I think we can find agreement with this message...

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Take Care,

V/R, Batch

I felt a bit like my grandfather had come back from the grave to give me a stern talking to!

Yes this is what is really wrong with our Country! We have all allowed this mess to happen. Blame it on whomever, but it is much larger than one man or one party !!!

Don

I hate to be the one to say it, but we're not all going to agree on this.

Brew wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2009 at 3:50pm:

I hate to be the one to say it, but we're not all going to agree on this.

Hell...we can even get people to agree on whether it's daytime or nighttime. Congress had been in check for decades and incrementally has grown to the out of control behemoth we see dictating to us today.  During the coming depression I think many people will begin reflecting on this very thought since we'll have both the time and inclination to assign blame somewhere. In this particular instance, blame will fall where it belongs.

notseinfeld wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2009 at 10:30am:

I felt a bit like my grandfather had come back from the grave to give me a stern talking to!

I know what you mean…  I sensed the same thing coming from my father all the way back to my Great-Great Grandfather, CDR Oliver A. Batcheller, USN and probably from men and women in our family before that.  
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There’s been a member of my family serving our Nation since April 19, 1775 when the Massachusetts Minutemen activated and five generations in the Naval Service since my Great-Great Grandfather was appointed to the US Naval Academy from the state of New York on November 25, 1859.  

He studied as a midshipman until May 1861, when the Naval Academy was evacuated to Newport, Rhode Island.  Shortly thereafter, President Lincoln placed him on active duty along with the rest of the upper three classes of midshipmen.  The family archives indicate he had the photo taken while he was serving onboard U.S.S. Monongahela shortly after the Battle of Mobile Bay in August of 1864 so he could have something to mail home to prove LT Batcheller was alive and well. START PRINTPAGEMultimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or END PRINTPAGE

Brew, I understand where you’re coming from…  However, given the gravity of the situation our Nation faces and the egregious behavior by members of Congress that started with voting for a terrible bill without reading it, I sense there’s going to be more agreement than not.  

Take Care,

V/R, Batch

My tea bags will be in the ail in the morning.  I couldn't agree completely with all of his proposals, but With many more than I disagreed with.

Jerry

Funny that that guy is dressed up old-timey like our founding fathers, yet he calls for the abolition of the electoral college.  They put the electoral college in place for a reason - mainly because they didn't trust direct election by the people, especially when the people were stirred-up by ranting lunatics. The tradition of having non-representative representatives goes back to the beginning.

A "We the People Stimulus Package" ??  That isn't a stimulus package at all.  A balanced budget is the opposite of a stimulus ... at this point, it would lead to greater economic contraction. My buddy Clark Howard was on the radio over the weekend (kinda sorta reluctantly) speaking in favor of increased spending and a temporary increase in the deficit, because he saw that as the appropriate measure given our situation.  

Make English the official language? The founding fathers saw no need for it. They saw a country where various states had communities of people speaking French, Spanish, German, and other languages.  Maybe it is a good idea for the future (I don't trust the Amish speaking their weird version of German, and wish someone would stop them).  So I'm open to that idea, and might be persuaded if I see more men wearing wigs, tights, and other pilgrim garb.  Especially if they were really wound up and emphatic.

Also, if you want to re-kindle the Revolution of 1776, you wouldn't go to your local supermarket, buy tea bags, and mail them to the government using the (socialist) postal system. You would smash up the supermarket and take the tea, and then destroy it to protest Chinese imports and government complicity (or something).  I don't see how that would solve any real problems, but mailing Lipton to Barney Frank is not going to change anything.

I think that some people are just poor losers - the collapse of the Republican Party has got them unhinged and ready to destroy the nation to save it.  They can't persuade others that their ideas are right, so they want to crank up the mob mentality and threaten violence.  This isn't Albania under Enver Hoxha - we are talking about rolling back the tax rates for the wealthy to 1998 levels.  

My 401k has already been rolled back a decade. Am I happy about it? Certainly not.  Am I scapegoating anyone, or threatening to go galt or hold my breath until I turn blue? No. That won't do any good. The history of capitalism is a story of booms and busts, and we are looking at a non-boom for a while. People with a conservative mindset may not like that, they may be frustrated that there is no simple way to circle the wagons and shoot our way to a better tomorrow.  But here we are.

We might be able to dampen the negative swing with a real stimulus package - it won't be a perfect solution, but I think it is better than any other alternative. Turning to guns to overthrow an imperfect elected government is not going to magically make the problems go away.



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Hell...we can even get people to agree on whether it's daytime or nighttime.

I assume you meant "can't" ??  I blame the internets - on the worldwide cluster support group, one never knows where the participants are.  It's always five o'clock somewhere.   ;)

I am neither republican nor democrat. I am merely human. I don't share all of the views of the video, but I do agree with a great deal of them.

The problem with our economy is the economy itself. I say abolish the unconstitutional IRS, eliminate the federal reserve and return to a standards based currency ASAP. Income taxes are for marxists and the like. I earned this money and you haven't done a thing for me. Go blow.

A unified country is ideal. Can we achieve it? I don't think so. There will always be nonbelievers, or haters, or whatever you wish to call them. We can remain as we are if and only if our current immigration laws are enforced. An official language is a good idea, but English shouldn't be the name of it. Maybe Americanish. I don't know. The problem is a little more pronounced here in the southwest. I had to ask for English to be spoken at a fast food drive-thru.

Most illegals are here to work, yet their earnings go back home. That is not acceptable. The problem isn't necessarily with the immigrants, but with the people that hire them knowing they are illegals.

Has anyone been to say...El Paso recently? It's like Tehran in 1978. You can't go anywhere without hearing gunfire. People being kidnapped daily for ransom. That's mostly from the drug runner culture, but no entirely. People just walking across the Rio Grande like it wasn't there.

Pardon my rant. I shall stop.

Yes Monty..that was meant to be 'can't'. Also I'm in complete agreement with you about the electoral college. As with all Constitutional provisions it was placed there after much deliberation purposefully. My neophyte understanding is that it gives balance to the system so that larger states do not have top-heavy representation. It's another check keep Democracy at bay which is really just majority rule. (see my tagline)

Naturally, I endorse Prediablo's sentiments and could have stood the extended version of that rant! Perhaps when he morphs into the full Diablo we can get our fill. :0

Ack--I'm speaking as if he's not in the room. Greetings Pre-D! Don't think we've met.

monty wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2009 at 11:53am:

Funny that that guy is dressed up old-timey like our founding fathers, yet he calls for the abolition of the electoral college.

Well bless my long gray whiskers…   Back the boat down Nellie !!!  We got us a big spinner on the hook and pulling out line…   It looks like the overpowering urge to strike at the piscatorial enticements worked again…  

Leave it to a liberal to pick the fly crap out of the pepper then start pole-vaulting rants of liberal gymnastics.  

And folks…  Did you catch the bit of twisted logic that maligns the Amish?   I told you liberals would suffer sphincter failure when they discovered their carbon tax Ponzi scheme wouldn’t apply to the Amish…  Watch for an amendment that taxes farm animal flatulence…

Our founding fathers held that English was the language of our new Nation or they would have started the Declaration of Independence and Constitution with “Press “one” for Spanish or “two” for English…”  The simple fallacy of the socialist mentality is their beloved ideology fails miserably when they eventually run out of other people's money.

Don’t ya just love the way liberals will do anything they can to belittle the Constitution in an attempt to shape it in their own socialist ideological image (like trying an end-run to give DC statehood without having it ratified by three-fourths of the States in order to pick up two more Senators), yet cry out in anguish at the mere suggestion of an Amendment that would lessen their opportunity to seize and hold power.

The origin and evolution of the 12th Amendment represented a concerted and determined effort by our founding fathers that took another 17 years to develop and ratify after the Constitution was signed.  They faced a number of challenges in writing this Amendment including the correct perception that political parties were mischievous if not downright evil.

I’ll agree that a lot has changed in the 233 years since the representatives from our original 13 Colonies totaling 4 million people began this most successful journey in democracy.  

Ultimately, I think most will agree after reading the un-rewritten history of our Nation, that even our founding fathers would be surprised and angered that their efforts in citing the principals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution have been so perverted as to legitimized the slaughter of over 50 million American babies in the last 36 years before they could be born… mostly at taxpayers expense.

Monty, inasmuch as you have eschewed commenting on the fact that more American babies have been slaughtered before they could be born in 36 years than the sum total of all casualties of war in the history of our great Nation, perhaps you could finally be so kind to provide the readers of this thread with the guiding liberal principals used to justify the magnitude of this barbaric practice.

And please… don’t attempt to do us the disservice of resorting to the dysfunctional logic used by the liberal elite members of Congress who voted for a $787 Billion dollar spending bill without so much as reading it first...  We await your response on this defining attribute of the liberal elite…

Face it Monty…  Your beloved illiterati in Congress and the White House have screwed the pooch on AIG and these liberal pantloads are still running around with their knickers in a twist trying to shift the blame…  

And you want these idiots to run Universal Health Care???

Take Care,

V/R, Batch

Batch wrote on Mar 24^th, 2009 at 6:59am:

And folks…  Did you catch the bit of twisted logic that maligns the Amish?   I told you liberals would suffer sphincter failure when they discovered their carbon tax Ponzi scheme wouldn’t apply to the Amish…  Watch for an amendment that taxes farm animal flatulence…

You caught me there, big boy!  I was not sarcastic at all, and am willing to give up my liberal position that people should have the liberty to speak whatever language they wish (under the guise of freedom of speech), if only you will dress up in colonial period costumes and jump up and down and demand it of me, just like the guy on the video did.

And while we are bringing the Amish into the modern age, lets see if we can increase their carbon footprint, OK?  No more occasional trips to the next valley on a horse and buggy, they need to get cars like normal people and start driving ten to fifteen thousand miles a year!! They need wall-wart transformers in every outlet - but they need outlets first!

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"This play within a play is ultimately not about AIG, corporate aircraft, fancy resorts and partying executives, all of which have been denounced by President Obama and members of his administration, along with many fulminating members of the media. While some people rail against 'greed,' some of the less affluent operate according to another of the 'seven deadly sins,' which is envy. I don't care how much money someone else makes. I simply want the opportunity to make the same, or more, should I choose to. ... Who teaches [wrong] values today? If you don't succeed, it's someone else's fault, not yours. Others who have succeeded owe it to you to make things 'fair.' Instead of attending to ways in which our own lives and circumstances might be improved, too many try to bring others down to their level. That never improves conditions for the ones at the bottom, but it makes them feel better, which is the objective of liberal politicians who want to keep people in sufficient misery so they'll continue to win their votes. It apparently doesn't occur to the miserable that they have a ticket out of their circumstances, if they will only climb aboard the right train." --columnist Cal Thomas

Nice class warfare material, Bob ... very subtle.

Obviously, the American people got it all wrong on AIG. The people that grabbed control of large corporations deserve thousands of dollars per hour.  When times are good, they deserve a massive bonus for their work. When they steer the corporation onto the rocks, they deserve a massive bonus for their work. And when they develop new financial instruments that lock up the entire economy and their company is insolvent, they need the government assistance to pay them their massive bonus.  

Economic productivity rises over time, and so does the gap between the top and middle.  So rather than focus on what is really happening and reign in greed, let's castigate the middle for envy and dissatisfaction, and feed them on the idea that they might someday be in the top, provided they don't rock the boat.  And let the poor buy lottery tickets.


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But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger — how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year — the richest five percent of the population — will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year — eighty percent of America — will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on the rise. Rising inequality isn't new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth — and they know it. START PRINTPAGEMultimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or END PRINTPAGE

DeStijl wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2009 at 10:10pm:

Income taxes are for marxists and the like..

Adam Smith, considered by many to be the father of modern capitalism, endorsed progressive taxation, where the wealthy bore a greater burden in paying for government.  So did Thomas Jefferson, who went even farther:


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"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." Thomas Jefferson, 1785 letter to James Madison

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Obviously, the American people got it all wrong on AIG. The people that grabbed control of large corporations deserve thousands of dollars per hour.  When times are good, they deserve a massive bonus for their work. When they steer the corporation onto the rocks, they deserve a massive bonus for their work. And when they develop new financial instruments that lock up the entire economy and their company is insolvent, they need the government assistance to pay them their massive bonus.

Correct except for the last sentance, the Government has no place in PRIVATE INDUSTRY and should butt out!  The bonus paid to corporate executives is the business of the shareholders of that corporation not the Congress nor the American people.

Bob P wrote on Mar 24^th, 2009 at 10:04am:

Correct except for the last sentance,

Ah - so you really believe the second tennet?  Do CEOs deserve a massive bonus for failing?  That is a key difference between us - I only think success should be rewarded.

As a shareholder, I don't want to pay for failure twice, though the CEOs and their lawyers have reduced the shareholders to a passive role.  I suggest that the US government is more responsible to the individual citizen than the typical corporation is to the small shareholder - they have zeroed out the small investor and do what they want.... gold stars when they do well, gold stars when they crap on the rug.  

If the Gov had stayed out of it AIG would be history, along with the CEO, Execs, and bonuses.  If there is truely a need for what AIG did, letting them fail would open that market for numerous other responsible businesses to move in and fill the void.
All the Gov is doing by throwing our tax dollars in this hole is failing to lance the boil.
Now they want to take over private companies and disolve them.  Duh, leave them alone and the market will do that on it's own.


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U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms Goal Is to Limit Risk to Broader Economy By Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, March 24, 2009; A01 The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document. The government at present has the authority to seize only banks. Giving the Treasury secretary authority over a broader range of companies would mark a significant shift from the existing model of financial regulation, which relies on independent agencies that are shielded from the political process. The Treasury secretary, a member of the president's Cabinet, would exercise the new powers in consultation with the White House, the Federal Reserve and other regulators, according to the document. The administration plans to send legislation to Capitol Hill this week. Sources cautioned that the details, including the Treasury's role, are still in flux. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is set to argue for the new powers at a hearing today on Capitol Hill about the furor over bonuses paid to executives at American International Group, which the government has propped up with about $180 billion in federal aid. Administration officials have said that the proposed authority would have allowed them to seize AIG last fall and wind down its operations at less cost to taxpayers. The administration's proposal contains two pieces. First, it would empower a government agency to take on the new role of systemic risk regulator with broad oversight of any and all financial firms whose failure could disrupt the broader economy. The Federal Reserve is widely considered to be the leading candidate for this assignment. But some critics warn that this could conflict with the Fed's other responsibilities, particularly its control over monetary policy. The government also would assume the authority to seize such firms if they totter toward failure. Besides seizing a company outright, the document states, the Treasury Secretary could use a range of tools to prevent its collapse, such as guaranteeing losses, buying assets or taking a partial ownership stake. Such authority also would allow the government to break contracts, such as the agreements to pay $165 million in bonuses to employees of AIG's most troubled unit. The Treasury secretary could act only after consulting with the president and getting a recommendation from two-thirds of the Federal Reserve Board, according to the plan. Geithner plans to lay out the administration's broader strategy for overhauling financial regulation at another hearing on Thursday. The authority to seize non-bank financial firms has emerged as a priority for the administration after the failure of investment house Lehman Brothers, which was not a traditional bank, and the troubled rescue of AIG. "We're very late in doing this, but we've got to move quickly to try and do this because, again, it's a necessary thing for any government to have a broader range of tools for dealing with these kinds of things, so you can protect the economy from the kind of risks posed by institutions that get to the point where they're systemic," Geithner said last night at a forum held by the Wall Street Journal. The powers would parallel the government's existing authority over banks, which are exercised by banking regulatory agencies in conjunction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Geithner has cited that structure as the model for the government's plans.

Hoover acted on the principle that government should not intervene in the markets .... where did that get us?  Oh, yeah - it turned a bad recession into the Great Depression.

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...if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number. Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up. If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero. The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG. While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy. No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders. "They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it." None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter. source: START PRINTPAGEMultimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or END PRINTPAGE

It seems like the feds have a long standing position in the private sector. or am I reading this wrong?

with warm regards,
Tony

Yes - the Federal Reserve Bank is in charge of the money supply and makes macro-scale money flow decisions.  When the money is out at the banks or in the hands of corporations or individuals, they make the decisions.

Almost all decisions of the Fed are outside of direct government control (the Fed is not a government institution, even though the President appoints its chairman). Most of these decisions are shielded from public awareness (witness the attempts to parse the cryptic words of Greenspan when he did make public statements).  

You could say that the US 'outsourced' the management of the dollar to private sector contractors in 1913.  

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(the Fed is not a government institution, even though the President appoints its chairman)

That would make it a political institution.

Callico wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2009 at 11:40pm:

My tea bags will be in the ail in the morning.

Something about mailing a tea bag in an envelope to Washington as a message?

Most likely wouldn't think it to get through any mail security there, no message received.

Brew wrote on Mar 24^th, 2009 at 11:36am:

That would make it a political institution.

Sorta - it is a private institution that has some ties to the political world. I would compare them to public utilities, airport authorities, and other quasi-governmental agencies.


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The Federal Reserve Banks have an intermediate legal status, with some features of private corporations and some features of public federal agencies. Each member bank owns nonnegotiable shares of stock in its regional Federal Reserve Bank—but these shares of stock give the member banks only limited control over the actions of the Federal Reserve Banks, and the charter of each Federal Reserve Bank is established by law and cannot be altered by the member banks. START PRINTPAGEMultimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or END PRINTPAGE