The REAL Race to the Top

While Bill Gates and Eli Broad fire up corporate editorial boards and reporters to hammer politicians toward changing state laws in order to beg for some chump change from Arne Duncan's little pot of federal bribe money, the REAL Race to the Top proceeds, entirely unsullied by the tens of millions of unemployed Americans or the shrinking public coffers that reflect the dwindling tax revenues from the Great Recession--brought to you by the makers of Wall Street.

The entire $4.3 billion set aside by Duncan's Office to fuel the unlimited growth of segregated charter chain gangs and pay-per-score teacher bonus plans is less than 15 percent of the real bonuses that will be paid out this happy holiday season to the crooks of just three Wall Street corporations. The total for the three companies? $29.7 billion. From Bloomberg News:

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, survivors of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, are set to pay record bonuses this year.

The firms -- the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- will hand out $29.7 billion in bonuses, according to analysts’ estimates. That’s up 60 percent from last year and more than the previous high of $26.8 billion in 2007. The money, split among 119,000 employees, equals $250,400 each, almost five times the $50,303 median household income in the U.S. last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show.. . . .

. . . .“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, said in an e-mail. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”. . . .

How "Free Market" Capitalism Really Works

It has taken us three years to now fully appreciate Jim Cramer's wisdom that he shared with a reporter back in 2006 (be shocked below). So yes, let's take Arne's advice here in 2009 and put some of this same entrerpreneurial spirit into creating a crooked educational poker game that uses children for chips and taxpayers to bankroll it.

From HuffPo:

In light of the current economic crisis, and with the hullabaloo ignited recently by Jon Stewart over the accuracy of CNBC's reporting, we thought it might be useful to revisit this shocking 2006 interview Jim Cramer gave to TheStreet.com's Aaron Task.

In it, the host of Mad Money says he regularly manipulated the market when he ran his hedge fund. He calls it "a fun game, and it's a lucrative game." He suggests all hedge fund managers do the same. "No one else in the world would ever admit that, but I could care. I am not going to say it on TV," he quips in the video.

He also calls Wall Street Journal reporters "bozos" and says behaving illegally is okay because the SEC doesn't understand it anyway.

Here are some gems:

-On manipulating the market: "A lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund, and I was positioned short, meaning I needed it down, I would create a level of activity before hand that could drive the futures,"

-On falsely creating the impression a stock is down (what he calls "fomenting"): "You can't foment. That's a violation... But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn't understand it." He adds, "When you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment."

-On the truth: "What's important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view - it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction," Cramer advises. "You can't take any chances."

School Construction Funds Cut From Stimulus

As I noted in an earlier post, one of the last things the Business Roundtable crowd wanted to see in the Stimulus was enough money to carry forward a national building renewal plan for public education, or enough state education assistance to remove the incentive from cash-starved states to accept Duncan's upcoming federal bribes to open more charter chain gangs. After all, who wants a charter school in a strip mall when you have s shiny, renovated public school to attend? Lost in the axing was $20 billion for school construction.

Will Secretary Duncan, or the Chief School Portfolio Manager as he likes to call himself, prevail with his plans to turn over American schools to business interests to do for public education what they have done for their own domain of expertise--business? Are we ready to accept the bankrupt notion that children's education should be treated as a business, or are we really ready to swallow the phony free-market rhetoric that would allow CEOs to replace public governance in the institutions that contain our most precious assets? Are we ready to allow the tax-dodging edupreneurs to bring down a public education system and a teaching profession that took almost 200 years to build up?

And what's with the President's lip service to school construction during his press conference the other night? Couldn't he manage a few nickels to at least offer a pretense that renewal of public schools has a chance?

In the meantime, here is a clip from Raw Story on the backlog of corporate fraud investigations that will take years to get through. More unaccountable lawyers and CEOs in charge, anyone? Anyone?

By DEVLIN BARRETT

WASHINGTON — The FBI is conducting more than 500 investigations of corporate fraud amid the financial meltdown, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, and there is an even bigger mountain of mortgage fraud cases in which hundreds of millions of dollars may have been swindled from the system.

Pistole says there are 530 active corporate fraud investigations, and 38 of them involve corporate fraud and financial institution matters directly related to the economic crisis.

Additionally, the FBI has more than 1,800 mortgage fraud investigations, more than double the number of such cases just two years ago.

There are so many mortgage fraud cases, he said, that the bureau is not focusing on individual purchasers, but industry professionals generating fraud schemes that could total as much as hundreds of millions of dollars.

"It is a matter of lawyers, brokers or real estate professionals that are systematically trying to defraud the system," Pistole said. . . .