Obama Administration

President Obama and Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were informed that BP would drill an unprecedented 35,000 feet well bore at the Macondo site off the coast of Louisiana. In September 2009, the Deepwater Horizon successfully sunk a well bore at a depth of 35,055 below sea level at the Tiber Prospect in the Keathley Canyon block 102 in the Gulf of Mexico, southeast of Houston... According to the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) sources within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Pentagon and Interior and Energy Departments told the Obama Administration that the newly-discovered estimated 3-4 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico would cover America's oil needs for up to eight months if there was a military attack on Iran that resulted in the bottling up of the Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker traffic, resulting in a cut-off of oil to the United States from the Persian Gulf. Obama, Salazar, Chu, and Gates green-lighted the risky Macondo drilling operation from the outset, according to WMR's government sources.

All this bickering and ongoing pissing contests are getting just a little confusing. So now Obama appeals, as Gibbs just announced, and appellate court overturns the overturned decision, only to capture even more of the rig workers' wrath? Drillers now all over the place, and for some reason BP is up, as if the firm will be doing fresh drilling in the GoM any time soon. And somehow this news is causing the EUR to spike, (luckily temporarily), just to demonstrate how every asset class now correlates with everything else and any reason, whatever reason, is good enough to cause a move in interconnected markets. Sigh. From the judge's language: "plaintiffs have established..likelihood.. showing..Administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously. Plaintiffs assert..they have suffered and will continue to suffer..irreparable harm..Court agrees." (via Platts)

In this must watch Real News Network interview with William Black, the outspoken critic of all that is wrong and broken with the current system spares no words to once again denounce the (purposeful) ineffectiveness of the administration, and rightfully predicts that with Obama's current track record of inactivity in dealing with the corruption and criminality at the nexus of finance and politics, there will be a massive loss for Democrats at the upcoming mid-term elections. In Black's words: "We knew as soon as we saw Summers and Geithner that the finance side of the administration would be a disaster, but we hoped that political side would be preeminent and say a) this is substantively wrong to continue get in bed with finance and b) it's terrible politics. The democratic party will be crushed if it does this. The political side has failed to get involved. This is one of those rare things where doing the right thing is really good politics, so support candidates that will actually do the right thing. And if the Obama administration continues this way, it's going to have a record disaster at the mid-term elections. There's going to be a massive loss of democratic seats."

Change?

Not much ...

Just because every credit collapse mushroom cloud has a silver lining. The Obama miracle recovery captured in one simple, easy to remember song.

Taking a card from the Private Equity deck, the Obama Administration has indicated that it wants to fast-track the Initial Public Offering of General Motors.

Could this be a sign of things to come? The Obama administration will impose stiff tariffs on imports of Chinese-made tires finding that a surge of Chinese imports has disrupted the U.S. market. Gee, ya think?

Is anyone else getting tired of all these headlines about how Obama and his learned senators will only give aid to banks (and bail out the Western financial system) if the latter increase lending to consumers and companies? With all due respect, this is really dumb for two reasons: consumers actually don't want debt (kinda goes against the whole increasing savings concept) and companies actually have easy access to credit.

Is anyone else getting tired of all these headlines about how Obama and his learned senators will only give aid to banks (and bail out the Western financial system) if the latter increase lending to consumers and companies? With all due respect, this is really dumb for two reasons: consumers actually don't want debt (kinda goes against the whole increasing savings concept) and companies actually have easy access to credit.