An Economy Without Firewalls: Behind Closed Doors

(Counterpunch) More than two years after Wall Street’s closest brush with death since the Great Depression, taxpayers, investors and voters are still waiting for the kind of bare knuckles Congressional action like the Pecora Hearings in the 1930s that resulted in federal legislation creating basic firewalls within the banking industries.

For more on this, read Pam Martens’ terrific piece in CounterPunch, “The Most Vital Ingredient in Wall Street Reform Goes Missing“. This morning’s Miami Herald shows the cracks in the wall: on the one hand reporting the Rooms-To-Go economy as showing new signs of life, and on the other, Miami’s closest connection to the Wall Street crisis: LNR, managing nearly $22 billion in troubled commercial backed mortgages.

A Time-Release Depression: When Money was for Nothing

(Counterpunch) The US economy is in the midst of a “time release depression”. A Phd in economics isn’t necessary to understand that the federal government has the capacity– and willingness– to paper the value of our currency by running printing presses 24/7– allowing for the semblance of order like a mannequin in a store window. It all looks real and something that we’d like to buy. Instead of rampant unemployment characteristic of the Great Depression, we have 10 percent plus the long-term unemployed and chronic under-employed.

The Police Got There First: Where Money for Environmental Crimes, Goes

(Counterpunch) It is little more and a little less than a footnote to an investigation by theMiami Herald of Miami-Dade police who used funds collected from environmental fines to buy SUV’s, Direct TV receivers, high powered rifles, and Costa del Mar sunglasses among other purchases irrelevant to the fund’s intended purpose.