Politics
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- ukit0
Not the biggest fan of this guy, but I think Chuck Schumer has it right here...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/20…
Schumer argued that there are good and bad ways to nationalize banks, and that the loaded nature of the term often leads to confusion. "'Nationalization' means many different things to many different people, and somebody needs to clear it up," said Schumer. "We have to distinguish. I like the good and don't like the bad."
Schumer contrasted nationalizing and holding on to a bank with taking over a failed firm for a temporary period. "Bad nationalization is when the government takes over these institutions and runs them for a long period of time. I don't think this is a good idea. I know President Obama doesn't and I don't think most Americans do," he said.
"The government is not good at making these decisions and managing assets in general. It's a different way of thinking in government. The government bureaucrats make for bad bankers and you'd probably end up making it worse," he said.
A second problem with 'bad nationalization,' he said, is that it concentrates too much power in the hands of government.
"There's a real danger of crony capitalism," he said. "Eisenhower himself warned of the military-industrial complex. If the banks were nationalized in the way we're talking, the bad way, you could end up having a military-industrial-financial complex that could threaten, in some ways, our freedom."
That doesn't mean that the government shouldn't take over failed banks -- even large ones -- he said.
"There is a good type of nationalization. I think that the [Treasury] Secretary was wise to do these stress tests," he said. "They're going to find some banks that are hopeless, that are zombie banks."
Those zombie banks, once discovered, he said, should be nationalized.
"Instead of keeping them alive for a long time," he said, "I do agree with people like Roubini or Mishkin -- and I think people would support this -- that the government should come in. And what the government would do would be: wipe out the shareholders, put in new management -- wipe out the old management and put in new management -- and then let the bank run sort of independently without day-to-day government intervention."
(Schumer is referring to economist Nouriel Roubini, who has called for nationalization, and Frederic Mishkin, a former member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.)
"This is not that different than what the FDIC is doing in certain places," he said. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has taken over a number of banks, guaranteed the deposits and begun the process of cleaning their balance sheets to prepare to reopen them as private institutions.
Earlier Friday, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the banking committee, made similar remarks on Bloomberg TV.
Schumer said that several conditions applied to his support of nationalization. "Government ownership should be brief. We should try to sell the cleaned up bank quickly," he said. "And second, for whatever time the government owns the institution, it shouldn't be running it day to day because of the dangers I cited before."
Schumer was asked if there are any financial institutions that are too large for a government takeover. He said that there are not.
"I don't think this is a question of size. This is a question of viability. There may be some small and some big that are zombies, basically, that can't really be saved and you just come clean," he said. "It should be regarded as a last resort, but a necessary resort, for some of the worst institutions and better than sort of a death of a thousand cuts for these institutions -- where you just keep pumping money in, they stabilize for awhile, get worse, etc."
- PonyBoy0
Nationalize!!!!!!
- TheBlueOne0
Ah, I love revisionist history. Neocon Richard Perle at the Nixon Center yesterday:
"There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy," Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. "It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy."
Not only was there a neo-con foreign policy, here is the statement of it's principles. A whole bunch of people got together and came up with a policy and signed their fucking name to it:
http://www.newamericancentury.or…
First Rove, now this tool...all trying to do their Evil Jedi mind trick and erase history like "Oh gee..what you saw wasn't really what you saw..."
Fuckers. Burn.
- TheBlueOne0
What Dean Baker says:
"The extraordinary financial collapse of recent months has been commonly described as a testament to the failure of deregulation. The events are indeed testament to a failure—a failure of public policy. Blaming deregulation is misleading.
In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. “Less” regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.
Framing regulation debates in terms of more and less is not only inaccurate; it hugely biases the argument toward conservative positions by characterizing an extremely intrusive structure of, for example, patent and copyright rules, as the free market. In the realm of insurance and finance over the last two decades, calls for deregulation have been cover for rules tilted starkly toward corporate interests. And the recent change in bankruptcy law, hailed by conservatives, requires much greater government involvement in the economy.
False ideological claims have circumscribed the public debate over regulation and blinded us to the wide range of choices we can make. Without these claims, what would guide regulatory policy? What kinds of choices would we have?"
The rest is well worth the read:
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.1/b…
- ukit0
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/2…
After a string of costly bailout and stimulus measures, President Obama will set a goal this week of cutting the annual deficit at least in half by the end of his term, administration officials said. The reduction would come in large part through Iraq troop withdrawals and higher taxes on the wealthy.
The president will propose to tax the investment income of hedge fund and private equity partners at ordinary income tax rates, which are now as high as 35 percent and could return to 39.6 percent under Mr. Obama’s plans, instead of at the capital gains rate, which is 15 percent at most.
Mr. Obama will also call for letting the Bush tax cuts on income, dividends and capital gains lapse after 2010 for individuals who make more than $250,000 a year.
- Awaits Republican talking points of "class war" to begin in earnestTheBIueOne
- ********0
"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."
Karl Marx, 1867, Das Kapital
*shivers
- GeorgesII0
and lets not forget our canadian friend Mr M.
- lowimpakt0
^ drgss
Can you highlight the page reference for that Marx quote above?
It doesn't sound like to the language of the time and isn't in the translation I read just now.
- ********0
I copied it from some news article. With some research the quote turned out to be fake -- a garbled recollection of what he wrote
- joeth0
Here's a great report on mass transit in America...
- ukit0
hahaha
http://www.newyorker.com/reporti…
“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. “How many bills has he passed?”
The stimulus bill was essentially held hostage to the whims of Collins, Snowe, and Specter, but if Al Franken, the apparent winner of the disputed Minnesota Senate race, had been seated in Washington, and if Ted Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, had been regularly available to vote, the White House would have needed only one Republican to pass the measure. “No disrespect to Paul Krugman,” Emanuel went on, “but has he figured out how to seat the Minnesota senator?” (Franken’s victory is the subject of an ongoing court challenge by his opponent, Norm Coleman, which the national Republican Party has been happy to help finance.)
“Write a fucking column on how to seat the son of a bitch. I would be fascinated with that column. O.K.?” Emanuel stood up theatrically and gestured toward his seat with open palms. “Anytime they want, they can have it,” he said of those who are critical of his legislative strategies. “I give them my chair.”
- ukit0
Nationalization? Feds, Citi at the table
- TheBlueOne0
UK prepares for a "Summer of Rage":
- Shouldn't that be "Winter of Discontent?"ukit
- Well, that comes after.TheBlueOne
- climate of fear!
climate of fear!
Bash the immigrants, and the gippos !mikotondria3
- ukit0
"To understand the dilemma facing Mr. Geithner and the Obama Administration, you could do a lot worse than read Catch-22 (something I have also found to be true of life in general.) Because unfortunately, Heller’s chocolate-covered cotton metaphor rather precisely describes the estimated $2 or $3 trillion in "legacy" assets – to use the administration’s preferred euphemism – clogging the arteries of the global financial system.
Except that while chocolate-covered cotton at least has some novelty value, most -- if not all -- of Big Shitpile (to use Atrios’s favorite euphemism, and mine) has none.
This, in turn, means it would literally be easier to square a circle, or maybe invent a perpetual motion machine, than to devise a plan that a.) lifts Big Shitpile off the balance sheets of the banks, while at the same time leaving them b.) solvent and c.) in the hands of private investors, without d.) constituting a flat-out transfer of wealth from taxpayers to bank shareholders."
- BattleAxe0
So who is in on this Chicago Tea Party!
- ********0
Whoever voted for Obama— you were played.
He is spending all of YOUR fucking money (and mine) without you having any say, whatsoever. Billions go to states, such as California, who will piss it all away on mis-managed and fucked-up programs and policy. What a supreme joke, and the joke is on you— The Obama-Nation.
Anyhow, you can all suck his pole when he's done bending you over. LOL!
- yea, this sounds like every president/government ever put in place. surprised?********
- yea, this sounds like every president/government ever put in place. surprised?
