Just as a certain percentage of republicans refused to admit that rotten things were happening under the Bush administration, many democrats have fought to defend the Obama administration against charges of mishandling the response to the economic crisis.
But now, as ABC news notes:
President Obama is facing growing liberal anger over his handling of the economy, with prominent voices on the left voicing concerns that taxpayer-funded bailouts are enriching corporate America while doing little to right the nation's economic ship....Talk, of course, is cheap.Several prominent Democrats are pointing out that Obama aides were more than willing to press auto workers to renegotiate contracts as a condition of bailouts for car companies -- but are now citing the sanctity of contracts in AIG bonuses, saying they can't be canceled.
"People have no confidence in what's happening right now," Jane Hamsher, the founder of the liberal blog FireDogLake, said Monday on ABC NewsNOW's "Politics Live."
"People on the right and the left are looking at all this money being shoveled to banks [by] friends of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers ... and they're not seeing any accountability," she added. "They don't know where the money's going, they don't know how much is gone, and it's all nontransparent and extremely suspicious."...
"He's walking down a very, very dangerous path right now," liberal activist and author David Sirota told ABCNews.com. "It betrays the exact problem that people are angry at -- that there's one set of rules for Wall Street and Washington and another set of rules for everybody else."
"It's becoming real, what the difference is between Obama's rhetoric about power coming from outside of Washington, and the reality of an administration filled with Washington and Wall Street insiders," Sirota said....
Robert Reich, who was former President Clinton's labor secretary, called it a "scandal" that "Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money."
"When our very own secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken," Reich wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed.
Democratic lawmakers joined Republicans in expressing outrage. They called on the president to do more to protect taxpayer dollars.
"The American people are being played for fools by AIG," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said today on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Unless and until the democrats demand that Summers, Geithner and Bernanke be fired and replaced with people with a demonstrated commitment to the public interest, things will just get worse and - despite the faux populism of both the democrats and republicans in congress - the people will just get angrier and angrier.
Isn't Obama still giving money out of the origianl 750 billion? Aren't you all getting a little anxious about all this. There is no way anyone could fix the scope of this problem in 60 days. I don't like the banks bailouts period, I want to Nationalize them, kill all the derivatives out there, refinance all the mortgages in foreclosure , pass regulations making this all illegal in the future. Painful , you bet but not as painful as it's going to be.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen a suggestion coming from the right or the left of what else there is to do.
treasury i believe has passed out several trillion?
ReplyDeleteif i'm not mistaken that 750b figure is a lil ruse for the sheeple.
several hundreds of billions have been shoveled to the top tier investment vehicles to make them more whole if not completely whole.
from my limited knowledge of this situation, there are several trillions to go to "clean it up"
if what i'm reading on the fringes, and have been reading for some time now this debacle is in the hundreds of trillions, and was known it was going to happen for a long long time.
just because we are paranoid doesn't mean we are always fucking wrong....or not being followed!!!!!
in 5 years i'll still be hearing about giving this democratic regime a chance. after bush fucked the world up it will take a long time to fix so give the democrats more time.
just l;like I'll hear in twenty years about the democrats waiting for all the chickens to be in a row before prosecuting the bush cabal for ruining the planet....
yada yada yada
The 750 bailout is not a sham it was voted on by congress and pissed away no argument there. You are absolutely right that many trillion have been printed up but we can't even find out what they did with those bucks. Some estimates of the size of the derivative problem is quadrillion dollars to put that in prospective World GNP is 56 trillion. So the question is will this piddling amount of money we are throwing at the problem have an effect?
ReplyDeleteImage: What One Trillion dollars, stacked on double pallets in one-hundred dollar notes looks like. The little dot on the lower left corner represents a six-foot person who is in considerable debt.
ReplyDelete"Exponential economic growth required by the mathematics of compound interest on a money supply based on money as debt must always run up eventually against the finite nature of Earth's resources." - British financial analyst Chris Cook.
“ 'Unregulated financial market' means that banks have been allowed to charge compound interest. Even ancient Rome capped interest at max 5% and compound interest (usury) was outlawed (See Tacitus, The Annals of Rome, Chapter Six, a.d. 29).
"There is a nine-year period between a commodity peak and a market crash. Add forty-six to that (the period between crashes) and you have a fifty-year-odd boom-bust cycle or once a generation we are plucked.- Tom Dennen, "A Unified Field Theory of Economics" (in progress.)
The following compilation is from 'The Great Reckoning' by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, Sidgwick & Jackson published, yes, in 1993.
· Commodity prices peaked in London in 1711 (Long before America came into the economic picture). The South Sea Bubble burst nine years later in 1720. Depression followed.
· Producer prices peaked in London in 1763. The London stock market crashed again in 1772 (nine years later). Depression followed.
· Commodity prices peaked in London in 1816.The London stock market crashed in 1825 (nine years later). Depression followed.
· Wholesale prices peaked in New York in 1864. A worldwide assets crash began in May 1873 (nine years later). Depression followed.
· Then followed our beloved Great Depression in the 30s, about which much has been said, from which, little learned.
Commodity prices peaked some fifty years later in Tokyo, in 1980. The Tokyo stock market peaked in 1989 (again, nine years later) and crashed in 1990. The depression following that crash is now upon us.
“I call this one, 'Grand Theft, Planet”, ibid, T.D.
From Tom Foremski - October 16, 2008
"According to various distinguished sources including the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland -- the central bankers' central bank -- the amount of outstanding derivatives worldwide as of December 2007 crossed USD 1.144 Quadrillion, ie, USD 1,144 Trillion. The main categories of the USD 1.144 Quadrillion derivatives market were the following:
1. Listed credit derivatives stood at USD 548 trillion;
2. The Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives stood in notional or face value at USD 596 trillion and included:
a. Interest Rate Derivatives at about USD 393+ trillion;
b. Credit Default Swaps at about USD 58+ trillion;
c. Foreign Exchange Derivatives at about USD 56+ trillion;
d. Commodity Derivatives at about USD 9 trillion;
e. Equity Linked Derivatives at about USD 8.5 trillion; and
f. Unallocated Derivatives at about USD 71+ trillion.
The Size of Derivatives Bubble now equals $190K Per Person on the Planet.
And they want our money NOW!