The article I found on Yahoo! Finance, Financial Improprieties Abound as Stocks Rally, is dated November 04,2010. After you see the quotes below, you might understand why I have told you that the article is a current one.

It seems like survival of the fittest like forces have turned a government of, by and for the people into a government of, for and by special interest groups.

As stocks quickly tumbled to Dow 7,500, the government became desperate. Real estate related losses were piling up; investors lost confidence in the financial system and drove Washington Mutual out of business.

The problem was too big to fix, so the administration forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board to change rule 157. Obviously, the fix is only topical. If it wasn’t, why would Fannie and Freddie need an additional $215 billion in aid?

The ‘new and improved’ rule 157 allowed Banksters to value assets at what they might be worth in the future. If bank A purchased a portfolio of real estate (NYSEArca: IYR – News) for $10 million in 2006 and lost $6 million because the assets turned toxic, bank A is allowed to value the portfolio just below $10 million. The very real loss is not included in the current earnings numbers.

The real question is whether you can trust reported earnings? If Berkshire, along with most banks and financial conglomerates, has the legal right to fudge their earnings we may rightly wonder who else is employing this convenient accounting trick? Some would call them stupid if they didn’t.

To emphasize, Citigroup reducing its bad loan reserves would be like an insurance company reducing its natural disaster fund right before hurricane season.

Five days before the election.Rachel Maddow had a commentary on the prospects for compromise between Republicans and Democrats.

I did not post it then because it made me too angry to think straight.  I got angry not because she was wrong, but because she was right.  I got angry not because she had divined the hidden meaning in what Republican politicians were saying, but because she put together a montage of the obvious.  She made it even more painful by adding to the montage the words of various Democrats that showed how deep into denial they were.

I have seen a few headlines about what she is saying today, but that may be even more painful to watch.

Thinking about these items and comparing them to what Obama had to say in his press conference shows that the denial did not end election night.

The question now should be what will it take for the Democratic politicians to wake up?

I have relented and started looking at her comments tonight.

I stumbled across “Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.”

Just to give you a flavor, here is one revelation he made:

On another site –“thinkprogress.com” [thinkprogress.org – ssg] – you can find out how the multibillionaire Koch brothers – also big oil polluters and Tea Party supporters – are recruiting “captains of industry” to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. Now, hold on to your seats, because this can blow away the faint-hearted: Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch’s ‘secretive network of Republican donors’ were two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That’s right: 2 of the 5 votes to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so.

I have seen a lot of the TV shows and writings of Bill Moyers over the years, but this may be the most hard hitting thing I have seen from him.

If you suffer from high-blood pressure, don’t read the rest of his speech. I don’t want to be blamed for anyone’s stroke. Instead, you might want to view the shortened version from his last TV broadcast in the clip below.

I realize now that I did not make this post at all clear as to the extent of the ground that Bill Moyers covered in his speech. The part of about Scalia, Thomas, and the Koch brothers was but a teeny part of it.

The essence of the speech was more about how the age of the Robber Barons is returning and how far this is from what the founders of this country had wanted.

In his column in The New York Times, Mugged by the Moralizers, Paul Krugman gives the usual explanation for increased government spending during a recession.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

He further goes on to mention the President’s failing:

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness? Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Perhaps it is time to look for better explanations if this one seems to fall on deaf ears.

Of course my explanation probably won’t fare much better.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure estimates that we need to spend $2.2 trillion dollars over the next 5 years repairing our infrastructure just to prevent it from failing.  If we know we need to spend this money at some point in the future, when would be the best time to spend it? I claim that now is the best time.  When private spending is underperforming, there is no better time for public spending.  There is little competition for the borrowing capacity.  The infrastructure use is at the lowest ebb that it is going to be (not that it is low, but relatively it is).  There is idle labor, equipment, and raw materials, so construction prices are low. There is little risk of inflation because there is so much idle capacity in the system

It is much better to do the work now than wait until the economy booms.  Borrowing will be expensive then as the private sector is competing for loans as they are borrowing to increase capacity.  Workers will be scarce and therefore expensive.  Raw materials will be costlier. Adding government spending to private spending at that time will stoke the fires of inflation.

Why would we pass up such a golden opportunity to do work that we know has to get done?