A Venti-Sized Recession?

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  • Posted By: emblita @ 10/21/2008 9:01:04 AM

    Ehm- how about Iceland? No of Starbucks 0, financial meltdown- complete. Or do you think that it was the Starbucks in London that took em down with them?

  • Posted By: aussieobserver @ 10/21/2008 6:20:32 AM

    Sorry, Australia's doing pretty well actually, Starbucks closed most of their stores in Australia well before this recent collapse because we didn't like their coffee! And as a Multicultural country we actually already had a well established, sophisticated and well catered coffee culture, with which Starbucks couldn't compete. Sorry about your theory!

  • Posted By: Nins @ 10/21/2008 1:43:36 AM

    After 9/11, the US government started rounding up Muslims without cause and without due process of law, and put them in prison camps like we did to the Japanese Americans in WWII. The Bush administration called it's main internment camp Guantanamo Bay. While there are certainly many guilty terrorists held in Guantanamo, there are also many innocent American citizens who have been held illegally for years without even being charged with any crime. They have been tortured by our government. Some of them have died.

    Recently the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration in the matter of Guantanamo Bay. The Supreme Court Justices were NOT on the side of the terrorists. They were on the side of the Geneva Convention, that says you can not torture POWs, and on the side of US laws that state you can not imprison a person without charging them with a crime and bringing them to trial. I'm sure that like most Americans, the Justices who voted against the illegal, immoral doings at Guantanamo didn't feel sympathy for the terrorists. They felt sympathy for the laws of AMERICA, the land of the FREE, where even rat finks get a fair trial.

    Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the Bush administration is busy trying to build a smokescreen to hide the CRIMES they have committed. Those pesky weapons of mass destruction. Just think, the National Debt went up over 6 trillion dollars under Bush. More than 2 trillion of it went directly into the pockets of Halliburton, a corporation owned by the Cheney family. Halliburton is now a DUBAI corporation and therefore is not subject to US taxes. All that money they took out of the US Treasury is going into the coffers of a MUSLIM country.

    Did you hear about how the US government is being charged millions for Halliburton deliveries of sand into Iraq from Kuwait? Sand. Like there is a shortage of sand in Iraq? Another contractor shipped sand from Idaho to Iraq at our expense. Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses these and other excesses of our current government's out of control spending in Iraq.

    Your grandchildren will be working like slaves to pay off this debt, so that the Bushes and Cheneys can live the high life in Dubai.

    Yeah, they're patriots, Bush&Co. They wear flag pins. And hide the money they stole from America in Dubai.

    And they want me to believe that Obama is a socialist. Right.

    In case you think McCain is any different than Bush, watch this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdJUCU1UH2w

  • Posted By: motorherz @ 10/20/2008 7:48:49 PM

    How many Starbucks are there in Toronto? Here's your counter-argument. Or you think Tim Hortons was the cause there?

  • Posted By: Nowforthetruth @ 10/20/2008 6:16:56 PM

    Who "Joe the plumber" may be is not the issue, though it's easy to see why the Dems want it to be. That's because the real issue is what Obama's comments to him revealed about Obama. In the exchange with "Joe the plumber" we find out that Obama really is as radical as his early political acquaintances, Davis, Ayers, Wright, etc., and that he is into the failed economic policy of wealth redistribution. Obama's tax and spending plans alone would be bad enough, but add Reid and Pelosi to the mix, with the three of them controlling both houses of Congress and the executive branch without any effective restraint, and you have something that should causes concern even among moderate Democrats.
    See Wall Street Journal: A Liberal Supermajority:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122420205889842989.html

    And whether McCain won or lost the third debate is also not relevant. He succeeded in the first half hour to plant the seeds of a Reagan style wipeout. Reputable historians and economists overwhelmingly agree that the taxation imposed by Hoover and FDR, and the "stimulus" spending and public works programs of FDR, actually deepened and prolonged the Great Depression. It was the production demands of WWII that got the economy going again. And when the war was over, the economy promptly went into recession.

    See e.g. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/03/opinion/main4499465.shtml
    And
    http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx

    Point is, Obama's programs are to tax, and it does not really matter who he taxes, those taxes are going to be passed through the economy. He has to tax, because it is they only way he can pay for his massive social engineering experiments. Any first year economics student knows that taxation is a tool used to contract an economy experiencing inflation, because it reduces demand by reducing the amount of money individuals and businesses have to spend. It is contractionary, which is exactly what you do not want to do when the problem is that the economy is contracting already into recession. Like Hoover and FDR, Obama's plans will only make it worse for longer.

  • Posted By: Nowforthetruth @ 10/20/2008 6:16:45 PM


    Look and listen for yourself. Hear Obama in his own words discusses his links to both ACORN and the mortgage meltdown, and praises bundling and securitizing mortgages by banks as a means to float loans to the poor. Never mind the link commentators point of view, just listen to what Obama says in his own words. A picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe more in the case of the last half of the second link.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJcVgJhNaU

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1M1T2Y314&feature=related

    See also:
    http://boards.msn.com/MSNBCboards/thread.aspx?threadid=808692&boardsparam=Page%3d2

    This is a link to C-SPAN video clips of the Congressional hearings at roughly the time McCains attempt at S.190. to fix Fannie and Freddie. See for yourself who said what.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs

    The link below contains a purported list of the top 25 in Congress who got contributions from the folks at Fannie and Freddie. Obama is listed third, after Dodd and Kerry, even though Obama is just a junior Senator. Obama is followed next by Clinton. Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are on the list as well.

    http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=16&artnum=1&issue=20080918

    And the link below describes how some Democrats in Congress tried to use the original version of the bailout bill to divert money eventually recovered to groups like ACORN, a group Obama has a long association with. See:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122247015469280723.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


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