I see that Congress will consider a major bail out of the financial institutions, possibly in the next week. While we don’t know all of the details yet, it will most likely involve the taxpayers taking on $700 billion of bad debt and getting little in return.
As Representatives who voted for the bankruptcy bill, it would be immoral of you to support such a bail out. After all, with that vote you showed no sympathy for guardsmen called up to Iraq – a war most of you supported – or Afghanistan at a pay lower than their civilian job not being able to pay the bills. And you had no sympathy for the parent of a child without health care -that many of you have done nothing to help them get – who had to put the bills on their credit card and then got overwhelmed. Now, to sympathize with huge corporations that made bad decisions would just be rank hypocracy in service of the very, very rich.
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Carl Ballard
It would be nice if they cared..but they don’t. And they all got or will get re-elected. Im afraid people wont start paying attention until ALL of their money is gone.
I spoke with a person (occupying an adult body) yesterday who tried to explain to me that I needed to vote for Rossi “so the price of gas will go down. It’s Christine Gregoire and her reckless spending that got us in this spot!”
Where do you begin with such a vast wasteland of ignorance? Obviously, it would take ten lifetimes to educate a person like that about how gas prices got so high.
The easiest way to obtain our long term goals is to convince such voters that Republicans are liars. Just pick, pick, pick away for however many years it takes to educate these less than astute citizens that Republicans are liars.
Constant examples won’t be hard to find.
The U.S. Census reports that 46.6 million americans did not have health insurance in 2006. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www.....05asc.html
My family, is one of those families. My husband, who worked in a pulp mill for 33 years, has Deep vein thrombosis (DVT).
Shortly after the mill closed, he was hospitalized. It was nine months before he could walk normally again.
He has been hospitalized 3 times since the first episode.
We can’t get health insurance. Every provider in WA State has turned us down because of my husband’s “pre-existing” condition.
He needs a device (it’s like a tiny screen) to prevent blood clots from moving into his lungs or heart. But we can’t afford it.
He’s on full disability now. Social Security approved his application on the first submission. But he will not be eligible for medicare for another two years.
To add insult to injury, we had to reimburse his long term insurance provider (Yes, we were good americans and had all the right insurance), $24,000 for for the benefits he was paid while he was waiting for social security to kick in BEFORE social security would begin making payments to him.
I’ve done my best. But eventually, the medical bills will put us in bankruptcy court.
$90,000 to date.
You don’t have to be a “deadbeat” to wind up bankrupt. You just have to live in a nation that refuses to provide it’s citizens essential services, like health insurance, while it bails out banks at a cost of over 700 billion dollars.
I’m still young (50) but there will be nothing left for me to retire or live on, once my husband is gone. After all these years, the only thing I have to look foward to is poverty.
Think you left out Cantwell.
There’s only one candidate for president this year who is ON RECORD as misusing his Congressional position to pressure federal regulators to back off from a bank making risky moves with its assets, leading to disaster for investors and an expensive government bailout.
Let’s see….who could that be?
This bailout does for the economy, what the Patriot Act did for the Bill of Rights:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com.....ilout.html
kirk@4,
Cantwell voted the right way.
Actually, the “Plan” authorizes the Sec. Treas. to obtain up to $700 billion for EACH REQUEST request he submits to the feds. The number of requests are not limited. That $700 billion figure is just for the inital request and it’ll go much, much higher.
The Plan sets out that the Sec. Treas. would be answerable to no one. No one would be allowed to question, analyze, dispute, block or file a request for judicial review about any of his decisions. And the Plan also sets out that no new regulations could be enacted.
The Plan is completely unconstitional. It’s unnecessary and and totally overreaches. It’s a power grab by the executive branch.
Let them fail and go into an expedited bankruptcy receivership. We’ll all take a hit–but it’ll pass soon enough.
If we as Americans agree to the Plan as proposed, we will have just totally and forever f’ed ourselves and f’ed America and the Constitution.
There’s no fracking way we as taxpayers should just say “Okay” to using our money to buy a bunch of worthless paper without oversight or agreements to accept meaningful, strict regulations.
Great post Carl!
I’m very concerned that the bailout will be much like the Republican legislation which was supposed to “solve” the problem of counting ballots, as occured in Florida in 2000. The Republicans never saw a crisis they couldn’t figure out a way to profit from, at our expense – even if they have to create the crisis themselves.
Example: Florida 2004 Election
As we now well know, the Republicans used it as a blatant attempt to ensure a “permanant Republican majority” by having electronic voting machines installed with no paper trail to ensure the votes were correctly recorded. In Florida in 2004, some voters reported that shortly after pressing the “vote” button, they saw their vote changed from Democrat to Republican in the blink of an eye before the screen cleared. Of course, with no paper record, their protests were simply met by (Republican) official’s insistence that “we cannot find anything wrong with the machines”. Some Democratic-leaning precincts recorded record-setting “undercounts” (people who voted consistently Democratic in the state races, but there was no vote recorded in the Presidential race). In addition, in some counties the percentage of “cross-over” votes defied all analysis, with Bush being recorded a huge majority of votes in Democratic-leaning precincts, even among voters who vote consistently Democratic in every other race on the ballot. Coupled with a complete disparity in the results as compared with exit polling, it shows a blatant attempt to steal an election in at least some counties in Florida. As a result, the Diabold company (which manufactured many of the machines in question) has changed the name of it’s voting-machine division, in order to distance itself from the stain of that election.
Getting at our Money:
Of course, the Republican plan has always been to get access to our money. They have pretty much strangled every penny they can from the current treasury, spending it like drunken sailors during the days when the Republicans had a majority in Congress, control of the White House, and effective control of the Supreme Court.
With the off-budget Iraq war, and the failed FEMA response to Katrina, the Republicans used no-bid contracts to pass along huge amounts of debt to be paid by future generations of U.S. taxpayers, the profits from which lined their own pockets to an extent not previously imagined.
Republican Philosophy of Money:
I remember when my wife worked for a large brokerage firm, she told me of overhearing an experienced broker telling a young associate (paraphrased from memory):
2006-2007 Attorney General Firings:
Amidst the “crisis” of national security which the Republicans insisted required the prompt passage of legislation, the Republican Speaker’s Office quietly inserted language allowing the President to appoint a U.S. Attorney to fill vacancies. Nobody (except the author of this provision) seemed to notice that it meant that unlike the initial appointments, the President could make an appointment without Senate approval. So the President could appoint a U.S. Attorney, have him/her approved by the Senate, and then fire them and appoint a new attorney general without Senate approval, for a term limited only by the President’s term in office.
We all know how well that turned out. In the quest for control of all aspects of the Federal Government, even Republican U.S. Attorneys were fired if they showed the slightest bit of independence to the Republican political aims. Our own U.S. Attorney was fired because he didn’t intervene to deliver the Washington State Governor’s 0ffice to the Republicans in their recount challenge. Another Attorney General in Florida was fired for prosecuting a U.S. Congressman (Republican) for corruption. Another (in N. Mexico) was fired for refusing to announce indictments of prominant Democrats in time for the November 2006 elections.
Current Economic Crisis:
I noted that the current deal was put together by the Federal Reserve Chairman, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the head of the New York Fed. I found it surprising that they didn’t make any effort at all to include Congressional leaders in their discussions, in light of the obvious advantanges of being able to claim “bi-partison support for the plan” and avoiding Congressional obsticles to it’s enactment.
Perhaps in the midst of the “crisis”, they thought they had time to do it later (apparantly this deal was put together a week ago, but announced before it was finalized due to the plummeting stock market on Monday and Wednesday of last week). Or perhaps they simply wanted to be able to claim that the Republicans “saved” the market, and not share any credit with the Democrats.
Or perhaps they wanted to put some real clinkers in the bill, and they wanted to be able to “dare” the Democrats to vote against it – so they could claim that the Democrats are standing in the way of fixing the economy, and therefore blame them for any further collapse (much as they have done successfully to date with the issue of funding of the Iraq war).
But givent the recent history of the Republican Party in (a) creating a “crisis”, and then (b) stealing us blind while purporting to solve the crisis, I think Congress should be well advised to be very, very, careful about giving the Tresury Dept. too much power at this time.
Root Causes of the Problem:
Remember, that this problem could have been avoided at many points over the past several years, but the Bush administration refused to do so.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the “zero-down, no income verification” loans allowed investors to play the “flipping” game with someone else’s money, driving up home prices for legitimate buyers. Let’s leave aside that the creation and explosion of the “sub-prime” market funded by securities of dubious value was completely unregulated by the government. And let’s leave aside, for the moment, the Bush administration’s failure to intervene when borrowers were pushed into the more profitable sub-prime loans by agents and brokers receiving huge “steering fees”, even though they could qualify for traditional mortgages.
Instead, let’s focus on the Bush administration’s failed attempts to remedy the problem, once it was obvious that it WAS a problem. The guiding principle of all their actions was “it’s the little guy’s fault”. In the Bankruptcy Reform Act, they sought to force debtors into repayment plans, even with up to five years of enforced poverty to pay back creditors in order to promote “individual responsibility”, even though many of the loans consisted of profit from usurious lending practices or through no fault of the debtors (medical bills, etc.).
When the current mortgage crisis became obvious, the Republicans insisted on a laughable plan to have creditors voluntarily offer to temporarily cut back their APR adjustments to people already in default – doing nothing for those who were fighting to keep out of default, and only a few debtors actually were approved under the plan. Obviously, it didn’t solve the problem.
They COULD have come with any number of federal programs which would have allowed the debtors with “exploding mortgages” to remain in their homes (there’s not enough time or room here to go into the various possibilities) as late as A YEAR AGO which would have (a) kept those foreclosed properties off the market, and (b) provided a “floor” preventing further depreciation of home values which cause more defaults. The refused to do so, instead choosing to blame the individual borrower for their condition and insisting that the market would cure itself.
So remember that this week as the Republican offensive begins, accusing the Democrats of causing this crisis. That dog won’t hunt.