Recently, I talked to the CEO of a very successful Icelandic company that has grown steadily over the decade it’s been operating. Every year, the CEO would go through the annual report, lean back and think with great satisfaction that his company was indeed showing a healthily steady growth. Then the banks and their satellite companies would come out with their annual accounts – and the CEO’s heart would sink, questioning what on earth was he was doing: compared to these companies his company’s growth was pitiful. Now, anno 2010, his company is still doing well and even hiring people.

This week, ABC News World News with Diane Sawyer is airing a series about the struggling middle class. The show's producers posed the following question to a few of the nation's leading economic and financial analysts, including UMKC's own William K. Black.

Just when you thought that nothing could stink more than Timothy Geithner's handling of the AIG bailout, a new report details how Geithner's New York Fed allowed Lehman Brothers to use an accounting gimmick to hide debt. The report, which runs to 2200 pages, was released by Anton Valukas, the court-appointed examiner. It actually makes the AIG bailout look tame by comparison. It is now crystal clear why Geithner's Treasury as well as Bernanke's Fed refuse to allow any light to shine on the massive cover-up underway.

Readers, Given the sharp contrast between the responses to corporate criminality in Greece as compared to what is not yet occurring in the US and the UK, this article describes the historical process of mobilization and change as it occurred in the US fairly well. Relative to the unfolding of the Great Depression in the US, we are at about 1931 during the so called Hoover bubble which was also described as a "recovery." It was more of a "dead cat bounce" as a pause to later and deeper collapse.

Hidden Fascism and the Fake Politics of Left vs. Right

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/20368

Citibank’s recent announcement that it may require seven days notice prior to honoring withdrawals is just the latest small brushstroke on a much larger canvas being painted by the banking system and the US government. The broader picture is shocking for those watching as it comes into view. Americans must heed Martin Luther King’s warning, “today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake.”

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5502/the_corporate_takeover_of_u.s._...

Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.

On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections-a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.

The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.

There is a lot of speculation over the reappointment of Ben Bernanke to continue to head the Fed, with the Obama Administration pushing hard. Of course, Wall Street is also calling in its favors. It looks like a done deal. The Administration has probably got the 60 votes required in the Senate to remove the hold, and the 51 votes needed for confirmation.

Readers: It looks like Obama's banking reform package just went into the dumpster. While it is entirely believable that BHO would confuse the performance of the stock market as legitimate economic indicators, it is also pathetic because the stock market was also developing a bubble based upon the bonuses and foreclosure liquidations. In effect the economics of Main Street have also again been thrown overboard. In the same pass I expect that Volcker's advice as conservative as it probably was, was also chucked.

Corporations, which control the levers of power in government and finance, promote and empower the psychologically maimed. Those who lack the capacity for empathy and who embrace the goals of the corporation—personal power and wealth—as the highest good succeed. Those who possess moral autonomy and individuality do not.

Readers: This is a relatively basic, though imo overly moderated, summary The author does not go to the level to declare that the details of the bail-out and the phony recovery were exactly that way because that is the way that the speculative finance sector wanted the process to be defined. Self congratulatory conceit is what was expressed in the recovery agenda and the economic ignorance of how real economies actually function is equally profound.