Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

America spoke. In very large numbers.

A choice at the ballot box. Not by court order, not with the national guard, but by simple choice. America changed a bit today, and will continue to change tomorrow. Some will come along with joy, other will continue to drag their feet.

I don't go much for all the fancy rhetoric, the soaring imagery. My needs are simple;

Competent governance by responsible adults.
Transparancy
Respect for the Constitution

Let's see if we can make that work for awhile. Then we can go from there.

Remember To VOTE

Make a Difference

Bring about CHANGE

REMEMBER TO VOTE THIS NOVEMBER 4TH






.

OK. Lets try again......

So the 700 billion dollar bailout deal is dead. Republican lawmakers got their feelings hurt when big bad Nancy said mean things about them. (Plus, they are scared to death that they will get there butts voted out of office). So what do we do now?

Here's a pretty good idea from FireDogLake;

1) Buy up mortgages at a discount and give people new fixed rate mortgages. The government shares in further house appreciation (only fair since it bailed the homeowner out). This stabilizes mortgage prices and helps people and banks both. It is essentially identical to what FDR did with the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), and we know how to do it. Initial price tag? Probably around 20 billion.

2) Use the FDIC (the folks who take over failed banks) to take over failed mutual and money market funds, make sure the investors get as much money back as possible, liquidate the funds in an orderly fashion (or keep them operating if necessary) and if they are kept alive, kick the people who screwed them up to the curb and change how they do business.

3) Declare a national emergency, with judicial review (unlike Paulson's seizure of ultimate power) and use the authority to review all purchases of banks, to institute oil rationing if necessary (or simpler procedures like "every street now has a 55 mile an hour speed limit, if it is normally higher). Also allows release of oil from the reserve, if necessary.

4) Expand the safety net such as food stamps, employment insurance, welfare and so on. We know this is going to get worse no matter what we do, so why aren't we taking care of ordinary people?

Read the rest here.

Pay me to go away......

Seems the new WaMu CEO made out like a ban....uh, typical golden parachuted CEO. Matt also makes the great point that the real way to control CEO compensation is to tax it accordingly.

From Matther Yglesias;

My understanding is that even for the super-elite it normally takes a couple of months to wrack up tens of millions of dollars. But Alan Fishman gets the job done with super speed:

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates.

One friend suggests “Obama should suspend his campaign to go punch this guy in the kidney.” Indeed.

Part of what you’re seeing as some of this unfolds is that the idea of CEO pay controls specifically tied to the bailout, though good, is also a bit of a joke. A lot of the folks responsible for this mess left their jobs months ago and are current sitting in their multi-million dollar homes, wearing extremely expensive clothing, and laughing at you, me, Obama, McCain and all the rest. Laughing their asses off. You just need to have additional tax brackets for folks up at the millionaire and multi-millionaire level to make sure that the public gets a bigger slice of the pie. If that decreases the incentives for the sort of wild financial shenanigans that brought the country to this point, well, so what?

Trust Us...part duex

Eric D. Hovde is chief executive of Washington-based Hovde Capital and Hovde Acquisitions. He has a nice assessment of the players to blame for our current financial mess.

Money Quote;

Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there's no need to look beyond Wall Street -- and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government's responsibility.

I find it hard to stomach the fact that investment banks that caused this financial crisis immediately ran to the government asking for assistance, which Bear Stearns received and Lehman Brothers, thankfully, did not. This is one of many eerie parallels that the current meltdown bears to the Great Depression, when Washington and the taxpayers had to step up and take unprecedented action to stabilize the financial markets and the economy. Unfortunately, the government today has already put enormous taxpayer resources at risk -- bailing out investment firm Bear Stearns, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer AIG, and proposing to buy risky assets from the banking system -- to stop the economy from plummeting into another depression. But these events only underscore the toxic relationship between Washington and Wall Street that has brought us to this point.

Read the rest here.

Third Time's the Charm?

A little background on our current financial mess, and how it dovetails into the earlier S&L and Enron collapses. "Deregulation" just another word for "Trust me". And we all know what "Trust me" means in politi-speak.

Who Gets Help......

OK. Let's make a deal. When this crisis is all said and done and all the bailouts have been created, defined, and put into action, let's circle back around and take a look see at how the taxpayer's money (which will be in the multiple billions of dollars) was used, and where it went.

Wanna bet the little middle class guy who lost his house, or his job, or his health care won't get squat? He'll be told to "pull himself up by his bootstraps" while the largest corporate welfare check in the history of the world gets written.

I'm just sayin......

The Blame Game

Matthew Yglesias sums this up pretty well I think. Regulation is only one piece of the puzzle. You can make all the rules and laws that you want, but the key peice is that you have to ENFORCE THEM.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the so-called Government-Sponsored Entities, really did have some serious problems that have contributed to the current financial crisis. They also really were, politically, generally closer to the Democratic Party. Thus it’s useful for Republicans to act, as John McCain did in his speech this morning, to focus on the tree GSE malfeasance rather than the forest of overall systemic failings. But it doesn’t really make sense. Consider the term “subprime mortgage” that you may have heard. Well, it turns out that what it means for a mortgage to be “subprime” is that it doesn’t meet Fannie or Freddie standards.

Beyond that, it’s impossible to say whether additional regulatory authority over the GSEs would have been necessary or sufficient to reduce the impact of this crisis because the existing regulators weren’t using their existing authority. Arguably, the authority they already had would have been sufficient had they used it. Indisputably, giving additional authority to people unwilling to use their existing authority wouldn’t have changed anything. And that set of regulators wasn’t the only set asleep at the switch — the Fed dragged its feet on the subprime issue despite Fed Governor Ed Gramlich’s warnings about problems here, and the SEC ignored the risks associated with the highly leveraged trades that were being made.

Problems existed with the regulatory oversight across the board. And of course part one crucial common thread here is that all of these agencies were headed up by conservative deregulators. The same people not enforcing environmental regulations and not enforcing civil rights law and not enforcing labor rights were also not doing their job at the financial regulatory agencies. Conservatives believe that the role of agency heads is to avoid using their regulatory authority in constructive ways.

I'll put my Social Security Money on 7...

Trusting your Social Security money to Wall Street

...not that long ago we had a rare political moment in this country, a moment where the public sat up and took notice of economic policy -- and spoke out and made its voice heard too. When George W. Bush made it to term #2, he decided to try to privatize social security to reward his supporters on Wall Street with a new source of capital, customers, and fees. (Those would be the same people whose firms are now cratering under the weight of the bad debt they recklessly took on while Republican regulators looked the other way.) But as it turned out, we Americans were not about to let our elected representatives turn over our social security taxes to Wall Street financiers to gamble with if it meant losing the guaranteed income that has allowed millions upon millions of American seniors to live out their sunset years with at least a basic measure of dignity.

But while ordinary Americans spoke out, John McCain stood with Bush (hugged him awkwardly in public, even), against the American people. In fact, just six months ago, McCain again let slip his fondness for privatization.

You can fool some of the people....

Despite an intense effort to distance himself from the way his party has done business in Washington, Senator John McCain is seen by voters as far less likely to bring change to Washington than Senator Barack Obama. He is widely viewed as a “typical Republican” who would continue or expand President Bush’s policies, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The Real McCain

What Atrios sez;

The sad thing is that few of these people will acknowledge that they simply got played, and instead want to cast McCain as a character in a play about a man's tragic downfall. He was always an unprincipled hack, but for a very long time his political fortunes were the result of his understanding of and willingness to cater to the desires of elite Villagers. Now he has a different target.

The Point of No Return?

"I fear the government has passed the point of no return. We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams. It’s pure crisis management. It’s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They’re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight," - Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian.

Hey Taxpayer, just shut up and pay your bills.....

From the NY Times;

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq
says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1
billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has
provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

Apparently you don't screw around with Dick's Halliburton $$$'s.

Fiddling while Rome burns......

"There sure are a lot of issues out there. We’re fighting in two wars abroad, losing one for sure, and perhaps the other one, too. There’s a mortgage crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis, and a series of constitutional crises. There’s the fact that our government is torturing people contrary to international law. There’s the rise of China. There’s, well, you get the point.

“Good thing we’re about to have an election,” you might say, “so we can figure out what to do about all of it.” Well, you’d be right to say it, but wrong to expect it. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, together with all the network honchos who helped choose the content of their questions for the final Democratic debate, don’t think any of these issues are as important as wearing flag pins, playing six degrees of separation with 1960s terrorists, or getting rid of that pesky capital gains tax on people making $200,000 or more—approximately four percent of the country."

Read the rest of Eric Alterman's article here...

Leavin' a bit of work for the next guy......

__________________________________________________

Joseph Stiglitz gives us the rundown on this administrations ruinous policies in "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush"

"In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous 'war of choice' in Iraq. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II.

"Agricultural subsidies were doubled between 2002 and 2005. Tax expenditures -- the vast system of subsidies and preferences hidden in the tax code -- increased more than a quarter. Tax breaks for the president's friends in the oil-and-gas industry increased by billions and billions of dollars. Yes, in the five years after 9/11, defense expenditures did increase (by some 70 percent), though much of the growth wasn't helping to fight the War on Terror at all, but was being lost or outsourced in failed missions in Iraq. Meanwhile, other funds continued to be spent on the usual high-tech gimcrackery -- weapons that don't work, for enemies we don't have. In a nutshell, money was being spent everyplace except where it was needed. During these past seven years the percentage of G.D.P. spent on research and development outside defense and health has fallen. Little has been done about our decaying infrastructure -- be it levees in New Orleans or bridges in Minneapolis. Coping with most of the damage will fall to the next occupant of the White House."



.

It's About the Oil....Part 3......

__________________________________________________

Jack Miles sums it up;

Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." In the twenty-first century's version of the "Great Game" of nineteenth century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea on the Persian Gulf -- a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the ill-built super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people -- but perhaps not.....



.

I Want A New Drug......

___________________________________________________

Spineocrat!!




.

It's About the Oil......Part Duex.....

_________________________________________________

Andrew Sullivan links to as clear and concise a reading of the real plan for the Iraq invasion as I've seen. Looked at from this perspective, all our actions start to make perfect, greedy sense.

Money Quote;

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.

.

When They Tell You It's Not About Oil.....

_________________________________________________

....it's about oil.

Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro explains (money quote);

According to high flying, oil insider Falah Al Jibury, the Bush administration began making plans for Iraq's oil industry "within weeks" of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, which aired on March 17, 2005, he referred to his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington, and the Middle East, where, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam Hussein.

By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 -- but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.

Anyone Seen My Nukes??

So. How did those nuclear armed cruise missiles "accidentally" get to Barksdale AFB, LA? We either have an extremely corrupted nuclear missle tracking and moving plan, or it was done on purpose. Neither one of these options are good. Hang on gang, it's time for us all to don our tin foil caps......

Larry Johnson from TPM has an interesting and informative post on this.


Money Quotes;

Recently the news media reported a USAF B-52 taking off from Minot AFB, ND and landing at Barksdale AFB, LA with six nuclear weapons aboard. The big question is how or why this could happen?

First of all I have to say we are not privileged to all of the information and may never know the underlying circumstances of this occurrence. The Department of Defense declared this entire event was a mistake and would investigate what actually happened.

Obviously there are two possibilities: 1. this was an error and the events that occurred were a tragic mistake of far reaching proportions; and 2. the nuclear weapons were moved on purpose.

The United States has had nuclear weapons for over sixty years. Through out this time the tracking, storage and movement of these weapons has been performed without any type of security problem. The chain of custody procedures has been refined to the nith degree to insure that there will never be a mistake. The access to, movement of, and custody of these weapons is so tightly controlled, each serial numbered weapon has to be signed for when possession of it changes (from one person to another), then only after receiving a lawful order to do so. In order to load a nuclear weapon onto an aircraft the Weapon’s Depot Commander must receive a lawful order from above. The order is sent down (in writing) to one of the bomb shelter custodians and the weapon is signed out to a Loader. The Loader, loads the weapon onto an aircraft and will keep the weapon/aircraft under surveillance with the aircraft under armed guard by the Security Police in an isolated protected area until the Aircraft Commander performs his pre-flight inspection on the aircraft and signs a receipt for each of the weapons by serial number. Once delivered at their destination the Aircraft Commander would receive a receipt for the weapons by serial number from the receiving facility.

With all of the necessary orders and paperwork required just to move a nuclear weapon from one room in a storage facility to another, it can be stated with some sort of certainty that this was not a casual mistake as the Department of Defense has eluted to.

Then if the movement wasn’t a mistake, it obviously was done with some sort of purpose in mind.

The destination of the aircraft was Barksdale AFB, LA from which a number of the strikes on the Middle East have initiated. Speculation would lead us to believe the weapons were being stockpiled at this facility for a possible strike somewhere in the world. Additional speculation would also lead us to believe the strike was to occur in the very near future. Why else the need to forego the normal overland transportation procedures for nuclear weapons and risk flying them to their destination in violation of a treaty with the Russians. Also how is it the press was aware of this movement? After all who would be suspicious of a B-52 taking off from a B-52 base and a B-52 landing at a B-52 base. This event goes on many times each day for practice missions and training. Some one had to have leaked the information to the press that the U.S. was moving nuclear weapons by air in a treaty violation.

This leads us to two possible scenarios.
1. Whoever leaked the information would have been someone in a position of authority knowing what was going on and concerned the U.S. was actually attempting to use nuclear weapons somewhere in the world and wanting to stop it by exposing it. This someone would have had to have a security clearance of some kind and violated the trust under which it was issued thus being exposed to severe penalties and jail time for potential treason etc. Facing such severe penalties someone would have to be totally committed to his/her own conscience/moral beliefs. This preemptive exposure would put the U.S. on a difficult footing and loss of the surprise factor, thus potentially curtailing the mission.
2. The other possibility would be the information on the flight was leaked on purpose in an attempt to influence a foreign government, group or situation to move in a particular direction. That the U.S. was “Saber rattling” and the stakes were high enough to risk antagonizing the Russians to accomplish it. (With the possibility the Russians were supporting the action and willing to overlook the violation as exemplified by their lack of response in the entire situation.)

In either case we have only seen some minor actions taking by the Department of Defense in an attempt to say; well, by accident we left a few nuc’s laying around on some missiles we were going to destroy and they accidentally got loaded onto a plane that by some coincidence happened to be going to a base other than the one it was assigned to (we rarely fly B-52’s assigned at one station to another station). B-52’s usually take off from their home base, fly their mission anywhere in the world by aerial refueling and then return to the base from which they departed. Often these flights take over 20 to 30 hours. If this was a mistake what is happening to the general officers in the chain of command who would have had to issue lawful orders for the movement of those weapons and all those in the custodial chain who would have had to sign for each weapon as they gained possession of them? It just doesn’t add up. Especially when there is a line item in the budget before Congress to upgrade the missiles the Air Force says they were about to destroy. There appears to be too many loose ends still dangling. In addition to all of this did anyone notice how quickly this entire situation quieted down. Usually the press would play on such a world shaking event for months. They do for other things like the first birthday of Anna Nicole’s daughter. We’ve heard about that for weeks on end. But, for a world event with treaty violation implications, no protests from the other treaty signers or other major world players, we get about three days of news attention and it goes away. It seems the exposure has played its roles and has gone away with hopes all is forgotten.

In closing, again we are not privileged in knowing all of the facts and undercover goings on in this matter to be fully aware of what the real intent of this action, but it appears to be more than what the surface information appears.

More War, More Fear equals More Power....

__________________________________________________

Andrew Sullivan outlines the potential Republican strategy for holding on to power. Six years ago I would have thought this a crazy notion. Doesn't sound so crazy now considering what this administration has done so far.

The chances of national reconciliation in Iraq have gone backward, not
forward, this past year, and the U.S.'s empowerment of anti-Shiite propaganda in
Anbar will only isolate Maliki further. The best that can happen is an
indefinite occupation of a dismembered Iraq to slow down genocide and make
ethnic cleansing more orderly. But even that is a very risky proposition. And
the events of last week mean that the Republican party now owns the Iraq
occupation more exclusively and deeply than they ever had - and indeed intend to
maintain it for another decade.

One option: Change the subject by launching wars against Syria and Iran,
and so polarize the country that the choice is framed as: MoveOn or America?
That's much better than having, you know, an actual debate about the merits of
the war in Iraq and the war against Islamist terror. On that, Republicans lose.
If the war is far wider and more terrifying, if the enemies can be multiplied
and amplified, then the dynamic plays to the advantage of the GOP. It's for us
or against us again.
Remember it doesn't matter to the current Bush
Republicans if they cannot persuade a majority of thie necessity of extending
the war to Iran and Syria. They have dropped attempting to persuade a majority
on the war. They are concerned only with shoring up their own party, which can
enable them to launch new wars before the current presidency ends.

.

The Road To Victory....er, Corruption.....

__________________________________________________

The Times reports that there might be a bit..oh, a few billion dollars worth....of contract irregularities. What a surprise. Tell me you didn't see this one coming.....

Military officials said Thursday that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — were under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon had previously disclosed.

In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and matériel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.

Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.

.

Nothing up my sleeve.....presto....the road to Victory

_____________________________________________________

What a sad state to which we have fallen. It's like we've given away our ability to deal with the truth.

Bush and his puppet general trot out a review of the surge that can't even pass the guffaw test, and we all settle down for another year of "This time for sure!".

Everyone but the "nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark" crowd knows that Georgie is playing out the string so he can hand this stinking dungball over to the next guy. All this so Republicans can point and say "You lost the war!!" Trust me, everyone will know that's bullshit as well.

But for some reason it does not seem that we can stop this. For some reason we will continue to sleepwalk through this nightmare. For some reason we will continue to allow this Kabuki theater to play out in front of us. For some reason we will continue to pretend that "it is what it is".

In the meantime, more US dollars and more US lives get flushed down the Mesopotamian toilet.

My question is why?

Short Answers to Long Questions.....

_____________________________________________________

From the Times;

... [Bush's] only real plan is to confuse enough Americans and cow enough members of Congress to let him muddle along and saddle his successor with this war that should never have been started.





.

New Orleans Today.....

_________________________________________________

The ever vigilant and direct Charles Pierce on the current state of New Orleans (and the U.S. as a whole);

....it should be noted Tom Joyner did a first-class radio broadcast from the Ninth Ward on Wednesday morning. Things got so heated about the presidential photo-op later in the day that Mayor Ray Nagin started to sound very uncomfortable. (He does, after all, still have to deal with this pack of thooleramawns for a living.) Excellent radio all the way around. Meanwhile, here's some of the latest from the indomitable Times-Picayune. The numbers are mind-blowing, at least to me -- I mean, 105,000 buildings lost -- most of them residential structures -- and $14 billion-with-a-B in damages. In an American city. In my lifetime. And not just any American city, but one that is more important to the cultural identity of this country than any other except (maybe) New York. My favorite word in all the world is "self-evident," as in, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Mr. Jefferson is saying that the monumental heresies to follow -- all men created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienables, etc., etc. -- are so obvious that they almost don't need to be explained, but that he will explain them anyway. That word set freedom itself free, which was the case in New Orleans more than it was in any other place I can name. An America without a New Orleans is just Great Britain with better beachfront property.

This, I believe, is in no small part why an administration with a cramped and vicious vision of the country, an administration dedicated to the depths of its rotted, vestigial soul to making this country less free, an administration that has us seriously debating how much torture is enough and whether the president should be forced to abide by the laws he signed, an administration that would sell the entire constitutional order down the river for a three-point bump in a poll full of fools, would allow this particular city to be so grievously wounded and then die in recovery. What are we to make of a country that allows these soulless, vacant fools to govern it with impunity? We are all in New Orleans, now, standing in the wreckage of a graveyard. The sun rises hot and merciless. The help never comes. And New Orleans, the birthplace of our national soul, just turns out to be the place where they took our national soul to die.