The political and business elites stubbornness on looking forward blah, blah, blah, has much to do with the amount of derivative crap (shit-pile) bets that grow by the week (JPM)and must be covered by the lazy nanny-state loving masses long into the future (which is the forward looking part, so don’t think it is all about the stupid Dr. Black, that’s the evil). So – Get Off Tim’s Lawn! Walk to work and join the 53%’ers! Commie-Socialist-Nazi wimps.

Watching the “Celebrity Jeopardy – DC Elites” shows last week though maybe it is more about the stupid, the teen girls from the prior week put them all to shame. Our Best and Brightest, so proud.

From the battlefield to the boardroom, countries (tribes) have long memories and pass on to each generation the resentments of their sufferings. This way the dying and deaths appear blameless or self-inflicted. We Are the World….not.

Jamie’s employing the Sgt. Schultz defense.

Last month from C&L: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has transformed the bank’s chief investment office in the past five years, increasing the size and risk of its speculative bets, according to five former executives with direct knowledge of the changes.

Dimon pushed the unit to seek bigger profits by buying higher-yielding assets, including structured credit, equities and derivatives, and ramping up speculation, according to two former employees.
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/former-execs-jpmorgan-chase-gambling-

And that day is not too far away according to this chart:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Looking-Back-on-the-Limits-of-Growth.html#

The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.

To quote this guy: Our system of producing elites is clearly broken. We are now producing horribly incompetent elites. People of the too incompetent to know they’re incompetent variety. There’s evil in there too, but I think the real problem is stupidity and incompetence.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/but-i-thought-they-were-proof-of.html

…there’s not much hoping it’ll be made right before then. 4 more years of Obama followed by 8 years of Jeb, all is lost.

Preparing the way for Julian Assange, the most evil person ever since the Rosenberg’s. Also, too Hitler.

If Iran’s medical needs are worth a 2 carrier response then North Korea’s test should garner at least a B-52 flyover:

The launch plans have been met with alarm in South Korea and the West. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said last month it “would pose a threat to regional security.”

“While the North is surely affected by the food aid being cut off, they will push on with their plans for the rocket launch,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “We can put on pressure to them by imposing sanctions, but they will use the missile and nuclear to pressure the U.S. back.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/04/north-korea-gearing-up-for-nuclear-test-south-korean-report-says.html

But then again if that arrogant Trayvon Martin, I mean Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to prowl around our best friends gated neighborhood wearing his hoodie, I mean taqiyah, flashing his gangsta grill, I mean scruffy beard, then we – US – must assume the worst and must pull a George Zimmerman COP arrest on his ass. If there’s any resistance or push back then Stand-Your-Ground bitches! Get them before they send nuclear tipped missiles to the heartland. Go all out BushDoctrine cruise, drone, bunker-buster on their punkasses. The cops, NATO, won’t mind, they’ll assume he’s carrying coke, I mean WMD’s, and give a free pass after the fake arrest, I mean tut-tutting. And it’ll all be forgotten if Brad and Angie adopt again.

We (the collective worlds people) are led by incredibly vain, greedy, and stupid people. The American Nightmare brought to you by The Street with the Euro Bubble underwritten by London’s City. Same shitty bets sold to government rich-man-wannabe deciders using our credit card for the buy in and out because Chamberlain was an appeaser: Schwarzman fiercely denounced initiatives by the Obama administration: “It’s war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/how_billionaires_destroy_democracy/

The Smartest Guys in the Room do realize there are 5 billion more people in the world than there were in 1930 don’t they? Do they really know what they’re doing? We.Are.Fucked.

4 of the 5 wealthiest counties in the country are part of The Village proper: http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/richest-counties-in-america.html

Seven Days in May close at hand? Not hardly, these George Armstrong Custer Narcissists can’t win at play:

War games rigged?
General says Millennium Challenge 02 ‘was almost entirely scripted’

He said that rather than test forces against an unpredictable enemy, the exercise “was almost entirely scripted to ensure a [U.S. military] ‘win.’ ”

Nor can they win at the real thing:

These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistleblowing US Army officer, through a “pattern of overt and substantive deception” by “many of America’s most senior military leaders in Afghanistan”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/16/spinning-afghanistan-americas-longest-war

Following the British and the Russians to hell. We have, the world has, a total failure in leadership all across the board – political, military, business, and spiritual – and they’re too vain to admit they don’t know what they’re doing. Free money for banksters, free money for generals, don’t tax the religious, and single payer-full retirement benefits for the deciders. Far from the bottom, still a ways to go.

What a moran. Seconding Phil2, I’m a 61 year old small sized white guy with 2 hoddies. WTF.

Yes of course there’re the very smart money men like Griffin who argue that “the government” should stop meddling with free-market capitalism and also keep their hands off his social security. And then there’s the Not-Wall-Streeter wealthy folks who get taxpayer donations, I mean contracts, by other means and they live in 4 of the 5 richest counties in the Greatest Nation Evah- http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/richest-counties-in-america.html

- and probably very happy that the Occupy movement is focusing on part of our problem and is not planning on occupying the Falls Church town square.

We do have campaign finance reform that along with Citizens United give the results that those who matter want so stop checking the $1 donation on your tax return they already have more than enough of your money.

Looks to me like Glastris et al’s list is to head off any complaints many (myself included) have had and will have being one that the Democrats and Obama did not keep their 2008 Promise to Renew America http://www.democrats.org/about/party_platform.

Comparing their Top 50 to the party’s platform will inevitably lead to the Progressive 1/2 empty – Centrist 1/2 full argument. With a little work one can find more than just a few Professional Left cranks to disagree with The Washington Monthly’s fluffing of the state rulers on the Left side of our Single-party-Center-Right.

Water board, no Obama stopped that. Solitary/drone the whistle blowers speaking lies to state truths!

Thank god it’s happy hour.

Married heterosexual couples will still do the sexy-time, even using the rhythm method, and besides there’s enough “next generation” to go around for a few generations.

Jung – “The great problem before us is over-population, not the atom bomb.”

Chomsky – “Consequences are many. It is, however, very important to bear in mind that, unfortunately, none lifts the two dark clouds that hover over all consideration of global order: nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, both literally threatening the decent survival of the species.

Quite the contrary. Both threats are ominous, and increasing.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/15/imperial-way-american-decline-noam-chomsky

Jung – “Men are inclined to resent any interference with their way of thinking and their hidebound convictions.”

Ken Livingston – “. . . The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.” http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/02/khan-ken-livingstone-interview

Bush the Younger – Bush, when asked by Bob Woodward “how is history likely to judge your Iraq war?” replied, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

Monsters, and selfish-self-centered-idiots I might add. Living “in the present moment”, now there’s a twist to New Age philosophy for you.

…but all the yeoman efforts of the government to restore these zombie banks to profitability has not yielded safe results just yet.

Or will they for some time to come as long as the Fed and Washington allow TBTF to cover their shitty mortgage derivative bets with more shitty derivative insurance to then when they lose that long-shot gamble even more shittier derivative bets, and on and on. Just because they’re The Smartest Guys in The Room and know that the money pile they dig into on an as needed basis must not dwindle we are told. So it’s Austerity Measures for the proles but inflated Stock-Option-Repurchases for our Galtian Overlords as they go about doing God’s Work, keeping us all safe and Grandma Millie’s lights on or something. Free Markets bitches!

There’s a part that race plays in this Republican “fight.” In the not too distant future God’s Blessed People will be a minority in God’s Favorite Nation, maybe before the Second Coming Rapture – that fact is a fear among religious conservatives. How they plan to stem the tide of “illegals” and “unwed mothers” and their “anchor babies” is to force their side (white women) to do their part – level the playing field so to speak. Keeping the right people in power, that’s their selfish, immediate concern not survival of the species, all babies, or the planet.

The authors conclude, “[T]he current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 [million years] of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/03/current-rate-of-ocean-acidification-worst-in-300-million-years.html

Yves Smith says all that needs saying: Translation: “We’re probably fucked, but the data is so far outside of historical parameters, we can’t say anything with a high degree of certainty.”

The people in charge are idiots and we seem to be okay with it.

“The goal of this settlement has been to benefit struggling homeowners and to do so now.” Yeah, right, whatever.

The “goal” the AG’s are being arm-twisted into accepting, as I see it, is the slow walk back of RMBS derivitives, a way for the banks to cash out their shit-pile bets. I wonder where the new HAMP-RMBS money is going? The Market? Where’s Lloyd’s peers next bubble? Ruled by Monsters http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/02/there-be-monsters.html … disabling the alarm, sneaking in at the moment security is lax, scooping up the valuable stuff, finding a fence to pawn it off on…http://news.yahoo.com/greek-culture-minister-quits-over-ancient-olympia-theft-084708203.html…Wait, I’m getting confused, is this thread about stealing Greek antiquities or shit-pile CDS’ like Timber Wolf? The mo is the same, the actors different with the expected results that serve the Masters…how else to pay for that gold Olympic ring then with bailed-out hedge fundie taxpayer donations?

The robo-signing is only part of the problem and maybe not even close to the bigger one which is – Who holds the note? and Will the title company issue a policy?

I work for a couple of banks doing land survey inspections for Baltimore City and surrounding counties, there is not a lot happening, it was slow all of 2011 and got even slower after the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed a foreclosure over title issues. This kabuki of settlements and bank penalties is, as I see it, the slow dance to changing title law so the banks can sell the houses they own and want to own. The fools who rule us do not have a plan to get the economy moving just have the one that fills the bonus pot.

Quite possibly a back door tax payer funded fix of the MERS debacle and the lost notes. The refi’s begin new paperwork that this time the servicers hold on to, for sure. Fixing these good mortgages on the tax payer dime bails out banks, again. Fixing barely surviving borrowers saves the banks hide when they go to foreclose, which they gleefully will once a payment is missed, because now there’s “clear” title.

The Very Smart People Who Eat, excuse me, Have Dinner With Jamie Dimon screwed up centuries of mortgage law with their greedy “fix” and now, boldly and without an ounce of humility, they again walk into the Treasury’s vault and stuff money into their pockets.

The 99% need to take a bath and get a job so they can be like a job creator and not a ward of the state, you know a bank.

When New York’s Mayor, Mike Bloomberg, one of the richest people in the country, doesn’t even bother to read the reporting in the magazine that bears his name and blames Freddie and Fanny for the housing problem getting the geniuses who rule us to hear anything other than their own cocktail chatter is hopeless. Of course Jamie doesn’t care, he has such contempt for our representative system that he laughs at its members concerns:

MARCY KAPTUR: Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, ‘What should I know?’ They said, ‘Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us.’

MARCY KAPTUR: I said, ‘Well, give me the top one.’ They said, ‘J.P. Morgan Chase.’ I went back to Washington that night. And one of my colleagues said, ‘You want to come to dinner?’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s a meeting with Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase.’ I said, ‘Wow, yes. I really do.’ So, I go to this meeting in a fancy hotel, fancy dinner, and everyone is complimenting him. I mean, it was just like a love fest.

MARCY KAPTUR: They finally got to me, and my point to ask a question. I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to speak out of turn here, Mr. Dimon.’ I said, ‘But your company is the largest forecloser in my district. And our Realtors just said to me this morning that your people don’t return phone calls.’ I said, ‘We can’t do work outs.’ And he looked at me, he said, ‘Do you know that I talk to your Governor all the time?’ He said, ‘Our company employs 10,000 people in Ohio.’

MARCY KAPTUR: And I’m thinking, ‘What is that? A threat?’ And he said, ‘I speak to the Mayor of Columbus.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you come further north?’ I said, ‘Toledo, Cleveland, where the foreclosures are just skyrocketing.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll have someone call you.’ And he gave me a card. And they never did. For two weeks, we tried to reach them. And finally, I was on a national news show. And I told this story. They called within ten minutes. And they said, ‘Oh, we’ll work with you. We’ll try to do some workouts in your area.’

We planned the first one after working with them for weeks and weeks and weeks. Their people never showed up. And it was a Friday. Our people had taken off work. They’d driven from all these locations to come. We kept calling J.P. Morgan Chase saying, ‘Where’s your person? Where’s your person?’ And they finally sent somebody down from Detroit by 3:00 in the afternoon. But out people had been waiting all morning and a lot of people that’s how they treat our people.

BILL MOYERS: You did a remarkable thing on the floor of the House recently. And I want to show my audience a clip of a speech in which you urge people to break the law.

MARCY KAPTUR: So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? In Ohio it is going to be 10 or 20 below zero. Don’t leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don’t have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can’t find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.

BILL MOYERS: Wow. You are urging them to resist the law when the Sheriff shows up to throw them out of their home.

MARCY KAPTUR: I’m saying that they deserve justice, too. And that the scales of justice in front of the Supreme Court are supposed to be balanced, and they’re not. And that possession is 90 percent of the law. And that you have legal rights, as a home owner. You have a right to legal representation. You have a right before the judge to have the mortgage note produced by whomever in the system has it. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/transcript1.html

No doubt, these are very, very smart people who dreamed up the formulas for the derivative scam they played on the rest of us and the world in their impatient, greedy want to have it all at the expense of “Grandma Millie” (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104×1711340)

And yet also, too very stupid as they fucked it all up and don’t know how to fix it other than to add more IOU’s to the pile. The threat of taking the system down ties the hands of every politician in the “free market” world, pussys. Atrios is right, Greece should tell them to fuck off and print Colbert Cash as its new currency.