Congress - Putting the Crony into Capitalism

Walter Russell Mead, getting to be one of my favorite writers, takes down Congress and Wall Street on their extremely cozy relationship. This whole article is worth a read, because it proves the old saw that the real crime is what's legal. A brief summary.

• Hedge fund investors and other key Wall Street insiders get tipped off by Congress and staffers on legislative direction. From the WSJ: When Senate Democrats finally brokered a compromise over the proposed health-care law, a group of hedge funds were let in on the deal, learning details hours before a public announcement on Dec. 8, 2009.
• As Mead notes. Fabulous profits are there to be made, perfectly legally; legislators do Wall Street a favor by giving the hedgies an early head’s up, the hedgies reciprocate by making large campaign contributions. Everybody wins except for the pathetic losers not part of the magic inner ring, and nobody breaks any laws.
• Congresscritters in turn, personally benefit from being brought in on deals that you or I can only dream about. Nancy Pelosi and her husband were parties to a dozen or so IPOs, many of which were effectively off limits to all but the biggest institutional investors and their favored clients. One of those was a 2008 investment of between $1 million and $5 million in Visa. . .
  
• OWS got it wrong, the problem isn't Wall Street, but the coziness between Wall Street and Washington, which the Tea Party better understands. The paternalistic and benevolent government envisioned by the architects of the blue social model has morphed into a corrupt insider state that can no longer regulate or protect. The answer can’t be to give more power to people like Chris Dodd; that is what the Tea Party understands and the OWS folks too often miss.

Considering all of the advantages that Congress has, we find studies that show that members of the House of Representatives stock market returns beat the market by 6.8%. To quote Dean:

These guys write the legislation, they make the rules... and they're completely immune from taking advantage of gaming the situation in any manner they feel... and they still can't make out any better than 6 and 12 percent above the market average?

U.S. Congress: where corruption meets complete incompetence.

Occupying the Ports? #Occupy's War on the Working Class - UPDATE 2

The Occupy movement intends to shutdown ports on the West Coast tomorrow, Monday, December 12. OccupySD plans are listed here. There stated aim is to draw attention to "unfair and unjust business practices of multinational corporations." That there is a nexus between multinationals and the ports is left to the imagination of the reader. They also claim that their purpose includes:

- our picket lines are picket lines organized by working class people, in solidarity with fellow workers

One problem with that assertion is that the unions aren't too happy. From the SF Chronicle.

"Support is one thing," Robert McEllrath, president of the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union, wrote to his members last week. "Outside groups attempting to co-opt our struggle in order to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process."

Not the 1 percent

The Alameda County Building and Construction Trades Council's secretary-treasurer, Andreas Cluver, said many of his union's workers were recently hired at port building projects after long stretches on unemployment. Given that, a port shutdown aimed at punishing the 1 percent "makes no sense," he said.

He said no union at the port supports the shutdown.

"We're extremely supportive of the message of Occupy Oakland, and we did come out to support the Nov. 2 general strike, but we're not behind this one," Cluver said. "When working people aren't involved in the decision on whether to shut down their jobs at the port, that's problematic. And we weren't consulted. Losing a day of wages is hard."

Also, given that this protest is planned for a Monday, is this really a protest of working people? Or maybe its a protest against working people for their effrontery in working for big corporations in order to put food on the table for their families. It seems that the #OWS and its affiliate's protests are actually a war against those who work, regardless of their "percent" by the leisured class of those who subsist off the generosity of our society.

UPDATES

SarahB at Lipstick Underground is providing updates this morning.

UPDATE 2

Dean at BeersWithDemo checks out the action with some man in the street pictures. Here is a taste:

Occupy the Mall?

The Drudge Report alerted me to the latest "occupy" plan, to Occupy Black Friday. I cruised over to their Facebook page to find this unhelpful rant:

This Black Friday, we will boycott all of the corporations that corrupt our government, and put profits before people.

Any holiday shopping we do this day will be at independent shops to support local economies and the 99% as a whole!

How do I figure this out? I guess I'm supposed to look up which of my shopping destinations are publicly traded corporations. Guess I'll have to buy that copy of today's Wall Street Journal after all.

So who do I notice has "liked" their Facebook page? Usual suspects, Al Jazeera English, and Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, . For real? This is mainstream? Obama wants to hook up with such a movement? At a time when his only real chance of re-election is a miracle in the economy, he's down with interfering with shopping? Not that it will make much difference. My money is on the following outcome, 99% of the stores in America don't even notice the campaign, while the media focuses on and glorifies some minor impact at the 1% of stores who get a few protesters.

The Weakness of the Occupy Protest Model

Temple of Mut has the details here, but suffice to say that living in unhygienic conditions is well, unhygienic. I have felt all along that the whole sleep-over motif of the movement was self-defeating, because the tent cities lent themselves to criminality and filth. Tea party protests have been famously well ordered and litter free which enhanced the credibility of the protesters. I might have been more impressed by the occupy movement if they were able to come back day after day, but leave their environment in, well, a green condition.

Corporate Welfare, OWS and the tea party movement

This morning's WSJ editorial page picked up on a theme from this blog that the occupiers and tea partyers can come together in opposition to corporate welfare. The whole article is worth a read, but they offer additional egregious examples of the waste of your tax dollars in support of companies that should sink or swim on their own.

Some of the most expensive flops include the Supersonic Transport plane of the mid-1970s, Jimmy Carter's $2 billion Synthetic Fuels Corporation (the precursor to clean energy), Amtrak, which hasn't turned a profit in four decades, and the most expensive public-private partnership debacle of all time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have lost $142 billion of taxpayer money.

The ethanol subsidy, benefiting mostly corn farmers and corporate fuel blenders in the Midwest, costs about $6 billion a year through an array of tax subsidies, tariffs and mandates while making fuel and food more expensive.

Crop price supports for wheat, corn, rice, sugar and soybean farmers are supposed to help struggling family farms, but at least half the subsidies go to large and wealthy farmers and corporations. Congress can't seem to wean the farm belt off these payments even though commodity prices and farm incomes are near an all-time high. Restricting those funds to farmers with incomes below $250,000 would save $30 billion over the next decade.

The Export-Import Bank has a portfolio of $14.5 billion of outstanding loan guarantees to assist major U.S. exporters. More than 90% of the funds went to 10 corporations, including Boeing ($6.4 billion), General Electric ($1.043 billion) and Caterpillar ($424 million).

The Presidential candidate that can capture the anger over these outrages can easily beat Obama, because he is all in for government subsidies, and has doubled down on defending the likes of Solyndra.

The Republican nominee doesn't have to have a great track record on this issue, he just has to show a credible change of heart on the issue. Fortunately, there is an easy way to do so, campaign against ethanol subsidies in Iowa, and then consistently oppose any other such subsidies the rest of the campaign. Tying Obama to corporate welfare is relatively easy. Given the justified anger over giving our tax dollars to corporations, Obama should have no chance. That he does is shameful.

1%ers

I'm just sayin'. I guess we should be angry at the 1%. What do you think?


Inspiration for this post from VDH, brilliant as always.

tea party Outreach to Occupy Wall Street

A guest at our Halloween party Friday night (not pictured, but that's your author on the right) had attended some of the Occupy San Diego events, and said that the press image of the movement distorted what they are trying to achieve. No surprise there, as I have seen the tea party movement's principles and activities similarly distorted. She said that the movement has serious demands that are the result of government enriching particular companies through undue influence. Further, she stated that one of the demands of the group is to prevent a revolving door between corporate lobbying and government. She also said that the Iraq war was the result of weapons contractors being highly placed in the Bush administration, a point on which I disagree. However, we had many points of agreement, but disagree fundamentally on what is to be done about government regulatory and tax policies, as well as subsidies and bailouts that enrich the privileged elite with the connections to benefit. The occupy movement seems to believe that we can build "good government" free from the influence of the wealthy and powerful, which will then regulate the activities of that group for the greater good of all Americans.

I fundamentally disagree that this goal is possible. What then is to be done? The fundamental problem is that the wealthy, and especially those in the financial sector, have benefited from government subsidies, bailouts and implicit guarantees. They make risky bets, knowing that the taxpayers will be on the hook to bail them out, while they still walk away rich. The only solution is to attack the source of the problem, which is to allow banks and other financial firms to fail. Further, we must ban subsidies and pork barrel projects. We must press for transparent and simple regulation that applies evenly to all businesses. To protect ourselves from financial meltdown from "too big to fail" we must enforce ever higher capital reserve requirements for ever larger firms, rather than execrable and impenetrable regulation like the 2319 page Dodd Frank bill.

The occupy movement targets the outrageous outcome of taxpayers bailing out the already wealthy. But there movement is being hampered by other deficiencies, and they could learn from the tea party movement. But I think they could get more traction and even tea party support if they made a few changes. On the other hand, the tea party should be thanking them for protesting the problem of crony capitalism. Crony capitalism and corporate welfare are a twin cancer on America, depleting our ability to grow the economy in a just way. However, the occupy movement is not getting the traction it deserves due to a number of distractions.

• It seems that #occupy is protesting all wealth, not just the unearned wealth. Americans think that Steve Jobs, for example, deserved to keep the wealth he earned, Wall Street bankers with implicit guarantees from Uncle Sam, not so much.
• Too many socialists in the movement call for the collapse of capitalism. The tea party purged racists from its movement, occupiers should purge the anarchists and socialists from theirs. (Yeah, I'm comparing socialism to racism. Various forms of socialism, such as national socialism and communism, have killed far more people than racism ever did. If you don't like the comparison, you're reading the wrong blog.)
• The occupy movement is perceived as trashy, as in literally leaving trash in its wake. Be model citizens, and the 99% of the public that isn't protesting might take #occupy more seriously. It leaves the impression that you are spoiled children, not adults taking responsibility for changing the republic.

Taking a look at this Occupy Wall Street web site, I can find common cause with some of their complaints, such as:

• They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
• They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

But some of the complaints seem shear fantasy:

• They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

Really? How are you able to publish your manifesto, and how am I able to read it?

So I will end with what I told our young guest, Friday.

It's the crony not the capitalism and its the corporate welfare not the corporation that are causing the problems in America today. You complain about money in politics, but after forty years of successive reforms, nothing has been done to stop it. At the end of the day, you never will because the rich have freedom of speech as well. The situation is like what Steve Forbes described. You have vermin in your kitchen. So you set traps, put out poison, and plug up the holes, but somehow the vermin keep coming back. That's because you have to stop keeping the cake under the kitchen sink! The cake is the largesse shelled out by government through crony capitalism and a regulatory excess that favors some businesses over others. The only way to get the money out of politics, is to get politics out of the business of dispensing money.

So how about it occupiers? Could we agree on ending all corporate subsidies, loans and tax loopholes as our common platform? Could we ask for a ban on government giving tax dollars to favored groups? Could we ask for regulatory simplicity, not complexity? Could ask for an end to "too big to fail?" I look forward to your response.

Quotes of the Week

Some great quotes about the state of the nation this week. First from Dean, on diagnosing the exact reason that the occupy movement appears to be careening out of control.

By rejecting the norms and institutions of civlized society they only find themselves recreating those institutions but without the underpinning of the rule of law. Without the rule of law, the Occupy "villages" become a study in the tyranny of the majority where pendulum swings in the "mood" of the General Assembly. . .

Next, from Peggy Noonan, quoting Paul Ryan on what should be the real object of our ire, both tea partyer and occupier:

The "true sources of inequity in this country," he continued, are "corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless." The real class warfare that threatens us is "a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society."

Amen, brother.

Obama Inflates the Education Bubble in the Name of Stimulus

What could go wrong? The President announced he is using his power to make a slight expansion in the program that the Democratic Congress passed in 2010, that basically allows students to never have to repay their student loans and gives them an incentive not to report income after graduation. Republicans should repeal this program after they gain control of the White House and the Congress in 2012. The President's idea is to cap student loan repayment rates at 10 percent of a debtor’s income that goes above the poverty line, and then limiting the life of a loan to 20 years. Take this example, even if not typical:

If Suzy Creamcheese gets into George Washington University and borrows from the government the requisite $212,000 to obtain an undergraduate degree, her repayment schedule will be based on what she earns. If Suzy opts to heed the president’s call for public service, and takes a job as a city social worker earning $25,000, her payments would be limited to $1,411 a year after the $10,890 of poverty-level income is subtracted from her total exposure.

Twenty years at that rate would have taxpayers recoup only $28,220 of their $212,000 loan to Suzy.

The president will also allow student debtors to refinance and consolidate loans on more favorable terms, further decreasing the payoff for taxpayers.

What's really wrong is that the cost of education has increased far faster than its value, in terms of increased earnings. There is in fact, an education bubble, that is already starting to collapse, if the complaints of those with master's degrees in comparative ethnic dance studies are to be believed. Check this graph from Carpe Diem:

If we had a housing bubble that burst in 2008; how would you describe the tuition graph? Clearly, the government subsidies are partially to blame for this increase. More importantly, the subsidies distort the economy and depress economic growth, because the supposed "investment" in college is providing the return on investment.

The Economist provides an excellent summary of the situation. The whole article is worth a read.

Mr Thiel believes that higher education fills all the criteria for a bubble: tuition costs are too high, debt loads are too onerous, and there is mounting evidence that the rewards are over-rated. Add to this the fact that politicians are doing everything they can to expand the supply of higher education (reasoning that the "jobs of the future" require college degrees), much as they did everything that they could to expand the supply of "affordable" housing, and it is hard to see how we can escape disaster.

Mary Lacey, at TechCrunch, interviews legendary venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and has this to say.

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

That sense of entitlement explains a lot about the unemployed twenty-somethings who are occupying Wall Street.

Caption Contest

Yes, that is a Mercedes SLK 320, sporting an Occupy home made window placard. Spotted today in Mission Bay Park. Your best caption wanted. Winner will get a free subscription to The Liberator Today and B-Daddy's Other Blog.

Honestly, I had promised myself I would stop blogging about Occupy Wall Street for a while, to at least see where that movement is headed.

Explaining a Few News Items

Lots of articles about the problems besetting the Occupy movement, especially Occupy Wall Street. I take no pleasure in their difficulties, but this seems inevitable for a movement that has adopted the French Revolutionary model, with the whole Paris commune/General Assembly concept. It is good to remember that the French Revolution ended in slaughter and dictatorship. The American Revolution stood the test of time, because a constitutional republic with separation of powers restrains the worst impulses of the mob. Early on I had hoped that their movement would focus on crony capitalism and call for an end to cozy relationships between business and government, but they don't seem to be trending in that direction. I also could be wrong about that, because I don't trust the media to accurately portray them any more than the tea party movement was accurately portrayed.

Much has been made of stagnating wages in the U.S., especially on the left. Professor Perry at Carpe Diem suggests that their may be a relationship to the number of workers entering retirement and stagnating incomes. I agree but not for the reasons cited by Perry. He suggests that the workers leaving the workforce see household incomes stagnate because they are now retired. But I don't think the statistics include retirees. However, there is an impact of the increasing number of retirees and the relatively fewer Gen Xers as compared to Baby Boomers. As the boomers retire, they leave the work force at their peak earning years. But there are fewer Xers to replace them, but more Millenials than Xers. This causes the average age of the work force to trend younger, and therefore less well paid. See the bulge of retirees at the 50-55 year old group below.



Opposition to the Keystone pipeline, designed to bring so called "tar sands" oil from Canada to the United States is usually couched in language about the potential impact to water supplies and the like. However, famous global warmist James Hansen, also director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, explicitly links opposition to the pipeline to preventing global warming.

Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the CO2 emitted while burning oil, which is used principally in vehicles.

Note that this is a tacit admission that there is plenty of oil in the ground, by a leading warmist. It is interesting to note that the enviros try to have it both ways, arguing simultaneously that our dependency on oil will come a cropper as we run out of oil, and also saying that if we keep burning oil we will wreck the environment. If we were really running out, then they wouldn't have to worry, would they?

Miscellaneous Musings

I missed the Republican debate tonight, by all accounts, that now seems like a wise choice. Gary Johnson was excluded and CNN moderated, what were we to expect? Sarah Palin said that the winner on substance was Newt Gingrich? Maybe that's true, but that's a sad night indeed.

Douglas Schoen polls the OWS crowd and finds some interesting statistics. The one I found most perplexing was "And by a close margin, protesters are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary (49%) or unnecessary (51%)." I thought this was a protest against the greed of the financial sector.

Fire Dog Lake takes exception with Schoen's characterization of the protesters as leftist radicals.

Here’s one of the key questions in Schoen’s poll:

What frustrates you the most about the political process in the United States? {Open Ended}

30% Influence of corporate/moneyed/special interests
3% Our democratic/capitalist system
3% Stagnant middle class wages
21% Partisanship
15% Joblessness
6% Income inequality
7% Corruption
2% Entrenched bureaucracy
2% Bush tax cuts
2% Obama abandoned left
2% Military spending
2% Federal Reserve
5% Everything

Out of this, which is mostly a pro-jobs, anti-special interest message, Schoen sees left-wing radicalism.

Hard to know who is more accurate both sides have some reasons to exaggerate their point.

Meanwhile, the #OWS crowd discovers a certain love, for well, private property.

Greece is probably going to default on its debt, with massive strikes being called as the Greek parliament prepares to vote on austerity measures.

Greece is expected to grind to a halt, with a general strike that could ground flights, halt most public services and shut offices and shops.

The 48-hour strike comes as parliament prepares to vote on the latest round of austerity measures, including more tax hikes, pay cuts and job losses.

The irony of further damaging the economy and making their own situation even worse seems lost on the Greek unions. The dysfunction in the Greek political system is such that no amount of good news (Germans and French agreeing on new terms) on the next bailout will change my opinion that the Greeks will default. David Skeel in the WSJ argues that the Europeans have failed to learn the lessons of the Bear Stearns bailout.

Europe can't afford to bail out Italy, so it might as well send the right message now by forcing Greece to restructure its debt. Greece is Europe's Bear Stearns.
. . .
If the European Union continues to treat rescue as the principal option for Greece, and to treat "default" like a dirty word, it is headed down the same path the U.S. took in 2008. As bad as that sounds, the consequences of going the bailout route will be far worse than they were in the U.S.
. . .
The U.S. isn't setting the best of examples in this regard, of course. By continuing to inject the government into the economy and failing to allow the markets—especially the housing markets—to return to normal, we almost certainly have prolonged our own period of low growth.

With more economic turmoil in store, I can't see an improved economy saving Obama from being a one-term President, that can now only be achieved by Republican ineptitude, of which they appear eminently capable.

Quote of the Week - Occupy Wall Street

Nicolas Kristof, writing in the New York Times today, eloquently defines the common and legitimate complaint that both the Occupy Wall Street and tea party movement share.

More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

Living under Communism in China made me a fervent enthusiast of capitalism. I believe that over the last couple of centuries banks have enormously raised living standards in the West by allocating capital to more efficient uses. But anyone who believes in markets should be outraged that banks rig the system so that they enjoy profits in good years and bailouts in bad years.

The banks have gotten away with privatizing profits and socializing risks, and that’s just another form of bank robbery.

To steal a phrase, its the crony not the capitalism. And what enables the banks to manipulate the system to their advantage? In my opinion, the fiat money system, whereby the dollar is valued at whatever the Federal Reserve says it is. The more I think into these issues, the more I am convinced that a gold standard is necessary to prevent banking shenanigans. Some banks need to fail and bankers need to lose their jobs, before we are going to get a system that justly serves the interests of the all of these United States.

Further, when one looks at the tax code and regulatory landscape, its very complexity enables the bankers manipulation of the system. Better to have simple regulatory schemes, scrap the current tax code and start over with a simple system, in order to end the odious outcome that we currently suffer through. No extra-legal seizure of assets, as some in the occupy movement propose, but certainly we need to shut down the source of ill gotten wealth in the financial sector, when it accrues to the use of loopholes, bailouts and secret Federal Reserve funding.

Sadness over OWS - Leftists Appear Firmly in Control

Gateway Pundit is reporting that

The pro-Obama Working Families Party of New York, a group that shares the same address as the SEIU and ACORN in New York, posted this advertisement on Craig's list. They are looking for energetic progressives to help them to fight to hold Wall Street accountable. And the pay is $350-$650 a week depending on the responsibility and length of time of staff.

Gateway Pundit offers a screen capture of the Craigslist ad.

This saddens me, because I had previously posted about the possibility of a common agenda. Here in San Diego, the Voice of San Diego interviewed some of the protesters, and filtering out the stuff I couldn't understand we have:

• Have student debt, no good job. (See Temple of Mut for discussion of education bubble.)
• Corporations profited from Iraq war through no bid contracts. (There is actually some truth to that, but the dollar value is nothing compared to Wall Street bailouts.)
• Inadequate health care for the poor. (No explanation of why Medicaid, America's largest program, let alone social program or health program, isn't providing care.)

Maybe I should have included injustice against LGBTQs of color, but I don't know what that means. However, there is little discussion of bailouts, the fed or crony loans to corporations, all of which are at the root of what's really wrong.

My offer of a coalition to deal with injustices that we can agree upon stands.

San Diego Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Common Agenda - UPDATE

Update at bottom.

Temple of Mut has a great round up on the Occupy (insert your city here) events yesterday. Fellow SLOBs W.C. Varones and Left Coast Rebel both attended the San Diego event yesterday. W.C. has great video and LCR has revealing pictures. They are worth a review, because this movement is complex and even self-contradictory at times, see Thor's Assistant's comments on a related post, where their demands are listed.

Pictures from LCR's blog of yesterday's San Diego rally:

What are the red and black flags in the background? Glad to see the U.S. flag.

I am sympathetic to many of the complaints that motivate the Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, bailing out Wall Street and the banks with federal money was the initial event that inspired the tea party movement's beginnings in 2009. Unfortunately, OWS appears to be getting hijacked by the usual suspects on the left, the socialists, communists, labor unions and the Green party. This results in fundamental disagreement with those in the tea party on the means by which to end the injustice of government support for privileged corporations. When OWS protesters start talking about confiscation of wealth and trampling property rights, it reminds me of the horrors of the Russian revolution. However, the outrage that all citizens feel with a political class that looks first to the interests of itself, then of its large contributors is poignant and a basis for common ground.

Here is an agenda that we might all agree upon, because it attacks the root causes that led to both movements.

• End the bailouts for financial firms and indeed all the failed corporations. Disabuse corporate CEOs of the notion that they can jet to Washington to save their companies.
• Eliminate the special dispensations for favored groups and corporations in the tax code. Simplify the corporate tax code so that simple profit and loss, as measured by generally accepted accounting principles form the basis of taxation. No more special breaks because you lobbied Congress. Ethanol comes to mind.
• End the secret bailouts by the federal reserve, which seem to involve more than just banks. Audit the fed.
• While we are at it, restore the gold standard for our money so that banks can be held accountable and not get federal reserve bailouts.
• Investigations and possible prosecutions for fraud in the manner in which mortgage backed securities were represented.
• Prosecutions when banks foreclose on homes when they don't even own the mortgage.
• End all government loans to corporations.

That's my short list, I hope those on the left can find some agreement.

UPDATE

I was alerted to a blog post by left of center, peak oil and "new urbanism" activist James Howard Kunstler, in the comments section of W.C.'s post. I am quoting one paragraph, because it shows that we can perhaps come to agreement with the left on some key issues.

For instance, what is Attorney General Eric Holder's program for prosecuting CDO swindles, the MERS racket, the bonus creamings of TBTF bank executives, the siphoning of money from the Federal Reserve to foreign banks, the misconduct at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the willful negligence of the SEC, and countless other villainies? What is Barack Obama's program for restoring the rule of law in American financial affairs? (Generally, the rule of law requires the enforcement of laws, no?)

In case you can't follow the acronyms he uses.

CDO = Collateralized Debt Obligation. Similar in structure to a collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO) or collateralized bond obligation (CBO), CDOs are unique in that they represent different types of debt and credit risk. In the case of CDOs, these different types of debt are often referred to as 'tranches' or 'slices'.

MERS = Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. A electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States. But consider this little gem in an appeals court ruling from Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems v LISA MARIE CHONG, LENARD E. SCHWARTZER, BANKRUPTCY TRUSTEE, et al.

Instead of presenting the evidence to the Bankruptcy Court, MERS attempted to withdraw the Motion from the Bankruptcy Court’s consideration, citing the failure of a MERS Certifying Officer to demonstrate that a member was in physical possession of the promissory note at the time themotion was filed. The only evidence provided by MERS was a declaration that MERS had been identified as a beneficiary in the deed of trust and that it had been named nominee for the originallender. Since MERS provided no evidence that it was the agent or nominee for the current owner of the beneficial interest in the note, it has failed to meet its burden of establishing that it is a real partyin interest with standing. Accordingly, the order of the Bankruptcy Court must be affirmed.

TBTF = Too Big To Fail. The doctrine that we can't allow some banks too fail or it will crash the whole economy. We have railed against that sufficiently in this space.