Len Hart

The 'bailout' is another Bush/GOP scam, a big black hole into which some 1.5 trillion dollars has already has been sucked! The dollar will eventually collapse as did German Marks under the Weimar Republic. Only the big banks benefit but they, too, will collapse. There is no bailout for the 'buck'. The emerging picture is one of fat cats scrambling to cover bare asses while putting the screws to you. This sucks!

Already $billions$ have been squandered, wasted, or simply stolen. Where is the accounting? Where has the money gone? Where is the loans that were supposed to have been made to folks hoping to own a home? How has the bailout benefited Americans in any way whatsoever? I'm open to any credible GOP explanation! I won't get one! Rather, I had expected Bush to tell Paulson: "You're doing a heckuva job!" The scary part is this: perhaps both Henry Paulson and Brownie have done precisely what Bush had intended. Like New Orleans earlier, the US economy is in ruins. Like New Orleans, there is no restoration in sight. There is, however, evidence that it was all planned.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.--Bush administration ignored clear warnings

The dollar has entered a 'death cycle'. A state of 'hyperinflation' has, perhaps, already been reached. Certainly, fewer people want bucks. This collapse may even be overdue. Since the GOP cut Faustian bargains with China, it was China that propped up the dollar because they wished to sell --via Wal-Mart --all its cheap knock-offs. Typically, 'hyperinflation' is often the aftermath of war and other social upheavals. In this case specifically, Bush's war of naked aggression against a nation which had never, ever, in any way posed a threat to the United States, is certainly among the root causes of the current collapse.

Were we supposed to believe this bailout of billions, perhaps trillions eventually would 'trickle down'?

The original proposal was three pages, as submitted to the United States House of Representatives. The purpose of the plan was to purchase bad assets, reduce uncertainty regarding the worth of the remaining assets, and restore confidence in the credit markets. The text of the proposed law was expanded to 110 pages and was put forward as an amendment to H.R. 3997.[4] The amendment was rejected via a vote of the House of Representatives on September 29, 2008, by a margin of 228-205.[5]

On October 1, 2008, the Senate debated and voted on an amendment to H.R. 1424, which substituted a newly revised version of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 for the language of H.R. 1424.[6][7] The Senate accepted the amendment and passed the entire amended bill by a vote of 74-25.[8] Additional unrelated provisions added an estimated $150 billion to the cost of the package and increased the size of the bill to 451 pages.[9][10] See Public Law 110-343 for details on the added provisions.

The amended version of H.R. 1424 was sent to the House for consideration, and on October 3, the House voted 263-171 to enact the bill into law.[6][11][12] President Bush signed the bill into law within hours of its enactment, creating a $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program to purchase failing bank assets.[13]

Supporters of the bailout plan argued that the market intervention called for by the plan was vital to prevent further erosion of confidence in the US credit markets and that failure to act could lead to an economic depression.

--Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

At the end of this 'crisis', the rich elites will be even richer than they already are. This is Bush's last 'fuck you' to the American people.

This FITS the GOP/right wing pattern made most obvious with the rise of Reaganomics, that is, wealth is transferred upward to the rich and privileged elites who run this country. Of late, they have run it into the ground.

Check out the facts of that at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Commerce - BEA, the Census Bureau.

Those numbers prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Ronald Reagan's infamous 'supply side' tax cut benefited ONLY the upper quintile. But for a brief period in Clinton's second term, the FLOW of wealth upward has continued.

NOW --about one percent of the nation owns more than about 90 percent of the entire population COMBINED! This is no accident. It is by GOP/right wing design. Anyone not sleeping through Economics 101 knows the truth of it.

This is done in many ways: 1) unfair tax cuts which have, in fact, shifted the tax burden to poor and middle class families; 2) well-timed recessions which BENEFIT the investor class, providing them with opportunities in which to buy up cheap stocks and depressed real estate; 3) the Military/Industrial complex which wages war for its living and in the process enriches only the big defense contractors.

It is objected: but the defense contractors create jobs and stimulate the economy. We're talking about a handful of robber baron corporations like Halliburton, it's subsidiary KBR and, of course, Murder Inc., otherwise called Blackwater USA. If you wish to build an entire economy upon death itself, wars of naked aggression, war crimes and outright murder, then this is definitely the way to go. Clearly --the GOP administration of George W. Bush and Darth Cheney learned much from the Nazi collaboration with I.G. Farben, Thyssen, Krupp and America's own Henry Ford. Indeed! There was money to be made in appalling acts of state genocide. Money was made by this ilk in Iraq. But it's not the kind of businesses I want to get juicy contracts that are paid by my tax moneys.

Like Rome, the US has become a bloated, inefficient empire which produces very little of lasting value. Indeed, the biggest US exports, like Rome earlier, are death and destruction via the war business. Most of the goods you buy are no longer made in the US. They come from China, Japan, and Taiwan. Programming is done in India. These deals can be traced back to Nixon's famous trip to China and Reagan's subsequent sellouts and betrayals of the both American industry AND American labor. What industries are left to America? Answer: industrialized death and destruction!

This 'crisis' is, as well, Bush's big FUCK YOU to the world.

As for Europe, it is already fragile. Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Serbia have turned to the IMF. Russia is a hostage to oil prices. If Urals oil stays below $50 a barrel for long, we are going to see an earthquake of one kind or another.

It is too early in this crisis to conclude whether Europe's monetary union is a source stability, or is itself a doomsday machine. The rift between North and South is growing. The spreads on Greek, Irish, Italian, Austrian, and Belgian debt remain stubbornly high. The lack of a unified EU treasury has become glaringly clear. Germany has refused to underpin the system with a fiscal blitz.

In the 1930s, it was not obvious to people living through debt deflation that their world was coming apart. The crisis came in pulses, each followed by months of apparent normality – like today.

The global system did not snap until September 1931. The trigger was a mutiny by Royal Navy ratings at Invergordon over pay cuts. Sailors on four battleships refused to put out to sea. They sang the Red Flag.

News that the British Empire could not uphold military discipline set off capital flight. Britain was forced off the gold standard within five days. A chunk of the world followed suit.

Nor was it obvious that Germany would go mad. Bruning persisted with deflation, blind to the danger. The result was the election of July 1932 when two parties committed to the destruction of Weimar – the KPD Communists and the Nazis – won over the half the seats in Reichstag.

We can hope that governments have acted fast enough this time – with rate cuts and a fiscal firewall – to head off such disasters. But then again, the debt excesses are much greater today. If in doubt, cleave to those countries with a deeply-rooted democracy, a strong sense of national solidarity, a tested rule of law – and aircraft carriers. The US and Britain do not look so bad after all. --World stability hangs by a thread as economies continue to unravel

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By: Len Hart Bush's Parting 'FUCK YOU' to America, via The Existentialist Cowboy