| The Big Bush bailout --- our tax monies used to save the butts of the rich while the GOP does a CYA in the September Surprise. Today, 10/15 it looks like the GOP fascists and John Mc(banal)Cain's geese are cooked, poke that turkey with a fork and lets see the goose fat ooze! |
| 10/27/08: Flash. Hollis Stewart Last Friday, 10/24/08, the New York times had a bit of news that ought to scare the hell out of you and me. It was the indication for another bailout of the people who have been screwing us for years: the insurance companies. Here is the wording of the times: "The chase for a piece of the Treasury Department’s $700 billion bailout program intensified Friday as the government considered extending it to include insurance companies as well as banks, and the auto industry stepped up efforts to secure a share of the money, The New York Times’s Edmund Andrews and Eric Dash reported. 10/23/08: Flash, The markets continue their recent patterns of erratic behavior as investors, who like GW Bush, don't have a clue try to figure out how to protect their investments in the highly touted "ownership" society. Of course the "ownership society" was a fraud all along. If you own something then you can determine what happens with it and with corporations only the giant investors have any substantial say in the decisions of the business --- all the small shareholders just drift along, puffed up by their sterile "ownership", participating in their own self deception. In fact most "small investors" are invested through mutual funds and other structures where others make the decisions, for a price, on the investment of the funds. Note that when things go south the "financial" professionals don't lose their own money they lose the money that they have been entrusted to grow. The real story, for those who want to know is this. The business structure of the US moved the wealth producing part of the economy off shore --- i.e. to other countries where they could find cheap labor, few environmental regulations and tax shelters for the rich. Now their scheme is beginning to come home to roost as the US is becoming a rich third world country that has begun a serious, steep decline that will impoverish millions. The choices will soon become one major choice: SOCIALISM/SOCIAL DEMOCRACY or CAPITALIST FACISM. If we Americans quickly organize and bring intense, overwhelming mass public pressure to bear on the political structure we may be able to bring about a socialist/social democracy government that will begin to resolve the economic problems in a manner that brings national prosperity, ends our predatory wars, and sees investment that improves the standard of living, health care, and so forth. 10/15/08: Flash, Markets dropped like rocks today, DOW --7.87%, NASDQ --8.47% AND S&P --9.03%, but you can bet that the Upper Crust either dumped their trash earlier on Asian or European markets or are figuring how they are going to make money off your/our home/s after their bank/s repossesses it/them. Part of the problem that the UprCrst has is that people like you and I are catching on to their scheme and no longer believe the hype. They will get everything they can out of us and then sell the repos for whatever the market will bear. Then the government will let them tax out their (imaginary) losses as business expenses and reduce their tax bill which of course builds their wealth. 10/14/08: Surprise, the markets all three declined today, but not of course by the large gains they made yesterday. The "Smart" people, the Upper Crust who have their money manager staffs who are working hand in glove with the bailout folks, you can bet, will be milking the rise in value yesterday to recover some of their previous "losses". Of course the really wealthy haven't lost anyway because they always protect themselves at our expense --- that's what the bailout is. 10/13/08: The markets rise, up about DOW 500 points at this writing, as governments promise to invest in or bail out the Banks (the upper crust) so that they will offer credit again. Of course this won't really help since you can't borrow your way out of debt because you just get in farther over your head. As George Bush, the 1st the elder, would say this is "Voodoo Economics." Advice to consumers: Don't buy on credit cards and/or put your house in hock with refinancing for things you don't need. 10/10/08: Flash, as this is being written the DOW is down about 2000 points for the week although there may be a little pull up from the bottom toward the end of today. This movement makes it even more obvious that all the maneuvers being taken by the Bush, Bernanke, Paulson, Cheney and McCain cabal are only being instituted to protect the rich and the rest of us are going to be allowed to go to hell on a slippery slide. Of course the media refuses to explain, or maybe they are too ignorant to understand, why everything is going to hell, or more likely, since the Upper Crust owns the media, the media puppets know who calls the tune. So, I will have to try. Since bank/insurance company/fiance deregulation in the late 90s all kinds of commodities have been turned into derivatives, stocks essentially that are sold on the basis that the commodities within the purvey of the stock will either maintain or increase in value and therefore protect the investment of the stock holder and furnish her a profit. New and included in this practice was the securitization of mortgages --- especially the so called sub-prime mortgages that were considered risky loans. The theory was that most risky mortgages would be repaid and if you put them all in a big basket then you could sell stock on that basket because overall the interest earned on the mortgages would pay a profit on the stocks and if there were a small amount of bad debt it would be more than covered. At the same time risk was further induced by allowing people to refinance their homes and take out the paper value of the rise in "real estate value" due to inflation in the housing market as "demand" pushed prices up. Duh, the value of the stuff in the basket became more and more speculative depending on the continual growth of the housing bubble. And that is where things started to go to hell. Money was loaned with the expectation that it would not be repaid. The problem is that when money is loaned against an inflated property value and the value drops, deflates, then the borrower owes more money to the lender than the property is worth. This is an inducement for people to just walk away from their mortgage and let the bank foreclose. It is very logical. Why would I pay back $400,000 and interest on a house that is only worth $275,000? I would be a fool to do that especially when I realize that the financiers convinced me to "take out the value in my home and maximize my life style by borrowing, not earning." And that is what the business community and the global economy counted on, that I would be fool enough to borrow money on my home, buy consumer goods and luxuries, living beyond my means but somehow finding a way to make my monthly loan payments. A further problem is low wages and underemployment or unemployment because this erodes the power of families to repay their debts and the REPUBLICAN PARTY has, since the time of Runny Nose Ronald Reagan, carried on a strategy to lower the income of the working people of the United States in order to put more profits into the hands of the Upper Crust who hate to pay decent wages, good health benefits, and provide adequate vacation time to employees. No, the upper crust wants all the money themselves so under the leadership of the GOP they set about destroying Unions that had provided the political muscle for the working people to earn so called "middle class" incomes and enjoy a fairly high life style. For example: In his first years in office Ronald Reagan forced a strike against the Air Traffic Controllers Association, their union, and broke the unions. When he attacked the ATC he used other workers against them by agitating that these were highly paid government workers who needed to be disciplined so they would learn to live on lower wages, etc. In other words, Reagan used the jealousy of those earning less as a motive force to hurt higher paid workers when the lower paid workers should have been keeping their eyes on the prize and demanding more themselves. Of course, I will say in his defense that since Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and slept through much of his terms as president who knows if he was really aware of the damage he was doing? Summary: For our system of capitalism to continue to function in the latter 20th Century and the early 21st Century "demand" had to be maintained by furnishing credit to the consumer markets beyond the ability of the working people to earn --- otherwise products wouldn't sell. Pernicious capitalism demands constant growth in consumption to maintain the wealth of the Upper Crust and when the working people of the lower and middle income ranges can no longer earn enough to pay their outstanding debts, buy more SUVs, houses, boats, and electronic gadgets the whole thing begins to collapse. Meanwhile, militarism and the Cold War and now the War on Terror have been used to blind the people of the nation to the looting of the national treasury, the despoiling of our land, and the theft of the nation's resources including our young whose lives have been thrown away in Korea, Viet Nam, Granada, Panama, Iraq and Aghanistan. See, this isn't so hard after all. The garbage you read in the regular papers is written to make you confused and to make you believe that we need experts to solve these problems, and that we need to bail out the rich, that Upper Crust, who own the experts. 10/6/08: Unite the Many Defeat the Few Monday afternoon, 4:35pm, Pacific Daylight Time: The market opened lower today after the debacle of the previous week when it lost about about 900 Dow points and ended up losing 365 more points today. This is after the passage of the give away bail out to the rich bankers on Friday, 10/3/08, that set Paulson up as the overseer, aye dictator, of the US rescue effort. Now Paulson is one of the guys who scammed the economy before when he was on Wall Street and Wall Street is where his friends and cohorts live and earn. Can anyone believe that he is going to harm them as he goes about his business? No, he will set about making sure that his upper crust friends bail out on the rest of us and take their loot with them. The legislation has no enforcement provision to prohibit "golden parachutes" for the executives who have governed over this banking/mortagage Republican Party neo-fascist looting of the American people nor will this new law take back any of the money that has been skimmed off the industry over the past several years. |
| The Bailout Page of Unite the many defeat the few |
| UTMDTF Normally does not, will not censor but the sentiment of this picture tells all. This is from a Wall Street demo about 10/1/08. No idea who took it. It arrived by email from a friend who also got it without any attribution. Love this picture! |
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CITIgroup and others will
--- but we know that they
are cowards and won't take
the leap of faith.
--- but we know that they
are cowards and won't take
the leap of faith.
| Bad |
| Unite the many, defeat the few --- fight for democracy! |