.. dragged a comb across my head ...
.. turned the radio on: shock! Horror!
-=*=-
The Dummos are caving in - as forecast, adding their milquetoast caveats.
The $US700bio is practically jumping straight into the Beagle Boys' pockets.
It's hard to imagine a bigger failure - except for a 1929-style crash and following depression, which so far we just don't have.
Sure, there's turbulence in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate), but that has hardly impacted the day-to-day sheople®, although the threat of superannuation funds 'evaporating' probably is biting. The sheople actually expect the stock market to crash every so often - that's an easy one, because that's exactly what happens. More shock, horror, and note a word now often deployed in conjunction with the current crisis: bet.
But: the markets were obviously defective - because why else would the neoliberals have deregulated them?
The deregulated markets allowed fraud to bloom, stealing from the cash-flow and enriching the clever-dick 'masters of the (finance) universe.'
Note: the now deregulated markets are also obviously defective - proof is the current crisis.
Q: how would you like your markets next? A: The markets, deregulated and regulated both, failed. The fact that markets crash, whatever their regulatory status, is - um, err - rather telling, eh? That pretty-well removes 'the market' argument, like toadally. Sooo, where (the bloody hell) is their ideology?
The proposed solution is to steal even more, this time direct from the sheople - $US700bio or so (final bill nowhere near in sight); goodly percentages of which will go straight to the same (criminal!) 'masters of the (finance) universe.'
And most probably (like night follows day), the Dummos will be blamed; it's the old-style wedge, damned etc.
-=*=-
Monday, September 22, 2008
For The Record
I called it first.
-Atrios 23:19
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_09_21_archive.html#8905305475796506073
And Because It's So Obvious
If the Democrats pass this piece of shit, look for Republican challengers to run against them on it.
-Atrios 15:23
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_09_21_archive.html#6220077789091439706
Smack Down
09.22.08 -- 7:45PM By Josh Marshall
I think Kos, Digby and Kilgore have this about right. The Republican/McCain plan is to get the Democrats to bail out the GOP's Wall Street friends and then run against them for doing it.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/218880.php
2008/09/25
woke up, fell out'a bed ...
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G'day Phil, there has been a breakthrough in the debate over the bailout ... from Chris Floyd.
The crisis of Wall Street's financial meltdown has demonstrated, once again, that although the Bush Faction thugs are criminals, killers, torturers, and thieves, without even the slightest competence in governing, they remain brilliant political tacticians. They may be willfully ignorant and brutally stupid in almost every other area, but when it comes to advancing their own narrow interests -- at the expense of the political opposition -- their low cunning cannot be denied.
Just look how they have made the Democratic leadership the face of the Administration's bailout plan -- which is perhaps the most virulently unpopular government action in the last 100 years. This unconscionable giveaway to the greedy rich was cooked up in the poison kitchen of the Oval Office, long before the late summer collapses that triggered the public crisis -- yet at every turn, before every camera, who do we see fighting hard for the plan? Why, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, front and center, day after day, talking it up, defending the President and his wise counselor, the rapacious Wall Street profiteer Henry Paulson. When the bailout goes through, and ordinary Americans see that their own lives and livelihoods are still collapsing all around them, who are they going to blame? Why, the Democrats, of course.
As usual -- as always -- the Democrats have handed their ostensible opponents a razor-sharp sword. You can hear it now: "That radical liberal feminist from San Francisco, that stubby little Massachusetts homo -- they're the ones who did this to you! Liberals and Jews and homos, they've stabbed you in the back again!"
As always, this message will be sponsored by the very Wall Street wolves which the Democrats are now falling all over themselves to save. The Democratic sell-out will, once again, be used to discredit any notion of ameliorating the most savage effects of unrestricted corporate power: "See what happens when them libruls monkey with the free market?" Just as soon as the biggest fraudsters and grafters behind the meltdown have filled their coffers with enough taxpayer loot to feel safe again, the extremist sect of "free market fundamentalism" will raise its banner over Wall Street -- and Washington -- once again.
Round and round and round they spin ...
G'day Phil, the House has voted down the bailout bill 205 Yea, 228 Nay. The sky hasn't fallen but the stock market did. From DemocracyNow! an interview with Dennis Kucinich. Their second story is sort of "what would FDR do?".
From Kucinich segment:
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I said we’re the Congress of the United States; we’re not the board of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is struggling to survive. And, you know, their former chief is now the head of the US Treasury. He’s in a position to be able to direct assets in a way that would help enhance his own financial standing. I mean, that’s a clear conflict of interest. And, you know, that’s something that needs to be said. You know, why are we permitting the person who has essentially been in a position where he’s managed assets that—you know, many of which are now in trouble, and he can come back and help clear the books for a lot of his friends? This is wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong. And, you know, it’s one of the things that adds a degree of stench to this.
From FDR:
This is an excerpt of FDR’s inaugural speech on March 4, 1933.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. […]
We face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. […] The withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side. Farmers find no markets for their produce. And the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment. […]
Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. […]
Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. […]
This nation is asking for action, and action now. […]
There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments. There must be an end to speculation with other people’s money. And there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.
These, my friends, are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the forty-eight states.
In the current situation fear has been used to try to garner support for putting the moneylenders in charge (unaccountsbly) of fixing the mess they made in the wake of the removal of safeguards. But generating fear has been the Bush Administration's stock in trade.
Now to Gleen Greenwald, who begins thinking the bailout will pass.
The blame game.
It took only a few minutes for the blame game to begin. Moments after the House failed to pass the $700 billion bailout plan, the Republican leaders--who could not produce the expected number of Republican votes for the legislation--came before the cameras with an explanation for the bill's collapse: a speech Nancy Pelosi gave.
House minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters that prior to the 228-to-205 vote everything was hunky-dory. Then the House Speaker delivered a "partisan speech" before the floor vote began. This, Boehner said, "poisoned our conference and caused a number of members we thought we could get to go south." Representative Eric Cantor, a member of the Republican leadership, held up a transcript of Pelosi's speech and decried her "failure to lead."
Some have odd priorities.
Mike Whitney.
Quite a conclusion. And to conclude this post - David Sirota with 5 reasons the bill should fail to pass ... and lots of comments.
Perhaps before any further vote and amid the spin their is some serious consideration as to other ways to deal with the situation.
And consider this, not exactly a novel approach.
And what has Chris Floyd have to say?
The vote by the House of Representatives to defeat the Wall Street bailout plan is the first act of political courage that the Congress of the United States has mounted in the last seven years. The fact that it was due largely to right-wing Republicans afraid of going down with the sinking ship of the witless leader they have followed blindly throughout his reign is a delicious irony -- but the whys and wherefores of the vote are not important. What matters is that one of America's moribund institutions has flickered to life long enough to derail a disastrous action that would have shoved the nation even deeper into the pit of corruption and ruin where it has been mired for so long.
The New York Times called the House vote "a catastrophic political defeat for President Bush, who had put the full weight of the White House behind the measure." But this is manifestly untrue. As everyone but the nation's media -- and the Democratic Party -- knows, George W. Bush has no "political weight" to use, or lose. Yes, he still retains the authoritarian powers that the spineless Democrats have given him with scarcely a whimper of protest (and often with boundless enthusiasm); but as a political force -- i.e., someone whose opinions and statements can sway popular opinion -- he has been a dead and rotting carcass for a long time. He is the most unpopular president in American history; and I can report from first-hand, eyewitness knowledge that he is thoroughly despised by some of the most rock-ribbed, Bible-believing, flag-waving, down-home, John Wayne-loving Heartland types that you can imagine. Even his own party -- a party fashioned in his own image, the Frankensteinian melding of willfully ignorant religious primitivism and rapaciously greedy crony capitalism that he has embodied in his twerpish person -- kept him away from their convention this year.
Just for starters.
G'day Phil, for once some representatives listened to those they are supposed to represent. Glenn Greenwald.
Retired New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, writing at The New Republic yesterday, makes a critical point, in a piece entitled "Celebrating the Bailout Bill's Failure":
Whether you favor the $700 billion bailout or not, the House vote today should make you cheer -- loudly.
Why?
Because the majority vote against it shows that Washington is not entirely in the service of the political donor class, by which I mean Wall Street and the corporations who rely on it for their financing. These campaign donors, a narrow slice of America, have lobbied and donated their way into a system that stacks the economic rules in their favor. But faced with as many as 200 telephone calls against the bailout for every one in favor, a lot of House members decided to listen to their constituents today instead of their campaign donors.
It might not last but it was refreshing.
And from Dave Lindorff.
And William Greider.
Jammed switchboards, quite a few people smell a rat .. or a number of very wealthy ones.
G'day Bob,
.. be interesting to see if 'sheople® power' can force their so-called representatives into making any meaningful change to 'the bailout.' (Dragnet theme…)
Y'can see the viewpoint of anyone 'doing it tough,' seeing $US700bio(!!?) go to the already obscenely rich fat-cats - the exact same fat-cats who actually *caused* the mess.
A bit'a sheople-success might lead to them giving a harder push.
For another view, try this:
«Stop the Bailout
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
It was the singular achievement of Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression to have demonstrated that the Great Depression was a crisis manufactured and prolonged by the attempts to stop an inevitable downturn. The policy response – creating more money, propping up prices, ginning up employment, and a host of other devices – took a stock-market price collapse and a banking liquidation and spread the mess throughout every sector of the economy. What might have lasted a year to 18 months instead lasted 16 years.
At the time, Ludwig von Mises tried to warn against intervention. See his Causes of the Economic Crisis. So did F.A. Hayek. See his Prices and Production. So did Lord Robbins. See his book The Great Depression.»
[lewrockwell.com]
Of course, there's more there for anyone who's interested; that's only the start of the article.
G'day, something for Congress to think about - an alternate bill.
Perhaps the rush was to try to prevent that sort of thing happening.
Pam Martens - "What Wall Street Hoped To Win."
George Monbiot on corporate welfare.
And the word "socialism" is still being used.
G'day Phil, this might raise a smile - a picture is worth a thousand words.
G'day Phil, there is time to have a proper examination of the situation.
Joseph Stiglitz.
The champagne bottle corks were popping as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced his trillion-dollar bailout for the banks, buying up their toxic mortgages. To a skeptic, Paulson's proposal looks like another of those shell games that Wall Street has honed to a fine art. Wall Street has always made money by slicing, dicing and recombining risk. This "cure" is another one of these rearrangements: somehow, by stripping out the bad assets from the banks and paying fair market value for them, the value of the banks will soar.
There is, however, an alternative explanation for Wall Street's celebration: the banks realized that they were about to get a free ride at taxpayers' expense. No private firm was willing to buy these toxic mortgages at what the seller thought was a reasonable price; they finally had found a sucker who would take them off their hands -- called the American taxpayer.
Then his suggested approach.
Robert Scheer.
Joshua Holland with a roundup of views.
Taking advantage of a crisis .. or manufacturing one to exploit the opportunities it creates? This has been a matter of much discussion. But for present purposes a subject for Glenn Greenwald ....
With apologies and regrets to Ed "Captain Ed" Morrissey, whose well-deserved "Funniest Blog Post Ever" crown is being snatched away after such a tragically short period of time, this observation today, from National Review's Mark Levin, will be hard to top for many years to come, even by the most imaginative right-wing satirists:
The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution's limits on governmental power. If conservatives don't stand up to this, who will? If they don't offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will?
Indeed. I wish those liberals would stop exploiting crises in order to expand the power of Government at the expense of the individual, but I sure am grateful that our nation is teeming with stalwart conservatives who defiantly stand up to those erosions, because if they didn't, who would? You can read all about the conservatives' heroic stance in defense of our Founding Principles over the last eight years, and their epic struggle to battle against the Left's exploitation of crises in order to "expand the power of government at the expense of the individual," in numerous books, including this one, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage:
In 2006, I also wrote a deeply admiring book chronicling the Right's historic crusade in defense of core Constitutional liberties, as the American Left relentlessly sought during the Bush presidency to exploit the 9/11 attack, Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds, the evil labs of Mrs. Anthrax and Dr. Germ (the Five of Hearts in the U.S. Government's deck of playing cards), Sinister Sleeper Cells lurking on every neighborhood playground, the revolving door of New Hitlers, and so many other crises -- real or imagined -- in order to expand federal government power at the expense of the individual.
An American with a sense of irony examining those who don't have one.
G'day Phil, the Senate has passed the bailout bill.
One Senator had voiced his objections.
A bad deal.
And, more from Glenn Greenwald. This details some oh so familiar tactics.
Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein has spent the week insisting that only gross ignorance could account for opposition to the Paulson bailout. After the House rejected the bailout plan on Monday, he wrote a column -- entitled "They Just Don't Get It" -- arguing that bailout opponents simply "don't understand the seriousness of the situation." He scoffed at the idea that any well-informed person could question -- let alone oppose -- the specific Paulson bailout plan Steve Pearlstein favors.
We've seen that approach. And has GG goes into detail there will be that familiarity becoming so obvious. There must be a school for mindless ranting.
G'day Phil, and now formally submitted from Tomdispatch Steve Fraser on Wall Street,the place Americans love to hate.
Wall Street sits at the eye of a political hurricane. Its enemies converge from every point on the compass. What a stunning turn of events.
For well more than half a century Wall Street has enjoyed a remarkable political immunity, but matters were not always like that. Now, with history marching forward in seven league boots, we are about to revisit a time when the Street functioned as the country's lightning rod, attracting its deepest animosities and most passionate desires for economic justice and democracy.
For the better part of a century, from the 1870s through the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the specter of Wall Street haunted the popular political imagination. For Populists it was the "Great Satan," its stranglehold over the country's credit system being held responsible for driving the family farmer to the edge of extinction and beyond.
Joseph Stiglitz on DemocracyNow!
Paul Craig Roberts.
A quickie, food for thought:
1, already pointed to by Bob:
October 1, 2008 at 19:43:56
Don't Make Working People Bail Out Wall Street
by Bernie Sanders
[opednews/Bernie Sanders]
2. October 3 - 5, 2008
Bail Out the Homeowners!
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
[counterpunch/roberts]
3, pointed to by (2) with wrong URL:
The Trickle-Up Bailout
By Jonathan G.S. Koppell and William N. Goetzmann
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
[WP/Koppell & Goetzmann]
Enjoy - or not; your choice.
Doom & gloom - or salvation?
I posted my 'quickie' on 2008/10/04 at 03:19.
Then this:
US approves $840b Wall St bailout deal
Posted October 4, 2008 04:44:00
«The United States House of Representatives has approved a revised $840 billion Wall Street bailout, bowing to intense pressure to help avert a global economic meltdown.»
-=*=-
A bailout, penned by a Beagle Boy. One of the same 'masters of the universe' that actually created the problem.
This blog is called "¡no more of the same!" for good reasons.
G'day Phil, the swindle is now official ... I get concerned when I see the CC so pleased .. so here come some reactions ...
Chris Floyd.
You've seen the news. You know the score. The House of Representatives has now completed the economic terrorist attack inflicted on the American people by the nation's elite.
The bailout bill -- or as Arthur Silber more rightly terms it, the "Extortion Bill" -- is already law, thanks to the Democrats in Congress, and to Barack Obama, who spent the day working the phones and twisting arms to make sure the $700 billion bonanza for the filthy rich passed without any more of the hiccups that held it up earlier this week.
The plan that Obama made his own -- despite its origins in the poison kitchen of the Bush White House -- is far worse than the version voted down on Monday. Every reputable economic expert says that the plan is unworkable; it will not solve the problems at the root of the current economic crisis, but will only make them worse. It entrenches many of the fraudulent practices that led to the meltdown in the first place, and rewards the perpetrators for their misdeeds with a gargantuan amount of public money, which they can now use to carry on largely as before, albeit with a few new toothless "oversight" mechanisms operated by their own Wall Street cronies, and their bribed-and-bought hirelings on Capitol Hill.
There were many viable, reasonable, eminently centrist alternatives to the radical, plutocratic Bush-Obama scam -- alternatives which would have been politically palatable to a broad spectrum of the electorate. One of the best ones of this ilk that I've seen was outlined in the eminently mainstream Washington Post earlier this week by two eminently respectable Yale economists. (You can find it here.) There were many other such practical and effective plans offered by reputable experts, any one of which could have gone a long way toward protecting ordinary citizens now exposed by the meltdown, supporting the banks, and stabilizing the markets -- all without effecting one of the largest single redistributions of wealth since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.
None of these plans were considered or debated or even mentioned, not even for a single moment, by the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. Instead, they joined the Republican leadership and the Bush Administration in repeating, over and over, the Big Lie that there was NO OTHER CHOICE but some basic version of the unworkable Bush plan. The Democrats -- led by Barack Obama -- not only threw a political lifeline to the most despised president in American history (in the middle of an election year!), they deliberately took ownership of a measure widely rejected by the American public -- a class war weapon of mass destruction whose malign effects will reverberate through American society for years, perhaps generations to come.
They rushed it through ... and showed no interest in discussing alternatives ...
David Sirota.
The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair -- stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
As a financial crisis became a political panic, capitalism murdered democracy (ironically, while pursuing a vaguely socialist bailout). Only, unlike a typical horror story, the dead body wasn't hidden, it was dumped in the nation's public square.
The fiasco started, like most, with unreasonable demands. Under threat of financial meltdown, capitalism's corporate lobbyists asked our democracy to forsake its usual deliberations and hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money in less than a week.
Many were surprised when democracy responded with such valiant defiance. As television screens split between the floors of the stock exchange and the House of Representatives, lawmakers initially voted with their constituents and against the bailout.
That's when this husband-and-wife argument escalated into a grisly crime of passion.
CNN's Ali Velshi frothed that "the banks and the companies don't care about the intricacies" of democratic deliberations. A CEO angrily told CNN that "the money is being held hostage to the political process" -- as if government resources are rightfully Wall Street's. And as the Dow tanked, the Chamber of Commerce threatened retribution against recalcitrant lawmakers.
The final deathblow came from TINA, shorthand for "There Is No Alternative" -- the motto that Margaret Thatcher used to peddle her corporatism, and that Washington and Wall Street used to promote theirs.
But there were alternatives, as has been shown.
Paul Craig Roberts.
Is the Paulson bailout itself as big a fraud as the leveraged subprime mortgages?
Yesterday, here on CounterPunch, I discussed the bailout as proposed and noted that the proposal cannot succeed if it impairs the US Treasury’s credit standing and/or the combination of mark-to-market and short-selling permits short-sellers to prosper by driving more financial institutions into bankruptcy.
A reader’s comment and an article by Yale professors Jonathan Kopell and William Goetzmann raise precisely this question of the fraudulence of the Paulson package.
As one reader put it,“We have debt at three different levels: personal household debt, financial sector debt and public debt. The first has swamped the second and now the second is being made to swamp the third. The attitude of our leaders is to do nothing about the first level of debt and to pretend that the third level of debt doesn't matter at all.”
The argument for the bailout is that the banks will be free of the troubled instruments and can resume lending and that the US Treasury will recover most of the bailout costs, because only a small percentage of the underlying mortgages are bad. Let’s examine this argument.
In actual fact, the Paulson bailout does not address the core problem. It only addresses the problem for the financial institutions that hold the troubled assets. Under the bailout plan, the troubled assets move from the banks’ books to the Treasury’s. But the underlying problem--the continuing diminishment of mortgage and home values--remains and continues to worsen.
Note: the correct link to the Kopell/Goetzmann article. Thanks Phil.
We have nothing but fear mongering from the CC.
Keep 'em frightened ... and compliant.
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