Stop the Socialism for the Big Banks

I don’t envy President Obama. While I can take issue with some of his strategies – I believe we should get out of Afghanistan, for example, and he should stop compromising away real health care reform – I can appreciate just how monumental the task of turning this country around is.

Reforming health care? It’s only been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first campaigned in 1912 for it. As Obama told Congress on September 9th of this year, “I may not be the first president to tackle health care reform, but I intend to be the last.” A bold statement, to be sure, something Mr. Obama is very good at. But accomplishing that goal, even with majorities in both houses – as we are seeing – is something else altogether.

Add to that the job of recovering from the greatest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, and you’ve already got a Herculean task. And we haven’t even mentioned all the other sticky issues, like averting a climate crisis, nuclear proliferation, environmental challenges, etc.

One could say that dealing with health care reform just now might have been taking on too much, although it is urgently needed and with Democratic majorities, it seemed like a good time to take it on. But averting financial disaster was not a voluntary task, it was thrust upon the new president. Unfortunately, out of ignorance on the subject, or a blind faith in those in the top echelons of the financial industry, or for whatever reason, Obama chose to trust the wrong team to help him. Now he must recognize his error, and find a new team, and a new strategy. The country’s long term financial health, and even our democracy, depend on it.

In a October 9th interview on PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal with Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, she said, “What they’re doing is they’re taking their mistakes and they’re dumping them on the taxpayer... It’s all at risk because of their behavior. We aren’t reigning them in. The laws of Congress passed last year in terms of housing, were hollow... It’s socialism for the big banks.”

Referring to the president, she said, “I think some of the people that he trusted haven’t delivered. I urge him to get new [financial] generals. It’s time.”

I have to agree, and I’m very sorry Obama couldn’t see from the start that you can’t fix a broken system by hiring the people who broke it, and who are invested in bailing it out. But now that it’s completely obvious, it is time to get a new team in there. Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes, Mr. President, otherwise you’ll be just like the failed president before you.

Unfortunately, the opportunity inherent in the original crisis may have already slipped away. It may, in fact, be a nearly impossible task, but we’ve got to try. The financial sector needs fundamental reform, and it needs it now.

Senate Repubs Try to Stick It to the Unions

This whole bailout mess is getting to look more and more like a Faustian bargain. Our legislators are willing to take what some say already actually totals over $2 trillion (that's right, with a 'T') dollars from us, the taxpayers, and hand it over to the bums on Wall Street without nary a string attached, but when it comes to saving middle-class workers, they just say, "fuggetaboutit!"

Instead, Senators, mostly of the Republican stripe, are demanding concessions from unions before they will consider voting to bail out Detroit. This, after years and years of concessions the auto industry unions have already caved in to.

Now, I'm not for a no-strings-attached bailout of the Big 3 automakers either. There should be conditions. Like, they must use the money to phase into making all-electric (preferably) and hybrid (if we must) vehicles. And only if the automakers withdraw their many lawsuits against state governments (in attempts to dodge environmental laws). They could insist on new management that actually understands that the same ol', same ol' won't work.

But, no. They make their only demand that the union workers be reduced to the swelling ranks of the working poor. And unfortunately, the media seems to be going along with the charade, talking as if it is the unions that are holding up a Detroit bailout.

This is a travesty. The American worker and homeowner is precisely who we should be bailing out, not the CEOs, bankers and Wall Street sleazebag.

We can only hope Mr. Obama truly understands this, and that we can make it through until he can implement some needed changes.

Changing attitudes toward Wall Street expressed graphically

Yeah, my sentiments exactly...

Dems disappoint in political use of bailout

I'm deeply disappointed in the Democrats for passing the bailout bill in the form that they did. Once again, the majority party in Congress makes an important decision -- actually a momentous and hugely consequential decision, in this case -- and resorts to the politically expedient path instead of the correct one.

They did this mainly, I believe, because the Republicans initially voted against it, and by taking the opposite side, the Democrats could leverage their already strong advantage in the economic arena, and hammer the opposition with the criticism that they are hurting Americans by delaying the "rescue."

But the plan is a faulty one. It is a little better than what Treasury Secretary Paulson first proposed, but so what? Of course the Bush administration is going to take an extreme position, so that in the inevitable "compromise" they'll get more of what they want. Republicans are very good at that game. They've been doing it forever. However, compromising with an extremely bad bill results in just a very bad bill.

The "safeguards" that this celebrated "compromise" resulted in are not in any way sufficient. They rely on an oversight board picked by the president, for one thing. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said it best, in his speech on the floor regarding the final draft of the bailout bill:

"In the midst of all of this, we have a bailout package which says to the middle class that you are being asked to place at risk $700 billion, which is $2,200 for every man, woman, and child in this country. You're being asked to do that in order to undo the damage caused by this excessive Wall Street greed. In other words, the “Masters of the Universe,” those brilliant Wall Street insiders who have made more money than the average American can even dream of, have brought our financial system to the brink of collapse. Now, as the American and world financial systems teeter on the edge of a meltdown, these multimillionaires are demanding that the middle class, which has already suffered under Bush's disastrous economic policies, pick up the pieces that they broke. That is wrong, and that is something that I will not support.

"If we are going to bail out Wall Street, it should be those people who have caused the problem, those people who have benefited from Bush's tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, those people who have taken advantage of deregulation, those people are the people who should pick up the tab, and not ordinary working people. I introduced an amendment which gave the Senate a very clear choice. We can pay for this bailout of Wall Street by asking people all across this country, small businesses on Main Street, homeowners on Maple Street, elderly couples on Oak Street, college students on Campus Avenue, working families on Sunrise Lane, we can ask them to pay for this bailout. That is one way we can go. Or, we can ask the people who have gained the most from the spasm of greed, the people whose incomes have been soaring under president bush, to pick up the tab.

"I proposed to raise the tax rate on any individual earning $500,000 a year or more or any family earning $1 million a year or more by 10 percent. That increase in the tax rate, from 35 percent to 45 percent, would raise more than $300 billion in the next five years, almost half the cost of the bailout. If what all the supporters of this legislation say is correct, that the government will get back some of its money when the market calms down and the government sells some of the assets it has purchased, then $300 billion should be sufficient to make sure that 99.7 percent of taxpayers do not have to pay one nickel for this bailout."

The Ronald Reagan era is over, and if it's not, it's a shriveled up, slimy grotesque bottom-feeding swamp thing that deserves to be, to turn Grover Norquist's meaning around, "drowned in a bathtub." The only "trickling down" that's been happening is the rich pissing on the poor (and the middle class). What we need now is some "trickle UP" economics.

We need a new New Deal. That's "trickle-up" economics, and it has already proven itself. By creating programs to foster the type of economic growth we really need, we can at once solve many pressing problems AND put people to work. Right away, the economy would get back on its feet. For what IS the economy, if not fundamentally a function of how the population is doing in it's exchange of goods and labor?

Right away, people would have more to spend, as neighbors and relatives get work in the new green industries which would flourish with a little boost from the government. Right-wingers can no longer frighten people with the charge of "socialism" when it comes to these types of programs -- sorry, not after you cried so hard for $700 billion for your big-buck buddies. No, investing in our infrastructure will not "socialize" the country into a bunch of mindless commie reds -- it will simply be an investment -- remember that word? -- in ourselves, in our nation.

Now that the bill has passed, Congress must not allow our $700 billion to be squandered away by Paulson and his Wall Street money "experts." We must hold most of it back, until we get some sane leadership back in the White House, by electing Barack Obama. At that point, Obama must, I repeat, must, free himself from the old economic policies still held by his unfortunate pick of economic advisers, and, in his own words, "do the right thing" with our money.

Maybe then, we can finally, for real, "get the country back on track."

NOW we're talking!!!

“Simply purchasing bad debt, ‘cash for trash’ and not receiving anything of value or giving $700 billion and not having a commensurate equity interest in Wall Street firms is unacceptable,” Dennis Kucinich said in a news release Monday. “No ‘cash for trash.’”

The former Democratic presidential candidate said he would be introducing a bill this week to create a “United States Mutual Trust Fund” to convert assets purchased by the government into shares that would be distributed to every man, woman and child in the country. Every American would receive about $2,300 worth of shares because that is the cost of the bailout package to each individual, Kucinich said.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_No_cash_for_trash_give_0922.html

GOP got their wish -- Gov't drowned in a bathtub

Conservatives got their wish: over the years since the Reagan administration -- admittedly helped along by Clinton -- they managed to squeeze government down small enough to "drown in a bathtub," as conservative Grover Norquist put it. The financial regulatory function of the government has been moribund for some time now.

Well, staring us in the face is the awesome and terrible result.

And now we're supposed to take John McCain's word for it that, after 26 years of complete and utter allegiance to the philosophy of deregulation -- proudly proclaimed from his own lips many times -- he knows best how to create a just, sane, orderly, fair-to-the-taxpayer structure of regulation out of the pile of rubble and dust that he, his economic guru Phil "You Bunch of Whiners" Gramm, and his team of die-hard deregulation-loving lobbyists have left us? Uh-uh. I don't think so.

The whole conservative philosophy of "getting government out of the way, so that the private sector can do what it wants, because the market will correct and police itself," is today totally bankrupt. It was already proven to be a bankrupt philosophy back in 1929. Back then, it required Roosevelt's New Deal to repair the financial devastation left behind, and it will require an even Newer Deal now.

All along the way, we have seen examples showing us that lack of regulation is disastrous in a capitalist system, but we allowed these clowns to remain in control of the levers of power anyway. So, they continued to make it easy for greedy slimeballs to take advantage of the lack of oversight. And when their behavior caused a major problem? Government bailout to the rescue!

The same government they had been trying to drown in a bathtub the whole time. "Privatize the gains, but socialize the losses." That's their real, unspoken, philosophy. Meaning the government picks up the tab for their high-risk and unethical behavior.

But wait! Who is this benevolent parent that always has enough to save the day? Why it's us -- we're the government, remember -- and it's our pockets these greedy bastards are picking every time their get-rich-as-quick-as-possible schemes implode.

Sure, something has to be done. But does that mean we rush a bill through on the say so of the president, no matter what? (Isn't that the same thing Bush did with the war and then the Patriot Act?) Does it mean we give total control over to his administration to do what they will with obscene piles of cash that are supposed to materialize out of thin air, and without any oversight? That's what Treasury Secretary Paulson demands. Yes, he has the gall to actually DEMAND it!

If this whole scene weren't so outrageously obscene, it would be funny.

But think about it, this whole mess could be an opportunity. Just as the Chinese word weiji, translated as "crisis," is composed of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity," we could, if we were a people worth our salt, use this crisis as an opportunity to completely revamp the financial system. The time is ripe, and if ever the people were ready for effective change, it is now.

But fear and ignorance will likely prevail instead. Fear of change, and general civilian ignorance of the depth and breadth of the problem and its systemic nature. The entire banking system is corrupt to the core, because it is founded on the Federal Reserve system, which is actually unconstitutional, and antithetical to everything the founders stood for.

It is a private central bank, despite the word 'federal' so deviously included in its title, when it was drafted by a group of the world's most powerful bankers on an island of the coast of Georgia in 1913. Later passed when most lawmakers were out of town in the dead of night near the holidays that year, it obliterated Article I, section 8 of the constitution, which gives Congress the power "To coin money [and] regulate the value thereof." Instead, the Federal Reserve Act let the private bankers start printing the money and regulating its value.

That is an enormous power. It has made the banking families stinking rich, and has slowly put our nation into previously undreamt of amounts of debt.

That act needs to be repealed. Call me radical -- this crisis calls for a radical solution, or we become China's property, basically.

After we abolish the Fed, and the government (that's us) regains the power of the purse, we set up a sane financial regulatory system. Then we freeze the assets of those in the financial sector who made off like bandits, and sort out what is ill-gotten gains, and do our best to return that money to where it came from.

We immediately institute a tax on offshored businesses, and steadily increase the rate of that tax, to give a powerful incentive to keep our nation's business at home, and our own people employed.

Then, we forgive all debt. Wipe the slate clean. Everyone gets their houses back, and the economy is instantly back on an even footing. We can all flourish once again.

Socialism? A dose, perhaps, temporarily. As are the bailouts these financial titans want -- only their brand of socialism -- corporate socialism -- is only for them, not the general population.

Insane? Could be. But I'd argue that a continuation of the present system is what's insane. After all, insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results.

Sure, some will get hurt worse than others in this scheme. But no one will be in too bad of shape, as they will not be in debt. Some financial "wizards" of the present system may have to find new jobs, but hey -- they didn't mind telling that to all the people put out of work in their globalization schemes.

With the so-called "pillars" of our economy falling like dominoes, what have we got to lose?

We have national pride, and a sane, prosperous society, to gain.