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Correction
I was wrong in my prediction made on November 12:
As the first tranche of the $700 billion is nearly gone, the Treasury will tell Congress that help to Detroit through the TARP program can only be given if Congress immediately and unconditionally hands over the full second tranche. Of those $350 billion maybe $50 billion will then be handed to Detroit
and on January 21 a new administration will discover that Paulson has
given the rest down to the last dollar to his friends.
That was clearly wrong, especially in the second sentence, and needs to be corrected. I underestimated Congress' spinelessness and its willingness to hand over taxpayer money to Wall Street.
In the deal now in the making the taxpayer funds for Detroit will be in addition to the TARP funds. Wall Street will get the full $700 billion TARP money without the reduction I anticipated:
Seeking to end a weeks-long stalemate between the Bush administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, senior Congressional aides said that the money would most likely come from $25 billion in federally subsidized loans intended for developing fuel-efficient cars.
By breaking that impasse, the lawmakers could also clear the way for the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., to request the remaining $350 billion of the financial industry bailout fund knowing he will not get bogged down in a fight over aiding Detroit.
Democrats are hoping Mr. Paulson will use some of that money to help individual homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Democrats are 'hoping' that Paulson will use 'some' of that money for distressed homeowners?
No way. Paulson will laugh at them while he shovels those billions over to his Wall Street friends.
David 1) “We could pay folks a dollar a bucket to move water from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the $700 billion (or trillion or whatever) and do more good for the economy then giving it to speculators.”
Concise! Clarity! Comprehension! We could also pay homemakers $1 a peanut butter and powdered milk cookie to buy, bake and freeze enough nutrition bars to get our kids through the Eon-long Gulag that Congress, Fed, Treasury and Wall Street have condemned them to as perpetual preferred indentured slaves. At least that would keep the farmers employed, the groceries open and the refrigerator lights on!
It’s an amazing thing, when you sit down at lunch with one or two fellow workers, and tell the ad hominems of your own life, shivers running down your back if you’ve ever been homeless before, lost a child before, or been divorced in the middle of the night before, raging at the shock and awe impact of deregulated usury upon fixed wages, everyone forlornly seeking any relief that comes from shared misery.
But if you tell the same stories in a larger context, wrapped in generalities to avoid public embarrassment of personal references, a strange transmogrification occurs. No one in the congregation wants to hear it! Almost immediately the preachers and the cheerleaders, the government, ivory tower and fee men and women professional leeches start talking over the conversation, ‘it’s gonna turn around, we’re all gonna be fine, you’re putting down the greatest nation on earth, God and Jesus will show us the way, next quarter will be better, put on a happy face, our Congress is going to solve the problem, our president (Bush) is a great leader, at least we’re not living under socialism,’ (sic) and more derogatory, for those who insist on retelling their meth house horrors, their wife and children leaving to live with grandparents stories, ‘well if you don’t like it here, move to Iran.’
But where it really becomes mind-numbing is when these stories get repackaged like CDSs, and retold at public hearings, only in the form of statistical tranches, SIV generalities and prognostication TARPs, amazingly, all human elements have been stripped away! Our so-called “leaders” deal only in proformas, tax projections, and what the economic future holds for mega corporations and shopping malls!
Where before, every other word of Our Collective Misery was ‘my sister’ or ‘the neighbors kid’ or ‘that poor old man down the street’, our leaders use words like ‘forecast’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘revenue stream’, meaningless formalities ‘will the august gentleman from Tennessee please’, truly eye-blinking, mind-numbing circus-circus, for what I’m here to tell you has already been decided behind closed doors, by a small group of monied- and business-tied elites: SPEND MORE TAXES!
So ‘the good news to report to you’ and ‘some challenges’ is, Americans are broke. Personal savings are negative, and have been for several quarters before the news made it to main street in August that we’re fundamentally over-drawn. Since then, personal credit has frozen, personal savings are in full bleed out, the economy has ground to a halt the way sap freezes in autumn, and a lot of folks are gonna fall!
The ‘good news’ is the tax system is still making collections, there is a thriving usury system growing stronger every day, government employment:programs are still growing by leaps and bounds as %age of an American GDP artificially fluffed by M3, DoD and tax spending in general. Yes, fellow citizens, Our Politburo is strong!
So what’s the closer? How do we wrap this up into denouement and go to commercial?
Our children are increasingly mute, increasingly frankenpharmed, increasingly in debt before they even attain their majority. And there are no jobs for them when they get there. They will be living at home with us, drawing on the same savings and bankrupt SSTF so rapidly being depleted. America is scrEUed! All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, can’t put this Humpty Dumpty back together again!
We’re gonna be paying the same high taxes as EU, but without any social programs!
What we can do is keep having bake sales for after-school programs, keep collecting canned food for our poor neighbors, support recycling building materials, household goods, furniture, appliance and shoe repair, anything to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it last’. None of our cash money for clothes, cars or commodities stays in the community anyway, it’s all going to international corporations bleeding us out.
The other thing we can do is beat the ever-loving sh-t out of our local government! Start a hearing-pool with your friends, attending public meetings and testifying vociferously, pre-scripted the way city council is pre-scripted, how we are mad as hell, how we’re not gonna take any more gas taxes, property taxes, Spanish-American War taxes, carbon taxes, ‘streamlined sales tax’ or leaf collecting taxes!
We’re not going to let the self-entitled and pensioned-for-life demi-politicians spend what little savings we have left, that should go to our indentured children, on more unnecessary public works and public employee programs. No more $10M parks, $100M civic buildings, $B highway expansions and state prisons, dross-gilded and massaged by overpaid consultants and under-competed over-change-ordered contractors.
30% overhead for usury, 30% overhead for administration, 30% fee-handler profit, we’re getting no more than 10c on the $1 for our taxes!!! If public works and local government were charities, they’d shut them down for fraud! Then they raise a hue and cry over auto manufacturers taking private jets to hearings, when county executives take dozens of taxpayer trips, all expenses paid, around the country, around the world, to attend politico suck fests, on our nickel!
We’e literally burning our money for heat to dig the frozen graves of our children.
Posted by: Cher Iah | Dec 6 2008 18:42 utc | 6
“i think a healthy mind has a firm grasp of one’s needs, at least in the basic sense of common needs…”
I appreciate your calm reply to my harsh post. However, I still think you are placing too much certainty as to “we know our needs.” It has taken thousands of years of culture and learning and “we”, myself included, still may not know our needs. A firm grasp of one’s needs takes much learning and unfortunately, with the primitive senses and instincts that humans are born with, human beings will probably always need to be assisted by a positive culture in knowing their basic needs. And knowing anything beyond the basics, or any attempt to positively fulfill these basic needs, probably requires the tools of good education and technology.
b’s example of homeless people obtaining the use of foreclosed homes is a good example. Of course food/shelter/clothing is needed by all people, but to think that giving the homeless a house is “solving their need”, even for a shelter from the weather is simplistic. It is a rough world out there. One still needs to continue living, and that implies so much more than just having shelter. Security is more than just a house to live in. Protection from predators is needed in both the macro and micro world. And even our health is more than just physical in nature but also spiritual. (I’m not necessarily talking religion here, but mental/culture/emotional needs are basic.) Thirty years ago, many ‘healthy’ minds had no idea how AIDS was spread, and death and suffering was the result. Their basic wants/needs of sexuality and intimacy served them badly. More to the point, if “we”, as a nation, gave every homeless person a home, would America/Americans instantly be that much better? Yes, for sure, in the short term, the very short term. But if one is only looking at very short term, perhaps there are better ways to initially help the homeless. My guess is many need more than just a house to live in.
Another of b’s threads today discusses Obama’s plan to get “we” out of this mess. Again, I see only initiatives that will help mainly in the short term. Of course, I don’t have the details of what Obama is proposing yet so I am writing this prematurely, but complete phase changes are needed, not upgrades, in our transportation, energy, communication, health, financial, educational and political/government systems. Of course for safety reasons, bridges and roads have to be repaired for the short term – BUT HELL, HAVEN’T AMERICANS HAD ENOUGH OF SHORT TERM SOLUTIONS? As others have noted here, cars and roads are not the ideal solutions for the future. Each one of the aforementioned categories needs almost complete change, not upgrades. Concerning communication spending, I agree that broadband is needed for every one. I have fought for an expansion of broadband in our rural area for many years now. I even started a non-profit corporation for this purpose and got hundreds of thousands in state grant money for the project. But as the project progressed, I found out quickly that those in government would not upset the corporate apple cart. It was really akin to those in power merely throwing a dog a bone. And I worry if Obama’s broadband details are anything like his healthcare plans, things may get worse not better, for the long run. In my opinion, America ‘NEEDS’ optical fiber to the home as a public utility, just like sewer and water. Today’s citizens need free Internet access and need it not to be monitored by big brother for content/user. And the emphasis on doing it on the cheap by wireless bothers me. At this point, I am afraid many of us may develop cancer with cell phone usage growing, and young adults literally growing them out of their ears. Wireless broadband for everyone worries me for this reason. Perhaps with technology, radiated power levels can be minimized to satisfy health concerns. This brings me to education, the most important thing of all. Here I believe our government could and should provide free education for anyone. Yet again, merely throwing money at our educational system won’t fix the fundamental problems. Although I call for large social programs, I do not consider myself a socialist. Far from it, I believe in the independence of the individual and in the basic principles of the free enterprise system. People should be allowed to take personal risks for their betterment and be rewarded. At this moment, the CEO’s of large corporations have little or no personal risk, yet reap great rewards for what I do not know. That is not free enterprise. People are no longer rewarded fairly for their labor or ingenuity. What the American people experience now is Corporatism and economic slavery. From my previous posts, those here know that I believe government should provide public utilities such as sewer and water, along with the backbones for education, health, transportation, and communication systems.
Annie, I know you possess a super bright mind, but sometimes, and maybe not in your case/situation, such a good mind can be a hindrance, not a blessing. In general (and again, I’m not talking necessarily about you) but I am disappointed by elitist or closed-minded attitudes. I find such attitudes with those of any political or religious persuasion. And people who are especially bright have the ability/luxury to rest on their early basic assumptions (which are usually pretty good and probably have served them fairly well). However, such thinking leads to laziness when considering new subjects or re-examining old positions. Perhaps Waldo’s closed mind about Obama is more to the point here. I haven’t been keeping up with all the posts here at MOA, put David seemed like a new poster and I welcomed his thoughts. Sure I could have criticized his post, but it was better than many of my posts. In reading your response to David, you reminded me of this elitism for some reason. You seemed so quick to admonish him. Why? Part of the reason for my post response to you was that I have a habit of rooting for the new guy or gal who may get scared off (or often an underdog) and came to David’s defense. There is always time to criticize.
Posted by: Rick | Dec 8 2008 2:08 utc | 31
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