I know Wall Street is crumbling, but Washington needs to start paying attention:
Putin’s in bed with Hugo Chavez.
North Korean Nukes are back in business.
Iran is keeping on keeping on.
Pakistan is playing chicken with US Troops in Afghanistan.
Turkey playing war games against Kurds in Iraq.
President Bush will most certainly go down in history as the worst President in American History and one of the worst leaders of all time.
The Bush Administration’s proposed $700 billion Wall Street Bail Out proposal is a collosal mistake for the US economy and the American people no matter what restrictions and limitations Congress is able to impose on a power-hungry Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
This “rescue plan” forces taxpayers to reward destructive and negligent business practices and does not address the ruptures in the foundation of the US financial system: deregulation of banks and financial firms, the overturn of the Glass-Steagal Act and a pronounced crony corporate business model which espouses a lack of transparency, limited share-holder input, misleading sales tactics and irresponsible lending.
If Congress actually cared “protecting the taxpayer” then lawmakers would attack the root of the current problem: declining home values and criminal mortgage rates.
Why not use $700 billion dollars to help homeowners keep their homes by purchasing foreclosed homes and offering affordable and reasonable mortgages? It could be a program similar to the Federal Student Loan program which gives millions of Americans the opportunity to pursue a higher education at affordable rates. It doesn’t take a MBA or PHD in economics to figure this out.
A healthy Main Street leads to a healthy Wall Street, but not necessarily the other way around.
Stop the Socialist Spendathon
Try pro-market, pro-growth solutions instead.
By Deroy Murdock
It is beyond irritating to watch President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gift-wrap their $700-billion early Christmas present for financially irresponsible bankers and the overleveraged borrowers who love them. These “three wise men” consider theirs the only method to stop the turmoil roiling trading desks from Gotham to Tokyo.
“Action by the Congress is urgently required to stabilize the situation and avert what otherwise could be very serious consequences for our financial markets and for our economy,” Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday.
But this mother of all government interventions is unlike a long, cold hypodermic needle in the belly: an inescapable misery, but preferable to death by rabies. There actually are desirable alternatives to building socialism and saddling every American man, woman, and child with another $2,300 in unjustified federal spending.
One option is to instruct the geniuses from Fannie Mae to Wall Street to deal with it. They made this mess; they should mop it up. Cut back, sell assets, develop fresh services, or get new jobs. Absent a federal bailout, Lehman Brothers sold parts of itself to Barclay’s Bank. Facing Uncle Sam’s cold shoulder, Merrill Lynch ran into the loving arms of Bank of America. Merrill’s customers will survive, and its employees will work for B of A or seek their fortunes elsewhere.
It may take time and tightened belts, but padlocking Washington’s bailout window will offer a generation of “masters of the universe” lessons that America’s Mr. Rogers-in-Chief cannot teach: Keep your winnings, but own your losses. If you fall on your face, especially after dancing drunk on the roof, Uncle Sam may empathize, but he no longer will rush in to swaddle you in silk sheets and place your bruised head on pillows stuffed with crisp $100 bills.
Other options exist, of course — and while they lack the bracing appeal of this sort of financial Darwinism, they remain far more attractive than our current policy of “survival of the fattest.”
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) chairs the Republican Study Committee, the congressional caucus of idea-driven, free-market stalwarts. These practicing Reaganites seem appalled to watch their GOP president morph before their eyes from GWB to LBJ to FDR. At a Capitol Hill press conference at high noon on Tuesday, Hensarling and a dozen RSC members expressed deep misgivings about Bush’s $700-billion baby. Preferring to drown it in the bathwater, Hensarling and his band of true believers rejected Bush’s collectivism and offered their own proposals for escaping this rubble — and returning America to a path of robust growth:
Give the capital-gains tax a two-year vacation. “Suspending capital gains taxes would bring as much as a trillion dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines back into the market,” Hensarling predicts. Also, as the Tax Foundation proposes, cutting America’s 35-percent corporate tax — the industrialized world’s second highest, after Japan’s — would boost U.S. global competitiveness. Since equity prices partially reflect long-term after-tax profits, lowering corporate levies should buoy stock markets.
Denationalize, then privatize Fannie and Freddie. “These troubled financial Frankensteins — created in a government laboratory — are not creatures of the free enterprise system,” Hensarling said. “We must ultimately take their monopoly powers away and return them to the marketplace.” Why not array Fannie’s and Freddie’s loans according to mortgage holders’ surnames? They then could be divided alphabetically into 26 units and auctioned off.
Waive “mark-to-market” accounting. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau argues, when distressed mortgage-backed securities sell at bargain-basement prices, unhelpful new bookkeeping regulations require that similar instruments elsewhere — including viable loans — be valued at equally low prices. This needlessly stains balance sheets.
Strengthen the dollar. Bernanke should boost U.S. currency, not pose as America’s uber-stock broker. A strong dollar lowers inflation, cheapens oil, and soothes world markets.
Bush’s bailout bonanza began with $29 billion for Bear Sterns. Then came the taxpayer-financed purchase of an 80-percent stake in AIG. And while the public and press gaped open-mouthed at the $700 billion request to rescue the financial-services sector, Washington quietly passed $25 billion to the auto industry. Doubtless, credit-card companies now await their slab of bacon. This cavalcade of giveaways and takeovers monumentally betrays the Republican Party’s most sacred tenets.
Even worse, Bush’s hyper-statism offers nothing imaginative. It takes brains to generate interesting ideas like Hensarling & Co.’s. It takes mere muscle to nationalize companies and toss handfuls of cash into the air. Just ask Eva Peron.
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.
Everyone should be waking up to Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times today. He puts it plain and clear why McCain-Clinton’s ponzi-scheme “gas tax break” is a ruinous plan for an already nose-diving “energy policy”.
“If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.” - Thomas Friedman
Americans should be outraged by their elected officials squabbling over energy policy in Washington. Has the oil industry paid everyone off??? Otherwise Congress’ actions and inaction simply make no sense at all.
Americans should be raising their voices in protest at the way both fronts in the “War on Terror” are being conducted. But, more disturbing than Iraq is our quagmire in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s US-anointed President, Hamid Karzai, is highly critical of America’s “handling” of the War in Afghanistan. Innocent Afghans continue to die at the hands of American soldiers. Security is still a joke in the country. The US is still searching rural Afghan villages for Taliban and Al Qaeda members while everyone with an internet connection knows that the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped to Pakistan’s Northwest Tribal Regions long ago. Our forces in the country are understaffed and overwhelmed. Tribal warlords and local chieftains barely bother with Kabul, the capital. And Afghanistan is free only in name.
And all of this is not to mention that our own generals are saying that we should expect things to “get worse” in Afghanistan this year.
What is going on here? What could possibly be the reason that the White House stopped looking for Osama bin Laden or hunting down the Taliban and Al Qaeda??? How in the world did we let the Taliban set up shop next door in Pakistan?
Unfortunately, Bush has ensured it so that Afghanistan will remain fertile ground for extremist groups hostile to the United States for at least another decade. Probably another generation.
Afghanistan should have been our number one priority from 9/12 onward. No question.
But, dwelling on the Bush Administration’s criminal flaws can not be our number one concern at the moment.
Now we need to turn as much of our attention as possible back to Afghanistan and get the job done once and for all. Get the job done right.
The country needs to be cleared of all terrorists. It needs security. It needs rebuilding. It needs to learn self-sufficiency. And it needs to be lead down the path towards prosperity. Like an orphan we need to take Afghanistan by the hand and finally treat her like a long lost family member now found.
This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky-polly anna-rant. All of this is possible. All of this can be done.
Our future depends on it.
We cannot forget what happened last time we let Afghanistan fall into ruin. We cannot let it happen again. And at the moment it looks like Afghanistan may be slipping further down that slope. Time to regroup. Time to refocus.
Leave it to “President” Bush to unite the Republicans and Democrats. Both parties are strongly condemning his approach at bringing the North Koreans to the negotiating table. Congress wants full disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear programs in return for fuel and food aide to the repressive regime. Bush is willing to settle for much less: full disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions in Syria (a situation that we and the Israelis are already on top of).
Bush’s ridiculous attempts at diplomacy would be comical if they didn’t concern the safety of humankind itself!
And lest we forget: what other hostile regime has begun to develop and will attain nuclear weapons on Bush’s watch? The government of Iran.
Thanks, Bush!
Muqtada al-Sadr is threatening full-scale war with the US in Iraq. 
Listen up White House: do you plan on doing anything about this guy and his army? We tried fighting him (via the “Iraqi National Army”) in Basra and lost. Maybe it’s time for a different approach? A little “thinking outside of the box”? A little nuance.
Calling Tehran to the table to negotiate a peace, a truce, an anything! (You know it’s bad when you need Iranian mullahs to wax diplomatic on your behalf.)
Like it or not, al-Sadr cannot be ignored. He is and will remain a permanent fixture of Iraqi life. And we can’t go in there and simply “obliterate” him in some Sadr City bloodbath - that will only make things worse.
Where is the State Department?! Where is the Pentagon?! Where is the White House?!?!?
Message to Bush: Start doing your (insert expletive) job!!!
The US is saying that we should expect things to get more violent in Afghanistan this year. Yet another failure of the Bush Administration.
Oil prices keep on climbing. Up, up and away!
Seems that it’s past time to start retooling our energy policy. We really can’t wait till November. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, bicycles and mass transit. It doesn’t a take a rocket scientist to figure out a solution. Only someone with common sense and whose pockets haven’t been lined by ExxonMobil.
The AP is reporting that a former high-ranking Department of Justice official has been accused of a criminal conflict of interest with connection to the disgraced and imprisoned former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. What a mess! Abramoff is the nightmare from which the Republican Party is never going to wake.
And this latest revelation only points in one direction: The White House.
Isn’t it a coincidence that Bush is fighting to keep his visitor logs confidential?
