Matt Taibi, our very own weapon of mass destruction against the bandits of Goldman Sachs:

Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself.

It only gets better. By which I mean, worse for Goldman Sachs.

Glenn Greenwald highlights this episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal, where Rep. Marcy Kaptur and economist Simon Johnson tell us that the big banks on Wall Street “own” Congress. An excerpt:

BILL MOYERS: Let me show you an excerpt from the speech President Obama made on Wall Street last month, September. Here is the challenge he laid down to the bankers.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses. Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.

BILL MOYERS: A reality check. Not one CEO of a Wall Street bank was there to hear the President. What do you make of that?

SIMON JOHNSON: Arrogance. Because they have no fear for the government anymore. They have no respect for the President, which I find absolutely extraordinary and shocking. All right? And I think they have no not an ounce of gratitude to the American people, who saved them, their jobs, and the way they run the world.

Why don’t they fear Obama? Because Obama’s top advisors are their own people, and they own Congress:

While the industry has scaled back its political spending in the wake of last year’s economic collapse, data from the Center for Responsive Politics show that it’s still investing heavily in the Senate, where it’s likely to have its best shot at stopping — or at least shaping — the crackdown on Wall Street that President Barack Obama has proposed.

And it’s clearly looking to Democrats to do it.

Of the $10.6 million the industry has given to sitting senators this year, more than $7.7 million has gone to Democrats.

The clue as to why our government struggles to deal with any substantial problem facing our country today is right there. So long as politicians must run massively expensive campaigns to get themselves elected, they will be in thrall to those who give them the most money. Between that and a media that’s incapable of either understanding or addressing the problems that face our nation, it’s hardly any wonder that some (myself included) find ourselves thinking that our nation is doomed.

Congress quickly adopted legislation that adds $7 billion to the highway trust fund, replenishes the federal unemployment insurance trust fund and gives new lending authority to Federal Housing Administration programs that play a large role in providing low-interest housing loans.

The House of Representatives passed $2 billion in emergency funds to keep the CARS or “cash for clunkers” program going and and unanticipated amount of people rushed to take advantage of it (the Senate will likely vote on it next week). The House also passed a bill restrict Wall Street pay and passed a far-reaching food safety bill requiring more government inspections and imposing new penalties on those who violate the law. Additionally, the House passed a defense appropriations bill, cutting the F-22 but not other programs the Obama administration and Pentagon want cut, but differences will need to be worked out with the Senate. Oh, and House members unanimously approved a resolution that in part recognizes President Barack Obama as being born in Hawaii which the Senate joined.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-6 to send Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the full Senate, which will take up confirmation on Tuesday (there’s no firm date for a vote yet). Sen. Lindsey Graham was, sadly, the only Republican on the committee to vote in favor.

Unfortunately, a full House vote and a Senate Finance Committee vote on health care reform have both been put off until September.

1. Apparently all it takes to get published is 1) a title that makes an over-the-top claim 2) a thesis based on the most conventional of wisdom and the most superficial analysis of modern affairs and 3) a track record of publishing similar books.

2. Iran offers to help in Afghanistan, pledging reconstruction aid and assistance in stopping the drug trade.

3. Our ridiculous policies towards Cuba are finally being questioned on the Hill.

4. Samueal Johnson says that America cannot recover until the oligarchy that controls the financial sector is broken.

5. Are Taliban militants in Pakistan extending their reach beyond the tribal areas?

6. Iraq: another suicide bombing in Mosul. Iraqis fear that the present “peace” is merely the eye of the storm, and some are not prepared to lay their weapons down.

7. Israel closes its investigation into claims of atrocities in Gaza.

More evidence to bolster Matt Taibbi’s conspiracy theory; the foxes are in charge of the henhouse, and our “reform” efforts largely mirror that of the oligarchical nations of Russia and Argentina:

Does anyone really doubt any more that the predominant characteristic of our political culture is “the incestuous relationship between governments and large [] corporate conglomerates”? Yet another former Goldman Sachs official and long-time derivatives advocate who played a major role in the repeal of key banking regulations, Gary Gesner, is now poised to become Obama’s chief of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the body charged with regulating commodities and financial futures. The sleazy, central role Goldman Sachs has played in the events of the last six months — from their current CEO’s still-unexplained presence with Paulson (its former Chairman) and Geithner (protegé of its other former Chairman, Robert Rubin) as the AIG bailout was designed to the massive government windfalls that firm has received (including from that very AIG bailout) — is merely illustrative of how our Government has long functioned and continues to.

Yves Smith last night noted the rather extraordinary (though unsurprising) development that the very institutions that played such a critical role in the crisis — Citibank and Bank of America — are now using TARP funds they received not to extend more loans (the ostensible purpose of the bailout), but rather, to buy up more and more of the very distressed assets that Geithner insists they need to be relieved of, because they now know that, under Geithner’s plan, they will be able to sell them at a substantial profit courtesy of public funds (i.e, the Government will buy those crippled assets at well above their current market price). As Smith puts it: “So not only are they seeking to extract far more than was intended even with the already generous subsidies embodied in this program, but this activity is also speculating with taxpayer money. . . .Welcome to yet more looting.”

We don’t need reform. We need a scourging.

For your reading pleasure:

1. The Treasury Dept. is set to announce new regulatory controls over previously unregulated financial transactions.

2. The Pentagon says in a new report that China is seeking to boost it’s military’s power and effectiveness. China says we need to chill out. In the meantime, China prepares to force Tibetans to celebrate “Serf Liberation Day“, the 60th anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

3. 16 die in a Baghdad bombing.

4. American cities are dealing with an increase in “shantytowns” as the number of homeless rise. Hollywood producers Peter Samuelson wants to give them something better than cardboard boxes to live in.

5. Secretary Clinton bluntly admits that the failed U.S. war on drugs has contributed to rising violence in Mexico.

6. American taxpayers are paying for the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, if in a backhanded way.

7. New study says that most wrongful convictions in Texas stem from witness misidentification.

8. Lisa Falkenberg on Gov. Perry’s stimulus fund logic (or lack thereof.)

9. The next American soccer star?

10. A question about student loan forgiveness tops the list at the new “ask the President” website.

Matt Taibbi says the honchos on Wall Street are robbing us blind and laughing at us while they do it:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

“But wait a minute,” you say to them. “No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?”

But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Matt Taibbi can never be accused of moderation of language, but strip it down and it doesn’t sound any better. The people who spent billions making sure that their complex financial transactions stayed out of the cross hairs of federal regulators, are now receiving trillions for their failing companies from the federal government in the form of shadowy and unaccountable loans and payments, at the behest of men who ostensibly work for the government but once hobnobbed with these captains of finance. In response, they patronize and condescend to anyone foolish enough to second guess their methods, insist that they are integral to the recovery process, celebrate when the government agrees to hand over more money, and bitch and moan about “misdirected” public anger over all of this. An optimist might be inclined to think that the Obama administration is on top of all this, like they say they are. A cynic might just be inclined to believe Taibbi’s version, that we’re all suckers and in the end the rogues on Wall Street who caused this mess will still be in charge, still raking in millions, while people like you and me are looking for jobs. These days, it’s very hard not to be a cynic.

Things I’m reading about, but don’t have much input on right now.

1) The Obama administration’s bank rescue plan: Wall Street loves it. Liberal pundits hate it. Between the two whose opinion are you inclined to value? Yeah, me too.

2) Iraq: I missed my chance to post on the sixth anniversary of the invasion on Friday, but I found this article on the vast disconnect between what the Iraqis think of the war and what American perceive from half a world away, starting with the very name of the conflict, as very instructive. And whereas the war seems to have dropped off the radar screens of most Americans, Iraqis are worried that the conflict is nowhere near being played out. They have reason to be worried; the insurgency has never been entirely stamped out in Mosul, an ethnic flashpoint, a streak of large-scale suicide bombings has erupted since the beginning of the month, and Sunni fighters are fuming over what they see as the Iraq government’s broken promise to employ them. The Iraq war is far from over. 

Smacked down!

President Obama on Wednesday announced a salary cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive large amounts of bailout money, calling the step an expression not only of fairness but of “basic common sense.”

“We all need to take responsibility,” the president said as he prompted Congress once again to act on his economic stimulus program and repeated his accusations that some Wall Street executives had shown “the height of irresponsibility” when millions of non-wealthy Americans were bearing the burden of Wall Street’s failures.

The people are sick and tired, Mr. Obama said, of seeing Wall Street executives come to the government “hat in hand when they were in trouble, even as they paid themselves customary lavish bonuses.”

“This is America, and we don’t begrudge wealth,” the president said. But Americans definitely begrudge “executives being rewarded for failure,” especially if their earning are subsidized by taxpayers, he said.

Naturally, not everyone is happy about this announcement:

“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”

Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.

“It would be really tough to get people to staff” companies that are forced to impose these limits, he said. “I don’t think this will work.”

I invite these execs to join the rest of us in hunting for jobs right now if they feel so inclined. Strangely, I’m just having a hard time imagining a flood of talent away from Wall Street right now.

These guys are like crack addicts; they just can’t stop themselves.