Tag: bailout

I’m with Kos:

The American people aren’t happy with this bailout. Democrats are giving McCain a gift by allowing him to be seen as its slayer. Yet Democrats sit there thinking that lining up behind Bush’s proposal will somehow be a political plus.

Yet every challenger across the nation, Democratic and Republican, is running against this thing to public cheers. The tone deafness on this is shocking.

At this point I really don’t know who is more incompetent, the Democratic Leadership or the Bush Administration.

All day Thursday – all frickin’ day – we were treated to one pic after another showing Democratic politicians working feverishly to pass a bailout plan that NOBODY WANTS – except Wall Street Fat Cats, Foreign Loan Sharks, and George W. Bush of course.

First, we had shots like this of Chris ‘Fred Flintstone’ Dodd and Barney ‘Rubble’ Frank in a desperate barefoot spin to get this 700 billion ton jalopy moving.

Next we had that uber-embarrassing White House meeting with Pelosi and Reid flanking George Bush like they were his guardian angels.

How bad does this look?

You’ve got polls showing an anemic 30% public support for the bailout, the AFL-CIO picketing Wall Street and Congressional mail coming in at 19 to 1 against, and yet the Dem Leadership somehow thinks it’s to their political advantage to be seen as large and in charge of this monstrosity?

Clueless.

Hello, this is my first diary here. It has already been posted and did pretty poorly at DailyKos until being rescued. It is a story of pain and suffering and I believe it is a decent prediction of things to come.

This is an old story from 1994 that has some relevance today. It is a story from a Democratic administration but the victims were forced to deal with a Republican resolution. It is a story that I had to live through.

I live in a 3000 unit apartment complex in the Bronx. It is a massive dwelling on 22 acres that was built in 1961. There was a conversion from a rental property to a cooperative in 1987, the last breath of a housing boom. A complete renovation made the property much more desirable.  

In order to sell many apartments very quickly the holder of unsold shares steered new shareholders towards seven and ten year balloon mortgages. People believing in their own upward mobility put up ten percent and made smaller payments that paid down just a small amount of the principle.

When these balloon mortgages ended so many of those loans were with defunct savings and loans and many residents ended up at the mercy of the Resolution Trust Corporation. Not only were many tenant/shareholders in big trouble, because of the RTC it looked like the entire complex was going to fail.      

Well, I’m a little late to the party, but that should be OK.

It seems as if Wall Street is going to get much of what they want in this upcoming bailout bill, but they’re not going to get all of it.

From Handout to Bailout

It looks like our elected officials showed a bit of spine and common sense in taking this from ‘handout’ to bailout and have placed some checks and balances on the handing over of $700 large to the extortionists on Wall Street.

But the key aspect of this situation is that it was still extortion.

Tonight was an eye-opening experience. Running behind all day long, Hubby and I decided to order a meat-lover’s stromboli for two, and I drove down the road to our local pizza place to pick it up.

There are some things you don’t do in life. You don’t start whistling in the check out line at the grocery store. You don’t give out your personal banking information to the Prince of Nigeria, regardless of how desperate that email sounds.

And, you don’t talk politics at the local pizza place.

All that changed tonight.

Crossposted from WWL to Docudharma, Booman, OWL, Station Charon and Never In Our Names.

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Or:

A foray into when the UNHOLY TRINITY comes back to bite the most indoctrinated, shocked nation in which it has ever been unleashed right in the ass.

As I often am wont to do, I went back to source material when troubled by this * new economic crisis. (* Which of course is neither new, nor could not have easily been predicted by previous models)

I am re-reading “The Shock Doctrine”. I loathe bogging down into economics, but her work is accessible. Normally understanding economics is about as easy for me as swallowing a VW and passing it sorted into its component parts in bags.

Bill Maher had Naomi Klein on this week past. We catch him on the Sunday Morning rerun * religiously. (* She says with full intended irony, being of the same mind that religious people are idiots for the most part)

“They moved the disaster from Wall Street to Main Street…”

I’d almost change my orientation to do this woman she gets it so very well.

“This is socialism for the Rich”

No Shit.

Andrew Sullivan I wanted to bitch-slap. He said exactly what I predicted the neo-cons would say: “Its the poor peoples faults for taking on loans…”

Not the cunning bastards who tricked us into taking loans they swore wouldn’t bubble from 8% to 18%, as they now have. Not the speculators driving up prices on oil. Its the STUPID poor people.

I wouldn’t do him if he was the last diseased prick on Earth and I drank a gallon of Spanish Fly in a post-battery Earth and both my hands were cut off.

I digress. Lets get back to the Real Trinity.

Wanna fear a Godhead? Fear this one.

Original article, by Bill Van Auken, via World Socialist Web Site:

As the Bush administration and Congress continued negotiations Monday on a trillion-dollar bailout package for Wall Street, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin in which he promised to carry out sweeping cuts in government spending and impose strict fiscal discipline on the US government.