Break too-big-to-fail, move your money to community banks

Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson have penned a piece recommending that we being moving our money out of the too-big-to-fail banks and into community banks.

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.

We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?

More...

Watch the video, then click here to find the most sound community banks in your area:

Rep. Eric Massa goes after Dick Cheney, Ed Schultz goes pitbull

Bravo, Eric!

Points:
Cheney was responsible (partly) for releasing two of the associates of the Undie-Bomber from Gitmo in 2007.

Rep. Senator Jim DeMint has blocked the confirmation of a TSA head for 9 months, placing the American traveling public in danger. (He also voted against passing a bill called the Improving America's Security Act of 2007, which among other things provided $250 million for airport security. Hypocrite.)

Then Ed calls Dick Cheney a coward and reminds us that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch while they "sat on their fat ass on vacation and did nothing about it".

Why can't Democrats grow some balls and tell it like it is?



I also particularly enjoyed Bob Cesca's new piece at HuffPost on Cheney's dig at Obama:

Needless to say, Cheney is well-qualified to take an authoritative posture when it comes to terrorism. After all, he and his little buddy "kept us safe" from terrorist attacks for eight years, right? Other than the worst terrorist attack in American history, of course, along with the Anthrax Attacks, the Beltway Snipers, the thousands of terrorist attacks on our contractors and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the attacks on our allies in London and Madrid, Cheney did a fine job keeping us safe (more about this in my book). Good job, Mr. Cheney!

So it wasn't any surprise when Cheney stopped thumbing through Uncle Billy's misplaced $8,000 long enough to fire off a few words about the failed Underpants Bomber attempt and the Obama administration's response. And since Dick Cheney is a very serious terrorism expert -- mainly because more Americans died in terrorist attacks on his watch than any other vice president ever -- the media gobbled it up, practically unchallenged.

Being in "exotic", "foreign" Hawaii hurts Obama's terror response

Is there any low they won't stoop to?

Now the GOP heads are saying that many Americans perceive Hawaii as "foreign", "exotic", and "tropical". Being there, instead of Crawford, Texas, hurts the Presidents response to terror because of "surfers in the background".

Srsly?

Was Hawaii responsible for Rush heart attack as well?

Family values: Karl Rove's (second) divorce

(Huff Post)

Famed Republican strategist Karl Rove got divorced last week, Politico reports.

Spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "Karl Rove and his wife, Darby, were granted a divorce last week. The couple came to the decision mutually and amicably, and they maintain a close relationship and a strong friendship. There will be no further comment and the family requests that its privacy be respected."

Karl married Darby Hickson in 1986. They have one son, Andrew. Rove's previous marriage to a Houston socialite ended after a year.

Actor Randy Quaid recently complained in a letter to a judge that Rove hit on his wife, Evi.

Glenn Beck's America: The rise of the Preppers

Paranoia, fueled by the right, results in soccer moms storing blood-clotting agents. Please note the first paragraph and see who Beck is selling this to...

(Newsweek)

Lisa Bedford is what you'd imagine of a stereotypical soccer mom. She drives a white Tahoe SUV. An American flag flies outside her suburban Phoenix home. She sells Pampered Chef kitchen tools and likes to bake. Bedford and her husband have two young children, four dogs, and go to church on Sunday.

But about a year ago, Bedford's homemaking skills went into overdrive. She began stockpiling canned food, and converted a spare bedroom into a giant storage facility. The trunk of each of her family's cars got its own 72-hour emergency kit—giant Tupperware containers full of iodine, beef jerky, emergency blankets, and even a blood-clotting agent designed for the battle-wounded. Bedford started thinking about an escape plan in case her family needed to leave in a hurry, and she and her husband set aside packed suitcases and cash. Then, for the first time in her life, Bedford went to a gun range and shot a .22 handgun. Now she regularly takes her two young children, 7 and 10, to target practice. "Over the last two years, I started feeling more and more unsettled about everything I was seeing, and I started thinking, 'What if we were in the same boat?'" says Bedford, 49.

On underwear bombs and the juxtaposition of freedom and feardom

So a guy gets on a plane in Lagos - paying cash and not checking any bags... oh and he's on a terror watchlist - and almost blows up a plane over Detroit.

Are we all on board with this so far?

He tries to set off the bomb over Detroit but the detonator malfunctions and all he manages to do is burn his penis off.

Still good? Here it is as a math problem:

Foreign embarkation + blatantly suspicious behavior + terrorist watch list = X (solve for X)

This guy getting on the plane is the equivalent of the Salahis getting into the White House. People fucked up.

And because of this, there is a whole host of other restrictions being put (sloppily) into place: no standing in the last hour of flight, no GPS-capable devices allowed, no blankets allowed, don't take a long time in the crapper (have they eaten their own food?).

The goal of terrorism isn't death, but fear. And so in that aspect, Undie-Bomber succeeded. We've allowed ourselves to get our collective shit scrambled. Again. While the President reminds us that: "We will never give in to fear". Right.

Undie-Bomber was from London and flew to Lagos to board the plane. Are we seeing the REAL problem here? The real problem is not domestic security, but security in third-world airports. Like Lagos. Where you can buy/bluff your way onto an airplane.

So if the problem is in Lagos, why are we concentrating on Charlotte? Of course I'm asking this is a government that invaded one nation who didn't have anything to do with 9/11 (Iraq) and just re-invaded another 8 years after they ceased to be a real threat to us (Afghanistan).

Oh, and Erroll Southers, former FBI and the president's pick to run the TSA, still isn't on the job because Republican Senator Jim DeMint is blocking his appointment. Over union issues.

Bet'cha a million dollars that CNN won't raise THAT particular issue.

What color is the sun in wingnut world?

Are you shitting me?

This is more of the 'if we say it long enough, the sheeple will fall in line' theory of politics that the right-wing is basing their hopes on. No solutions, no answers, just lies and misdirection.

"I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history. And President Bush dealt with it and within a year of his presidency within a comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent."

Mary Matalin suggesting that Bush inherited 9/11

DougJ at BalloonJuice asks why Republicans aren't held to the same standards as Democrats?

It’s an outright lie and not just because they didn’t “inherit” 9/11—unemployment was actually 5.7% December 2001, as compared with 4.2% when Bush took office, and it rose to 6.3% by 2003.

At what point does America stop taking these clowns seriously? Why does the media pander to their lies? How do the "serious journalists" at CNN not call her on the obvious baldfaced lie she told?

You are being ripped off

Best chart EVER!

National Geographic (via Andrew Sullivan) has this chart showing health care expenses (left axis) and life expectancy (right axis).

Just look. That's all. Look at it with an open mind.

This National Geographic chart, which I stumbled upon while reading that magnificent magazine on the airplane, truly blew me away. If anyone can look at this and not see a simply insane way to distribute health care, a system so inefficient no socialist country could ever replicate it, then they have stronger rationalization skills than I possess.

Americans are being ripped off. The current reform will only move this line marginally, but it will begin that vital process - because it will almost certainly improve the health outcomes of the 30 million or so people who will soon have access for the first time to insurance. And its cost-control measures, pushing back ever so slightly against fee-for service medicine at a time of limitless healthcare potential, might help too.

What this this graph does do is show why the current system, while providing excellent care for many, nonetheless does so at crippling expense to everyone. Without the kind of reform Obama has initiated, there's no way this will get better. We should think of this health insurance reform as the beginning, not the end, of some public policy sanity. And conservatives would do better to help add more cost-controls than run around screaming socialism when the current system has failed so dramatically in any collective or economic sense.