It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry, cheer or jeer, over the GOP senators' crisis manufacturing circus. Very reminiscent of Whitewater, Vince Foster, the White House travel office, etc...

The progressive media need to put one or more of these fraud-u-lators on the defensive.

GOLDMAN SACHS SHOULD BE DECLARED AN ENEMY OF THE STATE! They've done more damage to the USA and the world than any mid eastern country ever has! This scheme the Big Banks are perpertrating on us cut Americans salaries so we need to borrow from financial institutions to buy anything is killing us. The only winners are the Banksters VIA interest payments from all of us. This is why they have killed the private sector workers with unfair free trade agreements, and have been going after the public sector workers for years now by villianizing them because they want to make a liveable wage. GOLDMAN SACHS are not American. They are greedy bastards who only become Americans when they need our Military to protect their cowardly/Greedy/Scumbag asses and their financial interests

Corporate Banking in America has had the courage to sack the treasury by using or legislating laws that intentionally syphon public money via bailouts. A relationship of mutual benefit or dependence, that symbiosis is part of the equation that American upper crust just has difficulty with.

It is simple as Thom Hartmann has said America needs to revise the basic standard of living wage. Watching Thom talk about the visual evidence, people killing or injuring each other in mob action to get a deal in retail Friday.

Reflecting on this for the worst moment, those that have enormous wealth could find themselves holding their doors shut at their mansions to prevent being overrun by the desperate people who are way past believing that notion of job creators with money will do anything good. The Robin Hood community is around the corner. With the new leadership, Robin, a yank, guess his name is Mark Carney, blessed by her majesty the Queen. This has to be a brilliant appointment or her majesty is a real confused Lizzie. The question is will Mr. Carney recognize the problem to give balance to the system, because the European and American citizen will deal with the aristocrats with sweeping actions, they should know, the one percenters, they are very replaceable.

Doing some Google research for me is a huge disappointment, finding out U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers. WOW. No wonder nothing is done to prosecute banksters. Which means the first order of business is to get a new Attorney General. Obama is too new to be that connected to the old Greenspan model of the past several decades. So if Obama does nothing about this conflict of interest he is bought out too. Hope that is not the case. It’s a tough decision a whole lot of people are going to jail.

Libertarians like the Director of Production, Freedomworks, Austin Petersen (32:14 minutes), and other fundamentalist free marketers of the von Mises economic cult have engineered a handy dandy strawman argument against John Maynard Keynes’ concept of the multiplier effect of investment. This dishonest strawman argument simply says Keynes advocated a national policy of burying banknotes in abandoned coalmines and allowing the unemployed to dig the notes up thereby reducing unemployment. And then from this grossly distorted version of Keynes’ economic parable they derive “The Keynesianism Fallacy” which they claim leads to the financing and building of unproductive infrastructure projects since “demand must proceed investment” (33 minutes) otherwise government is just constructing “highways to nowhere.”

Keynes was explaining with the buried banknote example that capital expenditures for war, or infrastructure projects designed to reduce unemployment, function according to the same neutral universal economic laws regardless of whether the ends are constructive or destructive as in a war economy. Keynes famously wrote,

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again,” he wrote, “there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.”34 To emphasize how a commonsense grasp of economics differed from how economics worked in real life, he repeated his ominous conclusion that “just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance.”35 (Wapshott, Nicholas, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, Norton. Kindle Edition. pp. 149-150).

One section of this quote by Keynes, “It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like...” is deliberately left out by Laissez-faire apologists to present an absurd misinterpretation of Keynes’ hypothetical example explaining the multiplier effect of simulative spending. All free societies must make the political distinction between existing economic principles and specific national means-ends policies. These economic principles can be applied to any set of national policies depending on the moral, or immoral, aims of a given community. Keynes clearly pointed out; historically these universal economic principles have been enthusiastically directed toward war. Keynes’ critical point is that if government expenditures can be used in the destructive ends of war, they can also be used constructively to reduce unemployment with infrastructure investment. This Keynesian message is censored by propagandists like Petersen, and is replaced by the boneheaded reading of Keynes’ illustration.

Hartmann actually said Geitner "worked closely" with Goldman as President of the NY Fed and did not attribute his employment as being with Goldman Sachs.

Yes, that is what the answer is --- increase GDP. The most efficient and least influenced by cronyism is to leave the money in the hands of the American people. I trust the American people to invest and spend their money more wisely than big government. Hence, cut taxes for everybody. History has shown this to work. As GDP rises tax receipts increase. When you raise taxes it reduces GDP and total tax collections.

How full is that car?

Could give us a couple of summary lines from "road to roota"?

Taxing the rich has always improved the economy.

Serfdom is always the result of redistributing wealth to the top.

Wow! There is a row house on Capitol Hill worth less than a million? Is that the only real estate Grover owns?

Thom you are sounding a lot like the road to roota by Bix Wier. Be carful.

How about General Dynamics, aka GD?