Matt Taibbi Explodes All Over The WSJ's Evan Newmark

Last week the Wall Street Journal columnist Evan Newmark called Hank Paulson a "national hero." We noted that it's a bit early for that kind of thing and predicted that "history may yet render a more negative judgment."

Matt Taibbi is a bit more direct, calling Newmark "a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin" in his latest post on TrueSlant. He points out that Newmark didn't disclose that he once worked for Goldman Sachs, which Paulson ran before being tapped to head up the Treasury Department. And that's just for starters.

Exactly what part of Paulson’s record is heroic, Evan? The part where he called up SEC director William Donaldson in 2004 and quietly arranged to get the state to drop capital requirements for the country’s top five investment banks? You remember that business, right, Evan? Your hero Paulson met with Donaldson and got the rules changed so that Goldman and four other banks no longer had to abide by the old restrictions that forced banks to actually have a dollar or two on hand for every ten or so they lent out. After that, it was party time! Bear Stearns in just a few years had a debt-to-equity ration of 33-1! Lehman’s went to 32-1. By an amazing coincidence, both of these companies exploded just a few years after that meeting, and all of the rest of us, Evan, ended up footing the bill, thanks to a state-sponsored rescue of Bear and a much larger massive bailout of Wall Street in general, necessitated in large part by the damage caused by the chaos surrounding Lehman’s collapse.

Meanwhile your own Goldman, Sachs ended up with a 22:1 debt-to-equity ratio a few years following that meeting, a number that would have been much higher if one didn’t count the hedges Goldman bought through a company called AIG. Thanks in large part to Paulson’s leadership in his last years as head of Goldman, the company was so massively over-leveraged that it would have gone under if AIG — which owed Goldman billions when it went into its death spiral last September — had been allowed to collapse. But thanks to Hank Paulson, who heroically stepped in and gave AIG $80 billion the same weekend he allowed one of Goldman’s last key competitors, Lehman, to collapse, Goldman didn’t have to go without that money; $13 billion of the AIG bailout went straight to Goldman. So I guess we have Paulson to thank for the fact that he used about $13 billion of our taxpayer money to essentially bail out his own fuckups. I mean, that’s heroism if I’ve ever seen it. Audie Murphy has nothing on that. Sit your asses back down, Harriet Tubman, Thomas More, Gandhi and Jesus Christ. Hank Paulson is in the house!

...If anyone besides Paulson had been running Goldman Sachs earlier in this decade — if a person with a serious brain injury had been in his place, for instance, or a horse, or a head of lettuce — we’d all be better off today, because there wouldn’t be so many toxic Goldman-underwritten mortgage-backed CDOs on the market. We, all of us, are paying the freight for assholes like Paulson, and like you, for that matter. And while we’re getting over it, slowly, you’re really not helping when you open your mouth and pat yourself on the back for all the good deeds you’ve done. Spare, us, okay? Just give it up.

The American Solution is to Further Rob the People

Wading through the alphabet soup of American governmental plans to save the private banks and their uber private bank, the Federal Reserve, one can only come to a single conclusion: since day one of the crisis, indeed, from the very creation of the bubble that could and would only lead to the crisis, this has been only about stealing every single kapeky of the people's money, their rights and powers and has been orchestrated by both branches of the One Party Two Branch system of American body politics. As I stated in The Hypocrisy of American "Democracy" and in Whom Does the US Congress Serve, the American public is living in a serious state of denial, the English along with them, if they for a second believe that their government has their best interest in mind, on paper or even as a fuzzy conception.

It is impossible for this author to accept that the heads of American and thus much of the world's finance did not know that the loose money, low interest policies and the absolute lack of any lending standards, would not lead to a bubble. Further, as the bubble grew and the few Casandra's issued their calls, it is again, impossible for this author to believe that again, these masters of national and international finance had no idea that the bubble would explode and lead to total collapse. Only an uneducated and naive fool, the general body of the Anglosphere public, was absolutely clueless.

Furthermore, as the implosion got underway and all signals pointed to nothing but an absolute route, it is again, impossible for the author to believe that the most obvious solution was unknown and other solutions that would only insure the collection of trillions in dollars and debt, in the hands of the few greedy men about whom Woodrow Wilson lamented in his 1919 autobiography, would not occur.

The stated goal of all of these bogus thefts, excuse me, bailouts, has been:

1. the stabilization of the banks

2. the release of credit

3. the salvation of the economy and thus of the body citizenry

To this end, nothing has been accomplished but the absolute theft of $2-4 trillion dollars, depending on how one looks at the promises and obligations of the members of the One Party Two Branch system in DC to their owners in the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. That there has been no substantial change in any of the policies of either the Bush or Obama administrations, only upholds the basic fact of this theft. As I stated in The Six Evils of Wall Street and the Suffering of Humanity, the owners of the Federal Reserve, the masters of much of the hell unleashed upon humanity of the past 120 years, have practiced their art of theft very well indeed. Their last, up to this, most successful enterprise, was the rape of Russia, but even that, in comparison, to the schemes in America, is chump change.

If the goal was actually to accomplish these three points, as stated over and over and preached to the world, then the answer is quite simple. Please note, I, myself, do not subscribe to mass rescues and bailouts but to a strongly regulated, fair and flat inner market (please never confuse this with Free Trade, of which I am neither a prominent, nor lover off, but in fact a staunch enemy). Now the simple an intelligent thing to do, if the order of the day is to spend trillions, is to: one, set a dead line date, after which strict market regulations will go into effect, specifying the minimum criteria of loan generation. Second, investigations into criminal wrong doing should be launched and carried through on all banks involved, on insurance companies, and on scoring agencies. Lastly, all house mortgages, which are primary residences, should have been simply bought out by the government. That is correct, the government pays off the debt in one fell sweep and gives the certificate of ownership to the individual mortgage holders.

In effect, this saves the banks by wiping out their toxic assets (not to mention, all other holders of such debt), saves all the people who are in their homes and provides $500-$3,000 per month in each home owner's pocket to "stimulate" the economy of his or her choice. At the same time, strict legislation keeps this from happening again.

That the brightest minds of finance and the body politic could not or would not see this humble and simple and straight forward answer as the key answer, shows simply that this whole crisis is a rigged game, a final grab of all available wealth to an uber .5% and the 99.5% all be damned. And the reaction of the American public? Well, as I described in American Capitalism, Gone with a Whimper little more then the grumbling and desperate self delusion of a lost, misguided slave dreaming dreams of his uniqueness and freedom. A fool's desperate escape into flights of fantasy and distraction.

That there will never be a revolution or upheaval in the American lands, is beyond a doubt. The American people have neither the whits, the internal fortitude, nor the drive to suffer and sacrifice for their own and society's greatest good against their owners and betters. The ineffectual "tax payer" revolts, known as the tea parties, are nothing shy of a joke and most of the world must be laughing. One French protest march in Paris encompassed more people, in a nation of 1/4th the American population, then all of these hundreds of mini "revolts" combined, even if you multiply their sum total by a factor of 10. Is it really any surprise that Lenin stands proudly, towering in downtown Seattle, while his spiritual forefather sits upon a giant marble monument in DC, a white washed dictator named Lincoln?

To my Holy Motherland, I will say only what I said before: Russia Must Offer the World a Different Ideology and as such, be in the position to receive into her bossom those few of the Anglosphere peoples, those refugees from slavery, who show a will to fight the Marxist enslavement, that Russia herself threw off almost twenty years ago.- Matt Rodinos Blog

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