Kunstler: A flurry of bonuses paid out this holiday season by Goldman Sachs and its other amigos at the top of the banking food chain will be greeted by violence

History is a harsh mistress. For all his 'star quality' and likable personality, President Obama is increasingly perceived as impotent where the real ongoing disasters of public life are concerned, and he has made the tragic choice to appear to be hostage to the bankers who are systematically draining the life-blood from the middle class. Whatever we are seeing on the S & P ticker these days does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked for and even believed in. In a leadership vacuum, centers don't hold, things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.

SHOOT: Some excellent food for thought once again from Jim Kunstler.

clipped from kunstler.com Over the weekend, the The Huffington Post ran a McClatchy news service story about Godman Sachs's misdeeds around the issuance of mortgage backed securities.  The basic idea in it was that GS was aggressively gathering trash mortgages from fly-by-night "originators" all over America to bundle into tradable security paper, which they then pawned off on feckless, inattentive investors (pension funds, foreign banks, etc) seeking miracle returns -- at the same time that GS was buying credit default swap "insurance" by the bale, knowing full well that the collateral backing their own issuance of MBS was of a quality somewhere between dead carp and dog poop. n other words, they were shoveling shit investments out of one window, and betting against the value of them from another window.  Thus a picture resolves of GS's "true opinion" of the securities it paddled, and the question arises whether failure to inform the peddled of this opinion constitutes fraud. I certainly think it does.