From interview with People
Jenna and Barbara, how have you seen your parents change over the last eight years?
Jenna: Eight years ago, my dad was a very popular Texas governor. And I think in Texas, he was able to get a lot done because he was friends with Democrats and Republicans – Democrats supported him. So he was – we were very optimistic. I think maybe I was a little naive about how people would treat him. But he's never wavered in his decisions and he's the same as he was when we were little, his ethics. So that's something to be proud of in itself.
Barbara: And I would say we haven't see our parents as people change that much, because they've stayed the same to us and they've, as Jenna said, have the same characteristics and ethics that they had all their life.
Not again! Another Bush President's child who is unhappy with the treatment by others of their parent. Hang with me here, there's substance in this diary after the fold..
George W. didn't like how Sadaam treated his father. Then George W. had Sadaam killed. Now the twins aren't so happy with how the media and others have treated their father. Of course that's a joke, but there is a serious issue at hand. It's education. It's political education especially.
We must learn from mistakes. If there is one lesson to be learned from the Bush years it most certain is not that consistency is a virtue. Consistency for consistency sake is just stubbornness. As the 20th century's most famous economist John M. Keynes put it...
"When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
What does George Bush do when the facts change? "I stay the course"!
If this were only a harmless comment by the daughters of our President, I'd let it slide. But this problem permeates across this country. From Sarah Palin's pleas for Barack Obama not to bring our troops home in defeat to George Bush saying that we had 52 months of consecutive job growth. They just don't get it. EARTH TO REPUBLICANS- YOU FUCKED IT ALL UP. You wouldn't listen to reason, you were stubborn and ideological. You followed your tax cut gospel and your thirst for war 'gut instinct' into southwest Asian wars. You eroded our depression era protections, and looked the other way to financial crimes and dangerous anti-trust implications of companies too big too fail. We are here because of Republicans and their stubborn ideology.
Scapegoating Union Auto Workers for a Wall St/Washington Problem
There are Senators that voted for the Gramm Leach Bliley act, who are now telling autoworkers that their salaries are too high, and that's why GM is failing.
Alabama
Aye Sessions, Jefferson [R]
Aye Shelby, Richard [R]
Aye McConnell, Mitch [R]
Aye Gramm, Phil [R]
And the last on the list that's the "Nation of Whiners" Phil Gramm. The legislation that bears his nameGramm/Leach/Bliley overturned the depression era regulations that controlled derivative speculation.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate. For example, Citibank merged with Travelers Group, an insurance company, and in 1998 formed the conglomerate Citigroup, a corporation combining banking and insurance underwriting services under brands including Smith-Barney, Shearson, Primerica and Travelers Insurance Corporation. This combination, announced in 1993 and finalized in 1994, would have violated the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act by combining insurance and securities companies
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the United States and included banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation
Not only did this derivative speculation spark the Great Depression, they have also led to Enron, high gas prices, and this most recent Wall-Street disaster. The most recent a result of the creation of this $62 Trillion dollar market for CDS's
As Steve Kroft reports, essentially they are side bets on the performance of the U.S. mortgage markets and the solvency on some of the biggest financial institutions in the world. It's a form of legalized gambling that allows you to wager on financial outcomes without ever having to actually buy the stocks and bonds and mortgages.
It would have been illegal during most of the 20th century, but eight years ago Congress gave Wall Street an exemption and it has turned out to be a very bad idea... trillions of dollars in side bets on those mortgage securities, called "credit default swaps." They were essentially private insurance contracts that paid off if the investment went bad, but you didn't have to actually own the investment to collect on the insurance.
"If I thought certain mortgage securities were gonna fail, I could go out and buy insurance on them without actually owning them?" Kroft asks Eric Dinallo, the insurance superintendent for the state of New York.
"Yeah," Dinallo says. "The irony is, though, you're not really buying insurance at that point. You're just placing the bet."
Dinallo says credit default swaps were totally unregulated and that the big banks and investment houses that sold them didn't have to set aside any money to cover their potential losses and pay off their bets.
"As the market began to seize up and as the market for the underlying obligations began to perform poorly, everybody wanted to get paid, had a right to get paid on those credit default swaps. And there was no 'there' there. There was no money behind the commitments. And people came up short. And so that's to a large extent what happened to Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and the holding company of AIG," he explains.
Another act that aided in this was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, also known as the "Enron Loophole"
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 has received criticism for the so-called "Enron loophole," 7 U.S.C. §2(h)(3) and (g), which exempts most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The "loophole" was drafted by lobbyists for Enron working with senator Phil Gramm seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, "Enron On-line."
Several Democratic legislators introduced legislation to close the loophole from 2000-2006[5][6] but were unsuccessful.
In September 2007, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) introduced Senate Bill S.2058 specifically to close the "Enron Loophole" This bill was later attached to H.R. 6124, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, aka "The 2008 Farm Bill". President Bush vetoed the bill, but was overridden by both the House and Senate, and on June 18, 2008 the bill was enacted into law. One specific reason behind its introduction was to address the record high oil prices of the 2000s energy crisis.
And look what happened to Gas Prices once Democrats like Carl Levin stepped in to stop this madness. When this bill became law is indicated by the red line on this graph.
::Clap Clap:: Thank you Senator Levin. Now, for that time period before the red line. Will this stick to Republican ideology or be rewritten in the history books as mistakes made by all?
This recent Wall-Street disaster has hurt so many industries like the autos who came in to get a bridge loan. You'd think these Republican Senators would be willing to help clean up their mess. But nay to a bridge loan for American autoworkers, they were not.
Nay Sessions (R-AL),
Nay Shelby (R-AL),
Nay McConnell (R-KY),
Children are being left behind if they are not taught about Gramm/Leach/Bliley, Tom Delay, Alan Greenspan and the full works of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. I guarantee that I was not schooled about the Great Depression until college Economics courses. I didn't have a clue what a CDO or CDS was until I started hanging around DailyKos. I wonder if we didn't all know about the Glass Steagal Act growing up, if we would have ended up letting Gramm/Leach/Bliley pass.
Scapegoating the poor and the minorities
It feels like no matter what results occur from certain toxic Republican ideologies, they will never leave us. The race to the bottom that free market economics has created will all be swept under the rug. We'll be fed with some B.S. talking point, like Democrats through the Community Reinvestment Act tried to get houses for people who couldn't afford them. And always our great talking points will get pushed aside, to avoid looking too radical, or god forbid, partisan. Take this gem from Thom Hartmann appearing on Countdown with K.O.-
when Reagan came into office we were the largest exporter of manufacturing goods and the largest importer of raw materials on the planet. And, the largest creditor—more people owed us money than anybody else in the world. Now, just 28 years later, we’re the largest importer of finished goods, manufactured goods; the largest exporter of raw materials—which is kind of the definition of a third-world nation—and we’re the most in-debt of any country in the world. This is the absolute consequence of Reaganomics.
Are we progressing in this fight for truth and education or just shoving shit against the tide? My hope is that Barack Obama, once he gets settled in...
After the move, when he releases his infrastructure plan. I hope it has some money for small business creation. We need Moms and Pops to be able to open their own little business. So they don't have to ship off their life's savings to Wall-Street to have an investment. (And we'll need anti-trust regulations against Wal-Mart or any other monopoly that is standing in the way of Mom and Pop's success)