Surely some humor in John Boehner (R-eally no clue) the House Moronity Leader blaming the piss poor voting from the Republican side (2/3rds voted against the Bailout measure) on a pre-vote motivational speach by Nancy Pelosi (D-efinitely Wacky). No-one takes her seriously for 2 years and now suddenly she's influencing the REPUBLICAN side of the House!
It's almost as if the House members wishing to be reelected in 36 days time realize that now is a good time to start listening to their constituents -better late than never.
Last edited by Two's in : 30th September 2008 at 03:25.
It's almost as if the House members wishing to be reelected in 36 days time realize that now is a good time to start listening to their constituents -better late than never.
You got it, as all house members are up for reelection. They have to run every two years, which should be changed, but that is for an entirely different thread.
They have to run every two years, which should be changed,
Isn't the US system organised so that 50% of members of both houses are voted in every two years (for a four year term), to avoid the situation we have with the Westminister system where 100% of members face their electorates at the same time, which theoretically, if not practically, could result in a whole new cast of characters in one hit? It also avoids a complete rout for one party should a single issue be at the forefront (like a major economic meltdown?) at the time of an election.
Yep and these congressmen decided to go on vacation for some holiday, with all these problems going on.
They predict gloom and doom but don't interrupt their holidays!
What a joke.
Its a crisis, so really going...he did, she did is pointless. If you lend $1 to guy, who lends it on, who lends it on say 10 times you have $11 in circulation, everyone of the 11 thinks they have $1 in "assets" and the guy with the actual $1 at the end bought a lego house now worth 50C and the guys he gave the $1 to is in the med on a superyacht.
Every market in the world has tanked today.
Hats off to those on both sides that voted against putting a Paulsen $700B bandaid on a $15trillion wound (the approx of loans to people that shouldn't have them). He was shrieking today on TV about the house not writing the check. Mr ex-Goldman Sachs golden boy has lost it. Lock the bastard up along with Bernanke.
Whilst our pensions and retirement go south....some 'black' humour/satire...
Quote:
RICHARD Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate tells how Raymond Shaw, scion of a family prominent in US political life, is brainwashed by the evil Chinese and Russians into becoming a communist assassin. A sleeper agent, he is operated by his ambitious mother, who uses the queen of diamonds as a subconscious trigger. All she has to do is get her son to sit down and play cards. Then he can be programmed to murder. Outwardly a senior Republican official, Mrs Shaw has been a secret red for decades.
Despite the book's best-seller status and the two film versions (1962 and 2004), the American people took no heed of Condon's warning. His book wasn't fiction. It was a red alert. I've lost count of the letters and emails I've sent to the FBI, the CIA and ASIO trying to tell them about what has been going on, only to be dismissed as a weirdo conspiracy theorist.
Now everyone knows the truth: how George W. Bush has been the KGB's President, operated by mother Barbara, a covert commie for 50 years. Now her sleeper-agent son, working from the Oval Office, has brought down the US and the entire capitalist world. Here's how it went down.
Whereas Raymond Shaw was captured on patrol during the Korean War and brainwashed for months, George W. was captured while on one of his legendary drunken binges. It took only a few hours for KGB agents to brainwash him, as there was so little brain to wash.
Released into his mother's care, George announced he was giving up the booze in favour of faith. When he proclaimed "I'm born again", it was the truth. George was born again, but not into fundamentalist Christianity. He was born again in the fundamentalist faith of Marxism-Leninism.
Given that George Bush Sr was only marginally brighter than Jr, Barbara was able to plot the plot without Dad's knowledge. Using her incomparable status in the Republican Party, Barbara guided her son's career as if he were a missile. The first big step was, of course, the governorship of Texas. Then came the primaries. Then two terms in the White House.
For the President, the trigger mechanism wasn't cards but golf. Every time he putted, he could be programmed. And look what the commies have achieved. Using Osama bin Laden as a ploy - technically, he's what Alfred Hitchcock calls a MacGuffin, a plot device to misdirect attention - the KGB President more or less completely isolated the US. Bush made an enemy of the entire Muslim world and helped recruit countless thousands of young men and women to the Islamist cause. In the process he destroyed US alliances with the wider world, particularly Europe. He tore up international agreements, shredded the US constitution, approved torture, destroyed the credibility of the Justice Department and got senior members of his administration at each other's throats.
Gathering power to himself along Stalinist lines, the KGB President spied on his own people on a scale that Stalin would have admired. Take phone taps. The KGB couldn't have done half as well, if only because too few Russians had phones.
George W. established prisons inspired by Uncle Joe's gulags, with the torments of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib modelled on the interrogation techniques of his Russian masters. The rights and freedoms hard won by Americans through the centuries were destroyed in months. Any time Barbara wanted to up the ante, she'd suggest a game of golf. And as the world knows, the President played a lot of golf.
The world was fooled into thinking Ronald Reagan had won the Cold War. Gulled by Mikhail Gorbachev, the US really believed that the Soviet Union had been destroyed and dismantled. But any time now Vladimir Putin and his puppets will pull the strings and gather it all back again. They'll rewrap the old USSR and tie it up with a big bow. And the US will become the USSA, totally in the grip of socialism.
For that was the apotheosis of the Bush presidency. The ruin of American financial institutions. The destruction of capitalism. Karl Marx argued that capitalism would be destroyed by its internal contradictions and Bush obliged with cascading crises, encouraging insatiable greed that, in turn, produced a revolution. Yet not a single shot was fired.
Ah, the irony: the Christian Right helping elect and re-elect the atheists' secret weapon. Wall Street brought down more dramatically than the Berlin Wall by the capitalists themselves. All under the auspices of Barbara Bush and her dopey son.
Barbara and George were, as you know, arrested this morning. There'll be a show trial but it won't make any difference. It's too late now. It's all over, and just in time for Christmas. I mention this because Father Christmas was, of course, another commie plot. A dead ringer for Marx, dressed in commie red. But the Americans will buy anything.
And...
Remember, ALL the world's markets tanked today not just Wall Street. When Germany, Paris and London open today it will be carnage (they were shut).
Last edited by Track Coastal : 30th September 2008 at 13:04.
TC
A small but significant difference. Change the M to a B.
Quote:
No-one takes her seriously for 2 years and now suddenly she's influencing the REPUBLICAN side of the House!
That ignores the polarizing personality that she is. Short of Newt, I can't think of any other SOTH as controversial as her in recent memory.
She preached all this bi-partisan, feel good, non judgemental crap till she thought she could ram rod it through. Her star within the Democratic party took a hit today. No way she should have sent this pig to the floor for a vote till she had the absolute assurance that the Republicans would acquiesce and vote yes. All things I've seen indicates she felt that the dissenters would out of fear change the vote to a yea once the markets heard the results. Explains why the vote was left open for so long. Last I heard, her strong arm tactics only changed one vote.
Today wasn't the biggest ever, or even the second biggest, one day declines...that is just MSM hyperbole.
It wasn't as bad as Black Monday and not even in the same league as 1929.
Informed opinion suggest very strongly that another 1929 is simply impossible because the economy is structured very differently to that in 1929. In 1929 the private economy, Wall St, was essentially the only economy but these days, for better or worse, the Govt is a large % of the overall economy.
The 700 billion bailout was voted down because it was a BAD plan. It gave too much back to shareholders and the Banks.
Paulson was asking for a blank check and 'ask me no questions and just let me get on with it'. As a recent past CEO of Goldman Sachs he has many hundreds of millions $ of stock options that will become worthless if the system is not bailed out...privatised profits and socialised losses indeed. Does anyone REALLY believe Paulson is capable of coming up with the best plan when it WOULD cost him personally several hundred million dollars?
What the US Govt NEEDS to do is set up a bank that buys the toxic paper from the investment banking system at something approaching what it is really worth...maybe 3-5 cents on the $.
This ensures that the shareholders and banks take their medicine and that the average tax payer is not the innocent victim of this Congressionally induced corporate greed.
The banks and shareholders/CEOs etc NEED to take the fall out to its fullest measure...The system NEEDS to be flushed out...the overall health and reputation of the resulting banking system demands nothing less. The Congress, even though they caused this in large part, needs to ensure that what they take on will not destroy their ability to function as a govt and does not destroy their own (undeserved) credibility with Mr and Mrs Average.
Then some sense of reality must be injected into the populace with respect to the realities behind 'affordable housing'. Home ownership is simply NOT a right and with the best intentions in the world NOT EVERYONE can afford it.
The Democrat Congressional socialist 'affordable housing' policies going back to the Clinton era MUST be seen for what they are - Doing absolutely NO favors for lower socio economic groups. Declining a loan application from someone who IS a bad credit risk IS NOT RACIST!!
Tying the poor into mortgages they cannot afford because you have convinced them they have a right to home ownership and can indeed afford a house is about the nastiest thing I can think of inflicting on people you purport to want to help. Instead of renting a home they can afford (which is always cheaper than buying in cash flow terms) and allowing them to have a fighting chance to save some money and perhaps even invest some you instead put them into a scenario where they most likely will face all the horrors of struggling to pay for something they could never afford in the first place, going bankrupt and losing what they have been convinced is their right - and the anger at 'the system' that whole fiasco engenders.
People were predicting EXACTLY what has happened would happen 10 years ago for fecks sake!!!
Funny thing on the box tonight, Campbell Live listed US public debt at a shade under ten trillion dollars.
....so if the US public owes that much, then who did they borrow it off, and where did the lenders get it from, and if the lending banks tip over because the Government doesn't bail them out, will their depositors find their accounts emptied, and if not, why not, and how not?
....and if the Government does bail them out, where will it get the $700 billion from to do that, given that it won't go round the US public with a begging bowl first?
Just curious.
Actually I'm not just curious, I know the answers, but I do wonder whether people have thought about where Bank money comes from. Here, of course, we get told it that is sourced from the deposits of other people, you know, careful savers, and Japanese housewives, and Belgian dentists, and soforth.
The truth however is in the reality of the Fractional Reserve system of money creation - the real reality, not the one you will find in Wiki, which I have given up editing, because it always reverts to the same old lies come the morning. Funny that.
The other half of the answer is in the Imprest Supply system of money creation. We know that this works, because it is that, not the pockets of US taxpayers (at least not immediately), which is financing the war in Iraq, amongst other things.
Damn, where DOES all this new money come from?
Just kidding. Of course I know where it comes from.
I mean if Wall Street falls over, so what? Yes, people who borrowed money they should never have been lent, against assets which weren't worth what was lent on them, and with incomes which could never have serviced the debts they were incurring, yes, they will lose what they have bought with that borrowed money.
But the people who sold them the things they will lose, well, they won't lose the money which was paid to them, because they already have it, and it's out there in circulation, and no-one can come and take it back, now can they?
And the people who have accounts with the Banks which made the loans, well, they won't lose anything either, because their money is nice and safe in their accounts, where it always was.
If you think otherwise, go check your bank account. If your money is there where it should be, it can't have been lent to anyone else, now can it, unless of course the same money can be in two places at once, and wouldn't that be magic?
No, they ALL get reelected each two years. In theory, they all could change every two years, but they are so gerrymandered that incumbents have about a 97% chance of reelection. Pelosi is well past her sell-by date, as are most of them. My rep is 7-terms
ACORN:
Read this They have been caught in many states registering voters who don't exist. In Seattle, one testified that they just sat in a library filling out registration forms with made up names. If you're a leftover lefty from the Sixties and can't make it on the tenure track-join ACORN. You can Bill Ayres, not have to bomb Federal buildings, just undermine them.
the real reality, not the one you will find in Wiki, which I have given up editing, because it always reverts to the same old lies come the morning.
That could well be one of the funniest things I've ever read on PPRuNe! And stated without a hint of irony!
To the point. Unlike most posters here, I find myself at a complete loss as to what happens next. I express a certain admiration for the Republicans who voted as you would expect from the party who advocate a genuinely free market. In fact, I think I agree with them.
If only there were some way we could retrieve the obscene salaries, options packages and bonuses that have been handed out over the last 15 years to whizz kids in the Fool's Paradise, I think the no-bailout decision would be a good one.
There isn't, of course, so where does that leave us? The whiz kids still pocket their millions whichever way you look at it. They've gone, taken off with the money. Who is left to pick up the pieces?
To tell you the truth I don't really know. I'm not worried about the share market, it will find its level in the end, but I'm no expert in banking, and from what I understand there has been no similar banking crisis since the Great Depression. I repeat I am open to correction on this, since it's well outside my bailiwick.
Apparently of the 18 banks in the world rated AA+, Australia has four. That is comforting, especially since one of them is looking after my superannuation. We also have relatively high interest rates at the moment, giving our Reserve Bank a bit of room to manoeuvre should there be a massive credit squeeze and consumer spending backlash.
Here's hoping that Australia continues its position as one of the world's most stable economies. Given its position as basically a huge open cut mine, if we are stuffed, the rest of you can kiss your arses goodbye.
Just listened to GWB-Speak. He repeated the scare tactic "stock market affects retirement savings of millions" (paraphrased).
Well, he is right, though not in the way he implies. I owe my early retirement (before age 58) to the stock crash of 1987. That motivated me to sock away a few extra percent of my pay in well-diversified cheap investments, and 12 years later I was comfortable enough to clean out my desk & walk away from the daily grind.
Binos I think this is about the most comprehensive and non partisan explanation I have seen. After I read it I finally started to understand just how toxic and completely stark raving mad the use of CDSs became and why the banks are all terrified of one another.
No way she should have sent this pig to the floor for a vote till she had the absolute assurance that the Republicans would acquiesce and vote yes.
...isn't that based on the assumption that she wanted it to pass? Are we not considering for a brief moment the Democrats overwhelming desire to stick it to George one last time on the way out (even though the Republicans were the chief dissenters). But if you believed that, you would have to think that Politicians on the Hill consider being in power more important that doing what's right for the country, and that only leads to the conclusion that every swinging dick in town is out to shaft the taxpayers! Quelle surprise! You sir, have won this week's edition of "It pays to be a winner".
If Bush was in his first term, perhaps but not as a lame duck. The return on the investment of a final up yours isn't worth the risk. The potential backlash against the Dem's and Nancy herself would be tremendous if the public sensed it was being done for simple political gain. I have to think the reason it didn't pass with one in three Dem's would be the same reason it didn't pass with the Republicans. It is a flawed bill (yet I personally wanted it to pass-I lost a tremendous amount of money yesterday) and not many Dems or Republicans want their name associated with a bill that costs the public $700 billion when the perception is (but not necessarily the truth) that it's being done to bailout a few corrupt tycoons. Perhaps not thinking in the best long term interests of their constituents, but not partisan politics either. Often said the memory of the voter is short, but then again so is the term of a Representative. The posters and slogans for any would be Congressional candidate to use against an incumbent is being written this week for an election that may be many, many months off. That's not lost on the politically savvy.
That said, her job as the SOTH would be to see this through to a successful conclusion or not put it up for a vote till the appropriate arms were twisted to ensure success. She caved to market timelines by allowing the vote before all the back channel water cooler meetings were complete.
Either that dog is gonna hunt or it's not, but you need to know before you let it off the leash.
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