Tag: bailout

Coup de grace is French for blow of grace.  It refers to the hunter’s final shot to the head – the grace being the end of suffering for the unlucky prey.   In this case, it is we, the American people who are the ill-fated quarry.  We are like the mouse that the cat is now tired of playing with.  We will soon hear the crunching of tiny bones.

One of the things we will have to include in post-capitalist environmental design is a new system of money.  This diary is a preliminary investigation of this, continuing from the last diary on post-capitalist economic design.  Here I will discuss in brief the fate of the US dollar, the idea of the “time dollar” as explained by the founders of the Echo Park Time Bank, and the ideas of Hutchinson, Mellor, and Olsen’s The Politics of Money.

(Crossposted on Big Orange)

While many of us find ourselves swallowed up by the panic stimulated by 24-hour news cable services and the dying daily press, when we consider the current credit crunch and threats of doomsday, it is important to get some perspective on what is really happening.

History provides us that perspective. The following description of the famous economic panic that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble that surrounded railway expansion in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century presents an illustrative example.

The economist writing here looked back at this famous economic collapse and drew some serious conclusions. The parallels between then and now are striking, even if “then” was over 150 years ago (emphases added):

That was the sign that used to hang behind the building permit counter at one of our local municipalities.

I didn’t much like it then, because I thought it represented the worst of an ossified bureaucratic outlook toward public service.

But after the vote in the the House today on the bailout bill, I completely understand the sentiment.

The Wall Street bailout plan has been defeated in the House.

WASHINGTON – In a moment of historic drama in the Capitol and on Wall Street, the House of Representatives voted on Monday to reject a $700 billion rescue of the financial industry.

The vote against the measure was 228 to 205. Supporters vowed to try to bring the rescue package up for consideration again as soon as possible.

…

House leaders pushing for the package kept the voting period open for some 40 minutes past the allotted time, trying to convert “no” votes to “yes” votes by pointing to damage being done to the markets, but to no avail.

Whatever the relative merits of the economic legislation, this is still a very good day for our Republic.

It is far past time the Congressional Leadership realized that they are Representatives of the People – not of Wall Street bankers, corporate moguls, and foreign money lenders.  With public opinion so dead set against this bill, Pelosi and the others had no business trying to ram it through the House without adequate discussion and debate.

Hopefully, the defeat of Paulson’s Folly today will be a harbinger of a new era of greater accountability and responsibility by our elected representatives to the wishes of those whom they purport to represent.

But whatever the future may hold, at least on this day our Constitutional Republic has shown that it still has some life left in it.

Update: More on the vote from KagroX here.

Eighteen months ago, when the Department of Interior began talking about removing the gray wolf from the endangered species list, and leaving control of its population to the states, eco-advocates sent out a warning: if this goes forward, wolves will be eradicated. They were sneered at, called alarmists and ignored. Six months ago, on March 28, the wolf was removed from the endangered list in the northern Rockies,

The critics judged right. Nobody who knows the history of the wolf in the United States should be surprised. The government’s decision to delist might as well have included transportation to wolf country and free ammo for a few street gangs. The operative word for what occurred: slaughter. So the feds stepped back in last week.

You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to have your blood boiled by what Julie Cart writes about that slaughter in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Sportsmen” on snowmobiles rampaged through the area. They bragged that they’d shot a wolf. Some had them stuffed:  

And that’s a pleasant way to describe the bailout in the works by the corrupt politicians of the United States, these narcissistic, craven sellouts, who couldn’t bring themselves to stop their own country from invading another and killing 100,000s and displacing millions more, who couldn’t stop their military interrogators and gestapo-like spies from torturing thousands. These moral zeros are about to send something just under a trillion dollars to the scions of finance capital. These latter have lived high off the hog, raking in millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, off a pyramid credit scheme, leaving us — the suckers — to pay up for a generation or more when their con finally went spectacularly bust, unraveling into a wilderness of economic “instruments” and “derivatives” so convoluted and intertwined that no one could ever untangle it.

Original article, by Lance Selfa and subtitled Both parties have honored Corporate America’s wish for eliminating government regulation, via Socialistworker.org:

LIKE EVERYTHING else in Washington–from the Iraq war to the USA PATRIOT Act–the financial crisis that has already brought down a host of blue-chip Wall Street firms is a bipartisan disaster.

Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed what looks to me like the most sane and reasonable solution to our financial mess.  

Instead of being between a rock and a hard place, between a fraudulent bailout of the criminal banksters and a total collapse, Great Depression 2, destruction of the financial systems of the U.S. and the world, we have the middle ground sanity of Bernie Sanders.  His proposal for, if not solving, at least helping to heal our dire financial straits is the best I’ve seen.

Wall Street Bailout – 09/26/2008

There is little public support for President Bush’s $700 billion bailout. Just 30 percent support Bush’s package, according to an Associated Press poll released Friday. More than 4,000 of you have taken our survey, and those results are even more remarkable. Are you confident that taxpayers would be treated fairly if Congress and the Bush administration agree on a bailout? You aren’t. Do you think a bailout would help the economy? No. Do you favor a surtax on individuals who make more than $500,000 a year and couples earning more than $1 million to pay for a Wall Street bailout? More than 91 percent agree with the proposal by Senator Bernie Sanders. What’s more, as of late Friday, more than 40,000 (as of late Friday)of you co-signed Bernie’s letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson suggesting a tax on the very wealthy.

Follow below the fold to learn more and see if you want to sign on and support Sanders’ proposal.

Orignal article, an editorial subheaded The Bush administration and congressional Democrats are agreed on a bank-robbery-in-reverse to bail out the titans of Wall Street–but the Republican free-market madmen are getting in the way, via socialistworker.org.

BY DAY, it looked like an honorable agreement among thieves–Democratic and Republican lawmakers joining together over a White House conference table to hammer out the basic points of a $700 billion bailout of the Wall Street financial system at the expense of the vast majority of Americans.