09/26/2008
A coupla quick ones...
Love that corporate bailout
...while the wife and I deal with real-estate excitement in our lives.
1) My friend Lauren took a flyer and started a blog on Huffington Post. Her first entry is well worth checking out.
"It's not clear to me that the American public wants to debate Sarah Palin's child-rearing skills and personal decisions about her own pregnancy and maternity leave as a means to determine her competency as a Vice President. But at this point, we haven't been given much else. In the absence of a true forum for debate, people will continue to ravage over whatever information they can get."
2) Sharon Smith presents a point of view sorely lacking in the current "The sky is falling!" bailout coverage. Presented on Counterpunch.org, which makes me nostalgic for the days when there was an actual diverse press, with daily newspapers that wrote this way.
" On the fateful evening of September 18th, when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke pulled together a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill to discuss the rapidly deteriorating state of the U.S. financial system, congressional leaders feigned shock and horror at its severity. As Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, relayed his reaction to reporters after Paulson's doomsday scenario, "When you listened to him describe it you gulped."
But surely this group of veteran Washington insiders already had an inkling that all was not well on Wall Street. Schumer arrived in Washington in 1980 to serve in the House and was elected to the Senate in 1999. He sits on the Senate Banking Committee and its subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment. Also in attendance at the meeting was Christopher Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut, who first entered Washington politics in 1975 in the House of Representatives and joined the Senate in 1981. He currently chairs the Senate Banking Committee. Another present Democrat was Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, who has served in the House since 1981 and is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
These Democratic Party powerbrokers have certainly been privy to the inner workings of the financial feeding frenzy that has unfolded on Wall Street over the last two decades and are as complicit as any Republican in enabling the same firms now being bailed out with taxpayer dollars. It could also be argued that their liberal rhetoric is a key component of the selling job now needed to contain a popular revolt against the unbridled greed that has brought the U.S. financial system to the brink of collapse.
Indeed, their campaign coffers are overflowing with Wall St. dollars. Frank's top contributors in the current election cycle include Brown Brothers Harriman & Life, Manulife Financial, the American Bankers Association and the American Society of Appraisers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Back in 2003, Frank opposed the Bush administration plan to increase regulation of Fannie and Freddie. At the time, Frank argued, 'These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'''
Thanks to TC.
3) In the Lest We Forget category, acquaint yourself with the Business Plot of the 1930's, when fascism lurked close to the surface of the US business community. There's a BBC documentary about it - you certainly won't find an american documentary about it - streaming on the web.
Thanks to CT.