“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
That was Mitch McConnell in 2010. That was f*** you America. We don’t care that you have no job. We don’t care that you have no health care. We don’t care that your kids can’t read in the 10th grade. We don’t care that your babies are undernourished. We just want to get the black guy out of the White House. How much misery have McConnell and his greedy, self-serving cronies cost the people of this country in the last three years and how much more misery will they bring down on America if they win in November.
That’s right. They want you to vote for their guy Mitt and what do they promise you if you do? Lower taxes for the rich, disappearing programs that helped you through the hard times, times they created, less health care or none if they can get away with it, poisoned rivers, oil soaked animals, choking air and one scam after another, all flowing out of Wall Street, stealing your savings and screwing you out of your homes. Wow! What a platform.
In the past two years Republicans have fought the middle-class tax cut, killed the jobs bill, rejected a bill to reveal the sources of big campaign donations, delayed agreement on the solution to the debt ceiling, causing the first ever downgrade of our credit rating and obstructed efforts to provide debt relief to underwater homeowners seeking mortgage help.
The Republicans demanded a $16 million cut in the FAAS budget that led to a shutdown that cost taxpayers $25 million a day. They stopped a bill to cut student loan rates, another that would have given women equal pay with men doing the same job.
How did they do all this good stuff for the country? Two ways. One was by relying on a lock step majority in the House and the other was by implementing the obstructionist filibuster in the Senate, thereby creating gridlock and establishing the least productive congress in the history of the nation. That’s right gang. These guys did squat. In fact they did less than squat. They stopped squat from even happening. Are you going to reward them by extending their job at the next election or are you going to oust them from the House and Senate and send them packing the way they deserve?
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As everyone who reads this blog knows, I have never held back on attacks against Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase. In truth I have been very vocal in my condemnation of him and his compatriots as major causes of the funk in which our economy now finds itself.
So it’s only fair that I acknowledge the fact that Mr. Dimon had the stones and the integrity to come on TV a while back, and acknowledge that JPMorgan Chase, under his direction, has screwed up- big time, in dumping over $6 billion into a losing bet on the safety of corporate debt. To be sure, Mr. Dimon was quick to point out that $6 billion was small change when JPMorgan Chases’ total worth was considered. $6 billion may be small change to Mr. Dimon but it sure sounds like a hell of a lot of money to me, money that could be put to way better uses than CEO salaries and crap shoot investments.
The basic problem is that the money Dimon is investing is depositor’s money, not the bank’s money, and it is insured by the taxpayer backed FDIC. It’s not like Dimon took the cash from his pocket and slapped it down on a number. Jamie Dimon is one of the smartest guys on Wall Street and based on his recent interview on meet the press, mea culpas aside, he seems to realize that he shouldn’t be playing with other peoples money. He even made kind of a half hearted admission that we do need “certain” kinds of regulation. Most people think he did that just to get the critics off his back but I will grudgingly give him credit for what he actually aid, regardless of motive. Of course as soon as he said it his lobbyists tied up every phone in D.C. calling their bought and paid for congressmen and telling them in no uncertain terms that thy didn’t want any of those pesky regulations to even get started.
That’s the real world, where Dimon will be back to his old stance as soon as his company’s gaff gets off the front pages and he will once again be fighting to reduce regulation of the banking industry, but even if nothing else crashes, it is imperative that the banks, which with the end of Glass-Steagall, were allowed to merge their commercial and investment banking subsidiaries be forced to separate them again.
There’s nothing wrong with banks gambling with investor’s money. Investors are in the market to gamble. Depositors are not. When you deposit your money in a bank you have a right to expect that the bank will put it in only the most secure investments. That’s why the FDIC backs those deposits. The FDIC was not put together to insure against commercial bank loss, nor investment bank gambles. It is there to protect depositors against the failures of those bankers in whom they deposited their life savings, not to protect bankers against their own stupidity.
The first step in securing financial stability must be to separate commercial banks from investment banks so that the investment banks are not covered by the FDIC and are no longer gambling with taxpayer money.
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What does it take to get Attorney General Eric Holder off his ass and functioning? To date he has not indicted one single banker from the biggest criminal catastrophe in the history of the country. The late ‘80s crash resulted in over 800 bankers doing time for their criminal acts. Eric Holder can’t find one.
The list of potential felons includes; commercial bankers, investment bankers, Wall Street traders, real estate brokers, mortgage brokers and insurance executives. The list is endless and so are the unfiled public indictments. There are thousands of articles and close to one hundred books listing the illegal activities of these crooks and still Holder sits on his butt and does nothing.
Conjecture has it that the list is so long and so packed with millionaire names that the administration is terrified of a panic that would lead to a second crash. That may be, but ignoring all this criminal behavior sets a tone that is far worse in the long run.
Of course the question must be asked, does it all come down from Obama? Is it really about campaign funds? Is the Prez afraid of getting his big contributors in trouble and having to face the overwhelming tide of Republican money without the buffer he now relies on? Can there be any other excuse for this impossibly unethical behavior by our justice department?
Of course you can look at it from the other point of view, which is that if you put all these crooks in jail you would jam up the entire Republican Pac network.
Holder and his serfs are crucifying Bradley Manning and egging on the Brits to invade the Ecuadorian embassy, a breach of international law, to give them Julien Assange, all over a bunch of meaningless paper that despite the lies of the military prosecutor, has yet to actually put anyone in danger.
But here is a class of criminals who have ruined hundreds of thousands of lives all over this nation and they are walking the streets, Scot free. Forget all the accusations of the Right, this failure to prosecute, along with the signing of the NDAA are far and away the worst failures of the Obama administration. Forget people like Bradley Manning and Julien Assange and let’s get off our butts and go after the men and women who have actually done horrible damage to our nation and the people who live in it, pay taxes to it and fight its wars.
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We’ve spoken a great deal in this column about the causes of unemployment. I think that’s it’s now time to speak about how we can get people employed again; which policies are set up to help move us to that goal and which are in place to hinder our achievement of that goal.
I think it’s been firmly established that without demand there will be no motivation for the private sector to create jobs. All you have to do is look at the over $3 trillion that industry is holding in savings accounts instead of investing in job creation. We’ve already seen this, and we will only see it demonstrated again and again in the future. Cutting taxes for the rich so that the acquired money will trickle down into the job creation pool is nothing but a fantasy, a Mitch McConnell wet dream.. It has never and will never happen. So where does that leave us? With no possibility of private sector employment, we must create public sector employment in order to stimulate the private sector, which is, despite its failings,, the engine on which our economy must be built.
But all we hear from the right is that we must continue to cut government; that it must be made smaller. Okay, then where is employment going to come from? Of course, when you ask someone on the right, that question, they are stuck for an answer.
The answer is that the only place that can create employment without demand for a product is the government through the creation of services. This country is in desperate need of infrastructure. The states are in desperate need of police, firemen and especially teachers. These are the places where jobs can and should be created but the Republicans, despite the fact that they, at one time, backed these ideas, have now blocked any attempt by President Obama , to implement them through legislation such as the American Jobs Act. Which was filibustered to death in the Senate and not even brought to a vote in the House. This $450 billion package of fiscal measures aimed at job creation was to take effect in 2012. The package was to be financed by Obama’s long term deficit reduction plan.
Both independent economists and the Congressional Budget office agreed that the plan would have provided a significant lift to the job market in 2012 and 2013; that it would have added 1.3-1.9 million jobs in 2012 and more than 2 million by the end of 2013 but the republicans, who worried that any significant rise in employment would help Obama’s chances of re-election killed it. This was right wing patriotism in its finest hour. Screw starving children, let’s get ourselves elected.
Right now, government employment instead of rising to provide jobs is falling at the fastest rate since the ‘40s. If it had grown in the last three years at only the same rate as the population, which it did during the Bush years, the unemployment rate would now be under 7% instead of 7.8%. That would mean an additional 800,000 Americans would have jobs.
The US currently has about $1.1 trillion in unfunded infrastructure needs. Despite this, congress recently failed to approve Obama’s call for $90 billion in additional infrastructure spending, which would have supported 400,000 jobs. These jobs would not only help create demand, which would then create jobs in the private sector; they are jobs that would create competitiveness in the international marketplace.
The Republicans through their current spokesman, Mitt Romney keep bad mouthing these proposals but they don’t come up with anything that will create jobs.
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I hear that Grover Norquist is gathering the faithful again to renew their anti-tax pledges. Now, I hate to give scum like Norquist any kind of number one rating, but he may be the most destructive element in US politics today. This bum has wheedled, cajoled and bribed a large percentage of our congress to sign his destructive pledge, all in violation of their oath of office. I may be wrong but I do believe that every congressman who has signed the pledge has put himself in a position to be recalled.
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Watched Romney advisor, Bay Buchanan on MTP. She is certifiably insane. Accused both David Brooks and Sean Hannity of being against Romney. I watch this demented woman and I can see why Romney’s campaign is in the toilet. She raves about saving the nation from itself but has no solutions. She reminds me of the woman whose son has been convicted of rape, who calls the victim a slut. Are all the women of the right nuts?