College For All Once Again Exposed As Myth

The NY Times shows what's happened to the "American Dream" since 1989 - even for the college-educated:

YOUNG families are better educated than ever before, but they are earning lower real incomes.

The Federal Reserve Board’s newly released 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the median family headed by someone under 35 years of age earned $35,509 in 2013 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that is 6 percent less than similar families reported in the first such survey, in 1989.

Since 1989, the Fed has conducted extensive interviews of consumers every three years. Respondents are asked about their family’s income in the previous year, as well as about wealth, debt, education and attitudes toward financial issues. The results are released by family, not by individual, so the median family income may include the income of both spouses. Single-person households are included in the family calculations.

As can be seen in the charts, younger families have fallen further and further behind older families as time has passed. Nearly a quarter-century after the first survey was taken, families headed by people over 55 generally have higher incomes, after adjusting for inflation, than their predecessors did. But those in groups under 55 generally earn less than their predecessors.

In the first survey, the younger group included families headed by people born after 1954, and so was dominated by baby boomers. The latest group includes families headed by people born after 1984, and they seem not to have done nearly as well early in their careers. The earlier group came of age in a stronger economy and its members were generally not burdened by education loans as many of the latter group are.

The largest declines have come since the 2007 survey — the last one in which participants discussed their income in a year before the Great Recession began. The following survey covered income earned during the recession, and it was not easy to know how much of the falloff was a cyclical phenomenon that would disappear when the economy recovered.

But the newest survey covered income in 2012, three years after the recession ended, and shows that most of the lost ground has not been recovered. In fact, the real median income for all of the age groups except those in the 35-to-44 group declined from 2010 to 2013.

And you know that jive about how education is the issue, that those with higher educational attainment do better than those with lower?

It's jive:

Among families of all ages, those with more education tend to earn more than those with less. But that differential appears to be shrinking. at least for younger families. In 1989, the median income of families headed by young college graduates was twice that of similar families headed by high school graduates who never attended college. Now, the difference is only 52 percent. There are more college graduates in the group, but those graduates have a lower real median income than their predecessors.

They're still pushing college for everyone in schools, selling kids on the myth that people who go to college make more money than those who don't.

It's of course much more complicated than that, as can be seen by the diminishing gap between those with college degrees and those without in the recent surveys.

I know that the NYCDOE is pushing so-called "college readiness" as one of the school metrics for whether a schools is "good" or not.

That means there is pressure on administrations to push as many students into college DIRECTLY after graduation as they can.

Here's a lesson you won't hear much in schools these days, but one that needs to be given:

If students are not careful, going to college can harm them irrevocably for life.

Taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt at the start of their adult lives for a piece of paper that doesn't do much for them is irrevocable harm, whether the NYSED, the NYCDOE or the USDOE want to use that piece of paper as an emblem for college readiness or not.

Yesterday, Fred Klonsky linked to a Huffington Post piece about senior citizens swamped with student debt who are having their Social Security checks garnished:

The Education Department is demanding so much money from seniors with defaulted student loans that it's forcing tens of thousands of them into poverty, according to a government audit.

At least 22,000 Americans aged 65 and older had a part of their Social Security benefits garnished last year to the point that their monthly benefits were below federal poverty thresholds, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Education Department-initiated collections on defaulted federal student loans left at least another 83,000 Americans aged 64 and younger with poverty-level Social Security payments, GAO data show. Federal auditors cautioned that the number of Americans forced to accept poverty-level benefits because of past defaults on federal student loans are surely higher.

More than half, or 54 percent, of federal student loans held by borrowers at least 75 years old are in default, according to the federal watchdog. About 27 percent of loans held by borrowers aged 65 to 74 are in default. Among borrowers aged 50 to 64, 19 percent of their loans are in default. The Education Department generally defines a default as being at least 360 days past due.

As unpaid student debt approaches $1.3 trillion, the federal watchdog's findings underscore the consequences of increased student debt burdens and the risk they'll wreak havoc on households in the coming years if U.S. workers continue to see little increase in their paychecks, the economy barely grows, and the Education Department's contractors keep borrowers in the dark on repayment options.

22,000 senior citizens having their Social Security benefits garnished now.

Just wait and see what those numbers look like when the younger generations surveyed by the Federal Reserve start getting older and are still swamped by student debt.

This is where we're at these days - the American Dream, circa 2014.

As Carlin said, it's called the "American Dream" because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Wall Street, World Financial Markets Very Sad Free Fed Money May Be Coming To An End

From The Guardian:

Stock markets worldwide plummeted on Thursday, after the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, rattled investors by signalling an end to America's drastic recession-busting policy of quantitative easing.

Share prices across the globe have surged over the past year, helped by an unprecedented injection of cheap money, with the Fed buying up $85bn (£55bn) worth of bonds every month, and the Bank of Japan pledging "shock and awe" QE to revive a stagnant national economy.

But when Bernanke laid out a timetable on Wednesday night for cutting off the Fed's bond purchases by mid-2014, his words prompted a violent sell-off, which began in New York after European markets were closed, and ricocheted around the world on Thursday, from Tokyo to Istanbul and Oslo to Jakarta. In London, the 2.98% decline in the FTSE 100 index was the steepest since September 2011.

Elsewhere in Europe, shares suffered their biggest one-day fall in 19 months, with Spain's Ibex losing 2.9%, and the German, French and Italian markets all down by more than 3%.

The slide on Wall Street resumed when US markets reopened on Thursday. After heavy selling throughout the day the Dow Jones closed down 2.3%.

"We've had a market that for some years has been addicted to stimulus, and it's taken a brave man to say it has to end somewhere," said Neil Mellor, of BNY Mellon. He added that the true test of whether the US economy was strong enough to cope without QE would come when the prop of cheap money had been removed. "We don't know if there's a credible recovery there; we're peeling back the plaster."

Bond prices also fell worldwide, a trend that will push up borrowing costs for governments and consumers if it is sustained. Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's outspoken director for financial stability, warned last week that through QE, policymakers had deliberately inflated "the biggest bond bubble in history".

Let's repeat: "through QE, policymakers had deliberately inflated 'the biggest bond bubble in history'".

From a tech bubble to a real estate bubble to a commodity bubble to a bond bubble.

That's the 21st century economy in a nutshell.

Phonied up profits and stock prices propped up by the Fed printing press and cheap money.

Beware The Bubble

House prices have shot up over the last year despite a shaky economy, a stagnant job market and a whole host of other economic head winds.

Might there be another bubble?

There might:

Despite the green shoots reported by the Case-Shiller index last week that home prices rose a blistering 9.3 percent in February from 12 months ago, Edward Pinto, a former executive at the government-backed mortgage business, says another crash can’t be too far behind.

Pinto faults Uncle Sam’s housing policy of guaranteeing 90 percent of new loans in the gigantic $6 trillion market through Fannie Mae.

He goes on to say the feds are providing billions in fat trading profits to Wall Street banks and artificially — but temporarily — propping up housing prices.

Sooner or later, he says, economic reality will catch up with this fairy-tale market, which will lead to another depressing housing collapse.

The fundamentals that matter most are falling behind the latest house prices. These include job and wage growth. And that’s amidst a surprise loosening in lending standards and tightened inventory because of the snail’s pace of moving foreclosed properties to market, says Pinto, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Astonishingly, as much as 50 percent of all mortgages today are issued with zero-down payments, which includes many refinanced homes for the banks’ better clients.

In the meantime, Wall Street powerhouses reap their windfall gains, trading these complex mortgage-backed securities.

The Street makes out like a bandit. In this game, banks accumulate nickels and dimes on each side of the trade, profiting on shifting interest rates, mortgage prepayments and other variables — but not on the “real” value of the underlying mortgages.

“The Street makes millions and millions of dollars on these securities,” Pinto told The Post.

“That’s the dirty little secret. The government guarantees repayment of principal and interest payments on a timely basis, regardless of what the borrower does on an individual mortgage level.”

Borrowers also get another lift. The Fed, scrambling to lower mortgage rates, currently near 3.5 percent, buys up $40 billion monthly in these mortgage-backed securities.

But Pinto doesn’t buy it. The trends are remarkably clear, stretching back 150 years through American real-estate history.

“When interest rates go up, which they inevitably will — and we seem to be at the bottom right now — they go up gradually but deliberately over a period of 20 to 30 years,” Pinto said, noting this long-term trend.

When that occurs, the housing market will be hammered again.

By his calculations, if mortgage rates rise from 3.5 percent to 6 percent, incomes would have to rise by 33 percent, or house prices would have to drop by 25 percent, to stave off an otherwise inevitable housing disaster.

Since personal incomes have been static since 2007, that part of the equation is hardly guaranteed. So a home price bust is not far behind, says Pinto.

 Nah - I'm sure this will all end well.

Go ahead, bid up some real estate next weekend.

The market is BACK, baby!

Obama Set To Screw College Students, Parents On Loan Rules

Oh yes he is:

The Obama administration has found itself at odds with a key voting block—college students and their advocates—as well as many of its Democratic allies in Congress, because of an important, if technical, budget proposal that could have significant implications for college access.

In a move intended to stave off a doubling of interest rates on federally backed Stafford Loans over the summer, the administration is seeking to shift those interest rates from the current predictable, fixed-rate system to a market-based rate at the time of the loan. Right now, interest rates on subsidized Stafford Loans are set at 3.4 percent, but they're slated to jump to 6.8 percent in July, unless Congress and the administration act.

The shift to a 6.8 percent fixed rate could cost a student with $20,000 in debt—roughly the national average—an additional $12,000 over the life of their loan, according to an analysis by the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, Calif.

The administration and some Democrats in Congress have very different ideas about how to head off that potential rate increase. Advocates for students agree that under current interest rates, which are at historic lows—for instance, the rate was 1.73 on April 17—President Barack Obama's fiscal 2014 budget proposal offers a better deal for borrowers than they're getting right now.

But the proposal doesn't place any cap on the interest rate, leaving students open to much more expensive loans if interest rates soar in the future, critics argue.

Just hours after the Obama administration released its budget blueprint April 10, a coalition of student-advocacy groups including the National Campus Leadership Council, U.S. PIRG, Our Time, Rock the Vote, and the Young Invincibles put out a joint statement disparaging the loan plan.

 "Students have never taken out federal student loans without a cap on how high interest can go," they wrote. "The president stood with us by investing in higher education during his first term, and we're concerned that his budget does not deliver the same investment this time around."

 Nope - sounds like he's throwing college students and their parents overboard.

6.8% interest rates on student loans is high.

But leaving the Stafford Loan program without a cap means those rates can go much higher than that.

Sure, with the Federal Reserve printing press in overdrive these days, the loan rates are low right now.

But they won't remain low forever.

Not with all those extra Uncle Ben's Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke threw into the system that eventually he (or his successor) will have to pull out of it.

I dunno, maybe we'll never see 17% interest rates the way we did back in the 70's.

But if we did, and there was no cap on Stafford Loans, that's where those interest rates would go.

Hey, Obama, how about extending the 3.4% rate on Stafford Loans by going on the TV and telling everybody Republicans want to double the loan rate to 6.8% so they can pay off their banker and Wall Street friends?

Why Is The Federal Reserve Funneling Money To Libya?

Wait, I thought we were dropping freedom bombs on Libya?

Turns out we're also dropping lots of no-interest loans at the same time.

More change we can all believe in.

Oh, no wait - it's not, is it?

Obama, Bernanke Inflate Commodity Bubble

Obama renominated Bernanke, Bernanke has been running the Federal Reserve printing presses night and day to bail out insolvent banks, that newly printed money is being used to speculate on commodity prices - especially food.

See here.

More change we can believe in?

Nope - same old shit as usual.

Remember the tech and real estate bubbles?

They didn't end so well.

And bet your bottom, inflated dollar that this one won't end so well either.

Unless your a bankster or hedge fund criminal like Whitney Tilson, of course.

Ron Paul Worries Wall Street

Via Political Wire, here is Bloomberg Businessweek on the rise of Ron Paul, the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Comittee:

It may have taken 34 years, but Ron Paul has arrived, and he doesn't plan to squander the moment. His agenda includes landing the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee panel that oversees monetary policy—a job that will give him the power to push legislation reining in the central bank and to haul Fed governors up to Capitol Hill for hearings.

The prospect has Wall Street, Fed officials, and even Republican House leaders worried that Paul's agenda could roil the markets and make a mockery of the U.S. financial system. This is a man, after all, who entered politics because President Richard Nixon bucked the gold standard in 1971, and now wants to make gold and silver legal tender. He is pressing for an audit of the Fort Knox bullion depository and, earlier this year, grilled Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke about the central bank's alleged funding of Watergate and Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Bernanke called the charges "absolutely bizarre."

Although his book ploy was couched in humor, Gregg laid plain a new Washington reality: Moderate, probusiness lawmakers like him, who consistently protected the central bank's independence and ability to set monetary policy, are mostly gone. In their place are politicians who view the Fed with suspicion, or worse. Their unofficial leader is Paul, the 75-year-old Texan whose quixotic 2008 Presidential run on the twin themes of ending the federal income tax and abolishing the Fed vaulted him to prominence with the nascent Tea Party. Some of those admirers are among the 75-plus new Republicans about to join Congress. For the first time since he was elected to the House in 1976, Paul's followers are formidable.

...

Officials at several major banks have privately raised concerns with Republican leaders that, by allowing Paul to become a chairman, his radical views would gain legitimacy, according to three bank lobbyists. Others are watching with great interest. "Congressman Paul has his own very strong views on things, and you've got to respect that," says Steve Verdier, a lobbyist for the Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents smaller lenders and has fought efforts to weaken the central bank. "I think there is a strong consensus in the country to maintain the independence of the Fed," he adds.

If he gets the subcommittee gavel, Paul says he plans a thorough review of Fed policy. Fear of inflation is what motivates him the most. Next to the doorway in his Washington office are six framed German bank notes dating from the 1920s hyperinflation era. The notes are sequentially dated "to show how quickly the zeroes were added onto the bills" as inflation skyrocketed, Paul says. The notes are arranged around a quote by one of Paul's favorite Austrian School economists, the late Hans F. Sennholz, who Paul once met and calls "a tremendous influence on me." Paul is a devotee of the Austrian School, which teaches that manipulating money supply and interest rates are responsible for history's boom-and-bust cycles. "The Fed creates all of the bubbles and they create the inevitable bursting of all of the bubbles," says Paul.

He believes his oversight role is long overdue. "There has been a politically cozy relationship between Congress and the Federal Reserve," he says. That includes past efforts to keep him from heading the subcommittee. "Republican leadership, with the Fed's influence, has been working to keep me away from this for a long time. That's not going to happen this time."

Don't be surprised if something happens and Ron Paul does NOT get the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee.

Because anything that scares Wall Street scares corporate Repubs and Dems both.

And when corporate Repubs and Dems want to take care of their corporate masters, they do it.

I'm hoping Ron Paul gets this chairmanship.

The Bernanke testimony visits and the audit of the Federal Reserve Paul wants to conduct will be priceless pieces of theater, but also important pushback against the pre-eminince of the banksters.

Federal Reserve Wants To Make Foreclosures Easier For Banks

Gee, this sounds fabulous - for the banksters:

WASHINGTON — As Americans continue to lose their homes in record numbers, the Federal Reserve is considering making it much harder for homeowners to stop foreclosures and escape predatory home loans with onerous terms.

The Fed's proposal to amend a 42-year-old provision of the federal Truth in Lending Act has angered labor, civil rights and consumer advocacy groups along with a slew of foreclosure defense attorneys.

They're not only asking the Fed to withdraw the proposal, they also want any future changes to the law to be handled by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which begins its work next year.

In a letter to the Fed's Board of Governors, dozens of groups that oppose the measure, including the National Consumer Law Center, the NAACP and the Service Employees International Union, say the proposal is bad medicine at the wrong time.

...

Since 1968, the Truth in Lending Act has given homeowners the right to cancel, or rescind illegal loans for up to three years after the transaction was completed if the buyer wasn't provided with proper disclosures at the time of closing.

Attorneys at AARP have used the rescission clause for decades to protect older homeowners stuck in predatory loans with costly terms. The provision is also helping struggling homeowners to fight a wave of foreclosure cases in which faulty and sometimes-fraudulent disclosures were used.

...

Critics say the proposed change by the Fed would render the rescission clause useless. The Fed proposal would require homeowners who seek a loan rescission through the courts, to pay off the entire loan balance before the lender cancels the lien.

"This, of course, would be almost impossible for most consumers to do because they can't come up with the money until they get out of the loan. And they can't get out of the loan until the lien is released," said Barry Zigas, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America. "None of us are quite sure what purpose is being served by this proposal or what prompted it."

It's a bankster nation - we just slave in it.

Let me remind everybody that the Change We Can Believe In president was the guy who renominated Ben Bernanke to the Fed.

Heckuva job, Barack!

Fed Drops Money From The Sky

No wonder the interest rate on my savings account went down over the weekend.

They were anticipating Helicopter Ben flying into action:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve, getting ahead of the battles that will dominate national politics over the next two years, moved Wednesday to jolt the economy into recovery with a bold but risky plan to pump $600 billion into the banking system.

...

The action was the second time in a year that the Fed had ventured into new territory as it struggles to push down long-term interest rates to encourage borrowing and economic growth. In a statement, the Fed said it was acting because the recovery was “disappointingly slow,” and it left the door open to even more purchases of government securities next year.

Current policy is brutal on people trying to save some money.

Here's how Firedoglake put it:

Who gets hurt? Savers, the people who husbanded their income during the long boom period, putting money away for retirement. Who gets helped? Wall Street traders and banks, and anyone who bet that they would be the groups targeted for protection by the US government.

Great - Wall Street banksters and traders make out once again, while people trying to do the right thing and save a little get hurt.

More change we can believe in.

Remember, Obama RENOMINATED Mr. Bernanke to the Federal Reserve.

The Fed Vows To Print More Money

Oh, goodie - more free money for the banksters:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve acknowledged on Tuesday that its confidence in the economic recovery had dimmed, and announced that it would use the proceeds from its huge mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities.

Saying it would buy relatively modest amounts of government debt, analysts said the Fed signaled that it had no intention to back away from steps that it took, starting in 2007, to prop up the financial and housing markets. While the central bank held off on taking more aggressive steps, like a new, huge round of asset purchases, it left open the possibility that additional easing of monetary policy could take place in the fall if the recovery were to continue to weaken.

The Fed’s new stance marked the completion of a turnabout from a few months ago, when officials were discussing when and how to eventually raise interest rates and gradually shrink the $2.3 trillion balance sheet the Fed amassed through its response to the 2008 financial crisis.

In buying new Treasury securities to the tune of about $10 billion a month — a small fraction of the roughly $700 billion in Treasury debt sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet — the Fed will not let the balance sheet shrink for the time being.

More than anything, the announcement was a signal to the markets that the Fed was concerned about the pace of the recovery, and had shifted from its more optimistic assessment earlier this year, that economic growth was sufficiently strong to begin thinking about how to gradually return to normal monetary policy.

It would be nice if the Uncle Ben and the rest of his merry men and women gave a shit about, you know, jobs.

Actually it would be nice if President Accountability gave a shit about the same thing.

But so long as the banksters are happy, Uncle Ben and the FOMC are happy.

And so long as the ed deform movement is happy and Uncle Arme has $4.3 billion in walking around money to fire teachers, close schools and hire all sorts of people who don't know the first thing about education or school turnaround, President Accountability is happy.

And really, other than those things, what else matters?

Financial Reform vs. Education Reform

Barry at The Big Picture asks the following:

Why is the White House allowing soon to be retired Senator Dodd to drive the entire financial reform discussion?

The Consumer Protection legislation and the derivative reforms are the sort of things that the President should be leading on — not following someone like Dodd. Why is the White House AWOL on these important issues?

Can someone please explain to me — in calm, non-biased, rational terms — just what is going on here?

I would add that Obama is clearly leading on education reform - sending a 41 page blueprint to the Hill today for Senators and Representatives to use to write No Child Left Behind Jr. for him.

So why is Obama letting Dodd drive financial reform while he himself is driving education reform?

The answer is simple: he doesn't give a shit about financial reform. He doesn't care whether a bill passes or not, he has no interest in holding the companies that brought the economy to near collapse accountable for the mess and he doesn't care that these same companies are taking on just as much risk now post-collapse with taxpayer funded TARP money or newly printed money the Federal Reserve is handing them at 0% interest.

Obama just doesn't give a shit about that stuff.

He doesn't care.

But education reform, closing schools, firing teachers, busting the teachers unions, opening public education funds to for-profit charters and turning the public education system over to the Gates and Broad Foundations - that he cares very much about.

Very much.

It's Only Teachers Who Are Accountable

The financial system nearly collapsed last year because people in the financial industry at "Too Big To Fail" institutions like AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and others took too much risk and needed to be bailed out by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Many of those same people are being rewarded with seven and eight figure bonuses this year.

The financial policy makers who helped create this mess - like Ben Bernanke who voted yes on every Greenspan "moral hazard" policy decision and who has been printing money hand over fist to give to the "Too Big To Fail" institutions and Treasury Timmeh Geithner who oversaw the AIG bailout wherein he handed AIG counterparties 100 cents to the dollar on money owed to them for toxic assets they themselves had bought that were worth at best 20 cents and who asked one of those counterparties, Goldman Sachs, to keep this deal secret from the investigators at the SEC - continue to cheerfully make financial policy.

In fact, Obama renominated Bernanke for another four years and the administration said last week that Geithner has the full confidence of the president.

On December 25, 2009, a Nigerian man set his penis on fire trying to blow up a plane over Detroit. The man's father had warned the State Department that he had become radicalized and was a danger to the United States. In addition, the CIA knew he visited radical elements in Yemen and was a danger to the United States. Nonetheless the man bought a one way ticket with cash and bordered a plane in Nigeria without any luggage and flew to the United States with a visa that said he was coming for a "religious ceremony" (a jihadi euphemism for martyrdom.) The attack was only averted because passengers on the plane noticed his crotch was on fire and held him down until the plane landed.

Two days after the incident, Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said "The system worked..." when talking about the incident. Widely ridiculed for that statement, the administration forced her to walk that back the next day when she said "The system actually didn't work..." and Obama himself said there had been systemic failures throughout the intelligence apparatus that kept the Feds from stopping this man before he got on the plane to Detroit.

Nonetheless, Obama said he was not going to be part of a blame game and point fingers at anybody, so nobody was fired, nobody was held accountable for any of this.

Essentially Obama said "Mistakes were made" and left it that.

Now compare the way Obama has treated the "Too Big To Fail" institutions, the people at those institutions who are pulling in seven and eight figure bonuses for 2009, the policymakers who helped create the mess and the people in his government who missed the very obvious signs of a incoming terrorist attack and then afterward brushed aside criticism by saying "The system worked..." with the way he treats teachers and schools that he considers "failing."

You work in a school that used to be a "good school" but had hundreds of ELL's, support service students and other at-risk students dropped on it in the last few years from other schools that were closed, but have received no extra resources to handle the new students - too bad, Obama says your school needs to be closed down, the teachers need to be fired and a non-unionized charter should be opened in its place. Remember, it's only the test scores that matter.

You work in a school that has few resources, an overpopulated building, overcrowded classrooms, and bathrooms being used to hold math classes in because a charter school has been placed on the first and second floors of your building - too bad, Obama says your school needs to be closed down, the teachers need to be fired and a non-unionized charter should be opened in its place. Remember, it's only the test scores that matter.

You're teaching students who come from impoverished families with generations of dysfunctional behavior, mental illness, alcoholism and other addictions, students themselves who are in great emotional pain and act out that pain through angry outbursts in school or by simply never coming to class and you don't have any way to reach them - too bad, it's your fault they're that way and Obama says you're school needs to be closed down, the teachers need to be fired and a non-unionized charter should be opened in its place. Remember, it's only the test scores that matter.

In Obama's America, like in Bush's America, nobody is accountable for anything except for the teachers and the public education system.

Everybody else, including the president who gave himself a B+ for his first year in office (record deficit, 10% unemployment, hundreds of billions in giveaways to the "Too Big To Fail" firms, no major legislation passed, health care reform turned into major giveaway for the health insurance industry, reneged promises on Card Check legislation and DaDT) gets a pass, a "Heckuva job, Janet" pat on the back, or an eight figure bonus for taking the economic system to the point of collpase and needing billions in bailout dollars and continued access to Federal Reserve 0% interest-free loans to survive.

I cannot wait to hold President Accountability accountable come November 2010 and November 2012.

It's time everybody hold President Accountability accountable for not holding all these other crooks and incompetents accountable.

Plunge Protection Team

I'm a huge fan of CNBC's morning show.

Watch it nearly every morning.

What I have learned from watching that show in the last half year is that everything is fine and dandy with the stock market.

And if the market's up, well, then all is well with the state of the nation.

And since last March, the markets have been going up.

So all must be well with the economy and the nation , right?

Maybe.

Or maybe someone's funking with the numbers:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The massive stock-market rally in the past nine months is mostly due to secret government buying of stock-index futures, a respected stock-market analyst said Tuesday.

Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research, is the latest and most credible person to charge that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury (in league with top Wall Street firms) is rigging the stock market on a daily basis.

In a special report released Tuesday, Biderman said the $6 trillion increase in U.S. stock-market capitalization since March can't be explained by the usual sources of funds flowing into the market -- such as mutual funds, direct retail investment, pension funds, hedge funds or foreign purchases.

The only logical explanation for the extent of the rally, he suggested, is secret buying by a government committee known colloquially as the Plunge Protection Team. It's like the dark matter that astrophysicists conjecture must be there, even if we can't detect it.

The PPT was established by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 after the 1987 stock crash to coordinate the government's response to market meltdowns. It consists of the Fed chairman, the Treasury secretary, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Biderman acknowledged that he had no direct evidence that the Fed and other agencies have intervened in the stock market. But he worried about what will happen to the market if the PPT has been buying and suddenly stops.

Now maybe the government is doing nothing wrong and maybe they're disclosing all the Treasurys, agency bonds and mortgage-backed securities they've been buying in the fixed income markets.

Or maybe they're printing money at night and buying stock futures in the morning and hiding it from view.

Hard to know since there is no transparency at the Federal Reserve (which is the way Fed chief Ben Bernanke and Bernanke's boss, President Obushma, want it.)

But until the Fed proves differently, I'd lean toward the government buying up a bunch of Treasurys, bonds and securities with freshly minted greenbacks.

Remember, the people who caused last year's near financial collapse are still the ones running the show at the Fed and the Treasury Department.

Lots of good reasons why they'd be operating the Plunge Protection Team overtime these days.

Of course they can put all this tin foil hat stuff to rest by submitting to an audit of the Federal reserve the way Ron Paul and lots of others in Congress want.

Talk About Passing The Buck

Ben Bernanke said in a speech over the weekend that low interest rates didn't cause the housing bubble.

Instead he said lack of regulation caused it.

Uh, huh.

As a voting member of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke rubber-stamped ever Alan Greenspan move on money policy. That includes really cheap rates. Now it is true that a slew of financial innovations in mortgages allowing people to borrow money with little to no principle, to lie about their income and never get called on it, or to buy a house with mortgages payments that only pay interest helped bring about the bubble.

But so did really, really low rates. ARM's don't happen when interest rates are high.

Boy, it's a good thing President Obama has reappointed Ben Bernanke to the Federal Reserve for another term.

I mean, who doesn't want a guy who can't take responsibility for his own mistakes in charge of monetary policy for the U.S.

Silly me - accountability is for teachers, not Federal Reserve Open Market Committee members.