Tom Friedman discovered a short while ago that the world was flat and that he was married to one of the richest women in the world. What a genius.

I was reviewing a clip given us by the beneficent 49er and something struck me.

I had been staring at my toes for about two hours...do you know that you can actually see your toe nails grow if you stare at them long enough?

Anyway while I was watching the toe nails grow I happened to catch that Senator from Delaware, Ted Kaufman. And did you know that our largest financial firms are really filled with these cats who are just crapping all over the place and then covering it up?  

In a Thursday morning speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) blasted the "incrementalism" approach to fixing the nation's broken financial system, laid bare by a financial crisis that wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth and sent the economy into a tailspin not seen since the Great Depression.

Rather than nibbling around the edges, Kaufman wants to impose strict limits on financial firms' activities; significantly cut them down in size; and wants Congress to act more forcefully because federal banking and securities regulators failed to protect the public from an increasingly dangerous financial industry.

And it occurred to me, that all of Wall Street is a great big sand box. Like the cat toilets that can be found in homes throughout this grand country of ours?

And we have to stop nibbling around the edges of these cat loos.

Stop nibbling and take the entire smelly disease ridden box and bury it deep deep deep in the ground on some farm in Idaho; away from the potatoes and stuff and that goes without saying. I mean I really like potatoes.

But the point here is that is being ignored throughout Federal State and Local regulatory offices throughout our great land:

Regulatory neglect, however, permitted a good model to mutate and grow into a sad farce...

In fact, one of the primary purposes behind the securitization market was to arbitrage bank capital standards. Banks that could show regulators that they could offload risks through asset securitizations or through guarantees on their assets in the form of derivatives called credit default swaps (CDS) received more favorable regulatory capital treatment, allowing them to build their balance sheets to more and more stratospheric levels.

While this was a recipe for disaster, it reflected in part the extent to which the and complexity of this new era of quantitative finance exceeded the regulators' own comprehension...

What our regulators have been doing is spraying some Glade every once in awhile in the general direction of Wall Street.  A small can of Glade that could not even make a Senate corridor palatable.

And Wall Street, I mean the Chicago stockyards of old look more like a poo puddle made by a sickly Chihuahua compared to the ten million tons of the material that the money changers swim in all day long between phone calls to China and Japan attempting to pawn some bundles of it for profit.

Some people seem to become inured to manure. They begin to like it and do not ever come to understand the extent of the stench that they are creating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzrUqAtUcpU

"Over the last few months, Banking Committee members have worked together to try and produce a consensus package. Together we have made significant progress and resolved a many of the items, but a few outstanding issues remain," Dodd said in a statement.

But Corker blamed the Obama administration's approach on health care for pushing Dodd to move ahead with his own bill next week.

"There's no question that White House politics and health care have kept us from getting to the goal line," Corker said in a news conference Thursday, saying Dodd told him Wednesday he felt he needed to get a financial reform bill out of the banking committee before the Senate uses the procedural tactic known as reconciliation to push health care through the chamber by a majority vote.

"The elephant in the room is reconciliation and trying to get a bill out of committee before that time... . He is a victim of health care policy," Corker said of Dodd.

Some Democrats scoffed at Corker blaming reconciliation. "God bless Bob Corker. We appreciate all the help he gave us but at some point we just can't wait," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) "Senator Baucus spent 61 different meetings with Republicans trying to get something on health care. There reaches a point where you have to accept the inevitable."

Dodd's statement indicated that the reason for going ahead is that he felt the momentum of the closed-door talks waning, as many observers of the process have noted in the last week. Dodd is betting that taking a bill to mark up -- which he plans to do the week of March 22 -- will reenergize the process.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34261.html#ixzz0htYh4EH3

Now you have to hand it to the repubs. They do not even have to hold their noses anymore. For a group of politicos who do not believe in evolution, I mean these people have evolved to a point where they actually crave lying in the manure. They love throwing it at others and the smell has become a delightful wake up call to their olfactory nerves.

The shite artist formally known as Tom DeLay was one of those geniuses who could hunt down corruption on the Hill or at the financial centers in this country and make money off it before some mealy mouthed liberals came in to spoil the take. 

...But his tactics created two problems. First, Texas has very strict laws forbidding the use of money raised from corporations in state races, and TRMPAC raised a lot of corporate money. Second, it made for one very shady deal. On Sept. 20, 2002, the director of TRMPAC sent $190,000, including money raised by corporations, to the Republican National State Elections Committee. Exactly two weeks later, that committee sent exactly $190,000 to state candidates favored by TRMPAC. Each transaction, taken alone, appears legal. Bundled together, they look like an effort to funnel corporate money into a race from which it was banned.

DeLay's defense is that he didn't know the details of what was happening in the organization,

Frequent Flying. Stench: 5. Trouble: 3.

House ethics rules prevent members from taking trips abroad funded by lobbyists or by "foreign agents," groups or individuals registered to do political work for foreign organizations or governments. DeLay, however, has reportedly taken at least three such trips. In 1997, he went to Russia on the dime of a peculiar company based in the Bahamas and connected to Russian oil interests. In 2000, he went to Britain, his lavish journey paid for in part by a lobbyist. In 2001, he went to South Korea, funded by a recently registered foreign agent.

The Abramoff Muck. Stench: 6. Trouble: 8.

DeLay and Abramoff are old friends and allies. Now Abramoff is one of the most toxic men in Washington. John McCain is investigating him, as is the Department of Justice for allegedly bilking Native American tribes out of tens of millions of dollars while working for them as a lobbyist.

The Ethics Committee's Docket. Stench: 9. Trouble: 2.

Before the House Ethics Committee was waylaid, it admonished Tom DeLay on three different fronts last year. The first was for appearing to offer a bribe to fellow Republican Rep. Nick Smith to win his support for the closely contested Medicare reform bill. The second was for soliciting donations from a company called Westar Energy just as the House considered a bill of crucial import to the company. The third was for using a federal agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, to track down Democratic members of the Texas Legislature who were fleeing the state to block a vote regarding redistricting (see No. 1 above).

Family Circus. Stench: 3. Trouble: 2.

As revealed in Wednesday's New York Times--to DeLay's fury, as he expressed today--his wife and daughter have long been on the payroll of several of the political organizations he controls. Friends and family of congressmen have done this kind of work for a long time, but they don't normally rake in the sums that Christine DeLay and Danielle DeLay Ferro did: $500,000 in four years. http://www.slate.com/id/2116392/

But the one grand scheme of DeLay's that towers among all the other piles of excrement build by him is this one:

But as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski became furious at the abusive sweatshop conditions endured by workers, overwhelmingly immigrants, in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, of which Saipan is the capital.

Because they were produced in a territory of the United States, garments traveled tariff-free and quota-free to the profitable U.S. market and were entitled to display the coveted "Made in the USA" label.

Among the manufacturers that had profited from the un-free labor market on the island were Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas.

So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill.

But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay.

According to law firm records recently made public, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid millions to stop reform and keep the status quo, met personally at least two dozen times with DeLay on the subject in one two-year period. The DeLay staff was often in daily contact with Abramoff. http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/09/real.delay/

When you are mired this deeply in corporate sludge, when you find yourself in a septic tank so big and so deep that it eventually destroys any faux pride encompassing capitalistic 'principals'; what is a mother to do? Well, you just go ahead and claim that Republicans were "bigger than Christ."

Heracles had to fight the ignominious Hydra.

Upon reaching the swamp near Lake Lerna, where the Hydra dwelt, Heracles covered his mouth and nose with a cloth to protect himself from the poisonous fumes. He fired flaming arrows into its lair, the spring of Amymone, a deep cave that it only came out of to terrorize neighboring villages.[4] He then confronted it, wielding a harvesting sickle (according to some early vase-paintings) or a sword. Ruck and Staples (1994: 170) have pointed out that the chthonic creature's reaction was botanical: upon cutting off each of its heads he found that two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle for any but the hero, Heracles. The weakness of the Hydra was that only one of its heads was immortal.

You see, everytime to get rid of one slimy, stinking head like DeLay's, two more grow back in its place.

And more important, much more important to this discussion is that even though he had been the second most powerful man in the House of Representatives (really the most powerful since Denny Hastert had the spine of a sponge) his personal felonious conduct was chicken shite compared to what is going on out there. Have you ever wondered how some of these people work their asses off in order to give criminal masterminds trillions of dollars and receive pennies in return?  And the masterminds know this.

At least cheney and rummy and a few others were prescient enough to end up with hundreds of  millions of dollars for their efforts on behalf of the Grand Oligarchy.

See, it is important to investigate snakes like Ensign:

The evidence against Senator John Ensign (R-NV) is building. A set of previously undisclosed emails shows that Ensign tried to steer lobbying work to Douglas Hampton, the husband of a woman Ensign had an affair with--an apology of sorts. Ensign is being investigated by the FBI and the Senate Ethics Committee. In the messages--the first signs of an electronic trail in this case--Ensign suggests that a Las Vegas development firm hire Hampton, after the firm had approached him for help on several energy projects in 2008. Ensign denies all allegations of wrongdoing. "Senator Ensign has stated clearly he has not violated any law or Senate ethics rule," said the senator's spokesperson. "If Doug Hampton violated federal law or rules, Senator Ensign did not advise him to do so, did not suggest that he do so, and did not cooperate with his doing so."  http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/?cid=bsa:topnav:cs

2008 contained the days of infamy that led to millions upon millions of human beings losing their jobs, losing their health insurance and losing any hope of a career leading to the achievement of the American Dream.  Tens of millions lost their homesteads or came so close to losing them that they have lived in dire fear of complete moral disintegration ever since. 

Recently axed Merrill Lynch chief John Thain is getting lynched for handing out some $3 to $4 billion in bonuses to employees just before the firm merged with Bank of America. But Thain wasn't the only one handing our checks last year.

While 2008 was a devastating time for investors, 79% of Wall Street workers received bonuses, according to a study by employment Web site efinancialcareers.com  http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/28/wall-street-bonuses-business-wall-street_0128_bonuses.html

These are some of the things I wish to discuss in my next chapter on the giant cat box they call Wall Street.