Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
West Virginia voters complain of 'incidents' where VOTE MACHINES SWITCHED THEIR VOTES from Dem. to Repub. candidates...
PELOSI's DISGRACE... despite TWO FULL YEARS of a DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL MAJORITY - WITH the added bonus of a Democrat SENATE majority - Speaker Pelosi and her senior 'Democratic' Party "leaders" have, in abjectly cowardly fashion, DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to GUARANTEE THE SANCTITY of the vote....
...to GUARANTEE that in this first decade of the 21st century American democracy is based and grounded in a FULL and FAIR VOTE where every voter has a right to cast a vote free of fear and intimidation.
Where every voter HAS A RIGHT to EXPECT that their vote is counted fully and fairly, and NOT swiped by computerized voting tabulation THAT WOULD NOT PASS _ANY_ Financial insitution's MINIMUM levels of data security.
Almost TWO YEARS after Speaker Nancy Pelosi took up the Speaker's gavel in January 2001, Democratic voters have NO such assurance - thanks to the ABJECT, CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE, if not CRIMINAL COMPLICITY with the pro-war lobby to not make a fuss about Republican vote stealing - of Speaker Pelosi and her leadership.
The Agenda of Speaker Pelosi and the corrupt, complicit, inside-DC "Democrat" Party is clear: AMERICANS are entitled to genuine democratic governance ONLY when Right-Wing Republicans SO FOUL UP the Ameican economy, energy policy, foreign policy, and the fabric of American society itself, that an upwelling of popular resentment REJECTS the "Washington DC Conventional wisdom" that has been the Speaker's dominant agenda thus far.
=========================================================
Some Early W.Va. Voters Angry Over Switched Votes
Jackson County touch-screens switched votes, 3 residents say
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
By Paul J. Nyden, Staff writer
October 18, 2008
http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200810170676
<< At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept SWITCHING THEIR VOTES FROM DEMOCRATIC TO REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.
"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.
When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.
On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.
Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.
"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.
"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.
"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.
"Why didn't she [the polling clerk] tell me before I even used the machine that might happen? And how many people, especially my age, didn't notice that? >>
Thursday, October 16, 2008
John McCain's BULLYING and POLITICAL COWARDICE.. ENABLED by Speaker NANCY PELOSI's LIES and Political Cowardice.....
Former DIEBOLD technician CHRISTOPHER HOOD explains the EASE with which then DIEBOLD PRESIDENT BOB UROSEVICH had his technicians install "software patches" into critical vote-counting machines on the eve of the 2002 and 2004 elections:
AS we contemplate the possibility that Democrats might take enough Republican "red state" senate seats this 2007 election to gain a FILIBUSTER-PROOF majority in the US Senate, we hate to sound like back-biting complainers, but THE ENTIRE OUTCOME of ELECTION 2008 DEPENDS ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES that ARE KNOWN to be vulnerable to HACKING and VOTE-RIGGING... but after TWO YEARS of having a virtual dictatorial congressional majority in the US House (a "dictatorial" winner-take-all majority that is the inherent nature of the US House of Representatives), SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI has DONE EXACTLY NOTHING to address this critical issue at the core of America's democracy.
And, Ms. Pelosi's PRETENDED IGNORANCE to the contrary, THIS IS _NOT_ A COMPLICATED ISSUE: Using PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE designed, built, tested, run, AND ADMINISTERED by REPUBLICAN-OWNED vote-machine companies, IT IS FAR TOO EASY to SWIPE THOUSANDS, or TENS OF THOUSANDS, of votes, AND LEAVE NO TRACE.
We here at DemNationUSA have a cell-phone with a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera, with a 1 gigabyte SD card solid-state "flash" memory card that was purchased separately and installed in the camera's easy, slide-in SD card port. That SD card carries approximately 1,000 1-megapixel photographs. IF someone were to leave such a cell phone sitting on a bar while went to dance for a few minutes, it only take another person at the bar two or three moments - a few seconds - to flip the phone's SD port cover open with a fingernail, depress the SD card one-tenth of an inch, have it pop out and remove it. IF the camera's owner came back to the bar, they would find the cell phone sitting right where they left it. It would still function perfectly, it would still have all its phone numbers saved in the camera's built-in memory, and the camera function of the cell-phone would still work, saving a limited number of photos to the phone's same internal memory. But the 1,000 photos and sound-clips you had saved to the phone previously , would now be gone... VANISHED.
Computer memories work the exact same way, and of course you do not have to physically remove a computer's hard-drive or flash ("chip," or "solid state") memory to wipe out ALL the files stored in that memory... you can simply ERASE those stored files by deleting them, overwriting them, or re-formating the memory.
THAT is EXACTLY what DIEBOLD, ES&S, and SEQUOIA voting computers have done in the past 4 national - presidential and congressional - elections. In EVERY instance of THOSUANDS of "DISAPPEARED" votes and SWITCHED vote outcomes, the outcomes have ALWAYS BENEFITTED Republican candidates. The statistical likelihood that these suspicious voting outcomes would ALWAY benefit one part - the Republican Party - with NOT ONE INSTANCE where a Republican candidate has ever had any reason to file complaint about vote-swiping vote tallies benefiting Democratic candidates, is statistically a huge number, a MILLION-to-ONE _against_ the propabability that this was a random outcome.
The above three paragraphs are EXACTLY THE IMPROBABLE, million-to-one against voting outcomes that SPEAKER PELOSI, Senate Majority 'leader' HARRY REID, and the ENTIRE 'Democratic' "Leadership" PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE!
And now, on the eve of election 2008, we have DOZENS of WITNESSES - SIGNED witnesses UNDER OATH - coming out of the past 8 years of election rigging, testifying to what they know and have seen about those RIGGED, MANIPULATED, and ALTERED voting outcomes.... AND STILL Speaker Pelos and the 'Democratic' "leadership" PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE!
This is "LEADERSHIP" by INCOMPETENCE! This is VOTE-RIGGING on a MASSIVE scale!
This is the "Democrat" Party _ENABLING_ the Republican Party to ASSAULT and DISENFRANCHISE _TENS OF THOUSANDS_ of Democratic voters!
The above process of COMPUTUERIZED ELECTION-RIGGING was EASY to explain using the cell-phone camera & SD card analogy. Of course a truly determined hacker could not merely steal you cell phone's SD chip, but they could REPLACE it with another SD card, one that had 1,000 OTHER photos on it. Heck, if that replaced memory-chip card had child pornography photos on it, you could now be ARRESTED and SENT TO PRISON merely for being in possession of your own camera-phone!
The process of SECURING digital, computerized election results is ALMOST AS EASY TO EXPLAIN. For ALL of us ASSUME that there are STRINGENT STANDARDS of COMPUTER NETWORK SECURITY on our BANKING and FINANCIAL accounts. And indeed THERE ARE stringent, relentlessly enforced, relentlessly investigated standards for NETWORK SECURITY in the banking and financial industries, because, as is portrayed in James Bond and other drama and crime movies, there is a huge temptation for criminals to swipe thousands, millions, or tens-of-millions of dollars from one account, and transfer them to another account where the counterfeiter or hacker can withdraw the funds.
AT NO TIME have America's VOTING MACHINE COMPANIES _EVER_ HAD TO DEMONSTRATE NETWORK SECURITY and resistance to hackers that financial networks have to demonstrate every day.
Indeed, there is an every day precedent for the need to safeguard against SOFTWARE HACKING that would enable altered election outcomes: America's GAMBLING INDUSTRY. State regulators in Nevada and other states that permit slot machines exercise RIGOROUS MACHINE CODE INSPECTIONS of EACH and EVERY slot machine, because of the inherent temptation to INSERT A FEW LINES OF CODE INTO THE computerized gambling machines, would would allow the software hacker to __SKIM__ a portion of the machine's proceeds to an invisible file.
This process or technology is NOT "theoretical" - already state regulators in Nevada, going over machine code (software) for computerized slot machines, HAVE found lines of code inserted that DIVERT some portion of some machine's take, or allowed the hacker to operate the machine in a manner which would trigger a winning pull of the handle.
Below, more video testimony of the EASE with which America's CRITICAL VOTING MACHINES can be HACKED by the companies that produce those machines... WITH ALMOST NO government oversight, and certainlY NO government oversight of the machine's PROPRIETARY, "private" machine code.
The Democrats have been completely behind the eight-ball of a full decade of the world's rush in to the COMPUTERIZED, PC, tele-COMMUNICATIONS, and electronic VOTING era. CRITICAL ELECTIONS at the mercy of private, Republican affiliated companies is NO SAFEGUARD on the right to vote which undergirds America's democracy.
=================================================
Stephen Spoonamore testifies to the EASE with which COMPUTERIZED VOTING TOTALS can be HACKED, and winning voter margins CAN BE SWITCHED to the LOSING candidate, stealing elections from the winning candidate and their voters.
More on Mr. Spoonamores NETWORK SECURITY GROSS VULNERABILITY of America's proprietary voting machines TO HACKING and company VOTE-RIGGING....
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/94895/republican_computer_security_expert_explains_why_electronic_voting_can_never_be_trusted/
AS we contemplate the possibility that Democrats might take enough Republican "red state" senate seats this 2007 election to gain a FILIBUSTER-PROOF majority in the US Senate, we hate to sound like back-biting complainers, but THE ENTIRE OUTCOME of ELECTION 2008 DEPENDS ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES that ARE KNOWN to be vulnerable to HACKING and VOTE-RIGGING... but after TWO YEARS of having a virtual dictatorial congressional majority in the US House (a "dictatorial" winner-take-all majority that is the inherent nature of the US House of Representatives), SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI has DONE EXACTLY NOTHING to address this critical issue at the core of America's democracy.
And, Ms. Pelosi's PRETENDED IGNORANCE to the contrary, THIS IS _NOT_ A COMPLICATED ISSUE: Using PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE designed, built, tested, run, AND ADMINISTERED by REPUBLICAN-OWNED vote-machine companies, IT IS FAR TOO EASY to SWIPE THOUSANDS, or TENS OF THOUSANDS, of votes, AND LEAVE NO TRACE.
We here at DemNationUSA have a cell-phone with a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera, with a 1 gigabyte SD card solid-state "flash" memory card that was purchased separately and installed in the camera's easy, slide-in SD card port. That SD card carries approximately 1,000 1-megapixel photographs. IF someone were to leave such a cell phone sitting on a bar while went to dance for a few minutes, it only take another person at the bar two or three moments - a few seconds - to flip the phone's SD port cover open with a fingernail, depress the SD card one-tenth of an inch, have it pop out and remove it. IF the camera's owner came back to the bar, they would find the cell phone sitting right where they left it. It would still function perfectly, it would still have all its phone numbers saved in the camera's built-in memory, and the camera function of the cell-phone would still work, saving a limited number of photos to the phone's same internal memory. But the 1,000 photos and sound-clips you had saved to the phone previously , would now be gone... VANISHED.
Computer memories work the exact same way, and of course you do not have to physically remove a computer's hard-drive or flash ("chip," or "solid state") memory to wipe out ALL the files stored in that memory... you can simply ERASE those stored files by deleting them, overwriting them, or re-formating the memory.
THAT is EXACTLY what DIEBOLD, ES&S, and SEQUOIA voting computers have done in the past 4 national - presidential and congressional - elections. In EVERY instance of THOSUANDS of "DISAPPEARED" votes and SWITCHED vote outcomes, the outcomes have ALWAYS BENEFITTED Republican candidates. The statistical likelihood that these suspicious voting outcomes would ALWAY benefit one part - the Republican Party - with NOT ONE INSTANCE where a Republican candidate has ever had any reason to file complaint about vote-swiping vote tallies benefiting Democratic candidates, is statistically a huge number, a MILLION-to-ONE _against_ the propabability that this was a random outcome.
The above three paragraphs are EXACTLY THE IMPROBABLE, million-to-one against voting outcomes that SPEAKER PELOSI, Senate Majority 'leader' HARRY REID, and the ENTIRE 'Democratic' "Leadership" PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE!
And now, on the eve of election 2008, we have DOZENS of WITNESSES - SIGNED witnesses UNDER OATH - coming out of the past 8 years of election rigging, testifying to what they know and have seen about those RIGGED, MANIPULATED, and ALTERED voting outcomes.... AND STILL Speaker Pelos and the 'Democratic' "leadership" PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE!
This is "LEADERSHIP" by INCOMPETENCE! This is VOTE-RIGGING on a MASSIVE scale!
This is the "Democrat" Party _ENABLING_ the Republican Party to ASSAULT and DISENFRANCHISE _TENS OF THOUSANDS_ of Democratic voters!
The above process of COMPUTUERIZED ELECTION-RIGGING was EASY to explain using the cell-phone camera & SD card analogy. Of course a truly determined hacker could not merely steal you cell phone's SD chip, but they could REPLACE it with another SD card, one that had 1,000 OTHER photos on it. Heck, if that replaced memory-chip card had child pornography photos on it, you could now be ARRESTED and SENT TO PRISON merely for being in possession of your own camera-phone!
The process of SECURING digital, computerized election results is ALMOST AS EASY TO EXPLAIN. For ALL of us ASSUME that there are STRINGENT STANDARDS of COMPUTER NETWORK SECURITY on our BANKING and FINANCIAL accounts. And indeed THERE ARE stringent, relentlessly enforced, relentlessly investigated standards for NETWORK SECURITY in the banking and financial industries, because, as is portrayed in James Bond and other drama and crime movies, there is a huge temptation for criminals to swipe thousands, millions, or tens-of-millions of dollars from one account, and transfer them to another account where the counterfeiter or hacker can withdraw the funds.
AT NO TIME have America's VOTING MACHINE COMPANIES _EVER_ HAD TO DEMONSTRATE NETWORK SECURITY and resistance to hackers that financial networks have to demonstrate every day.
Indeed, there is an every day precedent for the need to safeguard against SOFTWARE HACKING that would enable altered election outcomes: America's GAMBLING INDUSTRY. State regulators in Nevada and other states that permit slot machines exercise RIGOROUS MACHINE CODE INSPECTIONS of EACH and EVERY slot machine, because of the inherent temptation to INSERT A FEW LINES OF CODE INTO THE computerized gambling machines, would would allow the software hacker to __SKIM__ a portion of the machine's proceeds to an invisible file.
This process or technology is NOT "theoretical" - already state regulators in Nevada, going over machine code (software) for computerized slot machines, HAVE found lines of code inserted that DIVERT some portion of some machine's take, or allowed the hacker to operate the machine in a manner which would trigger a winning pull of the handle.
Below, more video testimony of the EASE with which America's CRITICAL VOTING MACHINES can be HACKED by the companies that produce those machines... WITH ALMOST NO government oversight, and certainlY NO government oversight of the machine's PROPRIETARY, "private" machine code.
The Democrats have been completely behind the eight-ball of a full decade of the world's rush in to the COMPUTERIZED, PC, tele-COMMUNICATIONS, and electronic VOTING era. CRITICAL ELECTIONS at the mercy of private, Republican affiliated companies is NO SAFEGUARD on the right to vote which undergirds America's democracy.
=================================================
Stephen Spoonamore testifies to the EASE with which COMPUTERIZED VOTING TOTALS can be HACKED, and winning voter margins CAN BE SWITCHED to the LOSING candidate, stealing elections from the winning candidate and their voters.
More on Mr. Spoonamores NETWORK SECURITY GROSS VULNERABILITY of America's proprietary voting machines TO HACKING and company VOTE-RIGGING....
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/94895/republican_computer_security_expert_explains_why_electronic_voting_can_never_be_trusted/
Monday, October 13, 2008
McCain's INSIDIOUS Campaign links Obama with terrorists - for Obama sitting on CHARITY FOUNDATION BOARD selected by REPUBLICAN Walter Annenberg!
LINKS to the ANNENBERG FOUNDATION CHALLENGE for Chicago:
Annenberg Foundation http://www.annenbergfoundation.org/news/news_show.htm?doc_id=702786
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Annenberg_Challenge
CBS News: "FALSE REPORTS by McCAIN Campaign" re William Ayers role in ANNENBERG FOUNDATION education charity http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/13/eveningnews/realitycheck/main4518056.shtml
“The idea that the Annenberg Challenge was somehow the extension of the Weather Underground of the 1960’s, that is just one of the most lunatic contentions I can imagine,” says Mike Flannery, political editor at the CBS Chicago affiliate WBBM who has covered Chicago politics for 35 years.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed
"STATE INTERVENTION is a regular feature of STATE CAPITALISM, although the scale today is unusual"...... the ANTI-DEMOCRATIC nature of US CAPITALISM IS BEING EXPOSED.
According to at least one study, _One out of 5 companies on the Fortune 100_ WOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED but for GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION, and many of the rest have benefitted from government subsidies and other forms OF SOCIALIZED TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM Taxpayers TO those companies...
Noam Chomsky steps up to the plate for the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF INDEBTEDNESS that Bush-Cheney and Corporate America have put every working American family in...
$480,000, FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND DOLLARS of TAXPAYER DEBT per working American household, according to former US Comptroller Walker last night in his video-cast comments on the Phil Maher show.
THE AMERICAN MEDIA, and Democratic Party, ARE CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT for NOT POINTING OUT THIS POISONING, STIFFLING DEBT to the American people, especially as this Economic crisis empowers President Bush and his administration to DELIVER TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS of taxpayer money TO THE VERY FINANCIAL INSITUTIONS that CREATED this economic nightmare.
=======================================
Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed
by NOAM CHOMSKYB
Irish Times, Friday, October 10, 2008
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1010/1223560345968.html
Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky
THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.
The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.
Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.
In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.
The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".
In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.
But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".
The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".
Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.
Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.
* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.
Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.
The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.
The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.
Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky , edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times
© 2008 The Irish Times
According to at least one study, _One out of 5 companies on the Fortune 100_ WOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED but for GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION, and many of the rest have benefitted from government subsidies and other forms OF SOCIALIZED TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM Taxpayers TO those companies...
Noam Chomsky steps up to the plate for the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF INDEBTEDNESS that Bush-Cheney and Corporate America have put every working American family in...
$480,000, FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND DOLLARS of TAXPAYER DEBT per working American household, according to former US Comptroller Walker last night in his video-cast comments on the Phil Maher show.
THE AMERICAN MEDIA, and Democratic Party, ARE CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT for NOT POINTING OUT THIS POISONING, STIFFLING DEBT to the American people, especially as this Economic crisis empowers President Bush and his administration to DELIVER TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS of taxpayer money TO THE VERY FINANCIAL INSITUTIONS that CREATED this economic nightmare.
=======================================
Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed
by NOAM CHOMSKYB
Irish Times, Friday, October 10, 2008
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1010/1223560345968.html
Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky
THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.
The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.
Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.
In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.
The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".
In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.
But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".
The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".
Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.
Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.
* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.
Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.
The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.
The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.
Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky , edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times
© 2008 The Irish Times
Friday, October 10, 2008
"Democrat" Speaker Nancy Pelosi uses TAXPAYER DOLLARS... TO FUND the REPUBLICAN PARTY...
We here at DemNationUSA predicted this would happen: SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI's OVERSIGHT of the crimes, corruptions, abuses of power, and VAST FINANCIAL CORRUPTION taking place under the Bush adminsitration these past 8 years (past 2 years since Rep. Pelosi became the Speaker of the House) HAS BEEN SO WEAK... that IMMEDIATELY upon Pelosi's 110th Congress GIVING A BLANK CHECK to the "Masters of Universe" in billion-dollar Wall St. banking houses, would lead directly to - - - - THOSE BANKERS RECEIVING BILLION-DOLLAR US TAXPAYER BAILOUTS using tens to millions of dollars TO PROP UP THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
hat tip to SeeTheForest -
http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2008/10/first_bailout_r.htm
==================================
Sources: NRCC Secures $8 Million Loan for Final Election Push
By David M. Drucker
Roll Call Staff
October 8, 2008, 11:54 a.m.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/29150-1.html
The National Republican Congressional Committee, trailing its Democratic counterpart considerably in cash on hand, has secured an $8 million loan to spend on House races during the last few weeks of the campaign, according to sources.
hat tip to SeeTheForest -
http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2008/10/first_bailout_r.htm
==================================
Sources: NRCC Secures $8 Million Loan for Final Election Push
By David M. Drucker
Roll Call Staff
October 8, 2008, 11:54 a.m.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/29150-1.html
The National Republican Congressional Committee, trailing its Democratic counterpart considerably in cash on hand, has secured an $8 million loan to spend on House races during the last few weeks of the campaign, according to sources.
George Will, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Republican Party.. TRY TO BLAME Bush's MARKET MELTDOWNS on FANNIE MAE and Minority (Black) home owners....
BRAVO! For David Fiderer - he is DECONSTRUCTING the attempts by George Will and the Right-Wing Media - at the urging of John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party - TO BLAME THE _ENTIRE_ US and world financial economic crisis on MINORITIES (BLACK AMERICANS) in general, and FANNIE MAE in particular.
We here at DemocraticNationUSA have _NO_ doubt that 'Democratic' Party leaders have been in the middle of the DEREGULATION agenda, and have not stood up forcefully enough to the climate of greed and lack of oversight on Wall St. and in the financial markets.
BUT TO BLAME THIS _ENTIRE_ ECONOMIC CRISIS on Fannie Mae is patently absurd - especially since THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS IN CONTROL of BOTH the White House AND CONGRESS from 2002 to 2006. As recently as JULY 2006, PRESIDENT Bush's OWN Secretary of Treasury QUASHED RUMORS that Fannie Mae needed a bailout, Treasury Secretary Paulson flatly asserting that there would be no bailout for Fannie Mae.
BUT - IF Sec. Paulson had to ACKNOWLEDGE the POTENTIAL need for a bailout at Fannie Mae, SHOULD HE NOT HAVE ADDRESSED a BUDDING CRISIS THERE long before September and October 2008?????
===================================
Wagging the Dog With Fannie Mae: Republicans Explain the Financial Crisis With Racist Mythology
David Fiderer
Posted October 9, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/wagging-the-dog-with-fann_b_133388.html
"Is this video a lie?" wrote someone in response to my last piece on HuffPost.
No, "lie" is an inadequate description. I uploaded the video link, seen by two million people before me, and gasped at the artful perversion of history. It was like a post-millennium version of The Birth of a Nation. In that silent film classic, a pivotal scene is prefaced by the title card:
"AN HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of the State House of Representatives of South Carolina as it was in 1870."
Then we see black legislators in session, drinking whiskey, eating chicken, resting bare feet on their desks, and leering after white women. As J. Lapper wrote:
"This is also the first instance of "bait and switch" in the film. Prior to this, as noted above, [Director D.W.] Griffith used 'historical facsimiles' to give the film an air of historical accuracy...The subversive logic being, 'Earlier we saw facsimiles of Sherman's March, Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination. We know those are true. This must be too.'"
The updated "historical facsimile" from NakedEmperorNews.com, is just as dishonest and just as racially incendiary, since it has the semblance of reasonableness and reality. The hero at the Congressional hearings is the courtly southern gentleman, Republican Richard Baker, whose calls for regulatory oversight are drowned out by the shiftless uncouth blacks: Maxine Waters, Gregory Meeks, Lacy Clay, Artur Davis and Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, aided by one white guy, Barney Frank.
[Update at 9:00 am October 10, 2008: Yesterday John McCain echoed this video by saying, "Democrat members of Congress fought against reform and it is a matter of record and hearings that they said everything was fine." Barney Frank was one of the "willing co-conspirators."]
To appreciate the mendacity of the video, you need to understand the history of what happened at Fannie Mae, and the causes of the current financial crisis. You'd be hard pressed to get that knowledge from mainstream media, whose piecemeal reporting comes across like blind men describing an elephant.
Into this void of understanding, Republicans have sought to absolve themselves of blame with a racist mythology that has gone viral. George Will, a chief proponent, neatly summarized the narrative on This Week last Sunday:
"In fact, much of the crisis we're in today is because the government set out to fiddle the market. That is, we had regulation in effect with legislation that would criminalize as racism and discrimination if you didn't lend to nonproductive borrowers. We had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac existed to rig the housing market because the market would not have put people in homes they could not have afforded."
Will's narrative is about as accurate as D.W. Griffith's portrayal of Reconstruction. Fox News invokes it constantly. The ABC commentator invokes four different phenomena, none of which he understands:
1. The financial problems of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
2. The mission of Fannie and Freddie,
3. The Community Reinvestment Act,
4. The greater mortgage crisis.
To refute the lie, we need to address these issues one at a time.
What does the video have to do with Fannie Mae's collapse? Nothing.
The best way to understand what happened is to start off with an understanding of when things happened. Therein lies the bait-and-switch. The financial problems at Fannie Mae began after these Congressional hearings, which were conducted a few weeks before the November 2004 elections. Fannie Mae's troubles were caused by Daniel Mudd, who reversed the policies of his predecessor, Franklin Raines, when he became CEO in December 2004. The New York Times laid it out very clearly:
"[B]y the time Mr. Mudd became Fannie's chief executive in 2004, his company was under siege. Competitors were snatching lucrative parts of its business. Congress was demanding that Mr. Mudd help steer more loans to low-income borrowers. Lenders were threatening to sell directly to Wall Street unless Fannie bought a bigger chunk of their riskiest loans.
"So Mr. Mudd made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives.
[...]
"Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed at least $270 billion in loans to risky borrowers -- more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined, according to company filings and industry data."
Democrats Supported Regulatory Oversight But Objected to a White House Power Grab
So if the October 2004 hearings did not address concerns associated with Fannie's risky mortgages, what was everyone talking about? Something quite different, though an ignoramus like George Will could easily conflate the two concepts. An Administration report had skewered Fannie for engaging in some dodgy accounting practices - relating to timing differences over the recognition of income - which had a slight impact on its overall financial metrics. Fannie and its management deserved to be criticized and increased regulatory oversight was absolutely appropriate. But what the House Democrats in the video were objecting to was the Administration's level of overkill. From how they saw things, the Bush Administration was using the pretext of regulatory oversight to accomplish a power grab that would compromise the mission of Fannie Mae. Here's what Barney Frank said at the time:
"I believe we were well on the way, the chairman and I and the staffs, to putting together a bill that would have enhanced the regulator and could have passed. What stopped progress on a new bill was the Bush administration's determination to go beyond safety and soundness and into provisions that would have restricted the housing function.
"To the extent that people played games [with accounting rules] to get bonuses, I'm outraged. People making that much money, let me put it this way, at the level of compensation of the top officers of Fannie Mae, they should get bonuses if they rush into a burning building a rescue a kid, maybe a cat, but not for doing their job. I think it is unseemly of them to be getting bonuses in the first place for doing what they're getting paid very well to do.
[...]
"To the extent that there was manipulation, that is very wrong and should be penalized. But I've seen nothing in here that suggests that the safety and soundness are at issue, and I think it serves us badly to raise safety and soundness as a kind of a general shibboleth, when it does not seem to be the issue."
Banks Governed by The Community Reinvestment Act Were Not The Ones Who Caused the Subprime Market to Expand
Daniel Gross in Slate attacks a lot of the same mythology discussed herein, focusing specifically on phony claims pertaining to the Community Reinvestment Act, which has been around for 30 years and never affected the soundness of the mortgage markets. The CRA never suggested that anyone compromise credit standards and it didn't apply to the mortgage lenders or investment banks who were pumping up subprime mortgages.
Hank Paulson: The mortgage crisis was caused by events that began during the run up to the 2004 election and ended soon after the Democrats took Congress in early 2007.
Again, to understand what happened, begin with understanding when things happened. In this regard, there's no secret. Everyone in financial services knows when and how things happened. Hank Paulson's report to the President reflected the common knowledge expressed by Treasury, the Fed, the SEC and the CFTC:
"The turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for US. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into early 2007. "[Italics in original text.]
We see this in all the numbers. According to a survey by the New York Fed, about 77% of subprime mortgages and 85% of Alt-A mortgages were issued after 2004. What happened in 2004? Subprime mortgage securitizations were able to take off because, as Bloomberg reported, in August 2004 Moody's and Standard and Poor's loosened their standards for rating mortgage backed securities, which had traded in a highly liquid market for almost 20 years. The impact of the rating agencies' practices cannot be overstated. To date, banks have recognized about $500 billion in losses on subprime mortgages, the lion's share of which were packaged in securities originally rated AAA, i.e. presumed to always be salable at close to par.
In 2004 short term interest rates, reduced by Alan Greenspan to stimulate the economy going in to the election cycle, reached their lowest point, enabling certain buyers to get variable rate mortgages at teaser rates of 3% for the first two years.
Nowhere in Paulson's report will you find anything that suggests that the financial crisis was triggered by, as George Will put it, regulation that compelling lending to "non-productive borrowers" or by Fannie or Freddie, which had been around for decades, "rigging the housing market."
As a final aside, you may remember this little gem from the McCain campaign. It's an ad that claims Obama relied on economic advice from Franklin Raines, which wasn't actually true. What do you think McCain was getting at?
We here at DemocraticNationUSA have _NO_ doubt that 'Democratic' Party leaders have been in the middle of the DEREGULATION agenda, and have not stood up forcefully enough to the climate of greed and lack of oversight on Wall St. and in the financial markets.
BUT TO BLAME THIS _ENTIRE_ ECONOMIC CRISIS on Fannie Mae is patently absurd - especially since THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS IN CONTROL of BOTH the White House AND CONGRESS from 2002 to 2006. As recently as JULY 2006, PRESIDENT Bush's OWN Secretary of Treasury QUASHED RUMORS that Fannie Mae needed a bailout, Treasury Secretary Paulson flatly asserting that there would be no bailout for Fannie Mae.
BUT - IF Sec. Paulson had to ACKNOWLEDGE the POTENTIAL need for a bailout at Fannie Mae, SHOULD HE NOT HAVE ADDRESSED a BUDDING CRISIS THERE long before September and October 2008?????
===================================
Wagging the Dog With Fannie Mae: Republicans Explain the Financial Crisis With Racist Mythology
David Fiderer
Posted October 9, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/wagging-the-dog-with-fann_b_133388.html
"Is this video a lie?" wrote someone in response to my last piece on HuffPost.
No, "lie" is an inadequate description. I uploaded the video link, seen by two million people before me, and gasped at the artful perversion of history. It was like a post-millennium version of The Birth of a Nation. In that silent film classic, a pivotal scene is prefaced by the title card:
"AN HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of the State House of Representatives of South Carolina as it was in 1870."
Then we see black legislators in session, drinking whiskey, eating chicken, resting bare feet on their desks, and leering after white women. As J. Lapper wrote:
"This is also the first instance of "bait and switch" in the film. Prior to this, as noted above, [Director D.W.] Griffith used 'historical facsimiles' to give the film an air of historical accuracy...The subversive logic being, 'Earlier we saw facsimiles of Sherman's March, Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination. We know those are true. This must be too.'"
The updated "historical facsimile" from NakedEmperorNews.com, is just as dishonest and just as racially incendiary, since it has the semblance of reasonableness and reality. The hero at the Congressional hearings is the courtly southern gentleman, Republican Richard Baker, whose calls for regulatory oversight are drowned out by the shiftless uncouth blacks: Maxine Waters, Gregory Meeks, Lacy Clay, Artur Davis and Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, aided by one white guy, Barney Frank.
[Update at 9:00 am October 10, 2008: Yesterday John McCain echoed this video by saying, "Democrat members of Congress fought against reform and it is a matter of record and hearings that they said everything was fine." Barney Frank was one of the "willing co-conspirators."]
To appreciate the mendacity of the video, you need to understand the history of what happened at Fannie Mae, and the causes of the current financial crisis. You'd be hard pressed to get that knowledge from mainstream media, whose piecemeal reporting comes across like blind men describing an elephant.
Into this void of understanding, Republicans have sought to absolve themselves of blame with a racist mythology that has gone viral. George Will, a chief proponent, neatly summarized the narrative on This Week last Sunday:
"In fact, much of the crisis we're in today is because the government set out to fiddle the market. That is, we had regulation in effect with legislation that would criminalize as racism and discrimination if you didn't lend to nonproductive borrowers. We had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac existed to rig the housing market because the market would not have put people in homes they could not have afforded."
Will's narrative is about as accurate as D.W. Griffith's portrayal of Reconstruction. Fox News invokes it constantly. The ABC commentator invokes four different phenomena, none of which he understands:
1. The financial problems of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
2. The mission of Fannie and Freddie,
3. The Community Reinvestment Act,
4. The greater mortgage crisis.
To refute the lie, we need to address these issues one at a time.
What does the video have to do with Fannie Mae's collapse? Nothing.
The best way to understand what happened is to start off with an understanding of when things happened. Therein lies the bait-and-switch. The financial problems at Fannie Mae began after these Congressional hearings, which were conducted a few weeks before the November 2004 elections. Fannie Mae's troubles were caused by Daniel Mudd, who reversed the policies of his predecessor, Franklin Raines, when he became CEO in December 2004. The New York Times laid it out very clearly:
"[B]y the time Mr. Mudd became Fannie's chief executive in 2004, his company was under siege. Competitors were snatching lucrative parts of its business. Congress was demanding that Mr. Mudd help steer more loans to low-income borrowers. Lenders were threatening to sell directly to Wall Street unless Fannie bought a bigger chunk of their riskiest loans.
"So Mr. Mudd made a fateful choice. Disregarding warnings from his managers that lenders were making too many loans that would never be repaid, he steered Fannie into more treacherous corners of the mortgage market, according to executives.
[...]
"Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed at least $270 billion in loans to risky borrowers -- more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined, according to company filings and industry data."
Democrats Supported Regulatory Oversight But Objected to a White House Power Grab
So if the October 2004 hearings did not address concerns associated with Fannie's risky mortgages, what was everyone talking about? Something quite different, though an ignoramus like George Will could easily conflate the two concepts. An Administration report had skewered Fannie for engaging in some dodgy accounting practices - relating to timing differences over the recognition of income - which had a slight impact on its overall financial metrics. Fannie and its management deserved to be criticized and increased regulatory oversight was absolutely appropriate. But what the House Democrats in the video were objecting to was the Administration's level of overkill. From how they saw things, the Bush Administration was using the pretext of regulatory oversight to accomplish a power grab that would compromise the mission of Fannie Mae. Here's what Barney Frank said at the time:
"I believe we were well on the way, the chairman and I and the staffs, to putting together a bill that would have enhanced the regulator and could have passed. What stopped progress on a new bill was the Bush administration's determination to go beyond safety and soundness and into provisions that would have restricted the housing function.
"To the extent that people played games [with accounting rules] to get bonuses, I'm outraged. People making that much money, let me put it this way, at the level of compensation of the top officers of Fannie Mae, they should get bonuses if they rush into a burning building a rescue a kid, maybe a cat, but not for doing their job. I think it is unseemly of them to be getting bonuses in the first place for doing what they're getting paid very well to do.
[...]
"To the extent that there was manipulation, that is very wrong and should be penalized. But I've seen nothing in here that suggests that the safety and soundness are at issue, and I think it serves us badly to raise safety and soundness as a kind of a general shibboleth, when it does not seem to be the issue."
Banks Governed by The Community Reinvestment Act Were Not The Ones Who Caused the Subprime Market to Expand
Daniel Gross in Slate attacks a lot of the same mythology discussed herein, focusing specifically on phony claims pertaining to the Community Reinvestment Act, which has been around for 30 years and never affected the soundness of the mortgage markets. The CRA never suggested that anyone compromise credit standards and it didn't apply to the mortgage lenders or investment banks who were pumping up subprime mortgages.
Hank Paulson: The mortgage crisis was caused by events that began during the run up to the 2004 election and ended soon after the Democrats took Congress in early 2007.
Again, to understand what happened, begin with understanding when things happened. In this regard, there's no secret. Everyone in financial services knows when and how things happened. Hank Paulson's report to the President reflected the common knowledge expressed by Treasury, the Fed, the SEC and the CFTC:
"The turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for US. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into early 2007. "[Italics in original text.]
We see this in all the numbers. According to a survey by the New York Fed, about 77% of subprime mortgages and 85% of Alt-A mortgages were issued after 2004. What happened in 2004? Subprime mortgage securitizations were able to take off because, as Bloomberg reported, in August 2004 Moody's and Standard and Poor's loosened their standards for rating mortgage backed securities, which had traded in a highly liquid market for almost 20 years. The impact of the rating agencies' practices cannot be overstated. To date, banks have recognized about $500 billion in losses on subprime mortgages, the lion's share of which were packaged in securities originally rated AAA, i.e. presumed to always be salable at close to par.
In 2004 short term interest rates, reduced by Alan Greenspan to stimulate the economy going in to the election cycle, reached their lowest point, enabling certain buyers to get variable rate mortgages at teaser rates of 3% for the first two years.
Nowhere in Paulson's report will you find anything that suggests that the financial crisis was triggered by, as George Will put it, regulation that compelling lending to "non-productive borrowers" or by Fannie or Freddie, which had been around for decades, "rigging the housing market."
As a final aside, you may remember this little gem from the McCain campaign. It's an ad that claims Obama relied on economic advice from Franklin Raines, which wasn't actually true. What do you think McCain was getting at?
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Paul Craig Roberts expose of DEREGULATION leading to ECONOMIC CRISIS... Roberts DEFENDS REAGAN, points to CLINTON Admin. COMPLICITY in Wall St greed
Video supports author Paul Craig Roberts' contention that DEREGULATION was at the core of the US economic, credit, and banking crisis. Roberts make the explicit claim that the Republican "DEREGULATION!" mania came LONG AFTER President Reagan had left office, and when Republicans like PHIL GRAMM, JOHN McCAIN, DICK ARMEY, and Dick Cheney steered the Republican Party AWAY from the course set by Reagan.
===================================
AN EXCELLENT commentary by former REPUBLICAN REAGAN ADMINISTRATION official PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS outlines and details how THE _DEREGULATION MANIA_, propelled by Wall Street GREED led DIRECTLY to the current CREDIT, BANKING, and MORTGAGE CRISIS,
the current economic crisis being an EXACT, CARBON-COPY REPLAY of the 1980s SAVINGS & LOAN crisis that led directly to the Bush-1 DEFICITS, which led directly to the BUSH-1 RECESSION, which led to Iraq War US Army combat veteran Timmy McVeigh - involuntarily discharged from the Army and UNABLE TO FIND EMPLOYMENT in up-state New York after the war - to start listening to RIGHT-WING HATE RADIO as he moved to the MILITIA/gun-nut subculture, before he plotted and executed the BOMBING of the Oklahoma City government building with murderous results.
THOSE are the STAKES of THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS.
THIS economic crisis is a DIRECT RESULT of WALL Street bankers and brokers getting paid inflated commissions, from mortgage loans hyping INFLATED and OVER-VALUED property values. The "sub-prime" mortgage crisis is actually A SMALL PART of the "good" QUALIFYING home loans THAT WENT BUST - WASHINGTON MUTUAL _DID NOT_ write many "sub-prime" mortgages before it went into virtual bankruptcy and was taken over by the government.
====================================
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20955.htm
I remember when the deregulation of the financial sector began. One of the first inroads was the legislation, written by bankers, to permit national branch banking. George Champion, former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, testified against it. In columns I argued that national branch banking would focus banks away from local business needs.
The deregulation of the financial sector was achieved by the Democratic Clinton Administration and by the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, with the acquiescence of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Paulson bailout saves his firm, Goldman Sachs. The Paulson bailout transfers the troubled financial instruments that the financial sector created from the books of the financial sector to the books of the taxpayers at the US Treasury.
This is all the bailout does. It rescues the guilty.
The Paulson bailout does not address the problem, which is the defaulting home mortgages.
The defaults will continue, because the economy is sinking into recession. Homeowners are losing their jobs, and homeowners are being hit with rising mortgage payments resulting from adjustable rate mortgages and escalator interest rate clauses in their mortgages that make homeowners unable to service their debt.
Shifting the troubled assets from the financial sectors’ books to the taxpayers’ books absolves the people who caused the problem from responsibility. As the economy declines and mortgage default rates rise, the US Treasury and the American taxpayers could end up with a $700 billion loss.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Excellent Opposition to the PELOSI-Bush-PAULSON Millionaires' BAILOUT BILL...
Below we will post some quick links in opposition to the PELOSI-Bush-PAULSON US Taxpayer financed BAILOUT of WALL ST. MILLIONAIRES bill.
The premise behind this bailout is simplicity itself: Wall Street (and its lobbyists and hired media whores, which is to say 90% of the US media) CRYING AT THE TOP of their voices,
"IF YOU DON'T GIVE US A TRILLION DOLLARS TODAY, WE WON'T LEND YOU A DIME TOMMORROW!"
This is of course PATENTLY ABSURD.
#1. Senator Bernie Sanders opposes the PELOSI-Paulson GIVE-AWAY bill...
#2. Rep. Marcy Kaptur opposes the Peloi-Paulson GIVE-AWAY BILL..
#3. Rep. DeFazio OPPOSES the Pelosi-Paulson give-away bill...
#4. Rep. Dennis Kucinich opposes the Paulson-PELOSI BAILOUT bill...
#5. Lou Dobbs was even more outspoken Weds. night in opposition to the Pelosi-Paulson Bailout bill than his guests Rep. Kaptur and DeFazio were.... http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/09/30/ldt.kaptur.defazio.intv.cnn
Speaker Pelosi IS REWARDING FAILURE and CORRUPTION at the expense of the very citizens who have been steered in to predatory loans, over-hyped refinancing, inflated property values, and soaring gas and energy prices, from those very Wall St. banks, brokers, and energy traders!
WHILE Wall St. and it's media whores like to trumpet "SUB-PRIME MORTGAGES!" as the cause of this crisis, that is simply NOT true: WaMu did not write many "subprime" mortgages, if any: MANY of WaMu's FORECLOSURES are LUXURY HOMES in GATED COMMUNITIES by people who PUT 10% DOWN, and had good jobs and incomes at the time. Homebuyers in a RISING MARKET thought that they were _insured_ against a credit nightmare, because if they lost their jobs or incomes, they could always sell the home in a rising market. IT WAS WHEN THE WHOLE MARKET turned, that some people became UPSIDE DOWN for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the value of their loans, and other people simply lost jobs or had income-killing medical crisis.
Wouldn't a BETTER _CREDIT RESTORATION PLAN_ be TO FIND THOSE BANKS AND LOAN companies THAT DID _NOT_ FAIL in the over-hyped markets - and guarantee them BILLION DOLLAR LINES OF government CREDIT so they could take up where the FAILED banks & lenders left off?
Institutions like LOCAL CO-OPS and CREDIT UNIONS ?
No, clearly NANCY PELOSI, the DEMOCRATIC "leaders" in the House and Senate, the American media, and the Republican Party are IN IN BED WITH the Wall St. Banking lords who are SO QUICK TO BRAG ABOUT THEIR PROFITS one year - and BEG, PLEAD, CAJOLE, and DEMAND BAILOUTS the next!
Goldman Sachs infamous, wallow in bonus billions, WHILE thousands of American homeowners are BEING EVICTED FROM THEIR HOMES! The $16 BILLION BONUS GREED CHRISTMAS of Dec. 2006 - http://abcnews.go.com/Business/FunMoney/story?id=2723990
Media Whores all but CENSOR REAL ECONOMIC DEBATE from coverage of the bailout plan. This follows the WHORE media's FAVORITE THEME - THE HORSE RACE! The "he said, she said" politics of a debate or bill... WITHOUT HARD ANALYSIS of the economics behind theat bill, in this case bailout.
As Josh Silver reports at HuffingtonPost.com -
"The American people are getting virtually no hard economic analysis about what the bailout would achieve or what the range of options are.
to the International Monetary Fund after studying 42 banking crises over the past 37 years. Their conclusion: Bailouts often do not work, they often result in more bad practices, and they distort economies by transferring wealth from taxpayers to bankers and their customers.
Why hasn't economist Dean Baker been invited onto a single television program in the past week? He is one of the guys who actually predicted the current crisis." >>
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/29/why_bail/
Baker simply posits that IF the NIGHTMARE presented by Pres. Bush and his Secretary of Goldman Sachs came to pass - IF there were an entire banking meltdown - then the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT would step in and restore the banks - AS IT JUST DID in the case of depositers making a run on WaMu and BREAKING that bank.
Speaker Pelosi leaves Vote Integrity whistleblowers - out to hang.
RawStory.com posts a credible report by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane detailing YET MORE confirmation that DIEBOLD vote counting machines were used to ALTER THE TOTAL VOTE COUNT of several critical elections in 2002 and 2004. There are already dozens of stories which suggest that incumbent Georgia Senator Max Cleland - Democrat and Vietnam War triple-amputee - was ROBBED of his legitimate re-election vote majority, by HACKING of Deibold computerized voting machines and other methods. Both pre-election polls, and (post-election) exit polls had Senator Cleland winning the majority; but the official vote count had Cleland LOSING his election by the same margin that the exit polls indicated that he had won it.
That is, a high probability exists that vote-counting machines "FLIPPED" votes from the winning candidate to the losing candidate, STEALING votes from the popular vote winner, and thereby STEALING THE VOTES of thousands of Georgians who were opposed to the Republican candidate who actually lost the election, but won the office.
IN TWO YEARS AS SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, SPEAKER PELOSI has IGNORED those persisent reports - INCLUDING SIGNED AFFADAVITS BY WHISTLEBLOWERS - that America's election process more closely resembles voting in a dictator regime, than the pride of "FREEDOM" and "liberty" that Americans have taken as their birth-right.
THE ONLY THING Speaker Pelosi is qualified to do, is GIVE BILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS to the very financial ROBBER BARONS who REPEATED in the past 4 years, the ENRON ACCOUNING FRAUD of the 2002 years; and to LEGITIMIZE and WHITEWASH the criminal abuses of power of the Bush administration.
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/Cybersecurity_expert_raises_allegations_of_2004_0717.html
That is, a high probability exists that vote-counting machines "FLIPPED" votes from the winning candidate to the losing candidate, STEALING votes from the popular vote winner, and thereby STEALING THE VOTES of thousands of Georgians who were opposed to the Republican candidate who actually lost the election, but won the office.
IN TWO YEARS AS SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, SPEAKER PELOSI has IGNORED those persisent reports - INCLUDING SIGNED AFFADAVITS BY WHISTLEBLOWERS - that America's election process more closely resembles voting in a dictator regime, than the pride of "FREEDOM" and "liberty" that Americans have taken as their birth-right.
THE ONLY THING Speaker Pelosi is qualified to do, is GIVE BILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS to the very financial ROBBER BARONS who REPEATED in the past 4 years, the ENRON ACCOUNING FRAUD of the 2002 years; and to LEGITIMIZE and WHITEWASH the criminal abuses of power of the Bush administration.
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/Cybersecurity_expert_raises_allegations_of_2004_0717.html
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Harry Reid PATS HIMSELF ON THE BACK.. for COURAGEOUSLY GIVING AWAY _our_ Money...
Harry Reid is now qualified to guard a hen house, not with a double-barreled shotgun, two rolls of chicken wire, and good guard dog to help him.
He is this evening patting himself on the back for "COURAGEOUSLY" GIVING AWAY nearly a trillion dollars of money that isn't even his - Giving Away nearly A TRILLION DOLLARS of TAXPAYER MONEY!
AND THE WORST PART, the MOST DESPICABLE PART of Harry Reid's pathetic 'leadership' of the Democrat Senate, is not only can Reid NOT BEGIN TO ACCOUNT for the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS that have VANISHED from the US financial system... but Reid CAN'T EVEN GET THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TO ADMIT THAT THEY HAVE SQUANDERED the nation's treasury these past 8 years, Senate Majority "Leader" CAN'T EVEN GET HENRY PAULSON to acknowledge that he has BEEN CLUELESS these past 2 years while heading the Dept. of Treasury.
He is this evening patting himself on the back for "COURAGEOUSLY" GIVING AWAY nearly a trillion dollars of money that isn't even his - Giving Away nearly A TRILLION DOLLARS of TAXPAYER MONEY!
AND THE WORST PART, the MOST DESPICABLE PART of Harry Reid's pathetic 'leadership' of the Democrat Senate, is not only can Reid NOT BEGIN TO ACCOUNT for the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS that have VANISHED from the US financial system... but Reid CAN'T EVEN GET THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TO ADMIT THAT THEY HAVE SQUANDERED the nation's treasury these past 8 years, Senate Majority "Leader" CAN'T EVEN GET HENRY PAULSON to acknowledge that he has BEEN CLUELESS these past 2 years while heading the Dept. of Treasury.
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