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Thursday, September 18, 2008 |
DODBuzz: "Defense Secretary Robert Gates will announce a range of punishments for at least five general officers and possibly several colonels for lapses connected with the nation's nuclear weapons.
Last week, a panel of august experts led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger said they had been surprised by the erosion of controls over nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War and recommended that Air Force Space Command be folded into a new Air Force Strategic Command and urged a range of other measures to ensure airmen dealing with nukes 'feel they are part of an important mission'."
Who is in charge of the Air Force? They have seriously blundered on 9/11 and recently they had 'mistakenly' distributed nuclear bombs to countries where they were not supposed to be.
It seems like Bush is not really in command. Maybe his evil twin, Cheney, has been pulling strings behind his back for his own ends, like he did in Georgia where he gave Saakashvili the go ahead for his attack on Tskhinvali. Washington has all the characteristics of the decadence of Rome.
11:45:42 AM 
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FT: "I cannot judge the likelihood of the disaster scenario, but if there ever was a case for applying the precautionary principle in economic analysis, then this is it. It was also done in the right way, by insisting on controlling public ownership, i.e. nationalisation, of the company. The existing management is gone - again as it should. We will find out whether they left with golden parachutes or with just a carton box packed with their personal belongings.
Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the tax payer taking the risk and the losses?
If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership? There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer."
Guardian: "Merrill Lynch's newly recruited chief executive, John Thain, stands to share a $200m (£111.4m) payout with two senior lieutenants for less than a year's work which culminated this week in the bank surrendering its 94-year-old independence.
The Wall Street bank known as the 'thundering herd' agreed to a $50bn takeover by Bank of America on Monday after a hasty 48 hours of negotiation. The talks were prompted by fears over banking stability arising from the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Thain, who was previously the head of the New York Stock Exchange, joined Merrill in December with a mandate to steer the bank out of financial trouble. When he arrived, he was given a $15m signing on bonus. If he leaves in Bank of America's takeover, he stands to get a further $11m in accelerated stock payouts."
Some are making good money in this debacle. Disaster capitalism, indeed. Others aren't so lucky. Those responsible for the catastrophe receive millions.
Guardian: "Banks in crisis: Thousands of jobs to go as Lloyds TSB takes over HBOS"
MotherJones: "As the news broke of the Lehman Brothers meltdown and the rest of the latest financial crisis, John McCain, speaking at a campaign rally in Florida on Monday, angrily declared,
'We will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. This is a failure.'
And in a statement released by his campaign, McCain called for greater 'transparency and accountability' on Wall Street.
If McCain wants to hold someone accountable for the failure in transparency and accountability that led to the current calamity, he should turn to his good friend and adviser, Phil Gramm.
As Mother Jones reported in June, eight years ago, Gramm, then a Republican senator chairing the Senate banking committee, slipped a 262-page bill into a gargantuan, must-pass spending measure. Gramm's legislation, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists, essentially removed newfangled financial products called swaps from any regulation. Credit default swaps are basically insurance policies that cover the losses on investments, and they have been at the heart of the subprime meltdown because they have enabled large financial institutions to turn risky loans into risky securities that could be packaged and sold to other institutions."
WSWS: "By its very nature, the parasitism of American capitalism has generated corruption and criminality on an unprecedented scale. Wall Street CEOs have awarded themselves tens of millions and even billions in compensation, in an utterly irrational and socially destructive squandering of social resources for the benefit of private greed.
The entire financial system must be taken out of private hands and nationalized in the form of a public utility under the democratic control of the working class, with provisions taken to safeguard the holdings of small depositors and share-holders. It must be subordinated to the social needs of the people and dedicated to developing and expanding the productive forces in order to eliminate poverty and unemployment and vastly improve the living standards and cultural level of the entire population.
Those who are responsible for the economic catastrophe must be called to account. Criminal investigations should be undertaken with appropriate sanctions for those who have plundered the social wealth. A full public accounting should be made of the hundreds of billions that have been diverted to private bank accounts through fraud and criminality. Such gains should be seized and used for the public good."
I do hope this is the end of the disastrous privatisation and deregulation drive, which are responsible for the present chaos. Privatisation and deregulation destroy our economy. The present crisis is proof of that.
11:36:24 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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