Not to committ further heresy on a primarily democratic blog let me do my dsiclaimer before I say more. I am a registered democratic but I vote all around the block. It depends on the man and the times. Basically in the past the dems as a party have been better for business. That has changed and is no longer true as multi nationals have become the main voices and influence in congressional legistation for dems and repubs.
A politican is only a politican as long as he stays in office and they all know who provides the money to keep them in their offices…and it isn’t the public.

Just by observation we can see what has happen to the Chamber of Commerce for instance…gone big nationals, where it was once the voice of independent and mid size and small business. All politicans square off around “their” own political interest, where their districts are union, they are union, where their districts are corporate, they are corporate…Biden for instance was happy to ditch the liberal and progressive view in voting for the bankruptcy bill because Delaware is his home district and the Banks.

They would say they “are representing their districts”. But are they? Really?

This year the republican party got what it deserved. But the work is only half done. The democracts need the same treatment. If people insist on putting all their faith in and cleaving to a “party” the least they can do is hold that party’s feet to the fire and punish the hell out of them when they start their bait and switch and backwalking on the issues they ran on as a platform.

A six year old listening to most politicans talk on any issue would see thru them immediately. When a politican implies that workers don’t have a job because they didn’t get an education, or haven’t kept continuing their education and haven’t kept switching to different careers or job skills year after year as jobs in America disappear..a six year old would say…”whaat?’

When a politican waxes on in all his moral glory about how the US should lift third world workers and countries out of their misery by trading with them and giving them concessions I promise you he is getting ready to slip you a law and trade concession and legistation that will put American deeper into the ditch.

If we had a clean and uncorrupted congress that actually worked for America and Americans, that actually honored their oath of office and the constitution we would not have to worry about who the president was.

Congress is where it’s at, don’t forget it and make them all, the dems and repubs fear you, the voter.

The only reason for the ‘tweaks’ is to keep the system going, to keep the elites fed.

The reason cannibals are extinct is because they ate all their neighbors without considering reproduction issues and realizing they would eventually destroy their food supply. The elites and congress know they can’t totally disregard the masses and have to keep them somewhat going least the elites lose their food supply.

I just think that despite my political differences with Sen. Corker (and the fact that he’s a flaming idiot on a number of topics), I had to point out that he makes some good points about Chrysler’s situation. Detroit insiders have been mourning the loss of Chrysler’s technological and engineering expertise ever since Daimler dumped what they didn’t want back on the market. As is being pointed out in the current hearings, the most valuable portion of Chrysler currently is their Financing arm.

What does all this mean? I don’t know. Chrysler can’t be allowed to go under due to how interdependent the supplier networks are. But they simply aren’t a viable company any more.

Wow.

Given the size of the aid proposed relative to the financial services boyz (enormous vs. ginormous), and the disappearance socialistization of the industry, it looks like the Republican hatred of organized labor needs to be recalibrated. What’s three steps beyond ‘visceral’?

And doing this at the same time he and Rove are kicking off his legacy project is just another cherry on top.

So the US congress went along with GATT and allowed us to be flooded with cheaper imports,not subject to tarrifs. By the seventies it was already apparent that entire sectors of US manufacturing were going under, furniture manufacturers, textile manufacturers, parts manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, medical and industrial tools and so on. GATT was the begining of the end. It allowed a few corporations cash rich enough to position themselves to overseas and make alliences with overseas companies and government to virtualy wipe out every lesser company in their field.

Now….you can travel the country, especially the south and see the remains and ruins of thousand of former manufacturing plants of wood products, textiles, parts, that employed millions of people. All of this manufacturing became consolidated into the hands of those few major corporations that have gone even further now and off shored what domestic plants they had here to countries where labor cost are nothing.

As a current example. A wood products company near me that use to make plywood and had about 500 employees is nothing now but a depot for imported plywood…the defunct facilities and location near a port bought out by a US multi national “global’ company who manufacturers it abroad ‘and ships’ to the US to sell to home building and construction suppliers for less than it could be made here.

So what congress did with GATT was to tie American manufacturers and workers hands behind their back and tell them to go compete with labor getting 50 cents an hour in third world countries and no unions and no OSHA and no corporate taxes and no payroll taxes and no income taxes and no inflation and no tarrifs.

This is what congress calls a free market when it is actually a rigged fight.

I did paper on this back then…have no idea where it is now or if I still have it but I will look.

Which means.. Where Is The Balance?

The purpose of government economic legistation is idealy to maintain BALANCE.

Between labor and capital between imports and exports between all sectors of the econony that affect one another.

You do that thru legistation and law making. Thru regulation and requirements for transparency in the financial sector. Thru trade laws and policies.

Congress’s idea of balance is this… run the country’s business by considering the demands of their monied mistress on their legistative decisions….they implement this and that to sastify their mistresses demands…then they have to tweak something else a little to keep the US in busines because the demands of the mistress are squewing business unequally..so they implement and tweak, implement and tweak, tring to satisfy their mistresses and keep the US economy afloat at the same time…tweak,tweak,tweak…how long can you keep it all afloat when your decisions are split between what your mistress wants which is damaging your (the country’s) business and the decisions you make to cover for and compensate for the bad decisions your mistress is forcing on you?
That is your congress’s problem. That is the FED’s problem..implement for their favorite elites sector, then do a tweak to cover for the implementation, then tweak again to keep the first tweak and makeup tweak going….sooner or later you run out of tweaks…create a bubble to get thur some rough patch, then create another bubble when the first bubble crashes and on and on.

The US has been turned into a consumer society, not a production society. It has been going on for a long time and with Bush we just got speeded up to a return to the Gilded Age of Robber Barrons and Lords and Serfs.

Good damn luck to us all. If Obama can get the US out of it’s foreign and domestic corruption it will be a miracle. I don’t think he can but for those who believe in miracles, it’s an option.

i’m still working on the ’90s, so i haven’t started reading about the s&l scandal (i think it was you who made that suggestion?). but there is the beginnings of a timeline and the beginnings of a series of summaries (at least that is what i intend).