Fortunately we now have President Obama, and on this, the day after his first two months on the job, and except for that gaff on Leno, I like what I'm seeing, so far. That may change at any given time, but so far so good!
As many of you are doubtlessly aware... (Alright, as ALL OF US ARE AWARE!), most of the largest financial institutions in this country are circling the drain on their merry way to oblivion! All of their overindulged, overpaid, and under qualified bigwig CEOs, and Wall Street lackeys shrieking in protest!
The Republicans are all lined up with tear-stained eyes to blame it all on those dirty-bad-nasty Liberals and their godless ways! BULLSHIT!!!!!!! I lay this squarely on the head of none other than Phill Gramm himself! Sponsor, and coauthor of "The Gramm, Leach, Bliley Act of 1999"!
Ah yes! Let's talk about that weaselly little piece of larceny, along with it's partner in crime "The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000"! Look these two pieces of legislature up! Use Google, use Ask, use whatever! Take your time! I'll just sit here and wait!
Oh? Back already? Jumping up and down and shrieking "WHAT THE FUCK!", a lot? Yea! I feel ya! Did it too!
I'll just wait for you to get done!
It's not like the blood was even hidden! Here's a press release:
CHAIRMAN GRAMM'S OPENING STATEMENT AT CONFERENCE
MARK-UP OF FINANCIAL SERVICES MODERNIZATION
Sen. Phil Gramm, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, made the following opening statement today at the conference mark-up of Financial Services Modernization:
"America has been waiting 50 years for this bill, so I am going to be brief.
"Anyone who looks at the chairmen's mark will immediately see two things. One, there was a conscious effort not to go outside the scope of this conference. We thought it was important to have a bill that would stay inside the scope of the conference. I think members will find that, except for a few provisions related to the Federal Home Loan Bank System, where the provisions of this bill would dramatically change the operation of the Federal Home Loan Bank System. We did take a few steps to reign in the Federal Housing Finance Board in terms of actions they are taking that are opposed by the Treasury and where there is strong bi-partisan concern.
"Other than that, I am not aware of any major, or really any minor, provision outside the scope of the two bills. I think all of us recognize that if you want a bill, it means compromise. As Chairman Bliley said the other day when we presented the chairmen's mark, nobody ever gets all of what they want. You end up with compromise.
"I think again if people will look at the bill, they will see that there is a good faith effort in the bill to reach a compromise on numerous issues. There clearly was a compromise on CRA. Secretary Summers has said, and I quote, ‘The President will only support financial modernization that maintains the relevance of CRA. He will not permit it to be scaled back.' I would submit that anyone who reads the provisions of this bill will see that in fact the bill does meet that test. We have left a very tough issue, the unitary thrift issue, to be settled as a jump ball, but with the agreement, at least on the part of the three chairmen, that whatever happens on that issue, we are going to move ahead and pass this bill.
"I think that this is a bill, a mark-up document, where the more you look at it, the more knowledgeable you are about its content, and the content of current law, the better it is going to look.
"I want to thank Chairman Bliley, and I want to thank Chairman Leach. This has been a very difficult task but to do this work, it is worthy of our best efforts, and I think we have given our best efforts to it. Obviously, we are here today to finish the job, improve the product if we can and move ahead if we can't."--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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There it is, people! Every word of it! No slicing and dicing of the quotes, and hanging them together with those annoying three periods in a row! No trying to make the quotes say what the quotes don't! All of it! Every fucking word!!!!! Nothing left out! Nothing held back! Don't take my word for it! READ IT YOURSELVES!
From it's inception, this was the shadiest of shit! Conceived, and born to be the wettest dream of Big Finance! A grand and lovely gift! Wrapped and ribboned by their very own dimpled darling! Felonious Phill Gramm himself! A wondrous, and treacherous gutting of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933! A piece of legislation, which had been preventing the sort of things that caused The Great Depression from ever happening again! Of course the Glass-Steagall Act prevented savings banks, investment banks, and insurance companies from growing into the monstrous, all absorbing entities that, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and Bank of America turned into! It would not allow them to grow large enough to rip up the rule book, hold the entire country hostage, and write their own law! Big Finance had to get rid of it!
Also in the 1999 slaughter of nearly all the regulation standing between Big Finance, and whatever acts of thievery in it's hearts' desired, was the obvious pulling of any teeth, and the funding, that any regulatory entity had! Felonious Phill, and His Gang, put the cops on horses, and the robbers on Harleys! Fifty years of common sense regulation! Gone! In the stroke of a pen!
Oh, I don't even attempt to say their weren't a few Democrat's hands involved! And from the start, they, and their fellow Republican lackeys, did their deeds in darkness, and made no secret of the fact! Thus giving Felonious Phill the cover he needed to pronounce the old mantras of "Bipartisan support" as to the reason they kept such a VERY tight lid on this turd! It's pretty damned obvious, this bill was written to set the weasels lose in the hen house, and seat the fox to watch the flock! And let us not forget that old "Blow-Job Bill" signed both of these turds into law, even though the Commodities Futures Act was neatly buried in a 1100 page budget bill.
Ah, and wasn't there rare rejoicing in Dittohead Punditland! Boss Rush worked The Forbidden Chemistry on his stash of Oxycontin tablets, and made most merry with the results! Tucker Carlson acted on all the evil thoughts, he'd ever had concerning his bow tie, and Glenn Beck danced with a brisk step in his Secret Mormon Underwear! Everything standing between the fleecing of The American People, and the wool baskets was gone! The sheep were ripe, the shears were sharp, and hands were strong and willing!
Now, came the grandest piece of thievery imaginable! A series of acts so grim in their scope, and blatant in their larceny, it boggles my jaded mind as to how they got away with it as long as they did! Banks wrote sub prime, and NINJA loans (No Income No Job Access), to anyone who could sign their name! NO oversight! NO credit ratings examinations! Mortgages were written by unregulated agents, who were paid by the note! They had their own private regulators, (who were on their pay roll), rubber stamp these loans as AAA, and sold them as Mortgaged Backed Securities,(MBS) with high yields to both a domestic and international market! Even though, in real terms, they weren't worth the paper they were written on!
One of the over-the-counter derivatives, also deregulated in 2000 was the Credit Default Swap in which companies like AIG guaranteed the buyer of a MBS that for a premium AIG would guarantee the over-rated, and under-secured mortgages, against any potential losses in the case of default. These securities themselves were bought and sold at increasing profit margins. This became the fastest growing market and today amount to almost 60 trillion dollars of global debt! SIXTY TRILLION DOLLARS TRACED BACK DIRECTLY TO REPUBLICAN SPONSORED DEREGULATION
Everything was just wonderful! Everything was just fucking dandy! Until August of 2007, when the housing bubble, (Which had been steadily fed by building starts, artificially supported by the buck-wild mortgage market), collapsed on top of them! Then, the sudden rush of defaults, and the resulting foreclosures exposed the whole sad affair! Bank-Supported Insurance Giants like AIG who had been writing loss prevention policies on just plain out bad loans, wound up with forty dollars of debt for every dollar of assets! Then, ( just like when The Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 sank the Savings and Loans in the 90's), a glut of bad debt crushed the the entire financial industry! But now instead of just a few savings and loans, it was a huge chunk of the Global Economy which has suddenly become worthless at best, or turned into a giant sucking black hole, engulfing any, and, all money at worse!
Now, people, I want you to go to the library, and dig in the dusty tomes for anything about The Great Depression, and what steps were taken by The Hoover Administration, and The Roosevelt administration! Get yourself educated on the matter! We're living it again! Look at what worked, and look at what didn't! You'll come to the same conclusions that I did! President Obama is doing what needs to be done! I don't like it, and you shouldn't either, but its the only thing that will work at this stage in the game! We've got to pump money into the patients while we stop the bleeding! We've got one shot at this thing, and even if everything works out, we'll be paying the price for this for a long time to come!
Or we can take the Hoover Administration's way, and watch The Big Money sit on their asses, and count their bonus money! Oh! And they will get their bonus money7! That tax law that went through The Legislature like shit through a goose, is unconstitutional on at least two major points, AND THEY KNOW IT!! Big money plays, and the poor man pays! That's the free market system under Republican control!
It is the very Republicans, now howling about "Socialism" that caused the nightmare that we are living in now! The very ones screaming for MORE deregulation are the very ones that caused this whole sad scenario in the first place! The Few..The Loud..The Republicans!
There's a damned good reason for the dumbing down of America! There's a damned good reason for Republican-led opposition to any increase in educational funding! The Big Money wants the American People just smart enough to do the grunt work, and just dumb enough to buy their line of shit!
Numb, dumb, and hungry for more! That's what they're looking for in an American!
Well, We, the People woke up in 2008! I'm praying The Republicans won't sing us to sleep again!
Keep watch, people! And shoot at sound of a slow fiddle!
13 comments:
GOOD ONE, STONEY!
Where have ya been??? I was starting to get a little concerned. Welcome back!
Tom Degan
Great post Stoney, glad to see you back and still raging.
After seeing the GOP's finest yesterday introduce their package, "Road to Recovery" (sounds like something from the Betty Ford Clinic) I couldn't help but laugh my self silly. All they have to offer is more of the worn out bullshit that got us into this mess. Tax cuts is there answer to everything.
I couldn't agree with you more, Phil Gramm is a real fuck stick. Him and his mindless moron minions got us where we are today. Its time we just gathered all these assholes in one big room, lock the doors and throw away the keys. Don't let the scratching at the door bother you, its just a bunch of cockroaches trying to escape.
Tom,
Been busy with all manners of mind fucks! Got through most of them, and the rest of them, I'll deal with when I deal with them!
Thanks for stopping by, Tom!
Da Frog,
The Republicans are almost pitiful! No vision, no heart, nothing to offer but more of the same shit that got us all in to this shit in the first place!
The whole sad affair with their booklet is totally insane! All it is is a sales brochure for a bill of goods! No numbers, no research, no computations. Their budget is just a demand to cut taxes on the rich, and raise taxes on everybody else! None of it with any real suggestions as to how it will work!
Yep! Put them all in a round room, and tell them to piss in the corner!
Hey Stoney,
Glad to see a new rant from you. Artfully put.
Got to admit though, don't agree that the new administration is doing the only thing that can be done. What I see him doing is more of what the Bush group did, bail out the crooked financial firms.
If they had been allowed to crash and burn, there would have almost immediately been new smaller regional firms come on line. Chaos for a short time instead of this drug out calamity I think. Further, the information I am seeing says what they are doing is bound to fail in its stated objective because it does not address the obvious corruption throughout the the financial system, nor does it actually address the problem of people not having incomes. The employment promised won't come on line till next year. In the meantime, hell is coming to us all to some degree or another.
That's my take anyway.
You really nailed it with your portrayal of the deregulation that Phil Graham sponsored. What kills me is that we have all these finance committees and the Security and Exchange Commission, and all those who are supposed to know what is what (economists, Senators, think tank experts and media pundits, et al) and yet they all let this happen!!! ALL of these people are still at work. All still collecting their bloated paychecks, while the wage serfs are out in the cold. They should all be fired and shunned, at best. Hung for treason shouldn't be out of the question, either! These bastards have ruined the lives and fortunes of millions and are still collecting million dollar bonuses and riding first class, and we are still paying 30% on credit cards and hoping for food stamps, like chumps. AND THEY WANT US TO PAY THE BANKS!! What a pimp job. I like Obama. But this is not right.
Murph,
Ah! But you notice I said "At this stage in the game"! Obama has bailed out nothing but AIG, so far. All the big bank bailouts were done on Bush's watch, and The first bonuses went quietly into the pockets of the perps, and little, if anything was said, and they totaled in the billions!
I don't know what's going to happen next, and neither does anyone else, but I DO know that this mess is of Republican making!
The "Let 'em crash and burn" approach is tempting, to say the least! The problem is, the bastards got HUGE under the deregulation! In fact they got so big, that they can hold the country hostage, by taking down a healthy chunk of the entire economy with them!
Right now, what this country needs is some good common sense regulation of the financial industry! Bank should never EVER get "too big to fail" again!
Pat,
You're right, it probably won't work. But if you look at FDR and the "New Deal", you'll see a lot of the infrastructure projects that Obama is trying to shore things up with right now.
Likewise Eisenhower and his interstate highways. At least these infrastructure projects will show some real payback in the long run.
Personally I would NEVER do business with a big bank! Hazel, and I have our checking account in a small local bank. I know everybody by name from the president, to the janitor, and they know me! The bank is named "Carolina First", and they invest locally in the community.
They didn't sign notes for $500,00.00 to people making $15,000.00 on $300,000.00 houses! They make, and continue to make loans on common sense projects, that bring jobs, and added prosperity.
Some of my favorite things they are funding, is the tearing down some of the aging strip malls from the seventies, and replacing them with multi-use housing/retail buildings. These sorts of projects provide affordable rental units, with grocers, drug stores, and other retailers, within walking distance. Instead of more sprawl, they are actually bringing people, and retailers together. Instead of destroying historic districts, they're getting rid of tin-box eyesores, and replacing them with attractive buildings that make the town of Hendersonville more attractive, and reduce traffic and pollution. Instead of adding to the problem, they're providing solutions! Instead of destroying neighborhoods, they're creating them!
They do not lend money to "house-flippers" or suburban housing developments, and never have! Why? Simple! Those types of projects don't pay dividends in the long run! They destroy pristine vistas, undoing the very things that they are trying to accomplish! They prove that progress, with long-term benefits, and preservation of historic buildings, and pristine mountain vistas, need not be mutually exclusive.
Last year they loaned money to the owner of a small, but, beautiful 1930's Art Deco, brick shopping plaza on the south side of town, and home to a small coffee shop, a pet shop/aquarium store, and a bike shop. That money allowed the owner to make needed insulation upgrades and install more efficient electrical, plumbing, and heating systems, replace the leaking roof, and install solar hot water heaters. This was done with mortgage payments being kept low enough, so the small stores currently residing there would not see their leases jumping through the roof next time. Once again, problem fixed, with dividends for the future, and a beautiful piece of the town's history preserved. And even better, this shopping plaza is right next door to the bank building itself! By providing the funding for this project, they increased the value of the real estate they currently occupy!
Banks can be part of the solution, but only if they choose to be! I don't hate banks, I just hate big bloated monstrosities, that look only to the short term, and care nothing for the long.
The big bank bail out happened on Bush's watch. I didn't like it then, and I still don't like it! Bank of America, Newman Marcus, and the other multinationals, that rode deregulation through hard working people's 401K's and money market accounts, then skipped off with their golden parachutes, deserve rode out of town on a rail!
I likewise think Barak is only postponing the inevitable, but it might give us all a chance to look at what does work, and begin to implement change before the whole thing comes crashing down. Right now, he's over at the G20 trying to sell his plan to the rest of the world. The world market needs us! If we don't buy the stuff they make, then it don't get sold!
I have no doubt the shit is gonna come down! It's just a question of how much shit, and how far is gonna fall!
Hey brother,
been awhile since i got around for a visit and really don't have much to say about your post cause i just don't have the knowledge of big gluttonous mental cancer ridden cocksuckers that take advantage of people that just want to take care of their own and try to find a little happiness in a society that frowns on happiness as a way of life and tries to and succeeds in making it what it is. NASTY!
Personally for this one i am not to much concerned about the collapse of civilization because what's to lose?
The fervor of us as cockroaches on a treadmill ain't all that much fun as near as i can tell, so in as much as there will be massive groaning about living in a tent, well, what wrong with that, some of our people lived in teepee's as have i and it was the sweetest dwelling i have EVER lived in.
the state of todays gross and obscene life style (for the most part) comes at the expense of a continual and ongoing rape of our tortured earth mother and boy when the earth shake comes i for one will jump up and down for joy.
People are pretty much a scourge in the evolution ladder at this point as any thinking person would agree if thinking were allowed in our upbringing.
Which it ain't!
how the few that get it, get it is just another one of those great mysteries, at least for this one.
i think that some are just born as being dissatisfied from the beginning, and this would be a mutational jump because it means that the act of consideration is implied in that birth, right?
now this is a whole new ball game, and the mutant would look around and say
''what the fuck is going on'' and immediately start to stop and start doing the things that would bring harmony and peace to himorherself and to our mother earth of which without we would not even exist..!!!
Golly do ya suppose that is just way to complicated for the average joe or jane of which revealed cleavage is at the top of the list of things to contemplate?
My brother, we are in deep dodo, and that sick fuck OBAMA is just another little smoother to get the sheep all up and teary eyed because even though he's a black fuck he wears a white dick.
and thats no hay.
the dirty little bastard is a fucking lawyer, !!! is not that a clue??
AND if we cruise over to mr google and type in '' THE OBAMA DECEPTION'' there is a little ole movie that explains it much better then this one.
so on that note i go, but before that i just want to say how much i appreciate your taking the interest and time to post what needs to be posted on this place of sacred council.
aho
montana freeman
Montana Freeman,
Yea, yea, I know! But look at the choices we had!
The Presidential Election is the day we get to choose the most stable of the two or more lunatics that are actually crazy enough to want the fucking job!
Stoney,
Nice one I love how you always come up with clever titles haha
Hadn't checked your rage for a while.
Good one stoney! as usual you hit the nail on the head.
I lived thru the depression and know what FDR did for this country and also what the bush bunch did to this country and FDR's plan has them beaten hollow.
I have been disappointed in many of Obama's actions until I think what McClown and silly Sarah would have done as prez and vice prez
Hey Uncle Stony! This is your niece. You know, your sisters daughter. The one that lives in Florida. he he he. I haven't seen you in a long time. how is Hazel? I found a video of you on your tube :) I was like.."hey that's my uncle..What a trip! Send me an email and gray_one1@yahoo.com or look for me on myspace www.myspace.com/angelagray or you tube www.youtube.com/ladyangelagray Miss ya! and love ya!
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