No liability for lying

Mitt Rmoney (R-safe harbor from lies) has spent much of his life approving statements that may or may not be true but which excuse themselves from liability if they turn out to be true. Here's an example from current Bain dealings:

These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements.

Here's another:

This release includes forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.  These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by phrases such as TI or its management "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "foresees," "forecasts," "estimates" or other words or phrases of similar import.  Similarly, statements in this release that describe the Company's business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals also are forward-looking statements.  All such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.[emphasis added]

A third:

Because such forward looking statements contain risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward
looking statements.

There are many, many more, of course. Bain's various companies are involved in a lot of deals.

Since Mitt never worked under Sarbanes-Oxley (that we know of), he didn't actually sign these statements, but his cavalier attitude toward making shit up shows in practically every statement he ever makes, for example, this piece of pettifoggery:

According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

Mitt is a gee-whiz liar to the core. He believes his business and his god entitle him to say whatever he needs to say.

Creative destruction of the truth

Normal people call what Rmoney is doing lying.

Who is Mitt Romney for?

Political bankruptcy

Republicans want to return to disastrous policies because they would then have to admit the emptiness of their ideas and their own uselessness in solving any national problem bigger than changing the diaper of some busted Wall Street institution:

The economy didn't just crash under a Republican president, it crashed under Republican policies. It crashed with low taxes. It crashed with deregulated markets. It crashed with huge restrictions on union activity. It crashed with massive cuts in environmental regulations. It crashed with lowered trade barriers. It crashed with big fat Pentagon spending.

They got what they wanted. They got CEOs with no limits on their wealth. They got banks with no limits on their "creativity." They got trade agreements that guaranteed manufacturing could be moved to the dirtiest, cheapest, most desperate source available. They got massive cuts in capital gains taxes and equally large boosts in the wealth they could pass along in estates. They got everything they said would make us all wealthy. They got record oil and gas drilling. They got record giveaways of public land. They got everything they said would create jobs. They got the middle class to shoulder more, more, more of the burden so that those beautiful job creators would be free to work their magic.

They can't say the economy crashed because taxes went up, because they didn't. They can't say that the economy crashed because there was a raft of new regulation, because there wasn't. They can't blame it on "union thugs" or Saul Alinsky or the guy who writes Happy Holidays cards at Hallmark. They can't blame it on a president who was elected when the world was already in free fall. Only, of course they do. They say it because they have no choice.

I've hit some of these themes for a long time, but I don't think I've ever hit them as well as Mark Sumner on DailyKos. Go read the whole thing.

The prudent along with the gamblers

Tell me different

What this means: Republicans want to replace Medicare with vouchers for private health insurance, vouchers whose purchasing power is planned to decrease over the years, vouchers to buy something that at some point in everyone senior's life will not be available at any price. If they succeed, bankruptcy and destitution with no possibility of ever recouping independence will be the lot of most people in their so-called golden years.

The simple objective of the Republican Party is to deny any existence to any of us in the 99% that's not as a captive market. I have a hard time seeing how that can be classified as anything short of evil.

No business like show business

Any man who took a casino into bankruptcy has some 'splainin' to do:

In a piece of good news for Mr. Trump, a new poll showed a majority of likely voters agreeing with the statement, “Donald Trump being sworn in as President would be a great last scene in a Planet of the Apes remake.”

Or Idiocracy.

Honestly, isn't it obvious to everyone that America has thrown an even bigger nutty than a John Bircher's previously impotent dream of a wet dream?

America's coarse aristocracy

Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, yet all he has to offer is resentment and Galtian ego, despite his avid use of bankruptcy laws to escape his debts and leave others holding the bag:

[E]ven with daddy's millions, the best business education money can buy, and income and capital gains taxes slashed to the bone, somehow, Donald J. Trump still managed to declare bankruptcy several times, and was accused of turning of millions of investment dollars into a pile of junk along the way.

Punishing the innocent

President Obama retains the Wall St.-driven bias to help the thoroughly corrupt and incompetent banking sector as if they were deserving. I don't understand why. It has been bad economic policy (though better than the Republican Congressional caucuses' do-nothing rhetoric), and it has been bad politics.

Moral merit, of course, is not the first criterion. The health of the economy at large is what matters first.

Punishing the guilty is not as important as saving the blameless (or the less blameworthy, anyway). If bailouts save the economy for all of us, we have to hold our noses and bail.

Instead, we've had punishment for the innocent (stimulus inadequate for the deserving unemployed - most of them) and amnesty for the guilty (a banking system built on fraudulent practices throughout the life cycle of mortgages that have gone essentially unaddressed).

And the 112th Congress will give us even less of both justice and value, since it's dominated by doctrinaire anti-government Republicans.

Welfare for the deserving

Click image for full G.B. Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Banking stimulus

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Truthout cartoon.

Not cute any more

Click image for full Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette cartoon.

Different from you and me

Since the rich run things, there's no expectation that they must live up to their commitments even when their debts overwhelm them. The middle class? Bankruptcy is not for them, nor even abandonment of their underwater mortgages.

Sorry, my wallet's in my banker's pants

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The Republican way

It's not surprising that a Senator from a tobacco state, Mitch McConnell (R-better keep your KY handy if you're not a corporation), would use obfuscation, denial, and bullshit to fog his true objectives. Paul Krugman:

It’s a truly shameless performance: Mr. McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite. In recent weeks, he and other Republican leaders have held meetings with Wall Street executives and lobbyists, in which the G.O.P. and the financial industry have sought to coordinate their political strategy.

And let me assure you, Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bank bailouts. If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts. By depriving regulators of the tools they need to seize failing financial firms, financial lobbyists increase the chances that when the next crisis strikes, taxpayers will end up paying a ransom to stockholders and executives as the price of avoiding collapse.

Paul Krugman (and I, here and here) can tell that the Republicans are bullshitting, but the teabaggers go right on screaming that they pay too much in taxes, never mind that their taxes have gone down during the Obama administration.

The teabaggers are the Republicans' target demographic because they're easily fooled into believing nonsense that keeps them serfs to the feudal lords of Republican crony capitalism.

But the pension fund was just sitting there

The reason for the narrowly averted banking collapse of 2008:

[E]ven when banks can fail, bank managers and/or owners have an incentive to make risky bets; after all, their downside is limited — at worst, the bank goes under — while their upside isn’t: if they can earn high profits for a few years, they can walk away with a lot. Remember that in the S&L crisis of the 1980s, quite a few people made out like bandits while running their banks into the ground.

The simple fact is that unfettered markets have no reliable mechanism to align the timing of rewards with the timing of risks. That lack leaves inevitable opportunities to profit individually from disastrous debt overhangs that hurt the rest of us.

Updated (8/6/2010) for clarity of the last paragraph.

Col. Klink defense

So-called Maestro Alan Greenspan, still pining for Ayn Rand's seductively simplistic rationalization of infantile selfish fantasy, reasserts all the things he "knows" that the Great Recession has disproven. As the Great Depression which birthed him had disproven before.

Only an honest man could abjure the convictions of a lifetime, based on new (to him) experience. Instead, Greenspan quote-mines his inscrutable mumbles for something, anything exculpatory:

He pointed out that the Fed had warned about subprime lending and low-down-payment mortgages in 1999, and again in 2001.

There's no time - or authority - left for Greenspan to redeem himself. He had a run of luck, and then the maelstrom... He can't fix it, so he can't let himself regret letting it blow up.

Citigroup's executives, fat and happy and well-paid to ignore the truth, essay instead the Sgt. Schultz defense.

“No one, including myself, ever conceived we would see real estate prices plunge 30 to 40 percent, with homeowners walking away from homes en masse for the first time ever,” Thomas Maheras, the former co-head of Citi’s investment bank who oversaw its mortgage activities, said.

Lots of people knew there were problems. If educational TV is running "Flip That House" marathons, warning! People with no special training were wondering where all the buyers for million dollar houses would come from. Maheras was raking in too much money to notice.

Brooksley Born gets the last word:

“The Fed utterly failed to prevent the financial crisis,” she said. “The Fed and other banking regulators failed to prevent the housing bubble, they failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, they failed to prevent our biggest banks and holding companies from engaging in activities that would bring them to the verge of collapse without massive taxpayer bailouts.”

In lieu of a toaster

Click image for full Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader cartoon.

Throwing cold water

In an old western, the Republicans here would get slapped in the face to stun them out of their consistent hysteria. But the Democrats are too gentle. Way too gentle.

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Reverse Robin Hood

Without substantial regulation of Wall St., the fall 2008 bailout of irresponsible and bankrupt titans of finance amounts to theft from the middle class for the benefit of the rich.

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.