As Marie Antoinette supposedly said about the masses wanting bread, "Let them eat cake!"

The masses may not be asses, they may be the sleeping giant, but how can you tell the difference between the Leviathan's snores and the braying of a herd of donkeys?

Joe Sixpack may listen to Limpaw and decide to pick on Obama, but then Sally Sixpack may make a common-sense judgment that Obama is the bright spot in a gloomy night sky. Of the three branches, is the White House really the worst performer today? Of course, the SCOTUS of recent years is an outstanding disgrace with the Senate running a close second. Are the three branches in just another race to the bottom?

Myself, I think that the President seeks to respect the independence of the legisative branch and tries to perform according to what there is of the residual remains of a Constitutional ideal. The masses have no idea of how our government is supposed to function, according to Constitutional separation and balance of powers, but Obama does.

The media pseudo-elites appear to be more enthralled by the okeydoke than the masses they pretend to represent. I refer to the okeydoke of shock-doctrine effects that now underlie the paradigm of the Imperial Presidency that was foisted on us by way of US global hegemony following World War II (myth of "the most powerful man in the world").

Obama did what he could, went to considerable lengths in the summer of 2010, to retain Democratic control of the Congress. I caught myself smiling sardonically when I heard the President say that Americans will get the budget cuts they "want and deserve" (or words to that effect).

Nationally, the Republican National Committee controls the House of Representatives. Elections are rigged, more so in some states than in others. In Wisconsin, a GOP apparatchik invented thousands of votes out of nowhere to undermine the will of the people. And that's business as usual, attracting little comment in corporate media, which was very happy with the Wisconsin boohaha as a 'big story' earlier. The Republican National Committee is a huge and very successful money-making machine -- it uses images of ideologies in pursuit of further accumulation of wealth by its multiple masters and apparatchiks, but it represents no ideologies and has neither ideals nor realistic ideas.

Of course, Obama could PERHAPS have charted a very different course from the beginning (January 2009). I am not one of those who voted for him in 2008 out of wide-eyed naive expectations of great change in America despite the indifference and cynicism of most voters, including the majority who vote by not voting and who, with good reason, do not believe in the integrity of the vote-counting process.

Given that Obama is a political animal living in a political cage, can we reasonably expect him to do anything other than or better than what he is doing? I suspect that the President sees his role as contributing however he can to global social stability, but he is trying to do that as captain of a ship with a broken gyroscope and navigational system that is run by a corrupted and multiply-hacked computer.

Democrats, at best, are very slightly better. There's a little difference with the Progressive Caucus, just as there is with a few paleo-con Republicans, but none of them are currently proposing sane solutions to fundamental problems. Their positions are all based on obvious critiques of the okeydoke. But why bother even to discuss the okeydoke, except as history? Nobody today -- least of all Joe and Sally Sixpack -- really believes in it.

Well, maybe a few Tea Partiers still think that they believe in something, but about all they really agree on as national policy is that Obama is making a move to head up the New World Order and must be stopped at any cost.

I call that just more of the okeydoke. Cake for the masses.

Your best investment? Buy cake futures. I'm bullish on cake.

thx for the reply, I didn't mean the article is theoretical. I mean the entire foreclosuregate episode is often couched in theoretical terms. They banks and their cronies have been floating the idea that only true debtors are being hurt theoretically by "procedural errors", while innocent mortgagors are unscathed. Realistically ,the entire land record system might need to be purged of bad paper.

I was less theoretical here

ForeclosureGate Deal - The Mandatory Cover Up by Michael Collins

But your point is huge.  How can lawlessness be tolerated?  What is the meaning of fundamental requirements for contracts and contract law if there are no sanctions for those who break the law? 

There are two standards - those for the "elect" and those for the rest of us.  I have huge objections to any consent decree that lets these people off the hook.  One has to wonder why there are not local prosecutions, just one would do it.

Thanks

Thanks for pointing that out. I should have elaborated a bit after the 74 vote Senate majority was referenced. The Senate shamed itself that day. Clinton vetoed this. It was just too much.

It would be worth doing a correlation with bankruptcies prior to the vote in the states where two Senators voted for the bill. They don't care. They don't have to.

It's actually Himmelstein, et al. who should be tagged with any problems with the analysis, which I don't think are significant. Warren is a second author, although it's easy to tag criticisms by using her well known name. The study on 2001 data and 2007 were done through survey research techniques described in detail in the article. In the two "acting out" reviews by McCardle, there was no real attack on this so the numbers stand. The methodology didn't yield what McCardle expected from her "Googling" but that's not a reason to doubt the numbers and, as I pointed out, the methodology wasn't challenged. The final critique by McCardle was to disparage those who file. This reveals McCardle's character and discretion sufficiently to cause me to dismiss her. Critiques of any major study are vital, even when peer reviewed as the studies cited were:

Perhaps they are not the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree...

McCardle says the popularity of this study is extensive and, from that, she concludes that the authors manipulated the numbers to achieve that end. That's post hoc ergo propter hoc (at its worst)and it's also defamatory. If there was data manipulation in these articles (as opposed to errors of some sort) then the authors would be accountable to the university and the journal would have to retract. McCarcle combines a logical fallacy that most high school debaters would notice with a casual defamation as part of her critique.

I'll stick with Himmelstein et al. and say there should be more studies of these issues. If the numbers are inflated 10%, due to sampling error (which I doubt), they are still significant and show that the system ultimately ends up exploiting those with little chance to defend themselves and who are in the midst of a crisis.

Now I wouldn't say that the Bankruptcy Abuser was a myth. But familarity with bankrupty laws and figuring out who is able and willing to pay you back is SUPPOSED to be the core competency of those making loans. But by subsittuting regulatory capture for good business sense, the debt pushers pushed "bankrupty reform" as a way of being bailed out of their own bad business decisions. Changing the bankruptcy laws making it harder to escape from EXISTING debt was a HUGE gift to the credit card companies. There will will ALWAYS be people standing in line, waiting for a chance to borrow their way to the poor house. One of the reasons for bankruptcy law is to discourage others from making those loans to them.

And it's a buzz cut against their will.

It all fits together for the Money Party - they run the swindles, buy the government, fix the cases, and come out ahead of the game. The idea that the administration would float a $20 billion settlement offer is offensive to everyone. How about the $6 trillion loss in wealth by the people. It was a deliberate scheme to squeeze everybody. Then they turn around and drain every last ounce from people who have medical emergencies but lack sufficient health insurance. I'm sure the geniuses who brought on the ruin think they're superior for surviving. If they worked for any thing resembling a normal organization, they'd all be fired for cause. Instead, they continue to prosper. They are a toxic asset.

The public at large is not too interested for a couple of reasons. One is that they really don't have a clue what the Federal Reserve is. Perhaps the biggest swindle ever committed against the American people was to make them think a cabal of private bankers is actually a government agency.

And the subliminals are amazing and ingrained. I remember a few weeks ago a story on one of the networks, I believe about interest rates, and as the newscaster babbled on, the pictures in the background were of the Federal Reserve building. But not the whole building, instead it zoomed in on where the marble pillars met the roof.

Why?

What is this imagery saying? Well, it's saying that the Federal Reserve is a pillar. And that's what Americans have been duped into believing - that this cabal of private bankers, of bankers, by bankers and for bankers, whose real purpose is to shove hundreds of billions even trillions of dollars of the people's money into the pockets of bankers, and do so in a completely unaccountable and unchallenged way is really this rock solid government agency that protects our gold and looks out for the people's best interest.

It is the biggest swindle ever perpetrated on a people, and the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in world history.

Education on exactly what the Federal Reserve really is, and what it's doing to us is the Undiscovered Country for activists. 99% of the work on this remains to be done.

The Federal Reserve wants the people in the weeds arguing over the Democrat vs. Republican dog and pony show. So while that's going on they can continue to shove the people's money into the pockets of their friends.

And we're in this ludicrous position of constantly calling on the Federal Reserve to solve problems that the Federal Reserve caused. This mess, virtually in it's entirety was enabled by fractional reserve lending and 20 years of serial bubble blowing. The expansion of credit has enabled the elites to send half of the American manufacturing jobs overseas and make it appear as if this could be done without a loss to standard of living. This expansion of credit traces back in it's entirety to the Federal Reserve.

Someone once said, "Kill one person and it's a tragedy, kill a million and it's a statistic." Even the people who know what the Federal Reserve is doing are feeling dwarfed by it. It's so much money, the fraud and theft is so gigantic it's all feeling like just another statistic.

Every day, under our nose bankers take huge sums of the people's money virtually interest free from the Federal Reserve, then turn around and lend the people back their own money at 3% via treasuries bought through Goldman Sachs, stuffing their pockets with commissions along the way.

Now everybody blew a fuse in 2008 and insisted that from now on they want to know about ponzi schemes in real time. And yet out in the open right under everyone's nose the Federal Reserve sets up yet another ponzi scheme funneling billions hand over fist into banker's pockets and nobody does anything.

And it all coincidentally comes for us at a time when the man in the White House represents the culmination of all the hopes and dreams for 95% of the media, so they don't want to touch anything that makes him look bad.

We are in deep, deep trouble.

Do we know anything about whether all of these loans have been paid back?

I see that this writeup has had over 1000 views. I don't understand why I am the first person to leave a comment, but I would suspect that there's a connection between the silence here and the passivity and lack of outrage over this in general.

One difference though is that people come here to read about economics and your readers would all be above-average consumers of news reports.