700 Billion An Economic 9/II Just Another Shock Doctrine

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It seems to me that this rush bail out these bandits without ANY means of paying it back or selling their company or LIMITS to CEO payouts is utterly absurd. Hilary had it right freeze foreclosers instead giving this ridiculous handout of 700 billion which will eventually top a trillion. Nobody is looking closely at this questioning what is about to be done.

Give this a listen, read or watch as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Robert Scheer and Dean Baker speak on Democracy Now today called..Sen. Bernie Sanders, Robert Scheer and Dean Baker on the Proposed $700 Billion Bailout of Wall Street, the Largest Government Bailout of Private Industry in US History

JUAN GONZALEZ: Bob Scheer, the issue also of this rush to pass this legislation—I’m reminded somewhat of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11: an immense tragedy occurs, and immediately they try to rush through legislation without many of the members of Congress even having a handle as to what it really contains.


ROBERT SCHEER: Oh, it’s absolutely outrageous, and we can’t let them get away with it. I mean, consider that Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs, OK? He knew about credit swaps. He knew about hybrid instruments. He knew all of this stuff. And now he’s the guy that says Congress has to give him a blank check, it has to be a pure bill? Nonsense!


This is our money. Why isn’t this money used to help people who are going to lose their houses? You miss two, three payments, and they’re going to foreclose on you; then they say, “Well, we hope the banks will work out new agreements.” Nonsense! Do a freeze on foreclosures. Stop the bleeding. Have a year to let it settle, and force the banks to come to agreements.


You know, but, I mean, the idea that they didn’t know what was going on, well, this is a Ponzi scheme of their creation, and they thought they would bail before it hit the fan. That’s what they thought. They’d be gone, and someone else would be blamed. They’d have their golden parachutes. I don’t know why we’re not considering criminal charges against these people. They have done more to hurt this nation than bin Laden could ever dream of.


AMY GOODMAN: Well, Robert Scheer, we’re also joined on the telephone by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Independent of Vermont, elected to the Senate in 2006 after serving sixteen years in the House, longest-serving Independent member of Congress in American history. Senator Sanders says the middle class shouldn’t be forced to pay for a crisis created by what he calls the Bush administration’s deregulatory fever and Wall Street’s insatiable greed.


Senator Sanders, welcome to Democracy Now! Well, the watchword these days is—or words, I should say—“too big to fail.”


SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, Amy, that’s right. And I think if it’s too big to fail, it probably is too big to exist. And, by the way, among many other things, what we’re doing now with the Bank of America picking up Countrywide and picking up Merrill Lynch, you’re creating another institution which is too big to fail, so that, among many other things, in my view, that we have got to do is to start breaking up these very, very large multinational corporations who continuously put us in this position.


But my main concern—I’ve only got a few minutes here—my main concern is twofold. I mean, for the longest period of time, up to literally a few weeks ago, we had our friends in the Bush administration telling us that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, everything is just fine. And now they tell us we’re on the verge of a major economic meltdown. We’ve got to give Wall Street a $700 billion bailout. And, by the way, of course, it is not going to be the people who have benefited, the people at the very, very top who have benefited financially from Bush’s reckless economic policies who are going to pick up the bailout; it is going to be the middle class, which has been suffering for the last eight years.


So the first point that we have to make is, if a bailout is necessary, it is not going to be, if I have anything to say about it, a working people picking up the cost of this; it is going to be the top one-tenth of one percent, who earn more than the bottom 50 percent. It is going to be all of these people who have made out very, very well under Bush’s reckless policies. So that’s my main concern right now.


Obviously, also we have to ensure that the assets purchased from the banks are realistically discounted, so that we don’t get ripped off in the process, and we have to require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies.


Also, I think that we have got to be—we on the left have got to be thinking big and learn a little bit from our right-wing friends who are able to pivot on a dime. For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street. So, my view is that, included in what we do, there should be a significant stimulus package, a really significant one, which addresses healthcare, which addresses sustainable energy, which addresses the infrastructure, which creates substantial number of jobs, addressing many of the long-term unmet needs of this country.


Obviously, also, we’ve got to understand why we got into this business. I was just re-reading a speech that I gave in the House. I was on the House Banking Committee in 1999, when Glass-Steagall legislation was done away with and the walls were broken down. And I think many of the things that I said and a number of other people said at that time about what would happen, in fact, has happened. So you’ve got to go back to re-regulating not only financial services, but you’ve also got to look at energy trading as well, which is certainly one of the reasons that people are paying $3.70 for a gallon of gas today. So I think those are some of the directions that we’ve got to move in the next few weeks.

Peace

dignin

i just posted this link in another thread but since its on topic, here ya go...ony 7 minutes long http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc

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yield6 wrote:

i just posted this link in another thread but since its on topic, here ya go...ony 7 minutes long http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc

Yup I've seen that one, Economic Shock Doctrine and we fall for this shit every time while these banker CEO bandits cruise off on their mega yachts.

It's fucking crime and a sham.

Peace

unsung

I believe we are not being told the entire truth, I also believe it is because the general public can't handle it.

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unsung wrote:

I believe we are not being told the entire truth, I also believe it is because the general public can't handle it.

The American public will believe anything that is told to them...WMD invading Iraq and so on. Just we buy into thinking this 700 bil is the best thing for the country that's about $2336.00 per person in the US. While CEO's just pat each other on the back and say job well done.

This will be left of US taxpayers and this next administration to deal just one last stroke my Bush and company in his screwing of America. Oh I'm NOT excluding the Dems in this case especially Bill Clinton.

Peace

g under p

This speaks to how things really are going with our government and it's banking systems.

* Naomi Klein: "Now Is the Time to Resist Wall Street's Shock Doctrine" *

While the collapse of this country's financial system continues to send shock
waves around the world, we speak to the bestselling author of The Shock
Doctrine. Naomi Klein says the public should be wary of the Bush administration
trying to use the crisis to push through more of the radical pro-corporate
policies that helped cause it in the first place.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/24/naomi_klein_now_is_the_time

AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, this week it’s not only about passing this legislation, but it is passing it by Friday.


NAOMI KLEIN: Absolutely. You know, and a lot of people have even described this Paulson plan as an economic PATRIOT Act. You know, one of the mistakes that I think they made, honestly, Amy, is how short it is. It’s just three pages, which means—you know, usually these pieces of legislation are much longer, so people don’t even bother reading them in that moment of extortion—you know, “Pass it now, or else…or else the sky falls in.” So, you know, in this case, I think they made a miscalculation. You know, there was an interesting article in Time that just came out, where they actually say that they have been working—you know, this is a quote—it says, “[Paulson] and his team [have] been working on [this] proposal for more than six months.” So, it’s quite surprising that it is as pared down as it is. It’s three pages. And the craziest thing has happened: people have read it. Regular people have read it. It doesn’t take that much time. And, you know, you read Section 8, which is just so stunning, just so bold in its demand for total and complete impunity. And that’s really what’s getting in their way, is people are reading this text, and they’re frankly shocked by it.


You know, we heard Henry Paulson say that he thought it would have been presumptuous to put in clauses calling for regulation. This is absolute nonsense. Section 2 of the same document talks about how they have the right to hire contractors to administer this huge operation, and we know that that means contracting with some of the very firms who are going to be bailed out. And then it says that it would be—they would be contracting them without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts. Amy, that is just as—that’s Iraq levels of impunity, or even more. I mean, basically what they are saying is that we want to be able to contract with companies but exempt those companies from the existing laws that bar conflict of interest, that have whistleblowing laws. I mean, the laws exist on the books, and they are actively excluding these contracts from those laws. So the idea that they didn’t want to be presumptuous is complete nonsense. They are being extremely presumptuous, because they are actively excluding these contractors, these would-be contractors, from existing oversight. We have to be very clear about this.


AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting who Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is, served as an assistant to Richard Nixon’s assistant, John Ehrlichman, and moved right from there to Goldman Sachs, then became head of it when, well, the now-Senator and then-Governor Corzine left Goldman Sachs.


]NAOMI KLEIN: You know, Amy, I don’t think we can stress this enough. Henry Paulson is one of the key people, the top people, responsible for creating the crisis that he is now claiming he will solve, you know, and this is—if we think about the 9/11 analogy and, you know, the state of shock that Americans were in after 9/11 and the emergence of Rudy Giuliani as the savior—and, you know, people have so much regret about that. And in the book, I write about this as the state of regression that we go into when we’re frightened. And I think Henry Paulson has really been cast in this role as an economic Rudy Giuliani, saving the day, impartial, bipartisan, a strong leader.


I found this article in BusinessWeek that ran when Paulson was appointed to the Treasury, and I just want to read you one sentence, because I think it’s all we need to know about Henry Paulson. This is from BusinessWeek, when he got the appointment as Treasury Secretary in 2006. The headline of the article is “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington.” It says, “Think of Paulson as Mr. Risk. He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in [their] pursuit of profits. By some key measures, the securities industry is more leveraged now than it was at the height of the 1990s boom.”


Then it goes on to say that when Paulson took over Goldman Sachs in 1999, they had $20 billion in debts. When he—in these high-risk gambles. When he left, they had $100 billion, which means he took their risk level from $20 billion to $100 billion. So it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Henry Paulson, far from speaking for Main Street, is actually bailing out his colleagues for some of the very debts that he himself accumulated. This is an extraordinary conflict of interest.

Peace