Dodd Finds The Root Cause, Look No Further
For those of you using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as a web browser, apparently the video’s don’t show. Frankly I don’t know why, firefox works just fine as does other versions of IE. So here is the url for both videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM
The first video has been removed from youtube, apparently the music copyright holder complained, Time Warner. Anyhow! On-Ward!
Dodd must go.
If we are ever ever going to hold our leaders accountable, Dodd is the poster boy.
Think of the message this would send our elected for life governing elite.
No you can’t take us for granted, take our money, expect us to listen to your self-serving drivel, and then expect us to forgive. We need better than this. Our Country needs better than this, better than this self-serving political hack for life.
Dodd is really out of touch, he expected Obama to pick him for VP? All the time knowing this was waiting to blow up right before the election? Not only is that self serving it’s really deceitful. And a plus for Obama for recognizing the albatross.
Thanks to the EveryDayRepublican.com for the heads up on this video.
Here’s another one, seems hard to believe the Chairman of the Banking committee didn’t get the message. After all they have the internet in Iowa.
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What The House Republicans Did For You
The changes they fought for could save us billions.
House Republicans, meanwhile, fought hard for — and won — a provision that would establish a program whereby banks could buy government insurance to back the principal and interest on certain troubled assets, rather than selling them outright. They argued this was a better deal for taxpayers, and would reduce the overall cost of the rescue package.
Why? Because the government is historically a really bad assessor of risk, given the ready and open access to vast amounts of taxpayer money there has and is little reason to get better.
Whereas insurers typically are better because it’s their job on the line. The insurers will assess risk on the loans and assign premiums, incidentally if there is competition to provide the insurance, this should be a good third party assessment just how bad the crisis really is.
(Yes I know Credit Debt Swaps are what got us in to this mess, but unlike CDS’s this process will be transparent.)
And insurance is cheaper than buying the liability outright.
What McCain did for you was give the House Republicans some added muscle.
What Obama did for you? He was part of the problem along with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and Chris Cox.
Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008
1. Dodd, Christopher J, D-Iowa
2. Kerry, John, D-MA
3. Obama, Barack, D-IL
4. Clinton, Hillary, D-NY
Yup that’s change we can believe in.
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Bailout Deal Reached, Fine Check Your Souls Here
First, I want Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and Chris Cox to resign.
I get why we need a bailout, but if you are going to take my money…
I want your corporate souls.
I want Government accountants on your Board of Directors.
I want to own a piece of your company.
I want a price for removal of my accountants on your Board of Directors, price of the bailout plus interest, crippling loan shark interest, after all we have men with guns to collect.
I want veto power over all compensation packages.
I want my people in your face everyday you come to work.
I want rule changes that permit shareholders greater oversight and control. Once a year with a docile board and a scripted shareholder’s meeting isn’t going to do it anymore.
I want the shareholders of these companies to lose all their stock investments.
I don’t want to see any multi-million dollar walk-aways for any above mail clerk.
I want you broken up into many smaller companies, I am being held hostage because you are too big to fail, answer to that, break them up and they’ll never threaten me again. A key component of making capitalism work is an efficient marketplace, a couple of big players is not efficient.
I want an example that lives for a hundred years. Not just every two decades.
I want jail time.
A Trillion Dollars Put In Prespective
The M1 money supply is the amount of liquid money in the economy. If you added up all bank deposits, wallets, cash registars that would represent the M1.
The M1 is $1.39 Trillion dollars, the “ballout” is 70% of the liquid cash floating about our country.
The M2 money supply includes time deposits, certificates of deposits etc. It is about 7% of our gross domestic product. The M2 is $7.72 Trillion. The ballout is 13% of the M2.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is an attempt to measure the size of our economy, the GDP is $14.31 Trillion. The ballout is 7% of the GDP.
This is by any measure a sum of money that likes of which have never been seen in the history of Government intervention.
Where is the money going to come from? Easy, it can’t be borrowed, the Treasury does not have a bank account with that sum, we will have to print it.
Essentially increasing the M1 by 75%.
What does this mean to you and me? The value of the dollar against other currencies which had been improving will lose ground again. All imports will become more costly, such as oil and cars. All Chinese imports as all imports will increase.
Foreign companies will continue to buy American companies. There will be a run on American assests as Amercia goes “on sale”.
Allow me to value the $1 Trillion slightly differently.
President Bush, Chris Cox, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, four men who were supposed to be watching.
$1,000,000,000,000 / 4 men = 250,000,000,000 each.
Running for President, a once in a lifetime experience, cost of your neglect, priceless.
I don’t know what is the right thing to do. I revolt at the prospect of this massive transfer of funds, no this sheer invention of wealth out of thin air.
This created wealth is underwritten by you and me, the faith backing this wealth creation is the faith the rest of the world has in the American spirit to pull it out. That we are sooooo big we can’t fail.
It’ll take months and possibly years to truely find out what caused this. I suspect Governmental monkeying with the fundamentals of credit. The most basic of which, don’t lend money to people who do not have a reasonable expectation of a sufficient future cash flow to pay it back.
Does America have a reasonable expectation of a sufficient future cash flow to pay this back?
Those in Congress who want to amend the plan have a responsibility to every American workers and saver to come up with a solution. Just saying they don’t like the one on the table isn’t enough.
Some wise market sources, here and in London, are suggesting that the federal government should take preference stock in rescued institutions when it buys their subprime paper. That way the taxpayers would get good money back, ahead of the common stockholders, if and when these institutions then recovered. It’s an idea worth a look.
We are facing a massive financial implosion as a result of a huge debt bubble. Three times in modern history a major economy has faced this kind of situation. In America, 1929, and in Japan, 1989, the authorities failed to address the problem quickly and comprehensively. They tried to muddle through and get by using the old rules. The results? Japan has suffered 20 years of stagnation, including several recessions. Jobs and incomes suffered. Homes and shares are still down by maybe two-thirds. The U.S. economy in the 1930s fared even worse. Wall Street fell about 90%, from peak to trough, while the economy suffered a terrible depression lasting a decade. No one won.
Corporate oversight ultimately resides with the shareholders, they elect a Board of Directors to represent their interests. Clearly in my mind, these Boards of Directors failed. Epic failure. BODs are protected by insurance and the companies they serve. Unless criminial activity can be found I doubt they will suffer, with the exception they won’t be asked to serve on any other boards.
Where the Government could help is by increasing transparency of the Boards of Directors and making them more accountable to the shareholders.
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Why Do We Have A Senate?
Seriously, why do we have Senators?
Can anyone think of anything they have produced, other than Presidential candidates?
The house of representatives at least has entertainment value. The Senate just produces pontifications.
Often called the best job in America these Princes of the Republic are not called to any measure of worth. Locked in 6 year contracts, great pay, benefits, perks, a retirement plan to die for and virtually no accountability.
If Dodd can not be held accountable for his total neglect of his job, what incentive is there for any Senator to even show up? And indeed many do not.
Look at how Presidents age in office, contrast that with Senators. Senators don’t age. Some of them live into their 90’s and still are in office, we are talking really low stress living on Capitol Hill.
This election cycle is unusual given that we can not avoid electing a Senator for President. Historically we don’t like to make Senators President, we usually like to hold them at arm’s length from the ultimate seat of power. We like Governors best.
There is a wisdom of the masses are work here, we the unwashed whether we be Democrats or Republicans have an inherent uneasiness with Senators. There is a under-achieving elitist stench in the Senate, filled with people convinced of their own high self worth.
I have a theory that Sarah Palin’s popularity is in no small part due to the fact she is a Governor. I breathed a sigh of relief that we have at least a 50% chance of electing a team that has at least ONE adult on the ticket. Someone who knows that the trash needs picked up, the roads plowed, and businesses grown. Who knows that government has to work, not just talk about it.
The American people are mad, they see government sanctioned foolishness on Wall Street, an aviation system that is just plain not working, a social security system that is anything but secure and is absolutely GUARANTEED to fail, guaranteed I say!
A border that millions of people just walk over. We can’t even control our own borders. Congressman Hayworth estimated that approximatley 4,500 illegals cost the border every day in just the state of Arizona alone! Billions of dollars in Homeland Security, countless x-rays of my shoes and my briefcase, cross-eyed looks at my toothpaste and millions just walk in to the USA whenever they want. Is this insane or what?
Budget deficits that keep getting higher and higher, politicians running for office on platforms of greater taxation! Yes, dear reader Obama / Biden will raise your taxes, maybe not your income tax but you will end up with a higher costing government and you will pay for it.
I have cut my budget way back, just once I’d like to see some pain and some “do without” at the state Government and Federal Government levels. Just once I’d like to see some government employees subjected to some real world business like treatment, like maybe a plant closing or their entire function outsourced to Mexico. Cruel on my part, yeah it is. But till the Governing in this country feel some real world pressures and feel what the governed are facing it’ll just be more of the same.
An endless stream of entitlement programs that just grow and grow, never sunsetting.
A government sector that now rivals the private sector in size! This is our greatest threat to freedom. Jefferson would slap us silly.
An absolutely treasonous lack of action on a sane national energy policy that is 30 years over due!
Ethanol is treason. A raw naked exercise in political power, nothing more.
This ain’t working.
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Obama/Biden, Technologists Alarmed
From the premier Technology website, slashdot.
Seems the shine is wearing off the chosen one.
“Barack Obama has edited his official website on many issues, including a huge revision on the technology page. Strangely it seems net neutrality is no longer as important as it was a few months ago, and the swaths of detail have been removed and replaced with fairly vague rhetoric. Many technologists were alarmed with the choice of Joe Biden before, and now it appears their fears might have been well founded.”
“fairly vague rhetoric” HA! Now you notice?
Joe Biden has expressed a desire for a more heavy Governmental hand on the internet. Leaving many who follow internet business issues shall we say, worried?
Don’t also forget as the Delaware Senator, Biden is in the pocket of the credit card companies, which leaves him at direct odds with Senator Obama’s credit card reforms. Which, giving Obama his due, I think his credit card reforms are way over due.
I have to snicker at the technologists, which lately many of the young ones appear to quite the statists. Which I have never understood, seeing they the skilled ones have the most to lose when socialists take over. But maybe this is the start of the young technologists to realize that government is a double edged sword. Cutting both ways.
Joe Biden Is UnPatriotic
Put your money where your mouth is, Joe.
Or better yet, get your hand out of my pocket!
Hey Buddy!, Keep the change!
Hey Barack, Hillary would not have been such an idiot on the stump.
Bad judgment.
(Well, use this as a mulligan for the cabinet posts) OMG!
But then again you had to pick someone older more experienced, but that is the whole point, isn’t it?
AFP Challenges Biden to Prove His “Patriotism” by Forgoing His Tax Deductions, Sending Check for $18,053 to U.S. Treasury ASAP
As you’ve probably already heard, Sen. Joe Biden has been going around saying that paying higher taxes is the patriotic thing to do.
Well, we’ve taken a look at the tax returns that Sen. Biden released last week, and it turns out that he did what pretty much every common-sense American taxpayer does — he lowered his final tax bill as much as possible by claiming deductions — $62,954 (editor’s note: TREASON I SAY! TREASON!) for Biden last year alone. That lowered his tax bill by $18,053 last year, according to our calculations.
We normally wouldn’t begrudge a taxpayer minimizing his or her tax bill, but when Biden calls into question the patriotism of those who don’t want to fork over even more of their own hard-earned money to Washington, we think it’s time for him to put his money where his mouth is.
That’s why today we’re calling for Sen. Biden to prove his “patriotism” by sending a check to the U.S. Treasury for the $18,053 he saved on last year’s taxes. Because it’d apparently be “unpatriotic” to not do so. Right, Senator Biden?
The Forerunner Of Death To The Public Liberty
According to Jefferson we are way over due.
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty . . . And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
We have a constitutional convention on the CT ballot this November.
Thomas Jefferson would approve.
So let’s make him proud and annoy the hell out of our elected officials and re-assert our ownership of this state.
So maybe a nice quiet bloodless rebellion this November?
Let’s just vote
Dodd: This Could Be Huge
Understatement of the week. 
Governments around the world pour billions in to the markets today in an effort to shore up confidence in the markets.
The Europeans kicked in 185Billion, and we kicked in 85Billion to shore up AIG.
The Bank of Japan and the US Fed announce a plan to supply 60Billion in dollars to Japan.
All over the world Governments step in with un-precedenced amounts of citizen’s wealth to shore up the global financial system.
Our man Dodd as Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the citizen’s ultimate watchdog on these matters has lost his effective voice on these matters. His voice has been compromised by his own problems with sweetheart mortgages that you or I could not get. A VIP deal, yes a Very Important Deal indeed.
The Dodd has been compromised, he should be at the fore front protecting us now, he should HAVE BEEN AT the fore front protecting us for the past two years.
But he can’t now and he didn’t then. He was busy putting his kids on an IOWA school bus for the photographers.
Yes, Senator Dodd this could be huge.
You can’t effectively do your job now because you didn’t over the past two years.
Step down and let someone else take the reins.
Christopher Dodd, chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, told Bloomberg Television yesterday that turmoil in the financial industry means “credit does not exist” right now.
“I was told today you have to have a FICO score of 720 to qualify for a car loan,” Dodd said. “The effects of this could be huge.”
Halloween Mask Poll
The results are in and McCain wins by a mask?
I have conducted an informal poll of what Halloween masks are selling. Obama vs Hillary vs McCain.
Masks left on the rack as of Saturday:
Hillary: 12
Obama: 1
McCain: 0
No Bob Barr or Ron Paul
The sole remaining Obama mask was being tried on by a small African-American boy of ~5. I could not get the little boy to try on the Hillary mask.
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