When Conservative Blogger Andrew Sullivanendorsed Obama back in November,he became the darling of TV land’s talking heads. Now he gives 10 good reasons why Conservatives should vote for a Democrat for President.
I could add ,he left out reaction to the Democrats over-reaching , just as their Republican brethren did “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”. Then maybe the Cato institute wing of the party will replace the Bush/Cheney ideological wing, which so disdains his homosexuality, and be swept to power by a public revulsion to the probable Liberal excesses.
AN OBAMA PANIC? – New York Post
Recently, Obama said he wants to expedite loans to small businesses, so he seems to have a clue that they produce much of the country’s job growth. Yet his income-tax hike on upper brackets will hit vast numbers of small businesses (Sub Chapter-S Family Corporations) – they’d face the highest rates they’ve seen in decades.
Overall, his plan includes some of the most lethal tax increases imaginable, including a jump in the capital-gains rate. He’d expand government spending massively, with everything from new public-works projects to increases in foreign aid to a surge in Afghanistan – plus hand out a token $500 welfare check that he calls a tax cut to everyone else. Continue reading “Will Obama Still Raise Taxes?”
Saturday Night Live” ran a spoof of the financial crisis that skewered Democrats like House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and liberal contributors Herbert and Marion Sandler, who sold toxic-waste-filled Golden West to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion. Kind of surprising, but not for long. The tape of the broadcast disappeared from NBC’s Web site and was replaced with another that omitted the references to Mr. Frank and the Sandlers. Evidently NBC and its parent, General Electric, don’t want people to hear speech that attacks liberals.
The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes — investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research.
If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.
After a liberal era and then a conservative era, we’re getting a glimpse of what comes next.
Japan had their inflated Real Estate bubble in the 90s. Remember when the on-the-books value of their land’s country was priced higher than all of our land east of the Mississippi? Their big mistake, which their economy has never recovered from with zero growth that even 0% interest rates couldn’t jump start it was they never had an RTC.We blew out all of the bad Savings and Loans paper and our economy recovered. A lot of people got rich on those holdings when Real Estate recovered. The Japanese Banks never wanted to admit their losses and “lose face”, which is a big deal in their culture.
The problem this time is that the good and bad loans have been bundled together. The “Mark to Market” change in Nov. of 2007 was a huge SEC and Financial Board mistake. It allowed the current credit swap default market to explode to 70 Trillion dollars world-wide. The only way to value these toxic securities is not mark-to-market but by discounted cash flow. In other words if 10% of the bundle isn’t paying on their mortgage than value the paper by the remaining income stream and years left to maturity.
The Faustian bargain that started all of this was when the Banks wanted permission to roll-back post-depression regulations, such as banking across State lines, selling insurance, etc. In return, Congress forced lenders to agree to stop red-lining poor neighborhoods. Now everyone wants to encourage home ownership, but the problem started when, under congressional pressure,the highly politicized, bastardized Public/Private Mortgage behemoth Fannie and Freddie lowered standards. Read Wikipedia the history of the CRA legislation that promoted this activity. As a result, other Lenders had to drop their standards to be able to compete in the lucrative home loan business. We are now reaping the results of that race to the bottom. An ex-Miami Mortgage broker, told me how he was coached by the lenders not only what they wanted to hear but also what they didn’t want to know about. The lenders just wanted to look the other way. As long as property values kept going up their Ponzi scheme worked.
Here is a video, edited by Republicans, from a 2004 House hearing; convened to receive a report on Fannie Mae by the Office of Federal Housing Oversight that was trying to warn the Congress about “safety and soundness issues”. It became “kill the messenger”.
Paranoid distrust in response to disbelief – emotions trump understanding. Democracy needs an informed citizenry to survive. What happens when so many thrive on gossip and conspiracy theories as their News?
Op-Ed Columnist – Anxious in America – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com
Since President Bush came to office, our national savings have gone from 6 percent of gross domestic product to 1 percent, and consumer debt has climbed from $8 trillion to $14 trillion.
My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.
“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”
The Rise of Non-Americanism – washingtonpost.com
In final third of The Post-American World, which focuses on us rather than on “the rest,” is the strongest. Zakaria argues that America’s world-beating economic vibrancy co-exists with a dysfunctional political system. “A ‘can-do’ country is now saddled with a ‘do-nothing’ political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving,” he writes. In this video clip, Newt Ginrich gives 2 examples our dysfunctional government. while the 1st is a rather spurious, but amusing example, the 2nd is a all too true.
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.492169&w=425&h=350&fv=width%3D425%26height%3D355%26file%3Dfitna-en.flv] from wikileaks.org
Here is the controversial banned film on Islam, Wikipedia has a very good coverage ongoing of this film and its consequences. So after all the official condemnations, see it for yourself and make your own judgment. Wikileaks, the uncensored freedom of information site that we have featured on this blog before, has the original videos and some from the recent Tibet riots
Zakaria: Dems vs. Free Trade | Newsweek Voices – Fareed Zakaria | Newsweek.com
A senior Latin American diplomat, who asked to remain unnamed because of the sensitivity of the topic, says, “Look, we’re all watching Obama with bated breath and hoping [his election] will be a transforming moment for the world. But now that we’re listening to him on trade—the issue that affects us so deeply—we realize that maybe he doesn’t wish us well. In fact, we might find ourselves nostalgic for Bush, who is brave and courageous on trade and immigration.”
The facts about trade have been too well rehearsed to go into them in any great detail, but let me point out that NAFTA has been pivotal in transforming Mexico into a stable democracy with a growing economy. And, in Lawrence Summers’s words, “[it] didn’t cost the United States a penny. It contributed to the strength of our economy because of more exports and because imports helped to reduce inflation.” Trade between the NAFTA countries has boomed since 1993, growing by about $700 billion. There are no serious economists or experts who believe that low wages in Mexico or China or India is the fundamental reason that American factories close down. And labor and environmental standards would do very little to change the reality of huge wage differentials between poor and rich countries’ workers. Continue reading “Anti-Trade Tirades Scare World”
