Day: February 16, 2009

2009 Anal-Ocity

My Fingers Are Bleeding!  It has been a rough 2 months –anal to right–anal to the left–anal everywhere!

With all the debate on the Obama stimulus plan, Repubs have come swinging but not always connecting with their punches.  Especially when they try to use history to explain why the plan will not work.

Ohio Repub. Rep. Steve Austria said he supports a scaled-down federal economic-stimulus proposal, but the Beavercreek Republican told The Dispatch editorial board that the huge influx of money into the economy could have a negative effect.

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

I believe that the Great Depression began in 1929 and FDR did not take office until 1933, if memory serves me correctly.  Maybe Austria should have stayed awake in Am. history class, or at least used Google before he made his lame ass comment.  Just a thought.

Socialism For The Rich

I know…I know…that sounds like an oxymoron…terms that do not belong in the same sentence…but recently I was reading a piece written by Norman Markowitz and he made some excellent points.

Is it “Socialism for the rich”?

They got that in its fullest sense in the Reagan-Clinton-Bush era, when finance capital and capital generally got “deregulation,” plenty of military and other subsidies, along with guaranteed “bailouts” from federal agencies when their speculative bubbles collapsed. When I outlined the concept of “Socialism for the Rich” in a class I was teaching during the Reagan era and asked students to try to define it in their own words, one student caught the principle brilliantly when she said, “Do everything for me. Don’t do anything to me.” That sums it up perfectly, then and now.

There are criticisms that can be made of the Treasury proposals. Although it is really a symbolic issue (albeit an important one) the cap on executive compensation for banks and other firms receiving rescue funds should be much stronger. While it is good that the Obama administration raised the issue (for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt unsuccessfully proposed a $25,000 salary cap during World War II), Treasury’s retreat here can be seen as a small setback. More importantly, the Treasury is not advocating the creation of government authorities to supervise finance capital’s use of rescue plan money, hoping to use various incentive plans to prevent both capital hoarding and other misappropriations of funds.

But I doubt that those reasons are the causes of finance capital’s criticism, reflected in the sell off yesterday by large institutional “investors” or multi-billion dollar funds, which shape the daily prices of stock and the flow of capital. Nor do I believe that they want an item by item central plan over a definite period of time. What they want is what they had under Reagan and Bush: the fiction of regulation.

What upsets them I think is those parts of the Treasury’s report that suggest that aid to student loans, cars loans, home loans, might be radically expanded from the $200 billion previously proposed. What finance capital wants is “caps” on spending that benefits workers and consumers, caps to “restrict deficits” while providing capital without strings to banks and other financial institutions. This would permit them to tighten the screws on workers and consumers and also profit from greater interest payments. One should remember that capitalists who are asking for “bailouts” that increase deficits are by and large the same people who collect the interest on the deficits.

The Obama administration is just beginning and it is beginning in very encouraging ways. But it will have to develop dialectically through its conflicts and confrontations with the banks and corporations of the system that it is trying to save, just as the New Deal government had to move after its first two years to support far-reaching legislation to advance the interests of the working people against the banks and the corporations. We should all remember that the capitalist class in the first years of the New Deal used the National Recovery Administration to set up company unions and fix prices, as well as Agricultural Adjustment Administration subsidies both legally and illegally to drive tenants and sharecroppers off the land. The leading sections of capital saw the new administration as a “temporary” expedient to deal with the depression, an expedient to be gotten rid of once the emergency rescue legislation for capital had stabilized the situation. I am sure that the leading sections of capital today see the Obama administration in a similar light.

If one takes the time to look at the stim plan that will be signed soon, then the rich are getting a helluva good deal……working stiffs…..not so good….

Israel’s Move Right

The shift away from politicians who emphasize negotiations with Palestinians and the country’s Arab neighbors means that Israel’s right, after years in the political wilderness, is almost certain to be back in control no matter who forms the next government. It will hold 65 seats in the new Israeli parliament, or Knesset, compared with 50 in the old one. As Likud party’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Kadima’s Tzipi Livni each race to put together a coalition, both are courting parties to their right.

The right’s resurgence, analysts say, reflects the sense among Israelis that years of talks have yielded little but violence and insecurity. It also stems from a prevailing belief that deep Palestinian divisions between Fatah in the West Bank, which favors negotiations, and Hamas in Gaza, which rejects Israel’s existence, leave little hope for peace.

“The outcome of the election is that the way of the left has failed. The public has realized it was leading us to destruction,” said Hanan Porat, a rabbi who has helped lead efforts to build Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank for more than three decades. “The Qassam rockets that have been falling are more convincing than all the speeches about peace.”

Yet the two parties that most directly benefited from those feelings in Tuesday’s vote represent distinctly different strains of right-wing thought. Likud, which is considered most likely to gain the prime ministership, has focused on the danger of giving up the West Bank to Palestinian control and the need to increase Jewish settlements there.

Okay, I got to ask this….was the most recent massive attacks in Gaza for security or for political reasons?  I would like to believe that the attacks had nothing to do with the election, but I do not believe in coincidence.

More Banks Bite The Dust

Regulators have now seized 13 banks, and seven so far in February are the most for a month since 1993. State and federal agencies shuttered 25 banks last year, matching the total for 2001-2007, as home foreclosures soared and bank profits tumbled. The FDIC has doubled premiums it charges banks to replenish its reserves, which had $34.6 billion as of the third quarter.

The Obama administration is seeking to jolt the economy with a bank rescue using $350 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a $787 billion stimulus package and a plan to stem foreclosures. The housing plan involves the U.S. subsidizing as much as $50 billion for interest-rate cuts to help borrowers avoid losing their homes, said a person briefed on the proposal.

The FDIC classified 171 banks as “problem” in the third quarter, a 46 percent jump from the second, and said industry earnings fell 94 percent to $1.73 billion from the previous year. A new report may be released this month.

As many as 1,000 U.S. banks may fail in the next three to five years from mounting losses on commercial real-estate loans, RBC Capital Markets analysts said, almost double the one-year tally at the height of the saving-and-loan collapse. Most of the failures may occur at banks with less than $2 billion in assets.

More than 250,000 foreclosures were filed in January, the 10th straight month of a quarter-million filings, RealtyTrac Inc., the Irvine, California-based provider of real estate data, said in a statement this week.

What Are Republican Values?

This was a letter I found that was sent to the Augusta Georgia newspaper.

I’m still waiting to hear what those are. Would that include smaller government, an idea that escaped the attention of presidents Reagan and the two Bushes? A commitment to balance the budget, which was not of interest with either Reagan or George W. Bush? Keeping the government out of the private lives of the people, which is a foreign idea to the religious extremists, the base of the party?

Or would it be to forget those less fortunate, or just downright unlucky, to be laid off when there are no jobs to be found? Or to assume the market can get along just fine without government oversight, and that we will recover if we just leave it to business to do its magic and to rely primarily on debunked trickle down from tax cuts? Anyone care to say what the Republican Party is or should be all about in the 21st century?

This crisis, without doubt the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s, already has put millions out of work this past year, and getting worse by the month. All have lost any health coverage they had and many will become homeless without help. Even if we do our best to recover, it is likely to take years to get unemployment back under 5 percent. We need not only a stimulus to get people back to work, but we need to look to rebuild our shredded safety net, to help those who, through no fault of their own, are now living on temporary unemployment benefits and food stamps. If the GOP is so averse to the resulting deficit, how about them supporting increases in the taxes on the wealthy?

I say, shame on our Republican Congress for denying the need for help for those losing everything, seeming to think stimulus alone is enough.

Some excellent points made in the letter.

What Is The Life Expectency Of BS?

The GOP and all its Gump-esque pundits have been using the “I Won” attack for over a week now and I would like to know if there is a time limit on the use of BS?  It has gotten more play than it deserved, especially from something that is pure hearsay and not verifiable.

As in the primaries and then the election, terms were taken out of context or just plain made up and they developed a life of their own. with help from the strategists.  People, people….BS is just that BS!

It is time for the Dems to start using the moronic words of the new RNC chairman against the rest of the GOP.  You will understand what I mean when you read the next 2009 Anal-Ocity.

All this BS is geared toward the 2010 election so that the Repubs can say “We told you so” if the plan does not deliver…so far this seems to be their only plan…they have no plan B…there is no alternatives coming from the GOP….only criticism…that is some plan guys!

The GOP seems to be working on the situation as if the American people are all stupid….there was a time when I would have agreed with them…but I think that the public is educating itself and the BS will do NO good.

Maybe the energy should be to stop looking for “attacks” and work on a Plan B.