Some interesting facts from the video. The amount Goldman-Sachs spent on Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign this year was $583,000. On McCain, Goldman-Sacs spent $178,000.
The total campaign contributions from the real estate, insurance, and financial industries are as follows:
Obama: $25 million.
McCain: $22.1 million.
This profoundly disturbing page from comes from today’s Huffington Post. (The arrows are mine, of course.) We have in the Internet an instrument of mass communication that a founding father like Ben Franklin would have sold his last pair of bifocals to participate in, giving each of us unprecedented power to communicate with others. Yet in the face of yet another screwing from our representatives … our leaders … those corporate thugs in Congress, it’s all we can do to try our partisan best to elect yet another generation of these reprehensible criminals to Congress and the Presidency.
The Huffington Post finds it more important what Sarah Palin thinks of Katie Couric than the fact that their beloved Democrats just screwed us all to the tune of $700 Billion that the government doesn’t have. In fact, if you’ll read the smaller headlines on the bottom carefully, you’ll see that not only are they not expressing the public’s rage over this decision — they’re taking credit for it! And well they may, for it was Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who led the dizzying charge to abdicate their responsibility as an opposition party in their enthusiasm to sign on to yet another George Bush freedom fire drill.
The Difference Between The Two Parties We Fight So Hard Over
What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats? Here it is in a nutshell:
Republicans are people with who admit they have business agendas, then screw you. Democrats don’t admit they have business agendas.
Of course, we need to exclude from that judgement those statesmen in both parties who voted against this heinous bit of legislation, and I especially commend folks like Ron Paul on the Right and Dennis Kuccinich on the left who voiced their emphatic opposition.
Indeed, I say with the same conviction as Kuccinich, though without his faith in his Party: Wake up, America! Wake up, America! Wake up, America!
Vote for a third party candidate in November. Better yet, vote for more than one. Because if you believe what the media tells you and vote for one of the other party because you don’t want to "throw your vote away", you’re missing an opportunity to weaken the conspiracy of corporations an utterly corrupt and reprehensible government. Vote for a third party candidate. It matters less which one you choose, than that you walk away from the one party system masquerading as a two party system. They divide us into red and blue to conquer us, for if the electorate ever moved past the facile partisanship of The Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, we’d have a government of the people, by the People, and for the people again.
Maybe the idea that we ever had such a government is just a dream we all had, but it’s a dream worth speaking and voting and fighting for.
Here’s how it happened in a nutshell.
If I still had any money left, I’d read this book.
Wake up. Wake up. Please wake up.
I am pleased to announce that we discovered today that the American people have finally gotten an opposition party to stand up to the disastrous policies of George W. Bush.
Unfortunately, the opposition party we’ve been waiting for turn out to be Bush’s own Republican Party, who opposed the dumb Paulson bailout by 133 to 65. Meantime the Democrats — the party that followed our Worst President Ever into Iraq and later did nothing while letting Kuccinich’s articles of impeachment rot on the vine — voted 140 to 95 in favor of the plan that some 60 to 67 per cent of Americans opposed. You can read who voted for what here (pay no attention to the bill’s Title, which appears to be left over from last year’s HR3997).
So anyway, my fellow Democrats, nice job. The American people give you a majority in both houses, and you squander it.
Some political sentiments never get old, do they?
Or put another way:
Q. How many Democrats does it take to screw up a two-house majority?
A. How many do we need?
CNN has the latest discussion draft of the Paulson bailout from the House of Representatives.
I’ve written a number of appeals to oppose this bailout, and although everybody seems to have been cowed by the press and by Congress telling us how we’re all going to die any minute if this bailout doesn’t happen, I’m still opposed to it.
First of all, the executive compensation provisions (Sec. 111) are an absolute joke, but they let Congress (and the media) claim there are limits on compensation. Before the draft came out today, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich nailed what would happen on his blog:
Congress knows the public is furious. That’s why it’s insisting on the above-mentioned provisions. But Congress and the Administration, and Wall Street, also know that the public — and the media — can easily be hoodwinked into believing that certain limits and protections have been built into the deal when, on closer inspection, they haven’t. Wall Street is masterful at creating the appearances of value when there’s no value there, and many of our representatives in Congress are well-versed in the art of creating the appearances of public gains when the gains are mostly private. So the media has to dig hard and look at the details of this deal.
Sure enough, the limits include limits against compensation that entails unnecessary risk to the taxpayer, which is a good idea. Another provision bars "compensation based on statements of earnings, gains, or other criteria that are later proven to be materially inaccurate", and there is also a provision against golden parachute payments. So nothing in the language limits prohibits the usual exorbitant multi-million dollar compensation for an executive who stays with the company. As for statements that are "materially inaccurate", cooking the books is already a crime — though I imagine not a particularly enforced one — so I’m not sure what that adds.
The bottom line: if you’re the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the guy in Hank Paulson’s old job, and you make $73.72 million per year, no worries! We’ll pull your butt out of the fire, while meantime making noises for our constituents that make it sound like we’re populists protecting them against you greedy bastards our beloved campaign financiers. To be sure, any amount of $500,000 won’t be deductible by the corporation, but do you really think that will stop the CEO and his cronies on the board from spending the company’s money on themselves?
I don’t have the link to it handy, but I recall the original Senate Bill requiring that the government get an equity position equal to the amount of the junk debt purchased, but in the House Bill, for publicly traded companies the Secretary needs to get "a warrant giving the right to the Secretary to receive nonvoting common stock or preferred stock in such financial institution, as the Secretary determines appropriate". So if, when bailing out his old company, Goldman Sachs, for example, the Secretary determines it’s appropriate to spend $200 Billion on a single share of common stock — or none — that’s fine. That might be a little unfair because the oversight section does charge the Comptroller General with making sure the ACT does what it sets out to do, including "whether it has protected tax-payers". Still, I felt a lot more protected before Congress spent $6,800 of my family’s money.
Nevertheless, I predict you’ll here the media talking about how we’re all going to make our money back, so it’s not really $700 Billion, isn’t bipartisanship wonderful, yada yada yada.
It shall be a felony for any individual to accept payment from any publicly traded corporation, other organization organized primarily to conduct a business for profit, or intermediary acting on behalf of these entities, to lobby or otherwise influence the Congress, or for any member of Congress to knowingly consult with any such individual.
I don’t know how much you’re following the news of the bailout of wall street banks who repackaged bad loans, but if you’re not, now is a great time to get involved and please, please call your elected representative and tell everyone you can about this incredible fiasco.
Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, and George Bush are asking Congress for the authority to spend up to $700 billion at a time (that’s a balance sheet maximum, not a maximum on the total the government can spend). That’s more than the total cost of the War in Iraq so far. The Treasury will spend it buying bad loans, and get no equity stake in the firms they’re buying them from — leading some to call it "cash for trash".
Section eight of the proposed legislation gives Paulson an oversight-free blank check as to how to spend that much of your money.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
You can read the full text here.
Although as you might expect, public opposition to the plan is strongest among Democrats, several prominent conservatives have also gone on record as being opposed to the plan. This legislation is so bad that even CNN gets it.
Please look up and either write to or phone your Senator and House Representative right away. You can learn more about the proposal by clicking through on the articles current on Digg for Business and Finance.
Congress is in a HUGE RUSH to get this done, so those of us who think it’s expensive, ill conceived and leaves us stuck holding the bill need to MOVE NOW to express our concerns to Congress.
UPDATE:
Here is the latest draft the bill, which I must admit I think is substantially better than Paulson’s original proposal. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this makes me for the bill, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.
Are you thinking that the November election is going to bring about much needed change this year, when Obama is elected? If so, we have proved one thing: Americans believe what ads tell them.
Remember 2006, when we elected Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress?
Let me ask you something:
This weekend the Democrats have been given yet another opportunity to do something, and let’s watch what they don’t do about it. Having colluded with the Republicans to tear apart legislation designed to prevent what’s happening now from happening, we now have a bought and paid for free press who’s very happy to tell us what a catastrophe "we" are in so we’ll continue to fight among ourselves along party lines while both "sides" flush away seven hundred billion($700,000,000,000).
That’s a bit over $2,300 per man woman and child in America, long division fans (OK — I used a calculator!). So much for the stimulus payments we got this year. Do you feel stimulated?
My feeling of Deja Vu comes from watching the so-called liberal media report on this. Actually I’m being a little unfair to the Huffington Post, which usually has pretty informative and entertaining fare for us left wingers, but this story was so insipid and sycophantic about what our government is doing it could have come from Fox News.
I realize that my presentation of all this is going to sound borderline conspiracy-theorist, but let’s look at some of the elements of this "crisis":
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
I already linked to the Wall Street Journal article telling us what a disaster will befall us if we fail to act. Really? Why? I don’t know about you, but in my case the total value of my IRA (assuming it suddenly went from where it is to zero, which of course is a worst case), is already less than what I’ve "lost" in home equity since height of the market. And perhaps this is naive, but it seems to me that financial institutions are just one segment of the stock market.
From our Huffington Post article:
A grim-faced President Bush acknowledged risks to taxpayers in what would be the most sweeping government intervention to rescue failing financial institutions since the Great Depression. But he declared, "The risk of not acting would be far higher.
Says you.
It’s a Rush Job
In my other life as a real estate broker in Sacramento, I witnessed the market starting to decline in 2005. Though some people would argue that I was late becoming sufficiently pessimistic, we’ve nevertheless now had three years of declining home values and at least eighteen months of rising foreclosures. But let’s look at when the Bush administration and Congress finally got around to declaring this a crisis:
The administration wants to see a package emerge from the weekend, to lend calm to Monday morning’s market openings, said Keith Hennessey, the director of the president’s economic council. The goal is to have something passed by Congress by the end of next week, when lawmakers recess for the elections.
If you’re going to ram some legislation through Congress, what better time to do it than a week before everyone has to pose for the voters in a photo- opp where we all came together. That will help us with our next point: those pesky left-wing Republicans (also known as Democrats).
Are You a Spoiled, Rich C.E.O. Getting Wealthy Off The Bailout? No Sweat: The Government’s Got Your Back
OK, so maybe the sky is falling and banks are turning into fiscal suicide bombers before our eyes, sending shards of hot molten mortgage backed securities into the eyes of innocent retirees.
Paulson rejected Democrats’ calls to include tighter regulations, corporate reforms or limits on executive compensation as part of the measure, Sherman said. "He’s doing his best to paint a picture of the sky falling, and then he says, because the sky’s falling, you have to do it my way."
Hello, ground control to Major Tom… Earth calling Democrats… YOU ARE THE MAJORITY PARTY IN CONGRESS. Are we going to be hearing three months from now about how how the President and big bad Paulsen made you do something here you didn’t want to do?
Yes, it looks like we are:
Democrat Barack Obama said it was critical that leaders in both parties work in concert. "Truly, we are all in this together," he said.
OK, Senator Obama, that’s great. If we’re all in this together, maybe the Senator from Illinois can take a week off from campaigning to do the job the citizens of Illinois presumably elected him to do: to be an effective opposition voice to rampant deregulation and a government that writes blank checks for corporate robber barons?
Never mind. Let me just get my checkbook out. $6,900 from the Lockwood family for hedge fund managers and assorted Wall Street suits. Who do I make that out to… Department of the Treasury?
One industry is at risk of going under soon.
I’ve been absolutely fascinated in recent days to learn about the history of the mess we find ourselves in.
Here it is in a nutshell. In 1933, in the the throes of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress recognized that one of the abuses that led to the mess the country and the banking system was in then was the fact that banks who were in the investment business (which is inherently risky) were not separated from banks that receive deposits (which should be heavily regulated with a view to safety). So two Democratic Congressmen sponsored — and Congress passed — the Glass-Steagall Act, one of the main provisions of which was to separate the two types of entities. With some exceptions, the act made it a felony for anyone to engage in both deposit taking and the security business at the same time. This lowering of risk was essential, because the Glass-Steagall Act also created the FDIC, providing for government insurance of deposits.
Fast forward sixty-five years to the 1998. Bob Rubin is Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury. He’s also one of the three most highly paid members executives at Citibank (soon to become Citigroup). Sandy Weill, Citibank’s CEO, wanted to merge with Travelers Insurance, a merger which is illegal under Glass-Steagall. So Citibank approached the Clinton administration and said, in effect, “Look, this is against the law. Can we do it anyway?” And the Clinton administration said, in effect: “Sure, what the heck.”
Of course, getting Bubba to wink and nod worked as a temporary solution, but to more systematically dismantle the protections of the New Deal against rampant speculation and smash and grab capitalism, Glass-Steagall had to go. So in 1997 and 1998, brokers, bankers, and insurance companies pitched in and spent $300 million to effectively ask Congress, in effect, “Hey fellows, can we get rid of this pesky Glass-Steagall act so we can keep doing this?”
In those years, $58 million went to Congress directly, $87 million went to “soft money” contributions to both parties, and $163 million went to lobbying congress.
And so of course, Phil Gramm and the Republican-led Congress said, in effect, “Sure, what the heck”.
So now here it is 2008. In the last few days the Government has spent $85 billion buying AIG, having already placed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in Conservatorship and having recently bailed out Bear Stearns.
It’s fair to say that the same corporate fat cats who said to Congress: “Hey fellows, can we get rid of these pesky laws that are getting in the way of us making money hand over fist” are now saying to Congress and the government, “Well, gee, that didn’t work out well — look at all these debts we’ve created that we can’t pay. Can we have some taxpayer money to bail us out?
And of course, the government and Congress will say: “Sure, what the heck”.
Today we get the news that Congress is going to create an “entity to absorb banks’ bad debt”. Wow, how will that work, I wonder? Will it just soak it up like a Bounty paper towel, using taxpayer money?
Sure. What the heck.
Meantime, as the ship of state sinks, Andre Neil writing for the Daily Kos and the Wall Street Journal’s Dave Taranto are standing on the prow having a partisan shouting match over whether we should be emphasizing Phil Gramm or Bill Clinton as the culprit here.
We have no effective opposition party in the United States, but we are all of us here on the Internet, pledging holy allegiance to the passionate insane delusion of a two-party, representative system.
Sources / Related Reading:
The Glass-Steagall Act: Commercial vs Investment Banking
Citibank-Travelers Merger and Rubin’s Board Post
Clinton, Republicans agree to deregulation of US financial system
Seven Deadly Sins of Deregulation — and Three Necessary Reforms