US Taxpayer? You owe it to yourself to read this

[Bravus]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/20/bailout/

[Neil D]

Quote:

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

It does give one pause, doesn't it?

[carolaa]

Wow, that's awfully long, but it's horrific. As I've said many times, the rest of the world can plainly see what is going on while we cannot. The Democratic leadership is absolutely complicit in this nightmare.

[Tom Wetmore]

More than pause. My immediate reaction to that sentence and the one that immediately preceeded it are completely unprintable -

Quote:

"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" [sec. 8].

We have created worse than a socialized/nationalized economy - we have created a monster that is totally anathema to democracy - completely bypassing our Constitutional system of checks and balances. The Secretary of the Treasury has been given complete free reign without accountability. If this is passed as drafted, we will have just realized an absolute and complete separation of powers for this trillion dollar experiment for this arm of the executive branch of our government. This is the Bush/Cheney legacy they like to refer to as unreviewable "executive privilege." And everyone goes along in a blind panic...

First our personal freedoms and rights were given away for national security and now this for financial security...

I feel an urgent need to puke...

[Dr. Shane]

They have to do that or the lawyers will prevent anything from being done. Like I said, the situation is like a gun to our head. We have to do what needs to be done and we can't allow lawyers to stand in the way. It is a bad situation. Drastic situation require drastic action. Yea, it is bad, real bad.

[Neil D]

I don't think so.

We got ourselves into this very mess by doing the very thing that "gotta do now"....I feel a car salesman pitch coming...

....What if we give the experts a chance to sort it out? The economists to figure it out? They are the ones who study this stuff better than you or I...I would be willing to let them tell the politicians what to do...and then let the politicians duke it out...

[Dr. Shane]

That is exactly what has been going on. Bush didn't want to bail out any of them. The Federal Reserve chairman and banking officials from various world banks have been meeting for this past week. These financial "experts" are the ones that pretty much told Bush, Reid, Pelosi, Frank and Dodd how things are going to have to go. This is not a solution coming from the Bush Administration. The Bush White House is just going along with it.

I wish I could watch Meet The Press tomorrow but I have Men's Ministries to go to. It should be an informative one.

[Neil D]

What?!?!?! Bush is gonna RUBBER STAMP a solution????

I am sorry, but not with Cheney and Rove still in the administration....

[Tom Wetmore]

No Shane, you miss the point. This is the same path we have been lead down before. That is why the article started with a brief refresher on the lead up to the Iraq war and the domestic spying authorization. Here is another alarming example of the same sort of attitude toward the rule of law:

Quote:

But now, with the heavy involvement of the McCain campaign, Gov. Palin has embraced core GOP "principles" -- political officials can unilaterally exempt themselves from the rule of law and the people, through their elected representatives in the legislature, are powerless to learn what their political leaders have done. That, of course, has been the guiding principle of the Bush administration -- as one Bush official after the next has simply refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas as part of investigations into serious allegations of lawbreaking and other wrongdoing -- and the McCain campaign and the Palins are leaving no doubt that they are full-fledged believers in these corrupt and lawless prerogatives. - (emphasis added)

While I am tempted to just let you find it on your own... Source

[Dr. Shane]

Rove is no longer in the administration.

Salon.com is not known for being an objective news source. Iraq and the wire tapping are separate and unrelated issues.

[Neil D]

And you can no longer see the common theme of the thread....Come on, Shane....even I can add one plus one and get two...

[fccool]

The congress has near to none when it comes to making economic decisions of today. The economic policies are discussed behind closed doors by "experts" that then mandate change, or else. So, I suspect, was the case with this bailout.

Although the gun to the head allusion is there, but it's silly. In reality the bailout protects the big corporate interest and "speculative wealth" at our expense.

These people made bets for these future derivatives on debt to add up to 500-1000 trillon dollars. How can this be possible when the total world economies are only 60? So we supposed to support their "economic" speculations in hope that we somehow get a cut on all of this?

The reality is that Wall Streat will bet high... why would not it? It's in their interest to value the stocks and collateralized debt higher than its worth. They receive the benefits by sheer manipulation of numbers. They hardly contribute to any real economic growth, but only to the imaginary one... the one that they hope it will be.

So, instead of punishing we have these mistakes rewarded. It's like a cop stopping a drunk driver, giving them another bottle of vodka and saying "don't drink again".

We need some economic rehab :)

[carolaa]

Here's a more mainstream article. My personal favorite quote: "The proposal is a mere three pages long, but it gives sweeping powers to the government to dispense gigantic sums of taxpayer dollars in a program that would be sheltered from court review." Outrageous!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080920/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown

[Neil D]

Quote:

Although the gun to the head allusion is there, but it's silly. In reality the bailout protects the big corporate interest and "speculative wealth" at our expense.

***IF*** I were in charge, those guys would be stripped of thier economic wealth, and told to step down from thier companys or face procecution from the IRS....and jail time for evasion of taxes...

[Neil D]

[Neil D]

[fccool]

Here're some of my favorites:

[carolaa]

Here's my favorite quote from the linked article below:

President Bush is “asking for a huge amount of power,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University who was among the first to predict the crisis. “He's saying, ‘Trust me, I'm going to do it right if you give me absolute control.' This is not a monarchy.” (Roubini told the New York Times that despite these concerns, he also thought the plan could help stave off a recession.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080921/pl_politico/13689

I'm extremely curious to see how fear plays out with this congressional vote. Will their fear make them give a few people unlimited power without accountability?

[Woody]

Quote:

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

It does give one pause, doesn't it?

I heard on Fox that he will need more than a trillion

[Dr. Shane]

***IF*** I were in charge, those guys would be stripped of thier economic wealth, and told to step down from thier companys or face procecution from the IRS....and jail time for evasion of taxes...

That is my first knee-jerk reaction too but here is the catch...

We need the very guys that got us into this problem to get us out. If we fired everyone we would have to get a bunch of inexperienced people to run these giant financial companies.

It would be like being in an isolated village and needing surgery. There is only one surgeon and he does the surgery but messes it up because he was flirting with a nurse while doing it. As much as we would be mad about it and want to fire him, he is the only guy that can go back in and fix it.

[fccool]

Shane... how would you feel if a mechanic would wake you up at 3 a.m. in the morning saying...

" Yeah, I've had a wild night, and I just T-boned your parked car, but worry not. I'll fix it up for you for 15 grand. I'll all be shiny and new because I know what I'm doing and you need me?"

Let's not kid around. These people are money manipulators. They did not bring any real value to the economy. What they did is simply bought up the mortgage debt, repackaged it and then resold it based on the risk factors involved. Now they are stuck with bunch of IOUs on their hands while the payback time is here.

What drives me nuts is how the sub prime borrowers somehow are viewed as "victims" in all of this. These are the people who "needed" that extra car, or that house that they could not afford. These are the people to partially blame for this mess too.

[Bravus]

Quote:

What they did is simply bought up the mortgage debt, repackaged it and then resold it based on the risk factors involved.

Almost right, fccool.

But when they packaged it and resold it they labelled it msleadingly as being much lower-risk than it really was. This allowed it to be passed off as high quality, low-risk investments, and bought by retirement funds, for example, who have strict rules about how risky the investments they buy can be. Very bad debt was sold labelled as very good debt.

[Neil D]

So, in essense, a crime was committed by these guys. And the name of "these guys" would be ....?

[Neil D]

We need the very guys that got us into this problem to get us out. If we fired everyone we would have to get a bunch of inexperienced people to run these giant financial companies.

It would be like being in an isolated village and needing surgery. There is only one surgeon and he does the surgery but messes it up because he was flirting with a nurse while doing it. As much as we would be mad about it and want to fire him, he is the only guy that can go back in and fix it.

I remember that back in the 80s, an LA hospital was "overworking" their physicians. The Physicians went on strike over it, and there was only ONE or TWO ER physicians there to cover all the orders needed by the staff to take care of their patients.

Did you know, that the death rate of that hospital went DOWN? The staff knew what the patient needed and got the order from the ER Physican who rubber stamped it, and didn't have time to research out the hundreds of patients in the hospital. There were more discharges of live patients than usual.

If we take out the CEOs and leave the feds in charge of the economic crisis, the replacing CEO, knowing that they had better do it right or face jail time, would administer thier business with ethical conservativness. [something that I would heartly support, and one of the FEW times that I would promote conservative-ness!]

[Woody]

Quote:

how would you feel if a mechanic would wake you up at 3 a.m. in the morning

I would not be very receptive to that particular 3AM message.

The hour of judgment would come quickly for anyone who delivered the message at that hour.

I think our church's 3AM message is much better and timely.