Deregulation Destroys

    The last sentence of the editorial below — “The hard work of establishing and enforcing the regulations that are needed for a truly trustworthy financial system, still lies ahead.” — is a major reason — along with the integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court, preserving the U.S. Constitution, women’s rights and equality, and ‘bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ — to vote for Barack Obama. McCain is not just hand-in-glove with the architects of the current mess — deregulating the mortgage, credit, energy and banking industries — he’s one of them. Now he’s morphed himself into a born-again populist, railing with self-righteous outrage against policies he supported and helped put in place. And he has campaign advisors and staff that include not just Mr. Deregulation himself, Phil Gramm, but six other uber-lobbyists who carried and still carry McCain’s and Gramm’s water. Wholesale deregulation has never benefited anyone except the plutocrats.
     Sen. Obama’s call for ‘Main Street’ not to get lost in the rush to rescue ‘Wall Street’ is right on and what the people (not a bad word) of this country need.

September 20, 2008
Editorial

Hard Truths About the Bailout
 

 

The fifth major federal bailout this year — after Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the American International Group — is now in the works. Taxpayers have every right to be alarmed and angry. The latest plan is not necessarily a bad one, and officials had to move quickly to prevent credit markets from seizing up.But make no mistake, this crisis could have been avoided if regulators had enforced rules and officials had dared to question risky lending and other dubious practices.

If done right, this bailout could succeed where the others have failed and remove the threat of a systemwide financial collapse. But the upfront cost will be enormous. So will the risk of losses in the long run — on top of the risks already incurred.

The new plan would commit taxpayer money to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of troubled loans and other mortgage-related securities from banks and Wall Street firms. It is based on the reasonable premise that as long as institutions are stuck with those assets, the flow of credit, the economy’s lifeblood, will be constrained, or as in the past week, all but frozen.

Congress, with one eye on this week’s volatile Dow and the other on November’s election, could authorize the plan as early as next week.

It is painfully clear that the financial system will not rebound on its own from the excessive lending and borrowing of the Bush years and the credit collapse in their wake. The one-bailout-at-a-time approach hasn’t worked. And modest steps are no longer an option.

Lawmakers and administration officials must be prepared to tell Americans the full, hard truths about this plan:

¶ What is this going to cost the taxpayers and who decides? It’s generally believed that many of the troubled assets that the government would buy will, in time, be worth more than they can fetch in today’s chaotic markets. That’s far from a sure thing. The assets are tied to housing, so their value will depend on how far prices fall, how many people end up defaulting and how long it takes before housing rebounds — all big unknowns.

For those reasons, it’s important for Americans to know who is going to decide what is the right purchase price for these assets. Wall Street will have a role, of course, but outside experts should be allowed to analyze the results. Americans also need to know how the process will be monitored to ensure that taxpayers’ interests are protected. If the government gets the price right, the upfront outlay could be recouped when it later sells. If it overpays, the taxpayer is stuck with the loss.

¶ How will Congress balance the bailout of Wall Street and the needs on Main Street? If financial markets stabilize, all Americans will benefit. But Congress must do more to provide direct help to struggling American families. Lawmakers should use the bailout legislation to also extend unemployment benefits, bolster food stamps and provide aid to state and local governments to provide health care and other services that are especially important during tough times.

¶ The administration and lawmakers also need to tell Americans that the era of cheap and easy money is over and that there are more tough times to come. Whose taxes will have to go up? How will the government help to create the jobs of the future? How will the most vulnerable Americans be protected? And they need to explain that the cost of the bailouts will compete with other spending.

¶ Finally, Americans need to be told a more fundamental truth: This crisis is the result of a willful and systematic failure by the government to regulate and monitor the activities of bankers, lenders, hedge funds, insurers and other market players. All were playing high-stakes poker with the financial system, but without adequate transparency, oversight or supervision.

The regulatory failure, in turn, was grounded in the Bush administration’s magical belief that the market, with its invisible hand, works best when it is left alone to self regulate and self correct. The country is now paying the price for that delusion.

If lawmakers and administration officials really want to restore confidence, the bailout must be only a first step. The hard work of establishing and enforcing the regulations that are needed for a truly trustworthy financial system, still lies ahead.

 

No (taxing) brainer

80 percent of Americans will be better off with Obama’s tax plan

20 percent would be better off under McCain’s plan

(Source: American Tax Policy Institute, Oct. 23, 2008)

Give the Guy a Chance

A friend sent me an article (pasted in below) taking President-elect Barack Obama to task for some of his administration picks who have Clinton ties and for what the writer seems to think is counter to U.S.-International best interests.

The sense I get from this article is that people either (1) weren’t listening, (2) are expecting perfection vis a vis Obama meeting their own personal expectations and agendas or (3) need to find fault in order to fulfill their roles as professional critics.

In the three weeks — three weeks! — since the election, I see Obama doing exactly what he said he would do:

– He is indeed making sweeping changes. Traditionally newly elected presidents sack everyone in any position of significance with the outgoing administration and bring in replacements wholesale, at times, as we have seen, with little to no regard for their competence and with great regard for their partisanship, loyalty and cronyism. That’s the first major change I see Obama making. He is appointing people he has determined will be competent and effective.

– He repeatedly said during his campaign at in his victory speech that we are all Americans first, not Democrats and Republicans, not conservatives and liberals, etc., but Americans, and if elected he would be president of all of the people, not just those who elected him — which is opposite of one of the most infuriating aspects of Bush and his m.o., which was to politicize everything. Obama is demonstrating his intention to do just that, be a leader of all Americans to the extent possible. The William Pfaffs of the world point accusatory fingers at a Hillary Clinton appointment. Hillary Clinton missed being the Democratic nominee by a hair and, in the view of some, she rightfully won but was robbed. These folks further villified Obama for not picking her as his running mate. Well, how best to get her and her devotees inside his tent than to give her a significant post in his administration — one in which she has considerable expertise and clout? Mr. Pfaff and other critics seem to forget that she and his other selections, such as Bob Gates/Defense, are OBAMA’s appointees who will be part of HIS team and charged with carrying out HIS policies. They will have to work out/overcome whatever differences they might have had or touted in the run-up to his winning the nomination. If not, he can fire them. I personally admire the self-confidence his making such appointments demonstrates.

– He repeatedly said his administration would be transparent. He has already set that tone by holding more press conferences in just two days — going on three today — than Bush has had in six months. or longer.

– He said he would listen to the people. He has two websites devoted to just that and, from what I read/hear, is paying attention to them. Further, this allows all of us who want to make positive contributions and/or constructive comments to be an extension of the Smart Team his is assembling as his administration

– So he’s reaching back into past administrations and selecting people with experience and strong, effective track records. What if he weren’t doing that, but instead were chosing only unknowns, neophytes, Chicago cronies? What would the critics be saying then? “What’s that neophyte president-elect doing filling all of these important jobs with similarly inexperience people?!?” Obama is in a total no-win situation. He’s got to have people on his team who know their way through that uber minefield of Washington D.C.  While all of the attention and accompanying criticism is on those with past administration connections, omitted from their punditry are those who are new to federal government service, such as Arizona Gov. Janet Nepolitano (Sec. of Homeland Security) and University of California, Berkeley, economic historian Christina Romer (Council of Economic Advisors Chair) or that those with ties to past administrations Obama has picked for top jobs who will be serving as mentors to up-and-comers or that some such as Larry Summers were passed over for top jobs but because of their expertise and experience are being put in positions where they can mentor new comers who have been picked for top spots.

I say, lay off and give the guy a chance. He isn’t going to meet your or my every expectation or hope, but he is doing what this country needs right now. He’s imparting a sense of stability and assurance and providing solid leadership that not only we, but the rest of the world needs, which is reflected in the international response to his election and his actions — and he isn’t even president yet.

The Americans who voted for Barack Obama as president were promised change they could count on, but it rather looks as if they may actually be asked to make do with a mildly refurbished Clinton administration, with many of the same officials and nearly all of the same policies. The policies are drawn from the same centrist Democratic Party sources as those of Bill Clinton, and Obama’s admirers might even find themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton as Secretary of State — which makes no sense whatsoever. 

Are there no significant differences of view on war and peace between the two of them? Why did the American (and international) public have to endure a year and a half of Democratic party primaries in addition to the national election contest if the Democratic race could have been settled by the flip of a coin between people who believed in the same policies and thought the same thoughts? 

Where is the sweeping change Barack Obama was promising the electorate?  Looking back, he was rarely specific about the changes he intended to make. He constantly invoked the principle of change, without going much into the messy details, for which — admittedly — he was criticized at the time. 

Many who voted for him, as did this writer, relied upon his evident qualities, in comparison with his predecessor and most of his competitors, which were that he clearly was very intelligent, as well as balanced and mature: He was an adult, who spoke to his audiences as fellow-adults. This was his great difference from Hillary Clinton. Personally very intelligent, she has spent too long in the shady political precincts of ambition and calculation. She could never have made the speech Obama made on race. (Possibly he will never again be able to make such a speech. He has himself said that we must settle down now to being disappointed by Obama.)

The disappointment problem is international. Because of the enormous expectations Obama’s election has aroused abroad, above all among America’s European allies, any Obama-Clinton restoration of Clintonism would be met with incomprehension and disappointment. This is not because the Clinton administration was so awful, but because it was so confused in perception and lacking in foreign policy direction that it was easy for George W. Bush to merge it into the Great War on Terror. He had simply to add fear, security hysteria, lies about mass destruction weapons, and torture.

Europeans had never thought of Americans as torturers. When it turned out that the sponsors and defenders of torture occupied the highest offices of government in the United States, with the chief legal enablers of torture in the White House Counsel’s office itself, and heading no less than the Department of Justice, a chill passed through the Western alliance.  It was noted that the chosen euphemism for torture by president, lawyers and the CIA was “enhanced measures,” a direct translation of the term employed by the Gestapo. 

I was just in Brussels to speak to the European Ideas Network, sponsored by the Christian Democratic-Center Right-Conservative group, the largest in  the European Parliament. The audience seemed taken aback when I answered their question about what will change in European-American relations under Barack Obama by replying, “Probably not much.” 

The president-elect has said he will stop torture and extra-legal imprisonment, but on fundamental matters of transatlantic relations he clearly has indicated that he wants an alliance in which the Europeans contribute more.  (This will undoubtedly be a welcome change from the Bush effort to split the European Union by encouraging hostility toward the West Europeans by the pro-American former Warsaw Pact governments.) 

The U.S. contribution to the Georgia fiasco has undermined its reputation among the East Europeans. In the future, there probably will be more American consultation and good will in transatlantic relations, and perhaps even in dealing with Russia (there certainly is nothing to gain from hostility). However, Barack Obama himself said in his Berlin speech that he expects the Europeans to contribute a lot more to “winning” the war in Afghanistan.

This is not a popular idea; the European governments have been encouraging regional diplomatic solutions for Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Most Americans may be surprised to know that there is West European concern (as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told a Brookings audience in Washington last week) that the new American administration might try to take all this over for itself, and thereby wreck the progress already made. After all, it was Barack Obama who said that he would himself talk

Bailed-Out Bailing Out

“…most of the campaign donations from bailed-out companies are going to Republicans, some of whom ardently opposed the Troubled Assets Relief Program…”

“Rick Moran writes at the American Thinker: “Once the GOP takes control, it will be up to them to continue to bail out GM once the inevitable crunch comes. What do you think the chances are that the GOP would cave and throw more good taxpayer money after the bad?”

“The voters blame (the Democrats) for the bailout (most Americans don’t know TARP was conceived and signed by the Bush administration), and the bailed-out companies are funding the other guys.”

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/why-are-bailed-out-firms-abandoning-democrats/19687964

Excerpts from “Why Are Bailed Out Firms Abandoning Democrats?” by John Hudson, The Atlantic Wire.

Despite the party of No

Democratic Accomplishments

Signed Into Law…

• Health Insurance Reform, to recognize health care as a right, not a privilege and put a stop to the worst abuses by insurance companies including discrimination against people with pre-existing medical conditions. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• The Economic Recovery Act, to save and create millions of jobs and cut taxes for 98 percent of Americans. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, to make the largest investment in college aid in American history. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• Wall Street Reform, to rein in reckless practices on Wall Street, end taxpayer-funded bail-outs and “too big to fail” institutions, and protect and empower consumers. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• Extension of Unemployment Benefits, to extend benefits to millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in the Bush recession and to stimulate economic activity.

• Cash for Clunkers, to jumpstart America’s auto industry and spur the sale of 700,000 new vehicles. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights, to ban the worst practices by credit card companies and provide tough new consumer protections. [OPPOSED BY HOUSE REPUBLICAN LEADERS]

• Hate Crimes Prevention, to extend federal protection to people who are victims of violent crime because of their gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

• The Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act, to save or create the jobs of 161,000teachers, and thousands of police officers, and firefighters while closing tax loopholes that encourage big corporations to ship American jobs overseas.

• The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to restore the rights of women and other workers to challenge unfair pay and help close the wage gap where women earn 78 cents for every $1 that a man earns in America. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• The HIRE Act, to provide tax incentives for businesses to hire more Americans (4.5 million Americans have already been hired) and unleashing billions of dollars to rebuild highways and other infrastructure, and to crack down on offshore tax havens for the wealthy.

• The Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act, to boost the American economy and create jobs, expand the 1^st time homebuyers’ tax credit, and enhance tax relief for small businesses.

• The U.S. Manufacturing Enhancement Act, to help American manufacturers compete by temporarily suspending or reducing duties on materials and products which are not made domestically.

• Children’s Health Insurance legislation, to provide affordable health care coverage to 11 million children, who would otherwise go without coverage.

• Tobacco Regulation, to have the FDA regulate the manufacture and marketing of tobacco, especially to children.

• Budget Blueprint, to create jobs through investments in health care, clean energy, and education, reduce taxes for most Americans, and cut the Bush-deficit in half by the year 2013.

• Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO), to bring back the Clinton-era rule that requires all new policies that reduce revenues or expand entitlement spending be offset over five and ten years and therefore not increase the deficit. This spending rule led to the record surpluses during the Clinton Administration.

• Stem Cell Research, to end former President Bush’s ban on federal funding for lifesaving embryonic stem cell research. [ENACTED BY EXECUTIVE ORDER]

• Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services, to provide help for those who provide care to disabled, sick, or injured veterans and improve health care services to women veterans.

Passed by the House…

• Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ to end this outdated policy, contingent on the certification that military review was completed and that repeal would not impact readiness.

• The American Clean Energy and Security Act, to create millions of clean energy jobs, bring about historic reductions in pollution that causes climate change, and reduce America’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• The DISCLOSE Act, to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United that threatens corporate takeover of our elections. The measure requires CEOs to stand by the political advertising funded through their corporate treasuries, expands disclosure requirements, and prohibits foreign countries from exercising influence in the funding of U.S. elections.

• The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, to close tax loopholes that reward corporations for shipping American jobs overseas. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• Jobs for Main Street Act, to create and save jobs through investments to hire more teachers, police officers, fire fighters, rebuild highways and mass transit systems, and boost small businesses. [OPPOSED BY 100 % OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• Small Business Jobs and Credit Act, to establish a $30 billion lending fund to help community banks provide loans to small businesses. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• The America COMPETES Act, to reauthorize this legislation that aims to create millions of American jobs in science and innovation while reasserting America’s economic and technological leadership throughout the world. [OPPOSED BY A MAJORITY OF HOUSE REPUBLICANS]

• Response to the BP Oil Spill, to eliminate the $75 million cap on oil company liability, restore the Gulf Coast, increase safety requirements and oversight on offshore drilling, and protect local residents.

• Home Star Jobs legislation, to incentivize consumers to make their homes more energy efficient, create 168,000 jobs, reduce energy bills for 3 million families, and reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil.

http://dccc.org/page/content/accomplishments

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Feingold: No outside big money allowed

This is not the first time Feingold has risked his (Senate) seat to hang onto his convictions about the proper way to finance political campaigns. In 1998, in a race he ultimately won by a whisker, he told outside groups not to come into Wisconsin with unregulated “soft money” ads on his behalf. “No career, including mine, is as important as breaking the hold of this system of legalized bribery,” he told R.W. Apple of The Times.

 

Elections: Oshkosh Shrugged

By GAIL COLLINS

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/opinion/23collins.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

 

Before you burn down your house…

What strikes me in this mid-term political climate is that some people want to turn out incumbents regardless of their competence, effectiveness or whatever and w/o regard to who — or what — will replace him/her, and what the consequences might be. After Christine “Where is separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution?” O’Donnell won Deleware’s senatorial GOP primary, some people said they didn’t care who she was or how unqualified she might be, they would vote for her because they wanted a change. To me that’s like burning your house down because someone says they’ve got a nicer place for you to live — and even show you a picture of it — only to find that the “nicer place” is nothing but a cardboard cutout.

 Don’t bother us with facts; we’re too angry for that

 by PAUL FANLUND | The Capital Times | October 20, 2010

Russ Feingold sat in my office for an endorsement interview the other day and held forth knowledgeably for almost an hour on many issues, but I was most struck by his remarks on health care. Feingold’s willingness to be the nation’s only U.S. Senate candidate daring to campaign on his support for President Obama’s health care reform law has made national headlines.

The Wall Street Journal pegged an entire article to how the three-term Democrat was going it alone in that regard.

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/madison_360/article_ebef6a58-dbcc-11df-b317-001cc4c03286.html

Out of the GOP/Rove/FOX playbook?

This sure sounds like it:

“The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision…..The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc….. since its function … consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated …. its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions ….All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to….. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these … until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”

This is indeed right-wing thinking, but this is not from the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove braintrust.  It’s from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, Volume One – A Reckoning, Chapter VI: War Propaganda (1.1.5, 1925)

Workers can thank GOP and U.S. Chamber of Commerce for joblessness

So here’s the deal. U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Tom Donahue praises outsourcing — you know, U.S. companies sending American jobs overseas, which is a major cause of unemployment in the U.S. He thinks that’s good — or as he says, “outsourcing jobs, outsourcing work, has legitimate value.” 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporation-front groups like political-operative Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the mega-rich Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (notice the nice “patriotic” names these groups have) are pouring big bucks — can you say $300 million? – into GOP big-business/corporation-friendly Congressional candidates.

Some of that money might even be from foreign entities (and, if so, is illegal). But voters don’t and might never know because GOP senators successfully filibustered and killed the Disclose Act, which would have outlawed secret donations like those the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its U.S. job-killing confederates are funnelling into GOP campaign coffers and using — or freeing up money from non-foreign sources — to fund attack ads against Democratic Congressional candidates.

So the more GOP senators and representatives in Congress, the more Congressional support for continuing the drain of jobs from the U.S. and to other countries.

And what’s in it for the GOP? Why do they support bleeding the U.S. dry of jobs? Because doing so keeps GOPers in office — as long as they can keep Americans from realising that the GOP and its funding sources are the real high-unemployment culprits. 

The bulk of corporate and pro-corporate groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Rove’s and the Kochs’ campaign donations go to GOP candidates. The return on their investment is GOP support for outsourcing jobs and opposition to donor secrecy and bills like the one Democrats tried to pass last month that would have provided incentives to companies for creating jobs in the U.S. and disincentives for outsourcing jobs to other countries.

The reason behind all of that is, outsourcing U.S. jobs to other countries enhances corporate profits.

Money from other countries that benefit from outsourcing — you know, the “thank you for sending us your jobs” countries — to influence or outright fund Congressional representatives that improves employment in their countries (to the detriment of ours) means Americans who vote for Republicans for Congressional offices are, in fact, voting themselves and/or other Americans right out of their own jobs.

http://kaaltv.com/article/stories/S1794107.shtml?cat=10151

Where the jobs are

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show asked House Minority Whip Eric Cantor about who Cantor was referring to when he talked “the people” and what “the people” want.

Jon Stewart:  Who are “the people” because the people aren’t monolithic…so how do you know what the people want?

Eric Cantor:  Right now everybody wants jobs.

What Cantor didn’t say is where those jobs are and where people have to go to find them.  India, China, Mexico, Bangladesh.

If Cantor really wanted to help Americans get jobs in the United States, he would have ‘whipped’ his fellow House Republicans and gotten GOP senators to pass a recent bill they all voted against that would have provided incentives to corporations/companies/businesses to create and keep jobs in the U.S., and penalize/tax those that ship jobs out of our country. These GOPers and their corporate enablers wrap themselves in Old Glory, yet behave in the most unpatriotic ways.

Self-ID’ed Christians Constantly Prove They’re Not

News report:  Critics of athiest Christopher Hitchens upon learning that he has cancer says he got what he deserved.

And Jesus would have said???

And that means that an uncle who was a lifelong Nazarene minister who died of cancer got what he deserved, too?

That isn’t being a Christian. That’s being a Pat Robertsonian

From KKK to Tea Party to Rovian Crossroads

The GOP cabal of anonymous donors and its “House surge strategy” is nothing more that a modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan’s intimidate-and-control strategy. The difference between Karl Rove’s brainchild and the KKK of the 1860s and its forerunner and its lame early 1900s resurgence is that it uses money instead of jack-boot tactics, cross-burning and lynching to brainwash and dominate the populace. Otherwise Rove’s Crossroads donors is just another bunch of white bullies who are so afraid of democracy that they cower behind anonymity to lauch their attacks and attempts to take over the country.

It Takes a Village to be Rich

Becoming rich and staying that way can’t happen without a hand–or many hands–from the government.  The rich need to pay their fair share for that aid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/l22krugman.html?ref=opinion