Geithner Pushes Taxpayer Funded Bailouts and Wealth Redistribution
Posted in Public Affairs, Money Matters, Health, Education, wordpress, Politics, News Media, disclosure, ethics, obama, Opinion, Business, Energy on March 29th, 2009 by Stanford MatthewsObama and crew had a plan to hit the Sunday morning talk shows and continue to pitch their agenda. Tim Geithner was on NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week. There is no ‘hope’ that anything will ‘change’ about the approach of the White House or the Obama administration’s agenda.
One clip had a wall streeter saying when Geithner talked about his plan the first time they hated it. Now they love it. Why wouldn’t they? Private investment in toxic assets has the upside guranteed and the downside protected by the American taxpayer at an advertised rate of 7% for the private sector versus 93% for the taxpayer.
Geithner on This Week once again spoke of his desire for redistributing wealth as shown on this site bofore with his call for more broadly shared gains in future economic growth. While the Obama administration and Mr Geithner have done nothing more than stay on message and gain approval from the Wall Street they demonize by handing them a bailout for the bailout with the taxpayer assuming all the risk the plan to increase the role of government and redistribute wealth continues.
Mr Geithner also pointed out that expanding government’s role in education as well as dominating energy, healthcare and spending like mad on infrastructure for ‘make work’ jobs is still the primary goal of their ’stimulus’. There is nothing stimulating about it.
The anti-climatic appearance of Senator John McCain on Meet the Press after Geithner only served to provide comic relief as his words are still the same also. ‘Reach across the aisle’ and ‘compromise’ while keeping the borders as loose as ever. Okay Senator, you got two things right. The surge worked in Iraq and you supported it early compared to many others. You said the fundamentals of the economy were strong during the campaign and got hammered for it. Obama and crew are essentially using the same rhetoric and not being criticized much for it. Wonderful. And you were right to point out that Obama has gone back on his word about campaign promises like eliminating earmarks. To repeat, nothing has changed.
Obama and crew are buying favor with the same people they claim got us into this mess. And they are using your money to do it. If you see that as the hope and change promoted by Barry and friends and like it, you are definitely off your meds.
One more time, nothing has changed.
The roundtable on This Week featured George Will, Cokie Roberts, Matthew Dowd and Paul Krugman. Krugman of course maintains the Geitherner (Obama) plan is seriously flawed. And he has the credentials to render his opinion worth noting and something more than political opposition.
The rest of the panel provided a reasoned discussion the details of which you may or may not agree. If you are interested in those details it is suggested you view the program on Sundays. Transcripts appeared not to be available at the time of this posting.
Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com
March 26, 2009
The second reporter called on by President Obama in his 3/24 press conference was entirely lame and appears to be a White House ploy to waste time rehashing the Obama claim that their plan for bailouts will impose sanctions on recipients and transparency and accountability no one has seen with the first half of TARP. The reporter asked if anyone would be asked to sacrifice and mentioned that those acting irresponsibly were ‘cushioned’ from the consequences of their actions by the bailout programs.
The excerpt below links to an interesting analysis of how the price at the pump is determined. This blog cannot speak to the validity of this appraisal but it is interesting nonetheless. In other words it is worth a read.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Seventh District Congressman Dave Obey (D-WI) today unveiled details of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009, which is intended to help stabilize the economy and restore public confidence.
“The economy is in such trouble that, even with passage of this package, unemployment rates are expected to rise to between eight and nine percent this year. Without this package, we are warned that unemployment could explode to near twelve percent. With passage of this package, we will face a large deficit for years to come. Without it, those deficits will be devastating and we face the risk of economic chaos. Tough choices have been made in this legislation and fiscal discipline will demand more tough choices in years to come,” Obey added.
The report below may make disputes between energy suppliers in the US and their customers seem less of a critical issue. What initially seemed to be a hardline dispute over the negotiation of pricing contracts between the former Soviet Union and the Ukraine has accusations of theft. So the EU is getting no gas from Russia until the Ukraine proves it is not stealing gas? That’s a controversy you wouldn’t want to be on the short end with the Russians in the middle of winter. It puts one at a considerable negotiating disadvantage. Sucks to be them.
Moscow cut its supplies to Ukraine on January first following a price dispute and on Wednesday, it also stopped all shipments to Europe through pipelines running across Ukraine, accusing Ukrainian authorities of stealing gas.
Florida’s 24th district featured a decisive win for Democrat Suzanne Kosmas over three term Republican incumbent Tom Feeney. Kosmas is cited as having a real estate business and serving eight years in the Florida legislature. She will represent four Florida counties and while some refer to her as a moderate and having a history of working with Republicans and opposing tax cuts in Florida there are also hints of typical liberal agendas. At the top is her redeployment stance on Iraq, supporting massive infrastructure spending as well as propping up the Kennedy Space Center in her state, universal health care and alternative energy. If she believes in balanced budgets, pay as you go, ‘accountability’ and tax cuts how does that live with the spending she supports?
While this blog is something of a fan of NASA and its long history the agency is not without serious flaws. The relatively small portion of the federal budget used by NASA (16 billion a few years back) may be made leaner if the space agency ever decides to pursue some of the technologies advanced by the private sector in recent years. Kosmas states in her brief announcement and introduction on The Hill’s Congress blog that she views NASA, or more precisely, the Kennedy Space Center as ‘one of the most significant issues’ in her district. That is followed by this statement. 
Veteran lawmakers typically gloat after their efforts defeat a competing effort from the opposition party. Likewise they blame the opposition party when things do not go well which is often. Veteran politicians and newbies use approved rhetoric when speaking publicly in an attempt to snow the voter. When things get really bad they all talk about the word ‘bipartisan’. It is used to equally distribute blame when they are all guilty and agree to collective job saving, their own. It is also used in an attempt to make the opposition party look bad when nothing is being done typically in regard to legislation. So the newbies mentioned here as well as the veteran lawmakers are all relying heavily on their political playbooks which supports the notion that, yes, newbies are complicit in Washington politics as usual.
Now, for another installment of The Downside of Elections as Term Limits the featured freshman is GOP Congressman-elect Tom Rooney in Florida’s 16th district. Above all it is hoped that Mr Rooney will not follow the examples provided by his two predecessors. GOP Congressman Mark Foley caused a scandal by sending emails to Congressional pages that could only be viewed as inappropriate and along with other particulars in the story indicate Foley has some real problems Foley’s replacement proves once again that the truth is stranger than fiction by causing his own sex scandal in cheating on his wife and getting sued by the woman with whom he had an affair. So, enter one Tom Rooney here to save the 16th for the Republican party. But…..
Given that there is no chance a Democrat would display conservative principles any GOP candidate or in this case Congressman-elect holds the only promise for supporting a reasonable agenda. For that reason success for Tom Rooney would be a benefit to his constituents and possibly the rest of America too. With that in mind and the recent history of the 16th district in Florida, Rooney falls somewhere between the up and downside of elections as term limits. No doubt it is good Mahoney and Foley were ousted or outed as the case may be. Only time will tell if Rooney is up to the task. The upside is the two losers were eliminated via election so term limits were indeed part upside. If Rooney doesn’t work out that would demonstrate the downside once again. Not only suggesting newbies are a risk but all the time wasted over the last few election cycles with losers and rookies. But not like that supports the notion of veteran lawmakers being a better choice by default.
As is the case with most crisis situations every political hack, including you, Nancy Pelosi, cannot resist the temptation to make the story political and pile all blame on the opposition party. The same can be said of your Presidential nominee for 2008. No, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, but Barack Obama who has used this story to attack his rival, Senator John McCain. But Obama may be getting confused or over his head on this story as he announced agreement with the Administration’s efforts to calm the storm and hesitated on announcing his idea of how to solve the problem. Like you, he wants to wait to say that is what I would have done if it works or pounce on the opportunity to make a political statement if it does not.
Still considering the upside and downside of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the GOP nominee for Vice-President requires returning to the initial obvious question. Representing a state that receives the bulk of its revenue from energy interests and married to an employee of BP, a company with image problems of its own, the natural suspicion is where do her allegiances lie? To the obvious question there is the obvious liberal answer in the second paragraph of the excerpt below from WaPo.
Following the content listed in most popular news on Google and Yahoo has been a regular occurence here. At first it was disappointing that so much of what made it to the listing were stories with topics that probably shouldn’t rank as high as they did. But that just seemed to indicate a sad trend that ‘clickers’ at these venues concentrated on items that really do not matter. The tabloid type of content was getting the lion’s share of the most popular ratings by click. Again, sad that important issues were being neglected by whatever the demographic was. If one assumed that the readers were a representative slice of the general public the bulk of what they were reading was an even more dismal trend.
The IT topics represented by Microsoft, Apple and Comcast represent a trio of standouts all compromising the digital landscape. MS continues its habit of trying to convince users that things are different now. Apple has become as notorious as a techo-gangsta’ as MS with its idiot phone marketing as the latest Comcast episode proving net neutrality is an issue.
turned into ethanol and used as a fuel.
Gene Stevens, at the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Missouri, works with sorghum.
the search is on to find other biofuel sources.
