Oct 03 2008
With a brilliant smile and a confident swagger, Sarah Palin faced Joe Biden, and America, in the first and only vice presidential debate. But the face she presented was that of shallow Pollyanna with a woefully insufficient grasp of issues and facts.
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The Internet’s Chronicle Of Media Decay.
Oct 03 2008
The NY Times reports the U.S. sheds 159,000 jobs, making September the 9th straight monthly drop in employment and “the worst month of retrenchment in five years”. 760,000 jobs have been eliminated in the U.S. since the beginning of 2008, according to the Labor Department. “Most economists have concluded that, even in the rosiest outlook, the economy will continue to struggle well into next year.”
“This is an economy in recession, and every dimension of the report confirms that,” said Ethan S. Harris, an economist at Barclays Capital. “This has been preceded by a slow-motion recession. Now we’re going into the full-speed recession that will last somewhere between three and five quarters.”
In their coverage of the drop in employment, the LA Times reports, “The bad employment report was expected to heighten pressure on Congress to pass an economic rescue package designed to ease the credit crunch that has frozen Wall Street and shut off credit flows to businesses across the country.”
A story from Bloomberg news suggests the earlier Paulson-Bernanke Steps Created ‘Big Ripples’ that lead to the rescue. “The $700 billion rescue that the U.S. House considers today reflects the unintended consequences of decisions made by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke since March.“
Each decision to bail out or not created more instability, leading to further runs on securities firms, banks and insurers.
“Every time you tinker with this delicate system even small changes can create big ripples,” said Dino Kos, former head of the New York Fed’s open-market operations and now a managing director at Portales Partners LLC in New York…
The Treasury is gambling that the $700 billion plan now being debated in Congress will kick-start capital markets and lending. If the government is a buyer of mortgage securities, they will trade higher, Paulson told Congress. If the banks are cleansed of bad assets, they will find new capital and the cycle of lending will start again.
Investors say once again the government’s big-footing in the financial markets could create more problems than it solves.
Officials “have designed a financial bailout plan that is not only misdirected, but may further exacerbate problems in the housing market,” says Eric Hovde, chief investment officer at Hovde Capital LLC, which manages $1 billion in financial services stocks. “Just as foreclosure sales are pressuring housing prices today, government sales will only make matters worse.”
The House passed the Wall Street bailout by a 263-171 vote. McClatchy Newspapers report Maybe $64 million for Washington D.C. politicans explain the bailout vote.
Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics…
Both political parties have become beholden to Wall Street.
How the bailout will positively impact job creation and rescue the U.S. economy remains to be seen. Personally, I am highly skeptical.
Four at Four continues with the military consequences to shipping U.S. manufacturing jobs to China, what the Republicans are up to in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Canada’s Green Party, and a rather depressing story about penguins.
Oct 03 2008
It has been a strange week. Of course, it has been a strange lifetime, so maybe this past week’s strangeness may just be relative.
There is the economic bullshit, of course. No matter what happens with that, I’m just assuming it is going to suck big green weenies. That last time some economic policy bullshit actually benefited the people was when? Does anyone have any recollection?
But maybe there are some good things to take away from that. In hard times we sometimes need some of that.
The trouble is that even if we can find a smidgen of good being a comrade with the bad, there always seems to be more bad as a fellow traveler.
And then there is the fence turtle.
Oct 03 2008
From the House Clerk’s Office (the bailout vote): http://clerk.house.gov/evs/200…
Oct 03 2008
“The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future.”
U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater in his l964 book: With No Apologies.
Oct 03 2008
After the worldwide celebration….
There are a few issues on the table (Stop her! Stop her now, Do NOT let Nancy near that table!)
Oct 03 2008
Pepe Escobar cuts through the fog and bullshit emanating from the Washington, Wall Street, and media lockstep march to relieve you and your children of all the money they can, your future and the future of the country, while doing their damndest to stockholm syndrome you into giving it up to them willingly.
Pepe Escobar: What’s behind the “no banker left behind” bailout
The financial crisis may be the number one issue on US voters’ minds, but there seems to be no leadership at work in Washington, comments Pepe Escobar. The Wall Street bailout rejected by Congress and then approved by the Senate may not be the solution. It’s up to foreign analysts and economists to tell it like it really is.
What is in fact being saved – capitalism or a banking oligopoly?
Oct 03 2008
Oct 03 2008
Boy does this hit the Nail on the Head, at least in this Part 1.
Robert Parry: After 28 years of drunken optimism and blind nationalism the US wakes up to a grim future
Oct 03 2008
One of the series we used to have here at Docudharma was plf515’s What are you reading? To be real honest with you, I usually found his selections a bit intimidating. But that says way more about me than it does him.
I am a member of a book group that meets monthly. In September every year, we choose the books we are going to read for the coming year. I was not able to attend the meeting where this happened last month, but I found some of the selections very interesting and am looking forward to reading them this year. So I thought I’d share them here.
As a bit of background…the book group is all women who are mostly in their 50’s and 60’s. We are all professional women (one is recently retired) working mostly in the non-profit and health care sectors.
With that said, here are some of the selections for the coming year:
Oct 03 2008
“Over the last two weeks I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong.”
(Excerpt from Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s draft letter of resignation to President Bush, dated March 16, 2004, which Comey did not in the end send.)
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull”
(George Orwell: 1984)
I: Main Core and PROMIS
Suppose that the United States Government, or more likely an unaccountable privatized intelligence colossus empowered by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and fueled by the rampant cronyism of a system long ago gone rotten had a surveillance tool capable of peering into the most private aspects of American lives on a whim. Now suppose that the new growth industry of a previously unthinkable futuristic police state was already in place, is fully operational and has in fact been online being actively been being utilized for illegal domestic spying for years before those two airplanes even slammed into the World Trade Center. The ‘terrorist’ attacks were used as the justification for every unconstitutional reigning in of civil liberties ever since that heinous September morning seven years ago when the reset button was hit on two and a quarter centuries of American history and we all stepped forth into the brave new world of perpetual war, fear, suspicion and vengeance into a parallel reality in a place that would come to be known as The Homeland. What if this surveillance industrial complex was in possession of a database that was so large and so powerful that not only could it instantly process and retrieve the most minute or intimate aspects of a citizen’s lives but was also able to utilize extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities to actually predict likely patterns of future behavior.
