Interesting history of the pressures and difficulties of being Fannie Mae from the New York Times.

Shortly after he became chief executive, Mr. Mudd traveled to the California offices of Angelo R. Mozilo, the head of Countrywide Financial, then the nation’s largest mortgage lender. Fannie had a longstanding and lucrative relationship with Countrywide, which sold more loans to Fannie than anyone else.

But at that meeting, Mr. Mozilo, a butcher’s son who had almost single-handedly built Countrywide into a financial powerhouse, threatened to upend their partnership unless Fannie started buying Countrywide’s riskier loans.

Mr. Mozilo, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, told Mr. Mudd that Countrywide had other options. For example, Wall Street had recently jumped into the market for risky mortgages. Firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs had started bundling home loans and selling them to investors — bypassing Fannie and dealing with Countrywide directly.

“You’re becoming irrelevant,” Mr. Mozilo told Mr. Mudd, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential. In the previous year, Fannie had already lost 56 percent of its loan-reselling business to Wall Street and other competitors.

“You need us more than we need you,” Mr. Mozilo said, “and if you don’t take these loans, you’ll find you can lose much more.”

Then Mr. Mozilo offered everyone a breath mint.

Read the whole thing, and then see whether you think it was Fannie Mae or the greedy managers of Wall Street who drove Fannie into the mud.

During the early days of the financial meltdown, the news was that Wells Fargo Bank was set to acquire teetering Wachovia, but those reports were overshadowed by the news that the FDIC had brokered a deal with Citigroup for the acquisition.

If you read beyond the smear headlines that seem to dominate every major news source, you’ll discover the following:

• The brokered deal by the FDIC would have Citigroup acquiring Wachovia for $1/share, down from over $4/share a year ago.
• Citigroup’s offer only included the banking operation
• The offer by Wells Fargo was for $7/share and included all operations of the company.
• Wells Fargo has long been interested in expanding its presence to be competitive with Bank of America on the national banking landscape. An acquisition of Wachovia opens the door for them to become competitive while sparing the government $42 billion dollars of absorbed losses.
• A Wells Fargo acquisition protects employees who hold shares of Wachovia in their retirement accounts from huge losses.

On its face, it would seem that a Wells Fargo acquisition of Wachovia is a far superior solution to the fire sale brokered by the FDIC.

Now both deals are mired in expensive, urgent litigation. As of this writing, New York State Supreme Court justice Charles E. Ramos had blocked the Wells Fargo merger. That injunction was lifted by an appeals court a few hours ago.

Meanwhile, the FDIC frets that other deals might not happen because…

The litigation could put regulators in a tough spot. The Wells Fargo deal may be better for taxpayers, but if it succeeds, in the future other financial institutions may not be willing to help the government, as Citigroup did, because of the risk that they might not reap the anticipated benefit.

I’ve heard this before. Specifically with respect to AT&T and illegal wiretaps. Where the Bush administration urged Congress to give immunity because otherwise there was no incentive for companies to cooperate.

Have you ever heard such bogus logic? The Citigroup deal was so sweet it was nearly saccharine. What more incentive would they have needed? The fact that the “benefit” to Citi would have come at the expense of employees and individual shareholders seems to carry no weight. Just as the Bush Administration’s whine about AT&T’s non-cooperation was bogus, given that they were operating under court orders and all…

I have never in my life seen such wanton greed and corruption displayed for the world to see. Let’s hope voters are keeping their eyes open.

This is disappointing.

The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors approved a measure Tuesday to support offshore oil drilling, decades after an infamous 1969 oil spill coated the coastline and spawned the modern environmental movement.

I was shocked to read this. Seriously shocked. Santa Barbara has long been a stalwart opponent of offshore drilling and Rep. Lois Capps has been an outspoken opponent of the current push for it. So what was the Board of Supervisors thinking?

Turns out the vote was 3-2 on a largely symbolic action, since the city has no say in the matter. However, it appears that the almighty dollar has overtaken principle:

Supervisor Brooks Firestone, who co-wrote the request for a letter, wanted assurances from oil industry representatives that, because of modern advancements in drilling, such a spill would not occur again. Firestone’s family leases land to an inland oil drilling company that has struggled with spills, and last year he voted with the board majority in support of a federal moratorium on drilling.

“I don’t believe a spill of that magnitude could occur,” answered John Deacon, who has worked for various oil companies and now represents Tracer Environmental Sciences and Technologies.

This is one time where the term “flip-flopper” intended in the most derogatory fashion is applicable.

The horsemen of the apocalypse are on the hunt. Here’s the latest news on the pale horses of death: ExxonMobil, Total, Chevron, Shell, et al who have been given preferential treatment and no-bid contract opportunities to service Iraq’s oil fields. (Remember this?)

The NY Times reports:

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

By now there’s probably very little doubt in anyone’s mind about the evil living in the White House. But this should make us all choke on our $4.50/gallon gas.

And the Bush/McCain diversion? Offshore domestic drilling, endorsed by flip-floppers Bush and McCain.

Here’s a rhetorical question. After George W. Bush and his merry band of neocons have raped us all for the last 8 years and now do it again without the benefit of even a kiss, do you think it wise to allow them to rape our natural resources here in the US for…oh…another 50 years or so? 100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years?

Just like McCain’s fake gas tax holiday, the call for domestic offshore drilling is just another invitation for the American people to bend over and take it quietly.

Seriously, there is much more to say about this, but for now, just let the brazen, wanton greed of our current Administration and their chosen successor to sink in. Breathe the stench. Be as disgusted as you want, and then feel free to copy this and email it to your friends with the title “Bush/Cheney into rape and incest. Will McCain follow suit?”

Let it go viral.

On Thursday’s NewsGang Live, Rob LaGesse made the rather sweeping pronouncement that we were “much better off today than we were 30 years ago.” I disagreed. I also thought he had a rather arrogant idea of what people could and could not do when it came to picking up and moving from an economically disadvantaged area to one that was experiencing growth.

He compared such a migration to the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930’s. At the time, I didn’t have the words or the heart to educate him on what hell most of those migrants went through. Today, their children and grandchildren do indeed have better lives than their parents, but they are in danger of losing that once again to the greed and avarice of our time.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders asked his constituents to write letters telling him about how their lives have changed. These are not letters from the poor and destitute. They are letters from the middle class — the people who live next door or across the street from most of us. I plan to publish a few of these over time here on the blog.

If you have a story and are willing to share, I will compile those too, in a category called, appropriately enough, “Letters from the Middle Class.” Yes, we have computers today, and we have TVs, and we have some comforts that weren’t around when we were young. But over the last 8 years, our quality of life has deteriorated nonetheless. People are losing their homes. Even Ed McMahon is facing foreclosure.

This is the product of a government whose primary philosophy has been “Keep it all for the rich, conquer the innocent, and above all, do not share.” While leaving the middle class to sink, this government has bailed out Bear Stearns, allowed corrupt brokerage and mortgage brokers to prosper, and lost track of 7.8 billion dollars in Iraq. Imagine what that same 8 billion dollars could have done to help the people who wrote to Senator Sanders.

When you hear the right wing characterize Barack Obama’s presidency as “dangerous”, understand that danger to them is not the same as danger to us. Danger, as it’s understood by the right-wing money-hackers, means that someone besides their friends and corporate pimps have opportunities. Their goal is to make things better for THEM. That’s not service, folks.

It’s also not leadership you can count on. Consider John McCain’s close relationship to the author of the current mortgage crisis, Phil Gramm, who walks hand in hand with John McCain, shaping his economic policies.

This, ‘my friends’, is one reason McCain is running for a third Bush term. It’s not leadership you can count on, it’s the systematic marginalization of the middle class.

Here’s some change you can believe in. But you won’t get it from McCain or the Republicans.