Imagine it is 1998, and you are a writer for the online version of the National Review. In the past couple of weeks, President Bill Clinton has nationalized hundreds of billions worth of hospitals, and is now proposing a close to $1 trillion giveaway to the health insurance industry. First, imagine for a moment what the collective freak-out would be like from the right. Christ, you would be able to hear the hysterics coming from Rush Limbaugh without a microphone.
Then write your headline and put it in the comments. My headline:
“Liberal Fascism One Step Closer to Fruition as Soros Stroked Adulterous Clenis Siezes Assets From Citizenry to Liberally Redistribute Them to Fat Cat Big Healthcare”
Enjoy. Fiscal conservatives, my ass.
PS- I don’t know what lawmaker wrote this, but I want to move there so I can vote for him/her.
*** Update ***
You have to be kidding:
“A lot of those people will have to sell their homes, they’re going to cut back on the private jets and the vacations. They may even have to take their kids out of private school,” said Frank. “It’s a total reworking of their lifestyle.”
He added that it’s going to be no easy task.
“It’s going to be very hard psychologically for these people,” Frank said. “I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he’s ever done.”
Go DIAF.
Martin
There’s a 2nd email from said lawmaker now.
zzyzx
Obama is making a stand:
Rosali
My guess is that it’s a member of the House Financial Services Committee.
Dennis - SGMM
“Clinton Illegally Seizes Nation’s Hospitals, Extends Welfare to Rich Doctors! Republicans Call for Impeachment and Imprisonment!”
jake
My headline for the NR:
BILLARY SELLS OUT COUNTRY TO CRACK SMOKING WELFARE QUEENS
My headline for Robert Frank:*
MOAR WEALTHFARE** PLEEZE!
*I thought that was Barney Frank at first.
**H/T whoever coined this term.
El Cid
Damn. Obama’s making my point, which that any “plan” which consists of “give Hank Paulson the $700 billion to do with whatever the hell he pleases” literally doesn’t merit the word “plan”, any more than me having a “plan” for my small business which involves you giving me a million dollars and then going the hell away and never asking about it again.
Darkness
God, that quote made me feel much better. I’d guess Jim Webb or Barney Frank wrote that. Whomever you are… I volunteer for any duty to the cause of getting these thieves their due. Especially if it involves torches. I’ll bring the torches.
Dennis - SGMM
Paulson: We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen! We must do something about this immediately! Immediately! Immediately! Harrumph! Harrumph! …
Bush to Harry Reid: You owe me a harrumph!
Reid: Harrumph!
Joshua Norton
This is the pig without the lipstick.
Martin
He needs specifics of what a counter-proposal that achieves 1-6 will look like. He’s the leader of the Democratic Party – let’s see the details here. What’s the bill going to look like?
Dennis - SGMM
We’re getting the wrong end of the pig for lipstick.
JL
John, Welcome back! A certain congressman is looking for volunteers. If you missed it, go to open left and look at the first email.
Mary
Something like what Robert Reich is proposing?
Joshua Norton
They may have to fly (gasp) business class. Oh! The humanity!
Martin
It’s almost certainly someone in the House given how it was worded.
Shygetz
Screw that…I’d like to paint his house or something. But I’d have been more impressed if s/he had put his name on it.
Montysano
The Anonymous Lawmaker says:
And if this happens, cue Hannity/Limbaugh in 4..3..2..1.. GO! “I find it reprehensible that, in a time of crisis, Pelosi and Reid chose to endanger this country in order to score political points”.
All across the country, millions of listeners nod in agreement and go put the Palin/McCain sign back in the front yard.
When you have traitors running the country, assisted by more traitors in the media, WTF can a person do?
gbear
I was also going to guess Barney Frank until his name showed up in the second email. I think it’s pretty certain that it’s not Melissa (dumber than Palin) Bean. Ouch. I’d love to see Frank’s emails. :)
Here’s today’s quote from George Wills on ABC: “John McCain showed his personality this week, and made some of us fearful.” The video is a must.
lampwick
Better to outline principles and stick by them then offer a counterproposal which even if used as a basis for negotiations will just get hacked to pieces.
Obama is a senator who is running for president; he has to do those two jobs first, rather than be imaginary-president.
The House will cave to Bush, so everything hangs on Obama and Clinton getting the neoliberals Schumer and Dodd and the Blue Dogs not to sell out.
r€nato
You sure this didn’t come from The Onion?
Every last one of these fuckers should have their assets confiscated and left to rely on the social safety net they’ve been busy shredding since Reagan’s days in the White House.
r€nato
$3 trillion for endless war (profiteering).
$700 billion for Wall Street.
And not a dime for national healthcare?
You bring the torches, I’ll bring the pitchforks.
Joshua Norton
Any money printed from now on should replace “In God We Trust” with “WTF?”
gbear
“In
GodThe Salvation Army We Trust”Alan
Mary, I always secretly respected Robert Reich even though I laughed right along with Rush Limbaugh when Rush used to make fun of him on his TV show. Was it Robert Reich who coined the term corporate welfare? Anyway, the scales have fallen from my eyes. I agree with everything Reich says there. The Right’s ideology has failed.
jake
I’d say Bush’s – oops, sorry we’re supposed to pretend this is all Paulson’s idea. I’d say Paulson’s plan is comparable to a money for menaces scheme. Only his thugs beat the shit out of the shop owner first and now he’s giving him the chance to pay to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Fucking bandits.
Mary
Here in the west end of Toronto there’s a mall called Sherway Gardens. It used to be your average middle class mall, with a mixture of mass-market department stores, chain stores and a few high end stores. But over the past few years, as this area has become wealthier, some absolutely frivolous stores, such as a boutique devoted just to olives and olive oil, have opened.
I was at the mall yesterday to visit my dentist and pick up some new shoes and I passed by the huge, gorgeous and utterly empty store several times. I didn’t see a single customer enter or leave once on the busiest shopping day of the week. With any luck, the two young women I saw standing at the service desks will get other jobs folding clothes at Abercrombie and Fitch. Or maybe Wal-Mart. There will be some other people hurt by this trickle down in the coming months and years. Hope they’re not too proud to adapt.
ninerdave
“”It’s going to be very hard psychologically for these people,” Frank said. “I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet recently. And he said of all the trials in his life, giving that up was the hardest thing he’s ever done.””
I could put my foot up his ass pretty hard.
srv
My submission:
Mary
(Hey, when did comments with a single link start getting flagged for moderation? I thought the old limit was 3 links.)
Alan
Let me add, I’m not including the whole Clinton Administration in my assessment of Reich. If anyone would care to take the time to watch this interview of Kevin Phillips by Bill Moyer you’ll understand why.
burnspbesq
The best line of the day comes from Will:
In his pronouncements on the economy, he said, McCain “substitutes vehemence for coherence.”
Well said, sir.
Robert Johnston
There is a problem with the premise of this thread. If Clinton had even thought about nationalizing hospitals in 1998 he would have been impeached and removed from office almost instantaneously, certainly before he had the opportunity to propose a giveaway to insurance companies. Therefore, were he to have tried making such a proposal under such hypothetical conditions, the headline would have been:
“Delusional Psychotic Clinton Refuses Medication, Forgets He’s Not President Anymore”
Incertus
If you’re a person for whom the worst thing you’ve had to endure is losing the private jet, you’re no longer a human, and I don’t want to share the planet with you anymore. You’re taking up more than your fair share of space.
zuzu's petals
Re “CEO’s Walk Away With Millions While Their Employees Go Broke” per ABC headline, seems like Timothy Egan’s observation is more on-point than ever:
demkat620
If I had to guess on the letter writer, I’d lean toward this guy
Marshall
McCain loosing George Will on air is truly a sign of the apocalypse.
Does anyone have a link for the video of Obama ?
jbarntt
Imagine it is 1998, and you are a writer for the online version of the National Review. In the past couple of weeks, President Bill Clinton has nationalized hundreds of billions worth of hospitals, and is now proposing a close to $1 trillion giveaway to the health insurance industry.
I guess I would have to know why Clinton was nationalizing all those hospitals. Your scenario is lacking in details
In the early 1790’s, the Federal gov’t. nationalized the debts of the various states, (Hamilton’s assumption plan), and put the USA on a path to prosperity.
It seems to me that no company should be so big that its failure threatens our economic system, requiring a massive intervention by the Federal gov’t. The seeds of the current crisis are bipartisan, with the Republicans deregulating the financial sector, and the Democrats requiring that banks make mortgage loans to people who should not have got them.
Both problems should be addressed, but in the meantime Paulson’s intervention is necessary to stabilize the market. The American taxpayers will be online for hundreds of million dollars, but that is better than a cascading series of failures.
Hamilton’s plan hurt a lot of ordinary citizens in the short run, esp. his fellow veterans, but in the long run made the USA financially stable, so that in 1803 Pres. Jefferson was able to buy Louisiana from France without overburdening the country.
Hopefully, Paulson’s plan will prevent a market collapse, and be followed by a sensible re-examination of regulation of the banking industry and insurance sector so that no one company or handful of companies can get so big as to threaten the economy in case of failure.
demkat620
Yeah, right. Na. Ga. Ha. Pen.
Montysano
Here’s a question: we hear about the $60T credit default swap market (again referring to Terry Gross’ interview w/Michael Greenbeger). A CDS is basically an insurance policy.
So: is it that:
– $60T = the value of the insured securities, or;
– $60T worth of insurance premiums (which = “risk” = air)?
As way of pespective, my homeowner’s insurance is about 2% of value per annum. So what “is” the $60T?
Incertus
Here’s what it comes down to–this administration, the most incompetent and corrupt in the last hundred years at least, wants a check for somewhere between 700 billion and a trillion dollars, when they’ve only got four months left in office. This isn’t a bad idea. Making Anaconda 2 was a bad idea. This is a fucking disaster, and if the choice is between this and another depression, the depression doesn’t sound so bad.
Just Some Fuckhead
Sounds like Wexler to me.
Joshua Norton
What the fuck “conservative’s guide to history” are you reading? Hamilton wanted the Fed. govt. to assume the state’s debts to legitimize the federal government and establish its credit on the world market. It also would give the Fed power over the States. It narrowly got passed after much quid pro quo – including the location of Washington D.C.
This is just a give-away, plain and simple. There is no “give and take” – just taking.
The Other Steve
Just when you start to maybe like Andrew Sullivan a bit.
He proves he is a fucktard.
jbarntt
Yeah, right. Na. Ga. Ha. Pen.
Huh ?
dBa
Massive Fail.
PeterJ
Clap your hands harder. And faster. Otherwise Tinkerbell will die.
nicethugbert
First Draft: Clinton Legalizes Crack Cocaine
Final Draft: The Soros-Clinton-Heroin Connection
jbarntt
This is a fucking disaster, and if the choice is between this and another depression, the depression doesn’t sound so bad.
You gotta be kidding me.
snarkout
Montysano, the notional value of the CDS market is roughly $60 trillion, so that figure is equivalent to your house, not your homeowner’s insurance premiums.
Martin
Um, that wasn’t the Democrats.
Bush pushed this in 2004 as part of his re-election drive. The problem with no downpayment is that the borrower has nothing at risk other than his credit rating. If he defaults, it’s cost him essentially no money. The lender doesn’t give a fuck if they can’t pay because the Fed has insured the deal, so they get paid either way. Put some real regulation over this, insure only 80% of the mortgage, stuff like that and the program could work just fine, but none of that happened.
I’m not saying the Democrats are innocent on programs like this, they tend to over-reach as well, but this was a Bush initiative, not a Democratic one – and it happened during Republican top-to-bottom control.
Rick Taylor
Finally! Thank goodness, I was getting worried. This is good to hear. I wonder how it will play out. Republicans will try to attack him for standing in the way of saving the economy and talk about his lack of experience, but is pushing 700 billion dollars of spending on huge companies without any conditions really going to be a political winner? I’ve been wrong so many times I’m hesitant to answer, but it sure doesn’t sound like it would be.
nicethugbert
Sounds like Jesus to me. ;)
demkat620
That is not going to happen. Paulsen is opposed to even holding these people accountable, hell even hitting them in the nose with a rolled up newspaper is out as far as he is concerned.
Sensible regulation is out the window as long as we have the media we do and the republicans can make noise about regulation being the job killer.
We get the debt, they get the bonuses and the world keeps on spinning.
The Grand Panjandrum
That is simply NOT fucking true. Banks and other mortgage lenders have a choice of who they lend money to. No such requirement exists. They are NOT required to lend to anyone. Period.
jbarntt
What the fuck “conservative’s guide to history” are you reading? Hamilton wanted the Fed. govt. to assume the state’s debts to legitimize the federal government and establish its credit on the world market.
Hamilton was not conservative in the sense that we use the word today, that would be Jefferson and Madison. Why was it a bad thing to establish the credit of the USA on the world market ? You do realize that both Jefferson and Madison both came to accept the basic precepts of the Hamiltonian view ?
Montysano
I’m sure that we can safely assume that the notional value is leveraged at least 10X what would be prudent in a responsible market?
t jasper parnell
Doesn’t the wording here mean that the amount is not fixed at 7 with multiple zeros?
Incertus
Not at all, because I have zero fucking confidence that Paulson will stave off a depression if he’s given a blank check. Whether this becomes the biggest scam in history or the biggest fuckup in history, the net result is the same–we’re out another trillion dollars and we’ve still got a shitpile.
NR
Has McCain lost George Will?
El Cid
I’m sure that in exchange for letting them do whatever the hell they want with $700 billion, Bush Jr. administration officials and Republicans will be glad to vaguely smile nicely and mumble something reassuring when you say you expect better regulation, etc., and then if you follow them around the corner you’ll see them bust out laughing at you.
Martin
And thus is the difference between Democrats and Republicans today. Democrats want to preserve the values on which our nation was founded even if that puts the nation at risk, Republicans want to preserve the security of the nation even if it requires giving up our values. As Ben said:
El Cid
This is not true. Republicans care absolutely zero for the security of the nation. Republicans care only about the security of the investments of themselves and their powerful friends and their ability to wage wars where ever they feel inclined.
They just call that “security”.
Joshua Norton
The point is a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into that decision. And a lot of specific benefits were wrung out of it prior to it being passed.
This little cluster fuck is “how much do you want?”. And “will you take a check?”.
Hardly the same thing at all.
The Dangerman
Any bailout plan that doesn’t include, at the very least, a massive tax increase on the uberweathly is unacceptable; they engorged themselves with this mess, now they can fucking bend over and take one in the ass for the team (or, as Biden would say, do their patriotic duty); alternatively, they can all lie down in the street while we all piss on them.
And sold on EBay.
Also, the letter from the Congressperson is laden with grammatical errors; for example, first paragraph, I do believe that motherfuckers is one word.
I think it should be DIAPF (P==Plane)
t jasper parnell
And, just to pile on, here
Rightwingers everywhere:
Reality replies:
jbarntt
Clap your hands harder. And faster. Otherwise Tinkerbell will die.
OK
Balloon Juice has become a blog indistinguishable from Democratic Underground. We are in a major financial crisis and this is the sort of reply I get to a serious post ?
Montysano
I’m sure that we can safely assume that the
notionaltrue value is leveraged at least 10X what would be prudent in a responsible market?My bad.
Just Some Fuckhead
Lotta good comments. Cut my typing finger in a salad accident so I can’t play. :(
jbarntt
Any bailout plan that doesn’t include, at the very least, a massive tax increase on the uberweathly is unacceptable; they engorged themselves with this mess, now they can fucking bend over and take one in the ass for the team
Yeah, it is the uberwealthy who took out loans they couldn’t afford, so let’s use the tax system to punish them. That makes sense.
As to your sexual preferences, enjoy it. As to the team, I’m not sure what you mean, maybe your bath house buddies ?
The Dangerman
You deserve a bailout, no questions asked. Would a Billion do?
r€nato
If you intend to be serious, the next time you regurgitate this barely-disguised racist claptrap, please tell us how much money was loaned out under the Community Reinvestment Act since 2001 (I’m choosing that year as when the RE bubble started to inflate), and the default rate of such loans.
Because last time I checked, the epicenter of the mortgage mess was Orange County, which is not exactly known for either a substantial minority population nor for low household incomes.
The Grand Panjandrum
Our is being sold out by a bunch of paunchy, power-suited pussies.
Buggy Ding Dong
It’s time to bring back the guillotine for those poor private jet giver-uppers.
Just Some Fuckhead
I could prolly get by with a veggie slicer that doesn’t require a blood sacrifice to operate. Or a lifetime supply of sliced carrots.
jbarntt
That is simply NOT fucking true. Banks and other mortgage lenders have a choice of who they lend money to. No such requirement exists. They are NOT required to lend to anyone. Period.
In order to promote poor and lower class people into the middle class and to eliminate redlining, banks were required to loosen who could receive a loan. These are the prime recipients of failed loans.
No requirement was made to loan to anyone, a nice strawman argument. Most of the failed mortgage loans were indeed to people who shouldn’t have got them.
Joshua Norton
If that fails, just tell them it’s stigmata. You’d probably qualify for some kind of faith-based relief.
The Dangerman
Actually, it was the uberwealthy that fucking gave OUT the NINJA loans (No Income, No Job or Assets); if someone wants to give me a loan that I can’t afford with zero risk to me, I’m sure going to think about it so I could get a roof over my head.
Insinuating someone is Gay is so Junior High School; is that the limit of your education?
I stand corrected; those that are into the golden showers will have to be excluded.
r€nato
Actually we are going to be on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars.
I know it’s hard for you Very Serious Fiscal Conservatives to keep track of the difference between ‘millions’ and ‘billions’. After all, it was your type who lost track of $9 billion of cash flown into Baghdad.
“Let’s give Paulson a blank check for $700 billion, cross our fingers and ask nicely that maybe Wall Street might perhaps think about cleaning up its act somewhere down the road.”
Now, that is a Very Serious Plan from a Very Serious Person.
It’s hard to believe that this same kind of thinking went so far awry in Iraq. Must be the niggers’ fault.
snarkout
I’m sure that we can safely assume that the true value is leveraged at least 10X what would be prudent in a responsible market?
The issue in this case isn’t leverage — it’s that the pricing of the CDS was completely irresponsible. It’s like Crazy Eddie’s Insurance Hut wrote a bunch of homeowner’s insurance at low low rates, only to realize after the fact that it was insuring only houses below the water line in New Orleans and on the San Andreas Fault. The problem is that it’s not just speculators who were buying the CDSes, because really, at this point they can screw off and die; normal, serious insurance companies — Allstate, State Farm, what have you — and pension funds were buying these CDSes to hedge against risk in the bond market and are going to get hit hard when they have to adjust for the fact that Crazy Eddie can’t pay. If we give Paulson his blank check, we’re assured that everything will be fine because we will be paying Crazy Eddie’s bills while he goes off to his estate in St. Tropez with a model and a half-key of Bolivian.
Just Some Fuckhead
I wish someone would step us through the stages of private investment banks failing all the way through to next great depression. It’s not that I don’t believe it can’t happen, just that by training I don’t make decisions based on “Something bad happened!” followed by “Eek! Catastrophe!”
r€nato
Jbarntt, if I offered you a $300,000 loan without bothering to check that you had the income to pay it back, if I asked for a wildly-overvalued asset as collateral, who would be the bigger fool? You for taking the loan or me for making it?
There’s this thing called, ‘due diligence’. I would think a Very Serious Person like yourself would be familiar with that concept.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I rather liked Tanta @ CR’s gloss on the same letter:
Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark.
r€nato
snarkout, haven’t you heard? It’s the fault of the poor people and the darkies. You are a Very Unserious Person.
james
jbarntt: In any other place in the world, these dudes, Paulson, the bankers et al. would be put up against the wall. I’m not joking. Folks, common people would be looting their houses as we speak.
But there are Steelers games to watch and pizza on it’s way.
There is nothing to be serious about. This is one massive fucking ponzi scam, from start to finish. It’s happening. There is going to be taxation without representation. Naked, unchecked executive power in the hands of one man. Political pressure will be brought, the only people with access to the congresspeople and senators right now are lobbyist. People will cave and this will pass, with the double benefit of making Obama look like he can’t even control his own party or accomplish anything he says.
Meanwhile, Combat Brigades are being retasked to ‘homeland security’ with the express mandate of ‘urban and civil unrest pacification’. You can find the article on the army times website.
If you want a serious reply: Wages have stagnated, while the prices of houses have doubled or tripled. When people went to their banks asking… fucking asking… if it would be possible to own a home, the answer was unequivocally ‘yes’. No income checks, hell, they were even willing to enable what they knew to be horrid risks by flat-out lying on the applications.
The banks and the mortgage agents got paid and did not care. When some folks started defaulting, interest rates were raised on the majority of other homeowners to make up the difference. Rates tripled in some cases. What was a $2k a month mortgage became a $3k or more, with no recourse for the borrower.
Shorter: grow the fuck up, dude.
gwangung
I don’t think so. The math doesn’t even make sense. ALL those mortgages were from the poor and middle class?????
That doesn’t pass the sniff test.
droog
I don’t know which congressperson wrote those two e-mails, but rarely have elected officials and hooch lobbied together so efficiently for the public good.
chopper
yeah, the bush admin. did such a great job with the last 700 billion we gave em. now iraq is a fucking paradise.
jbarntt
Must be the niggers’ fault.
Interesting comment, care to explain further ?
t jasper parnell
Evidence for this? Any? Reliable evidence for this? There is none.
joeyess
We Warned You. Bill Clinton Is And Has Been A Communist Since His Trip To Russia While A Student At Oxford.
jbarntt
If you intend to be serious, the next time you regurgitate this barely-disguised racist claptrap, please tell us how much money was loaned out under the Community Reinvestment Act since 2001 (I’m choosing that year as when the RE bubble started to inflate), and the default rate of such loans.
Because last time I checked, the epicenter of the mortgage mess was Orange County, which is not exactly known for either a substantial minority population nor for low household incomes.
A serious response, and indeed it was the Community Reinvestment Act I was referring to. I admit my comment was based on conservative columnists who made this argument, not from real knowledge. If I am wrong about this, then I will admit it, meanwhile I need to do some research. If you have facts and figures and they bear you out, I will acknowledge that.
Joshua Norton
Oh come, come. It’s a direct right-wing-dog-whistle-to-english translation of your comment about “the Democrats requiring that banks make mortgage loans to people who should not have got them.”
Kind of like “elitist” now substituting for “uppity”.
Just Some Fuckhead
So yer just shootin yer mouth off without having researched anything but yer willing to admit yer wrong if someone else jumps through enough hoops for ya? Getting a sense yet of why no one considers you serious? (..totally unrelated to your inability to use the very basic comment formatting tools?)
patroclus
This post makes a good point, but I have to ask: If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered by an Islamofascist, would you still favor allowing two gay illegal immigrant abortionists to continue to shove their “lifestyle” down people’s throats??!!
Dennis - SGMM
I’m not going to defend jbarntt however, he does beat the hell out of myiq.
t jasper parnell
Read. Report on CRA
SGEW
In all seriousness: this is the sort of admission that people who read “conservative” columnists need to make more often.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Oh Lord won’t you
buy me a Mercedes Benzbring some real fiscal conservatives to the discussion!Bogus talking point already shredded by multiple comments upthread.
Which explains why the demographic and geographic characteristics of loan default rates and foreclosures are such a good fit against areas with higher numbers of poor and lower class people. And why the Jumbo and Alt-A loan pools are in trouble.
Or perhaps not.
Epic fail.
Why don’t you try actually making a serious post, and then we’ll see what sort of response you get.
The response you are seeing now is what happens when right wing trolls try to catapult propaganda on Balloon Juice and get put through the chipper-shredder feet first for their trouble.
Thanks for playing and have a nice day!
D. Mason
I bet you never thought you would be writing that.
fledermaus
Look people I was watching the Sunday show and they all assured me that everything would be fine if we just elect Michael Bloomberg dictator for life and not ask too many questions
PeterJ
The reply was to your
Hopefully if we give away $700 billion it will work, and if it doesn’t then hopefully it will work with the next $700 billion. Or the next.
Just as long as you clap your hands harder and faster.
Because one thing we shouldn’t do is add any kind of oversight, since we don’t have any time left.
Besides to clap.
SGEW
Hopefully these tigers won’t rip my face off when I poke them with this stick.
What could go wrong?
NR
A mentally retarded monkey with Tourette’s Syndrome beats the hell out of myiq.
SGEW
Now that’s an image to treasure.
Martin
Who, me?
I wouldn’t call us *the* epicenter. Maybe *an* epicenter…
OC has two components here:
1) OC is the home to many of the shiftless lenders. Drive up the 5 and the 405 in Irvine and you could see them all in their 2-story tilt-ups that got built frantically 5-10 years ago. A lot of them are gone now, profits taken and debt dumped on others.
2) We had a pretty damn nice bubble here. I’m in one of the nicer suburbs of OC, but it’s a suburb nonetheless. Median home prices in my city of almost 200K topped out at $990K. That was median, in a city the size of Des Moines. Everyone here did cash-out refis. I’m the only person I know that didn’t get a new media center in the last 5 years, or a Hummer, or a new kitchen. *Lots* of people moved up. The person we bought from (at just shy of half a mil) moved up to an $850K house. The person behind us sold 2 years after we moved in for $800K and bought a place 2 blocks away for $1.3M. The plan was simple – stretch your mortgage payments as far as you could in the new place, and in 2-3 years sell for 40%-60% more than you paid. Rinse and repeat. It even worked for us, though we didn’t play the game as such. We bought our first place for $105K, sold it for $380K, bought our new place for $475K and it’s currently still worth about $675K. Our monthly payment didn’t change a dollar from start to finish. We never took cash out even when we refied. (Not too shabby for someone in the public sector that earns below the median nationally.)
But for people with a bit more to work with, buying a 2nd home to rent with the prospect of selling it at a profit is pretty common. I know a number of people in this position. None of them are in good shape.
Around us we have a fair number of foreclosures. It’s not as bad as Sacramento and lots of places around the country, but it’s definitely noticeable. We’ve had a number of people we know get foreclosed on. One other had bought a $1.2M house with nothing down. Due to employment issues, they had to move and sold at a $150K loss. They didn’t have $150K in savings, so they’re negative with no savings to put down on a new house. Since they’ll be lucky to buy with less than 20% now, they’re pretty fucked and will spend the next 3 years or so just to pay off their loss on the house.
Even though it’s not as bad as many other areas in terms of numbers of properties, the dollar figures are staggering. I mean, these are million dollar properties being foreclosed on, which I have to admit we’ve gotten accustomed to. The dollar losses on these properties are pretty big because million dollar homes are falling to $700K. But when your median home price is 9x what your median income is, you have to figure something is going to blow up pretty good. There’s a decent bit of old money here and people like us that have equity out the wazoo, but not that much. A lot of people are at their breaking point. They can’t leave for new jobs because they’ll get massacred on their home sale. With the state budget where it is, I think we’re going to see a wave of people crumble as expenses climb and jobs get tight.
As for minority population, OC has a pretty goddamn big minority population. 3 million people live here and there are lot of latinos in places like Santa Ana, we have a huge persian and chinese population, lots of vietnamese up around Stanton, etc. One difference with many of these ethnic groups is that they tend to be pretty fiscally responsible. They are heavily cash-based. They don’t borrow much at all. Foreclosure rates in ethnic neighborhoods were lower last I read.
The bigger problem with lower income areas is that cost of living here is so high relative to income that many young people simply cannot get a reasonable start on housing. A starter condo where I live was $450K. That’s a hell of a down payment for a prime loan, even if mom and dad throw a check your way. When you came out of a ~$1M home (half of the people here) shacking up with 3 of your buddies in an apartment is a hard pill to swallow, and saving up $100K takes quite a while. Those 0 down and interest only loans were very attractive – not so much to minorities but to white middle class kids in their early 20s that had a pretty decent job and were looking to get started on building equity.
Things have changed quite a lot though in the last 2 years. On my cul-de-sac, there are 4 other families – all have college/post college age kids. They all live at home. 3 of the 4 have their kids with their spouses and a newborn living with mom and dad. The kids have decent jobs (one is an attorney, one is a sales manager, I forget the 3rd) but they just don’t have the savings to get started and paying rent would make it impossible for them to get the down payment anytime soon.
Well, I wouldn’t call them uberwealthy, but most of the people I know who have been foreclosed on earn 6 figures. The people making ~$50K that own homes are all fine. Those of us at the lower end of the income spectrum didn’t feel like we had the headroom to risk equity losses by investing in real estate. Those at the higher end felt like they could use real estate to leverage their higher income into early retirement.
The one exception to this is my uncle who was just foreclosed on. He’s a supreme jackass and his wife was a mortgage broker. They got in way over their head, mainly because she was kicking ass income-wise for a while there. Turns out she was pushing people into bad loans in order to boost her own finances and when her shitty lender went under, she went with it. It’s been somewhat satisfying convincing my relatives to not loan him a dime. Unfortunately living in his car probably won’t change them. But he’s not a minority or low-income borrower. He’s one of the zillion of middle-class white Americans who felt they deserved better and kept reaching for it, even when it was out of reach. He’s also the sole Republican in the family and proclaims no responsibility for his woes.
Stuck in the Fun House
You got hand it to Jbarnett, he does possess a sort of fearlessness coming here and admitting to half baked analysis gleaned from reading missives from the very people who preached us into this mess. It’s a thoroughly mindless form of fearlessness, good only for it’s entertainment value on a slow Sunday afternoon. But why quibble over small details when the rest of wingnuttia has their heads collectively stuck in a hole in the ground whilst the country circles the drain. Or is writing psychotic parables about how Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are to blame.
DonnaInMichigan
Don’t despair people…
Sarah Palin has a plan!!!
“Were going to shake things up, and fix things, ya’ll”.
Shes a maverick! A reformer!
Dont’cha all feel safer now?
The Moar You Know
The only possible headline for John’s scenario:
RAPIST CLENIS IMPOSES COMMUNISM BY FIAT, RIGHTEOUS REPUBLICAN MOB STORMS WHITE HOUSE AND SLAYS INSANE HEAD OF STATE AND LESBIAN WIFE. NEWLY SWORN IN PRESIDENT GINGRICH PROMISES “WE SHALL NEVER ALLOW A MADMAN TO SEIZE THE REINS OF POWER IN SUCH A MANNER AGAIN.”
And so the Republic dies. Way to go, dipshit.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
And once again jbarnett proves he knows nothing about anything.
nicethugbert
Here we are on the verge of The Great Depression II and the “conservatives” are still trying to flood their kool-aid into the water supply. Personal Responsibility = It’s Lesser Economic Lifeform’s Fault = It’s Democrat’s Fault = It’s The Mass’ Fault because they invented Naked Short Selling, Credit Default Swaps, Deregulation, etc., especially, Lack of Common Sense and Pass The Buck/Hot Potatoe.
TenguPhule
Wrong.
Banks saw a way to get big profits by making shit loans to whoever came in and passing it on to someone else in the form of chopped up bonds backed up by shit.
That you don’t even know that much proves you are a low information fool.
SGEW
I believe the polite way to say this is “undecided swing voter.”
(heh)
Loneaok
Shorter: It’s the black people’s fault.
nepat
Still waiting to hear from Chief Executive Palin on the economy. Wasn’t she picked for her executive experience? The clock’s ticking.
Loneaok
Damn, why do conservatives get stoopid around anything that intersects with race? How dumb do you have to be to think anti-discriminatory regulations (ending redlining) means that banks have to make bad loans? It only means that they have to offer the SAME bad loans to various ethnic groups.
Besides, it’s just patently obvious that the market crises are exploding because no one knows the true value of the assets and debts at play, not because brown people got a tiny percentage of that money. The completely insane financial markets created in the last couple decades were designed to obscure proper information and the uberwealthy cheered it on.
SGEW
This one’s so easy, I’m not even going to say it. I’ll just let it stand there as a rhetorical* question.
Here’s another one: why do almost all ethnic minorities support the Democratic party? Why are we so sensitive when the Republicans or Mr. Limbaugh discuss racial issues? Why ever could that be?
*Note to Gov. Palin: this is different than “hypothetical.”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Since the CRA slur is making the rounds of the right-wing fever swamps, here’s another point to keep in mind:
It isn’t just residential real estate which is tanking. CRE (Commerical Real Estate) is also on a taxi ride to hell.
I guess all those poor people weren’t content to just buy up overpriced homes, they also had to do around building shopping malls and office parks and hotels too.
NR
No kidding. Remember how all of us were hoping that McCain would pick Romney for VP just a few weeks ago? Well, now it’s looking like we dodged a serious bullet. If he was out there talking to the people about the economy from the point of view of a successful businessman, we’d be in trouble. But Palin brings nothing to the table on the economy. Nothing.
Jess
I want to know who wrote this too–Mr. Cole, are you sure it wasn’t you? I’m going to frame it and hang it in my office for everyone to see.
zzyzx
What happened to the football post?
I got lucky with the housing price runup. I qualified for an 80/20 and then when my paper equity hit 20% I refied into a straight 30 year fixed. I was being a little conservative but I feel smart now.
ThymeZone
National Review Headline:
We are truly fucked, the conservative movement is dead.
And may I say, good riddance to it.
Delia
So what are you saying? We damn crackers are too dumb to know what’s good for us? That’s why so many of us support the goopers?
Delia
So what are you saying? We damn crackers are too dumb to know what’s good for us? That’s why so many of us support the goopers? Even if they rob us blind?
Delia
oops
gbear
Go DIAF.
Indeed.
ps: did John lose another thread? What happened to the football post that was above this one?
west coast
Headline: Democratic Insistence on Equal Housing Protection Leads to Mandatory Socialization of Financial Markets
That’s right, the meme is already out there on the right…the fiscal crisis is the result of minorities buying homes.
gopher2b
I still want someone to explain to me how letting these retards fail on a massive scale leads to a depression. There are plently of banks and large companies with tons of cash to fail the credit void for awhile.
This is entirely about saving investment banks and hedge funds.
Loneaok
Let me get this straight: CRA laws forced banks to stop discriminating against whole neighborhoods based on race and REFUSE to offer home loans. In other words, the CRA laws forced lenders to look at borrowers on an individual basis (so unAmerican!). Eventually, the financial industry figured out that they could discriminate against whole neighborhoods by OFFERING insane loan structures when 2/3 of the borrowers qualified for traditional, safe loans when looked at as individuals. So what the reichtards want us to believe is that this all could have been avoided if the financial industry still had the right to discriminate against individuals on the basis of what neighborhood they live in or their melanin count?
x/posted at Sadly, No! thread on the same topic.
elf
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”
Done and Done
Just look at us, studying this and commenting judiciously and what good will it do us.
Sorry for the “glass half-empty” outlook, this just so screws the rest of our lives and our poor kids only have half a clue if they have any sense at all.
So I got me a Total Rewards Card from Harrahs and you bet I intend to use it! Fuck my retirement which sure as hell ain’t happening now.
jcricket
Speaking of the glass… I love this image on the subject.
Seanly
boo fucking hoo
I’m crying big tears for these rich jackasses.
Hey, maybe that 42% of America that thinks they’ll be in the top 1% of worth will catch a clue now…
KT
This epic f’up makes 9/11 look like a mosquito bite. Congress should tell, not ask, tell these captains of finance what is and what is not going to happen and slap them with a charge of economic terrorism if they so much as raise a finger in protest.
They want to play games with the economic health of the entire country? Screw ’em treat them like any other terrorist because that’s what they are if they don’t cooperate.
Darkness
That’s right, the meme is already out there on the right…the fiscal crisis is the result of minorities buying homes.
Well, if you can’t demonize brown people, you aren’t having a good week.
In reality, sub-prime foreclosures are fast being outpaced by Alt-A and option payment ARM ones which are entirely good credit score customers. Not brown people, not poor people… middle to upper middle class whites. If it were only subprime, this mess would be contained, as they are on the decline and all those CDOs could be priced accurately since the landscape would be clear and predictable ahead.
Darkness
It only means that they have to offer the SAME bad loans to various ethnic groups.
You know another interesting effect that came out of this “give a loan to anyone with a pulse so we can pass it as instant profit for us along the line” mentality the banks had, was this environment let anyone who could spell their name become a successful loan broker. Normally, you’d need a good roladex of relatively well off people and access to connections with long-time real estate agents, etc … it’d take time to break into the market. BUT, because the banks would finance literally anyone, a lot of hispanics jumped into the business and wrote these terrible loans in their communities, essentially screwing their own, although at the time, it probably didn’t seem like it. I suspect fewer bad loans would have been written in these communities if the barriers to entry to the loan broker business were a bit higher. I.E., I doubt honky loan brokers would have cased hispanic neighborhoods looking for loan customers under normal circumstances, and gotten an unsuspicious reception. Getting hispanics in on the supply chain was the only way hispanics would have gotten loans in such numbers.
This truly was an equal opportunity boondoggle at multiple levels.
Martin
Remember, where I live, $100K income with $100K downpayment and a 650+ FICA puts you in a subprime mortgage for anything larger than a double-wide.
I know quite a few subprime mortgages on million dollar homes among my friend set.
LiberalTarian
You know what *really* burns my ass?
I thought I would enjoy the failure of conservatism more. You know, like “see, we told you regulations on the free market are necessary because greed trumps morality.” But, instead, it’s tails they win, heads we lose. Sure we were right, but now we have to clean up this big mess.
The politics of resentment, indeed. I resent the hell out of those motherfuckers. It’s my driving the car off the cliff dream 24/7–“How am I going to fix this????”
Martin
Huzzah! There is hope afterall. Pelosi finds her inner leadership, at least for today:
LiberalTarian
Right. People wanting to have their own house would turn away someone who was going to make that possible, regardless of their race. I hate it when people assign race as the reason for greed. (A) Race is irrelevant when it comes to greed, and money was being made all the way up the food chain on clearly dirty loans, including your white-moral-gatekeepers. (B) It really shows the depth of a person’s ignorance to say things like “Black people didn’t help each other during Katrina” and “Hispanic people ripped each other off and killed the US economy!!”
Dude, find yourself a de-Limbaughtomizer. It may take time, but at least you could try. Then again, I don’t see how you can possibly rise above your racism. I just don’t think you have it in you.
ed
I believe this is the most accurate description of the right wing “media” and their audience ever offered.
Mary
Paging David Jones. Would Mr. Jones please pick up the white courtesy phone?
Martin
That’s why we call them dittoheads. They don’t need to think, just barf up everything Rush and Hannity tell them.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
You have to give the guy props for using the term “real knowledge” correctly. There may be hope for him yet.
If John ever thinks about taking on an apprentice, he could do worse.
zzyzx
Apparently Obama is leading on the topic! Cool!
Delia
Here’s Hank Paulson in a “let them eat cake” moment.
I don’t watch the Sunday talky talky shows anymore because they’re bad for my disposition, so I didn’t witness this. But really, when it comes time to draw up the DIAF lists, Paulson’s name belongs near the top.
zoe from pittsburgh
Seriously? They’re lucky they’re not stripped of all their worldly possessions and tossed in jail for driving our economy into a ditch just so they could buy a freaking personal jet.
It’s truly nauseating.
Joshua Norton
Or more accurately – Bush gave them a note scrawled on the back of a deposit slip saying ‘give me all yer money’.
Napoleon
Just to throw an idea out there, what if Obama comes up with a plan and that is what the Dems pass. Bush either agrees with it and regardless of what he says basically confirms that its a workable plan, or veto it and basically put on the sholders of the Reps whatever bad comes of it (regardless of what they say that the dems are at fault, because I think that is not how the public will see it).
r€nato
I say we show these fuckers what *real suffering* is.
It’s not a ‘total reworking’ of one’s lifestyle.
It’s being homeless. Destitute. In fear of your life from random violence. Not being sure how you are going to eat from day to day.
I say we take these fuckers and parachute them into some anarchic hellhole like Somalia or Ethiopia. THAT is traumatic. Having to scale back your opulent lifestyle… not so much.
Goddamn. This kind of arrogance is the stuff of which revolutions are made.
Jake
Obama would appear to be leading his party, quietly, in response to the Paulson plan.
Ed Marshall
I’ve been laughing all day. I know I have absolutely zero reason to be laughing at all. It’s hysterical, and when I’m not laughing I’m thinking about guillotines or harvesting organs from these people or the like.
jbarntt
Shorter: It’s the black people’s fault.
Sorry, it’s guys like Dodd and Obama pandering to people who should not have got loans, whether they black, white or whatever.
Delia
Naw. That’s not a total reworking of their lifestyle. Now this would be a total reworking of their lifestyle.
El Cid
I wish all these lying jackasses trying to blame the deregulation of credit swaps allowing the isolation of the mortgage industry from any questionable loans on too many minorities getting homes to try and prove that, say, minority home ownership has gone up by several hundred billion dollars’ worth in the past 5 years.
jbarntt
Just to throw an idea out there, what if Obama comes up with a plan and that is what the Dems pass. Bush either agrees with it and regardless of what he says basically confirms that its a workable plan, or veto it and basically put on the sholders of the Reps whatever bad comes of it (regardless of what they say that the dems are at fault, because I think that is not how the public will see it).
The Democrats should basically accept Paulson’s plan. It seems to be a reasonable one. This is not a time for partisan politics.
Ed Marshall
You don’t have any idea what the hell you are talking about. It’s beyond stupid and I’m so goddamn mad right now, I can’t be bothered to explain why to a moron.
A few years ago, I worked for an idiot who got his news the way you do and he was telling me about how all the nuclear power plants were going to shut down in 2006 because the liberals did something. Did I know how much of our power is nuclear? About twenty-percent, I guessed (the answer is 19%). No, ninety percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power.
He ran his business into the ground to and lost me my job. Probably because he was your brand of jackass.
jbarntt
I wish all these lying jackasses trying to blame the deregulation of credit swaps allowing the isolation of the mortgage industry from any questionable loans on too many minorities getting homes to try and prove that, say, minority home ownership has gone up by several hundred billion dollars’ worth in the past 5 years.
An English translation would be helpful.
Incertus
You don’t have to go that far. Take them to Haiti and let them eat a few mudpies–and no, I’m not exaggerating when I call them that. People in Haiti eat dirt to stay alive.
Jake
And better trolls would be appreciated.
El Cid
jbarntt: You mean a translation into “dickhead” would be helpful to you.
No credit swap deregulation, no current sub-prime mortgage industry crisis. Same bill that gave us the Enron tragedy.
Incertus
You have an odd definition of reasonable. The problem with it is that it’s full of stupid.
Napoleon
The Paulson plan is completely partisan and is a horrible plan.
Its obvious from your posts your a f—ing moron.
Dennis - SGMM
Pandering to the people who wrote those loans seems to be okay though. None of the applicants held a gun to someone’s head and said “Write the loan or else!” The people loaning the money were the ones with the responsibility to make reasonably certain that the loan would be repaid. The people who bought and/or insured the financial instruments based on those loans had a responsibility to at least know what was in those instruments. Now it appears that many of the loan applicants were aided and encouraged in falsifying their loan applications and the people invested in the derived financial instruments had no idea what was in them and therefore just made up a value for them that companies like AIG accommodatingly insured.
Many idiots were handed many loaded guns and as long as money came in every time they pulled the triggers the people who were supposed to regulate them just put their fingers in their ears.
Kevin
Republicans only look for bipartisanship when they’re trying to spread the blame. We’ve had seven years of the wingnuts running this country into a ditch, fuck them.
Delia
You already said the same damn thing hours ago, then admitted you get your talking points from conservative columns and don’t really understand them, and disappeared for a while. Did you come back refreshed, thinking you’re ready for another go?
Two quick question first. How many troll points do you have on the John McCain website? And what do you get when the contest’s over?
r€nato
Translation: Just bend over and take it, Democrats, like you have been for the past eight years.
And when it fails miserably, Republicans will say, ‘well, you Democrats supported it too!’
Fuck that and fuck you, jbarntt. I am goddamned tired of the most partisan assholes this nation has seen since Nixon, lecturing us about ‘this is not the time for partisan politics.’
The last time we heard that line, a lot of us bought it and the result was Bush took us into Iraq, let Osama go free, shoved the “Patriot Act” down our throats and took the AUMF as a grant of dictatorial powers.
Nunh-uh. Not this time. Bush and the GOP do not get the benefit of the doubt again.
jake
Where can I buy tickets to that match?
Napoleon
By the way, I have an alternative plan that is even more reasonable, the high priest of high finance that have brought our economy to the brink of meltdown can junp out of the windows and splatter their brains all over the sidewalks of NYC. I would be more then willing to have the US Government pick up the bill to hose their guts off the sidewalk, and instead of costing us $700mm it will only cost us $10k.
Dennis - SGMM
Wasn’t that a popular line among Republicans just before we blundered into Iraq?
El Cid
We don’t have the luxury of waiting to find out if Saddam Hussein really has weapons of mass destruction. We must act now, within the next 30 minutes, or all of you will surely die.
Stuck in the Fun House
This is correct. It’s time for republicans to STFU. The has had it up to here with wingnut philosophy. and so has I.
Stuck in the Fun House
This is correct. It’s time for republicans to STFU. The country has had it up to here with wingnut philosophy. and so has I.
Martin
Um, since it’s been established that me here in OC is at one of the flashpoints of the whole housing disaster, can you kindly explain how Obama and Dodd are pandering to one of the most Republican counties in the nation? And we’re not fundies here, but mostly big money ‘fiscal conservatives’. Seriously, explain that to me.
Further, given that you’ve already copped to not knowing what the fuck you are talking about, explain how predatory lending practices don’t exist:
Hmm, they were more likely to face foreclosure because the lenders were charging them more. Gee, what a shock. Further, why don’t you explain Operation Malicious Mortgage to us:
Yes, it’s always the black, white, and whatever people’s fault. Ignore the 200 CEOs and however many hundreds or thousands of people each one of them fucked over.
If you read one of my previous post, I’ve been quite clear that some borrowers are just fucking irresponsible, but so far the evidence that I’ve seen is that the irresponsible ones aren’t low-income, rather they are high-income. And predatory lending is more likely the cause for low-income failures. And herein lies part of the problem with Republicans – they assume anyone who is low-income is irresponsible and anyone who is high-income is responsible. It’s as though Enron, Arthur Anderson, Worldcom, and Charles Keating never existed. The State of California is still fucked 5 years after Enron’s bullshit, but that’s all the fault of the black, white, or whatever people here too, eh?
r€nato
…adding, I think a lot of us on the left could not stand Bush already in 2001, we didn’t think he was legitimately elected…
…and nonetheless we gave him the benefit of the doubt in the wake of 9/11.
He and Cheney and their neocon comrades spectacularly misled this nation into the Iraq war and spectacularly abused the benefit of the doubt we gave them.
They have done nothing in the time since to convince any reasonable person that they should ever be given the benefit of the doubt on anything whatsoever. In fact they have proven themselves to be spectacularly dishonest, corrupt, cynical, hypocritical and incompetent.
And you think we should just trust in them again and give them a $700 billion blank check with no oversight? Especially since they are on their way out of office and can’t be held accountable for any of this after January 20?
Are you fucking kidding me?
jake
I went to college with trust fund babies who had never seen a homeless person until they left their little enclaves to travel to the airport. Needless to say their reaction to this blatant example of human suffering was to come down with an attack of the vapors and wonder why on earth those people didn’t just get a job.
In my dreams I rounded up these spoiled shits and dropped them off in downtown Poughkeepsie at around 11 p.m. It wasn’t like the corpses of a few rotten little punks could make the Hudson any nastier.
So there you have it. No need to waste the money on airfare, just take them to the nearest urban or rural blight zone and just … walk away.
El Cid
If you do not hand Hank Paulson $700 billion in the next few minutes, the terrorists will win.
r€nato
Hey I would buy tickets to THAT and I bet you could make money on the ticket sales. It would be SRO.
t jasper parnell
The plan is not reasonable, at least what we know of it, is because there is no plan. The bill, as currently written, is given an unelected official 700 billion and allow him to buy what debt he likes with no oversight. This isn’t a plan it is a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Joshua Norton
Apparently you’re here just to post John Boehner’s demands that Democrats capitulate to lunatic Republican thievery and echoing his mock-concern demands that “This is not a time for ideological purity.”
Here’s Boehner honorably rising above “partisan politics” just last week…
Non-partisian politics, wingnuttia style: STFU and do what we want.
El Cid
By the way, after you give the better part of a trillion dollars to Wall Street to pay for the party they threw after they were deregulated, we will have a new excuse to deny you a well-funded health care program and a Green economy and a minimum wage increase and anything else.
Until Wall Street needs the next trillion dollars, and then we’ll take it out of your hides again, peons.
Now is not the time for hesitation, thought, or partisan division.
KT
Why not just freeze the trading of financial stocks for 30 days till everyone calms down and lawmakers get the chance to really get a look at what they are asking us to buy?
TenguPhule
Right.
This is a time to line the GOP SOBs up against a wall and shoot them.
End of Partisans. End of Problem.
Delia
It seems to be a reasonable one. This is not the time for partisan politics, and this plan is quite easy to carry out and much cheaper. Furthermore it would give much needed employment to city sanitation workers.
El Cid
I have an even more reasonable alternative plan.
I need you all to give me a million dollars and then just STFU.
We don’t have time for partisan division about this, either.
Delia
Yeah. I guess the guillotine is too eighteenth century.
t jasper parnell
See, um, er, ah, we cannot help out the average American cause there’s like all these transnational banks that need our aid, and, ah, like, ahem, it would be wrong to let them suffer for their errors in judgment.
El Cid
Public campaign financing would be an inefficient and burdensome use of taxpayer dollars, dollars that instead could go directly to Wall Street to pay them back for throwing an Enron party for the whole country after they were deregulated.
KT
Penny ante. Think big dude! You need $50 billion because you’re “too big to fail” and get your Congressman on board with the promise of heaps of campaign cash.
t jasper parnell
Bipartisanship we can believe in:
jcricket
This means nothing that the Republicans propose can be considered, right? Because there’s not a fucking word that comes out of their mouths that isn’t complete bullshit designed solely for partisan gain.
Like Palin, they lie about everything, and when confronted, lie about the lying.
At least some Democrats are making truly non-partisan statements, about asking for pragmatic checks and balances on this new bailout, and asserting that if we can help Wall Street, we can help other people too. That’s partisan only if you view helping everyone in America survive the oncoming recession/depression as “partisan”.
NR
As Obama said today, Paulson has no plan. Asking for $700 billion to do whatever the hell he wants with, with no oversight, isn’t a plan, it’s a mugging.
jake
What are you, some sort of Communist?
Oh wait. That’s no longer a bad thing, is it?
What are you, some sort of CAPITALIST?
Dennis - SGMM
Hey America, are you better off now than you were eight years ago?
El Cid
Is our Democrats learning? Are they actually going to try to put food on your family? Are they uniquely American?
Does this mean they’re actually willing to think some of this through while the people who caused this mess are screaming that the asteroid is about to hit and we have to give them a trillion dollars to send the world-saving team into space as long as it’s a blank check handed to the guy who kept getting all the asteroid predictions wrong?
Stuck in the Fun House
For people like Bush, Paulson and rest of the merry band of the mirror universe Reverse Robinhoods, this is like proposing Baby Jeebus be nailed to a barn door for the hell of it. It’s why this rush, rush shit,. If you don’t do this yesterday, everybody will be living in a cardboard box by Thursday. You see, They believe that the money in the treasury, all of it, rightfully belongs to them anyway (rich people) who alone make this country run. It’s not just that they’re greedy (and they are), it’s the conviction within every cell of their miserable carcasses that THEY ARE ENTITLED. And I bet they will bow up and reject anything of the sort for paying back money they are certain is theirs to begin with. Even to let the country implode from their malfeasance and greed. I hope to hell I’m wrong, but what shred of recent history suggests otherwise.
Dennis - SGMM
From El Cid’s linked article:
So it’s important enough for them to Hoover $700,000,000,000 out of our pockets but not important enough for these schlockmeisters to take a pay cut. Fuck that. They should be required to have “I am a greedy fuckstain” tattooed across their foreheads.
““If we design it so it’s punitive and so institutions aren’t going to participate, this won’t work the way we need it to work.”
Right. They should be able to keep their money, take our money and we should all just STFU. Hell, why not ask for another tax cut for the bastards as long as you’re here.
Joshua Norton
It would be cheaper and solve a lot more problems just to give every head of household in the country $1 million dollars.
They can’t start screaming about “wealth redistribution”. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
jcricket
Yes, moral hazard only applies if you earn less than $250k a year. Beyond that, you must not be let to suffer.
Joshua Norton
See the McCain economic plan.
PeterJ
jbarntt is the goat?
r€nato
Now *that* is change I can believe in. You have my vote, sir.
r€nato
I bet he blamed it on the Democrats and illegal immigrants.
El Cid
You just can’t disagree with Secretary Paulson: what we need to do right now is to make sure these Wall Street executives feel really good about themselves and their financial futures, and if it costs all us ordinary Americans a great deal of our future to do so without the slightest impositions on these partied-out deregulatees, then, shucks, it’s worth it, ain’t it?
Dennis - SGMM
We can pay for part of the bailout with a pay-per-view reality show where all of the investment bankers and hedge fund managers are marooned on a desert island with a dozen oranges and one case of bottled water for a month.
Stuck in the Fun House
So now it’s a Program and not a fucking government bailout with our money. And this fuckwit is worried that a bunch of loser CEO’s without two corporate nickels to rub together might not participate. I tell him what, he can have enough cash to buy a world class firing squad and even solid gold bullets and we the people will create a program whereupon participation of these Benedict Arnold’s will be required. (as has already been suggested upthread)
El Cid
You know, “Program” or “Plan” are mighty fancy words to describe “give me $700 billion no questions asked in unmarked bills and I’ll figure out what to do with it.”
Dennis - SGMM
“A riot is an ugly thing… und I think it is just about time that we have one!”
Delia
And in the link we find out:
Now is not the time for partisan bickering. Phil Gramm belongs on the list of aristos who need to be cleansed from the body politic at the first opportune moment.
jbarntt
For people like Bush, Paulson and rest of the merry band of the mirror universe Reverse Robinhoods, this is like proposing Baby Jeebus be nailed to a barn door for the hell of it
The liberal Democratic view of finance is interesting.
jbarntt
You know, “Program” or “Plan” are mighty fancy words to describe “give me $700 billion no questions asked in unmarked bills and I’ll figure out what to do with it.”
So what’s your plan ?
Dennis - SGMM
The conservative Republican view of finance used to be called extortion.
El Cid
Yeah, I guess any view of finance which doesn’t involve handing out a trillion dollars to Wall Street to get them off free from their de-regulation party must seem kind of strange to the conservative mind.
But then, there is no conservative mind, just idiots parroting some noxious nimrod from a bunch of right wing columnists.
Stuck in the Fun House
The conservative republican view of financing is a fucking disaster for the US and the world. Make sense troll, or just STFU.
jcricket
Right, afterwards, as in, after I am dead. After we have absconded with all your money. After the company is a hole in the ground and everyone who actually did their job right is on the unemployment line. After we have ruined the American economy and your 401k and left you to pick up the pieces.
Afterwards my ass.
I’ll say it again. Corporations are like little fucking bratty children. They bitch and moan about the rules and structure, and claim they’ll be fine if left to their own devices. But because they are children, we need not listen to them. For all his faults, Clinton had the cajones to raise taxes on the rich, despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the certain doom that was to follow. And guess what? Budget deficits turned into surpluses. Tax revenue went up, and accompanied by a period of economic growth (which I’m not claiming he was the source of), this made the average person’s lives better.
Listening to CEOs and corporate lobbyists about the consequences should we ignore them is like believing Eddie Haskell or Lucy from the Peanuts.
jcricket
“Monday Night Rehabilitation” for CEOs anyone? See Idiocracy if you haven’t (not a great movie, but a bunch of great moments in it).
The question is, who gets to play Beef Supreme?
Incertus
Right now, for me, it looks pretty much like telling the Bush administration to go fuck itself while the adults figure something out. Again–I have no faith that Paulson’s plan is anything other than a $700 billion giveaway to friends of George, so anything he wants, I’m against. I figure we’re fucked either way, so we might as well make sure the folks who are squealing the loudest for this bailout get fucked along with the rest of us.
If you’ve gathered from that statement that I’m pissed off, and ready to storm the castle with torches and pitchforks, perhaps even pull a little Fight Club action while we’re at it, you’re pretty much dead on.
Delia
You’re really not mature enough or smart enough to play with the big kids, jbarntt. We’ve been discussing this for a couple of days now; we’ve read the economists, we’ve listened to the people here who know finance, we’ve read all the other blogs on the matter. The verdict is in. It’s extortion and bullshit, and we’re now onto the barricades and making fun of stray trolls. Go do some heavy duty reading or else go add up your troll points on McCain.com and go to bed.
t jasper parnell
Yes, brilliant question. My plan is build a time machine go back 9 years and bring all of today’s newspapers with me. But seriously. It is
1) pause and think things through.
2) Incremental protection for banks, i.e. some money right now and some more should it prove necessary with quarterly reviews.
3) Transparency, in terms of decision making and state investment in the economy
4)Tit for tat: we give them money they agree to changes in the “industry” up and down the line including acceptance of an effective regulatory regime.
5) Massive and transparent oversight.
6) George Bush and Dick Chaney resign.
7) Maroons who get their talking points from liars shut the fuck up and let the grown ups, which is to say those of us left, right, and center, who have argued correctly that this administration is a joke, deal with the problems created by a bunch of anti-American fools.
8) Other stuff.
7)
Delia
Oh, and jbarntt, I might add: shut down the computer, clean up the basement and wash the dishes for your mother. She would really appreciate your making yourself useful for a change.
t jasper parnell
On the plus side we won the Ryder Cup.USA USA, etc.
Rick Taylor
So far the crises is going exactly as one would expect. Republicans are accusing any attempts to make this bill into anything but a naked give away to wall street as partisan.
Anything but complete capitulation means Democrats are putting partisan gain above country. The moderate Democrats will cave, and enough of the rest will follow to give the administration everything it’s asking for. I hope I’m wrong, but anything else would be almost unprecedented.
Digby puts it perfectly.
Dennis - SGMM
A plan clearly states its goal and its scope in the first paragraph. A plan’s progress to successful completion
is subject to review and and evaluation via the timelines and benchmarks stated in the plan. A plan assigns responsibilities and enumerates total costs.
A good plan lists those contingencies that may affect its success and suggests strategies for dealing with those contingencies.
The proposed bailout is proof that the Bush administration learned plenty about using MS PowerPoint and not one fucking thing about using MS Project.
Martin
So, if the poor people are fucking up the works by hoodwinking lenders into giving them loans, why is Paulson now expanding the bailout to possibly cover auto loans, credit cards, and the like?
Oh, right, it’s because college students are hoodwinking lenders as well. Man, these poor finance executives don’t stand a chance against these slick operators.
Delia
Wait. There’s more. Paulson’s plan doesn’t add any of those pesky regulations the goopers hate so much. It really is “just give us the money and STFU.”
nicethugbert
I wonder what happens if we institute discipline now and hold the money until after X-mass. Won’t that put needed cash into the system? Oh no, wait, everything is made over-seas. Well, somebody will get bailed out.
Dennis - SGMM
“The Plan” Which looks a lot like the “Give me the cash!” scene from Fifth Element.
rachel
I beg to differ. There is a conservative mind, and I think I’ve found it.
Dennis - SGMM
OT: This thread is now over 200 comments long. Balloon Juice has not coughed or gone offline (To my knowledge) the whole day. My posts have all appeared within seconds of hitting “Submit Comment.”
All hail John Cole!
Stuck in the Fun House
Those are very common in the Funhouse, sometimes even with the body attached.
:)
Balconesfault
T Jasper Parnell said:
You know, if we were unfortunate enough to have a terrorist attack on our soil before January 20, 2009 … a pretty good case could be made for ritual suicide. At that point, there will be absolutely nothing left but endless failure to the horizon …
Dennis - SGMM
It’s the body of a gigantically fat baby that constantly cries for food and attention, shits in every corner of the house, and threatens to stop breathing if it doesn’t get its way.
Incertus
Motherfucker, if you jinx us I will hunt you down and spit on you. Or something nasty like that.
Alan
Ha ha charade you jar.
LiberalTarian
House Republican staffers met with roughly 15 lobbyists Friday afternoon, whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don’t load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.
“We’re opposed to adding provisions that will affect [or] undermine the deal substantively,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, whose members include the nation’s largest banks, securities firms and insurers.
A deal killer for the group: a proposal that would grant bankruptcy judges new powers to lower the principal, interest rate or both on a mortgage as part of a bankruptcy proceeding.”
Um, so, are they saying if there are conditions to ensure fair dealing and appropriate accountability, they won’t bite?
Isn’t that kind of like a fish on the hook mandating the terms of his netting???
binzinerator
I’d buy tix to see that. Use the proceeds from the ticket sales to help the homeless, the PTSD vets, the sick kids without healthcare and everybody else the GOP made a special effort to fuck over. Which is most of America, actually. Unfortunately, that would likely also include people like jbarntt who apparently are too stupid to realize just how badly they’ve gotten the fucking they’ve foolishly been asking for. Well this is 2008 and after almost 8 years if they’re still cheering on the gooper’s Great American Fuckover, they deserve to get it good and hard.
We could have them pay some of it back by earning minimum wage as backstops to the GOP SOBs featured in the main event suggested above. Just a thought.
I do like that Hoover mention. They’re calling it the worst financial crisis since Great Depression. And another GOP SOB was president then, Hoover. The connection which you no doubt intended.
They called the Depression-era shantytowns of the homeless “Hoovervilles”. We should call today’s neighborhoods of foreclosed homes “Bushburbs”.
Conservatively Liberal
The markets are junkies and they have shot up with everything they could get their hands on to keep the buzz going. As they got further and further into their habit, it has taken increasingly larger doses to keep the high going and now they are broke and they have hit rock bottom.
Maybe not. The dealer is trying to get them one last fix, one last injection to try and revive the buzz. All they are asking is that we pay for it. And our children, and their children, and their children…
Wealthfare indeed. If you are rich enough, you can have the government cover your losses. But if you are not rich enough to afford this coverage, you go broke.
Indeed,
wethey have the best government that money can buy.Delia
Translation: “We want to rob you for $700 billion and take your house as well. If we can’t take your house, the whole deal is off.”
LiberalTarian
Sadly, No is kicking butt and taking names.
Joshua Norton
Instead of wiping out the treasury and pretending to try to stop the unstoppable, we need to figure out how to mitigate the effects of this disaster on the people and taxpayers of the United States, especially the homeowners going into foreclosure.
Let the unregulated financial firms just go belly up – straight into the arms of Federal receivership, just as if they had been regulated S&Ls and banks. We can set up a real RTC just as we did in the 1980s.
Kevin
Kevin Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Excuse me?
Kevin
Give us your money and we’ll kill your economy. If you don’t, we’ll kill your economy.
Delia
This morning I was listening to NPR. There was some Very Important Expert explaining why this whole bailout was so important. The NPR reporter asked him how the government was going to pay for the whole bailout, and the Very Important Expert patiently explained to her that the Federal Government could do things to pay bills that ordinary citizens could not do — like borrowing from foreign countries and printing more money.
I’m not making this up.
Joshua Norton
Could we get them to print Pounds this time? They’re worth more.
Mary
John, have you changed blog settings recently? I’m getting comments pushed to moderation if I have even one link in them. I suspect Kevin just experienced the same thing. Didn’t it used to be up to two links with no moderation kicking in?
LiberalTarian
Huh. I’m afraid to talk about the moderation bug because I met catch your moderation cooties. ;) Seems to be a thing for the last couple days.
Jeff
Even Ben Stein on Larry King tonight was harping on the fact that there was no regulation sections to the bill and it gave Paulson too much power. It was practically a love fest between Stein and Robert Reich.
wasabi gasp
$700,000,000,000 could feed one needy child for 38 million years at 5 cents a day.
Jeff
Video of Ben Stein and Robert Reich.
Shouting at the Rain
Fixed.
Martin
I’m surprised the universe didn’t implode.
$700B could buy the 144,000 people that will be saved in the rapture a Double-Double per day, marked on the wrapper with the verse “The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.” for 6,000 years – the age of the universe.
Coincidence? I think not.
wasabi gasp
Oops, billion. The kid gets 38 billion years of hots.
Martin
Wow, Ben gets a bit of respect from me. I didn’t think that would be possible after that abortion of a film he made.
TenguPhule
We need to treat these people from Wall Street like terrorists making demands.
We don’t negotiate. We snipe their asses.
Mme. Dufarge
Can’t… knit… fast… enough! AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Nikolita
Suze Orzman (or whatever her name is) just said (in reply to a viewer’s question on Larry King Live) that taxpayer dollars are being used to bail out the banks and the economy because no one else has the money to bail them out.
= /
Nikolita
Suze Orman just said (in reply to a viewer’s question on Larry King Live) that taxpayer dollars are being used to bail out the banks and the economy because no one else has the money to bail them out.
= /
Nikolita
Suze Orman just said (in reply to a viewer’s question on Larry King Live) that taxpayer dollars are being used to bail out the banks and the economy because no one else has the money to bail them out.
= /
El Cid
Yes, but what is Suze Orman saying about all this?
zuzu's petals
Jed Bartlet sounds off:
As irritating as Sorkin’s dialogue could be sometimes, he could sure write a good rant.
TenguPhule
The Domestic Ammunition & Public Entertainment Stimulus Package.
It involves using many bullets on many Republicans and selling tickets and PPV to everyone else around the world.
And it’s *STILL* a better plan then Bush’s ‘Give us the $1 Trillion and STFU’ lunacy.
Conservatively Liberal
Fix’d for Jeebus.
Rome Again
I guess you think that people who go in to an establishment looking for a loan are the ones to blame? Are you really not aware that there was a huge push by the people writing these loans to talk people into getting them?
I was approached by someone I used to work with who went to work in the mortgage industry and she was telling me she could get me a loan and was flabberghasted when I didn’t take the bait. I am not a homeowner, and I knew that what she was trying to sell me could only come to no good down the road later on. These people who got caught up in this mortgage crisis didn’t just wake up one day after deregulation began and say “Hey, let’s go see if someone will loan us money for a house with our awful credit rating”… no, they were told they could get these loans, either by people trying to sell them, or people who had bought one. The responsibility lays at the feet of those who offered loans to those with credit problems.
Jon H
Pretty much all these financial institutions have big art collections.
Any bad debts we take on ought to be accompanied by every last piece of salable art more valuable than hotel decor.
jake
Win.
Thanks for the much needed laugh.
Jon H
” they were told they could get these loans, either by people trying to sell them, or people who had bought one.”
And it’s because the people getting the loans weren’t the customer. The customer was the person buying the bundled debt.
Just ask yourself, who’s paying up front? That’s the customer. In radio and TV, the customer is not the viewer, it’s the guy paying for ad time.
In real estate, it’s not the person getting the no-money-down loan.
Jon H
Actually, on second thought to my art collection appropriation idea above:
The art should be taken, then the best of it should be organized into a show and sent on a tour of museums around the country. That’d raise some more money.
Then after the tour, it should be sold.
Dennis - SGMM
From Wikipedia:
Only in this case when the scheme came to the attention of authorities they found it necessary to throw in $700,000,000,000 of our money. Take that, schemers! We’ll punish you with as much money as we can print!
w vincentz
Headline, huh?
How about “GAME OVER”
From last night’s 60 Minutes….
“Q: In 1999, you were one of the senators who helped pass deregulation of Wall Street. Do you regret that now?
McCAIN: No. I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy.”
Rome Again
You get no argument from me. The weird thing is the customer didn’t even have any clue what they were buying. It’s almost as if they thought they were in a casino with a 500% payback rate. They didn’t care what was in the packages, they just wanted to get their hands on them.
~~
Word Press Attempt#: 4
Rome Again
Why is my comment awaiting moderation? I didn’t even place a link in it at all.
Hmmmmm!