Mr. Moderate

According to this article on the CNN web site, Rush Limbaugh spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, where he continued to display his deliberate confusion over the founding documents of our government. According to that CNN article, Rush said this:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom — and the pursuit of happiness.

For the record, here is the actual preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Rush was confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, whose text includes the words Rush attributes to the Constitution:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Continue reading ‘Rush Limbaugh Is STILL A Big Fat Idiot!’ »

Anybody who believes we ought to just adopt the proposal put forth by Secretary Henry Paulson needs to study the “Mega-Million Dollar CEO Payouts” article from ABC News. Look for Henry Paulson under Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson was paid nearly $164 million by Goldman Sachs when he left to become the Secretary of the Treasury. I’m sorry, but that smells an awful lot like a pre-bribe, given that Paulson made a “mere” $4 million the year before and only about $12 million the year before that.

Can anybody honestly believe that there isn’t going to be a good chunk of the $700 billion bailout going to help Paulson’s friends at Goldman Sachs? Even if it is just $7 billion of good taxpayer money going to Goldman Sachs, that is still a pretty good payoff for a $164 million “pre-bribe.” I rather strongly smell a rat, and I’m a long way from Washington DC!

Oliver Stone’s masterpiece movie, Wall Street, seems an appropriate centerpiece for the meltdown in global finance we are currently working our way through. We got to this point of near-total market collapse because the real Wall Street didn’t learn a single thing from the morality play produced by Stone. In spite of being one of the classic seven deadly sins, greed is still the centerpiece of Wall Street morality. In other words, the real Wall Street still plays according to the famous quote from Michael Douglas in the movie, Wall Street, where he says:

greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

To say that the people who inhabit the real Wall Street ought to know better is to understate the obvious. But when you are playing with Other People’s Money (OPM), you are divorced from the risks, and yet you get to reap a substantial portion of the reward. The ultimate in OPM is, of course, federal bailout dollars. And as I write this short piece, our government is going through the motions of agreeing on just how many more federal bailout dollars will be made available to the rich dealmakers on Wall Street so that they will go back to making deals which seem to drive all that is left of the US economy these days.

Should the federal government be taking taxpayer dollars and putting them down on the table at the new Wall Street Casino? Given the reaction to the proposals of the Bush Administration to privatize the Social Security System, I would expect that the vast bulk of US citizens would vote “NO!” But of course, it is our alleged representatives, who get huge quantities of cash from the greedy inhabitants of the real Wall Street, who will actually vote to approve this ghastly mess. Is there much doubt that Congress will go along with this requested bail-out? Probably not, but one can hold out hope for at least a little while.

Let me begin by quoting the final words of my previous blog post:

The Republican kleptocrats have probably stolen over $1 trillion this time around, and the United States is hovering ever closer to bankruptcy as a consequence. How much more taxpayer wealth are we going to allow them to suck out of the Treasury before we decide that deregulation is the real source of this fiasco? I don’t know, but it sure seems to me that the American voters just don’t get it (yet)!

In a fine above-the-fold article in USA Today, David Lynch notes that the seeds of the recent meltdown on Wall Street were sewn back in 1999 with the repeal of key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933:

By the time of the 1990s boom, the financial services industry was campaigning to repeal Glass-Steagall, arguing that foreign rivals were hobbled by no similar restraints. In 1999, Congress assented.

“The pressure was so great that Congress really couldn’t resist it,” says economist Peter Bernstein. “Nothing really bad had happened since 1982, and those bad things that did happen were transitory.”

If important financial institutions failed, market participants and lawmakers alike felt that market forces could restore order on their own, with only minimal government aid.

Maybe they were wrong.

It isn’t just that they were wrong. This isn’t a case of bad judgment. This is a case of deliberate theft where these large financial institutions effectively socialized their risks while privatizing their profits, as many commentators have noted, among them Professor Nouriel Roubini in his recent blog post. Roubini is referenced in the Lynch article:

Former White House economist Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the current financial storm two years ago, has a harsher verdict. He says the USA is turning into “the United Socialist State Republic of America.”

Those may seem like harsh words to use on alleged “conservative” politicians. However, as I’ve noted in a previous blog post, there is actually very little overall difference between communism and fascism, so it isn’t surprising that a fascist Republican Party would act to socialize those business entities they feel they need to preserve in order to continue ruling the nation.
Continue reading ‘Welcome to the Fascist States of America!’ »

Most people would think that the terms “Western” and “Eastern” had to do with the 20th century confrontation between the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The origin of this distinction between what is “East” and what is “West” actually goes back 17 additional centuries to 285 CE when the Emperor Diocletian divided the Roman Empire into its Eastern and Western halves. After Diocletian, the Roman Empire was united and divided several times until the final division in 395 when the Emperor Theodosius I gave half to each of his two sons by his first wife. The western half went into a period of rapid decline, and was overrun by various surrounding tribes in various places and at various times. Some date the fall of the Western Roman Empire as early as 455 CE, when Rome was overrun by barbarian tribes, but the last widely-recognized Emperor of the West formally abdicated his rule on October 4, 476 CE.

The Eastern Roman Empire, which is usually called the Byzantine Empire, continued on for many centuries, however. Its founding is sometimes taken as May 11, 330, when the Emperor Constantine, who ruled over both East and West, formally consecrated his new capitol as Nova Roma (New Rome). However, after his death, the city became known as Constantine’s City, or Constantinople. To distinguish this long-lasting empire from the older Roman Empire, the eastern empire is frequently referred to as the Byzantine Empire, a name which is taken from the name of Constantinople prior to Constintine’s extreme makeover. Before then, the small town which stood at that site was called Byzantium, a trading post town established in the 7th century BCE.
Continue reading ‘Why Are We “The West?”’ »

Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
…

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
– Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who

One of my favorite quotes of all time is by George Santayana (from The Life of Reason [1905 1906], Volume I, Reason in Common Sense, Chapter 12):

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. . . . Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, and a large part of what he pledged to accomplish was to “get government off our backs” by deregulating various industries. One of the deregulated industries was the Savings and Loan industry which, I’m afraid, you need to be fairly old to understand how critical that industry used to be to the American economy. But in its zeal to eliminate government regulations that prevented businesses from seeking profits wherever they could be found, the Reagan administration convinced a Democratic Congress to vote away the governmental controls which ensured that industry remained healthy. However, they did not vote away, but actually increased, the guarantee of health provided by the US taxpayer through the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC). This was, of course, a recipe for disaster as the greedy owners and managers of savings and loan corporations sought vast personal wealth for themselves without one thought for the safety of the federally-insured funds they were using to create that wealth. This led to the Savings and Loan Crisis (or S&L Crisis) of the late 1980s, which was the precursor to the current subprime mortgage crisis. Apparently, we never did really learn our lessons from the S&L Crisis so I’m going to begin with a discussion of what went on with that mess.
Continue reading ‘We’re Getting Fooled Again!’ »

Its been just over a year since my last post. Things have happened in my life. But I’m ready to come back to blogging now, so here we go.

A number of issues have experienced dramatic change since I ran out of time and energy for blogging back on July 1, 2007. BBC reporter Alan Johnston was released from captivity, largely unharmed (physically, anyway; the mental strain is another matter). The housing crisis in the USA has ballooned into a full-blown disaster for America, with major financial institutions forced into unfavorable take-overs or other painful reorganization steps. General Petreaus was actually able to make “the surge” in Iraq work. But while the military news is reasonably good, politically the Iraq government is still demanding that US troops leave Iraq, which means that we will still eventually lose any long-term benefits from fighting the Iraq war.

Unfortunately, however, most of the other topics I wrote about over a year ago are still with us today, largely unchanged. So, once more into the blogosphere I go. Please keep an eye on this page as I expect to post regularly at least through the 2008 election.

I hate to harp on the housing crisis but several new articles came out today and if you didn’t know what the underlying story was you might tend to believe that everything was well here in America. The housing market will not be cured for many months, and perhaps years to come. However, that does not mean that certain local markets might not experience a short-term boom on occasion. If you are “flipping houses,” there may yet be some room to maneuver if you are in the right market. But sooner or later, if you are not careful, you will get caught holding the bag and one bad deal can destroy all of your profits.
Continue reading ‘Denial Is Not A River’ »

Back on May 6 (Don’t Get Your Bubble Burst!) and again on May 16 (Housing: Whistling Through The Graveyard) I wrote about the ongoing collapse of the housing market in the United States. On Tuesday, June 19, USA Today wrote a length piece which verified what I had said earlier: the optimistic statements were wrong and things were settling in for a long decline (Subprime storm winds will keep blowing). The scope of the problem is clear from that article:

Home foreclosures in Minneapolis doubled in 2006 and are on pace to double again this year.

…

The Mortgage Bankers Association predicts that adjustable-rate subprime foreclosures, already at a record, will rise into 2008, …

If I can give any prospective homeowner a word (or two) of advice, it is this: be conservative!
Continue reading ‘Housing Nightmare Settles In’ »

For a long time now, BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been held captive in Gaza. With the recent takeover of all of Gaza by the Hamas movement, Hamas has announced efforts to free Johnston. You can get the latest details on the BBC web site by clicking on the image.

The only way we can make good decisions is by relying upon facts, not propaganda or fantasy. Good reporters need to go into difficult situations to gather actual facts. Alan Johnston is just one of many brave reporters who has experienced personal tragedy due to his willingness to brave difficult circumstances. The group Reporters Without Borders keeps tab on those who suffer for daring to bring the truth to the public. As of this minute, that group reports that in 2007 (so far), 45 reporters have been killed, most of them (27) in Iraq. In addition, 125 reporters remain in prison for alleged crimes associated with their reporting. It seems like powerful interests find it to be better policy to imprison or kill the messenger than to fix the problem(s) that confront the people of the world. We must all do what we can to change this.