George W. Bush increased the size of government and increased government spending more than any previous president.
The Bush White House (January 2001 to January 2009) and the Republican majority Congress (2001-2006) pushed through a $1 Trillion Tax Cut for the superwealthy and started a false war in Iraq (launched on a false premise of Weapons of Mass Destruction) that cost $700 billion and counting.
But waiting in the wings was…THE BIG FINISH…the Bush Securities & Exchange Commission allowed self-regulation by the Wall Street banks concerning subprime-mortgage-backed securities, so that we had to shell out another $700 billion in bailout money. This was in September 2008 under the auspices of Hank Paulson, Bush Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO just before his position in the Bush Cabinet.
Add all that up and you are looking at the majority of our country’s deficit.
On top of that we have:
-10% unemployment
-a frozen-to-starting-a-trickle credit market
-home values cut in half
-401ks obliterated
-the Dow is half way back to its high of 14,000 in October 2007 (so all stock portfolios have been negatively affected)
* During the last decade the average American’s wages were stagnant, but productivity went up. Meaning, Corporate America squeezed more hours out of workers without sharing the rewards with the workers.
Very simply, Mr. Brooks, President Obama and the Democratic-led Congress are cleaning up the messes (plural) left behind by George W. Bush and the Republicans.
It’s not about BIG GOVERNMENT or small government. It’s about taking care of the majority of Americans, making sure they have jobs and homes, they can take care of their families and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The American Dream just got stepped on by the greedy corporate crooks who took over the Bush White House and Wall Street (the Subprime Market during the 2000s). Didn’t you see the recent NY Times article, “Handing Out Money to Stave Off Homelessness”?
Sometimes I think you have tunnel vision, Mr. Brooks. You’re theoretical instead of practical a lot of the time when I hear you on the radio or read your column. We’re talking about blood, flesh, bones, bad breath, hair and skin, teeth that need braces and eyes that need glasses. We’re talking about moms and dads and their kids.
The Great Recession is the result of Republican Party Rule. We’re just going about the business of cleaning up the messes (plural) left behind by Bush and the Republicans.
Lead, follow or get out of the way, Mr. Brooks. Uh, you’re in the way Mr. Brooks, get out of the way.
To gauge the pace of coal commerce, check the amazing tonnage ticker on Peabody’s Web site,
http://www.peabodyenergy.com/
which by my estimate logs about 7 tons a second in sales. To gauge the climatic implications (from coal burning and other sources of carbon dioxide), watch the animation above, created by the environmental visualizer Adam Nieman. His video illustrates what carbon dioxide emissions from human activities would look like if you could watch the gas volume accumulate in front of you in real-time….
Here’s a section of Peabody Energy statement on global trends:
International markets remain outstanding in the Pacific Rim, with China and India coal import demand continuing at record rates and developed economies running at higher capacity factors as they recover from the global financial crisis. Global steel production is expected to increase more than 10 percent in 2010, and global seaborne metallurgical coal demand is expected to increase by more than 50 million tonnes….
These numbers, which are in line with projections by various independent energy analysts, vividly illustrate that the blazing growth in wind and solar manufacturing and deployment in Asia has to be considered against a backdrop of enduring growth in the use of fossil fuels (and resulting emissions).
The Earth will be here for millions more years. The thing is, depending on our actions and the eco-system repercussions, the Earth may not be inhabitable for us. Or…if we get a solar-electric system on every available rooftop powering the plug-in electric car in every garage, then we just might improve our economy, create energy independence, enhance national security. Oh, and the icing on the cake–we help our environment by not expelling any carbon emissions into the air while charging our homes and our cars.
That and continuing to improve energy efficiencies. We should start by “Changing the Source of our Energy”: eventually solar is 25%, oil is 25%, natural gas is 25% and all other renewables, like hydroelectric, wind and geothermal, make up the remaining 25%. No more coal; coal becomes our emergency stockpile. Natural Gas can be a transformational fuel for the next 25-50 years, because Natural Gas burns cleaner than coal.
We don’t need to build any more nuclear plants, because the radioactive waste from nuclear energy creates residual hazards, like cancer and unhealthy particulates seeping into our ground water.
I grew up in California, and I have worked in the solar electricity industry since 2006.
When I was a kid growing up in San Diego and we had a water shortage due to drought, I remember the rhyme from the Public Awareness Campaign on the radio: “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.” This little poem was to remind us Californians to abstain from flushing every time, in order to save our limited supply of water.
Well, in California, we have an overabundance of naturally occurring, CO2-free, renewable (for millions of years) energy from the Sun. Sit on a beach for an hour and you will feel the power of that nuclear reactor in the sky. That big, burning ball of fire generates a lot of wattage. All we have to do is to install solar-electric panels on every available roof to soak up the free-floating rays. Every day that we don’t absorb the Sun’s energy for electricity is a wasted opportunity.
* A solar-electric system on every available roof and a plug-in electric car in every garage, and Americans have just put a cap on the cost of running their homes and their passenger vehicles: reference the American-made Tesla or the new electric Mini Cooper by BMW. The electricity prices from the grid keep going up year after year, but by using solar electricity homeowners can stop those price increases. With a solar lease, homeowners can save money from day one! By buying a solar electric system, it takes roughly 5-7 years for the system to pay for itself…and then the Sun is providing free energy for 40-50 years (the solar modules have a 25-year warranty). The solar system increases the home’s value, according to the Appraisal Institute in Chicago, Illinois.
“When it comes to home value, a solar power system may be your best ‘remodel’ option. Based on a recent study
by ICF Consulting (funded by HUD and the EPA) energysaving measures such as solar can add $20 of home value for every $1 of yearly energy cost savings. That makes an already bright idea really shine.”
This is a total transformation concerning how Americans power their homes, offices and cars. Plenty of people are standing in the way with misinformation, disinformation and propaganda campaigns designed to deter people from using solar electricity. Unfortunately, there is no Public Awareness Campaign for solar electricity in California: no radio ads from the state government, no TV ads about the state rebate. There are no print ads or billboards from the Public Utilities Commission about the savings available through solar electricity. The same non-communication applies to the federal government and its 30% tax credit (which was knee-capped at $2,000 for residential solar until the Democratic-led Congress of 2008 leveled the playing field, so that homeowners could enjoy the same tax credit as commercial entities).
Ask 10 Californians you meet on the street about solar electricity and you might get some educated responses. Ask those same Californians about the state rebate and the federal tax credit, and you are likely to get 9 or 10 blank stares. Hardly anybody knows about the incentives for solar because there is no Public Awareness Campaign!!
What we need, very simply, is a rhyme for solar permeated on the radio and TV, in the newspapers and magazines, and in big letters on high-traffic-zone billboards. The Solar movement in California needs a Public Awareness Campaign to counter the demagoguery and sophistry of those who have a financial interest in solar electricity failing: namely the utilities like PG&E, SDG&E, Southern California Edison and LADWP.
(LADWP uses 44% coal to make its electricity; coal is dirty and cheap.)
http://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/cms/ladwp000536.jsp
2009 Power Content Label
Energy Resources
LADWP Power*(projected)
LADWP Green Power** (projected)
2007 CA Power Mix***(for comparison)
Eligible Renewable****
14%
100%
10%
-Biomass & waste
1%
-
<1%
-Geothermal
2%
-
2%
-Small hydroelectric
5%
25%
6%
-Solar
<1%
-
<1%
-Wind
6%
75%
2%
Coal
44%
-
32%
Large Hydroelectric
7%
-
24%
Natural Gas
26%
-
31%
Nuclear
9%
-
3%
Other
<1%
-
0%
TOTAL
100%
100%
100%
* 100% of LADWP Power is specifically purchased from individual suppliers.** 100% of LADWP Green Poweris specifically purchased from individual suppliers.*** Percentages are estimated annually by the California Energy Commission based on the electricity sold to California consumers during the previous year.**** In accordance with Los Angeles City Council’s action on 10-5-04 for File No. 03-2688 (RPS).
For specific information about this electricity product, contact LADWP at 1-800-DIAL-DWP. For general information about the Power Content Label, contact the California Energy Commission at 1-800-555-7794 or www.energy.ca.gov/consumer.
How about something like “The Sun can make your computer run. California is going solar-electric: half the system is paid for by incentives! You get a rebate from the state and a tax credit when you get it. “ And then a website or 800 number to call.
Solar electricity needs a Public Awareness Campaign. The utilities claim to support solar electricity, but they do everything they can behind the scenes to stymie increased use of Photovoltaics (Energy from the Sun). When it comes to Solar, the California Public Utilities Commission needs to start supporting the Public more than the Utilities: meaning get a Solar Electricity Public Awareness Campaign going pronto!
Remember, burning fossil fuels causes increased carbon emissions that can lead to icecaps melting, sea levels rising and coastal flooding. Solar electricity is CO2-free.
Sincerely
Solar Electricity makes the Utility Meter spin backward!
* Click for cartoon…http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=24831
He had lost his $75,000-a-year job as a mortgage consultant, his three-bedroom house with a Jacuzzi, his Lexus sedan. He could no longer pay even the rent on his cramped studio apartment — not on his $10-an-hour part-time job as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant.
Faced with eviction, he was staring last month at the imminent prospect of joining the teeming ranks of the homeless. His last hope was a new $1.5 billion federal program aimed at preventing that fate. Within days of applying, a check for $775 was on its way to Mr. Moore’s landlord, enabling him to stay — at least for now….
“We’re behind on January and February rent,” she says.
Ms. Martin is mortified to be asking for help. She grew up wealthy, with vacations spent on Caribbean cruises. “I had everything I ever wanted,” she says.
She and her husband run a house-painting business that has been in his family for three generations. (Martin is her maiden name. She declined to be identified by her married name for fear of embarrassing her husband’s family, whose name is emblazoned on his truck.)
They have three boys, a 12-year-old, and 9-year-old twins. At the house they have rented for seven years, on a street lined with well-tended lawns, the walls are covered with photos of her boys displaying their batting stances.
Until 2008, their painting business was pulling in $100,000 a year, which paid their $2,450-a-month rent and allowed them to buy a trailer on Clear Lake, where they took the boys water-skiing.
But last year, in a weak economy, they earned $38,000. They sold their trailer. They ran through $15,000 in savings. One day last winter, Ms. Martin noticed the refrigerator was nearly empty, and her checking account balance was down to $100. She drove to a county office and applied for food stamps.
“That just broke my heart,” she says.
Her father has money to help if it really comes down to it, she acknowledges.
“I don’t see him letting his grandkids land on the street,” she says, “but he’d hold it over our heads for a long time. That would lower me to a level that I wouldn’t want to go.”
So she is here, at Samaritan House, filling out the paperwork for the homeless prevention program.
“The government would not look fondly on Caesar’s Palace if it opened a table for wagering on corporate failure. It should not give greater encouragement for Goldman Sachs to do so.
Roger Lowenstein is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the author of ‘The End of Wall Street.’ “
“For the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on.”
George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925) was an American Painter.
Title: “Dempsey and Firpo” [The hero is in the white shorts]
Date: (1924)
* An iconic American image from the Roaring ’20s, when Republican Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover led us into the “Great Depression,” beginning with the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
The “Great Recession” is also a result of Republican Party Rule.
Bush White House (Jan. 2001 to Jan. 2009) and the Republican-led Congress (2001-2006).
” ‘But wait a minute,’ you say to them. ‘No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?’
But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.”
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they’re about to do it again
MATT TAIBBI Posted Jul 13, 2009 1:49 PM
EXCERPT:
Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners — old people, for God’s sake — pretending the whole time that it wasn’t gradeD horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. “The mortgage sector continues to be challenged,” David Viniar, the bank’s chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. “As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions … However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable.” In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.
“That’s how audacious these assholes are,” says one hedgefund manager. “At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing.”
I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you’re actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn’t amount to securities fraud.
“It’s exactly securities fraud,” he says. “It’s the heart of securities fraud.”
Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million — about what the bank’s CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.
The effects of the housing bubble are well known — it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.
And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm’s payroll jumped to $16.5 billion — an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, “We work very hard here.”
But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down — and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.
“[We do] God’s work.”–Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs
LONDON (Reuters) – The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, believes banks serve a social purpose and are doing “God’s work.”
In an interview with London’s Sunday Times newspaper, Lloyd Blankfein also said he believed big profits and bonuses at banks were a sign that the world economy was recovering.
“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose,” he told the paper.
The dominant Wall Street bank posted third-quarter earnings of $3 billion (1.8 billion pounds) and plans to hand out more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.
Blankfein told the Sunday Times that the bank’s compensation practices correlated with long-term performance.
“Others made no money and still paid large bonuses. Some are not around anymore. I wonder why?”
He added that he understood, however, that people were angry with bankers’ actions: “I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer.”
(Reporting by Victoria Bryan; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
Seeing what happened in D.C. reminds me of the “fallacies of logic” I learned along the way. #1 The ad hominem attack, like a school yard name-calling incident: “He wears purple shorts, he doesn’t know anything.” In much the same way, a caricature of President Obama as Joker-portrayed-by-Heath-Ledger does not depict the actual man in the White House. There is no logical argument in it; it is Demagoguery.
President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Congress are working to benefit the majority of Americans…while cleaning up the multiple messes left behind by George W. Bush and the Republicans.
* Dempsey got knocked out of the ring, but he still knocked-out Firpo
