Emailing links is not really my thing but there really were three very good articles at CounterPunch I would like to present to a few people by email.
CounterPunch is my favorite website followed closely by Znet and this gives me a chance to penetrate the barrier people have against reading email given the way the economic crisis has risen to the hottest subject of conversation.

1. "This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart? It Should Be, But ..."
by Alexander Cockburn - http://counterpunch.org/cockburn09202008.html

2. "Grasping at Straws: Full-Spectrum Breakdown."
by Mike Whitney in his article titled - http://counterpunch.org/whitney09202008.html

3. "America's Own Kleptocracy: The Market and the Terminator Machines"
by Michael Hudson- http://counterpunch.org/hudson09202008.html

=================================

http://counterpunch.org/cockburn09202008.html

Weekend Edition
September 20 / 21, 2008
CounterPunch Diary
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart? It Should Be, But ...

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Hope walks arm in arm with fear, and so naturally enough Candidate Barack Obama is now reminding us, a la Roosevelt, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself and we must all pull together in a spirit of bipartisanship. Wrong. We have many identifiable things to be frightened of, starting with a bailout program designed to bail out the thieves running our financial system, and stick middle America with the pricetag – heftier than you can imagine. Why pull together with the licensed thug who just stole your money with the pledge that he would be doing it again to your kids?

For the practicalities and implications of the thievery on Wall Street I highly recommend the pieces on our site this weekend by Michael Hudson, Pam Martens and our other writers. I also press upon our readers the reminder, which CounterPunchers surely don’t need, that when it comes to fingering the perpetrators this crisis is indeed truly bipartisan. What exploded last week was an economic credo that has been rolling along since the early 1970s: neoliberalism.

By all rights, this last crisis has brought us to the crossroads where neoliberalism should be buried with a stake through its heart.
We’ve had thirty years worth of deregulation – the loosening of government supervision. This has been the neoliberal mantra preached by both major parties, the whole of the establishment press and almost every university economics department in the country. It is central to the current disasters. And if you want to identify symbolic figures in the legislated career of deregulation, there are no more resplendent culprits than the man at McCain’s elbow, Phil Gramm, and the man standing at Obama’s elbow at his press conference, Robert Rubin.

Take Gramm first.

In 1999 John McCain’s friend and now his closest economic counselor, then a senator from Texas, was the prime Republican force pushing through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It repealed the old Glass-Steagall Act, passed in the Great Depression, which prohibited a commercial bank from being in the investment and insurance business. President Bill Clinton cheerfully signed it into law.

A year later Gramm, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, attached a 262-page amendment to an omnibus appropriations bill, voted on by Congress right before a recess. The amendment received no scrutiny and duly became the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which okayed deregulation of investment banks, exempting most over the counter derivatives, credit derivatives, credit defaults, and swaps from regulatory scrutiny. Thus were born the scams that produced the debacle of Enron, a company on whose board sat Gramm’s wife Wendy. She had served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1983 to 1993 and devised many of the rules coded into law by her husband in 2000.

Somewhat stained by the Enron debacle Gramm quit the senate in 2002 and began to enjoy the fruits of his own deregulatory efforts. He became a vice chairman of the giant Swiss bank UBS’ new investment arm in the US, lobbying Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006, urging Congress to roll back strong state rules trying to crimp the predatory tactics of the subprime mortgage industry. UBS took a bath of about $20 billion in write offs from bad real estate loans this year.

Long acknowledged as one of the most mean-spirited men ever to reach Congress, utterly charmless, (he managed to win only eight delegates in a hugely expensive bid for the Republican nomination in 1996) Gramm kept close contacts with the man dubbed McNasty when he was at the Naval College in Annapolis. Aside from their affinities in viciousness of character Gramm had access to big campaign funders in Texas, necessary from McCain’s 2008 bid. He became McCain’s campaign chairman and chief economic advisor.

<snipped>

Cockburn’s essay is devastating. He has forced me to re-examine some of my own assumptions preceding a a you-tube editorial (my first) that I am working on. (I am also planning on making a Tales from the Green Road file, to explore my feelings for Obama. That may take some doing, but I digress.)

Up until this point, I assumed Clinton signed repealed Glass-Steagll was a by-partisan gesture in order to win support for his “economic development zone” program. That may have been the spin at the time, but Cockburn claims that Robert Rubin was even more gung hoe to repeal the act, perhaps even more so that Gramm. Which would make what I have so far completely incorrect.

(This is what I am working with. If the sentence structure and punctuation is a little odd, this is because its dialog, and not script. It’s also still being researched & refined. Input is welcome.)
A clip from Jim Slattery’s stump speech: We have to put partisanship aside

Ending by-partisanship has been apart standard political banter for as long as I can remember, and has consistently been one of the top issues Americans have held for nearly as long, for both Democrats and Republicans. So much so that calls for by-partisanship has become more of a political cliché and cynicism, than meaningful leadership. But more and more, I find such sentiment to be the product of political naiveté on the part of many Democrats, if not a covert signal of preemptive surrender before much of the GOP’s agenda.

The unpleasant and inescapable reality on the hill is that bipartisanship all too often means caving to the GOP’s relentless and aggressive war against the Democratic Party in specific. There was the “blue card” policy that let one senator hold up any one of Clinton’s judicial nominees. A policy that was ended once Bush came into office. There is the K-Street project, which openly discriminates against Democrats, refusing them qualified people jobs as lobbyist, congressional advisers, and researchers. The Department of Homeland Security was dispatched to track down Texas State Democrats when they objected to an overt effort to gerrymander their districts – outside the usually ten year interval when districts are usually redrawn. They were ordered to arrest the Democrats and bring them back in chains. IN CHAINS! The entire justice department has been so politicized that it trumps up charges against Democrats running for re-election while refusing to honor or enforce congressional subpoenas submitted against Republicans. Vice Presidential Candidate Sara Palien is directly benefiting from this judicial hypocrisy as Republicans labor to silence and bury several investigations into her own tenure as Governor. Even as we speak, Republican agents across the country are busy striping the names of millions of likely Democratic voters from the voter registration roles, effectively stealing the November 2008 election for John McCain before even the first vote has ever been cast.

And look at the damage done from the “by-partisan” governance of past administrations. (Add more information here based on repeal of Glass-Steagel) If Bush, as Obama accuses, erected a house of cards that is now falling down around us, Bill Clinton’s by-partisan spirit still laid the foundation for our current disaster.


With respect, Mr. Slattery, I ask you how, how in the world can you possibly cooperate with Republicans in the face of that kind of political hostility?

And while Cockburn doesn’t say so directly, but implies it, there is no stake through the heart of neoliberalism. Indeed, this is an area where I can speak with some authority. Neoliberal economic policy – AKA “Free trade” is based specifically on selfish greed. It’s not even based on what’s good for industry, or even for corporations, but absolutely in the sense of what benefits me directly.

I know some are saying that the crash may be part of some plan. The Amerio comes to mind. But I suspect that the architects of the crash or the mortgage melt down are not that sophisticated But their reaction remains constant. Again, what benefits me. So the bail out plan is less about the government stabilizing the markets, and more about using tax payer money to bail out them selves and their own losses.

People should have long ago been outraged, and the fact that they aren't is telling that they don't know the scope of what is going on. If they don't know enough to be even slightly angry, there is no hope of penetrating their shell of bliss.

There is a 10:23 video critical of Treasury Secretary Paulson using his interview on Face the Nation this morning. The fact that this guy has outrage shows that he is above the clue stage in his understanding of what is going on. He brought out some information that most people would not know, and I did not know that Paulson was able to liquidate a half of a billion@ portfolio tax free under the law when he accepted his government position when leaving Goldman Sachs.

I believe this crisis was manufactured by the people that now say they know the remedy. The laws were broken to make loans to people with no jobs and was riddled with abuse that plenty of people knew was going on. This is the financial takeover of the wealthy and we are to make Paulson a dictator. People should be outraged, but frankly, most people don't know a dam. We are one dumbed-down country. USA!USA!

Great stuff here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO6P_yjKFR4

Posted by: JustinTheSkeptic | Sep 21, 2008 9:18:33 AM - http://tinyurl.com/4azkfe


Barry,

I can't email you directly so I'm posting this here. Would you please post something about the paragraph below! This is as authoritarian and anti-constitutional as anything I've ever seen in my 51 years, completely eliminating checks and balances, the very foundation of the constitution. This is a bait and switch... using the run on money markets as a proxy for financial armageddon. The run on money markets could easily have been staunched with the insurance proposal. Instead, they are using this crisis to promote a power grab of gargantuan proportions, not unlike using 911 as an excuse for attacking Iraq. Please bring this to the attention of as many as possible.


Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

check this out!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C2933%2C425672%2C00.html

The Monopoly Party admits ineptness and is going to create a dictator before it goes home on Friday. Unfuckingbelievable.
========================
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aVPBaUbYV_qQ


Democratic Congress May Adjourn, Leave Crisis to Fed, Treasury

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iVpKmozYkrh4

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The Democratic-controlled Congress, acknowledging that it isn't equipped to lead the way to a solution for the financial crisis and can't agree on a path to follow, is likely to just get out of the way.

Lawmakers say they are unlikely to take action before, or to delay, their planned adjournments -- Sept. 26 for the House of Representatives, a week later for the Senate. While they haven't ruled out returning after the Nov. 4 elections, they would rather wait until next year unless Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who are leading efforts to contain the crisis, call for help.

<snipped>