finally- hold the big banks on Wall Street accountable. Now, we have to keep holding the President accountable to make sure the right things happen. But a huge, huge step was taken yesterday, and it may yet result in the biggest win progressives and middle class homeowners have had against Wall Street in many decades.

The backdrop is the ongoing fight over what to do about the deep and pervasive corruption of the big banks in terms of mortgage securitization. If that sounds like an obscure wonky issue, know this: it is at the dead center heart of the 2008 financial collapse, and over whether the housing sector and the economy in general comes back strong any time in the next decade. Over 25% of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, and until you deal directly and aggressively with that problem, the housing market will remain dead, and the economy will stay flat. The reason that all this economic damage happened is financial fraud on a mass level: what NY AG Eric Schneiderman calls the old pump and dump. Bankers committed mortgage origination fraud, duping both home purchasers and investors who bought their crap, on a massive scale. Then bankers (some of the same and some new ones) intentionally inflated a bubble they knew could not sustain itself, and they did it on a massive scale as well. Then they bought off Moody’s and the other ratings agencies to give Triple A ratings to this toxic mess. And then they commissioned perjury on a massive scale- possibly a million separate counts- through the robo-signing scam to try to foreclose on homes as fast as they could.

They made more money faster than any small set of people in world history, and it was based to a great extent on fraud. And the rest of us have been handed the bill: 8 million lost jobs, the $750 billion TARP bailout, the trillions in Federal Reserve bailout, 25 percent of homeowners underwater, millions of foreclosures. And by and large, the bankers who created this mess have yet to be held accountable in any way: they aren’t in jail, they still have their jobs, very few of them have even had to pay fines.

For reasons I will never understand, certain Attorneys General and some members of the Obama administration started over a year ago going down the path of taking a small subset of these issues, the robo-signing, and trying to do a settlement deal with the bankers that would have been a disaster: a relatively small amount of money in exchange for a wide ranging release for legal responsibility in many different areas. This has been called by some a slap on the wrist, but it was far worse than that, because the bankers who caused this mess would have gotten off the hook for most or all of these sins with no investigations being done and no accountability being had. Fortunately, progressives who follow these issues have been able to build a big movement around stopping this get-out-of-jail-free-card deal, and have been demanding a real, full-scale, wide-ranging investigation that included all the financial fraud issues, with a goal of forcing the banks to be held more fully responsible for the damage they have done to homeowners. Led in this fight by the remarkable Attorney General of New York Eric Schneiderman, who fought and scrapped for the right thing every step of the way, we appear to have won a big initial victory in this fight: Eric will be co-chairing a new inter-agency task force to investigate all forms of financial fraud. I am told by a senior White House official who has been involved in all these negotiations that as far as they are concerned, Eric is considered by them as first among equals, with the power to drive this task force forward. Knowing Eric, if he’s not able to get done what he wants through this investigation, he will walk away anyway.

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In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday morning, Willard once again rewrote history on his position about the government's rescue of the auto industry. He's been playing this little game for months.

Let's be clear. Willard opposed the bailout, which began under George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. Period.

“My view with regards to the bailout was that, whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go,” he said, during the event at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, sponsored by CNBC.

The problem is, if there hadn't been a bailout, there would be no auto industry.

“Without the intervention of the Bush and Obama administrations, we would have seen the liquidation of both Chrysler and probably GM,” Cole said in August. “That would have taken the whole industry down. We would have seen a disaster in terms of the job impact.”

Something in the range of one million jobs would've been lost.

Willard wants to take credit for favoring a managed bankruptcy -- which is something the Obama administration proposed early on -- and simultaneously bash the bailout.

This is much like bragging about the fact you opposed using a defibrillator on a patient who's heart had stopped--but were right about the antibiotics he was put on later.

Amazing that he keeps getting away with it.

There’s a reason a big majority of the country approves of the Occupy Wall Street folks in spite of all the media derision and right-wing attacks, and a reason that demonstrators all over the country and world are organizing in their wake. The reason is that most people know what too many politicians in Washington don’t: that the big banks on Wall Street have a corrupt business model that recklessly assumes taxpayers will bail them out if their bets don’t pan out, and that their political juice will get them out of trouble if they violate laws and slide around regulations. There are three things in the news that remind us of this sorry story once again, and the American people need to raise holy hell about all of them: another sweetheart deal for Citibank on fraud charges, a new Bank of America maneuver that could turn into the biggest taxpayer bailout of all time, and a faction in the administration trying to ram through a new deal for all the big banks to have their legal issues related to foreclosure wiped away.

First case in point: the astonishing (and so far mostly unnoticed) little slight-of-hand that Bank of America pulled when it switched over its Merrill Lynch-derived toxic assets to a federally insured program. Read this and weep: Bank of America is moving $75 trillion of highly risky derivative contracts “from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits.” The FDIC, which is the government agency that insures bank deposits, is screaming bloody murder, but the Federal Reserve wants to let them do it.

This is a big f’ing deal, friends. Maybe the biggest swindle ever, certainly the biggest government bailout by far if the ship goes down. It makes TARP and Federal Reserve bailouts so far look like chump change. Remember, the Fed bailed out banks to the tune of a mere $16 trillion in 2008, and TARP threw in less than $1 trillion on top of that. Seventy-five trillion dollars is almost 5 times as much. Now, we don’t know how much of the $75 trillion us taxpayers would be responsible for in the end, because we don’t have access to Bank of America’s books, and the company hasn’t failed yet. But to allow taxpayers to be on the hook for this kind of exposure to even some part of a bank’s risky bets is an obscenity beyond belief.

Then there is the latest Citibank settlement. Citibank agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges it defrauded investors in a billion-dollar mortgage security deal, and Citibank didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. This kind of settlement happens all the time, and is yet another example of a corrupted system: mega-banks pay modest fines on massively fraudulent behavior; no one goes to jail, loses their jobs, or even has to admit wrongdoing. Breaking the law — stealing from and defrauding people— and then having your company stockholders pay one of these modest fines if you do get caught is just business as usual for these huge banks. And everyone in the industry knows it. When Hank Paulson, who was generally a great friend of the big banks as the Bush Treasury Secretary, wanted to force Wall Street banks to do something he considered urgent during the 2008 financial crisis, all he needed to do was to say he was going to have the FBI look at the banks’ books and emails. They would agree to anything he asked them to do, because they knew they all had plenty to hide.

Bank of America and Citi are the two most wobbly banks of the Too Big to Fail crowd. The argument from 2008-on by Tim Geithner and other pro-Wall Street government officials is that we can’t do anything tough to these banks because it would cause system-wide risk. In fact, they say, we have to keep bailing them out, letting them off the hook for their legal transgressions, not be too tough on regulating them, not break them up, etc. because otherwise we will have another financial panic. But continuing to let them drain us dry isn’t working, and as Europe has discovered, at some point the bailouts get too big to take on. A $75 trillion bailout is too big a bailout number even for the U.S. government to contemplate dealing with, but Bank of America is trying to slide such a deal under our noses.

Fortunately, Dodd-Frank did actually give us clear resolution authority for the Too Big to Fail banks. Banks have recapitalized themselves; the stress tests at least in theory gave government officials more knowledge of the banks’ asset holdings. Based on what Geithner himself has said, we should be in no danger of having to bail out Too Big to Fail banks. If they get in trouble, we can take them over just like the FDIC does, sell off their assets, and wind them down.

And yet, we keep doing the bailing, as well as the winking and nodding at their fraudulent behavior. The BoA $75 trillion transfer to a federally insured subsidiary is the most egregious bailout yet. The Citibank wink and nod is the latest in a long line of letting crooks off the hook. And we may be on the verge of yet another massive sweetheart deal for the big banks, a deal that if it gets rammed through will not only absolve the biggest banks of all their legal violations, but a deal that would completely undercut any administration political claims that they are willing to take on Wall Street.

Check this out:

US state and federal officials plan to give the country’s largest mortgage servicers wider protection against legal claims in exchange for refinancing help for existing borrowers, as talks on a $25bn settlement of alleged foreclosure improprieties advance.

The proposed agreement would settle allegations that Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial engaged in faulty mortgage practices, including employing so-called “robosigners” – agents who processed foreclosure filings en masse without examining the underlying paperwork – that abused homeowners’ rights and led to wrongful home seizures. The banks declined to comment.

Now of course, reporters sometimes get things wrong, and I haven’t heard from the White House whether this story is accurate. What I suspect, in fact, is that there are two factions in the administration, one mostly from Treasury trying to get this done as quickly and quietly as they can, and one among the political staff at the White House who understand how insane it would be politically to give the banks yet another sweetheart deal after the President praised Occupy Wall Street and after David Plouffe told the Washington Post that they will be running against Wall Street in 2012. Understand that what’s spelled out in the Nasiripour story in terms of the legal release for the big banks sounds worse than what Tom Miller was trying to negotiate with them. Once again, big banks would get off with no legal accountability whatsoever for the crimes they committed, and the money they pocketed on fraudulent activities. And while $25 billion sounds like a lot of money, it is a mere fraction of what they made on activities that were clearly not legal, and it is an even smaller fraction of what is actually needed to help underwater homeowners maybe 5 percent of what is needed. Remember how bad HAMP was: this $25 billion program would be politically far worse, because administering a fund that inadequate to the problem would be a nightmare, and for every homeowner you helped, 19 would be ticked off because once again there was nothing to help them.

This is a deal that I can absolutely guarantee to my friends in the administration will blow up in their faces badly if they go through with it. All those Occupy Wall Street demonstrators all across the country will be demonstrating against the White House. Labor unions and all the community groups doing bank actions will go crazy. Every economist and consumer group who has been working on the financial reform issue will react very badly. For Obama to run against Wall Street while handing the big banks another sweetheart deal, and getting the negative reaction it would cause, would be untenable. For all these reasons, I don’t think the President will go along with this deal. But as we know from the Suskind book, there are people in his administration who have a track record of acting on their own. Tim Geithner could well be (and from what some sources tell me, is) trying to ram this deal through while the President is dealing with getting our troops out of Iraq (thank you, Mr. President), and fighting with Republicans on taxing millionaires and billionaires. The RED ALERT in my headline is for the President as well as activists who care about this issue.

We need to start reining in the big banks’ power to wreck our economy, and we can start by not giving them more sweetheart deals and bailouts.

When I first heard this story about a farmer from Port Townsend -- on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle, the area where The Egg and I was set -- who had embarked on a bank-robbing spree, I was moderately intrigued. After all, rural hardship is often closely involved in these cases.

But it turns out that wasn't the case at all: Michael Fenter wasn't hard up for money to keep his farm afloat. Indeed, he didn't keep or spend any of the $86,000 he got away with: he gave it away, apparently to a right-wing Patriot organization or something very much like it.

This information was buried, actually, in the Seattle Times story by Maureen O'Hagan:

Calling it "one of the most perplexing cases" he's ever considered, U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle sentenced Fenter on Monday to 10 years in prison, and ordered him to make restitution to the banks. He walked away with $86,000 from the first three robberies, and that money has never been accounted for.

...

During the robberies, Fenter told bank employees that he was angry about the government bailout of banks. He said he was taking the money to give to people who needed it, according to court documents — though when asked about it by authorities he declined to provide details.

Upon his arrest, he said his name was "Patrick Henry," a Revolutionary War-era governor famous for his "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech.

One Bank of America employee said at Friday's sentencing hearing in Tacoma that she thinks about the robbery everyday and her heart races.

"He's a terrorist," she said.

...

As for the question why? Fenter said robbing banks wasn't to get money for himself or his family. Instead, he did it because he was a "true patriot." The money, he said, went to fund that cause.

"What I am for is real justice, real truth, and real accountability within our system of government," he said. "The money was used and is probably currently being used to get to the truth."

He did not make clear who was using the money — though he emphasized it was being used in a "peaceful" way. Nor did he say what, exactly, he hoped to learn.

I think it's funny that Fox News spends so much time whipping up hysteria over scary black people.

Because there sure as hell are some scary white people out there, ya know?

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As you know, many right wing hacks receive their wingnut welfare checks whenever they publish their books. They are commonly devoid of facts or any type of intellectual honesty, but are always supported by the right wing infrastructure that passes on book bailout money to help support their wingnuttery to the masses. There is no bigger recipient of the wingnut welfare system than Ann Coulter. You can call it TWERP. 'Troubled Wingnuts Effective Relief Program.' There's plenty of money to be passed around to undeserving conservatives and she's there to collect it with open arms.
It's interesting that she's still around after she said that 'Jews should be perfected" and that the 9/11 widows are reveling in their status as celebrities and she has never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much." But conservatives can never go too far.

C&L has an extensive archive on Coulter alone, but Jezebel caught her on The View back in January going Hitler on the ladies.

Ann Coulter was on The View today, of which four of the five co-hosts are single mothers, a role that Coulter criticizes in her new book Guilty. As you can imagine, it wasn't pretty.
--

But instead, Ann wanted to complain that she was "attacked" in an earlier segment before she was on camera, alleging that Barbara read aloud from her book as though it were Mein Kampf. Ironic, since she's always going on about "victimization." Sherri put her back in her place, though, when she told her she didn't like how she was speaking to Babs. Joy's face during the entire thing, btw, was great.

Don't you just love how Coulter calls them Nazis in her own defense? It's typical. Terry Welsh has a post that calls out the NRO for still supporting one of their writers for pushing insane, Hitler nonsense about the president, just like the tea partiers.

But, when Thomas Sowell writes an article in The National Review which compares Obama's deal with BP to set up an escrow account to Hitler's use of the Reichstag fire to suspend civil liberties, well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. And when a Republican congressman quotes that essay with admiration on the floor of the House, we're in full on crazy territory...read on

Over The Cliff is a fact based, reality based book and doesn't rely on fantasy to fill in the blank pages. Mark Potak from the SPLC described the book like this:

“Over the Cliff is a genuinely useful cataloguing of the remarkable descent of the American right into vicious name-calling, racist demonizing, and paranoid conspiracy-mongering since the election of Barack Obama. Amato and Neiwert do a first-rate job of chronicling the dangerous, populist rage on the right that pandering politicians and shameless media pundits are aiding and abetting.”

—Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center

You can grab a copy here.

So I see this video of Utah GOP Senate candidate Mike Lee telling the Salt Lake Tribune that he basically believes the taxpayers should be on the hook for cleaning up the BP oil spill. What can you say to this weird but consistently Republican attitude that the free market means never having to pay when you've f&%#ed up? Think Progress has the whole exchange.

But then I read this article about the dire economic condition of my home state. You know, the eighth largest economy in the whole world. And we're bankrupt.

It’s a story that’s being repeated all across California – and throughout the United States – as cash-strapped state and local governments grapple with collapsed tax revenues and swelling budget gaps. Mass layoffs, slashed health and welfare services, closed parks, crumbling superhighways and ever-larger public school class sizes are all part of the new normal.

California’s fiscal hole is now so large that the state would have to liberate 168,000 prison inmates and permanently shutter 240 university and community college campuses to balance its budget in the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Think of California as Greece on the Pacific: bankrupt and desperately needing a bailout.

Another flipping bailout. And then it hit me. You know who the ultimate Welfare Queens are? They're not those fictional mamas living high on the hog and driving Cadillacs as Ronnie Raygun insisted and Sharron Angle sneers at.

The true Welfare Queens are the Republican Party.

They don't worry about income, fetishizing tax cuts beyond all reason, yet they spend like drunken sailors. Then when they find themselves (and the state or country) completely destitute and hurting, do they consider raising taxes to pay for their rampant spending? Of course not. They want to be bailed out.

California actually institutionalized this kind of Welfare Queen attitude, thanks to Republicans like Howard Jarvis's Prop 13 and the California Consititution's requirement that any budget item or proposed tax increase must get a near impossible 2/3 vote of the entire state legislature. So now there's literally no way to get the tax increases other than the Governor holding his hand out to the Feds.

So the next time you see overly-entitled Republicans saying that the taxpayers should be bailing them out, call them what they are: Welfare Queens.

You'll remember I wrote about this before, when I first found out Whirlpool took millions in bailout money and then announced they were moving this plant to Mexico.

Now they've closed the plant and soon the town will turn into a ghost town:

“We were considered the refrigerator capital of the world,” said Randall Reynolds, who was a forklift driver.

But that family tradition will soon end because Whirlpool plans to close the plant on Friday and move the operation to Mexico, eliminating 1,100 jobs here. Many in this city in southern Indiana are seething and sad — sad about losing what was long the city’s economic centerpiece and a ticket to the middle class for one generation after another.

“This is all about corporate greed,” said Ms. Ford, who took a job at Whirlpool 19 years ago. “It’s devastating to our family and to everyone in the plant. I wonder where we’ll be two years or four years from now. There aren’t any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?”

At a time when the nation’s economy is struggling to gain momentum, Whirlpool’s decision is an unwelcome step backward. It continues a trend in which the nation has lost nearly six million factory jobs over the past dozen years, representing one in three manufacturing jobs.
Connie Brasel, who earned $18.44 an hour making thermal liners for the refrigerators, sees Whirlpool’s move as a betrayal not just of the workers but also of the United States.

“This country made Whirlpool what it is,” she said. “They didn’t get world-class quality because they had the best managers. They got world-class quality because of the U.S. and because of their workers. And now they want to pack up and move to Mexico. I find it offensive.”

[...] The closing leaves not just Ms. Ford and her son without a job, but also her husband, a worker in the metal-pressing shop.

“My mom and dad told me that when they were young, there were jobs everywhere,” she said. “They said we had Whirlpool, Bristol-Myers, Mead Johnson, Windsor Plastics, Guardian Automotive, Zenith. Now if you want to find a job, there’s nothing around.”

Ask the workers who is to blame, and they say not just Whirlpool, but also President Bill Clinton for having negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated tariffs on trade with the United States’ neighbors. They say the pact has siphoned jobs to Mexico.

They also blame Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, saying he has largely ignored their plight, and President George W. Bush and President Obama, saying they had done little to reverse manufacturing’s decline.

“When people are unemployed for a long period, they would look at any administration, including this one, as being part of the problem and not doing enough,” said Mohammed F. Khayum, the dean of the University of Southern Indiana’s business school. “It can definitely play a role in this November’s elections unless things turn around before then.”

Our country is missing a strong industrial policy, with an administration and Congress that chooses which manufacturers are important to support --and why. As long as economic disasters like this are repeated all over the country, I don't think Democrats are going to be pleasantly surprised this November.

After hours and hours of debate, the Senate voted down Senator Lisa Murkowski's (R-AK) amendment to reverse the EPA's finding that greenhouse gasses harm the environment, 53-47. This amendment was also known as the "Big Oil Bailout" because if it had passed, greenhouse gasses would no longer have been considered a pollutant and we could blithely skip down the garden path burning oil, polluting more wetlands with spilled oil, and killing more animals.

It was enormously frustrating to me (but not surprising) to see six Democrats vote with Republicans. For the record, Senators Bayh, Lincoln, Rockefeller, Nelson (Neb), Pryor and Landrieu all voted for the amendment.

One of the more remarkable moments in the debate leading up to the vote was Senator Lindsey Graham, who twists like a pretzel in his efforts not to deny the science while still supporting ending the EPA's authority to make this finding and enforce it.

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Amped Status: Not only did Goldman Sachs profit on betting against CDOs they designed to fail; more importantly, they insured them through AIG which led to a $182 billion taxpayer bailout.

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Mario Piperni: On Republicans, War, and Dung

Shakesville: We've had nests on the porch, in ferns, and small tress around our home for many years. Amazing!

AlterNet: Exposing the Christian right's new racial playbook

Gawker: WaPo cannot tell Obama from Malcolm X

1) Social Security, at current rates, is not expected to run short of money before 2037.

2)The simplest way to "fix" Social Security, if you're worried about a "problem" 27 years in the future, is simply to remove the contribution limit. End of problem. Period. Social Security is not in crisis.

3) The reason politicians want to "fix" Social Security is to increase the SS surplus, so they can use it for other things.

4) Medicare has more serious issues. However the simplest way to fix healthcare in the US is to move single payer, which would reduce healthcare per person by one-third. It has worked for every other country in the history of the world that has done it. It will work for the US. Since we've admitted now that everyone deserves health care, and since it's cheaper, and better, why not use the next round of healthcare to fix Medicare by fixing health care?

The unspoken entitlement is the US military. The US spends about half the entire world's military budget. There is, actually, no one in the world who can invade or seriously threaten the US in any fashion. (Is Canada going to invade? Mexico?) You can easily slash the military budget in half and still be so far ahead of any possible combination of enemies that it isn't even close.

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