The Chancellor will move to take control of the Royal Bank of Scotland today by injecting £20 billion of taxpayers’ money.
The Government is also expected to take over HBOS in the most dramatic extension of state ownership in the British economy since the war. The bank’s rescue takeover by Lloyds TSB appeared to be on the brink of collapse last night.
As governments around the world scramble to prevent the collapse of the global financial system, Alistair Darling will unveil plans for a £40 billion “recapitalisation” of the banking sector.
I’m going to need a chardonnay sugar scrub. You’re taking a bath but the AIG folks already took theirs– in white wine.
(Props to Eschaton for the first link.)
It occurs to me that enormous amounts of rightwing wealth have been erased and outfits like Evergreen Freedom Foundation may wake up to discover their patrons are broke.
Good.
I expect Rush Limpdick’s advertising revenues, and therefore his $28 million annual income, will take a hit, too.
The fun thing about all this is that most of the paper wealth now going up in flames was owned by obnoxious rich people — i.e., Republicans, Birchers, and Swiftboaters.
Obama will be the Democrats’ Reagan. And McCain will be the last presidential candidate of the Whig, er, Tory, er, Know-Nothing, er, Republican, er, GOP, or whatever they call themselves, Party.
Rabitt comments breed quickly.
And um, thanks for your support, as Bartles and James used to say.
Hang on to your cotton tail, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
I guess that I am amazed at the general public’s, and certainly the vast majority of Republicans, inability or refusal to understand and recognize that the world, not just the United States, is teetering on the brink of a total financial meltdown that will make the history books forget all about 1929.
Folks, the perfect storm may me about to sink our ship. The enemy turns out not to be terrorists from the outside, but rather greed and arrogance on the inside.
God save/help/bless the United States.
We need all the help we can get.
@6 Don’t forget that most of those arrogant greedheads are/were* Republicans.
* By Nov. 10 it will be hard to find anyone willing to admit they ever voted Republican.
I have been under the apparently mistaken impression that the ‘capitalists’ were supposed to supply the capital.
I think it’s time to take off the green-tinted glasses and see who’s behind the curtain.
As if we didn’t know.
We have to re-supply our ‘rulers’ with capital so they can continue to trickle our own money upon us.
How long can this charade continue?
“This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass.” Walter Sobchak
10
So what you are saying is that this is all Senator Larry Craig’s fault?
Thank you, you are too kind. Shows nightly at 8 and 11PM.
@4 “The Democrat’s Reagan”? Oh god no. What a disaster Reagan was. And it was not because he was a nice, affable, old man. It was because ideology trumped common sense, and was pummeled down the throats of the American people by an Affective and affable grandfather figure. The last thing this nation needs is a return to those kind of politics whether you are left or right.
I think we need a return to moderate sensibilities. I actually think Obama is going to be more like that last great Republican from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. A statesman who has to govern a union falling apart. I just hope we don’t have to endure a civil war in the process.
Reagan was and remains to this day pure evil. And a Democratic version of that would be likely just as evil.
I rather enjoy the “Obama FINISHED?!?” and “Over for Obama?” blog ads.
12 “I just hope we don’t have to endure a civil war in the process.”
Me, too….but it’s a definite possibility. Unfortunately, there are even worse ones.
@12- while I tend to agree with your assessment of Reagan on political philosophy and as a President who set us on this course that has taken us over the cliff (although I am not convinced he would not have had the common sense to pull up before we went over the cliff- he did have some of the intuitive ancient Greek sense of midpoints and moderation) I think the point being made is that Reagan did transform our politcal landscape for a generation. If Bush had not fucked it up so badly, and fucked over all of us with it, Reaganism might now be rapidly eroding, but I am not convinced it would even yet be gone.
The point is Obama can be a transformative figure and be a presidency that takes thoughtful progressive politics and policy into the 21st century and reshapes America while he’s at it. This is his great promise.
For now it is only promise, and much hard work will remain to be done, most of it AFTER the election, but out of crisis does come opportunity.
We have had few truly great presidents in our history, but the great ones reconstituted the American dream- Washington, Lincoln, FDR. I believe they are the only truly great presidents.
I don’t put Reagan near that level, but he has to be given great credit for remaking modern conservativism into a cohesive majority and a dominant force. I have spent much time in my adult life railing against and fighting against that force, and I detest it, but he did it for the most part, fair and square.
Until the last eight years, I never thought for a moment I could miss Reagan, but he looks pretty good compared to what we have. Hell even Ed Meese and Caspar W look good compared to this bunch.
Obama has the charisma, smarts and the opportunity to mobilize all of us and remake America. God knows we need it right now.
And I like the Larry Craig line, too.
@15 I have come to think what makes the American project so compelling is that it is generally tempered in moderation. The way our system institutionalizes the balance of power, for example. Maybe this is self delusion given our protracted imperialist involvement with the affairs of many nations of the world. Which I lay at the feet of the hysteria of the Cold War which has been very damaging. Pre-WWII American exceptionalism was a quaint operation from the rest of the world’s perspective. Obviously, there was the obliteration of the American Indian that will remain a dark stain on this country for many generations to come. But despite all the warts of American history I think it remains true that this is a place of grand opportunity, optimism, and relatively superior openness. This project works because we the people, a fractured and incoherent mass, are appealed to as a necessary revolutionary force. Most explicitly in the declaration of independence. This is the brilliance of the American system. All voices come together and are mediated in a system that is unfettered with specific ideological bias. The system for better or worse renews itself every few years. And for the most part the transitions have been bloodless. This process strikes me as the very opposite of the Reagan project. Which through a force of charisma shifted the political climate to one that is ruled by ideological struggle and works by subverting the will of the people into a kind of empty nationalism for the explicit purpose of consolidating power.
Obama, may very well represent a great new hope for a vast and dramatic progressive agenda. But I strongly feel that the kind of politics Reagan represented is the wrong model, not because of its particular political bias but for the totalizing assertion of it dominance. Kos, for example, keeps talking about “crushing their spirits” by establishing a permanent majority in the house and the senate. This assertion while an amiable vision for the gooey goodness of the progressive agenda, I worry runs counter to the spirit of the American project. I do not seek to totally crush and destroy the republican party. Only to discredit the contemporary incarnation. After all we need to keep some around to to act as a counter weight to the excesses of “our side”. And there will be excesses. If anything the last several years has taught us, it is the utter disaster one party rule becomes.
I am very wary of the kind of totalizing force that Reagan represents. Even if this force is couched in a progressive agenda. The problem being the fetishizing of the offices of power. We the people are the source of the legitimacy of power, always and absolutely. We give meaning to our government as the collective expression of our interests. Not the ideological “perspectives” that are used to organize any particular party, or affiliation such as conservative or liberal. The nation is the combination of many contradictory voices. Not the effusive voice of a “dear leader”. American democracy does not begin and end with Obama. It is only a temporary manifestation of the national mood.
I would rather have weak leaders, and a strong institutional arrangement that guarantees the ability of individuals to redress their grievances.
Reagan for me represents a perverse triumphalism that is counter productive to achieving the “will of the people”. I hate to entertain the thought that Obama would succumb to the same disease. The problem is ideology either left or right. As the old John K. Galbraith saying goes:
I will end on an encouraging quote from a nice young man from Detroit.
So far, the British plan is being accepted well, with European markets up slightly so far in morning trading, according to the BBC World Service.
re 16: Were you satisfied with the moderate efforts of the captain of the Titanic to avoid the iceberg?
The American Revolution was anything but an exercise in moderation.
I just read on another local blog (Blatherwatch), the Obama is a Marxist, and there’s a good chance that after he’s elected he’ll suspend all elections for the foreseeable future.
Paul Krugman Wins Nobel Prize For Economics
Suck on it, righties! Being a liberal economist is respectable! Shilling for Wingnut Whack-O-Nomics — naaaah.
@12 ““The Democrat’s Reagan”? Oh god no. What a disaster Reagan was.”
You misunderstand my comment. Reagan, even though we don’t like him, ushered in an era of conservative government in the U.S. that enjoyed a 25-year run — until conservatism finally imploded under its own inherent contradictions. Obama is a similarly transformational president and we are beginning a new liberal era. That’s all I’m saying. Obviously, there are no other comparisons to be made between the old, slobbering, white guy and the young, energetic, black guy. Reagan got a lot of undeserved mileage out of the collapse of the Soviet Union which was set up by a succession of Democratic presidents; all he did was take the credit. Obama, by contrast, has to rebuild a world left in ruin by Wingnut Whack-O-Nomics and the conservatives’ idiotic chest-thumping foreign policy.
19 T
But Marxists love elections.
@12 Ideology was merely cover for looting. I doubt they believe the ideology. It’s simply a tool to hoodwink the rightwing masses. For example, when Grover Norquist debated Goldy, he repeatedly tripped over his own ideology because he couldn’t make it work when Goldy challenged him with facts, and Norquist is too smart a guy to believe in something that so obviously doesn’t work, so you’ve got to look past the ideology at what the underlying motives are. To figure out their motives, follow the money — from your pocket to theirs.
@12 “I just hope we don’t have to endure a civil war in the process.”
The Republican leadership is incredibly irresponsible. They’re setting up their followers to refuse to accept a Democratic victory. If Obama wins, it’s because ACORN stole the election with massive voting fraud. Look at the lynch mob atmosphere of their campaign rallies. These people are going to lose this election, and when they do, they will be extremely angry. Unable to accept any responsibility for the mess they created, they will refuse to believe that ordinary citizens who got badly hurt by their policies finally rejected their flawed ideology and their awful governing. After losing the election, they will ramp up the hate rhetoric even more. Who knows what it will lead to, or where it will end. Liberals must arm — as a deterrent, and just in case.
@17 The U.S. stock market opened 400 points UP this morning.
@19 “I just read on another local blog (Blatherwatch), the Obama is a Marxist, and there’s a good chance that after he’s elected he’ll suspend all elections for the foreseeable future.”
I heard that about JFK in ’60, too. And every Democratic candidate since.
[broken record player clicking in background]
By awarding Krugman the Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy is trying to send a message: Okay, you wingnuts have had your fun playing in the sandbox, but you’ve gotten out of hand and adult supervision is now stepping in.
Expect a major tantrum from the 2-year-olds after the election.
@23 This point I agree with entirely. Wholesale looting of the treasury is the ideology. And it is a farce to give this criminality any kind of legitimacy by even calling it an ideology. To borrow a well heeled saying. In foxholes there are no fiscal conservatives, only people with different spending priorities.
Today’s Quote
The GOP is “the party of stupid.” — Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman (Source: Newsweek)
@23 It isn’t just the Treasury. They’re also after workers’ wages, consumers’ spending money, savers’ bank accounts, and retirees’ Social Security.
Nowhere is the looting more systematic or vicious than in privatized health care. A couple months ago, I met an elderly woman who gets up at 4:30 AM every day to start work at 6 AM as a campground attendant. She is the widow of a World War 2 veteran. Her husband was entitled to VA medical care, but when he had his heart attack, the VA turned him away for lack of bed space and the ambulance crew took him to a private hospital. After he died, she was left over $70,000 in debt and the private health care creditors took her home. Now she is destitute, lives in a small travel trailer hooked up to a pickup truck, and moves from campground to campground looking for minimum-wage work.
@31 That is the future that Republicans have created for average Americans; and that is why polls and media interviews strongly indicate that millions of average Americans who have submissively gone along with the incessant drumbeat of rightwing propaganda until now will look past Obama’s race and the GOP’s smears next month and decisively repudiate the Republican Party and its candidates on Nov. 4, 2008.
More on Krugman, from headlines today:
American Paul Krugman wins economics Nobel
By the way, anybody notice how often McCain mentions that scuttling the Air Force tanker contract saved the U.S. taxpayers money?
I agree that the process was flawed, although it’s a drop in the bucket compared with the amounts stolen from the federal treasury under the Bush administration.
But in the meantime, the Air Force is going to have to go another decade without a more efficient tanker than the aged ones it is now flying, and it looks like the new program will cost considerably more, in the long run, than the original one. The original contract went to Boeing post-9/11 when the company really, really needed the orders. Now that Boeing is flush with commercial aircraft orders whick will keep it busy until 2015, it doesn’t need to get the orders in order to keep the assembly lines alive. (In fact, the tanker order now would actually complicate things – if Boeing doesn’t have the Air Force contract, it could turn over the existing 767 assembly line to work on the new 787 airplanes.)
By the way, on the way into work this morning I heard on the radio (KZOK) Bob Rivers say that the election was over for McCain two weeks ago, and McCain’s only job now is to lose as gracefully as possible.
Rivers seems to me a typical “undecided” voter in this election – basically economically conservative, leaning a bit to libertarianism. If he’s convinced that the election is already over – some three weeks before the actual election day – that says a lot.
By the way, the DJIA is up 486.81 as of 8:34 a.m. PDT, to 8,938.
Expect that as soon as the DJIA closes over 9,000, somebody on Fox News will trumpet how John McCain single-handedly pushed through the “Economic Surge Plan” which resulted in this great “victory” for the U.S. economy.
Lost in their “analysis” is the drop in value over the past year, and that all they managed to do after dumping trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and interest-rate cuts by the feds to 1-1/2 %, was to stop the free-fall for the time being. Oh, don’t forget the trillion dollars or so which the U.K. and other European taxpayers are having to dump into their banks to keep them from failing due to the domino affect of the U.S. collapse.
And in the meantime, Mitsubishi Bank in Japan is buying Morgan Stanly. Although Japan has it’s own economic troubles (there they call it the “American Disease”, they know a good deal when they see it, and are more than happy to buy American companies (not just stock, but a controling interest in the companies) when they are being sold for scrap-sale prices.
Remember during the Reagan era when they wanted to sell of the National Forests for next to nothing to lumber and mineral companies in order to finance their tax cut for millionaires? They got stopped there, although quite a few “sweetheart leases” still exist.
Under Bush, they didn’t bother with something as puny as the National Forests. Instead, they drove down the value of the entire national economy so it could be purchased piecemeal by foreign interests at fire-sale prices.
re 37: The Tories are still amongst us. I wonder why the Bushes never brag about their family’s Revolutionary War heroes.
Maybe there aren’t any? I’d have to research this to be sure.
I’m kind of wondering how the wingnuts plan to “resurect” the Bush legacy after this coming January.
You know they are going to start laying the groundwork by claiming everything good that happens during the Obama administration was carry-over from the Bush administration (like they still claim the current Economic collapse is due to Clinton’s housing strategies some thirteen years ago).
Within a couple of years, you are going to have wingnuts here re-writing history, claiming that by December 2008 Iraq was completely pacified, the American economy was on the upswing, and that anything bad that happens after that was due to Obama and the Democrats, but anything good was due to the Bush legacy.
19
troll, get the meds adjusted.