A look at the Obama community blog pages show that the trolls are out in force tonight. What is it they are afraid of? This maybe?
http://www.keatingeconomics.com/
The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain's attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late '80s and early '90s.
John McCain was accused of improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee aunched investigations and formally reprimanded Senator McCain for his role in the scandal -- the first such Senator to receive a major party nomination for president. At the heart of the scandal was Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which took advantage of deregulation in the 1980s to make risky investments with its depositors' money. McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating with federal regulators tasked with preventing banking fraud, and championed legislation to delay regulation of the savings and loan industry -- actions that allowed Keating to continue his fraud at an incredible cost to taxpayers. When the savings and loan industry collapsed, Keating's failed company put taxpayers on the hook for $3.4 billion and more than 20,000 Americans lost their savings. John McCain was reprimanded by the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, but the ultimate cost of the crisis to American taxpayers reached more than $120 billion.
The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today's credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules. And in both cases, John McCain's judgment and values have placed him on the wrong side of history.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4584#more
Posted by Jerome a Paris on October 1, 2008 - 7:20am in The Oil Drum: Europe Topic: Economics/FinanceTags: Economy, finance, original [list all tags]
(Note: This was written for the European Tribune this week-end, ie before the rejection of the plan by Congress, and before the most recent bank bailouts, but its conclusions stand)
In other words: nothing short of a revolution will do. Can it still be a peaceful, democratic one?
(Allen Hussein note: posted with the permission and encouragement of James Kunstler whom I ran into at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) conference in Sacramento CA)
Sam Stein, Huffington Post
With the financial world in an unpredictable crisis, the political debate has shifted sharply to the efficacy of turning government programs over to the private market.
In particular, the Obama campaign has begun highlighting John McCain's support for privatizing Social Security, the venerable government institution known as a third rail of politics.
Appearing in Florida on Saturday, the Democratic nominee warned voters that his opponent's plan would leave the retirement security of senior citizens at the whims of an erratic market.
"I know Senator McCain is talking about a 'casino culture' on Wall Street," said Obama, "but the fact is, he's the one who wants to gamble with your life savings and that is not going to happen when I'm President of the United States."
The McCain campaign has responded to these and other attacks by accusing Obama of fear mongering, repeatedly denying that the Arizona Republican ever supported privatization in the first place.
"He's not ever talked about outsourcing Social Security into the private sector," senior adviser Steve Schmidt told reporters Thursday. "What people talk about with regard to personal accounts is giving the American people an ability to have a greater return on an investment -- it could be bond funds, for example."
But a rarely-seen video in a new documentary released by the group Progressive Accountability, a portion of which was handed over to the Huffington Post, shows this simply isn't true. McCain has in fact argued that privatization is necessary to maintain Social Security into the future.
"Without privatization, I don't see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits," McCain declares at a December 2004 event in New Hampshire.
"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in American today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace and it's got to be fixed," he declared on the campaign trail this year.
The footage, part of a documentary called Third Term and narrated by Democratic strategist Paul Begala, is pretty cut and dry, and as such, damaging in the current electoral environment. And there are many other similar quotes out there. This March, for instance, McCain declared: "I'm totally in favor of personal savings accounts...along the lines that President Bush proposed." (Personal savings accounts, it should be noted, became the messaging that Republicans turned to after privatization performed poorly).
And so, McCain and his aides have been handed an uphill challenge this week. Faced with voters concerned about turning over their benefits to an unstable market and an opponent eager to engage in a Social Security debate, the Senator has been left trying to gloss over his past support for privatization and avoid a political minefield.
"We have to have some straight talk for America," said McCain on Wednesday. "The Social Security system is going to go broke. It will not be there for present day men and women who are working. And we have to fix it and we have to do it in a bipartisan fashion."
(click on link at the top of the article for a link to a video of McCain saying he was for privatization)
From the Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/billions-for-bailouts-who_b_127882.html
The current financial crisis facing our country has been caused by the extreme right-wing economic policies pursued by the Bush administration. These policies, which include huge tax breaks for the rich, unfettered free trade and the wholesale deregulation of commerce, have resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very wealthy.
The middle class has really been under assault. Since President Bush has been in office, nearly 6 million Americans have slipped into poverty, median family income for working Americans has declined by more than $2,000, more than 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance, over 4 million have lost their pensions, foreclosures are at an all time high, total consumer debt has more than doubled, and we have a national debt of over $9.7 trillion dollars.
While the middle class collapses, the richest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top 0.1 percent now earn more money than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The wealthiest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion while Bush has been president. In the midst of all of this, Bush lowered taxes on the very rich so that they are paying lower income tax rates than teachers, police officers or nurses.
Now, having mismanaged the economy for eight years as well as having lied about our situation by continually insisting, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," the Bush administration, six weeks before an election, wants the middle class of this country to spend many hundreds of billions on a bailout. The wealthiest people, who have benefited from Bush's policies and are in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all. This is absurd. This is the most extreme example that I can recall of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
In my view, we need to go forward in addressing this financial crisis by insisting on four basic principles:
(1) The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush's economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout. It would be immoral to ask the middle class, the people whose standard of living has declined under Bush, to pay for this bailout while the rich, once again, avoid their responsibilities. Further, if the government is going to save companies from bankruptcy, the taxpayers of this country should be rewarded for assuming the risk by sharing in the gains that result from this government bailout.
Specifically, to pay for the bailout, which is estimated to cost up to $1 trillion, the government should:
a) Impose a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue;
b) Ensure that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for them; and
c) Require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the assumption of risk is rewarded when companies' stock goes up.
(2) There must be a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages. Among many other areas, we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and moving our country from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Further, we must protect working families from the difficult times they are experiencing. We must ensure that every child has health insurance and that every American has access to quality health and dental care, that families can send their children to college, that seniors are not allowed to go without heat in the winter, and that no American goes to bed hungry.
(3) Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. That means reinstalling the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down in 1999. That means re-regulating the energy markets so that we never again see the rampant speculation in oil that helped drive up prices. That means regulating or abolishing various financial instruments that have created the enormous shadow banking system that is at the heart of the collapse of AIG and the financial services meltdown.
(4) We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation's largest depository institution, has absorbed Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, and Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest brokerage house. We should not be trying to solve the current financial crisis by creating even larger, more powerful institutions. Their failure could cause even more harm to the entire economy.
10,587.59
This is what the DOW closed at on January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton's last day in office.
10,609.66
This is where the DOW closed today September 17, 2008. After over 7-1/2 years of the Bush-McCain economic plan designed to benefit Wall Street over Main Street, the Dow is up 22 points or 3 points/year.If the Bush McCain economy does not benefit Main Street or those who invest their 401K's into DOW index funds (and if I really wanted to make them look bad, I could compare the NASDAQ on Jan. 21, 2001 to today) over the Bush Administration bascially had dead money sitting on the DOW. Now McCain wants to privatize Social Security and invest it in this market.If it doesn't benefit Main Street and doesn't necessarily benefit investors in the stock market, who does it benefit? McCain is carrying water for the brokerage houses and investment banks thatgot us in this mess in the first place.
MR. OBAMA, PLEASE GO FOR THE THROAT!!! PLEASE HIT MC CAIN ON HIS IDEA OF PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY IS A SHAM TO PUT THE NATION'S RETIREMENT PLAN AT RISK TO ENRICH THE CROOKS AT LEHMAN BROTHERS AND BEAR STEARNS!!!!!
In looking at this blog, I see that the trolls are starting to come out and bring up the old discredited Muslim BS. I guess when your VP candidate wants to dismember the union and have Alaska succeed (wouldn't that be treason), McCain appears to be coddling pedophiles with his ad slamming the protection of kindergarteners from molesters, pervasive lying so bad that even Karl Turdblossom Rove calls out McCain, and a 500 point drop in the DOW and major bankrupcies leave John :the economy is fundamentally strong" McCain flat footed and clueless.
It is time to remind the rightard trolls of what the truth is, the Republican Party is the party that destroyed America. The trolls are part of that sad legacy.
This evening on Bloomberg TV with the stock ticker showing todays 500 point loss in the DOW and the DOW futures down over 100 points making tomorrow's open look ugly, Obama had an interview on the best finance TV channel out there. Another thing I really like about Obama is the real solid team of financial experts backing him includingformer Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former FED Chairman Paul Volker.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aL1Sy.O86pX0&refer=home
By Peter Cook and Kim Chipman
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said regulation of Wall Street needs to ``catch up'' with changes in financial markets, and investors can't expect taxpayers to bail them out in bad times.
Obama said the role of ratings services must be examined as part of any revamping of the way markets are monitored and regulated, and he suggested that he doesn't favor having the government stepping in to rescue failing firms.
``The idea that taxpayers can continue to be on the hook for failures at firm after firm after firm I think is a real problem,'' Obama said in an interview tonight with Bloomberg Television.
Obama, 47, and his Republican rival, John McCain, are calling for tighter government regulations following the collapse of New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. securities firm until last week.
Separately, Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. consumer bank, agreed to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. for about $50 billion. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are trying to arrange financing for American International Group Inc., the biggest U.S. insurer by assets, to plug a $70 billion to $75 billion financing gap, according to people familiar with the situation.
Volatility
Investors and government officials are worried that Lehman's bankruptcy, the biggest in history, will trigger more volatility in the financial markets, crimp credit-market liquidity and further slow an already sluggish economy.
Obama blamed the crisis in the housing and financial markets on the failure of President George W. Bush's administration to monitor markets and push for new systems of oversight.
He argued that McCain would continue Bush's economic policies, which the Illinois senator blames for creating conditions for the Wall Street meltdown and housing-market rout.
It's ``premature to offer up'' detailed prescriptions to prevent a similar crisis in the future, Obama said in the interview tonight from Denver.
He said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was correct in calling for a streamlined regulatory system and that the Federal Reserve can't be expected to shoulder the whole load. Nor, he said, can the government bail companies out of risky ventures.
`Extraordinary Risks'
``Whether it's Freddie Mac or some of the investment banks, at some level what you had is a situation in which investors and management at these firms were taking extraordinary risks with enormous upside when the market was good, but you can't have a situation where you expect the taxpayers to foot the bill when times are bad,'' he said. ``I think Secretary Paulson understands that at some point the markets are going to have to solve some of these problems.''
Obama said a new regulatory system must be significantly more transparent. Just as after the stock market cash of 1929 banks had to maintain certain capital requirements in exchange for government support, some of today's non-traditional banks must have same kind of transparency and accountability, he said.
Obama singled out credit-ratings companies as in need of closer scrutiny.
Rating Debt
``There's a lot of work that has to be done in examining the degree to which ratings agencies were involved in making some of this debt, some of the leverage that was taken on, look like it was much safer and less risky than it was,'' he said. ``So that's a whole area that we have to examine.''
The financial-industry distress comes as Obama is trying to calm fears among Democrats that he's not doing enough to respond to McCain's attacks and the Republican's recent momentum in polls. McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate has energized conservative Republicans, who had been lagging in their support of the Arizona senator, 72.
The financial crisis sparked an exchange of attacks today on the campaign trail and both candidates consulted with Paulson as well as their own advisers.
Obama talked this morning with his top economic advisers, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. While his campaign issued a statement early, Obama, who was traveling to Colorado from Chicago in the morning, didn't speak about the crisis until almost five hours after Arizona Senator McCain, 72, made his first public remarks in Jacksonville.
McCain's campaign also quickly released a television ad, with shots of the Lehman Brothers and New York Stock Exchange building emblems, that says ``our economy is in crisis'' and ``only proven reformers McCain and Palin can fix it.''
To contact the reporters on this story: Kim Chipman in Denver at kchipman@bloomberg.net; Peter Cook in Washington at pcook6@bloomberg.net.
http://www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/17/obama.ap/index.html
RENO, Nevada (AP) -- So much for hugging in church.
A day after Barack Obama and John McCain exchanged an embrace during a faith forum at a California megachurch, Obama called the U.S. economy a disaster thanks to "John McCain's president, George W. Bush," and chided his Republican rival's campaign for trying to make him look unpatriotic and weak.
At a town hall meeting with several hundred union members, Obama said he had a great conversation with McCain at the forum at Saddleback Church sponsored by the popular evangelical pastor Rick Warren.
The two candidates shook hands, briefly hugged and stood onstage with Warren, the first time they appeared together in public since the end of the primary season.
But Sunday, after praising the Arizona senator as a "genuine American patriot," the Democratic presidential hopeful got back to business -- methodically tearing into McCain's health care, tax and energy policies and criticizing his advisers.
"McCain says 'Here's my plan, I'm going to drill here, drill now which is something he only came up with two months ago when he started looking at polling," Obama said of McCain's energy policy.
The GOP hopeful has become a vocal proponent of offshore oil drilling as a way to ease U.S. dependence on foreign oil and has criticized Obama for failing to embrace it as a way to help bring down oil prices. Obama noted that McCain had long opposed lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling.
The Illinois senator also criticized McCain's advisers as "the same old folks that brought you George W. Bush. The same team." He noted many had been lobbyists in Washington before McCain asked them to sever all lobbying ties.
Obama added, "They say this other guy is unpatriotic, or this guy likes French people. That's what they said about Kerry," referring to the 2004 Democratic nominee who lost narrowly to Bush. "They try to make it out like Democrats aren't tough enough, aren't macho enough. It's the same strategy."
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers responded, "John McCain has never questioned Sen. Obama's patriotism, but he clearly does question Sen. Obama's experience and judgment, and they do have profound differences of opinion on the best way to reduce our dependence on Mideast oil, bring jobs back to America and keep our nation safe."
Earlier this summer, McCain handed day to day operation of his campaign to Steve Schmidt, a veteran GOP strategist who was a spokesman for Bush during the 2004 campaign. Most of his other top advisers are longtime loyalists who have worked for McCain for years.
Even so, Obama stepped to McCain's defense when a voter criticized his Vietnam era record. A Naval aviator, McCain spent 5 ½ years as a prisoner of war there after being shot down and badly wounded.
"Respectfully I'm going to disagree with you on McCain and his service," Obama said. "I think his service was honorable. He deserves respect."
As someone who grew up in Southern California and spent my share of time bodysurfing, it was really cool to see this. Of course, the Rightards will try to claim that spending a day at the beach with your family and going bodysurfing is elitist (elitist equipment required: 1 pair of swim trunks or cutoffs).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/14/obama-bodysurfs-in-hawaii_n_119070.html
For more pictures of Obama in Hawaii go here.
The Neocons Do Georgia
By Paul Craig Roberts
15 August, 2008 Counterpunch
http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts150808.htm
The success of the Bush Regime’s propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.
As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.
It certainly worked with Americans.
The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.
Iraq is in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed by American bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships.
We do not know the death toll in Afghanistan, but even the American puppet regime protests the repeated killings of women and children by US and NATO troops.
We don’t know what the death toll would be in Iran if Darth Cheney and the neocons succeed in their plot with Israel to bomb Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons.
What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.
That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity.
America will never recover from the shame and dishonor heaped upon her by the neoconned Bush Regime.
The success of the neocon propaganda has been so great that the opposition party has not lifted a finger to rein in the Bush Regime’s criminal actions. Even Obama, who promises “change” is too intimidated by the neocon’s success in brainwashing the American population to do what his supporters hoped he would do and lead us out of the shame in which the neoconned Bush Regime has imprisoned us.
This about sums up the pessimistic state in which I existed prior to the go-ahead given by the Bush Regime to its puppet in Georgia to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russians in order to defuse the separatist movement. The American media, aka, the Ministry of Lies and Deceit, again accommodated the criminal Bush Regime and proclaimed “Russian invasion” to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Russians in South Ossetia by the Georgian military assault.
Only this time, the rest of the world didn’t buy it. The many years of lies--9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, “the United States doesn’t torture,” the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated “terrorist plots,” the determined assault on civil liberties--have taken their toll on American credibility. No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government.
The rest of the world reported the facts--an assault on Russian civilians by American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian troops.
The Bush Regime, overcome by hubris, expected Russia to accept this act of American hegemony. But the Russians did not, and the Georgian military was sent fleeing for its life.
The neoconned Republican response to the Russian failure to follow the script and to be intimidated by the “unipower” was so imbecilic that it shattered the brainwashing to which Americans had succumbed.
McCain declared: “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” Imagine the laughs Jon Stewart will get out of this on the Daily Show. In the early years of the 21st century the United States has already invaded two countries and has been beating the drums for attacking a third. President Bush, the chief invader of the 21st century, echoed McCain’s claim that nations don’t invade other nations. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7556857.stm
This dissonant claim shocked even brainwashed Americans, as readers’ emails reveal. If in the 21st century countries don’t invade other countries, what is Bush doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what are the naval armadas and propaganda arrayed against Iran about?
Have two of the worst warmongers of modern times--Bush and McCain--called off the US/Israeli attack on Iran? If McCain is elected president, is he going to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as “nations don’t invade other nations,” or is President Bush going to beat him to it?
We all know the answer.
The two stooges are astonished that the Americans have taught hegemony to Russians, who were previously operating, naively perhaps, on the basis of good will.
Suddenly the Western Europeans have realized that being allied with the United States is like holding a tiger by the tail. No European country wants to be hurled into war with Russia. Germany, France, and Italy must be thanking God they blocked Georgia’s membership in NATO.
The Ukraine, where a sick nationalism has taken hold funded by the neocon National Endowment for Democracy, will be the next conflict between American pretensions and Russia. Russia is being taught by the neocons that freeing the constituent parts of its empire has not resulted in their independence but in their absorption into the American Empire.
Unless enough Americans can overcome their brainwashed state and the rigged Diebold voting machines, turn out the imbecilic Republicans and hold the neoconservatives accountable for their crimes against humanity, a crazed neocon US government will provoke nuclear war with Russia.
The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
I really have a difficult time believing that I am typing this but after seeing McCain's attacks over the past couple weeks and Obama's feeble response, Obama needs a fighter on his side. (another reason I am warming to Hillary is that my 1st two choices, Jim Webb and Jack Reed don't want the VP position).
During the primaries, I got pretty upset at the Clintons, even adopting posting handles such as "Bitter Honky Hillary Hater." When the primaries ended, I was against any stampede to put Hillary on the ticket as PUMA pandering. Now, it is time to make true Hillary's slogan "in it to win it." Hillary won the 2nd half of the primaries but was unable to overcome an insurmountable lead that Obama built up early. Since the Presidential elecion is a one time shot in November, a similar "run out the clock" strategy by Obama would be fatal to his Presidential hopes and the nation.
Hillary would have made McCain pay a huge price for his flip flop on the Iraq withdrawal timeline, his confusion of Shite/Sunni, the Gramm "whiner" comment, and all the other times that McCain steps all over himself. I am sick of Obama giving McCain a pass on his stupidity while McCain hammers Obama over any miss-step that he makes. This country cannot afford another four years of Bush and having Hillary as VP, Bill, baggage and all, would be much better than 4 years of McCain.
