Wall Street’s Unraveling

What we need NOW is Real Democracy IN America. www.realdemocracyinamerica.com

What we have to do is INCORPORATE the WHOLE DAMN GOVERNMENT. America2inc.com

SAVE AMERICA
OPEN DOORS
AMERICA IS A COUNTRY OF MIGRANTS
MIGRANTS WILL SAVE AMERICA
GIVE CITIZENSHIP FOR EVERYBODY WHO BUY A HOUSE BY CASH

'Corporate America' sold out the American People in the name of GREED. The American People themselves welcomed the largess heaped on them, temporarily, and are just as guilty. EVERYONE WAS GREEDY. The AMERICAN PEOPLE first began this trip to hell when Clinton and the US Congress became whore to the lobbying corporations, allowing passage of the 'FAST TRACK' trade agreements. The individual corporations gained fabulous wealth while it cost the American People ten fold. The shift of power to China is now well on its way, as this and other dictatorial governments hold empty promises to our GREEDY CORPORATIONS while they themselves manipulate markets to serve their own ends, always pretending to follow the 'rules'. The corporations which have not become truly 'gobal corporations' will die, chasing the evaporating wealth of the US, a mirage. The 'global corporations will within ten or twenty years realize that China never intended to be a partner. It has always intended to RULE. Its over folks. We defeated ourselves with our own GREED.



Corporate America is now largely an empty shell. Our US 'corporations' have now morphed into GLOBAL CORPORATIONS with no moral obligations or other practical limits to exploit the world's unprotected labor markets and unprotected environment. Indeed, they can't. Unfettered capitolism requires that they exploit most efficiently to survive agains competing corporations. It is a race to the bottom for the 'Global Corporations' regarding unprotected labor, resources, and markets. Perhaps overly optimistically, while the US has lost, perhaps western Europe can hold out and maintain quality lifestyles for their people. But it nevertheless will be under the shadow of the economies run by dictators, such as China.

Posted By: OLDFOOL @ 09/21/2008 1:24:54 PM
Comment: This is all just a symptom of something much larger. The Americans 'lost' everything when with then President Clinton and the 'bought and paid for' US Congress successfully launched the 'Fast Track' trade agreements, immensely profitable for individual corporations but costly the the American People, as a group. It cannot be stopped now. Over the next thirty years the entire US structure will fall to the level of third world countries which themselves will likely increase somewhat in wealth over the next decades. The center of power will permanently shift to other financial giants, the most successful of whom will pretend to follow the 'rules' but will instead successfully 'manipulate' the world's production of goods and markets to their own advantage at the expense of everyone else, such as China. Oh well. Everything changes, though fundamental principles remain: FOOLS WILL ALWAYS FALL EVENTUALLY.

As a public high school teacher, the current state of our public institutions reflect our values as a society, from my point of view. We are bailing out these failing institutions with taxpayer dollars while the state of our public school system continues to decline.

I invite readers to compare the federal funding and bailouts for failing economic powerhouses verses the declining support and funding of our public schools: Strong schools and education that ALL of our children and citizens benefit from.

Good teachers are being laid off and class sizes are growing. No child left behind is a law that requires improvements without the promised funding to implement these improvements. And our schools are listed as "failing schools" because of unrealistic goals that are never supported or funded by the federal government in the first place. What is left in our public schools is often a stressed out skeleton staff that does not have the ability to properly educate our students, which we would hope will lead us someday to more effective ways of running this country.

Meanwhile, these corporate lobbyists have effectively secured deregulation and what they consider "optimal" conditions for their financial success (deregulation). And a few well-connected people have lined their pockets with enormous amounts of other peoples' money.

This sort of short-term gain at the expense of long-term growth way of thinking has infected our entire way of running our society. This is NOT A REPUBLICAN VS DEMOCRATIC "WEDGE" issue. Enough is enough!

Unfortunately middle and lower class young people (the MAJORITY) of our future do not have the money or the resources to hire corporate lobbyists. Their teachers and their schools have limited resources. And there is little to NO organized efforts to effectively support the reform and progress to lead our public schools to educate and prepare our future. In every other developed and developing country we compare our students' progress with, there is a clear and dedicated effort to improve, fund, and prioritize education. In America, we are starving our schools while bailing out reckless fat cats who've thrived on greed. Is this the American Way? Or have we lost our way?

Let this be a lesson to us!!! Hopefully (as we say in class) we will learn from these mistakes and become better - isn't this the American Way?

Let me get this straight...

Wall Street eats *** in 1929, the government has to bail out Wall Street and set rules so it doesn't happen again, Wall Street recovers, Wall Street starts bitching and moaning about being regulated, the government removes the restrictions, Wall Street eats *** in 2008.

Shouldn't we have learned the first time it happened? Sadly, I won't be surprised when they start bitching and moaning in half a century that the regulations, once again, are hampering them and the government, once again, falls for it. Once again, we live in a nation where corporate welfare rules; the profits are privatized and the losses are socialized.

Free N l G G E R Jokes at

C H I M P O U T . C O M

DID WE HAVE A RIGHT TO EXPECT ANYTHING ELSE FROM THIS PRESIDENT? Blame it on greed and fear? My bu**! Put the blame where it belongs! Bush had a known track record before he took office of having run into the ground every business he had been involved in, this was brought out clearly in the elections of 2000. With him at the helm of our countrys economy, he has managed to do the same: homeowners losing their homes, the dollar in the tank abroad, the insurance and banking industries awash in bankruptcies, the price of gasoline at staggering levels, 4 billion dollars a month thrown down the toilet in Iraq, etc., etc.. And McCain has supported his economic blunders 95% of the time! It is time for a change.

As a public high school teacher, the current state of our public institutions reflect our values as a society, from my point of view. We are bailing out these failing institutions with taxpayer dollars while the state of our public school system continues to decline.

I invite readers to compare the federal funding and bailouts for failing economic powerhouses verses the declining support and funding of our public schools: Strong schools and education that ALL of our children and citizens benefit from.

Good teachers are being laid off and class sizes are growing. No child left behind is a law that requires improvements without the promised funding to implement these improvements. And our schools are listed as "failing schools" because of unrealistic goals that are never supported or funded by the federal government in the first place. What is left in our public schools is often a stressed out skeleton staff that does not have the ability to properly educate our students, which we would hope will lead us someday to more effective ways of running this country.

Meanwhile, these corporate lobbyists have effectively secured deregulation and what they consider "optimal" conditions for their financial success (deregulation). And a few well-connected people have lined their pockets with enormous amounts of other peoples' money.

This sort of short-term gain at the expense of long-term growth way of thinking has infected our entire way of running our society. This is NOT A REPUBLICAN VS DEMOCRATIC "WEDGE" issue. Enough is enough!

Unfortunately middle and lower class young people (the MAJORITY) of our future do not have the money or the resources to hire corporate lobbyists. Their teachers and their schools have limited resources. And there is little to NO organized efforts to effectively support the reform and progress to lead our public schools to educate and prepare our future. In every other developed and developing country we compare our students' progress with, there is a clear and dedicated effort to improve, fund, and prioritize education. In America, we are starving our schools while bailing out reckless fat cats who've thrived on greed. Is this the American Way? Or have we lost our way?

Let this be a lesson to us!!! Hopefully (as we say in class) we will learn from these mistakes and become better - isn't this the American Way?

Oh by the way, the reason why we haven't seen inflation (or depreciation of the dollar, its the same thing really) is because a lot of the debt is financed by foreign countries buying up Treasury bonds (instead of the Fed printing more money to buy them). Those foreign countries are primarily China, Russia, and Japan. Also, the Chinese central bank keeps buying up dollars in exchange for Yuan to ensure that the dollar remains valuable while the Yuan remains undervalued. And the reason they want this is so that Chinese exports to the US remain cheap.

So essentially, the reason we can have massive deficits and still enjoy low inflation is because the Chinese, Russians and Japanese are financing the debt. Which is why we're so handicapped in dealing with China and Russia, no matter what they do.

Government debt can drive inflation - the Treasury Department issues Treasury bonds to finance the debt, some of which are then bought by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve pays for them by printing more money. But that means more money in circulation, which any student of basic economics knows is one of the main factors behind inflation.

An even simpler way of looking at it - unlike you and me, when the government spends more than it earns, it can make up the difference by just printing money. But the more money is printed, the less valuable it becomes. Very elementary, high school economics.

However I do agree that outsourcing has a miniscule effect on the overall economy.

26K. That is disgusting. How could society value a teacher so gratuitously. Cops only make 12K per month in pension and benefits, and have to work a full 20 years to get a measly 50% pay pension. Imagine the greed of a teacher with a masters degree wanting more thant 26K at the expense of one of our finest, our heroes.

Deatr Mr. Samuelson,

I really appreciated your article on getting real about healthcare last week. As usual you are dead on in your analyses. I have oone major disagreement with your premise regarding government health insurance. You state that the government insures about a quarter of the population through medicare and medicaid. This is correct according to 2003 gao study. The bigger point however is that the US healtchare pricetag is now about 3 trillion dollars, and the government's piece of this is about 50%. As you correctly pointed out, the poor and elderly use subsantially more healthcare dollars than others. The others are the group who was cherry picked by private insurers following 2003 medicare modernization act. Cherry picked because of their good health risk potential with the added bonus of 10% boost over their medicare contract amount existing before this act. I hardly saw a blip on the media radar when the major healthcare insurers settled a RICO suit brought by physicians and hospitals. The details of this suit highlight what is wrong with US health insurance. As a physician I have surmised that health insurance is a very cleverly crafted plan to steal patient's health, and one that is very lucrative at that (their cut is 20% of the 3 trillion). I suspect the the current government buyout of insurance and bank bad debt will follow the principals the medicare modernization act did. It will allow the people in these businesses to cherry pick the good debt, and dump the bad on the taxpayers.

Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the rest of the failed institutions have failed primarily because of former Senator Phil Gramm. The Gramm-Leach-Biley Act stripped away the regulations separating banking from investment companies, insurance companies and mortgage guaranty companies. Those regulations were added after the Great Depression when it became obvious that allowing banks to be in bed with the stock market was a sure way to rig the system to collapse, as it did in 1929.

Lo an behold, a few years after the regulations were removed, the sh!t has hit the fan, and the inter-related investment, insurance, mortgage and banking industries are now starting to collapse, and guess what, you, the taxpayer will have to pay to clean it up.

Phil Gramm is the Senator who brought you the "Enron Loophole" that de-regulated futures trading, causing the prices of oil, gas and food to spiral out of control.

Senator Phil Gramm was McCain's top economic advisor until recently, when he was forced to step down after he said that there is no problem with our economy other than a "mental recession" on the part of a "nation of whiners." Phil Gramm is the man who McCain said he wants to name Secretary of the Treasury if he becomes President. You have to believe John McCain when he says that he knows little about the economy -- so little that he doesn't even know who to choose as an advisor.

Barack Obama addressed the Enron Loophole, futures trading, short-selling and Wall Street de-regulation months ago in his economic position papers, which are available on his website. Obama has been saying all along that he is going to put in strict regulations and clean up Wall Street.

McCain just started saying that he favors regulation in the past couple of weeks. How is it that McCain is going to put in new regulations, when he plans to appoint Phil Gramm, the man who caused the de-regulation, as Secretary of the Treasury? McCain says he would fire Christopher Cox, the SEC Chairman, to solve the problem. However, the problem is caused by lack of regulations on the legislative level, regulations that were removed before Cox was appointed. The SEC can only enforce regulations that actually exist, so making a scapegoat of Cox solves nothing. I would suggest that McCain is guilty of saying what's politically expedient, that he does not actually intend to regulate the banking industry. McCain knows that most Americans are unaware of the details.

I am a middle-aged white conservative Republican who loves America. I am voting for Barack Obama.

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/15050.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/145011/page/1
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6007788.html
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0D81038F934A25752C0A9649C8B63
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/gG5Rzb

The Great Depression came about after a 12-year consecutive string of Republican Presidents (1921-1933) starting with Warren G Harding, to Woodrow Wilson, to Calvin Coolidge to Herbert Hoover.

The "roaring '20's" was characterized by easy credit, unregulated markets and artificially high growth. Things quickly turned sour as a result of overinvestment (economic bubbles), malfeasance by bankers and industrialists, and incompetence by government officials.

FDR won the Presidency on a platform of economic reform and a re-establishment of the middle class. The measures he took to give relief to the middle class and reform of the financial system was called the New Deal. This deal implied higher government spending, but it was spending that was centered on domestic development and the re-establishment of consumer demand. His program saved America.

DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? Fast forward to 2008.

It seems that we never learn from history.

Capitalism, by design, will always have businesses who will seek to make money in any fashion possible until something goes horribly wrong or someone makes them stop. I compare Wall Street, and by extension capitalism to a schoolyard full of unsupervised 4 year olds. They will find their way to have as much fun as they can until somebody gets hurt.

Right wingers should not be afraid of regulation - it doesn't necessarily imply restriction. The game can be played much longer and by more people if someone is out there making sure that they play by the rules.

OBAMA-BIDEN '08