Friday, September 19, 2008

AS CLEARLY AS I CAN

1. THE ECONOMY

Republican administrations deregulate which causes financial institutions to disregard fundamentals and gamble with others’ money racking up huge profits until they lose a lot or everything. Then some Republicans want to bail them out at more expense to others (including us taxpayers) while other Republicans want “the market” to work it out, which means those without means will have to suffer through very hard times, losing jobs and homes and health care and money for food and necessities as the economy bottoms out.

Democrats believe in regulations and oversight, and if anyone is going to get bailed out, they believe it should be, or at least must include, those who suffer the most from corporate and/or financial institutions mistakes, or actual criminality, working people and the poor.

It’s not the Great Depression again—yet. Even though that collapse of the world economy that began with our stock market crash in 1929 has some similarities to recent events, like occurring under Republican administrations that don’t believe in regulating and overseeing the banking industry or insurance companies or mortgage or brokerage firms until it’s too late and continue to spout “the fundamentals are fine”, “the economy is strong” bromides in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, until it’s too late and then they want a handout from the rest of us.

But even if it were to become that bad, which is doubtful given the effort of some of the world’s strongest economies to avoid it by any means at this point—which is more apt to cause inflation or even hyper inflation with the printing of so much money and the accumulation of even more debt, which means the declining wages of the past eight years under the Republicans would continue even more so—

the good news is some of our parents and grandparents got through The Great Depression okay. They may have lost their houses and their jobs, but they didn’t starve to death or die—unless they jumped off a building out of fear and shame at having caused or contributed to the financial wipe out of so many working people’s homes and savings and livelihoods etc. Nowadays those guys just take their golden parachute and jump out of the pilot-less plane. (Here’s a link to a pretty good take on some of this.)

2. THE WARS

It’s not World War II, the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century, much more violent and destructive than anything we’ve seen since. And some of our parents and grandparents survived that too, though not many without knowing personally someone who didn’t. It was a sad and difficult time, but everyone, or almost everyone pitched in to help defeat some of the most evil movements the world has ever known. And while they did it, others wrote songs and movies and made other kinds of art to inspire them and make them laugh and give them a break.

Bin Laden is not Hitler and the Iranians are not the Japanese. But our military is overextended and McPalin’s statements (they both do it) about wars they might want to fight if elected do give one pause, if one is thinking clearly. A larger conflict sure is possible if you have leaders who believe in military action as a solution to the world’s problems. (And here’s a link to show why that isn’t just a possibility but a probability, made before Palin was chosen, but one could be made showing her being even more militaristic than McCain.)

3. THE ELECTION

It took a Democratic administration, FDR’s, to create the programs that provided the oversight and safety nets to insure that we didn’t have to go through a financial collapse like 1929 and the Great Depression ever again, and that could mobilize a nation to enter a war that our enemies were winning, hands down, at the time and to defeat them and eliminate the evil they were purveying.

But Republican administrations ever since have done everything they can to undo FDR’s programs that created the regulatory agencies and safety nets that kept financial institutions and corporations in line while protecting working people and the poor (the corporations and financial institutions still made plenty of profits, but they paid a fair share to the government to fund the agencies that oversaw their practices making sure they didn’t risk so much that working people could lose their savings and pensions etc.).

Reagan was particularly successful at it, until Junior got in almost eight years ago and outdid him. Under Reagan’s deregulations, we not only had weaker unions—meaning corporations and businesses can get away with hiring part time help with no health insurance at lower pay and so ons—but we also had the last giant collapse of financial institutions that had to be bailed out by us taxpayers, the deregulated Savings and Loan debacle (that McCain was a part of but was let off the hook by his fellow congress folks).

Once again Republicans have gotten us into a financial and military mess that they created and want the rest of us to not only bail them out and pay the price for their losing gambles and destructive mistakes, but they want us to vote them back in for four more years! It’s a no-brainer, for most of us.

But I have members of my extended clan who, like a lot of our fellow citizens, live in areas of the country (and again, no accident they’ve become Republican strongholds) where they don’t have access to NPR or even MSNBC. They get a steady diet of Rush and O’Reilly and Fox News (has any show on Fox News run footage of Palin lying about her response to “the bridge to nowhere” by showing her standard stump speech where she claims she said “no thanks” to it against earlier footage of her speaking in favor of it when she wanted the money or pointed out that she still took the money for the project and has been spending some of it on plans for a, you guessed it, bridge to the same “nowhere”) (oh, the answer is no of course) and the only alternative is mainstream media, the big three networks, which pay more attention to personalities and the horse race aspects of the campaign than to the issues, and when they address the issues they bend over backwards to try and be balanced but often end up just avoiding the objective facts of McPalin lying about Obama raising taxes on most of us (they say raising “your taxes” to crowds full of folks whose taxes would actually be lowered under Obama’s plan) etc.

So those folks aren’t stupid, any more than I was before I went to college on the G.I. Bill where I learned facts that I’d never seen before about Viet Nam and how we got into that war and who was profiting from it and how our government deceived us. We need more “teach-ins” like in those days, not only on college campuses but in high schools and communities the way so many college students and professors went out and did during the Viet Nam War that led to a turn around among those “middle Americans” from being blindly supportive of a failed policy to being against it.

Unfortunately the divisions among Democrats and on the left led to Nixon’s election, helped by voters who believed him when he said he had a plan to end the war, even though the details were sketchy at best and mostly non-existent, and in fact turned out to be a lie, much the way McCain now says he has a plan to straighten out the economy and win the war(s) but the details are sketchy at best and mostly non-existent and he has already been proven to lie about those things over and over again. (See this link for confirmation.)

17 comments:

Harryn Studios said...

otherwise known as "reality [in the u.s., part one] - for idiots" ...
thanks michael - a good starter course, though you may want to address education, waning culture in america, and the mccarthy era flava of media manipulation in your next edition ...

the other day i remembered some of the newsreels and controversies around the end of reagan and the bush the 1st administratiions - when there were a bunch of bank, investment groups, and lending institutions merging and how the dems were saying it could be dangerous to create these mega piggy banks and that it could create future instability or volitility in the market if they ran into fiscal problems and the reps saying that the mergers could only strengthen and protect the investors and shareholders in the longrun and that restrictions would limit the expertise of the professionals with global market and investment acuity - sounded like a good argument at the time ...

i think mccain is starting to crack under pressure - i'm sure you've heard the litany of foibles this week; from fundementals of the economy being good, to the diplomat from spain being from latin america and being in opposition to our/his policy, to him firing people as president whom he doesn't have authority over, - oh, and sarah mentioning the palin/mccain ticket - does she know something ...

its all getting interesting ...
sorry about the run-on thoughts - must of read too much kerouac, cage, and ginsberg as a kid ...

JIm said...

Michael, you lack Clarity of Sight!

Twenty years ago, red lining was considered an evil by congress. In response they passed “The Community Redevelopment Act”, forcing banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers if the bank wanted to grow. Sub prime mortgages were a response to the congressional act. They were then bundled and sold. The root of the problem was political interference with the free market. The results have been just another unintended consequence of liberal ideas gone amok.

FDR showed what liberals do when then gain too much power. He attempted to pack the courts and over turn democratic institutions. There is substantial evidence that his radical reforms prolonged the Depression. WW11 was the engine that ended the Depression.

Bin Laden and Iran are not Hitlers, only because the killing has not reached the scale of WW11. It is not for want of trying and their efforts continue. America achieves peace through strength. Most Republicans believe in a strong military. The modern Democrat Party believes in peace through surrender and weakness. Obama has already promised to gut the military and redirect funds to social programs. Truman, FDR and JFK would be ashamed of the modern Democrat Party.

Lally said...

Jim, You're entitled to your opinion, but if you tell outright lies about me and the people who mostly read this blog, I'm gonna have to delete them. I'll let you pass this time, but Obama has repeatedly made it clear he wants to expand the military, make the forces larger and therefore better able to confront the challenges that were mostly brought about and/or made worse by the current administration. If anything, Obama is too centrist for a lot of Democrats, e.g. his healthcare plan wchich depends on the private sector but backs it up with government ganruntees (exactly what this administration just did yesterday and today with the financial institutions, another flip flop in the direction of Obama's more centrist thinking) though McPalin keep saying he would have the government run healthcare. Maybe they can get away with those lies on Fox or Rush or at their private rallies, but not on my blog. As for the rest of your comment it's full of other lies and distortions but I've been hearing them from the right all my life. And as for people being embarassed by their own party, shame on you for not being.

JIm said...

Obama quotes:
The quotes are contradictory. Pick the one you prefer.

1- Obama promising the non-profit group “Caucus for Priorities” that he would reduce wasteful military spending. Oct. 2007

“I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending,” Obama said in the video. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

In the video, Obama also said: “As president, my sole priority for defense spending will be protecting the American people.”
----------------------------------
2-Obama, now the Democratic nominee, was asked on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to cite examples of where he would be willing to break with his own party.

“I’ve said that we need to increase the size of our military,” Obama answered, noting that such legislation might anger some on the left.

source http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/08/mccain-attacks-obama-on-military-spending/

JIm said...

Did I lie about the about:
1- Community Redevelopment Act

"In 1977, Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to require banks, thrifts, and other lenders to make capital available in low- and moderate-income urban neighborhoods,..."
sourcehttp://www.epa.gov/brownfields/html-doc/cra.htm

2- Did I lie when I said that FDR attempted to pack the Supreme Court?
The Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, frequently called the Court-packing Bill, was a law proposed by United States President Franklin Roosevelt. While the bill contained many provisions, the most notorious one (which led to the name "Court-packing Bill") would have allowed the President the power to appoint an extra Supreme Court Justice for every sitting Justice over the age of 70½. Six additional justices would have been appointed. This was proposed in response to the Supreme Court overturning several of his New Deal measures that proponents claim were designed to help the United States recover from the Great Depression.
source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Reorganization_Bill_of_1937


3- Did I lie when I said that Iran and Bin Laden are trying to get nuclear weapons? (I can only wish this this was a lie.)

JIm said...

"exactly what this administration just did yesterday and today with the financial institutions, another flip flop in the direction of Obama's more centrist thinking) though McPalin keep saying "

The actions of the govt. violate conservative principles. But when your house is on fire, you do not stop fix the plumbing. The choice is bailout or economic catastrophe. Hopefully, we will come through alright but this nation's and the world's economy is on a knife edge. Maybe we will get to the plumbing in the next year or so.

Lally said...

Jim, This will be my last comment on the lies in your comments to this post, because I just don't want to waste the time and energy on someone who spouts rightwing propganda and has no capacity for admitting his and his party's lies and distortions, unless they are ones that the rightwing of the party consider not low enough for their standards.
Your own quotes from Obama, which I have not verified and if you got them from most of your usual rightwing sources I would be highly skeptical of, but even given that, your own quotes show you lied. You said "Obama has already promised to gut the military and redirect funds to social programs" which your quotes do not support. The telltale rightwing words are "gut" and "social programs" as is your insistence that the present financial crisis was caused by an attempt by congress to stop "redlining' (i.e. letting banks refuse to make loans to African-American owned businesses and neighborhoods etc.) all code words for "black Americans" in Republican campaigns and policies in the past. Obama does no such thing and this crisis is a direct result of Republican Party policies of deregulation or putting cronies more interested in drugs and orgies in charge of agencies meant to oversee industries, financial and otherwise, or who work for those very industries as lobbyists or will after they let those industries dictate the laws regulating or unregulating them or even write them, all of which has occurred. Obama wants to grow the military in ways that will make it better suited for the kinds of wars we are faced with, and stop the waste and overruns and the building of weapons systems that even the military says it doesn't want or need but congress folks, mostly Republicans, but some Democrats too, want to see continued for the money and jobs it brings to their home state, even if it's impratical and takes money away from other more necessary programs, like yes, "social" ones that have been "gutted" by Republicans so that if you were one of the fianncial genuises on Wall Street or in related financial industries who used the money of others to gamble on mortgages that should never have been given—not because of the "redlining" law but because of the financial community's belief that home prices would only go up and therefore these people could use the values of their homes to refinance and create even more brokerage fees etc.—you not only got to gamble with other peoples' money and get away with it, you got taxed only 15% while everyone else was taxed more because you these genuises only paid capital gains taxes on the money they made on these schemes, not counting and other kinds of wealth for these financial genuises who then, when the whole thing comes crashing down like the ponzi scheme it is, they walk away with their wealth (Elmer Fudd, the head of Lehman got $149 million last year for a company that just went backrupt under his leadership) and the rest of us either foot the bill for taxpayer bail outs or foot the bill for the damage it does to the economy which is felt hardest and soonest and worst among people who have to work to pay their bills, not to live like pharoahs and enrich their progeny for generations to come. I don't care what your rightwing soruces say, you are continuing to spread lies, the same kind of lies your party's leaders spread to get a man in the white house with almost no experience or credentials nor the intellectual curiosity or knowledge to deal with a hurricane, let alone two wars and the biggest financial meltdown this country has seen since the Great Depression. And let's not even mention the lies your guys spread to get us into Iraq. No more Jim. Not here.

JIm said...

Michael,
Re: Lies and liars.

You have repeatedly called me a liar. I was not a liar when we first met in kindergarten in Mrs. Sink's class. I was not a liar when we attended Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School and St. Benedict's Prep. We lost contact for forty some odd years but I have not become a liar in the interim. I have criticised, what I believe, are your's and Obama's views on governence and on national security. I have never called you a liar. We have political differences. That is no excuse or defense for calling into questions your political opponent's honor and honesty.

Anonymous said...

Michael:
It was great to see McBush confronted on "The View" and have them call his ads lies, as they are. The rightwing smear machine hates to be called out, as Jim's response makes clear. These people are not patriots, they do not represent what is best about our country, but they are fiercely loyal to their own twisted doublespeak. Unless Jim is making more than $250K a year, it's hard to hard to understand why he would carry water for such a crowd of rich, privileged, criminal incompetents. But this is a sad fact about diehard rightwingers like Jim: no accumulation of bogus wars, disaster mismanagement, election-fixing, spy-outings, financial collapses, and other assorted failures (not capturing Bin Laden, for example)will convince them their heroes are wrong. It's a waste of your precious time. You need another 40-year break from Jim and his fellow rightwingers, as do we all.
---TPW

-K- said...

To me, yesterday was the end of the Reagan Revolution.

Lally said...

The end for now, anyway, And thanks TP. As for Jim, we all experience truth differently. I remember that teacher as Mrs. Zinc (originally Miss Murphy, the half Irish half Latina 3rd grade teacher beauty I had a crush on and thought it was reciprocated!).
Either one of us is wrong or both of us, about that. But I would never accuse you of "lying" about it. Nor would I accues you of lying if you gave your perspective on the school experiences we share. i remember you and me having fist fights, mostly over girls, almost once a week. I know you only remember having a couple of those. Who knows who's right? Probably it's somewhere in the middle. My experince of benedict's was probably different because i was there on a scholarship (for brains not sports) which was constantly being threatened by my behavior, causing trouble, and I spent most of my spare time working for my father in his home maintenance business (which included some work on your house as I remember it, but difinitely included working in the homes of other guys who went there and whose families were better off) as well as washing dishes in Gruning's and working on political campiagns for the Democratic Party (flyers under windshields at church or as handouts at the train station kind of stuff, but even making cvalls to set up rides for the elderly to the polls etc.) selling Christmas trees, working for the parks department as a monitor on the pond when it froze for ice skating or on Flood's Hill for sleigh riding etc. etc. etc. So my experience of that day "Prep school" we both attended would be different (and I think as you said before you worked for your father in his business in new York, a whole other experience). So we would naturally have different perspectives (I also lived in a small house with five siblings, the sixth already had died when i was born) a grandmother, and various borders at different times, etc.). But facts are facts. And what I am angered by in your comments is when you write things that either outright accuse me or those I'm writing about or for of lying, or it's just implied in your supposed factual corrections of my posts. I don't write things I haven't researched unless they're stated as opinions. You can state your opinions all you want, but distorting the truth, lying, and then pulling the Ollie North defense (i.e. misdirecting the charges of lying through self-righteous outrage over impugned honor and going on the offense without ever dealing with the original charges, etc.) when called on it, is, once again, a tired rightwing tactic. Like: We're outraged that you would question a working hockey mother of five about her foreign affairs experience or expertise or lack of both (lack is the fact) or lies about refusing pork (accepted it and is still accepting it, fact) or her actions as a governor (appointed high school friend who worked as a realtor and had no education, experience, or expertise in agriculture as the head of the state algricultural department and when questioned about it pointed out that as a girl she had really liked cows), etc. I might not cite all the footnotes to my research, because this isn't a Ph. D. thesis, it's a personal blog, but those who know me know I do not quote or refer to facts and figures without grounding them in source material I deem reliable from decades of experience. I might be off on some numbers (like when I cited that McCain voted over 90% of the time with Junior, it turns out that in recent times he has voted 100% with him) because I generally write these things spontaneously without notes or the sources before me. But I'm always close enough that the point is still valid. You can cite other sources for your "facts," but they are sources that have been proven unreliable in most cases. For instance, close to 100% of scientists who specialize in atmospheric conditions, weather conditions, and the history of climate change, agree that there is serious climate change going on now. Out of that almost unanimous worlwide opinion, there is another majority opinion, sometimes cited as above 80% sometimes above 90%, depending on how the question is posited, who agree that manmade conditions are contributing or have contributed to that reality. Now, that leaves a handful of scientists, relatively speaking, who still claim there is no climate change occurring, despite the undeniable FACT that the ice cap is melting more rapidly than even the close to 100% who believe in climate change predicted it would! And a handful more who believe that humans aren't contributing to this at all. So you can cite that handful over and over again, and you can even cite different percentages based on skewing of the FACTS, by rightwing, usually oil company funded, research. But that would be lying about the facts, period. You may believe it, as you seem to believe all the other rightwing propaganda you spout in your comments. But you're still wrong.

Harryn Studios said...

yeah, this entire 'truth and lies' issue is troublesome ...

it seems that these days, almost any statement can be backed up with truckloads of supportive data ...

even things that have faded into recent history, like new orleans and katrina - we're still arguing over what was wrong and right ...

recent events are even harder to distinguish because the dust hasn't settled on the details - so they continue to be talking points that obscure the bigger picture ...

whatever value we place on the vast amount of data available at our fingertips today [coupled with our interpretation of events] still doesn't change the fact that the opportunity to rationalize nearly every judgement has become epidemic ...

in itself, that's scary - 'truth and lies' are just judgement calls aligned to a bigger strategy that have nothing to do with 'right or wrong' - and its' real hard to infuse ethics into a game of who wins or loses ...

all i know is that blind nationalism has had some hideous historical consequences - and that was before the internet and blackberries ...

JIm said...

After reading your wordy response, I still am not sure if you meant and continue to call me a liar. To bad we don't live near each other so we can work it out the way we used to.

PS Many recent reports indicate that we are entering into a global cooling period. Sources are available upon request.

Harryn Studios said...

one of the points i failed to mention in my last comment is that part of the 'extended strategy' in today's litigation is to wear down opposition to ones' opinion by creating a sense of wearisome futility ...

still doesn't change what is right and wrong ...

JIm said...

Democrat Party failure to back rigorous oversight and deleveraging: This from Bloomberg News. You know Mayor Bloomberg that "Right Wing Lying Nut" as I am sure you would characterize, since it does not comport with your view of what the facts.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_hassett&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

Anonymous said...

Let the whole God Damn thing collapse. The Capitalists keep mis leading folk to believe that Capitalism is equivalent to Democracy and describe Socialism as some kind of evil that would lead to the erosion of democratic principles. How ironic.
Beware of re-distribution of Wealth initiatives. It's lasted long enoug that wealth has been distributed from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. Enough!
Losses are socialized. Profits are privatized. What would Jesus say.

JIm said...

Good News for George Obama. Conservative columnists and radio personalities have raised money to get Barak's, deperately poor half brother enough money to get out of his hut in Africa and into decent living conditions. Thanks to conservative charity, he looks forward to an education in auto mechanics.

Note: Barak his brother, who would like to cure poverty in the world, did not contribute.