The U.S. banking industry is now acknowledging that, for all intents and purposes, they're massively gutting the consumer credit marketplace--making it virtually impossible for at least 2/3 of the population to obtain credit, at all. Meanwhile, efforts--planned and in place--to return credit liquidity to the public domain are being compared to pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

Very simply, banks are not cooperating--and they have no intention of cooperatiing either--with the government's plans; yet the government wants to give them (and a totally unregulated "shadow banking system") trillions more in coming days?

It's all right here: "Card Issuers Choke Firms With Rate Hikes, Limit Cuts."

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The true extent of the status quo's looting of U.S. taxpayers is about to be spelled out to the general public in black and white this week.  See: "Fed Program to Spur Loans May Start With Few Deals."

Over the next few days, this is all going to get very, very clear...at least to anyone that bothers to pay attention.

The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are "about to announce" (they've been talking about this for many months) a massive Wall Street "bad bank" plan that is, effectively, nothing more than a recycled, $2 trillion-plus, Bush administration taxpayer giveaway to the very entities and individuals that created our economic freak show in the first place. (And, we may have reached a tipping point where even the MSM may no longer be mincing words about these truths.) They are still spinning this like it's new information when little could be farther from the truth. See: "Geithner Says He'll Soon Offer Details on Toxic-Asset Cleanup."

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Yet again, Robert Kuttner,  economist and urban theorist, co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect Magazine, Boston Globe columnist and author of , "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency," nails it. In fact, perhaps this time, he delivers a grand slam homer in: "Geithner's Folly."

As Kuttner tells us:

President Obama deserves immense credit for being willing to spend serious money to prevent recession from becoming depression. He has resisted pressures from fiscal conservatives to put budget balance first, or to make social insurance bear the brunt of spending cuts down the road. And he has used his gifts as a teacher to enlist the broad support of the American people for a far-reaching strategy of public investment.

However, all of this good work will be for naught if his team doesn't get the banking system functioning again. And so far the grand design of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is entirely on the wrong track.

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Virtually Absolute Power
There is, perhaps, no entity within (and without) our government that is more powerful, unknown, misunderstood, and deliberately obfuscated from the public than the Federal Reserve System.

And, in fact, I would even go as far as to say that the House and Senate, arguably, have greater review powers and control over (and access to) our nation's intelligence agencies than they do over the Federal Reserve.

Proving my point: Here's perhaps one of the most pathetically absurd statements I've ever read relating to the absence of oversight that's led us into this abyss we're referring now to as "our nation's financial woes," from the "Government Regulation and Supervision" section of the Federal Reserve System page in Wikipedia. (See link in paragraph below it.) This is just rich:

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