Pat Buchanan: Nut job

President Obama asks the UN Security Council to punish North Korea

Obama's request stands as his initial response to the recent North Korean missile launch, an act the United States considers "provocative" and which was prone to elicit just this kind of response from Washington. The text of Obama's request can be found here.

On the Wall Street grifters

Glenn Greenwald asks his readers to:

Just think about how this [Wall Street scam] works. People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting. When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal. Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government. Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced. This corruption is so tawdry and transparent — and it has fueled and continues to fuel a fraud so enormous and destructive as to be unprecedented in both size and audacity — that it is mystifying that it is not provoking more mass public rage.

Greenwald continues by marking some of the ways President Obama and his administration had already helped these grifters to loot the public's money. He quotes with approval William Black who went so far as to identify the financial system as one grand Ponzi scheme and Secretaries of the Treasury Geithner and Paulson before him of "covering up" this immense fraud. Campaign rhetoric aside, that the Obama administration gave this help should have surprised no one. Not only had the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) given candidate Obama more money than any other candidate, but Wall Street has effectively captured not only the executive institutions which finance capital found most interesting but even the federal government as a whole, as Greenwald points out by quoting from Simon Johnson's recent article on the crisis.

Briefly put, the federal government is becoming — or has become — a massive rent extraction mechanism which serves the interests of American finance capital.

Fated

Peter Morici assesses the significance of the latest BLS unemployment report. His conclusion:

Simply, investors and employers lack confidence in the overall likely effects of Treasury Secretary Geither's plans to stabilize banks and President Obama's stimulus package and budgets proposals.

Lacking confidence that the demand for what Americans make and sell will recover significantly, anytime soon, businesses are girding for a long siege — slashing employment and dividends and other hunkering down. They are preparing for a depression and the eclipse of American leadership.

And:

Increasingly, the economic slowdown looks more like a depression than a recession. Recessions are like stock market corrections — after a time, equity prices rebound without government intervention.

Federal Reserve interest rate cuts and stimulus spending and tax rebates shorten recessions and ease their impact. However, those policies will not end the current slump, because it is grounded in fundamental structural dysfunctions in U.S. banking, energy and trade policies.

A depression is not self-correcting. The economy shifts down to permanently lower levels of production and sales, high unemployment rates become chronic, and federal deficits become narcotic — federal deficits dull the senses but don't cure the disease.

The unemployment rate continues to rise

This is the latest bad news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline sharply in March (-663,000), and the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 to 8.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Since the recession began in December 2007, 5.1 million jobs have been lost, with almost two-thirds (3.3 million) of the decrease occurring in the last 5 months. In March, job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors.

You know times are tough when….

….Americans flock to libraries.

Fox News attempts to smear Obama and Harold Koh

Fox fans the flames of prejudice

Using a poorly supported source, Fox News charged the Obama administration with attempting to impose Sharia law in the United States. Fox based its smear on an unverified assertion attributed to Harold Koh, Dean of Yale's Law School and an Obama administration State Department appointee. The Obama administration denies this and kindred charges. Daily KOS debunks the Fox report here. It also provides a transcript and video of the report:

Truth or lies

Chris Floyd depicts the plain facts of our current situation:

The political class has failed us. At every level, they have failed us. Republican and Democrat, they have failed us. Liberal, conservative and centrist, they have failed us. They have lived on lies, and lived by lies, for so long that they no longer know how to comprehend the truth, much less communicate it or — God forbid — act on it. And so they plow on deeper into the darkness, in zombified pursuit of pointless goals, heedless of the signposts warning of danger, like some demented wagon train dragging a load of dead mules toward the edge of a cliff.

Political failure is nothing new, of course. Deliberate deceit — and egregious self-delusion — are nothing new. Misrule and evil on the part of elites are nothing new. But the great churning engines of the American Empire — especially its war machine — are infinitely more vast and powerful than anything seen on earth before. Its inextricably entwined economic and military forces permeate the globe. Nowhere on earth can you completely escape the tourbillions of these forces; yet because of this same pervasive reach, there is now no place on earth that cannot send its shock waves back up the line, roiling the imperial heartland itself. The very magnitude of the American power structure makes the consequences of its crimes and failures more destructive and widespread: the difference between your house being hit by a cannonball or by a cruise missile.

The United States is the core country of a highly militarized global political system — and may a God (any God) forgive America for what it has wrought.

Police and demonstrators clash at G-20 protest

According to a report in The Independent, "A violent mob targeted a Royal Bank of Scotland building in the City of London today after demonstrations turned ugly."

Why?

Now that a flock of buzzards await GM and Chrysler to finish it, John Nichols directs this broad but obvious question towards Detroit, Wall Street and Washington, DC: "How come, if the auto industry must feel the pain, the speculators on Wall Street and the CEOs of the big banks and insurance companies only feel the love of the TARP program?"

Really…. Does Obama's preference here reflect the effective limits of America's crony capitalism? Permitting much of America's auto industry to die without a real fight makes as much sense as the previous indifference to the plight of America's steel industry.