"This week the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a powerful report, released jointly by chair Carl Levin and ranking member John McCain, that received the unanimous support of its 13 Democratic and 12 Republican members. The report concluded that Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials of the administration consciously adopted a policy for the torture and abuse of prisoners held in the war on terror."
• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion
TOTAL: $3.92 trillion
Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks | The Big Picture"But We The People won some symbolic victories in that battle, including the explicit promise of complete transparency in the use of that money.
Now it turns out that We The Payers won nothing at all, and that we are not even being afforded the most basic right of being able to view how that money is being spent."
"US Taxpayers Violated" by Dr. Chris Martenson, FSU Editorial 11/11/2008"For all the fury over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion emergency economic relief fund, it seems downright puny when compared to the running total of the government's response to the credit crisis.
According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system."
Washington's $5 Trillion Tab - Forbes.com"U.S. intelligence officials say they have no credible information about potential terrorist or criminal attacks against a weekend summit in Washington of world leaders to deal with the global financial crisis.
In fact, law enforcement officials said they were more concerned about angry protesters, such as people left jobless by the financial meltdown, than they were about terrorists."
Security focused on protesters more than terror - Forbes.com"At home, our failed attempt at global liberation has left us less free than ever before. Ancient liberties, cultural imperatives, even basic solvency were subsumed by the war effort. And the conservative movement that gave Bush his margin sanitized his radicalism at the cost of its soul. All he touched turned to dross. Yet he departs unbowed, still a Churchill in his own mind.
It would be easy to leave him to that delusion and turn a more hopeful page. But Bush wasn’t alone in his failure: a country marched behind him and a movement cheered him on."
The American Conservative -- Bush’s Broken RecordFed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return."
Bloomberg.com: Worldwide"The Senate is considering legislation that would do more to bail
out lenders and speculators than to help homeowners keep their homes,"
he said. "The Senate bill would actually prolong the time it takes for
the housing market to adjust and recover, and it would lead to higher
interest rates."
Earlier this week, the Bush administration said the president would veto
the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 if it passes Congress because it
objected to two key elements. The first is a provision that would
change the bankruptcy law to let judges reduce the amount of principal
and interest due on mortgages of those filing for bankruptcy.
"Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources."
Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com"Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.
You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking... In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was
hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the
US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.
Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future."
John Gray: A shattering moment in America's fall from power | Comment is free | The Observer"The more voters learn about the proposed $700-billion taxpayer-backed Wall Street rescue plan, the less they like it. Most voters remain largely unworried about their own money, too.
Just 24% of U.S. voters now favor the plan first proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a week ago and the subject of very public negotiations on Capitol Hill ever since, according to a
Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken Friday night. Fifty percent (50%) oppose it, and 25% are undecided."
"9. Foreign Banks Can Cash in Too
Or perhaps the fact that U.S. tax-payers look like they might also end up bailing out foreign banks will end up being a fly in the ointment.
Now, the U.S. bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensifyscrutiny by Congress and critics.
Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic U.S. mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as U.S. banks.
On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson indicated in a series of appearances on TV talk shows that an original proposal introduced Saturday had been widened. "It's a distinction without a difference whether it's a foreign or a U.S. one," he said in an interview with Fox News.
He's right, in a way. There are no U.S. or foreign mega-banks -- just multinational financial
institutions with headquarters at home or somewhere abroad. If one accepts the logic of the plan at all, it might as well extend to multinationals with foreign-sounding names. The rabbit hole is only so deep, and we're already way down it."
Sanders: Larry, I’m sure after all of the ranting and raving you have done against government intervention and the virtues of free market I know without saying that you are opposed to the bail out.
Kudlow: No, I’m in favor of it.
Sanders: Oh, you’ve become a Socialist overnight Larry, what happened?….I think your version of socialism is to bail out the rich. My concern is about the middle class and working families who are now asked to bail out the disaster caused by the incredibly greedy people on Wall Street who have fought for this deregulation which is now taking us over the cliff.
advice about Brazil and what we should or shouldn't do are now broke,"
news agency EFE quoted Lula da Silva as saying in a speech in southern
Brazil."
"This past week, the government announced that it would take Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the mortgage giants, under conservatorship, which is a nice way of saying that they will be nationalized.
We don't use the word nationalize any more. We can try an experiment and read the new term conservatorship" back into history. In fact, we might say that Stalin and Lenin put Russia's industries under a kind of conservatorship. Or we might say that Mao pushed a kind of land conservatorship, or that Hitler's policy was one of national conservatorship. Marx's little book could be re-titled: The Conservatorship Manifesto.
You see, the government keeps having to make up new names for these things because the old policies, which were not that different in content, failed so miserably. The old terms become discredited and new terms become necessary, in an effort to fool the public.
It's as if a restaurant served a shrimp dish that gave all the customers food poisoning, and so each night it decides to serve the same shrimp but name the dish something new: crangon cocktail, prawn pasta,
scampi salad, or what have you. But no matter what they call it, it is still poison.
No, I didn't make this up."
""This is our land. We are afraid to send our sons out the door for
fear the American troops will pick them up," says Mohammed, who was
chosen by the others to represent them. "Daily we have headaches from
the troops. We are fed up. Our government is weak and corrupt and the
American Soldiers have learned nothing."
A strong sense of frustration echoed through dozens of interviews by
The Associated Press with Afghan villagers, police, government
officials, tribal elders and Taliban who left and rejoined the
religious movement. The interviews ranged from the capital, Kabul, to
the rural regions near the border with Pakistan."
"Then, last week, advisers from Morgan Stanley
hired by the Treasury Department to scrutinize the companies came to a
troubling conclusion: Freddie Mac’s capital position was worse than
initially imagined, according to people briefed on those findings. The
company had made decisions that, while not necessarily in violation of
accounting rules, had the effect of overstating the companies’s capital
resources and financial stability.Indeed, one person briefed on
the company’s finances said Freddie Mac had made accounting decisions
that pushed losses into the future and postponed a capital shortfall
until the fourth quarter of this year, which would not need to be
disclosed until early 2009. Fannie Mae has used similar methods, but to
a lesser degree, according to other people who have been briefed."...
"These two gigantic hedge funds intentionally
manipulated their accounting to show a capital position that was
stronger than reality, by pushing forward losses instead of recognizing
them as they occurred.While not illegal, it had the effect of lying to the markets, which put both firms at risk of all-on collapse.
Now the government proposes to bail them out at your expense and risk the collapse of the government's funding,
instead of indicting the executives of these firms and placing them
into rundown, forcing the losses to be taken by the people who profited
from the gains during the "salad years.""
Identified by their black baseball caps emblazoned with a white
star, squad members keep an eye on delegates they fear might cause a
scene. The squad is empowered by the convention managers to take
delegates' credentials and kick them off the convention floor -- a step
one convention official said would be unprecedented."
"The next White House occupant will inherit the deepest housing recession in a generation, growing fears of bank failures, a sinking dollar, $4 gasoline and an economy bleeding jobs. He'll confront wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mounting tensions with Iran and the U.S.'s flagging international reputation.
Historians say the economic and foreign policy crises in Bush's wake will present either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain with the biggest challenges to a new president since Herbert Hoover left office during the Great Depression." LINK
The Office of Management and Budget, President Bush's administrative arm, has shot down a service plan to add five active-duty generals who would oversee purchasing and monitor contractor performance.
The boost in brass was a key recommendation from a blue-ribbon panel that last fall criticized the Army for contracting failures that undermined the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, wasted U.S. tax dollars, and sparked dozens of procurement fraud investigations.
As the Army's contracting budget ballooned — from $46 billion in 2002 to $112 billion in 2007 — it had too few experienced people negotiating and buying equipment and supplies, according to the panel. Worse still, there wasn't a single Army general in a job with contracting responsibilities. That meant the profession had little clout at a critical time." Link
- “Without privatization, I don’t see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.” [C-Span Road to the White House, 11/18/2004]
- “As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it — along the lines that President Bush proposed.” [Wall Street Journal, 3/3/2008]
McCain is nuts. Does he not remember? Why would he contradict himself so obviously?
