The Bailout - My thoughts today

[Al Today]

Now, I know the world is what it is. Things are as they are. I should, (and mostly do), just accept the way things are and not get upset. But, ignoring current events is difficult, and sometimes my emotions just kick in to overrule my ability to calmly analyze the situation. I wrote below what I felt after reading the morning news. My therapy is writing and thinking. I decided not to edit what I wrote.
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The following could be called a rant. Yes, I’m emotional and quite ticked off. I like to think the following is a wake up call to those of you wandering into this bar.

Okay… Now, who out here will stand up for the gubement and say the PTB really does care for the citizenry? Who out there is gonna say that U.S businesses too, wanna help fix the economic woes here in the good old USA? Here is an eye opener, to me anyway, my sobering perception: The gubement wants to enslave us and business seems to wanna exploit us. Who cares for the people? NOBODY in power anyway. Will the common folk ever open their eyes and SEE what is happening here? I don’t think so, or people may "see" when it’s too late. Hell, I think it’s already too late. Seems to me people may be in shock, denial, or just don’t freaking care! I dunno what.

I’m not gonna supply the enormous amount of URLs to news information that could spell it all out fer ya. With just a little effort, one could research into the situation and reasonably conclude that we ALL are gonna get screwed. With just a little desire, maybe people would do a little reading and think. Nah, seems to me most just don’t give a krap.

From what I see and hear from many people around me, they are freaking ignorant, or just plain stoopid. And what makes me wanna puke is that some of these closed minded ingrates really think that good ole sweet BeeGeeBus is gonna come on down and save us all. After Armageddon of course… Geeze louize, please, someone, pass the barf bag…

Here is just ONE(1) example…
_http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok
[quote author=Feb 09 ]U.S. Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailouts as Senate Votes -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages. … The $9.7 trillion in pledges would be enough to send a $1,430 check to every man, woman and child alive in the world. It’s 13 times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office data, and is almost enough to pay off every home mortgage loan in the U.S., calculated at $10.5 trillion by the Federal Reserve.[/quote]

I just can’t stand it... Here is another:
_http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/05/news/economy/tarp_oversight_hearing/index.htm
[quote author=February 5, 2009] So far, the Treasury has injected into 360 banks more than $195 billion of the $250 billion allocated for capital injections. It has also sent another $20 billion each to Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) in emergency funding, $40 billion to American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500),and $21 billion to General Motors (GM, Fortune 500), Chrysler and GMAC [/quote]

Ah hell… here’s one more to chew on:
_http://www.therealestatebloggers.com/2009/01/18/federal-bailout-money-going-straight-to-bottom-line-not-to-loans/
[quote author=January 18th, 2009] Well guess what? While the politicians ask for the release of the last 350 billion of the bailout, the bankers are talking about how they are using the money to pay down their loans.
What is not being discussed how they are planning on lending the money out to businesses and consumers.
[/quote]

 

[Buddy]

Hi Al Today;

Working through the pain of realizing what one has found oneself in the middle of can be agonizing. And it seems to me that one of the reasons some people stay "asleep" is because the horror of the situation could probably "blow" their mind if awakened all at one time.

Barring any other intervention, it seems as if "things" are gonna have to carry themselves out to their logical end result doesn't it?

Many good people are working as hard as they can to influence "things" so that other alternative futures become possible. They can use all the help they can get.

Posts like this serve to encourage me to redouble my efforts, and strengthen my committment to the Work.

Thanks

 

[webglider]

Al Today, would you mind if I join you?

Why are people still listening to Rush Limbaugh?

_http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_012209/content/01125108.guest.html

Why is President Obama trying to forge a coalition government with psychopaths?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

February 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Destructive Center
By PAUL KRUGMAN
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

Obama seems like a smart guy. Why is he trying to work with people a)hate his guts? b) whose policies caused the economy to crash in the first place?

Why, when the infrastructure of the U.S. is falling apart, are municipalities bulldozing buildings created by The New Deal?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/us/09wpa.html?ref=todayspaper

February 9, 2009
New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer
By TRACIE ROZHON
GREENHILLS, Ohio — When people talk about green architecture as though it were a new movement, Greg Strupe laughs. Mr. Strupe lives with his family in one of the country’s first green towns, built during the Great Depression by unemployed men and women and championed by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

This 1938 village, along with Greenbelt, Md., and Greendale, Wis., was created to move struggling families out of nearby cities and into a healthier, more verdant environment, with shopping, recreation and nearly 200 small modernist apartment buildings and houses surrounded by a forest.

“The houses may be kind of plain looking, not spectacular, but to me at least, they are a treasure,” Mr. Strupe, 47, who repairs scales, said last week. “Like my old metal kitchen cabinets — the landlord asked, but I don’t ever want them changed.”

Yet, change has come. Over protests from residents, officials tore down 52 apartments on the National Register of Historic Places, saying they made the village look down at the heels. Signs saying, “Not for Sale” and “Keep Your Hands Off My House” are taped to frosty windows.

Hundreds of buildings commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and Roosevelt’s other “alphabet” agencies are being demolished or threatened with destruction, mourned or fought over by small groups of citizens in a new national movement to save the architecture of the New Deal. In July, at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico, a dozen buildings built in the Spanish Revival style in the 1930s, including murals with Native American themes, were bulldozed. In Chicago, architectural historians have joined with residents of Lathrop Homes — riverfront rows of historic brick public housing — to try to persuade the Chicago Housing Authority not to raze the complex. In Cotton County, Okla., a ruined gymnasium has only holes where windows used to be. Across the country, schools, auditoriums and community centers of the era are headed for the wrecking ball.

“It’s ironic to be tearing them down just when America is going through tough times again,” said the biographer Robert A. Caro, who wrote about the W.P.A. in “The Power Broker,” his book about the builder Robert Moses. “We should be preserving them and honoring them. They serve as monuments to the fact that it is possible to combine infrastructure with beauty.”

Town officials say that appreciation often comes at a high price. Many structures are dilapidated or outmoded, built in a stolid style, with columns and entablature, that they dismiss as “Greco-Deco.”

The grand, flood-damaged Charity Hospital in New Orleans has been marked for demolition, although a recent engineering study judged it sound.

Developers often focus on imposing buildings sitting on prime sites: in Robinson, Ill., a striking Egyptian-influenced gymnasium was demolished last fall.

In Ocala, Fla., where there is a move to tear down the Deco City Auditorium, an angry official cut off preservationists at a recent public hearing, saying he was not interested “in what prom somebody went to” but only in “how to make this city grow.”

“Scarcely a week goes by without my hearing of some endangered New Deal site,” said Dr. Christopher Breiseth, the departing president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y. “It’s a legacy in jeopardy.”

Professors, authors and architects have formed the National New Deal Preservation Association. State governments from Arkansas to California are compiling lists of W.P.A.-era projects still standing.

[/b]“They are redolent of a moment when there was more emphasis on making an integrated community — not just building houses, but auditoriums, community centers and schools,” said the architect Hugh Hardy, who restored Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “It’s a better use of energy, in a time of fiscal restraint, to see what we can reuse, remake and renew,” he added. “It’s monstrous to say you have to tear them down.”[/b]

On a recent day, the air chilly and wispy with snow, parts of Greenhills did look their age, especially the little strip mall with a boarded-up Johnny’s Toys warehouse nearby.

But other sections were chock-a-block with ’30s detailing, the houses freshly painted and very much in use. A small, white pool house with three porthole windows and a curved glass-block facade stood next to a brilliant blue water slide.

Where the demolished apartments stood, there are now several vacant lots and nine new single-family houses, priced at more than $200,000; many of these are still for sale. Jane A. Berry, the municipal manager, bought one but conceded the new houses were built too close to each other. “We’re trying to attract families,” she said, “and there’s not even room for a swing set."

While there are no current written plans to demolish more buildings, the village council reserves its right to do so. And so 10 residents, including Betty Senior, a retired teacher, together bought one of the threatened rundown apartments and fixed it up, just to show what could be done.

In Depression days, New Deal programs planted three billion trees, constructed 46,000 bridges, and restored 360 Civil War battlefields. Photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange recorded what suffering looked like; artists created idealistic murals and sculptures. More than 65,000 buildings — stone monuments in the South, green towns in the Midwest, white clapboard meeting houses in New England — rose from the hands of previously unemployed Americans.

Some, like the Marine Terminal at La Guardia Airport, with its flying fish frieze, and the Immigration Station Ferry House at Ellis Island, with its poignant sense of history, have survived and are among the country’s most celebrated buildings.

But others have been lost over the decades — along with the artworks within.

“I consider all the post office murals threatened,” said Gray Brechin, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written about the New Deal. “Since the postal service was privatized several years ago, all this art is in limbo,” threatened not only with demolition, he said, but by “slow erosion.”

Juanita Stevenson has spent 26 of her 56 years in the same apartment at Lathrop Homes in Chicago, a public housing project from 1937. She voices fears that the city’s plan to build new housing — one-third of it condominiums — will destroy the sense of community. When tenants move out now, the housing authority does not replace them; only 220 apartments of 925 are occupied. Landmarks Illinois is lobbying to have some if not all of the homes retrofitted.

Preservationists cite the clever detailing in these and other public projects as a hallmark of the era.

“With small budgets, the architects did interesting things: they varied the pattern of the bricks, angled them, put them together to look like a fluted column — there’s a lot of ingenuity in New Deal architecture,” said Robert Leighninger, a sociologist and author of “Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal.”

That ingenuity is present in smaller projects, as well, especially the Civilian Conservation Corps campgrounds built within the nation’s system of parks, one of Roosevelt’s most cited achievements. From Camp David, the presidential retreat, to the circle of log cabins in a Midwestern wilderness, many of the camps are still operating, serving millions of families every year. But they are significantly underfinanced, said Elizabeth Goldstein, the executive director of the nonprofit California State Parks Foundation.

In the heart of a forest, the Lost Lake Campground near Rhinelander, Wis., has been the subject of requests for help since the 1980s.

Eight log cabins, a little dining hall, a boat landing and two bath houses built about 1935 in the Rustic style, with board-and-batten siding and rubble-stone chimneys, are rotting as the water seeps in. Trent Margrif of the National Trust for Historic Preservation said, “It’s death by a thousand tiny cuts.”

Mark Bruhy, an archaeologist in the Rhinelander office of the federal Forest Service, says campers still come to the cabins on the secluded, glassy lake. But the current estimate for restoration is $800,000 to $900,000.

So far, the money has not arrived. But Mr. Bruhy said he hoped that a new proposal, to be included in President Obama’s economic stimulus program, would succeed.

“We have not given up on our commitment,” he said. “We have not backed off.” [/b]

 

[Al Today]

Posts like this serve to encourage me to redouble my efforts, and strengthen my committment to the Work.

Thanks Buddy. Every now and then I just spout out what's on my mind. If one person reads and start to think, to me it's all worthwhile. Methinks that sometimes I just gotta let off some steam or bust. I worry about making noise, and sometimes I think of that proverbial one voice in the wilderness, wondering if they'll ever be heard... Selfish, for sure... I yam what I yam.

Al Today, would you mind if I join you?

Why are people still listening to Rush Limbaugh?

Why is President Obama trying to forge a coalition government with psychopaths?

I wishfully think more would join in and maybe something might get done to change this mess. Laura started the butterfly flap years ago and I think the waves are building.
My view of Rush is that he's for entertainment only. Just shooting blanks, diverting attention, probably unknowingly helping the hidden powers that be, and those pesky farmers tending the field called Earth.
Our new prez., is doing things that make me go, "No Surprise", and "That Figures". Like they say, the new boss same as the old boss. Just another puppet helping to feed us farm animals and psychically fatten us up for slaughter.

 

[dant]

[...]
Just another puppet helping to feed us farm animals and psychically {and physically} fatten us up for slaughter.

My comment added above.

Yes, that is why (I think) that Revelation (the STS manifesto?) is perhaps
thought of in terms of `The Harvest of Souls' (for total consumption?)

Which is why one of the reasons I smoke a (peace?) pipe.

Hm.

 

[Al Today]

Yes, that is why (I think) that Revelation (the STS manifesto?) is perhaps
thought of in terms of `The Harvest of Souls' (for total consumption?)

Which is why one of the reasons I smoke a (peace?) pipe.

REVELATION... Hmmm... Yeah that alone is thread worthy and could ignite some fire...
Speaking of fire and smoke, I see it's smoke o'clock, "time" for a cig (or two)...
Yum, nicotine...

 

[webglider]

My view of Rush is that he's for entertainment only.

That's what I thought, but apparently, his opinion carries great weight with Republican lawmakers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rush8-2009feb08,0,3685241,print.story

   

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rush8-2009feb08,0,2881422.story

From the Los Angeles Times
Rush Limbaugh has his grip on the GOP microphone
As Republicans grapple with their fall from power, not all are comfortable with the talk radio king's suggestion that he, by default, has become the politically wounded party's unofficial leader.
By Faye Fiore and Mark Z. Barabak

February 8, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco and Washington — In 1994, Rush Limbaugh was a field marshal in the Republican revolution, rallying troops fervid in their passion, armed with a change agenda and determined to shake Washington upside down.

Fifteen years later, Republicans are politically hobbled and Democrats are fervid in their passion, armed with a change agenda and determined, along with their new president, to shake Washington upside down.

And again there is Limbaugh, master of the talk radio universe, unchanged and unbowed. If anything, his prominence and political import have increased.

Obama is "obviously more frightened of me than he is Mitch McConnell. He's more frightened of me, than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn't say much about our party," Limbaugh said on the air, referring to the GOP leaders in the Senate and House, respectively.

That may be cause for personal congratulation (not to mention a bigger audience). But as Republicans grapple with their fall from power and undertake some inevitable soul-searching, not all are comfortable with Limbaugh's suggestion that he has become the party's unofficial leader by default.

"He motivates a core Republican, who is a very important part of the Republican coalition, and we need those guys to be interested and active," said Jan van Lohuizen, a GOP strategist in Washington. "But it's not enough. The Republican Party has shrunk and it needs to be expanding."

While the GOP's star has fallen, Limbaugh's has soared. As party leaders struggle to find their voice, Limbaugh's baritone booms loud and clear three hours a day, five days a week on 600 radio stations across America. If a $400-million contract and the title of most influential talk radio personality -- as voted by industry pros -- aren't sufficient proof, consider President Obama's decision to pick a fight with him three days into his presidency.

Hosting Republican lawmakers at the White House, Obama called out his nemesis by name. "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," Obama said, pitching his economic stimulus plan and offering a priceless advertisement of Limbaugh's influence.

The radio host happily responded on his next program. "I am Rush Limbaugh, the man President Obama has instructed you not to listen to!" he crowed, adding to a long list of self-appellations that includes America's Truth Detector; Doctor of Democracy; Most Dangerous Man in America; and All-Knowing, All-Sensing, All-Everything Maha Rushie.

By his own account, he is the most prominent voice of conservative thinking -- "the last man standing" -- now that Republican lawmakers have decided to, in his judgment, bow before the president. Indeed, Limbaugh seems more energized than ever. "Things just keep flying out of my fertile mind," he said during a recent reckoning of how "Obama the Unifier" had sprinted to the liberal left.

Limbaugh's listening audience is relatively narrow -- it is predominantly white, male and politically conservative -- but highly motivated. Many of the 20 million or so who tune in each week are willing, even eager, to pummel their opponents with letters, phone calls and e-mails to make their voices heard.

They can make a difference. Among their achievements, talk radio listeners helped kill President George W. Bush's immigration reform effort. Recent polls suggest that, despite Obama's high approval ratings, public support has declined for his stimulus bill since Limbaugh and his broadcast peers began railing against it.

Limbaugh has plenty of critics, not all of them liberal or Democrats. Some Republicans worry that the 58-year-old AM radio icon, highly effective at rallying disenchanted conservatives, may be turning off the less ideological voters whom Republicans need if they hope to again become a majority party.

"The question is: Are we going to have an all-white-man litmus test under the Republican Party? Or is there room for diverse opinion on environmental issues, on the issue of right to life, the issue of taxes and spending?" said Rich Bond, a GOP strategist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee. "There must be room for dissent in the Republican Party. It must be sincere. It must have comity."

To some, Limbaugh crossed a line when he recently rooted for Obama's downfall. Asked along with other prominent political types to write 400 words on his hopes for the president, Limbaugh said: "I don't need 400 words. I need four: I hope he fails."

"That sort of thing is going to turn off moderate voters. It's going to repulse some people," said David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of "Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior." "There are a whole lot of people right now who just want to go ahead and give [Obama] his shot, hold back the arrows for a minute. And by immediately pulling out the partisan card, which is what Rush is doing, I think that repels more people than it attracts."

However, Limbaugh is accountable to no one but his faithful fans, his words arcing like spears flung from the Palm Beach, Fla., studio he calls his Southern Command. Enemies rooting for his comeuppance have been disappointed more than once.

Limbaugh acknowledged an addiction to painkillers in 2003 and was arrested three years later. (Prosecutors agreed to drop a charge of prescription fraud if he underwent treatment.) He has been married and divorced three times. Still, nothing seems to shake his standing with core conservatives. (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hosted Limbaugh's third wedding in his own home and performed the ceremony.)

Few Republicans dare cross him. "I don't need him crawling up my [backside] any more than the president does," said one GOP strategist and Limbaugh critic, who would speak candidly only if granted anonymity.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) recently learned the perils when he defended McConnell and Boehner in an interview with Politico, a Washington publication. It's easy for Limbaugh to criticize Democrats, Gingrey said, because he doesn't have to work with them every day. After he spoke, Gingrey's office was flooded with calls and e-mails from angry conservatives. He spent the next day apologizing all over cable television and on Limbaugh's show for making "those stupid comments."

These days, the radio host is so front and center that even his absence gets noticed. (He was on vacation last week and unavailable to comment for this article.) The liberal Huffington Post took note of Limbaugh's absence -- "Just as Rush Limbaugh ascends as the top leader of the Republican Party, it appears he has disappeared" -- and suggested sarcastically that he may have been forceably removed.

Not likely, though Limbaugh may eventually recede.

Though there is a place for his contentious commentary, "eventually, he will pale in importance next to the collective efforts of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner," Bond said. "He'll pale in comparison to the goods work of the new Republican national chairman, Michael Steele. He'll pale in comparison to the Republicans when they find new talent and new voices ahead of 2012."

Until then, the microphone is his.