Day: October 28, 2008

Was The Bailout Socialism?

Hell no!

Hopefully this will be the last time I will address this ridiculous accusation.

The financial crisis which has swept the globe over the past month, centered in the US banking system, has dealt an enormous blow to the official ideology of the American ruling class, which more than any other has elevated worship of the “free market” to the status of a state religion.

The federal bailout of Wall Street—despite the hysteria of the House Republicans—has nothing to do with socialism. The measures could be more correctly characterized, not as nationalization of the banks, but as privatization of the US Treasury, turning over its vast resources to billionaires and speculators.

The charges of “socialism” demonstrate the degree to which the eruption of financial crisis has confused and frightened the political representatives of the ruling elite. They recognize that the near-breakdown of the credit markets has discredited the capitalist system in the eyes of the working people, the vast majority of the population, and they react nervously to anything that might provide an opening for the expression of anti-capitalist sentiment.

Socialism means the reorganization of economic life under the democratic control of the actual producers, the working people whose labor creates all wealth. It can come about only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, led by a revolutionary party, which establishes a new and far more democratic form of state, a workers’ state, which exercises ownership and control over the means of production. Socialism cannot be engineered through backroom deals between Wall Street bankers and Washington politicians, or through the policies of any Democratic or Republican politician.

Some 160 years ago, Karl Marx wrote, “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism.” He was describing the mood of fear and trepidation in the European ruling classes on the eve of the great revolutionary wave of 1848, even though the number of conscious revolutionary socialists was still a relative handful. If the specter of socialism today haunts the American ruling class, despite decades in which socialism has been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of slander and vilification, it is likewise because the profit system faces a new period of revolutionary upheaval.

There is NOTHING….I repeat…NOTHING socialistic about Obama or the much maligned bailout.  It is time toi stop trying to compare these cases to something that NO one has any idea about.  To keep referring to socialism in these4 cases is doing nothing but showing one’s ignorance.

Eastern Europe Faces The Crisis

The economies of central and eastern Europe are being rocked by the crisis of world capitalism, compounded by the corrupt and pro-big business policies of their local elites.

Defying many economists and commentators, who had forecast that the region would be well placed to deal with the credit crisis due to the lower relative weight of finance capital within their national economies, much of Eastern Europe stands on the verge of insolvency and deep and protracted recession.

An estimated five million workers have left the eastern European countries for Western Europe between 2004 and 2007. The mass migration from the ex-Soviet states has left key sectors of the economy and public services such as healthcare critically short of skilled workers. Poland and Ukraine almost had to abandon their status as co-hosts of the 2012 European Football Championship due to the chronic shortages of labour needed to renew facilities for the competition.

Only a few months ago, a recession in Western Europe was viewed as a potential boon to overheated Eastern Europe economies. Inflation, running at 15 percent in Russia and Latvia, seemed to be the greatest threat. However, as the full impact of the global crisis unfolds, the alleged ability of Eastern Europe to weather the storm relatively better than its Western counterparts has been thrown into question.

All the economies of the eastern European region are highly dependent on credit from the international markets. The Institute of International Finance has estimated that total private capital and credit flows into eastern Europe, the former USSR and Turkey, are likely to fall from nearly $400 billion in 2007 to an estimated $262 billion next year, a figure which may fall even further as it is based on optimistic forecasts of the effectiveness of the international governmental bailouts of the banks.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts a fall in the growth rate for gross domestic product (GDP) for central and southeast Europe from 5 percent this year to 3.5 percent in 2009. For Russia and the former Soviet Union, it predicts growth of around 7 percent for this year and 5.5 percent for 2009.

The IMF will be demanding and recieving much more in concessions from these countries if they want aid in their fighting the economic crisis.  (Read my post on the IMF)

8 Reasons Why Obama Will Lose

This is a reprint of a piece in the Chicago Tribune written by Eric Zorn.
1.“Bittergate.” Obama has been remarkably disciplined in his campaign, but his one “oh, no, he didn’t!?” moment was a doozy—his unscripted comment in April that “it’s not surprising [that residents of small-town America] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

2.He’s played too much defense. Though Obama’s campaign has run bazillions of ads criticizing McCain, they’ve stayed away from trying to raise questions about McCain’s character and his judgment—questions the McCain campaign has been raising relentlessly about Obama and that Obama has had to answer.

It’s absurd, for instance, that more ink has been spilled about the judgment Obama showed in the 1990s when working on education reform with former Vietnam-era radical Bill Ayers than about McCain’s judgment in 2002 and 2003 to cheerlead for the invasion of Iraq.

3.He was more dismissive than responsive to festering issues. When questions came up about Obama’s real estate dealings with crooked fundraiser Tony Rezko, he tried to brush them off with curt denials rather than bury them with documents and comprehensive answers.

Ditto his lackluster and in places inaccurate responses to concerns about his votes on “born-alive infant” legislation when he was in the Illinois Senate and demands that he give a full accounting of his personal and professional interactions with Ayers.

4.He left points on the table. Most of you know about Obama’s sleazy associate Tony Rezko. But how many of you know about McCain’s sleazy associate Rick Renzi? McCain named Renzi, a retiring Republican congressman, a co-chair of his Arizona campaign in January, even though the Wall Street Journal and other publications had reported he was the subject of a federal corruption probe.

Renzi was indicted in February and is facing trial. Yet the Obama campaign, apparently content to try to sit on this lead, hasn’t made an issue of him or of McCain’s friendship with convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who once urged his radio listeners to “go for a head shot” if federal agents came to take their guns away.

5.Biden’s blunder. Yes, foreign evildoers tend to test new presidents. But when Obama’s veepmate, Sen. Joe Biden, blathered on recently about an inevitable crisis in the first months of an Obama administration, it gave McCain a fat opening to highlight security concerns, one of his few winning issues, and play the fear card.
6.The economy now looks more like a chronic woe than an urgent crisis. This has allowed McCain to settle into an anti-tax, anti-spend, anti-liberal campaign groove that often works for Republicans.

7. Smoke. I’ve never seen a candidate subject to as many nutty rumors and guilt-by-association smears as those about Obama that land in my in-box every day. If enough voters decide in the end that there must be fire somewhere in all that noxious smoke, Obama’s apparent lead will vanish.

8. He’s African-American. Let’s be honest. In this rotten year for the Republican brand, if a white Democrat were sitting in the polls where Obama now sits, this “how he might lose” talk would be absurd.

Where Has All The Money Gone?

Where has all the money gone?

Long time passing,

When will we ever learn?………..is that Bob Dylan I hear in the background?

In an unusually frank article published in Saturday’s New York Times, the newspaper’s economic columnist, Joe Nocera, reveals what he calls “the dirty little secret of the banking industry”–namely, that “it has no intention of using the [government bailout] money to make new loans.”

As Nocera explains, the plan announced October 13 by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to hand over $250 billion in taxpayer money to the biggest banks, in exchange for non-voting stock, was never really intended to get them to resume lending to businesses and consumers–the ostensible purpose of the bailout. Its essential aim was to engineer a rapid consolidation of the American banking system by subsidizing a wave of takeovers of smaller financial firms by the most powerful banks.

Nocera cites an employee-only conference call held October 17 by a top executive of JPMorgan Chase, the beneficiary of $25 billion in public funds. Nocera explains that he obtained the call-in number and was able to listen to a recording of the proceedings, unbeknownst to the executive, whom he declines to name.

“It is starting to appear,” the Times columnist writes, “as if one of the Treasury’s key rationales for the recapitalization program–namely, that it will cause banks to start lending again–is a fig leaf…. In fact, Treasury wants banks to acquire each other and is using its power to inject capital to force a new and wrenching round of bank consolidation.”

Early this month, he explains, “in a nearly unnoticed move,” Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, put in place a new tax break worth billions of dollars that is designed to encourage bank mergers. It allows the acquiring bank to immediately deduct any losses on the books of the acquired bank.

In a nationally televised speech delivered September 24, in advance of the congressional vote on the bailout plan, Bush said it would “help American consumers and businessmen get credit to meet their daily needs and create jobs.” If the bailout was not passed, he warned, “More banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account…. More businesses would close their doors, and millions of Americans could lose their jobs … ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession.”

One month later, the bailout has been enacted, and all of the dire developments–banks and businesses disappearing, the stock market plunging, unemployment skyrocketing–which the American people were told it would prevent are unfolding with accelerating speed.

While no serious measures are being proposed, either by the Bush administration, the Republican presidential candidate or his Democratic opponent, to prevent a social catastrophe from overtaking working people, the government is organizing a restructuring of the financial system that will enable a handful of mega-banks to increase their power over society.

Once again I ask, When will we ever learn?

What If McCain Loses?

If Republican John McCain loses the November 4 election as most polls predict, his party may be in for a rough period of soul searching.

Analysts and some party activists say losing the White House will highlight the pitfalls of relying too heavily on a narrow foundation of conservative Christians whose support has nonetheless become crucial to Republican electoral success.

But some social conservatives say a victory for Democrat Barack Obama, whom they regard as an “ultra-liberal,” will energize them for the 2010 congressional “mid-term” races and the 2012 White House battle.

Moderate Republicans say a McCain loss will show the limits of that strategy and demonstrate that the party may not be able to win if it just focuses on pleasing the base without reaching for the center.

“Focusing on social conservatism alienates moderate and mainstream voters and will consign us to 160 House seats in the South and the mid-west,” said Patrick Sammon, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay Republicans which stresses social tolerance and fiscal conservatism.

conservative positions have alienated more moderate voters.

And that is the name of that tune.

Sen. Stevens To Get His

Senator Ted Stevens, Alaska’s dominant political figure for more than four decades, was found guilty on Monday by a jury of violating federal ethics laws for failing to report tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and services he had received from friends.

The jury of District of Columbia residents convicted Mr. Stevens, 84, on all seven felony counts he faced in connection with charges that he knowingly failed to list on Senate disclosure forms the receipt of some $250,000 in gifts and services used to renovate his home in Girdwood, Alaska.

The verdict comes a week before a second jury of sorts, the voters of Alaska, will decide whether to return him to the Senate or elect his Democratic opponent, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage. After Mr. Stevens’s indictment in July, he asked for a quick trial so he might clear his name before Election Day.

If Mr. Stevens loses his seat, the trial’s implications could be felt on a broad political scale, helping Democrats in their drive to win enough seats in the Senate to give them a filibuster-proof majority of at least 60 votes. Within an hour of the verdict’s becoming public, Democrats in Senate races around the country immediately sought to make the conviction an issue for their opponents, demanding that those who had received money from Mr. Stevens, who was generous with contributions to his colleagues, return it.

Here is a kicker.  Did you know that if he wins his election he can still be a senator, unless the senate throws his butt?  Ok, now why is it that a person that was convicted of a felony and has been a good guy cannot vote at all in some states?  That is a little sick–a felon can be a senator that leads this country, but a person cannot vote.

How Many More Are There?

Federal authorities in Tennessee announced Monday that they had arrested two alleged white supremacists who were reportedly planning a killing spree that would end with the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena, Ark., were charged in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn., with the illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a gun store and making threats against a major presidential candidate — the Democratic senator from Illinois.
The two men also allegedly discussed shooting 88 other people to death and decapitating 14 African Americans, choosing those numbers because, officials said, “they have special significance within the white power movement.”

The eighth letter of the alphabet is “H,” and the number 8 twice signifies “HH” — for the Nazi greeting “Heil Hitler.” And 14 is the number of words in a white power slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

They allegedly discussed robbing or burglarizing a gun store to be “more equipped” with firearms and ammunition, and Cowart used the Internet to send Schlesselman diagrams and photos of a gun store in Jackson, Weaks said. On Oct. 20, Cowart allegedly drove from Tennessee to Arkansas to pick up Schlesselman, Weaks said, and the two discussed attacking a predominantly African American school and traveling from state to state to rob and kill people.

I was wondering how long it would take these people before they showed up and started doing something stupid.

The GOP Future Of Medicare

If the GOP wins the election in a week, here is what we could be looking at, assuming that the Congress is as spineless as it has been in the last year.
Under a McCain presidency, even with a Democratic Congress, there would be increased privatization of Medicare. They don’t call it that, of course. They give it a Madison Avenue label: “Medicare modernization”, i.e., turning larger and larger sections of Medicare over to the insurance carriers, with the taxpayer footing the subsidy bill.

This is done in the worn out name of better service and saving money, even though, rather than saving money, it will cost more, and service will deteriorate even more. This is always the case with privatization schemes. When the IMF and World Bank (yes, the healthcare crisis is an international one) force countries to whom they lend money to privatize their public services, they throw those countries into crisis. Privatization is their ugly quid pro quo. The bankers know very well that this costs taxpayers more and that services suffer, but their ideology (neoliberalism) must be served and the coffers of the corporations and banks must be filled. Therefore, both the current international financial crisis and the ongoing Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security can be laid, in part, at the door of the IMF and the World Bank and their neoliberal ideologues.