Well, boys and girls,
Submitted by donjo on September 21, 2008 - 6:06pm.
it's not too late to skim through Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine," for you are about to experience the latest US version of it first hand. First, create a disaster, (financial system crashing) secondly, scare the hell out of people, then RUSH to solve the "problem" with quick solutions that invariably benefit the wealthy, the corporations, and those in the sitting government while totally screwing the citizens deeply into the ground.
Hang on tight, it's going to be a bumpy ride. If you have the time or inclination to protest to your congress critters, you had better do it f a s t.
The combined donations to Obama from these companies probably wouldn't finance half the campaign efforts just in Colorado. Obama has raised what? $250 million? $300 million, now? Their $1.093 million seems like a tiny percentage of the total.
And what about all the liberal/progressive organizations who have given money to Obama? Don't they have at least as much "influence" as the corporations you mentioned? I put "influence" in quotes because there's not much evidence that campaign donations actually change anybody's opinion.
This all seems like a stretch to me.
Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!
The organizations you mention aren't about to take over our financial institutions at taxpayer's expense. This is a financial coup, engineered by the repubs with help by the dems, we're talking about; in essence, "socializing" our private system for the benefit of the few. (So they won't have to pay for their mismanagement and greed while ending up with pockets full of cash). That's how the shock doctrine works.
There's plenty of articles out there delineating this event by people who, unlike me, know what they're talking about.
RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
Thanks, Don. While the rescue may, in fact, be a "coup" "engineered by the repubs with help by the dems," if it works, won't it help lots of people on pensions, with IRAs, and prevent a major collapse and a disaster of epic proportions?
There seem to be short-term and long-term implications -- in the short term to avoid a calamity and in the long-term make it impossible for it to happen again. It may be necessary to "socialize" part of the economy in the short term, as long as in the future it can be returned to the private sector in a re-regulated but otherwise free market.
I read or heard decades ago that successful capitalism depends on "controlled greed." It's always made sense to me.
Stan Davis
Lakewood, CO
Wes Clark -- Make America All It Can Be!
It's helping keep corporation execs out of jail and rolling in taxpayer money among other things.
This explains it somewhat:
"Silber quotes extensively in these pieces from the analyses by Mike Whitney, who, like Silber, has been hammering away at the sober reality behind all the hysterical headlines and stock market roller-coaster rides. Here's Whitney:
http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1610/135/
The problems cannot be resolved by shifting the debts of the banks onto the taxpayer. That's an illusion. By adding another $1 or $2 trillion dollars to the National Debt, Paulson is just ensuring that interest rates will go up, real estate will crash, unemployment will soar, and foreign central banks will abandon the dollar. In truth, there is no fix for a deleveraging market anymore than there is a fix for gravity. The belief that massive debts and insolvency can be erased by increasing liquidity just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.
That's why Henry Paulson is the worst possible person to be orchestrating the so called rescue project. Paulson comes from a business culture which rewards deception, personal acquisitiveness, and extreme risk-taking. Paulson is to finance capitalism what Rumsfeld is to military strategy. His leadership, and the congress' pathetic abdication of responsibility, assures disaster. Besides, why should the taxpayers be happy that the stocks of Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual and Goldman Sachs surged on the news that there would be a government bailout yesterday? These banks are essentially bankrupt and their business models are broken. Keeping insolvent banks on life support is not a rescue plan; it's insanity.
****
The "rescue plans" now being bipartisanly bruited in Washington make Silber's conclusion painfully explicit. For what is that basic plan: taking at least $700 billion of your money and giving it the same rapacious, ignorant twits -- the financial terrorists -- who have just blown a gargantuan crater in the global economy. What's more, the disperal of this astronomical largess is to be left solely to the arbitrary will of the "unitary executive," with no oversight, legislative or judicial, whatsoever.
Don't you wish someone would give you $700 billion to give away to your pals as you see fit? With no strings attached, no questions asked?
Silber also points us to yet another salient point noted by Whitney -- who ain't getting all this funny money:
Not a dime of public money is provided for over-extended mortgage-owners trying to stay in their homes. Not one congressman or senator at Thursday's meeting rejected the bailout plan or called for a criminal investigation to establish whether laws were broken in the sale of fraudulent securities which have clogged the global system; pushed banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and homeowners into default, and precipitated the greatest financial crisis in the nation's 230 year history.
And here we come to the crux of the matter: "Not one congressman or senator...rejected the bailout" or called for a criminal probe into a scheme in which bad debts and "financial instruments" based on thin air stripped trillions of dollars from ordinary people and law-abiding institutions. Just as with the world-historical war profiteering of the conquest of Iraq, nobody wants to know, no one among the great and good will step up and speak the stark truth."
RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
Lots of rationalizations about town these days.
Simply put, it's called stealing.
Last I knew, however many laws have changed, stealing is still a crime.
It just depends on who is doing the stealing to make it such.
Will Obama speak truth to power?
that the only thing that stops this from happening is a popular uprising by the PEOPLE. And sometimes that isn't even enough.
RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
It'll explain it to you.
RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/09/20/naomi-klein-saves-the-day-on-real-time-andrew-sullivan-has-no-clue/
Klein debated Andrew Sullivan about the cause of the financial crisis on the Bill Maher Show.
Andrew Sullivan is of course the conservative author/commentator who supports Senator Obama. Sullivan also has been guilty of being disrespectful to Wes.
What goes around comes around, and the US is now taking what it dished out for so long.
Big Financiers Start Lobbying for Wider Aid
By JENNY ANDERSON, VIKAS BAJAJ and LESLIE WAYNE
Published: September 21, 2008
Vying for Influence ... and Profit
"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.
Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.
At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.
Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.
“The definition of Financial Institution should be as broad as possible,” the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents big financial services companies, wrote in an e-mail message to members on Sunday.
The group said a wide variety of institutions as varied as mortgage lenders and insurance companies should be able to take advantage of the bailout, and that these companies should be able to sell off any investments linked to mortgages.
The scope of the bailout grew over the weekend. As recently as Saturday morning, the Bush administration’s proposal called for Treasury to buy residential or commercial mortgages and related securities. By that evening, the proposal was broadened to give Treasury discretion to buy “any other financial instrument.”
The lobbying became particularly intense because Congress plans to approve a package within just two weeks, without the traditional hearings and committee process.
“Of course there will be fierce lobbying,” said Bert Ely, a financial services industry consultant in Alexandria, Va. “The real question is, Who wouldn’t want to be included in the package?”
Mr. Ely said the open-ended nature of the Treasury’s plan could be interpreted to mean that the government was open to acquiring “any asset, anywhere in the world.”
“The question that I am raising — is there any limit?” Mr. Ely said.
Each part of the financial industry is pursuing its own interests.
Small banks, for example, are pushing the government to buy loans they made to home builders and commercial developers. Wall Street banks are lobbying to temporarily suspend certain accounting rules to avoid taking big losses on the assets they sell to Treasury, which would weaken them further."...
RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
When financial houses own assets that have declined in value, they should either hold onto them until they increase, or sell them to the highest bidder. The highest bidder does not necessarily have to be the Federal Reserve or the Federal government. China could bid. The Bank of London could bid. Other financial houses could bid.
It's ridiculous for the representatives of taxpayers to jump into this situation and offer to pay whatever the financial houses are demanding. They need to play some serious hardball concerning how much of the taxpayer's money should be spent to acquire whatever risky investments they finally decide to purchase.
Nick Kelly
Wes Clark could still secure America as a national security candidate.
Demand that the Bailout Legislation Be Rejected
We are witnessing a bankers' coup d’etat. In the name of saving the economy from a crisis created by their own greed and immense profits, Bush and the biggest bankers have taken a country and a people hostage.
“Give us your money and tear up what’s left of your Constitution or we will sink your economy,” is the message from Wall Street and the Bush Administration. “Give us the power and money we demand or you will be left jobless from a new economic depression."
Under the pretext of the banking crisis, the Bush Administration is changing the way this country operates. This is not simply taking trillions of dollars from the people and giving it to the richest bankers to do with as they see fit.
...
RUSSERT: So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
SEN. OBAMA: I will not.
supporter told me he should be impeached
Iraq didn't do it for him, but the gross
neglect and the thievery did
1/20/09---jail is too good for him
Bill (from RI)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-klein/now-is-the-time-to-resist_b_128433.html
Reality-based science equals real national security.
Here's some snippets from a really long article detailing the relationship between the dems, wall street "tycoons," and the present financial managers of the US Govt.
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/09/21/baracks-wall-street-problem-is-now-americas/#more-4939
Let’s start with the numbers. Why is a first term Senator pulling down almost $300,000 a year from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Countrywide Financial, and Washington Mutual? He has not even completed his fourth year in the Senate and received a total of $1,093,329.00 from these eight companies and their employees. (all data from OpenSecrets.org). John McCain’s numbers, according to OpenSecrets.org for the period 1990-2008 (i.e., 18 years worth of data) only collected $549,584.00. In other words, Barack is receiving $273,582.25 (and 2008 is not over) per year while McCain raised a paltry $30,532.44.
Want another shocker? Barack Obama has received more from one source–Goldman Sachs $542,252.00–than McCain has from all of the companies combined. Who the hell is more beholden to lobbyists? And why does a junior Senator from Illinois rate this kind of dough?
****
Fannie Mae was not standing on a corner selling mortgages out of a hot dog stand on the corner. She needed help on Wall Street. So, who helped her market the securities and raise the case? The “good” folks at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and AIG, just to name the more prominent ones.
So who was in charge of Fannie Mae for 16 of the last 18 years? Let’s start with James A. Johnson (no relation). Remember him? Barack initially tabbed him to head up the Vice Presidential search team. He was Walter Mondale’s campaign manager in the 1984 fiasco and chaired the search committee for John Kerry. But he started as Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae in 1990, quickly moved up to be the CEO, and left Fannie in 1999 as Chairman of the Executive Committee.
And guess where he went? Fishing? Nope. He became one of the outside directors of the board of Goldman Sachs in 1999 and also served as the Managing Director of Corporate Finance for Lehman Brothers
****
Goldman also gave us John Thain. John is now CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Thain helped to complete the reverse takeover of the NYSE by Archipelago in 2005. As you may have guessed – Archipelago’s largest owner - Goldman Sachs.
Well, who is the current Secretary Treasurer of the United States? It is Henry Paulson, former CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs. Mr. Paulson took the reins in early 2006. Yet another Goldman guy.
****
They picked Goldman Sachs former Chief Economist, William Dudley. An ‘economist’ for a trading operation? I know, it doesn’t sound right to me but maybe he takes direction well. William took this post in late 2006.
World Bank, you ask? Who runs the World Bank? The President of the World Bank is Robert Zoellick. Mr. Zoellick spent most of his career working for various governmental agencies. No Goldman connection here? Almost. He resigned in June 2006 to join Goldman. After a one year stint of indoctrination of how things work at Goldman, and who truly butters his bread, he was appointed World Bank President in June of 07’.
So, former Goldman people are in place as the United States Secretary Treasurer, the head of the NYSE, the head of the trading operations at the Federal Reserve (an economist at that), and President of the World Bank. Big deal? It gets better.
****
Allowing Goldman and the CRMPG, with the blessings of the Federal Reserve to sway the markets in the direction that benefits them most, in the name of financial stability is a bullet to the chest of capitalism.
****