(UPDATE 1)How Rahm Emanuel Made Mega-Millions and Bought His Way to Power – ObamaBush to Destroy the dollar Rob the creditors of what US owe them and Rob US people! Nice!
ObamaBush to Destroy the dollar
Rob the creditors of what US owe them
and Rob US people! Nice!
Bush and Obama are competing to shovel out trillions of dollars, so USA can return to the good times of yesterday.
But wasn’t yesterday the root cause of today? Didn’t saving nothing and spending more than Americans earn, purchasing what Americans cannot afford in cars, consumer goods and houses, buying far more from abroad than we sell abroad—didn’t that cause this crisis and crash?
USA is heading either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation, or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing the creditors of what US owe them and robbing own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.
What would the Founding Fathers think of USA now?
November 27, 2008
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions:
To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.
Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake.
We are all Keynesians now.
Thus, we have the $700 billion Bush bank bailout, the $700 billion “stimulus package” Obama wants by inauguration to “jolt this economy back into shape” and the $800 billion fund Hank Paulson created to get consumers borrowing and buying again.
These come on top of Bush $455 billion deficit, the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the $105 billion in pork to grease the $700 billion bailout, the $100 billion to $200 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, the $140-billion-and-counting for AIG, the $25 billion for the greening of GM, Ford and Chrysler, the $25 billion more to save the Big Three and the $20 billion for CitiGroup.
Now much of this overlaps, and some will be retrieved. But we are still staring at a deficit that could approach $2 trillion.
How would this stack up historically?
A deficit of $1.4 trillion would be 10 percent of gross domestic product, dwarfing the postwar record 6 percent run by Ronald Reagan in the Jimmy Carter recession.
Bewailing the “Reagan deficits” has been a staple of Democratic oratory. This will stop. But the politics of this is not the point, the policy is.
Consider what we are about to do. Bush in 2008 spent 21 percent of GDP. States, counties and cities spent another 12 percent. Thus, one third of GDP is spent by government at all levels. Obama and Co. propose to raise that by another 10 percent of GDP. We may soon be north of 40 percent of gross domestic product controlled and spent by government.
That is Eurosocialism.
And where, exactly, are we going to get the money?
Americans save nothing. We spend more than we earn. Thus the levels of consumer debt, credit card debt, auto debt and mortgage debt. U.S. foreign-exchange reserves amount to a piddling $73 billion.
The only nation with the kind of cash on hand we need now—if we don’t print the money and invite another gigantic bubble—is China, with its $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.
Will Beijing lend back the dollars it has piled up by selling to us?
China certainly has an incentive to keep Americans spending. For our purchases of Chinese-made goods have often been responsible for 100 percent of China’s growth. China does not want to kill the American goose that lays those golden eggs—until the goose can’t lay any more eggs. Then they won’t need the goose.
But should China decide to lend us the money, what will Beijing demand in interest rates and assurances that we will not default. After all, the U.S. debt is 70 percent of GDP, our savings rate is near zero, and our merchandise trade deficit is still running at 5 percent to 6 percent of GDP.
Unlike the 1950s, we are today dependent on foreigners for two-thirds of our oil and for much of our manufactured goods—toys, TVs, radios, cameras, cars, shoes, clothes, bikes, motorcycles—and for the $700 billion to $800 billion we borrow each year to pay for these imports.
With U.S. homeowners, consumers, companies and banks now going bust, why must the nation borrow trillions more to bail them out? So we can maintain our status and standard of living as the last superpower.
Bush and Obama are competing to shovel out trillions of dollars, so we can return to the good times of yesterday.
But wasn’t yesterday the root cause of today? Didn’t saving nothing and spending more than we earn, purchasing what we cannot afford in cars, consumer goods and houses, buying far more from abroad than we sell abroad—didn’t that cause this crisis and crash?
A family man in America’s condition, awash in debt, spending more than he makes, would cut back consumption, find a second job and get out of debt. Or declare bankruptcy, accept the shame and humiliation, change his wastrel ways and start anew.
Is it different for a nation?
Yet we seem to believe we can borrow and spend our way out of a swamp of unpayable debt into which borrowing and spending have plunged us.
We are headed either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation, or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing our creditors of what we owe them and robbing our own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.
What would the Founding Fathers think of us now?
http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/081127_socialist.htm
That when consumer demand weakened, companies would reduce output and lay off workers. Then government policy makers would respond to the decline in employment and output with monetary and fiscal policies that boosted consumer demand.
That boosted consumer demand? Now how did government policy makers do that? How could government policy makers make consumers want consumer goods that they didn’t need in the first place and why would the policy makers do it? In case you don’t know well here is the main reason.
The international financial powers want their weapon to remain intact against the human race and that weapon is money. So they want to makes things as monetarily stable as they possibly can. They can take the living standards of the world’s populations down gradually. But, they can’t do it in one fell swoop. They would have revolutions against themselves.
So they want to fight off a major worldwide depression at all costs. They don’t want the world’s populations coming down on them. Money is a thief and a liar. The powers behind it claim that the human populations need it. When populations are forced to pay more for goods and services than what they are paid to produce and distribute those goods and services, they are being robbed of their labor pure and simple.
In order to obtain what they need they either have to pull their belt in and do without a lot or they have to go into debt to the international financial powers.
And that is what the international financial powers are waiting for-that usury debt that they can collect from the world’s populations. And if everyone pulled in their belt and did without, the economy wouldn’t function at all. That would tighten consumer demand, decrease output, and get laborers laid off.
I know the human race is drunk with the wine of Babylon’s whoredom. She has been a queen and is no widow because everyone bows down to her as if she were God himself. So God is going to have to destroy money himself. P.S. Mr. Buchanan.
People in this world have said shame on those who don’t pay their credit and file bankruptcy. But does anyone say that companies should feel shame when they file bankruptcy?
Has anyone said that the big banks should be ashamed of taking money from the pockets of little people the way that they are taking trillions from the populations of all of the major countries of the world right now? Enough said.
While Some of Us Are Hoping for Change,
Others Are Literally Starving for It
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country, many of them elderly or single women with children, have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. General welfare recipients receive $140 a month in cash and another $140 in food stamps. This is all many in Trenton and other impoverished areas have to live on.
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/108622/
And yet the US set aside over $400 million dollars to destabilize Iran and to $billions more to help Israel cause more persecution and oppression against the Palestinians.
AmeriKKKans approved the expensive wars that caused so much death and pain on Iraqis and Afghans.
Now they reap the bitter fruits of their own imperialist hubris.
Unemployment is soaring and it may be March before we feel the first dollar of an Obama recovery plan.
What are the reasons for President George W. Bush to have blocked the post-election congressional effort to make a down payment on an anti-recession program aimed at job-creation and sending money to the squeezed states, which must balance their budgets while struggling with ever-rising demand for basic services such as Medicaid and what remains of the program we used to call welfare?
www.alternet.org/workplace/108863/america_out_of_work/
What are the reasons for Bush to have blocked payment on an anti-recession program?
He already spent too much of AmeriKKKa’s money on killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine.
That’s why.
How Rahm Emanuel Made Mega-Millions and Bought His Way to Power
New details emerge of Emanuel’s days as an investment banker.
By Ben Protess
Since Rahm Emanuel was appointed the next White House chief of staff last month, ProPublica has been retracing his previous life as an investment banker, which earned him more than $18 million in less than three years.
The New York Times recently shed new light on Emanuel’s Wall Street days — and how they helped send him to Congress.
In late 1998, Emanuel left the Clinton White House to work for Wasserstein Perella, a now defunct investment bank run by Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor.
“I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” Wasserstein told the Times. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.”
Indeed, as we previously noted, Emanuel used his political connections to broker major deals while at the firm. (One deal was a $16 billion merger that created Exelon Corp., now one of the nation’s largest electric utilities. Another involved SBC Communications, the telecommunications company run by William Daley, Clinton’s commerce secretary and the brother of Chicago’s mayor.)
After leaving the bank in 2001 to run for Congress, Emanuel benefited from the sale of Wasserstein Perella, which gave him an unusually large payout. Russ Gerson, global head of financial markets for A.T. Kearney Executive Search, told the Chicago Tribune in 2003 that Emanuel’s compensation would put him “in the top 3 to 5 percent” of investment bankers at that time.
The cash proved helpful when Emanuel found himself in a tough fight for a seat in Congress. He contributed $450,000 out of his own pocket to the primary campaign, and his leading rival accused him of trying to buy his seat, the Times reports.
The financial industry also heavily financed Emanuel’s campaign. From the Times:
After Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Emanuel also leaned heavily upon the industry while he was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 midterm elections. Financial industry donors contributed more than $5.8 million to the committee, behind only retirees.
Once he reached Congress, Emanuel served on the Financial Services Committee, which handles legislation involving financial markets and banks.
Neither the Times nor anybody else has suggested Emanuel went on to do the bidding of the financial industry. But there’s little question his days as a banker have helped shape Emanuel’s perspective. From the Times:
Former colleagues said the insight it afforded him on the financial services sector is invaluable especially now. But Mr. Emanuel built up strong ties with an industry now at the heart of the economic crisis, one that will be girding for a pitched lobbying battle next year as the incoming Democratic administration considers a potentially sweeping regulatory overhaul.
Friends of Mr. Emanuel’s from his private-sector days said he still checks in with them regularly to plumb their insights on economic issues.
In an interview with the Times, Emanuel said he often acted against the wishes of the financial industry. “I would say I’ve been as tough on my friends as others,” he said. “I call it like I see it.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21427.htm
