I love that photo…When will the time come for us to sing “Happy Days are Here Again”? Ever?

Whoa, I’m not sure I like the photo of Obama as The Penguin… (I realize it’s FDR, which I’m hoping he will be like)

pach – that’s kabuki, not a marker.

oversight is not accountability. equity is not taking ownership of the mortgages. and the bonus thing is just a throw away line.

when obama calls for accountability, transparency and re-regulation as part of the deal for a so-called “bail-out” then i’ll take his talk seriously.

It now appears that in 1980 Republics would have loudly applauded Carter had he cancelled the Presidential Debates because of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

MORE VERTIBRATE DEMOCRATS!

LOL. not much could make me laugh today, but that one hit my funny bone. thanks. *g*

It now appears that in 1980 Republics would have loudly applauded Carter had he cancelled the Presidential Debates because of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

It would certainly appear so to anyone who believes that Republicans believe in moral symmetry.

This just in from CNN …

Republican McCain is saying he will hold his breath until Congress passes the 700 Billion Bailout for Wall Street.

pelosi just finished press conference. bill for “bail-out” is coming up on house floor later today.

And McCain’s not even in DC yet. Wow. Modern communications techniques are certainly amazing.

Suppose Obama had done first exactly the same thing that McCain did yesterday. Namely, “suspend” his campaign and call for a postponement of the first debate? The media reaction would have been brutal: “Inexperienced Obama is afraid to debate McCain!”.

Chris Matthews called McCain’s move “razzle dazzle”, a distraction. Razzle dazzle may work briefly for a while, as it did with the Palin pick, but soon enough people get tired of it. No one could contemplate taking 4 years of it, since resorting to it means there is no fundamental principles guiding policy making decisions.

Post updated with your comment.

“Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

Thomas Jefferson

“We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself.”

– Republican Party platform, 2008

(found this in comments @ HuffPo)

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

Thomas Jefferson

I’m an anthropologist. And one of the things that we always suggest is that one use “comparative examples” with other cultures and societies to see what works in them.
While not of this scale, there have been similar real estate/credit bubbles burst that have been dealt with in other nations. These were having impacts on their economies on the scale of that seen in the US right now.

One particularly successful route taken was The Swedish Model

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Thomas Jefferson

thanks.

really, really hope to be eating crow on that one.

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson

loved his parting comment to Rachel -

Do you want 8 years of Razzle-Dazzle ?

yeeeikes !

Sorry, Mr. Jefferson, but that is the very nature of democracy!

I do not understand why Congress and the Senate (Dems in particular) are even entertaining this bailout request. The market must resolve itself.

According to the government numbers, the economy is still growing. We are nowhere near the 46% unemployment of the Great Depression (and I live in Michigan and hubby is in the auto industry and we’ve been in a 4 year recession). How does this bailout help the housing debacle in any way? Regulated banks didn’t hand out the majority of these crappy mortgages, unregulated lenders did! So who are we helping?

And how on earth can the Dems consider this deal when the deal is not understandable to any economist whose opinion I’ve read in the last 2 days?

And McCain’s not even in DC yet.

McGramps can’t seem to figure out how to get out of New York….

call a cab, John! Tell the nice driver to take you to where the flying machines are….

I will simply die laughing if some kind of deal is announced before McCain can get his zeppelin to DC.

a last minute sit down with E! News Daily ?

I’m feeling like Obama is pulling another FISA…………Screw the electorate in favor of being viewed as bi-partisan.

Selise, being an eternal optimist it sometimes pains me to read your responses, but I want to let you know also that it takes someone with a huge BS detector to keep us on track. Thanks for keeping it real.

I thought he was riding solo to DC, Paul Revere style.

Yes. How quickly it became a How To Do It question vs. Yes or No.

thanks for the link.

Sweden’s financial crisis in the early 1990s stemmed from a 1985 deregulation of credit markets, which set the stage for overexpansion and bubbles in the real estate and finance markets. When those bubbles burst in the early 1990s, Sweden’s currency crumbled and interest rates spiked to 500% overnight. Of the country’s seven biggest banks, five needed either government bailouts or big injections of money from shareholders. The value of the country’s real estate market plunged 50-60% in 18 months. “The whole Swedish banking system was off-balance,” Lundgren recalls.

The government tried several stop-gap measures to no effect and in late 1992 opted for a complete re-booting of Sweden’s financial system. Conservative Prime Minister Carl Bildt’s administration sat down with the center-left opposition and came up with a bipartisan, multi-tiered approach. The government issued blanket insurance for a period of four years to creditors in all the country’s 114 banks. It established an agency to oversee all banks that needed recapitalization and told them to immediately write down their losses.

it looks to me that paulson’s plan is geared to do the exact opposite of the bit i put in bold.

I do feel this is the new deadline. The world is coming to an end but do we have to deal with how grampy feels about it?

Could we please not throw rocks at Obama even before anything happens? The man deserves a chance at least in all fairness.

Yep, once again obama has grabbed the bull by the horns and buggered it.

thanks. alot. trying to. so hope to be wrong and have everyone get to remind of that every single day.

Corporate Aristocrats and constitutional usurpation!!!

“If the American people ever permit private banks to control the value of currency, the banks and corporations will deprive the people of everything…”

700 billion dollar corporate ballout and 700 billion a year for oil!! Lots of Liberty lost…

Sound like the King and corporate cohorts in colonial crime all over again??

He has to come through on this or he is a fraud. He can stop this bill – Ian wrote about that already. If he doesn’t, then he didn’t want to. Everything, until this bill is either dead in the water or it includes at the VERY least share equity, is nothing but hot air. This is him tim to lead. He hasn’t lead on any issue yet – this is it.

Well I share some skepticism after the FISA thing. But I agree. Obama has a chance to hit a home run or he could strike out. But give him his chance at the plate. He’s going to the world series, while grampy is reminiscing about stick ball in the streets.

I’ve been disappointed at the grassroots/netroots lack of specific response on this. This is historically big. I figured at least a Strange Bedfellows response with some major points to address. Is the Bill available to read? I’m only finding analysis references.

We had several days of “hashing” post FISA. Here’s our chance and…WHo is going to lead the netroots on the major points?

My comment is based completely on what Obama has said about the bailout.
If I do not make a comment now, when it might be heard, I would be very angry with myself when the bailout is pushed down my throat.

He’s had chance after chance on other issues, namely FISA. He needs pressure much worse than this from our side to get him to do the right thing – or, if you want to be charitable, to give him cover to do the right thing. If we sit around being nice to him, waiting for him to do the right thing, he will not. If he gets elected, we should be ready to keep the pressure on him 24/7 b/c we’re going to have to.

Unless there is a dramatic change in the Democratic plans, I don’t think you will be. These are the 10 questions I put up yesterday.

1. How was the number $700 billion arrived at? Be specific.

2. How can mortgages be refinanced if you buy the paper and not the mortgages?

3. If neither financial companies nor the government know the value of their paper, how can a reverse auction establish it?

4. Why can’t the government simply establish the value by declaring what it is willing to pay? This would let companies place a value on their derivative paper because they would know what the underlying asset is worth. If they want to sell fine, if they don’t, well that’s their decision.

5. What is your position on Glass-Steagall?

6. Shouldn’t companies and major players who created this mess be banned from managing the bailout?

7. What limits would you place on leveraging and derivative trading?

8. Why not nullify credit default swaps and force the refund of the most recent pay ins for them?

9. Mr. Paulson, isn’t your former association with Goldman Sachs a disqualifying conflict of interest?

10. Mr. Paulson, why in your first year as Treasury Secretary did you do nothing to forestall a catastrophic bursting of the housing bubble? Why in your second did you do as little as possible to stave off the worst effects of its aftermath? Why did you spend 6 months on a 2 page plan without Congressional input or involvement and then present it 2 weeks before Congress was set to adjourn?

Only the first of these has been answered. They made up the number. The rest are still out there. There are several elements that have not been elucidated and what their relations are with each other. These are title to mortgages, the mortgage backed securities, equity in firms, cash flows, and the higher order derivatives like credit swaps or further bundling of tranches.

before anything happens? i think we’re already well past that point. (see sunday)

OT: I believe in trickle-up economics. The value of a house, like everthing else, is the amount someone is willing to pay for it, which in turn depends on how much they can afford to pay for it, which in turn depends on the size of the loan they can reliably service, which in turn depends on their in on their pay and the security of their job/career. The pay for the average American has not gone up for about twenty years, and the security of their employment has declined markedly. Therefore, the value of the average house would have declined over the past twenty years except for one thing: houses are bought by families and there has been an increase in multi-income families. But we’ve reached saturation on that effect, so the real market values of houses is going to be considerably lower than the bubble’s peak.

To restore the value of Wall Street’s portfolios, improve the wages and security of American jobs. It’s simple as that.

The goals are different:
Sweden wanted to fix the problem.
Paulson wants to delay things until after Nov 4 for political purposes.

Ari Fleisher just said the opposite of what a commenter here wrote. He said (paraphrasing) I have a feeling that if Obama had been the one to suspend his campaign, that the media would have swooned, saying this is the most brilliant, bipartisan more.

after 2 days of hearings with paulson and bernanke, the fact that we don’t have answers to your questions is, i think, a big red flag.

Gosh, no reason to think that Ari Fleisher has a bias.

bipartisan MOVE. (sorry)

I totally agree. How about we start faxing these questions to the Obama camp as well as the McCain camp and all our house reps? We should move on it now.

when obama calls for accountability, transparency and re-regulation as part of the deal for a so-called “bail-out” then i’ll take his talk seriously.

‘
Exactly. Obama is long on vague abstractions. I want to see concrete details.

No reason that I know of. I was wondering Where He’s Been. Oh great, he’s back.

How about WE provide the concrete details and flood his office with them as well as McCain’s. It’s OUR MONEY. WE decide.

I also believe that pressure should be applied heavily and often. I have e-mailed Obama’s campaign repeatedly re this – it’s all I can do. I have a thing about fairness – no execution before the trial.

Every time Obama gets a chance to go with the majority that put him in this position, he chooses to become repug-lite – you know all of the examples. His actions are always to show the insiders that he is really one of them. He may be a better orator than st. john, but Obama is going down the same road, just slower.

I am trying to look at this shit and am trying to figure out McShames priorities. McShame thinks economy is cratering and his leadership is urgently needed. Appearing on Letterman show is more important than working on crisis. Appearing on Courics show is more important than appearing on Letterman show. Appearing in front of Clintons crowd is more important than working on crisis. working on crisis this coming friday night (will anyone be working on crisis friday night) is more important than doing debate. I am confused – I think my head is going to explode

Yup – along with the big red flag that no elected official appears to know the questions that need to be asked!

That should be in an Obama commercial today.

good call.

we can at least demand answers to all of hugh’s questions.

selise and hugh,

Thanks for all your efforts.

Hugh, I emailed your list to Obama, McCain, WH, Pelosi, Dodd, and my Reps. I followed up and made calls to my rep offices local and in DC.

Thank you both, again, for your dedication and clear thinking on the issue.

Can you give us the Obama campaign link here, so people can start emailing these questions and our opinions, without having to look up the email addy?
Thanks!! It could get everyone moving a little quicker.

barackobama.com

Please send lots of e-mails pounding away at the problem.

…when obama calls for accountability, transparency and re-regulation…

My cover letter requested to answer the question publicly and demanded accountability, transparency and re-regulation. This the money of the people and this process HAS to be an open book or all are risking not representing us.

selise @ 58

My 62 was for you.

Karl Denninger over at http://market-ticker.denninger.net/ has been on this for a year – this systemic meltdown was inevitable, and the Wall Street bail-out now in Congress will do nothing to fix the real problems.

He says:

As things stand right now, if you do not get on the phone today and scream – literally – at your Congressfolk, they are going to pass this despite your opposition. Calls and faxes were (as of last night) running 300:1 against! We need to literally shut down the Washington DC switchboard if we intend to stop this – and stop it we MUST.

but the bribes political donations from Wall Street are running 300:1 for, so we know which way this is going to go.

Then, when the FDIC needs cash to redeem insured accounts with failed banks, they may be left out in the cold. Nightmare!

from Weiss Research:

Weiss Research is the latest with a 24-page white paper:

“I. Too Little, Too Late to End the Debt Crisis. Congress should

1. Disregard data based on the list of troubled banks maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC’s list currently has 117 institutions with $78 billion in assets. However, based on a broader analysis of recent FDIC call report data, we find that institutions at risk of failure include 1,479 FDIC member banks and 158 thrifts with total assets of $3.6 trillion, or 36 times the assets of banks on the FDIC’s list.

How about WE provide the concrete details and flood his office with them as well as McCain’s. It’s OUR MONEY. WE decide.

Ian has been doing a pretty good job of laying out policy principles with some degree of detail. Here is a pretty good policy statement from the Center for Economic Policy Research: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/…..a-bailout/

But, you’re right. Like the lobbyists, we (the progressive blogosphers) need people to draft specific detailed legislation for Congress. I would imagine that there are people here (possibly retired) who have experience and skill at doing exactly that. Good idea.

!8) Or just stand at the curb and wave at the yellow cars! One will take you there.

got it, thanks. off to fax, just as you suggested.

Thanks, if you get any answers to them. Let me know.

Yeah, I have printed copies of materials from CEPR sitting right in front of me.

I have just been disappointed a lack of coordinated effort on an issue equally important to FISA (in some ways more important). Our economy is directly tied to national security concerns along with many other concerns…This requires a unified and strong response from US. IT’S Tea Party time folks.

here’s a fun thought – if the Democratic Congress passes this travesty, even with symbolic, decorative, toothless “oversight” but no control, the Republicans may use it against them in campaign ads in October!

Seriously! Thats what all the Newty Gingrich handwringing is about – to be on record saying it was a bad idea but they didn’t have the votes to stop it, so its all the other sides fault!

How would you like to be wearing that albatross in November, Democrats?

Fax numbers:

Obama senate fax #’s

D.C: 202-228-4260
Chicago: 312-886-3514

Biden senate office:

D.C: 202-224-0139

McCain senate office:

D.C.: 202-228-2862
Phoenix: 602-952-8702

Hugh, I’ve called and emailed 3 times with your questions.

Twain, just FYI, when I called, the person I spoke with at the Obama campaign said “a lot of people” are worried that Obama is about to pull another FISA on us.

Okay, back to work…one last thing –

(((selise)))

Looks like the Dodd plan and not the Frank plan (much less Bush/Paulson) is what’s the most likely thing to pass:

http://tpmelectioncentral.talk…..t_pass.php

Yay!!!

Our economy is directly tied to national security concerns along with many other concerns…

Exactly. We won WWII by out-manufacturing our opponents. Now we rely on China to do our manufacturing. Does anyone else see the strategic flaw in this approach? ;-)

Also, four years ago, our key opponent in the war on terror, Osama bin Laden, announced his strategic objective:

“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah,” bin Laden said in the transcript.

He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, “using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers.”

“We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat,” bin Laden said.

As they say, “it’s all about the economy.”

My #75 was in reply to you.

I was wondering when someone would finally bring up that this whole economic disaster was called for by Bin Laden! Thank you.

Good on McCain for throwing a monkey wrench in the way of Frank’s bill.

Once again, McGramps is late to the party. This deal — love it or hate it — is all but done, (trust me, the Dow would not be up 200 points right now if it wasn’t) and he looks like a knucklehead. As Dodd said, he hasn’t heard from McCain at all regarding this bill.

This was a clear (and somewhat successful) attempt to:

1 Get the Rick Davis story out of the news cycle. If it got it’s due, Davis probably would’ve had to resign.
2 Get the Palin interview w/Couric out of the news cycle.
3 Give McGramps an excuse in advance for his inevitably poor performance in the upcoming debate.
4 Stop the bleeding in the polls.

I was wondering when someone would finally bring up that this whole economic disaster was called for by Bin Laden!

The following is from the first writing on military science, Sun Tzu, 400 BC, and it’s as applicable today as it was then:

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming,
[…] you will exhaust your strength, and if the campaign is
protracted, the resources of the state will not be equal to the
strain. […] In all history, there is no instance of a country
having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the
distasterous effects of a long war can realize the supreme
importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close.

IIRC, that’s from James Clavell’s edition.

Obama lost all his credibility to get the “benefit of the doubt” when he reversed on FISA and cleaned-up by selecting Mr. Patriot Act (Biden) as his running-mate.

Hurl away.

Th snarky photo is completely out of line, and I’m sorry to see this piece of ‘journalism’ as the first facing me since I stopped coming to FDL back in the spring.

Snark back at you, my friend. For the authors’ biased eyes, Obama’s larger press conference yesterday, did discuss the urgency of bankruptcy reform, as well as a few other urgent issues. However, he said, there are a few more serious financial issues that, with his 5 caveats attached,(wiping out the Rights’ personal bailout hopes) are more urgent and need quicker action.

He’s clearly been extremely concerned about changing that bill and talked about it many times, as opposed to the author’s more favored candidate who helped write the original bill and knowing it would pass with all of the Right behind it, didn’t vote for it just to cover her own ass.

So pick your poison, carefully.

In case ppl don’t know http://publicmarkup.org/ has the text of Dodd’s bill and the Bush regime’s proposal.

I called both my senators and my rep. Used specifics from the bill to talk about. I think that is better than emails. Whatever, they do pay attention to phone calls so do EVERYTHING!!! My grandchildren should not have to pay for wars and a bailout to maintain the lifestyles of the rich and famous.