One Year Later, Wall Street's Miracle: Can You Believe It?

Does anyone now believe that our financial industry was truly on the brink of collapse and in dire need of $700 billion of our tax dollars?

The whole economic meltdown scenario, painted in the waining days of Bush-Cheney, strains credulity now, especially when we look at these facts reported yesterday in the NY Times about Goldman Sachs: "...earned $3.19 billion in the third quarter, powered by strong trading and gains on its own corporate investments. Revenue was $12.37 billion. The earnings of $5.25 a share easily exceeded analysts’ estimates of $4.18 a share or $2.34 billion."

Goldman's chief executive Lloyd C. Blankfein said: “Although the world continues to face serious economic challenges, we are seeing improving conditions and evidence of stabilization, even growth, across a number of sectors.” Those sectors in recovery appear to comprise only Goldman, et al.

Goldman also reported it had earmarked $5.35 billion in compensation and benefits, an increase of 84 % from the year earlier. Goldman isn't alone. Bank of America allowed Merrill Lynch to shell out billions more in bonuses last December before their merger, and Citigroup, Bank of America, J. P. Morgan and others are making sure to keep the world's economic challenges outside their doors.

Wall Street's miracle turnaround is good news if you believed Goldman and company were at the brink of collapse. But more and more these days we're not convinced. With Goldman's own insiders then and now inside the White House, the obvious conflict of interest is an outrage and certainly merits Congressional scrutiny. Just don't hold your breath.

The transfer of  income to the wealthiest Wall Street firms was just the icing on the cake, which came about as the Bush-Cheney term came to an inauspicious conclusion. Why are we to believe their claim of iminent financial meltdown has any more authenticity than Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had when Bush-Cheney made it up as a pretext to the 2003 invasion?

What seems specially galling now is watching the Goldman brain trust continue to reap the benefits of gorging themselves at the public trough, while 99.9% of us continue to be left off this party's invitation list. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to lecture President Obama about his Socialist tendencies, while we are wrecked by record personal bankruptcies, home foreclosures, official joblessness approaching 10% (but much higher in reality), a decade of income stagnation, soaring health care cost, the implosion of 401k and other retirement account balances, and will face the trillions in our national debt due to Republican-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq even as they cut taxes for the wealthiest 1%.

Which leads to the two obvious questions: Where's the public outrage? How will the Obama administration ever be able to deliver a bailout for the rest of us when the foxes who perpetrated the slaughter remain inside the Hen House?

Mr. Grayson Goes to Washington

What happens when you mix "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" with "Lethal Weapon"? You get the story debuting on Capitol Hill featuring the unlikely breakout performance by Rep. Alan Grayson, a first-term Central Florida congressman who is surprising all observers (as well as many of his constituents) by dramatizing the Republican health-reform-strangling gambit that has hamstrung Congress for most of the summer and fall.

Rep. Grayson's first shot fired at Repugs on the House floor over a week ago was number one with a bullet: He pulls off his easel chart cover and asks what is the Republican health care plan? "No. 1: Don't get sick," the first chart says. And if you do get sick? Grayson dramatically flips over the next two pages, which say: "No. 2: If you do get sick... No.3: Die quickly." Rep. Grayson goes on, in a little more than two minutes, to contrast the key features of the Democratic health-care approach. It was a made-for-cable-TV power play that has had reverberations that have rippled, one may argue, further than anything President Obama has said publicly on the subject to date. Here's the video:



Since his appearance, Rep. Grayson has pulled in better than a quarter of a million dollars in campaign contributions, appeared on CNN's "Situation Room" and numerous other cable networks, and turned up both light and heat on the do-nothing Right. But maybe more than that, Rep. Grayson has been surprisingly effective of fighting anti-health-care distortions with a few inconvenient facts, and in doing so has shown his fainting-violet colleagues in the Democratic Party what it takes to fight the obstructionist Repugs for what is right.