Excellent Financial Crisis Write-Up

Hale Stewart has an excellent post describing the timeline leading up to the 2008 financial collapse.  Unsurprisingly, there is a good amount of Republican hypocrisy thrown into the mix: they were pushing for entities to provide more high-risk loans before they blamed those entities for the entire crash.  Of course, only a small fraction of high-risk loans were made by those entities, but when did a Republican let reality get in the way of their delusion?

The post’s premise is supported by a ton of research done by a wide variety of folks.

If you’re at all interested in knowing exactly what happened, read this post.  There is some economic jargon thrown in, but slog your way through it.  You’ll be better off because you’ll know what to look for in the future.

In the News 10/21/08

Newsweek did a piece investigating our health “care” system’s emergency rooms.  In the leading paragraph:

The modern emergency room, as most people think of it, has an emergency of its own: It’s packed, costly, noisy, and overrun by uninsured freeloaders who can’t legally be turned away once they walk through the ER doors. If you’ve actually been in an ER in the past few years, you know the first three things are true—but how much do you know about the rest of the people in the waiting room? As it turns out, they’re not disproportionately uninsured patients with nowhere else to turn. They’re more likely to be people who do have insurance.

A number of myths are taken apart in the interview with Dr. Manya Newton, an emergency physician at the University of Michigan.  Here’s just one: 85-90% of all emergency room visits are people with insurance.  The uninsured aren’t clogging the ER.

Will there be a 21st century Great Depression? With the increasing scope of the financial crisis, more people seem to think so.  Survival web sites are growing in popularity.

The impacts of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq won’t be known for years.  Already, the seeds of future problems in Iraq are being laid. John McCain likes to talk about how Iraq is one big happy country.  The truth: ascendent, new tribal leaders have been splitting up provinces into their own private fiefdoms, weakening the central government’s power and directly challenging the “democratic” system the neo-CONS put in place.   Almost 100,000 Sunni fighters are being paid by the U.S. to not attack U.S. military forces.  As Iraq’s government moves to expand its role, it has refused to accept these fighters into the official Iraqi military and police forces.  What happens when the Sunni fighters take up arms against the elected Iraqi government?  The U.S. created a situation where Iran will likely become a much stronger regional player.

The corporate media still loves Pickens’ (Insane) Plan. Switching from oil to natural gas makes no sense.  It will enrich Pickens and it will do nothing to alleviate the climate crisis. The U.S. needs to take bold steps toward zero-emission transportation.  Pickens would have us wait 10-30 years before doing so.  Meanwhile, the climate continues to be forced by humans.

The increase in families that are becoming homeless is described as ‘alarming’.  The CONServatives’ obsession with zero taxes has put state and local organizations in huge binds.  There is simply no money to appropriately address the problem.

News Items 10/13/08

The Treasury has come up with some solution details.  First: purchasing troubled mortgage-back securities.  That’s okay, I guess.  Second: buying mortgages, particularly from regional banks.  That’s a lot better.  Third: insuring mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.  That’s a good idea too.  Fourth: purchasing equity in a broad array of financial institutions.  That’s a darn good idea.  If taxpayer money is being used to take assets off company books, taxpayers should be in line for any potential future gains.  Fifth: helping delinquent borrowers stay in their homes.  That’s kind of vague, but it’s a good summary statement.  I’d really like to see some details on just how they’re planning on achieving this goal.  [Update]: These details and weekend-long meetings among the largest economic powers had a positive effect on U.S. markets today: the Dow gained 936.42 today, as an example.

67% of Coloradans would rather protect pristine national forest lands and not increase oil and gas protection in them. 70% thought that the high number of already unused leases was reason enough not to grant the industry new ones on public lands.  56% were intelligent enough to recognize that opening drilling up in the lands wouldn’t lower gas prices.  Just one more reason why “Drill, baby, drill” isn’t working out West: we live next to the areas where the drilling would actually occur and we don’t think it’s a good idea.

Google has come out with a 21st century energy plan (ClimateProgess’ take) and it’s darn good.  Here is their top-level summary of goals:

Our proposal will allow us to reduce from the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) current baseline for energy use:

• Fossil fuel-based electricity generation by 88%
• Vehicle oil consumption by 38%
• Dependence on imported oil (currently 10 million barrels per day) by 33%
• Electricity-sector CO₂ emissions by 95%
• Personal vehicle sector CO₂ emissions by 38%
• US CO₂ emissions overall by 48% (40% from today’s CO₂ emission level)

The cost of Google’s plan?  $4.4 Trillion!  Ah, but the savings of Google’s plan?  $5.4 Trillion!!  I’ve heard estimates of the cost of business-as-usual, but I forget what they are.  I’ll follow up on this in the future.

A Siegel also provides a take on Google’s plan.

The effects of climate change in Colorado are being assessed.  Among them: change in river flows through mid-century. Climates are expected to migrate upward in elevation.  Supplies of water will decrease.  Demand is likely to increase.  Guess what will happen to costs.  Or we could actually do something about our climate change forcings.  See the Google plan above.  It’s a step in the correct direction.

Help 350.org send 35,000 invitations to Sen. Barack Obama and John McCain to attend the December U.N. Climate Meetings.

The hysteria over Amendment 41 continues among wonky circles. It shouldn’t, as info from the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission came out last week. Scholarships, insurance policies and dinners are allowed, just like A41 supporters have maintained.  A41 banned gifts from lobbyists and anything over $50 in value from non-lobbyists.  The Colorado Supreme Court has refused to look at A41′s constitutionality until the law was applied or enforced.  I think the intent behind A41 was apparent to voters.  I don’t think the Commission will whittle away the intent, as opponents claim.

Arctic sea ice volume likely set an all-time minimum this year.  While the areal extent reached the second lowest value on record, the volume of the remaining ice was less this year than last.  It’s not hard to figure out why this is.  A record low areal extent last year meant the ice that formed last winter was new and thinner than ice that formed over decades or longer.  That ice melted easily this summer.  The small area of thicker ice?  It melted more this year because of the warmer ocean waters underneath it.  As those waters get warmer year after year, the ice above it has less long-term viability.  The NSIDC should continue to verify the final volume value for 2008.

Republicans have maintained their stranglehold on local and state politics with their GOPAC program – it trains folks how to push fringe policies to the public.  That’s how they’ve gotten so many extremists in positions of power.  Want to counter it?  Throw a little something toward Progressive Majority.

What does it mean to be fiscally conservative?  CONServatives certainly don’t know the answer.

News & Discussion Items 10/9/08

The electoral map for this year’s Presidential election looks better and better for Obama.  Florida is going his way.  So is New Mexico and Colorado.  So are Virginia and North Carolina!!!  As of yesterday, Missouri, Nevada and Indiana were toss-ups.  Today, add West Virginia to that list!  (That’s a dynamic link – it updates at least daily)  McCain leads Obama by only 1 percentage point in composite polling.  Obama would garner at least 320 electoral college votes, compared to only 158 for McCain if the election were held today.  Only 60 votes are up for grabs.  There is the distinct potential for a landslide election.

[Update]: Conventional Wisdom, as defined by the corporate media, is lagging way behind the polls of the past few weeks.  Obama’s likely electoral college lead has been above 270 (needed to be elected President), and is above 270 by at least 50 votes today.  Yet the corporate media haven’t reported on that reality.  Instead, the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC all show Obama with a 260-264 count.  The NYT is about the worst: their analysis ignores dozens of state-level polls from across the country that have been conducted since October 1st.  The corporate media’s best-case scenario is a close race.  They’re not doing reporting – they’re trying to produce entertainment.  Unfortunately, the public has no idea that the corporate media sucks so bad at these predictions.  Notice also that there are no cries from right-wingers about the “liberal media” on this story.

That same corporate media put pro-coal and pro-oil ads on air after the Presidential debates.  The “we campaign’s” ads were refused by the same media (not liberal!).  This is what happens when war corporations own media.  All is not lost: you can ask ABC to run the Repower America ad.

From a friend:
Politics is like driving.
To go backward, put it in R.
To go forward, put it in D.

The markets had another brutal trading day.  The Dow finished 678 points lower – another 7% loss.  One year ago today, the Dow hit its all-time high of 14,164.53.  One year ago today, the sub-prime mortgage crisis was well known and its effects were spreading.  Wall St. and most Republicans didn’t want to do anything about it (some pro-corporate Dems are in that box too, btw).  Now look at where we’re at.

In slightly better news, the Treasury Department said today that it was looking into buying stakes in some of the country’s banks, as I noted Britain had decided to do yesterday.  That one step closer to a wiser solution than the Bailout Bush and Paulson pushed.  There are still plenty of easy policies to implement that would have a more positive long-term impact.

The American budget is $3 Trillion.  Thanks to Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., America’s debt is $10 Trillion.  The next President is going to operate under very adverse economic constraints.

How aggressive do you suppose the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Alaska Senator Ted “Tubes” Stevens is, considering the DoJ is stuffed full of Bush cronies?  Not very, if their case history is any guide.  They have screwed up major elements of the trial thus far.  It makes it seem like there are really two defense teams for the Senator.  If only former Governor Siegelman had belonged to the correct party…

Economic News: Bad and Worse

Wall St. continues its free fall, with the Dow falling over 500 points today after falling 370 points yesterday.  Indices are at the same level as they were in the fall of 2003.  Retirement accounts have lost $2 Trillion in value.  The problem?  Despite the approval of the Bush Bailout by Congress last Friday, no one has any confidence in anyone else.  Banks still refuse to lend to one another or to credit-worthy customers.  As I and others stated last week, the Bush Bailout didn’t address the fundamental problems in the economy.  More and more people recognize that and are reacting to it.

They’re also reacting to the realization that the Bush administration’s refusal to do anything about the housing bubble for over two years spread tons of bad debt and risk around to world banks.  So the world is staring a deep recession in the face because the Bushies decided they’d rather wait until America was in debt past its eyeballs before proposing something.

The Federal Reserve is offering to buy up another $300 billion of loans from banks, without collateral of course, to unfreeze credit markets.  How are they going to pay for that?  By borrowing money from the banks.  By printing more money.  Printing more money, by the way, increases inflation, which was at 5.4% last I checked (and that’s a b.s. low-ball calculation by economists who want to pretend the economy is doing better than it really is).  In an era of stagnant incomes and rising unemployment, higher inflation will simply wreck the middle class’ ability to stay afloat.

The economy has been running on credit, as everyone should be well aware of by now.  First in the 1980s and 1990s with credit cards.  Then in the 2000s with home equity.  Now that credit is being taken away in a flash.  What’s left has two distinct faces: consumer borrowing is down for the first time since 1998.  While it’s good that people are borrowing less, it also means they’re going to spend less.  After all, incomes after inflation haven’t increased in years.  Consumers without credit will have no money to spend unless one of two things happen: incomes increase (the better solution) or credit flows again (the worse option).  Raising incomes will put our economy back onto the path of health again in a meaningful way.

Oh, here’s the worse economic news.  Foreclosures were running at record rates for the past 12 months or so.  Well, it turns out that the government uses numbers from RealtyTrac.  So good, so far?  Well, RealtyTrac hasn’t kept track of foreclosures in 900 rural counties across the United States.  Here’s a choice piece of the article:

But in West Virginia last year, it [RealtyTrac] counted fewer than 500 foreclosure notices. New federal statistics counted 12,000 notices in the state, since the start of 2007.

Heck, that’s only 24 times as bad.  Who’s counting?  Thankfully, a Democratic Senator in July co-sponsored the Foreclosure Prevention Act, which Congress passed in July. The bill required the Department of Housing and Urban Development to measure foreclosure rates in each state.

So amid stagnant wages, rising unemployment, rising inflation and worse foreclosure numbers than have been reported in two years, the Republicans have done a pretty good job of wrecking America’s economy.  Their pursuit of making the richest Americans uber-rich has affected millions of good, hard-working Americans negatively.  That’s the reason Barack Obama is leading John McCain by double digits in polls and is nearing a blowout in the electoral college numbers.  That’s the reason why John McCain and Sarah Palin are inciting their supporters with hate speech.

Economic Solutions & Discussions

It’s taken a while, but some alternative solutions to the corporate welfare the Senate just approved yesterday are making their way into the blogosphere.  Thoughtful criticism is also being generated.  Though by no means exhaustive, here are a few that I’ve read and wanted to pass along.

Michael Moore’s proposal.

The first of bonddad’s mark-to-market criticism

More of bonddad’s well-written thoughts on why what’s been proposed won’t fix the real problem.

Senator Bernie Sanders lays out 9 reasons why the Senate Bailout is bad for Americans.

I agree with bonddad that the Senate Bailout doesn’t address the underlying problem.  As usual, Democrats got scared from Republican fear-mongering and so passed a bill that deals with the symptoms.  The economy will not get better as a result of this bill’s passage.

Speaking of which, Republicans are handing Democrats the worst economy since the Great Depression.  As we move forward, look for plenty of criticism from those who did the actual wrecking.  Look also for few solutions to be offered.  R’s are better at the former than they are at the latter.

What happens when the Bailout doesn’t pay for itself?  What happens when American taxpayers are saddled with $700 billion in debt?  How many issues will go unaddressed in the next 4, 8, …, years as we’re forced to spend billions on interest alone, nevermind the principle?  The rich created this problem.  Let the rich pay for it.  The rest of us have enough to get done already.

Reject the Senate Bailout Bill

I asked yesterday where the leadership was to lead the country out of the economic troubles it’s experiencing.  Details of the Senate Bailout came out overnight and it’s clear that leadership cannot be found in the Senate.  Their Bailout is worse than the House version.  Instead of only giving irresponsible corporations $700 billion of future taxpayers’ money, the Senate Bailout includes some tax cuts (not all bad) and a change in accounting of mortgages.  Those accounting practices, known as “mark to market” require banks to adjust the value of their assets to reflect current market prices.  So what’s wrong with that?  House Republicans whined that the rules forced banks to report huge paper losses on mortgage-backed securities, which might have been avoided.  What’s wrong with that?

Housing prices ballooned in the past 10 years, unsustainably so.  Then folks started having their houses foreclosed on because banks weren’t ensuring borrowers had the income to pay their bills.  They gave away overpriced houses to anyone who said they wanted them.  Once houses started being foreclosed, demand for housing fell.  House prices started going down, at a slower rate than they were run up.  As the foreclosures mounted at a record pace, the packages of mortgages that banks sold started losing value.  Unfortunately, the prices for those packages had escaped from reality, reaching levels that exceeded world Gross Product.  Read that again: the gamblers playing with these packages sold them so many times for so much profit that their net price far and away blew past what the world can produce in one year.  That doesn’t make much sense, but that’s what happens when a market is unregulated.  It gets to make up its own rules and it did so based solely on greed.

As losses stacked up, banks were forced to adjust the package prices to what their current market value was. Which meant they started to fall.  Unfortunately, the difference between what the packages were sold for and what their reasonable market value was very big.  That’s where news of banks writing off billions of debt arose.  The banks couldn’t sell the packages at prices they paid because the actual property had lost its value.  What House Republicans want to do is make it so that banks could reset the price of those packages to whatever they want.  That’s correct: Republicans want banks to play make believe with what a mortgage is worth.  Just ignore the fact that it’s not just that people don’t want to buy the houses, people can’t buy the houses.  Republicans want to put a small band-aid on a gaping wound and tell Americans a solution has been found.  Republicans don’t want to address the causes of the economic slowdown, they want to address its symptoms.  What Republicans want to do is what they’ve done to inflation and unemployment numbers: rig the calculations so that the numbers report what you want them to report, instead of what is real.  Which, by the way, is how they run government: it does what we say it does, not what it really does.

By including a number of tax cuts, the Senate Bailout is trying to sweeten the pot for Republicans.  Despite the fact that Democrats supposedly control Congress.  Despite the fact that Americans of all stripes have clearly indicated their disapproval over forking over 700 billion of their dollars to out-of-control Wall Street gambling fat-cats.  That’s money that will not go toward education, health care or global warming.  The Senate is hoping that by dressing their Bailout up with some tax items that haven’t made it on to any other legislation, the American people will swallow their awful pill with a tiny bit of sugar.  The important part is: the Bailout remains.  The immoral Bailout of too-large corporations with taxpayer dollars remains.  As I pointed out yesterday, no Congressional members have clearly defined how giving away $700 billion will unlock the credit markets, which is the real problem today.  Senators pushing this Bailout are instead demonstrating their disdain for Americans and their loyalty to corporations who donate to their reelection efforts.

Moreover, Democrats are still jumping at Republican fear-mongering.  Everything we’ve heard from Bush and Paulson is how afraid we should be about this “crisis”.  They have done so without defining what the crisis is or how their Bailout would address such a crisis.  Give the banks $700 billion or else….  Or else what is the pertinent information.  Most Americans clearly don’t believe Bush or his cronies (with good reason), but Senators are rolling over like the good puppies they’ve been trained to be.  Senators that vote for this bill don’t deserve their positions.

One last thing: this situation would have played out completely differently if we still had the Clinton surpluses and not the Bush deficits.  Surpluses were going to run into the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars by this point in time.  Instead, Bush has doubled our deficit while running up record debts.  So much for fiscal conservatism.

I ask that my Senators reject this bill.  If they do not, I ask that the House of Representatives does.  If both chambers pass it and Bush signs it, our economy will not be better for it.

***

A couple more thoughts about this.  The first is this: I have zero trust that the Bush administration is going to appropriately implement this bill.  It is disturbing to me that after 8 years of nothing but the most insidious of lies, anybody is expecting Bush to follow either the letter or the spirit of the contents within the Senate Bailout.  The list of lies would take more time than I care to think about to assemble, let alone diagnose and discuss.  And so it is still somehow incredible to me that the Senate is preparing to hand Bush everything he wanted in the first place and stuff some fluff around it to soften the blow of passing it.

CONservative economic policies have failed.  That fact seems to have escaped said Senators because they are contemplating giving away $700 billion to see if voodoo economics will work.  Maybe this time, eh Senators?

The continued capitulation to Bush disgusts me.  I have no doubt that overall, Barack Obama is a better choice for President than is John McCain.  But if Obama votes for this, I fervently hope other activists realize that he will not be the savior that many have ascribed him to be.

***

Think about the morality of these two headlines:
WaMu CEO could get $13.65 million for 18 days work
WaMu employees’ pensions fate unclear; many to lose jobs

Executives are waging class warfare against Americans.  The Senate just voted to continue that war.  If anybody seriuosly thinks Paulson will responsibly dole out $700 billion to his corporate buddies, I have a bridge in Alaska I can sell you.

Where Is The Leadership?

Do we have a President?  Or do we have someone who is drawing a paycheck but isn’t running the country?  The latter seems to be the more accurate assesment.  What leadership has George Bush personally shown to the American people?  None.  He and his cronies knew the financial market freeze up was coming and they decided to do nothing about it.  At a minimum, they allowed banks to fail.  More accurately, they encouraged their failures through destructive policies.  But ever since the Bush Bailout was presented to America (months after they had written it), where is the resolute leadership that pundits were crowing about the past 8 years?  The answer is there wasn’t any leadership to begin with.  Bush can’t demonstrate that which he doesn’t have.

The House of Representatives rightfully rejected the amended Bush Bailout Plan.  Legislators can talk all they want to about how much they negotiated about the bill.  The difference between the original and modified Bush Bailout Plans?  About 100 pages of fluff.  Nothing real was added to or taken away from the bill.  Treasury Secretary Paulson was still going to be left with too much unchecked power.  Homeowners were still going to lose their homes.  Executives were still going to walk away from their experiments which ended in disaster with millions of dollars.  The credit markets were still going to remain stuck in neutral.  And since then?  Bush has exhibited no attribute that is so sorely needed at this time by the middle class.  That’s not by accident – current events are a direct result of planned CONservative economic policies.  Enrich the rich further.  Destroy the middle class and make America look more like a feudal state than a democracy.

Readers of this blog know I have no love for CONservative policies.  They’re too top-down, hypocritical and destructive of democratic principles.  Careful readers of this blog know I don’t pull any punches when it comes time to disagree with Democrats.  This is one of those times.  None of the Congressional leadership, Democratic or Republican, has displayed any kind of useful leadership either.  Many of them are just as guilty in creating this morass as Bush’s cronies are.  Their palms have been greased with too much corporate money during their careers.  During that same time, Democrats lost more races than they won.  Their habits are ingrained in an environment where Republicans could get away with relentlessly attacking them, no matter if those attacks resembled reality or not.  Despite stunning victories in the past 2-4 years, many older Democratic officials still don’t understand that the political landscape has shifted underneath them.  They need not fear absurd Republican attacks like they used to.  But they remain cowed and thus unable to lead at one of the most critical moments in our history.

Democrats should come up with their own legislative bill to address the financial mess.  I know they wanted to go home at the end of last week and campaign, but reality has a rude habit of interrupting plans.  Democrats haven’t reached out to economic experts to work on developing their own policy proposals.  Similar financial situations have cropped up before, both in the U.S. and abroad.  Solutions were identified and implemented before.  Simply looking at those solutions and slightly adjusting them to our current situation would seem prudent.  This particular economic problem cannot be characterized by anything more esoteric than has been witnessed before.  It is an insult to Americans that Democrats, historically so good at dealing with the economy, are offering no plans of their own.  I expected Republicans to drop the ball – and they have.  All they’re proposing is further tax cuts for the rich.  That won’t solve anything for the rest of the 99% of us.

First Bailout Bill Fails in House and the Fallout

Last week, the Bush administration wrote up a 3-page Bailout they wanted Congress to rubber-stamp.  Were they forgetting that they lost control of Congress in 2006?  Were they betting that the pro-corporate Democrat-led Congress would roll over for them the same way the pro-corporate Republican-led Congress rolled over for them for six solid years?  Either way, populist elements of both parties raised their voices all last week following Bush’s Bailout bill, demanding substantial changes to the bill or rejection of it.  The House worked on their own Bailout bill all week and nearly had something Thursday before John McCain wrecked things.  So the House was left to renegotiate things over the weekend and finished up yesterday.  The House “debated” the bill this morning and voted it down this afternoon.

The stock markets all tanked today, the dollar rose, oil prices fell and the bond markets received a lot of the money people are pulling out of the stock markets.  There wasn’t enough change between Bush’s Bailout and Congress’ Bailout.  Taxpayers were still overexposed, oversight wasn’t enhanced enough, and executive compensation wasn’t reined in.  Most importantly however is the root causes of the financial industry’s problems weren’t meaningfully addressed.  Housing prices were allowed to balloon for too long.  Those prices have to come down to more realistic levels, which will take more time.  Banks are maintaining a lock on their cash, stopping the flow of credit both here in the U.S. and is now starting to lock things up globally.  Credit extended to borrowers will be reined in for a while and that’s a good thing.  Too much of our recent economic expansion was based on too much credit being made available to unworthy borrowers.  The Republican-build economic house of cards has to fall.  Giving away $700 billion to Bush’s cronies isn’t going to fix our problems.

Americans are likely to want a quick fix to our economic morass and a quick fix isn’t what it needs.  The U.S. economy needs a thorough cleaning-up.  Everybody can’t get rich quickly all at the same time, and that certainly can’t happen if the richest are trying to do it by gambling with Americans’ mortgages.  A number of viable solutions have been proposed by folks across the country in the past week.  It is now time for Congress to open their eyes, ears and minds to those solutions.  Those solutions address the actual causes of the economic mess, not its symptoms.

So what can happen moving forward?  The Senate is going to take up their version of the Bailout Wednesday.  I’m unsure how much the Senate and House versions differ.  If the Senate version is passed, the House could, but doesn’t have to look at the bill.  If the Senate version is not passed, nothing really changes.  House Democrats want either a revote or a new bill to consider.  House Republicans have said forget it and have threatened to go home for the year.  Lots of politics are flying around the issue.  At a minimum, the House leadership now has the time to look for additional/different solutions and work on something new.

A bill doesn’t have to be approved this year.  It could wait until a new President and a new Congress go to work early next year.  Taking into account the backers of the Bailout are the same people that helped create the conditions for the economic mess, waiting until next year might be a good idea.  I personally have no confidence that Bush’s cronies or allies (Republican or Democratic) can come up with an honest attempt at correcting things.  I’d like for candidates running for office this year offer their thoughts on solutions and let the people decide who they want to fix things.

***

[Update]:  Read the following:

“The stock market was definitely taken by surprise,” said Drew Kanaly, chairman and CEO of Kanaly Trust Company, referring to the House vote. “If you watched the news stream over the weekend, it seemed like it was a done deal. But the money is being held hostage to the political process.”

Does anyone else find it interesting that an executive has clearly equated that a Constitutionally-defined process is the same thing as criminals taking hostages?  How many millions of dollars is Drew in line to get when he leaves Kanaly?  That’s the taxpayers’ money Drew is talking about, not his.  If he and his chums hadn’t gambled Americans’ mortgages away, they wouldn’t be begging to be bailed out.  This quote is proof that the “crisis” is phony.  Drew, Bush and their allies are trying to pull a fast one on us. (h/t OpenLeft)

***

Where are all the headlines jabbing at the divided Republican Party?  Republicans split their votes for and against the Bailout.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce threatened retaliation against those who voted against the Bailout while the right-wing extremist group Club for Growth threatened retaliation against those who voted for the Bailout.  The Chamber’s threat sounds a lot like Drew’s (above).  The fattest cats are likening people who didn’t like this Bailout (a majority of Americans) to criminals and threatening to destroy them politically.  Of course, there’s no stern message from John McCain or John Boehner to the Chamber or the Club to keep politics out of a crisis.  They’re too busy pointing fingers at Democrats.  What leadership!

***

A real solution (courtesy of TrueMajority.org):

Putting real regulations back on runaway financial corporations, and taking an ownership stake in exchange for any taxpayer support

Providing mortgage relief so ordinary Americans stop losing their homes

Putting millions to work by investing in new green jobs and infrastructure

Investing in a health care plan to cover everyone

News Pieces 9/27/08

In a move toward improving the transparency of bills in Congress, PublicMarkup.org has put the original Bush Bailout plan and Senator Chris Dodd’s plan dealing with the same issue up for public view.  The public can also comment on the legislation.

Oh, in case you’re wondering – despite having billions of dollars worth of bad assets and paying executives millions of dollars every year, the financial institutions looking for a $700 billion handout is still paying for lobbyists.  In the millions this year alone.  While families are losing their houses.  That’s immoral.

The Republican County Clerk in El Paso is illegally trying to prevent students at Colorado College from voting this November.  Why would that be?  Could it be that young voters are breaking 65-32 for Obama over McCain?  Every vote Bob Balink prevents for Obama and other Democrats is one step closer toward his party’s success.  There are 10 days left to register to vote for this year’s election.  How many voters will be unable to vote because of this Republican’s immoral efforts?

While the summer season has drawn to a close for the Arctic, thankfully ending the horrible rate of melt this year, the Antarctic’s winter is also ending.  This winter wasn’t as good to the sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere as last winter was.  The maximum extent was 15 million sq. km, over 1 million sq. km. less than the area last year.  It appears Aug. 2008 wasn’t a good year for ice worldwide as the Southern Hemisphere actually lost over 500,000 sq. km. of ice in a two-week time period.  August also saw the fastest rate of melt of ice in the Northern Hemisphere.  After attaining a +2 million sq. km. anomaly last year, the Southern Hemisphere is lucky to be right at the 1970-2000 mean, and appears to be heading negative as the melt accelerates.

The shuttle mission to Hubble has been delayed by 4 days, from Oct. 10th to the 14th.  Most of the delay was caused by Hurricane Ike’s landfall and damage to the Houston, TX area.  Atlantis is scheduled to make the trip to Hubble.  Endeavour is waiting on a nearby launch pad in the event that Atlantis experiences damage significant enough to prevent a return to Earth.  Endeavour is scheduled to make another construction flight to the International Space Station later this year if the rescue mission is unneeded.

A potential lunar colony site has been mapped in 3-D using camera data that wasn’t meant for 3-D.  I think Mars exploration and colonies should come first, but recognize the long-term importance of the Moon as well.

Gas shortages are occurring across the southern U.S. A couple of factors are causing this situation.  Hurricanes Gustav and Ike shut down drilling and refining infrastructure as well as power delivery systems across the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana and Texas.  More disturbing is the following:

In its most recent Weekly Oil Data Review, Barclays Capital pointed out that the U.S. gasoline inventory has reached its lowest level since August 1967, when demand was a little more than half its current level of 9.3 million barrels a day. At 178.7 million barrels, inventories are 21.6 million barrels below their five-year average.

Replacing those inventories isn’t easy either.  “Once the refineries get back up and running, they’ll drain the already low crude oil inventories.”  Not discussed in the article is the impact of fuel corporations sitting on millions of acres of leased land without drilling.  Not discussed in the article is the impact of not building additional refining capacity in the last 30 years, making the drilling issue completely irrelevant.  It’s that lack of refining capacity (which are only operating at 67% of capacity right now) that has put a large region of the country in danger of running out of gasoline.  If that situation gets worse, food won’t be able to be supplied.  Then the anger over Bush’s Wall St. Bailout will seem minor in comparison.