Ritholtz had a great short post today - a brilliant set of principles that would fix the financial sector and restore - maybe - enough credibility to banking to be meaningful.

Under either Obama or Romney we wont see any of this - they are both acting as if they are committed to guaranteeing the too big to fail banks a second bailout as the global economy continues to choke on higher EROI on liquid fuels. Many (if not most) of the idependent banking experts say another finance crash is inevitable, because fundamentally nothing has changed, and risky unregulated trading in poorly understood complex derivitives is still standard practice, made worse by high speed trading, and the international economic slowdown.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/10/bair-5-steps-to-fix-wall-street/

2. Publicly commit to end bailouts
“Market must punish the boneheads.” We should learn from post-2008 bailouts is we should never allow ourselves to be in that position again. Wall Street cannot have an indefinite option to “put” its losses to the Treasury and to taxpayers.

Solution: Make penalties for asking for and getting bailouts egregious — wipe out shareholders, fire management.

4. End speculation in the credit derivatives market
If arsonists can’t buy fire insurance on someone else’s house, why allow speculation using credit derivatives? Credit default swaps with no vested interested are the same thing. Read more »

Hardcore progressives dont need to be too concerned if Romney wins. Romeny and the republicans have no economic plan, no solutions for any of the problems we face, and the american people will pay a HUGE price for electing him. And that is as it should be. Americans cant think clearly about the future, they believe the corporate media when they shouldn't trust the "official story" that comes from any corporate source, and a solid dose of awakening pain will do the whole country a lot of good.

So, dont be sad if Romney wins, is my position. Yes, the Iraqi oil we took for the fossil carbon corps will start to come online before 2016, holding worldwide fuel prices down a bit, and the republicans will take credit for that; but, thats a minor force, and the other economic forces will reduce that to a relatively small bump in a downward arc as the perfect storm of population increase, resource depletion, and global warming slowly strangle the oil age economy.

Republican nostalgia, and their fearful denial of reality and the natural world of physics and biology, can't solve complex problems that require complex, intelligent, and longterm solutions. 

And the democrats need to learn to be bolder, braver, and less corrupted by wall street. 

Anyway - to get to the original impetus for this post - we have to remember that Obama is 100% a tool of the corporate elites - and this article outlines his tool nature as well as anything I have ever read:

  Read more »

Stevieslaw: Mitt no More

“You won’t have Mitt to kick around anymore,” opined Smokey Diamond, our ace reporter.  “The word on the street is he is changing his name from Mitt to Franklin Delano Romney.”

We turned on the TV just in time to catch the end of the ceremony on Fair and Balanced.  Franklin Delano Romney waxed eloquently on just what Roosevelt and the New Deal had meant to him when he was growing up in a cold-water flat in Toledo, Ohio.  After, he hugged Bernie Sanders, the left leaning Senator from Vermont, and said Bernie was his “new best bud.”

Paul Ryan, who is apparently still severely conservative would only say, “I will be at the gym.”  “I will be pounding things at the gym--- pounding them bloody, for the next few weeks.”

This is one of the great parody playlists of all times. Just let this baby play.

We all heard about the big voter fraud deal in Florida, where a company hired by the republican party faked republican voters in 11 counties.

Here's a new case closer to us in virginia - the republicans set up voter registration tables, and threw out forms that didn't register republican, from the looks of it,