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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (420983)	9/30/2008 6:11:54 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1571690

You know, thats a point. If everything was fine back when Barney Frank said Fannie Mae had no real problems, then everything has gone to hell since the Democrats took over Congress. LOL Of course, everything wasn't really fine then, Frank was just pushing to let the problem fester a few more years. We know people h/b warning about this problem since at least '99.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (420983)	9/30/2008 7:23:09 AM
From: Road Walker	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571690

When Madmen Reign By BOB HERBERT Madness. I’m not holding my breath, but I would like to see the self-proclaimed conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealots step up and take responsibility for wrecking the American economy and bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Depression. Even now, with the house on fire, the most extreme among them won’t pick up the fire hoses and try to put it out. With the fate of the Bush administration’s desperate $700 billion bailout of the financial industry hanging in the balance, Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, stuck to his political playbook like a man covered in Krazy Glue. He pronounced himself “resolute” in his opposition to the bailout because to be otherwise would amount to a betrayal of party principles. To deviate from those principles, in Mr. Issa’s view, would be like placing “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.” We are in very strange territory here. George H.W. Bush warned us about “voodoo economics” in 1980, but the ideologues clamped a gag on him and put him on the Gipper’s ticket. For much of the time since then, the madmen of the right have carried the day. They were freed of their remaining few restraints with the ascendance of George W. Bush in 2000. These were the reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age. This was the crowd that cut the cords of corporate and financial regulations and in myriad other ways gleefully hacked away at the best interests of the United States. Now we’re looking into the abyss. When President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck. “Our entire economy is in danger,” he said. He should have said that he, along with his irresponsible Republican colleagues and their running buddies in the corporate and financial sectors, put the entire economy in danger. John McCain and his economic main man, Phil (“this is a mental recession”) Gramm, were right there running with them. Credit markets have frozen almost solid, banks are toppling like dominoes and brokerage houses are vanishing like props in a magic act. And who was one of the paramount leaders of the manic anti-regulatory charge that led to this sorry state of affairs? None other than Mr. Gramm himself, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Where is Mr. Gramm now? Would you believe that he’s the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the investment banking arm of the Swiss bank UBS? Of course you would. A New York Times article last spring noted that the “elite private bankers” of UBS “built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires.” Toadying to the rich while sabotaging the interests of working people was always Mr. Gramm’s specialty. He was considered a likely choice to be treasury secretary in a McCain administration until he made his impolitic “mental recession” comment. He also said the U.S. was a “nation of whiners.” The tone-deaf remarks in the midst of severe economic hard times undermined Senator McCain’s convoluted efforts to reinvent himself as some kind of populist. But they were wholly in keeping with the economic worldview of conservative Republicans. The inescapable disconnect between rhetoric and reality is often stark. Senator McCain has been ranting recently about the excessive pay and “bloated golden parachutes” of failed corporate executives. And yet one of his closest advisers on economic matters is Carly Fiorina, who was forced out as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Her golden parachute was an estimated $42 million. Voters have to shoulder a great deal of the blame for the economic mess the country is in. Too many were willing, for whatever reasons, to support politicians who spat in the eye of economic common sense. Now the voodoo that permeated conservative economic policies for so many years has come back to haunt us big-time. The question voters should be asking John McCain is whether he has stopped serving his party’s economic Kool-Aid, which has taken such a toll on working families, and is ready to change his ways. Is his sudden populist transformation the real thing or just a mirage? In the gale force winds of a full-fledged economic hurricane, it’s fair to ask Senator McCain whether he still considers himself a conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealot. Or whether he’s seen the light.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (420983)	9/30/2008 8:18:03 AM
From: steve harris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571690

How many changes do you think your boys should get? ted won't accept the facts until the pain in his pocketbook gets a little more painful....

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (420983)	9/30/2008 8:35:05 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1571690

Ted, seems like the economy was running just fine until the Democrats took control of Congress. All of a sudden, everything collapsed. It really is a significant point. The Dems, not Bush, not the GOP, are responsible for this mess. In 2004 the Republicans on the banking were clearly proclaiming, "IF YOU DON'T ELIMINATE THE REQUIREMENT THAT WE LEND MONEY TO THE POOR WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM." Meanwhile, Dodd & the rest were on CSPAN saying, "THERE IS NO PROBLEM." This problem rests squarely on the Dems policy of requiring the funding of loans for people who cannot afford to repay them. Thhis isn't complicated.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (420983)	9/30/2008 10:38:38 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1571690

The Long Reach of a Depression By Richard Cohen It comforts me that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and an architect of the financial bailout plan the House rejected Monday, is a specialist in the Great Depression. This, of course, was the economic calamity that beset the United States from 1929 to about 1942 and ended only when America went to war. What stopped the Depression was a worldwide bloodbath. Anyone who knows the history of those awful times has to be chastened. The Depression was not, after all, simply an economic crisis. It was also a political and cultural one. It contributed to the rise of totalitarian movements abroad -- both in Europe and Japan -- and some pretty ugly political movements here as well. These things are hard to measure, but American democracy's closest call probably came during the Great Depression. The rhetoric in Washington seems oblivious to history. It talks only of financial matters and it searches, as any mindless politician must, for culprits. Greed is blamed, as if it is something new or controllable, and the entire problem is discussed as if failure will do nothing but endanger some rich institutions and their equally rich managers. The Great Depression teaches otherwise. Throughout Europe, the Depression saw the rise of fascist parties -- the Nazis in Germany, the Union of Fascists in Britain, the Croix-de-Feu in France, etc. Elsewhere, communist parties were emboldened. People were desperate and they looked for desperate solutions. It is hard to envision anything like this happening again. But why not? The world is a smaller place than it was in 1929. We have become globalized, financial markets intertwined as never before. During the Depression, nations moved to close their borders to refugees. How could more people be let into a country -- any country -- when those already there were out of work? America, too, clamped down on refugees -- even though many of them were fleeing for their very lives. In 1939, the St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees went from Germany to Cuba and back to Europe because its passengers were not welcome anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. It is harder still to envision anything like that happening today. But, again, why not? The zeitgeist changes instantly. Less than two years ago, the world was awash in credit and then, within months, there was none to be found. Credit had dried up. The housing market plummeted. Mortgages turned out not to be worth the paper they were written on -- not that anyone could find the paper, anyway. Circumstances were suddenly different. If circumstances get even more different, who knows what could happen. Much has been made of the so-called culture wars here in America. The McCain-Palin ticket represents one culture and Obama-Biden another. But this clash is not about culture per se-- otherwise, how could the mother of an unwed pregnant teenager be the conservative while her opponents, as conventional as Saturday night at the VFW, be the liberals? No, it's really about outlook. Obama's people feel they have control over their lives. Palin's people do not have a similar confidence. This is why the Republican National Convention made war on the media. This is why Palin frequently has referred to "the pollsters and the pundits." These were the hidden manipulators of the culture and the economy, part of the often-invisible elitists who made it so bad for everyone else. They controlled the culture, the smut that came into one's home on the TV set and what was playing at the multiplex. They owned the banks and the newspapers and the TV networks -- and it didn't matter that their name could be Rupert Murdoch and they could be deeply conservative. As Don Quixote knew, "facts are the enemy of truth." Hard times are hard on truth. The Great Depression was not just a period of wholesale unemployment and incredible poverty -- of bread lines and apple-peddlers and women selling brief intimacy for 10 cents a dance. It was also the period of Hitler and Mussolini and, in this country, of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, and the belief among otherwise sane people that communism was the remedy for what ailed us. An economic crisis is like war. It's impossible to contain. It affects everything it touches. Ben Bernanke knows all this. He might focus on the raw numbers of the Great Depression -- "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," Franklin Roosevelt said -- but he would also have to know their social and cultural ramifications. You can, if you want, say the bailout program is about the future. But it's really about the past. cohenr@washpost.com Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group Page Printed from: realclearpolitics.com at September 30, 2008 - 09:36:58 AM CDT