Readers: This is the second article pasted here on leveraged buy-outs. My next posting will be a re-posting of material from Wikipedia specifically on Leveraged Buy-Outs. The article below should be more understandable with a basic knowledge of what a Leveraged Buy-Out (LBO) is and how they operate. A key point is that within a LBO the workers are fully treated as an expense only in the process to create double digit returns on the leveraged capital.

Readers: this is the first article that we have published here on leveraged buy-outs. It is yet another dimension of the financialization of economics which was a product of Wall Street greed and the availability ZIRP money from Japan and now from the US and UK. As an example the money pushed through Congress supposed intended the fund green technology projects primarily created employment in China, not in the US.

Readers: I wonder if this means that Halliburton will move its main corporate office back to the US. This obviously will disappoint a large number rich people who were looking for a safe place live after extracting as much wealth as they could from actual communities. Having a sea for a moat on one side and a desert on the other side as a barrier to threatening activists and critics of corporate policies sounds like a castle strategy to defend against peasants in revolt.

Readers: Please note that as one result of the AIG bail-out that the US Government owns 80% of AIG's shares, but refuses to exercise control of its management. THIS is what Free Market and financialized economics looks like. Admin.

Thanks to AIG, some of the poorest residents of rural Kentucky learned you can always be made poorer by corporate villains.

IT’S JUST NOT AS SIMPLE AS YOU MAY WANT IT TO BE. by Neil Garfield
http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/some-stories-dont-end-well-in...

from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/stop-socialism-for-the-ri_b_37...

Joe Biden's father had it right: "It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor." How did we get here?

More than thirty years ago we embarked on a grand deregulatory experiment. The financial sector was unleashed from New Deal-era controls. We were told this would lead to great prosperity and that free free-markets would police themselves.

The experiment failed.

Readers: This is effectively a review and rebuttal of an article by Ellen Brown "Job Losses? Not in North Dakota: A Stimulus Plan That Really Works" published at HuffingtonPost (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/job-losses-not-in-north-d_b_34... and other places. I have not read Ellen Brown's book yet, though Jamie Walton's critique seems to be spot on.

Before President Bush left office, Representative Marcy Kaptur visited then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. and presented him with a list of all of the people in her district whose properties had been foreclosed. Although each page included four columns of names, the full list still stretched all the way down the steps of the Treasury Building to the street below when unfurled.

Kaptur was able to get the administration to form a task force composed of representatives from several agencies who were supposed to work with local stakeholders to address the foreclosure crisis.

Readers: This represents a somewhat different perspective and has some analytical flaws which I will comment on later. PROUT can be an adequate starting point for the transformation of economic practices. The point being made by this inclusion is that at least this position does not attempt to validate and justify oligarchy and greed which underlies much of the econo-theology of "Free Market" capitalism, imo.This article also comes from Venezuela, which is attempting to establish a 21st century socialism. What that goal implies or what the outcome will be is for a different time. Admin

Jail, anyone? Perhaps that’s too harsh, and at any rate premature, but is anyone ever going to be held accountable for the behind-the-scenes sweetheart deals that passed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through the AIG shell game to the very banks that caused the financial meltdown? Or for the many other acts of double-dealing that left one out of three American homeowners owing much more than their houses were worth while the folks who swindled them were rewarded with hundreds of billions in public money?