A Meeting of the Presidents
Posted by: prehistoric rocket science on: September 24, 2008
Our next President, John McCain, will be deliberating with our current President, George W. Bush, along with Loser of the Century, Barack Obama, who has been working the phones for a week with House and Senate leaders to get a clean bailout bill through Congress, tomorrow; to get a clean bailout bill through Congress. You may need to re-read that sentence a few times to clearly understand just exactly what the hell is going on in Washington.
While McCain has journeyed from, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”, all the way to shutting down his campaign because the crisis is sooo bad that Armageddon will strike at exactly 9:00 am on September 29 unless the straight-talkin’ Maverick rides into town to save us; his poll numbers have fallen beneath the Bradley Effect threshold. Obama, having wrested extemporaneous details from Chairman Dodd’s proposed plan, called McCain this morning to see if the two could issue a joint statement and get this damn thing done.
Now, Barack Obama is done. McCain flustered about cancelling Friday’s debate, even though Bush, Dodd, Reid, Frank, Pelosi and a host of Republicans said they were close to a deal and that the presence of McCain and/or Obama would just muck up the works. Pundits from the likes of CBS, FOX NEWS, and CNN agreed that McCain was imploding; so, hours later, Bush had a change of heart, and “invited” both candidates to have a sit-down.
Masterstroke.
Please remember, this disaster is the result of deregulation – something Bush has been pushing for eight years and John McCain has been pushing for twenty six years. Please remember, McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, has been profiting by his association with McCain while lobbying for the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac up until as recently as last month. Please remember that Bush won the 2000 election by a vote of 5 to 4 in the Supreme Court, and that we’ll never know who really won in 2004, thanks to Diebold – so this year, the GOP decided, why even bother to show up for the debates? We know that somehow the Republicans are going to pull a victory out of their asses, we just don’t yet know how they’ll do it…
Question: Why in hell would any American - conservative, moderate, progressive, or liberal, vote for a seventy two year old guy who has changed his position on the most important issue we face at least seven times in the last nine days?
2 Responses to "A Meeting of the Presidents"
September 25, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Here is another portion of the 3 page article. Please everyone, you owe it to yourselves to read this article to understand exactly what it is Paulson is asking us to bail out.
The Anatomy of a Bubble
Until recently, most people had never even heard of derivatives; but in terms of money traded, these investments represent the biggest financial market in the world. Derivatives are financial instruments that have no intrinsic value but derive their value from something else. Basically, they are just bets. You can “hedge your bet” that something you own will go up by placing a side bet that it will go down. “Hedge funds” hedge bets in the derivatives market. Bets can be placed on anything, from the price of tea in China to the movements of specific markets.
“The point everyone misses,” wrote economist Robert Chapman a decade ago, “is that buying derivatives is not investing. It is gambling, insurance and high stakes bookmaking. Derivatives create nothing.”1 They not only create nothing, but they serve to enrich non-producers at the expense of the people who do create real goods and services. In congressional hearings in the early 1990s, derivatives trading was challenged as being an illegal form of gambling. But the practice was legitimized by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who not only lent legal and regulatory support to the trade but actively promoted derivatives as a way to improve “risk management.” Partly, this was to boost the flagging profits of the banks; and at the larger banks and dealers, it worked. But the cost was an increase in risk to the financial system as a whole.2
Since then, derivative trades have grown exponentially, until now they are larger than the entire global economy. The Bank for International Settlements recently reported that total derivatives trades exceeded one quadrillion dollars – that’s 1,000 trillion dollars.3 How is that figure even possible? The gross domestic product of all the countries in the world is only about 60 trillion dollars. The answer is that gamblers can bet as much as they want. They can bet money they don’t have, and that is where the huge increase in risk comes in.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/IT-S-THE-DERIVATIVES-STUP-by-Ellen-Brown-080918-354.html
September 25, 2008 at 8:22 pm
The current banking fiasco was brought on by an elaborate ponzi scheme that is now tumbling on a worldwide scale. The American people are now being asked to bail out individuals that gambled with money they did not have in the first place. This is only an emergency for the bankers that have exercised poor business judgement.
Here is an excerpt from an article I just read that explains the derivative mess rather succinctly. I am urging everyone who is trying to understand this mess to read the article, the link is provided at the end of the excerpt.
“Proposals for reforming the banking system are not even on the radar screen of Prime Time politics today; but the current system is collapsing at train-wreck speed, and the “change” called for in Washington may soon be taking a direction undreamt of a few years ago. We need to stop funding the culprits who brought us this debacle at our expense. We need a public banking system that makes a cost-effective credit mechanism available for homeowners, manufacturing, renewable energy, and infrastructure; and the first step to making it cost-effective is to strip out the swarms of gamblers, fraudsters and profiteers now gaming the system.”
Link to whole article below:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/IT-S-THE-DERIVATIVES-STUP-by-Ellen-Brown-080918-354.html