Blackmailing for Bail Outs

Apparently our federal government’s only interests are the war and the wealthy, as evidenced by the tax payer funding of a trillion dollars for Iraq and a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street.

Rather than give the 700 billion to the bankers who got us into this mess to begin with, why not invest it in Americans with good ideas? Whenever the politicians want to push through shady measures the situation is always so urgent there’s no time to wait, it’s an emergency! Senator John Kyl said the bail out is so urgent we don’t have time for ideas.

One entrepreneur has the idea of developing a way to make oil from mold. But of course this idea and many like them are finding it very difficult to obtain funding. Gee maybe some of that 700 billion could help this entrepreneur develop alternative energy sources, because that’s what we really need to get out of our current mess, get off the oil. That and a redistribution of wealth.

Oh but that smacks of communism you say, so that’s a no go. At this point we are no longer a republic, the feds have nationalized the mortgage industry, socialized losses on Wall Street, subsidized the oil industry and privatized wars all with tax payer dollars, therefore a serious redistribution of wealth is sorely needed to get this country back on track. America used to be a place where you could get ahead through hard work, effort, determination and doing without. Not so today.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said you can have the power and wealth in the hands of the few or you can have a democracy but you can’t have both. If this current economic meltdown and impending credit crisis doesn’t show everyone what happens with the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few than nothing will.

All the talking heads in DC are telling us if we don’t do something fast our retirement and college funds will dry up, there’ll be no more credit loans for cars, millions will lose their homes and jobs. As if these things haven’t been happening for decades thanks to NAFTA and banking deregulation. Why do you think they changed the rules for bankruptcy a few years ago? They saw this coming, they knew it was imminent.

No one has said that this bail out will work, only that if we don’t do it we‘ll be in a recession. The more they say it the more fear it instills to all Americans.

We are not descended from fearful people, the founders risked their lives and their fortunes to establish the United States of America. Don’t let them blackmail us into becoming Amerika home of the scared and land of the financially enslaved.

Privatizing Profits

If we complain about the high cost of living then we’re told “tough luck you should’ve planned better.” The greedy bankers didn’t plan very well with our money market funds and our retirements, but while they get financial rescue we have to pay more in taxes.

The mortgage backed security was a Wall Street plan that created the current credit and home mortgage crisis. Sub prime loans (sub prime loans were created in the 80’s because of banking deregulation) were pooled into blocks of mortgages worth millions of dollars. These blocks of mortgages would be sold to investment banks like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch who then turned them into MBS (mortgage backed securities) bonds that were sold to pension plans and foreign governments. Wall Street made billions gambling on our homes and lost.

In these unreasonable times our capitalistic system socializes losses while privatizing profits, all brought to us by decades of regulation busting politicians and corporate crooks, including but not limited to John McCain. Remember the Keating Five? Charles Keating was a big cash donor to John McCain. The bail out of Keating’s bank the Lincoln Savings alone, cost us four billion. The bailouts of Keating’s and other banks set the ball rolling for this sub prime loan debacle.

Adam Smith who wrote the book on capitalism in 1776 said “only God can fix prices”. Now look where we are after Wall Street fixed the prices in the housing market to explode ever higher with no end in sight.

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (former chairman of Goldman Sachs) is putting the interests of the private sector over the interests of the public. Bush, Cheney and their appointees will leave us with an oligarchy; ‘Government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich‘.

Redefining Victory

We’re being told that the surge in Iraq is over and we have achieved victory. The president and the Pentagon are hedging their bets by saying “durability exists” but the “progress is reversible“.

We were told we won in Afghanistan when the Taliban were expelled and were replaced with former Unocal oil company consultant Harmid Karzai. Today the number of American deaths are the highest they’ve been since 2001, violence is up by forty percent, the Taliban are taking over villages without the use of military force and they control 90 percent of the poppy wealth.

Secretary of Defense Gates claims because of this “victory” in Iraq we won’t be seeing large scale operations like this again, instead we’ll be seeing smaller Special Forces Operations.

The steel desk warriors at the Pentagon sent Special Forces and Navy Seals on missions to the tops of mountain in Afghanistan where their helicopters were shot down in in an area they were told was devoid of the enemy. Our brave forces were then surrounded and attacked by Taliban and Chechen fighters. One Special Forces team leader said all modern technology failed them and he had to go back to fighting wars the old fashioned way; with thinking, pencil and paper.

The old fashioned definition of victory is when the dying of American troops stops and the enemy surrenders. Neither of these have happened in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The war in Vietnam (which both the president and vice president dodged) was televised. We’re not seeing any signs of victories now just like we’re not seeing any of the coffins coming home.

Wall Street Eats Main Street

By bailing out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae the US government has become the largest holder of mortgages in the country. As government chartered private enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to borrow money at a lower rate, and both were intended to buy mortgages to put cash back into the hands of lenders, enabling them to make even more mortgage loans. Fannie Mae, created in the 30’s, originally could only buy FHA or VA backed loans. Freddie Mac was created in the 70’s and was only supposed to buy S&L loans; loans backed by deposits and put out by savings banks.

During the 80’s, Countrywide; Ameriquest and other non-bank mortgage lenders were funded by wholesale loans made by investment bankers on Wall Street. These wholesale loans permitted non-bank lenders to capitalize on the sub prime loan industry that led to the destruction of our mortgage banking system that had worked for over 150 years. In the 80’s these hugely profitable non-bank mortgage lenders sued and won to have Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae buy their sub prime high risk loans.

The sub prime lenders coerced people into paying higher interest rates to off set closing costs and points amongst other tricks such as using fake appraisers to forge the value of a home higher so they could loan more money to make more money. The higher the interest rate the higher the profits for non bank lenders, mortgage brokers and Wall Street investment firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns amongst others who made billions from people who didn‘t have much.

They were able to perpetrate this scam on something called a “Mortgage Backed Security” created by Lew Ranieri of Wall Street. The non bank lenders would sell their mortgages to Wall St, which securitized them as “MBS” bonds and then sold them to pension plans, mutual funds and banks from other countries.

The CEO’s of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae couldn’t buy enough of them to have on their balance sheets, a trick for making future profits look like profits made today. Freddie Mac begged Countrywide to buy their sub-prime loans. Now, we as tax payer are going to pay for these huge investment frauds and scandals while the few walk away with billions bilked from our savings, our retirement and our homes.

Two months ago Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson was saying that we weren’t going to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, he just needed the new bail out powers granted to him by Congress to help the market gain “confidence” knowing they had this possible back stop of a government sponsored tax payer bail out.

Then our government sponsored a bail out of Bear Stearns (a Wall Street investment firm and wholesale lender to sub prime non-banks) by loaning JPMorgan Chase 32 billion at two and a half percent interest to purchase Bear Stearns. At the time of this bailout Secretary Paulson said he didn’t know how many more companies had participated in predatory lending and dangerously risky investments or as he phrased it “moral hazards”.

The underlying ‘secret handshake’ of Wall Street; sub prime lenders, and all those who bought these MBS was that the private mortgage companies; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were insured by the government so… no need to worry. If anything happens the US ‘guvmint’ will bail them out.

For decades the utopian anarchists who run the government have told us that in a capitalistic society the market will “regulate” itself. However, it appears that when the market is flooded like now with “moral hazards”, it cannot regulate itself. It ends up needing a bail out by the same big government they so despised when it came to regulating them. We’re spending billions to bail out the Wall Street bankers who funded these predatory sub-prime lenders.

The mortgage industry had worked well for 150 years, but Reagan and the other Republican and Democrat politicians alike deregulated the industry by using the ruse that these ‘rules’ crippled our capitalistic democracy, with a government that was too big and had too many regulations. We the US tax payers get big bills for bail outs when we get rid of big government.

For all those who are against nationalizing the oil industry they should be against nationalizing the mortgage industry which is what Bush has done by taking over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The US tax payer now owns a 2 trillion dollar debt in mortgage loans.

Trillions for Iraq and billions to bail out the greedy bankers on Wall Street. Where is this money going to come from? It’s the impoverished children, the elderly poor and the disabled veterans who are the ones this government scales back on first, the rest of us are next. Say sayonara to Medicare and Social Security, we can’t afford these “entitlement” programs created by big government that helps society because we’re too busy baling out the greedy Wall Street investors and sub prime lenders like Ameriquest, Countrywide and the CEO’s of Fannie and Freddie who, after being fired, will receive 24 million dollars between the two of them.

Medic! Pass the Tampon please!

US soldiers in Iraq are using tampons sent to them by family and friends to stop bleeding battle field wounds. With today’s technology there are dressings designed for any wounds sustained in war to prevent the victim from bleeding to death. But these are in short supply, so our soldiers are using tampons in place of the dressings to stop the bleeding.

Bush, Cheney and all the other neocon Republicans should be held in the highest contempt for running these wars ‘on the cheap’ (when it comes to supplying the troops) and treating our soldiers like disposable pawns on a chess board.

It is these same people who blackmail the Democrats into funding their failed wars by saying anyone who doesn’t vote for the war funding doesn’t support the troops. Meanwhile they’re the ones sending Americans into battle without the proper supplies or protections.

But let’s not exonerate the Democrats from their responsibilities to fight back, because the founders put the war funding powers into the hands of Congress as they are the ones who decide what the price of the war will cost us in lives and taxes.

Soldiers using tampons on the battlefield should make us all livid. Do people know this is going on and if they don’t they should. To learn more about the treatment of our soldiers read it here.