Only 610,000 people filed for unemployment last week. Things must be better.

The word is, only 610,000 people filed for unemployment last week (a holiday week). That’s a drop from previous weeks. 

Let’s all go out and buy a car.

Of course, let’s face it, the number would almost have to go down at this point, simply because there are fewer people left out there who are actually employed so that they can be layed off.

Then there’s that pesky news about home forclosures that are on a serious rise, since that temporary Presidential AKA “Bandaid” moratorium on foreclosures expired on March 31.  Nothing like putting off the inevitable, eh? The bandaid fell off, look for the scabs brought to you by the same Wall Street industry that took hundreds of billions from your children and grandchildren, and then doubled your credit card rates in mid-stream– and got away with it. Boy those political contibutions to Congress sure must be rolling in, because Congress is making sure they drag their feet on stopping those credit card interest rate increases.  But don’t worry, just as soon as everybody’s credit scores are trashed and just as soon as all the interest rates are at the Loan Shark level, Congress will be outraged.  Why….they will have had NO idea this was happening! If they had only known!

Like I said, Don’t Worry!

Really, be patient. It’s all just simple math. Using Government statistical methods, just as soon as unemployment reaches 100%  and everyone has collected his or her last unemployment check, everything will level off , and the official unemployment rate will be zero.

Everything is under control folks. Fed Bagmen Tim and Ben are on the job.  They are going to arrange to give another hundred billion to launder to your bank as a reward for raising your interest rates– and everything well be just fine. And the Global Warming people are On The Job. They will save the earth. Too bad nobody living in it will live to see it, but hey, small price to pay, right?

Don’t worry! Be happy!

Had a Chase card for a few decades? Never missed a payment? Have great credit? Then you are a toxic asset

Welcome to what Daily Puma calls Soiled Green.

YOU ARE A TOXIC ASSET IF YOU HAVE ALWAYS PAID YOUR BILLS ON TIME, AND YOU MUST BE CONVERTED TO SOILED GREEN.

Soiled Green is the act of banks trying to SOIL your credit rating by increasing your monthly minimum payment 250%. When you can’t afford this 250% increase ( 600 dollars a month for some customers) the banks then report your Toxicness to the credit bureaus and then charge you obscenely higher interest rates on the very same debt you previously had been paying down for years, on time.

There’s more.

Plus, ALL OF YOUR OTHER DEBTS will most likely get hit with much higher interest rates as well. Only then will Wall Street Be Happy because it means these robber baron banks have created more profit.. At this point, you become a frightened worker bee whose only mission is to try and pay bills, nothing else matters nor do you care to get involved or protest basically illegal credit card actions out of fear you will fall further behind with your bills

And in Congress, the Band Plays On.

America, Wall Street and Congress are screwing you so badly, it is time to take matters into your own hands. These people are starting to look like bedfellows. Either that or everyone in Congress is inept. You pick.

Our Congress looks the other way every single day while you get screwed.  All those contributions to their election buckets have turned them against you. They are not protecting you from these sharks.

If you have stellar credit, you are being screwed.

They are deliberately trashing your credit rating, and your Congress doesn’t give a rat’s ass.  Neither does the White House. This is starting to look like one big party.

As I mentioned before, I’ve had a 5 % Capital One card for nearly two decades and got a letter saying they would arbitrarily raise my rate to 11% in April. I called and protested and they offered me an “Opt out” that would keep my rate but freeze my card.  This was a deliberate effort to shitcan my FICO score. I refused and told them I would just keep their card for spite and never use it again till they returned my original rate. They decided to let me keep my rate for awhile. Then they had the AUDACITY to remind me to use the card and take advantage of their great rate! I will never use their card, I don’t care if they put it down to 1%. Just for spite.

Do you realize what these pigs are doing while Congress hums along? Your credit score can influence a whole boatload of things. Your car and home insurance premium for starters.  If these racketeers continue to go unchecked, Corporations everywhere will profit and you will lose! They will have the benefit of a responsible payer as a customer with the added benefit of a nice high interest rate!

America, you are being shafted. Not just by Tim Geithner, Goldman Sachs and  International Bankers, but by your own elected officials. They are letting this happen and doing NOTHING about it. If they can fire CEOs they can protect you. But they don’t. What part of this is hard to understand?

There is a shakedown going on here! They are deliberately trashing good credit scores so that they can rape the wallets of ALL Americans.

You are going to have to fend for yourself, because sooner or later, this is going to affect YOUR wallet.

Go here to see what other fed-up Americans are doing. And while you are there, read what some other banks like Citbank and AMEX are up to. Sooner or later, you are going to be raped.

I am more convinced every day that this is deliberate wallet rape. Don’t be silent! Cramp your credit card company’s phone lines with complaints.  If they announce that they are changing your rate, pay off cards if you can and then tell them in person that you will never use their card until they re-instate your original agreement. Do not cancel the card! Make them do the work it takes for you to keep it!  They deserve to have thousands upon thousands of unused registered cards that give these pigs nothing but an echo.

If you can’t pay off your card, go to your Congress Rep’s web site and tell him or her to start paying attention to their constituents instead of greedy international bankers who write them campaign checks. Don’t email them just once. Do it every day and get as many people as you can to do it every day. Jam their email servers. Tell them you vote and that they will NEVER get your vote unless and until they put a complete stop to the harassment of Americans by the credit card companies.  Tell him or her that you are sick of hearing congress say they care and you expect Congress to prove it! It’s time that voters harass them in the way these banks, that have gouged the treasury have the audacity to harass us.

Incidentally, just in case you don’t think this is deliberately contagious,  Bank of America has just announced that they too are going to gouge the hand that kept them alive. They are also raising rates on anyone with a balance, and particularly on anyone who has less than a ten percent interest rate, regardless of your credit rating.

The Federal Reserve and other bank regulators passed rules in December that would limit banks’ ability to raise credit-card interest rates. But that doesn’t start until July 2010.

Now, Congress is considering separate bills that would impose stronger restrictions on banks much sooner. Last week, the Senate Banking Committee approved its version of the legislation, which is waiting for a full Senate vote. A House subcommittee passed similar legislation last week.

Thataway Congress! Jerk around and play with yourselves, while your banking buddies do all their damage to Americans first. You know, give em that time to crank up those rates and get your campaign contribution, wink wink. You hypocritcal bastards!

**UPDATE**Cavuto guts Rep. Grayson over putting Geithner in charge of arbitrarily setting salaries

UPDATE: I am told that today, the House of No Representatives passed  the bill mentioned in this piece.

Not that this will even make it to the Senate, much less stand a SCOTUS test. Here’s a member of the House of No Representatives who has a bill on the table that gives the Secretary of the Treasury full authority to arbitrarily set the salaries of anybody in a company that takes bailout money.  That means, at any level, with impunity,  if  that little twit Geithner so decides.  No range in the bill. Nothing. No stopgap for anybody below a CEO either.

I want to know why we don’t get to set Geithner’s salary. And speaking of firing “CEOs”– I’ll bet plenty of people think Geithner ought to go. So far, everything he has touched has turned to……well……..shit.

Rep. Grayson is right about one thing: Cavuto is incredibly rude to him.  Somebody has to finally do it.  And this guy is talking about Geithner like he is actually somebody America elected and trusts. As IF any of us thinks a tax cheat, who can’t even put two words together and throws around trillions of dollars to his Goldman Sachs friends in any way he can, should be in Charge of Anything, much less in charge of destroying Capitalism and the Constitution by setting the wages of anybody he decides needs his “touch”.

This isn’t about CEOs anymore. You can just smell it.

The House of No Representatives. Truly a carnival of power-hungry dictators. No wonder the Framers gave us a Senate to put a stop to these mobsters. But then again, we have Harry, who would fit in really well in the House. Who oversees the Overseers?

“I’m from the government.  I’m here to help.”.

Out of control.

Out. Of. Control.

Rolling Stone: “The Big Takeover”

If you read nothing else on the internet today, I urge you to read Matt  Taibbi’s piece in Rolling Stone, entitled The Big Takeover.

This is an eight page jaw-dropping piece that traces the sequence of events that brought America and its hard-working, responsible citizens to their financial kness.

Taibbi declares:

The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

You should send that link to everybody you care about.  Tell them they’ve been had and ask them exactly what they intend to do about it. It’s nearly midnight. Do we know where are money is?

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

Matt is dead-on about one thing in particular:

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough.

The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

Not only is he dead-on, but he provides the sequence of events surround the plan to screw Americans out of the money they earned, saved and invested. One commenter on the article  sums up what Taibbi has done here:

Matt, This article is brilliant! I’ve circulated it to all my friends who are pissed off, but not pissed off enough — and not pissed off at Barack Obama. I adore Obama, campaigned my butt off for him, cried my eyes out when he was sworn in, but I am beginning to wonder if perhaps Obama is Goldman Sach’s gift horse to us dumb bunny Trojans. We opened our gates, rolled him inside amidst joyous festivities, but in the dark of night, out of his belly popped Summers, and Geithner, and Liddy, and Patterson … you get the picture!

Please to there now and read.

So guess which companies owe more than $220 million in back taxes? Go ahead. Guess

America is being Cluster F*cked daily, folks. It’s time for a lot more than tea bags.  It’s time some hide is figuratively skinned. It’s time for prison and it’s time for seizure of personal assets.

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) – Some top recipients of U.S. bailout money owe the federal government more than $220 million in unpaid taxes, a U.S. lawmaker said on Thursday.

 Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia who heads the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, said 13 bailed-out companies owe the federal government taxes. Two of them owe more than $100 million each.

Lewis said the firms, which he did not name, signed statements at the time of receiving federal aid stating that they owed no federal taxes.

 ”It is a disgrace. The American people are fed up… and they’re not going to take it anymore,” Lewis told a hearing to examine the oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

It’s not a disgrace. It’s a Cluster F*ck and we all know it. And it has to stop. We expect it to stop. It will stop. This bailout party must come to an end. People must go to jail. Money must be recouped. Not later. Now.

Somebody has been walking away with Trillions of dollars we don’t even have. Some small group of serious thieves has raped the wallets of a minimum of two future generations using dying, pillaged corporations as money launderers for each other. AIG gets billions and the first check they write is to Goldman Sachs of Bernanke and Geithner Board of Directors fame. Why is that?

Nobody wants to work for Geithner it seems. They drop out like flies. Why is that? Geithner hired CitiGroup’s Economoic Advisor. Why is that?  Who would hire the loser-economic adviser of a losing company? And why is it that these companies that owe millions of back taxes haven’t been hounded by the IRS, Mr. Geithner?  And since the IRS is under your charge, why is it you didn’t know that their disclosures regarding taxes were a lie? If one of us owed ten cents to your IRS, we would be hounded. Of course, not paying taxes after receiving repeated warnings is no new thing to you, Mr. Geithner, is it? What job is that that you are “Just the right guy for” again?

Somebody in the US Treasury is enabling this. The money is flowing to these places like a river, in one door, out the other.  Somebody must answer for this. Bernie Madoff is beginning to look like a petty candy store thief next to what is happening here.

There are plenty of questions and it’s time somebody asked them. Rep. Lewis has started that ball rolling, bless his heart.

Lewis’ subcommittee looked at the top 23 TARP recipients and found that more than half owe unpaid federal income taxes. One unidentified company owed $112.75 million in unpaid taxes from 2006 and 2005,according to the subcommittee’s research. Another company that received government funds owed $101.8 million dating back to before 2004.

We appreciate your revealing information Rep. Lewis. We really do bless you for it. But the public has a right to know the names of these companies and the pigs who are raping us.  This is the money of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Americans!

If these companies lied on their tax disclosures in order to receive TARP money, this means somebody committed fraud, a federal offense. There must be indictments and people must go to jail. But not before we squeeze every dime of our money out of their thieving hides in the most painful of ways, up to and including all of their personal assets.

Enough is enough. And then some. America is leaving its slumber period now. Hubris will do that to people. Thank God. Thus, we begin the pitchfork and torch phase we have seen over AIG. This has just begun. America is being torn down from within. It’s time to lock the Treasury TARP money down. No more bailouts. The heads must start to roll for all the public to see these shameless faces go down in shame.

Rep. Lewis: You GO guy!

Hey Barney! You gonna join in or what? Because somebody needs to check out those nice fat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonuses that are being handed out as we speak to the Big Shots from that loser corporation too.  We’ll make that YOUR assignment, because while the country is in an uproar over AIG bonuses, the rest of the Band Plays On under the radar.

And Chuck: Yeah. We DO care. America is just waking up and stretching. Soon, the coffee will be perked and suddenly, everybody is going to be moving around, wondering how it is that our House and Senate let this all happen.  That means you too, Chuck.

Folks, an index of these thieving companies that took our money can be found here.

Here are the top 23 recipients as of the date of that index (late January, 2009).  Unless this list has changed drastically in totals recently, half of these companies, according to Rep Lewis, are delinquent in more than $220 million in IRS taxes.

Numbers are in millions:

10/28/2008 Citigroup Inc*** New York $25,000 Completed 10/28/2008 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co New York $25,000 Completed
10/28/2008 Wells Fargo & Co California $25,000 Completed
10/28/2008 Bank of America Corp North Carolina $15,000 Completed
1/9/2009 Bank of America Corporation** North Carolina $10,000 Completed
10/28/2008 Goldman Sachs Group Inc New York $10,000 Completed
10/28/2008 Morgan Stanley New York $10,000 Completed
12/12/2008 The PNC Financial Services Group Inc Pennsylvania $7,579 Completed
11/14/2008 U.S. Bancorp Minnesota $6,599 Completed
11/14/2008 Capital One Virginia $3,555 Completed
11/14/2008 Regions Financial Corp Alabama $3,500 Completed
11/14/2008 SunTrust Banks Inc Georgia $3,500 Completed
12/12/2008 Fifth Third Bancorp Ohio $3,408 Completed
1/9/2009 American Express Company New York NY $3,389 Completed
11/14/2008 BB&T North Carolina $3,134 Completed
10/28/2008 Bank of New York Mellon Corp New York $3,000 Completed
11/14/2008 KeyCorp Ohio $2,500 Completed
12/12/2008 CIT Group Inc. New York $2,330 Completed
11/14/2008 Comerica Texas $2,250 Completed
10/28/2008 State Street Corp Massachusetts $2,000 Completed
11/14/2008 Marshall & Ilsley Corp Wisconsin $1,715 Completed
11/14/2008 Northern Trust Illinois $1,576 Completed
11/14/2008 Zions Bancorporation Utah $1,400