Bernie Sanders: they are “Hell bent on destroying the middle class and creating an Oligarchy”, Daily Kos, July 26, 2010, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Class War 101. Bernie Sanders is THE MAN.

Senator Bernie Sanders calls it what it is, fabulously wealthy families and their multinational corporations are hell-bent on destroying the middle class and determined to create an Oligarchy.

. . . While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

TheNation.com

Bold text and italics added by the diarist

Crossposted at The Progressive Electorate.com

More from Bernie Sanders . . .

The truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance.

Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

TheNation.com

Bold text and italics added by the diarist

The average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. And the rich are richer than ever. Anyone guess why? Because when the rich get richer, the EVERYBODY ELSE gets poorer. There is only so many ways you can slice a pie, and if a few people get most of it, everyone else must go hungry.

And, as Bernie Sanders so points out, the richest 400 families in America are richer than ever. Under Bush they raked in the cash while the average media American family saw their income drop by nearly $2,200 a year while the social safety net was slashed and defunded. And why? So very rich people could pay less in taxes and shirk their civic duty to their nation.

Now, I would argue that we already have an Oligarchy now, but certainly Bernie Sanders is already aware of that. I think Senator Sanders is alluding to something worse, like an Oligarchy on steroids. Citizens United fueled, out of control, a Too Big to Fail Oligarchy that would recall to my mind these words written by George Orwell.

So what happens when a few people have more money than medium sized countries? I mean that literally, what happens? Or better, what is happening?

From Forbes.com, where Billionaires are applauded as the Randian heroes they imagine themselves to be.

George Lucas, the famed Hollywood director behind the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and ILM, the world’s most bankable special effects shop, has a $3 billion fortune, making him worth as much as the GDP of Guyana.

Forbes 400 members with net worths just under $1 billion still possess fortunes that could operate the economies of significant fractions of the globe. Gary Magness, who owns water rights in Colorado through his ranch holdings, has a net worth of $990 million, which barely exceeds Vanuatu’s GDP ($988.5 million).

If this year’s three poorest Forbes 400 members were to combine their wealth (a combined $2.9 billion), their amassed fortune would be worth more than the workings of Belize’s entire economy.

George Lucas? WOW! But George Lucas is a storyteller who brings joy to the world, where as investor John Paulson is worth twice as much as Lucas (6.8 Billion) and all he had to do is profit off the real estate bubble and then short sell the subprime market. John Paulson’s wealth equals all the wealth in Montenegro. And these guys aren’t even in the Top Ten wealthiest people in America. If a few people have wealth equivalent to entire nations is it not possible that a few wealthy people can bribe and manipulate entire nations, thus circumventing and overthrowing the Democratic process? Of course! Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Here is yourTop Ten wealthiest plutocrats in America circa 2009

1   William Gates III 50,000 Million   (Microsoft)
2   Warren Buffett        40,000 Million   (Birkshire Hathaway)
3   Lawrence Ellison 27,000 Million   (Oracle)
4   Christy Walton & family 21,500 Million   (Wal-Mart)
5   Jim C. Walton        19,600 Million    (Wal-Mart)
6   Alice Walton        19,300 Million    (Wal-Mart)
7   S. Robson Walton 19,000 Million    (Wal-Mart)
8   Michael Bloomberg 17,500 Million    (Bloomberg)
9   Charles Koch        16,000 Million    (Energy, FreedomWorks, finances Tea Parties)
9   David Koch         16,000 Million   (Energy, FreedomWorks, finances Tea Parties)
11   Sergey Brin         15,300 Million    (Google)

Did anyone notice that the owners of WALMART are 4 of the top 10 richest people in America? Did Walmart eat the middle class? Is Walmart Too Big To Fail? Looks like it.

And as for the people who work for Walmart and earn just enough to go into debt for the rest of their lives, well, it doesn’t seem that anyone is worried about them does it? If they lose their jobs they are called lazy by rich people who never break a sweat or worry about homelessness, if they keep their jobs and struggle to survive and ask for help they are chided for wanting “handouts”.

For the people who work for Walmart and other huge Corporations the American dream has become a nightmare according to Bernie Sanders, and as someone who has lived that nightmare all my life, I entirely agree with him. The game is rigged, rigged for rich people, and if rich people NEVER lose money, everyone else can never earn enough to prosper.

We must level the paying field and STOP giving a huge advantage to the super rich and multi-national corporations. One way our Democratically elected officials can do this is by progressive taxation. And Bernie Sanders has a plan.

That is why I have introduced the Responsible Estate Tax Act (S.3533). This legislation would raise $318 billion over the next decade by establishing a graduated inheritance tax on estates over $3.5 million retroactive to this year. This bill ensures that the wealthiest 0.3 percent of Americans pays their fair share of estate taxes, while making sure that 99.7 percent of Americans never have to pay a dime when they lose a loved one. It also makes certain that the overwhelming majority of family farmers and small businesses never have to pay an estate tax.

This legislation must be passed because, with a $13 trillion national debt and huge unmet needs, we cannot afford more tax breaks for millionaire and billionaire families. But even more importantly, it must be passed because the United States must not become an oligarchy in which a handful of wealthy and powerful families control the destiny of our nation. Too many people, from the inception of this country, have struggled and died to maintain our democratic vision. We owe it to them and to our children to maintain it.

TheNation.com

Bold text and italics added by the diarist

So who is lazy? The person struggling to find a job after free market corporatists shipped their jobs overseas? Or the person who inherits millions of dollars from a dead relative without earning that money and then refuses to pay taxes on it?

The Responsible Estate Tax proposed by Senator Sanders may not seem much, but it is a start. More importantly, it frames the debate in a way that Progressives can win. Because the truth is, billionaires and all of their wealth are the cause of our societies economic problems, not immigrants or unemployed people or Government spending. All of that is a strawman, they shrieks of anguish over “socialism” is a red herring, designed to shift the conversation away from the fact that this form of multi-national corporate capitalism is driving 95% of the world’s population into poverty, and the few who prosper have enough wealth to corrupt the Democratic process in such a way that they are, in reality, an Oligarchy.

Whether we can curb their absolute power and preserve the notion of a Democracy of a majority of The People, and not a Oligarchy based on who controls the majority of the wealth, is what is at stake. Will we starve and exploit our fellow man for profit, or allow all people to prosper? That is the question. What is your answer?

Because I know what the Billionaires, the “Economic Royalty” as F.D.R. named them, I know what they want. It is obvious if you know where to look, and look hard enough.

Greed is NOT good. Greed is destroying America.

Listen to the Chilling words of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko:

Gordon Gekko: "Greed is Good!"

And Greed is all the Conservative movement has, greed and hate and lies and fear.

Because they serve the Oligarchy and themselves and no one else.

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

~ George Orwell, 1984

And so we must FIGHT BACK, and the truth is your greatest weapon.

Peace and love to all.

You can follow me on Twitter @JesseLaGreca Thanks to Ministry of Truth for allowing Evans Liberal Politics to republish his works on an ongoing basis.

See Pres. Obama: On issue after issue, we try to move forward and they try to take us back, Daily Kos, July 26, 2010, by Blackwaterdog: about the DISCLOSE Act vote in the Senate tomorrow. Watch President Obama: Limiting the Influence of Special Interests.

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Taking Your Message to the World

The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind, &#169 The New York Times, May 12, 2010, by Catherine Rampell, excerpt quoted verbatim:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Many of the jobs lost during the recession are not coming back.

Period.

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

The phasing out of these positions might have been accomplished through less painful means like attrition, buyouts or more incremental layoffs. But because of the recession, winter came early.

The tough environment has been especially disorienting for older and more experienced workers like Cynthia Norton, 52, an unemployed administrative assistant in Jacksonville.

“I know I’m good at this,” says Ms. Norton. “So how the hell did I end up here?”

Administrative work has always been Ms. Norton’s “calling,” she says, ever since she started work as an assistant for her aunt at 16, back when the uniform was a light blue polyester suit and a neckerchief. In the ensuing decades she has filed, typed and answered phones for just about every breed of business, from a law firm to a strip club. As a secretary at the RAND Corporation, she once even had the honor of escorting Henry Kissinger around the building.

But since she was laid off from an insurance company two years ago, no one seems to need her well-honed office know-how.

Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.

Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes

Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes, The New York Times, May 14, 2010, by David Leonhardt, excerpt quoted verbatim:

In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.

It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.

Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.”

It’s fair to say, then, that the downturn is moving into a new stage. It has already been through three: the prologue, when credit markets began to quiver in 2007; the big shock, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, led into almost six months of terrible economic news; and the stabilization, when the news became more mixed.

Now comes Stage 4: the slog.

“It’s not going to be an overnight turnaround,” as Bernard Smith, an unemployed engineer in Greenville, S.C. (a state where the broader jobless rate was 20.5 percent this spring), who has been looking for work since May, told me. “It’s going to take time.

Comment by Paul Evans: The fact of the recovery, however, is born out in data such as reflected in the graph presented, from New Jobs Data, with Handy Graph for your Blogging Use, Daily Kos, May 7, 2010, by SanatFeMarie. 290,000 new jobs won’t really “fix things” but it’s a start. However, the Obama administration should make JOBS, and not such matters as winning in Afghanistan or even the vaunted Wall Street reform or climate bill, the number one priority. See Message to Obama, Karzai and Congress: Americans and Afghans Need Jobs, Not War, Evans Liberal Politics, May 13, 2010, by Code Pink. Robert Reich highlighted this in the following article:

Why the President’s Next Big Thing Should Be Jobs

Why the President’s Next Big Thing Should Be Jobs, RobertReich.org, March 25, 2010, by Robert Reich, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Few presidents get a second honeymoon of their own making. (George W. got one when terrorists attacked the United States.) Barack Obama’s victory on health care reform has breathed new life into his administration, recharged the Democratic base, and given the rest of America a sense of someone who fights for average working people.

The question now is: What does he do with his second honeymoon?

Some say it should be used to enact financial reform. Most Americans despise Wall Street and want to be assured there’s no repeat of the grotesque sequence of river-boat gambling with the economy followed by a taxpayer bailout followed by seven-and eight-figure bonuses. Democratic strategists would love to let Republicans hoist themselves on their own petard by defending Wall Street.

Financial reform surely needs bucking up. The bill passed by the House last year was riddled with loopholes, delays, and cop-outs for the Street. The one that’s emerging from the Senate Banking Committee is only slightly better. It still allows a world of unregulated derivative trading and hands the ball over to the same regulators that punted last time. It doesn’t even include Paul Volcker’s watered-down remake of the Glass-Steagall Act. And the Senate bill is likely to get even worse as Harry Reid and Chris Dodd troll for Republican support. In an election year when Wall Street money is flowing freely to both parties, watch your wallets.

Notwithstanding all this, the biggest Next Big Thing ought to be jobs.

Including all those who have entered the job market since the bottom fell out, the nation is about 11 million jobs short. The President ought to use his second honeymoon to get a jobs bill that will make a difference.

Although the official rate of unemployment for the third of Americans with college degrees – the kind of people who inhabit executive suites, the media, and Washington – is now down to 5 percent, most Americas inhabit a different job planet. The unemployment rate is 15.6 percent among Americans with less than a high school diploma and 10.5 percent for those with only a high school degree.

Even these rates understate the problem. Add in people working part time who’d rather it be full time, those too discouraged even to look for work, those working in a full-time job at fewer hours, and those who lost their jobs and have settled on new ones paying far less, and more than one in four of those without high school degrees are unemployed or underemployed; 22 percent of people with only high school degrees.

See, It’s The JOBS, Stupid! Why DC Elites Don’t See This, Daily Kos, May 11, 2010, by davej, excerpt quoted verbatim:

People care about jobs. They still care about jobs. And politicians who don’t care about jobs will lose their jobs, because that is what motivates voters.

Polling at Pollingreport.com proves that people are much more concerned about jobs than deficits. (Note there are some polls that show equal concern, no polls that show deficit with a higher concern)

* FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. May 4-5 Economy and jobs 47% Deficit, spending %15
* BS News/New York Times Poll. April 5-12 Economy/Jobs 49% Budget deficit/National debt 5%
* CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. March 19-21 The economy 43% The federal budget deficit 8%

See Long-Term Unemployment an Ongoing Issue, Daily Kos, May 10, 2010, by Mcjoan, excerpt quoted verbatim:

While the economy created 290,000 new jobs in April, unemployment jumped to 9.9 percent as 805,000 people rejoined the labor force to renew their job search. Sadly though, 6.7 million Americans, nearly 46 percent of the nation’s unemployed, have been jobless for 27 weeks or more. Another 1.2 million are still discouraged and no longer looking….

See Despite Signs of Recovery, Chronic Joblessness Rises, The New York Times, February 20, 2010, by Peter S. Goodman.

See The “Real” Unemployment Rate Jumps To 17.1%, Prison Planet, May 7, 2010, by Joe Weisenthal.

The unemployment rate for the working poor (those making under $20,000 a year) is now 31 percent. Shameful. The unemployment rate for those making over $100,000 a year is quite livable at 4 percent (3.2 percent for those making at least $150,000 a year). OF COURSE the people in power are not so concerned. THEY have nothing to be concerned about, right?

I Need A Job. Any Ideas?

Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Hey Democratic National Committee, concerned about the 45 percent tie reported for a national vote if the fall elections were held today? Do those Tea Party guys have you sweating a little bit?

You should be sweating. There has been well over $2 trillion — some say an unbelievable total of $13.2 trillion — for the fat cats on Wall Street, but precious little for main street. If you want to win this fall, I suggest you get off your ass and do something to create jobs for ordinary Americans. Do this only if you want to win the elections. If you want to muddle through this fall with the status quo, I suggest that you don’t deserve to hold the House. Yes, of course, the GOP has all the wrong ideas about job creation — the Laissez Faire, pure free market, root hog or die mentality drives me nuts — but if the Democratic Party doesn’t do something pretty spectacular to make things better for ordinary Americans, I say you deserve to lose this fall. In spades.

The Obama administration has done nothing but continue to follow Bush administration policy on financial matters, led by a team of financial advisers who CAUSED the mess and institutionalized the greed that got us where we are. If the President is ACTUALLY a populist, if he is a progressive and for the little guy, I have yet to see all that much evidence of it. I KNOW there has been some good legislation, but what has been passed was just about ruined by the lobbyists and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. It’s all very well to lay the blame on them, President Obama, but the American people need RESULTS and have been counting on you to come through. So far it’s been largely a disappointment. And I don’t see how it could be otherwise given the economic team you have in place…. These people — Geithner, Summers and Bernanke — are the same people who didn’t just CAUSE the problem, they ARE the problem. The Obama administration lacks credence as long as these people are at the helm. Fewer and fewer ordinary Americans can be fooled about this now.

Not to trivialize the unemployment/jobs situation at all, but perhaps you might enjoy watching Monty Python, Silly Job Interview (video). There are more Monty Python Videos on my Really Funny Videos page. Wonderful existential absurdity. If you’re tired of the news you might want to have a look. Or if sitcoms are more your thing, consider watching some clips from Two and a Half Men, one of my favorites. If you want to listen to some really good electronic, rock and pop music while you surf the web, there are hours of really good music on my #1 rated Electronic Rock Playslist. We’ve go some decent Rock Music Videos, too. At Evans Liberal Politics we’re proud to not just inform you, but entertain you, too.

If you can’t get a decent job in this economy, at least you can have a little fun. Have you been sucked into the online survey taking ripoff yet? I have to admit, I’m spending a lot of time at it, but mainly in the process of filling out these surveys, you end up getting screwed by mandatory offers. The worst was the free Dell XPS laptop scam. They start you out with just two offers out of about 12 that you need to accept, and then when you are heaving a sigh of relief and hit the NEXT button, you’re faced with NINE mandatory offers. (I quit at that point.) What a ripoff! Guess I’ll be fine with my current laptop for a while, right? Caveat emptor!!! If anyone has a decent idea about how to ACTUALLY make some legitimate money from home, please do email me. And thanks for stopping by Evans Liberal Politics.

Watch Homelessness and Poverty in the U.S., with stark images of poverty in our affluent society.

Watch U.S. Families Struggle To Eat, CBS News – 3:30.

Watch Poverty in America — 4:44.

These will give you “the idea” of what it is like to be poor in America. Can you take it? Do you have enough caring in your heart?

Living on the Edge: Poverty in America

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Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Yes, it’s scary these days in the downtowns of the major cities. I don’t mean the financial districts, I mean the downtowns where regular people live. There it is very scary indeed. Look, here at Evans Politics, we’re NOT anti-establishement, we are just pro-Democrat, and we even disagree with the Party on some things like abortion, which we are largely against. Bob Swern is my favorite economic commentator, along with Paul Krugman. I guess that makes me progressive as to economic theory. But it’s not just us who feel, and in fact KNOW the economy is in a mess of trouble. Just go downtown someday: to the REAL downtowns….. If we don’t get the Fed in some semblance of order, get it “under control” and get the investment banks properly regulated, the second dip of the double dip recession is coming, and soon.

Washington, you sure better get it together and do the right thing. Democrats, if you don’t get the Fed and the investment banks under control, it ain’t going to be pretty come the 2010 elections. It’s kind of hard to feel good about the party in power when you can’t get a job, you can’t pay your mortgage, and the whole mood of the country is in some kind of gloom. There are five applicants for every job opening up these days. Also, one in five people who are still considered job seekers is unemployed or underemployed. Everybody knows it is the investment banks, and the Fed, and yes, Washington, which is the problem. Better get it together boys. Better listen to the people and do what’s right. Nobody’s fooled, just you people who seem to be the fools to me.

Bob Swern: IMHO, if had to name the two people most spot-on–whose observations and actions concerning the egregious effects that the Quiet Coup has had upon almost everyone but the status quo–about our nation’s historical economic downturn, they’d be Columbia University economics professor and Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and Elizabeth Warren, the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Wall Street bailout. Charlie Rose had both of them on his show this week.  You may access both interviews, in their entirety, right HERE. I wanted to focus upon Warren in this diary, and her interview is  directly linked: HERE.

Here’s what Zero Hedge had to say about it: “Elizabeth Warren Discusses The Global ‘Enron’: From Wall Street To Greece And Back.”

The appearance of the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, Elizabeth Warren, on Charlie Rose is a must watch. In addition to an in depth discussion of the the consumer protection agency, which despite all valiant attempts to the contrary, will likely end up under the Fed’s jurisdiction, thereby making the world’s most powerful cabal even more powerful, Warren touches on a variety of other issues, including the sovereign debt situation, commercial real estate, and the one concept at the heart of it all: the lack of impairments by stockholders (and certainly by debtholders) in what was a bankrupt financial industry. The world would not have ended had banks been forced to readjust their balance sheets: the outcome would have been far simpler – all those who had their collective net wealth associated with the balance sheets, and specifically the equity tranche, of firms like Goldman, JPM, Citi, BofA and Wells would have been wiped out. But why do that when not just they, but the entire government were willing to make it seems that a balance sheet reorganization is equivalent to liquidation. Once again, those at the top were more than happy to take advantage of the stupidity of the morts (whose great desire to be distracted by stupidity like primetime TV is well known to the financial-media complex) and in the process make themselves even richer, and more powerful. Now, we expect yet another blogger to come out with yet another book discussing this and every other deadbeaten horse issue out there. And with time amoral hazard itself will slowly become illegal, as everything, and we mean everything, succumbs to the decision making of the Federal Reserve’s Politbureau. In the meantime nothing will change until democracy itself is reignited in this country.

Warren tells us: “We’ve gone straight from Enron to Greece.” She says, ultimately, it’s all about transparency and honesty, of which there is  virtually none, as far as Wall Street’s concerned. (I posted a diary on this just a few days ago, right HERE.)

Warren touches upon everything from Greece to the too-big-to-fails to wiping out shareholders in bankrupt institutions.

Some snippets from her comments:

On off-balance sheet assets yet to be “marked-to-market” by Wall Street..

“Enron taught us a few years back, you remember, in fact that the books are dirty, that there is one set of books put out in front for everyone to see, but there are effectively off the book transactions that nobody can see that reflect the real risks that your enterprise has taken. “

On wiping out shareholders who made money when everything was profitable… (i.e.: privatizing profits and socializing losses)

‘Wiping out shareholders who were the people who invested and who had profited from all of the mistakes that these companies had made for years and years and years before that, that’s not hard.  That’s not rocket science.  That’s just a difference on who gets to sit at the table and who gets to walk away with money.”

Warren continues on to remind us that, due to the just-commencing downturn in commercial real estate (CRE), approximately 3,000 of our nation’s 8,000 banks are at risk of insolvency in the course of the next 36 months. In what’s just the first inning of a rather massive commercial real estate bust, it’s really all about how this will affect these banks that just happen to be the same banks that have been the traditional source for capital for much of our nation’s small business. As Warren reminds us, this is one of the basic reasons why small business lending’s become so tight in the past couple of years; banks are building up reserves for the crash and burn ahead.

(Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: not to mention the great Chinese real estate bubble that’s about to “burst” onto the scene – so maybe it’s a bad pun, but we’re going to have to deal with it. Maybe that will be what triggers the second dip — or the depression we all fear.)

And, on the double-dip Great Recession, the meme that even some of the blogosphere’s most optimistic pundits downplayed up until just the past few weeks…

CHARLIE ROSE: Joe Stiglitz, who you know who was here last night, basically says he fears we’ll see a double dip recession, so the economy has to do with inventory and the end of the stimulus and a whole range of issues, unemployment staying where it is. Do you have that kind of, even though you’re a lawyer and not an economist, fear about this economy?

ELIZABETH WARREN: I am afraid.  I’m afraid because of what I see in the real economy. I’m afraid because I don’t see books that are clean, balance sheets that have been cleaned up.  I’m afraid because in October of 2008, Secretary Paulson came to the American people and he said the problem is toxic assets on the books of the banks, and they’re still there.

–SNIP–

I’m afraid because Secretary Paulson said there’s too much concentration in the banking industry, and there’s even more concentration today than there was…

As Warren closes out the interview she says we have not “…begun to rebuild an economy we can believe in. “

It’s true. As the Senate decides whether or not they’ll even bother to create a very weak, virtual caricature of the Consumer Finance Protection Agency–one without any teeth in it at all; one which Barney Frank just referred to as “a joke”; and one that might very well have been run by none other than Warren, herself–“the truthteller,” Elizabeth Warren, admits she’s afraid of what the future holds for the economic well-being of almost all Americans.

See U.S. Enriches Companies Defying Its Policy on Iran, The New York Times, March 6, 2010, by Joe Becker and Ron Nixon. (And we’re talking $107 billion here.)

Read The U.S. Senate and Bunning’s Universe, Evans Liberal Politics, March 5, 2010 by Paul Krugman.

Find out All about Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, here.

Read The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency, The New York Times Op-Ed lead, March 6, 2010, by Frank Rich.