Wobbly Times number 25

via Doug Henwood's LBO-talk.....Ed Hyman, Wall Street's favorite economist, features a poll asking who's been helped most by the Obama administration's economic policies:

large banks 62%
Wall Street 54
manufacturing firms 21
people who've lost jobs 15
average working person 13
small biz 11
my family/me 10

For once, Americans are dead on! Can Australians be thinking the same about Rudd's Labor Government?

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William Black, the government regulator who
fingered House speaker Jim Wright, John McCain,
John Glenn and other members of the "Keating Five"
for bribe-taking during the S & L crisis and is now a
prof at the University of Missouri, has been sounding
a similar note for some time. In April, he told
Bill Moyers that "the entire strategy is to keep
people from getting the facts..."

"[Moyers] Are you saying that Timothy Geithner,
the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the
administration, with the banks, are engaged in a
cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

"[Black] Absolutely....

"They're deliberately leaving in place the people
that caused the problem, because they don't want
the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan
Administration's central priority, at all times,
during the Savings and Loan
crisis, was covering up the losses.

"[Moyers] So, you're saying that people in power,
political power, and financial power, act in concert
when their own behinds are in the ringer,
right?

"That's right. And it's particularly a crisis that
brings this out, because then the class of the
banker says, "You've got to keep the information
away from the public or everything will collapse."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html


see also the Citibank report on Plutonomy.