I agree with Krugman, but I’ll show you the photo that made me lose faith in Bush:
Photo by: Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle / AP
It is singer Harry Connick, Jr. praying over the dead body of a grandmother in the devastation of the New Orleans Superdome. TEN THOUSAND AMERICANS were stranded in the Superdome, for days, without plumbing, trash disposal, even fresh air.
Our President was up in the air, looking weak and impotent, while a singer was down below with his hand on the dead body of someone’s mother and grandmother, giving her a blessing.
And, lest you think its all the men doing the irresponsible spending, Mrs. Kathy Fuld is front and center in an article about rich women hiding their designer purchases in unlabeled bags (kind of like the tranched mortgages her husband sold).
Here is what $5000 can buy you, at www.net-a-porter, and ITS ON SALE, down from $8,435!!!!! Its a plain sheath dress, with gilded embroidered wings, because when you go to your $1000-a-plate fundraising dinners where you can buy fur in private, you are an angel:
Perhaps you’d like to add in some sparkling shorts, that went from $1000 to 776 ON SALE – geez, the price, is almost patriotic, isn’t it? You’d buy them if they were $1,776, I bet.
And if you are looking for some work boots, something to take you around town like regular working people, how about these python boots?
available for only $2,580…
And, since you order via the internet, no need to be embarrassed about your excessive, gaudy shopping while the rest of the country can’t make their mortgage payments because your husband decided to sell financial instruments that have no actual money in them, except of course the money to be made by selling those crazy financial instruments… does that make sense? no? well, that’s okay, she’s go to run, has to stop in to a favorite storefront to buy a few more $2500 cashmere blankets…
Usually when you pay your CEO huge bucks, its because he/she (let’s be honest, its almost always a he, so no need to be politically correct here), brings in the bacon. They get paid millions, because the asset, the corporation, increases in value for shareholders. You get paid, therefore, to produce.
Why, then, have bank CEO’s been paid bonuses and salaries and stock options worth 1.6 billion in 2007? In 2008, they’re all bankrupt and need bailouts. That’s not ‘bringing in the bacon’, that’s fraud.
In an article in the New York Times, by Stephanie Clifford, we hear the feeble excuses of a formerly trusted ‘expert’, The Economist Magazine, who blew it:
“About 2008: sorry,” reads a note from the issue’s editor, Daniel Franklin, in the prediction edition for 2009. Who would have seen the financial crisis coming, Mr. Franklin asked? “Not us. The World in 2008 failed to predict any of this,” he said.
In what could be the most ridiculous statement of 2008, The Economist said ‘oops, we didn’t see it coming’ to the recession that is enveloping the globe.
WTF?
They’re not Sunset Magazine, or Veranda Magazine, or SciFi Magazine. They are ‘The Economist’. They seriously did not see this coming?
The housing market contracted. Regular people shared viral videos about how banks were way, way beyond their normal lending limits, extended beyond their usual loan-to-capital ratios, but the Economist didn’t know?
Wages stayed stagnant, prices for everything rose, two-income families were suffering. Who was in charge of that magazine, if they didn’t foresee a global slowdown. Books like ‘Trillion Dollar Meltdown‘, ‘Bad Money‘ and ‘The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism‘ dared to broach what Americans did not want to hear, that we are a nation deeply in debt, at war in a war we can not afford, wasting away our infrastructure with starving citizens who can’t make ends meet, debasing our currency, losing our pre-eminence in the global economy. Sure the books were published in 2008, but they were written in 2006 and 2007 based on information The Economist had access to and reported.
The Economist ‘did not see this coming?’
I did. I sold my house and got out of a million dollar mortgage because I could see a real estate slowdown and I made tough decisions before the undertow hit. My realtor, Warren Mullen, saw the slowdown coming. Anyone who took out a second or third mortgage saw it coming, when they suddenly had a harder time qualifying. Money was leaving the lending markets by mid 2007. Credit card companies jacked up their rates to cardholders, in 2007 and contracted their offers of available credit to new cardholders.
Either I am entirely prescient and should be paid on salary by magazines, the government and private industry, or The Economist whiffed on this one and is now taking the ‘We’re sorry, we didn’t know’ route.
In an interview, Mr. Franklin shrugged at the bad calls. “It’s nice to be right, but it’s not the only point of this,” he said. “Part of it is to say what’s going to be on the global agenda.” In store for the coming year, The Economist says, is an older work force, a recession and a boom in Blu-ray disc sales.
Blu-ray sales? An older workforce? That’s The Economist’s 2009 predictions?
How about a huge unemployed % of American workers who no longer have health insurance? How about municipalities bankrupt? How about a currency and monetary system entirely debased by the Federal Reserve and now trillions of dollars of created money, TARP?
I understand that President Bush didn’t understand this was going to happen, but that’s because he chooses to live in a rarified elitist world, joshing in his tuxedo that ‘the rich are his base’.
But a magazine called The Economist? You can’t ask to be seen as an expert and then wave your hand dismissively, ’so sorry’, when the curtains get pulled back by the little dog, like the Wizard of Oz.
Texas is infamous for running the largest slave markets in the United States. I understand that many neighborhoods had this type of covenant, but this one kept it until 2000? Only 8 years ago? No one caught it in the 43 years that it was in force? It went into force in 1957. It wasn’t stricken with Civil Rights legal changes?
I wandered thru the Dallas Freedman’s Cemetery,
which commemorates slaves who were freed.
You might not remember, but Texas didn’t free its slaves when Lincoln did TWO AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER. Texas waited until June 19th, 1865, hence the Juneteenth Celebrations.
This cemetery is near a freeway. Not in a gated community. These statues are at the front, outside the Cemetery: they represent the magnificence of Africans on their own land.
And here are the representations of what happened, when they were stolen away, dragged onto slave boats and carried to America.
Here’s the statue that sits at the center of this special place of remembrance:
Because this history is still so raw, and our Former President is buying into an enclave where the only allowed non-whites were live-in servants when he was put in as President 8 short years ago, Bush should publicly address and disavow the history of racism at his new home. 15 of 17 homeowners signed a petition to strike the offensive clause from the Meaders Estate ownership covenant in 2000 and it was so stricken in 2001. You can read the original covenant and its 2001 addendum, here.
Traffic has increased, as gawkers look on the President’s future home… Here’s what police say: “When the Bushes are here full time, I imagine we’ll be here full time,” said Officer Michael Bratcher of the Dallas Police Department, who was directing traffic.
I wonder where the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas City Government were until 2000?
Someone did not get the memo about the separation between Church and State upon which the United States of America was founded 200+ years ago.
For two years, the state of Kentucky hung a plaque saying that GOD is helping out the US Office of Homeland Security.
I wonder if its the same GOD being called on to help Notre Dame football, or prayed to by starving children in Afghanistan, the Appalachian mountains, the Congo.
Seriously, when is GOD going to come down and slap people for trying to monopolize him for their own personal beliefs? Isn’t GOD too big for any one religion?
Atheists want God out of Ky. homeland security
By ROGER ALFORD
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — A group of atheists filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to remove part of a state anti-terrorism law that requires Kentucky’s Office of Homeland Security to acknowledge it can’t keep the state safe without God’s help.
American Atheists Inc. sued in state court over a 2002 law that stresses God’s role in Kentucky’s homeland security alongside the military, police agencies and health departments.
Of particular concern is a 2006 clause requiring the Office of Homeland Security to post a plaque that says the safety and security of the state “cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon almighty God” and to stress that fact through training and educational materials.
The plaque, posted at the Kentucky Emergency Operations Center in Frankfort, includes the Bible verse: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”
“It is one of the most egregiously and breathtakingly unconstitutional actions by a state legislature that I’ve ever seen,” said Edwin F. Kagin, national legal director of Parsippany, N.J.-based American Atheists Inc. The group claims the law violates both the state and U.S. constitutions.
But Democratic state Rep. Tom Riner, a Baptist minister from Louisville, said he considers it vitally important to acknowledge God’s role in protecting Kentucky and the nation.
“No government by itself can guarantee perfect security,” Riner said. “There will always be this opposition to the acknowledgment of divine providence, but this is a foundational understanding of what America is.”
Kentucky has been at the center of a series of legal battles involving religious issues in recent years, most involving displays of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. One case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2005 that such displays inside courthouses in two counties were unconstitutional.
Kentucky isn’t the only state dealing with religious issues, but Ed Buckner, president of American Atheists, said it’s alone in officially enlisting God in homeland security.
“I’m not aware of any other state or commonwealth that is attempting to dump their clear responsibility for protecting their citizens onto God or any other mythological creature,” Buckner said.
State Rep. David Floyd, R-Bardstown, said the preamble to the Kentucky constitution references a people “grateful to almighty God,” so he said he sees no constitutional violation in enlisting God in the state’s homeland security efforts.
For the last 8 years in America, we have been led by the ‘Ownership Society’ believers, which is a misnomer, because they like you to believe you have ownership, but ownership actually belongs in the hands of multi-national corporations. Here is a great video on opening up Science, and scientific information, to the global brain.
Problem is, the corporations have a vested interest in keeping things secret: their profits depend on their ability to beat someone else to the marketplace and claim ‘ownership’ of scientific information.
That thinking should be outlawed. All information should be common. Billions of humans, thinking. That’s where our future lies. In connecting those minds and taking ideas to fruition. Not hiding science information so one company can make profits.
Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in Chicago to be relieved from his payments to Deutsche Bank, based on a ‘Force Majure’ clause in his loan documents. This clause ‘allows the borrower to delay completion of the building if construction is delayed by things like riots, floods or strikes. That clause has a catchall section covering “any other event or circumstance not within the reasonable control of the borrower,” and Trump figures that lets him out, even though construction is continuing.
He wants a state judge in New York to order the bank to delay efforts to collect the loan until “a reasonable time” after the financial crisis ends.
Deutsche Bank thinks the idea that an economic downturn should free people from the obligation to pay their debts is laughable.
It pays to be rich, doesn’t it? To be able to add clauses to contracts that protect you, but not to allow the same protection to people who buy from you. There is a bible story about a lender who can’t pay his own debt to the king… The king forgives the debt, the lender goes home and tries to collect from someone poorer than he, the king hears and blows his top, throwing the man he forgave into prison for not sharing the loan forgiveness.
The Donald should be offering leniency to his purchasers if he’s going to argue for his own release.
The banks are taking bailout billions but holding their mortgagees over the usual payment fires. I agree with Reich. The bailout should be shunted past the banks, to the real customers, the payees of these overly aggressive mortgages. I’d cut the house values to what www.zillow.com has, minus an additional 30% off, then force banks to only try to collect that amount. They took the risk on the upside, they should take the risk on the downside.
