McCain Out-Hoovers Hoover

McCain Out-Hoovers Hoover
By: emptywheel Thursday September 25, 2008 4:39 pm


if you think about it, McCain's about to do Hoover one better. After all, Hoover didn't fuck up the response to a financial crisis until after he was President. McCain's little photo op seems to have scuttled the Paulson deal, just as it was almost finalized.
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Warrior Negotiator

by dday

It's very hard to get the lay of the land on this bailout, but this looks to me like what happened today.

• After several hours of talks, Democrats and Senate Republicans reached something approaching a deal on at least principles, without specifics. House Republicans, particularly the rank and file, were never on board.

• The deal met virtually every priority John McCain had been promoting all week, but once he got to Washington, he met with John Boehner, came out and changed his tune.

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78% of Americans want a bailout



By Paul Davidson, USA TODAY
Nearly eight out of 10 Americans — 78% — say Congress should approve a historic bailout of the nation's financial markets, but most want lawmakers to significantly modify the Bush administration's $700 billion plan, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll
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Barney Frank: God save us from John McCain's "help"
By: SilentPatriot @ 7:52 PM - PDT

After announcing earlier in the day that a fundamental framework had been agreed upon, it appears House Republicans are trying to gum up the process with proposals Secretary Paulson testified would not work.

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Senator McCain has said he had to interrupt his campaign and couldn't do a debate because he had to come here to help us. God save us from such help. But in any case, there is no sign whatsoever that Senator McCain's got any real role here, so he certainly ought to feel free to go back and debate.

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McCain and House Republicans Shred Bill "More Deregulation!"
By: Ian Welsh Thursday September 25, 2008 4:40 pm
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Looks like McCain showed up to the President's "let's all agree on a bad bill" meeting and started talking about his own bill, with House Republicans. Apparently this bill involves more deregulation to fix the problem. (No, I'm not kidding. This is clearly some sort of pathology) So by the end of Bush's photo op, the bill was lying in pieces on the floor. I'm glad to see that John McCain's intervention helped so much in bringing together a deal.

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Breaking: House Republicans Scuttle Economic Rescue Talks
By: Scarecrow Thursday September 25, 2008 7:45 pm

Just breaking on MSNBC:

About 10:00 p.m. Thursday night, Barney Frank emerged from a Congressional meeting to announce that House Republicans had scuttled the negotiations over the financial bailout plan.

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The latest Gee Whiz new car.

The XR-3 Hybrid is a super-fuel-efficient two-passenger plug-in hybrid that achieves 125 mpg on diesel power alone, 225 mpg on combined diesel and electric power, and performance like a conventional automobile. The design of the XR-3 Hybrid focuses on existing technologies and a vehicle �personality� that makes conserving energy a fun driving experience. It showcases the design ideas explored in Robert Q. Riley�s book, Alternative Cars in the 21^st Century.
At just 1300 pounds, this high-performance design combines lightening-fast acceleration, a maximum speed of 85 mph, and fuel economy of 125- to over 200-mpg.

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Finally, Congress has a chance to redeem itself for the evil credit card bills they afflicted upon us.

Bonddad at The Agonist

You mean credit card companies might engage in questionable marketing practices? Say it isn't so! And the Bush administration hasn't done anything about it? I'm shocked!

Seriously -- it's about time we looked at these companies' practices. And while Dodd is obviously looking to get some press for his presidential run with these hearings, it's still a really good thing to see. This is something I'm going to try and follow for however long it goes on.

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A way Of Looking At The Economic Cost of War

Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars

I'm pretty good at math, but I cannot conceive a number that high. What a horrible, tragic waste, first and foremost in lives–both Iraqi and American–but also in potential of what we could have done with that money. To wit…

NYTimes:

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign - a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children's lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn't use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

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Healing the world's politics. Is that possible?

Chris Floyd at Truthout

...a quiet announcement at London's Hammersmith Hospital at the turning of the new year heralded a breakthrough that has the potential to be one of the most transformative developments ever seen in global affairs: a positive change on a par with - or even surpassing - the world-altering malignancies of war, greed and strife. But this boon could be strangled in its cradle by the vast corporate interests threatened by its radical new approach to both health care and business.

The approach is called "ethical pharmaceuticals," and it was unveiled on January 2 by Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, and Steve Brocchini of the London School of Pharmacy, the Guardian reports. Their team of scientists in India and the UK, financed by the prestigious Wellcome with technical assistance from the UK government, have developed a method of making small but significant changes to the molecular structure of existing drugs, thereby transforming them into new products, circumventing the long-term patents used by the corporate giants of Big Pharma to keep prices - and profits - high. This will give the world's poorest and most vulnerable people access to life-saving medicines - now priced out of reach - for mere pennies.

But the breakthrough is not merely biochemical. Shaunak's team is proposing a new model for the pharmaceutical business. The patent of the transformed drug they have developed is held by non-profit Imperial University. And because their methods are hundreds of millions dollars cheaper than the mammoth development costs of the big pharmaceutical companies - whose spending on marketing and advertising often dwarfs their funding of scientific research - Shaunak and his colleagues can market their vital medicines for infectious diseases at near-giveaway levels, yet still stay in business. How so? By foregoing the profit motive as the ultimate value of their work.

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Be sure to thank George for the coming fine economic climate.

It will be just about like the environmental climate. In a word... Screwed!!

Michael Roston at The Raw Story

"The picture I will lay out for you today is not a pretty one and it’s getting worse with the passage of time," said David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, in a Thursday morning hearing of the Senate's Budget Committee. "Continuing on our current fiscal path would gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately even our domestic tranquility and our national security," he warned.

[...]

The head of the GAO also warned that if no action is taken now to control government spending, severe tax hikes could be necessary. He stated that, "balancing the budget in 2040 could require actions as large as cutting total federal spending by 60 percent or raising federal taxes to 2 times today’s level."

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The economy is doing so well that the Euro is now worth more than the dollar. Way to go Bushie!

Bonddad at No Quarter
...the rise of the Euro internationally is another sign that the U.S. dollar is not what it used to be. There is increasing pressure on nations to buy and sell oil in euros, and anecdotal evidence suggests that drug dealers and money launderers now prefer euros to dollars. Historically, the underground cash economy has always sought the most stable and valuable paper currency to conduct business.

This is what happens when supply-side economics and rampant "shop 'til you drop" consumerism is the dominant economic policy of a nation.

The US government has run massive fiscal deficits for the last 6 years. Despite the accounting tricks used to mask the deficit's true size, the Bureau of Public Debt reports that total outstanding debt on September 30 2001 was $5,807,463,412,200.06 and currently stands at $8,593,076,179,156.67 -- an increase of 48% in six years. At the same time, the US government has cut taxes and gone to war, which has increased discretionary expenditures over 30%.

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This doesn't look good to me.

The United Arab Emirates are dumping dollars. That sounds like the economy might just be starting to tank. All that borrowed Iraq war money that Dubya is spending like a drunken sailor, might have a little to do with it.

Nicole Bell at Crooks and Liars

The United Arab Emirates plans to convert 8 percent of its foreign-exchange reserves to euros from dollars before September, the latest sign of growing global disaffection with the weakening U.S. currency.

The U.A.E. has started, "in a limited way," to sell part of its dollar reserves, the governor of the country's central bank, Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, said in an interview. "We will accumulate euros each time the market appears to dip" as part of a plan to expand the country's holding of euros to 10 percent of the total from the current 2 percent.

The Gulf state is among oil producers, including Iran, Venezuela and Indonesia, looking to shift their currency reserves into euros or sell their oil, which is now priced in dollars, for euros. The total value of the reserves held by the U.A.E. is $24.9 billion, Suwaidi said.

The dollar has fallen more than 10 percent this year against the euro.

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Did you know that L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" was an allegory?

OK, you got me. So what is it about?
Read this, by Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization.

Every now and then I read something that comes as a complete surprise. You might have the same reaction to the following passage from Jack Weatherford's The History of Money (1997), which comes out of his discussion of the late nineteenth century debate over adding silver to the gold monetary standard:

The most memorable work of literature to come from the debate over gold and silver in the United States was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, by journalist L. Frank Baum, who greatly distrusted the power of the city financiers and who supported a bimetallic dollar based on both gold and silver. Taking great literary license, he summarized and satirized the monetary debate and history of the era through a charming story about a naive but good Kansas farm girl named Dorothy, who represented the average rural American citizen. Baum seems to have based her character on the Populist orator Leslie Kelsey, nicknamed "the Kansas Tornado."

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