Thank you to our Nebraska Congressional Representatives, Adrian Smith, Jeff Fortenberry and Lee Terry, all of whom voted NO on the nefarious "bailout" plan yesterday. It was good to see liberals and conservatives uniting for the good of the country.
Thanks to all the Reps who voted as the people wanted. Pols were running 300 to one against the "bailout". Steel yourselves, folks, I'm sure there are smooth-talkers coming to twist your arms while in recess for Rosh Hashanah.
Mellencamp's classic heartland rock Rain On the Scarecrow. Apropos.
Showing posts with label Congress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Congress. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Joe Sixpack's Letter To Congress
A forum I frequent, Life After the Oil Crash, has the following excellent letter by member Joe-Bob Henry-Bob, to his congressional representatives posted over there. It explains things better than I could by a long shot. For your information:
QUOTE Dear (congresscritter),
There is one main reason that America has been a prosperous nation. Transparency. Both citizens and foreigners have devoted capital investment to our country over many decades because, simply put, we have rule of law and companies that want to do business in our country must tell the truth.
Consider a banana republic, in which accounting books are cooked, property is seized, markets are manipulated, currency is printed, and entire portions of the economy may be nationalized at any moment. Crooks tend to win out and the average citizen's wealth is destroyed. This is because they are not able to rationally plan for the future. ...so no one invests in such a country, as at any moment, one's hard-won wealth could be erased. Having a chance to rationally weigh the facts and make a sound judgment call allows wealth to be created. It is transparency that allows for prosperity and everything else we might want to achieve as a nation must stem from that.
Our current economic crisis is due to lack of transparency and a consequent absence of trust. Where once a person could make choices with one's money with some degree of confidence, this is no longer possible. Oversight and regulation were removed from our financial institutions. Our country's financial institutions are hiding liabilities and refusing to mark worthless "assets" to their market value and our Fed and Treasury are ASSISTING in this instead of stopping it! The entire system is seizing up because no one can trust anyone else. Moreover, if someone is attempting deceive me, if for instance they are trying to convince that something that is worth only $0.10 is actually worth $100 so that I will buy it they actually ARE trying to steal from me.
A lack of trust would be warranted! It is not merely a matter of "spin" or public "perception"
Please take steps to restore trust, transparency, and the rule of law in our nation.The Fed and Treasury have cooked up this 700 Billion bailout which can easily balloon to several times greater size, which will burden the taxpayers and benefit those who started the problem.
Moreover, their proposal contains this clause: "Section 8, ReviewDecisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
Think about what that means. Regardless of whether they manage to keep this in the approved version.... THIS IS THE SPIRIT IN WHICH THE PROPOSAL WAS MADE!
Please take some time to review the following materials, at least the short youtube presentation.
It offers, briefly, a far superior solution to the most recent bailout. ...it is an alternative to what we've been doing so far - fruitlessly spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, nationalizing companies, and changing the rules of investment every week. That is NOT the rule of law, and it is NOT transparency. It leads to chaos.
Sincerely,
(joe-bob)
UNQUOTE
Please watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KYtD-Ff_eM&eurl=http://www.fedupusa.org/
http://www.denninger.net/letters/mortgage-mess.pdf
http://www.denninger.net/letters/2008-07-19-Lawmakers.pdf
+++
QUOTE Dear (congresscritter),
There is one main reason that America has been a prosperous nation. Transparency. Both citizens and foreigners have devoted capital investment to our country over many decades because, simply put, we have rule of law and companies that want to do business in our country must tell the truth.
Consider a banana republic, in which accounting books are cooked, property is seized, markets are manipulated, currency is printed, and entire portions of the economy may be nationalized at any moment. Crooks tend to win out and the average citizen's wealth is destroyed. This is because they are not able to rationally plan for the future. ...so no one invests in such a country, as at any moment, one's hard-won wealth could be erased. Having a chance to rationally weigh the facts and make a sound judgment call allows wealth to be created. It is transparency that allows for prosperity and everything else we might want to achieve as a nation must stem from that.
Our current economic crisis is due to lack of transparency and a consequent absence of trust. Where once a person could make choices with one's money with some degree of confidence, this is no longer possible. Oversight and regulation were removed from our financial institutions. Our country's financial institutions are hiding liabilities and refusing to mark worthless "assets" to their market value and our Fed and Treasury are ASSISTING in this instead of stopping it! The entire system is seizing up because no one can trust anyone else. Moreover, if someone is attempting deceive me, if for instance they are trying to convince that something that is worth only $0.10 is actually worth $100 so that I will buy it they actually ARE trying to steal from me.
A lack of trust would be warranted! It is not merely a matter of "spin" or public "perception"
Please take steps to restore trust, transparency, and the rule of law in our nation.The Fed and Treasury have cooked up this 700 Billion bailout which can easily balloon to several times greater size, which will burden the taxpayers and benefit those who started the problem.
Moreover, their proposal contains this clause: "Section 8, ReviewDecisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
Think about what that means. Regardless of whether they manage to keep this in the approved version.... THIS IS THE SPIRIT IN WHICH THE PROPOSAL WAS MADE!
Please take some time to review the following materials, at least the short youtube presentation.
It offers, briefly, a far superior solution to the most recent bailout. ...it is an alternative to what we've been doing so far - fruitlessly spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, nationalizing companies, and changing the rules of investment every week. That is NOT the rule of law, and it is NOT transparency. It leads to chaos.
Sincerely,
(joe-bob)
UNQUOTE
Please watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KYtD-Ff_eM&eurl=http://www.fedupusa.org/
http://www.denninger.net/letters/mortgage-mess.pdf
http://www.denninger.net/letters/2008-07-19-Lawmakers.pdf
+++
Monday, September 22, 2008
Mike Gravel: A Declaration of Independence for 2008
Powerful. I dig old Mike Gravel. Tell it, Michael. Listen up, y'all.
QUOTE When in the course of human events, unattended grievances make it necessary for citizens to reexamine the structure of their government and bring about change.
We were once a great nation, created by immigrants from foreign lands who populated a bountiful continent.
We now witness our nation’s prestige and our domestic liberties considerably diminished.
We, who suffer the consequences of a dysfunctional system of government, seek to reaffirm our founding principles and to improve upon the structure of representative government.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, Government is instituted in society, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
However, if a Government controlled by special interests becomes unconcerned with the public’s wellbeing and destructive of the people’s rights, it is the duty of the people to change that government to provide security and happiness for its citizens.
The malevolent corrupting power of money on the body politic has caused repeated injuries to the public interest.
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a suffering nation and a disillusioned world:
The Presidency and the Congress are steeped in the cult of secrecy that denies a free people knowledge of what their government is doing to them and to others in their name. Secrecy is the foremost destructive force to democracy.
The Presidency and the Congress have failed, after the oil shock of 30 years ago, to provide leadership to end our dependency on oil. Continued reliance on oil distorts our foreign policy and causes Americans to disproportionately pollute the environment.
The Presidency and the Congress have been complicit in permitting a small, rapacious, greedy minority of money managers and corporate titans to manipulate the U.S. and global financial markets for their selfish gain.
The Presidency and the Congress have redefined the criminal act of terrorism as an act of war in order to maintain the nation in a constant state of war, which in the words of James Madison is the worst of all evils in that it facilitates the control of the many by the few.
The Presidency and the Congress have obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing the right of habeas corpus to fellow human beings, regardless of national origin, and by transporting them to secret prisons in foreign countries to be tortured and held without knowledge of their crimes or their accusers.
The Presidency and the Congress have plundered our treasury to fund unnecessary and illegal wars and foreign military adventures based on lies and misinformation.
The Presidency and the Congress wage psychological war on their own citizens to induce unfounded and unreasonable fear of non existent threats in order to militarize America’s culture and make acceptable ludicrous defense expenditures––greater than all the rest of the world combined––when in fact there is no nation capable or desirous of threatening our security.
The Presidency and the Congress, in pursuit of an illogical “war on drugs,” export military weapons that violently destabilize foreign democracies. Their “war on drugs” ravages America’s inner cities, destroys the families of our most disadvantaged citizens, and puts more of its own citizens in prison than any other country in the world.
The Presidency and the Congress encourage and fund our self-appointed role as “the world’s policeman,” becoming the basis for American Imperialism and for distorting our nation’s budget priorities with excessive funding for the military-industrial complex.
In every electoral contest, Americans vote for change. Yet real change is never realized. Despite creative advances in the private sector of human society, our public sector––government––is mired in partisan stalemate, unable to respond to the complex global demands of the 21st Century.
The political structures of our current representative democracy were designed in the 18th Century and are not susceptible to change.
Therefore, We Citizens of the United States of America, in our capacity as the sovereign creators of our government and its Constitution, solemnly declare that we seek a greater role in our own self-governance, beyond that of merely voting and giving away our power to politicians on Election Day.
We choose freedom––the right to participate in the central power of government––the right to initiate and vote on laws––in partnership with those we elect to our governing legislative bodies. As sovereign human beings we have the innate right to collectively make majoritarian decisions on the policies that affect our lives.
We, the people, recognize that elected officials at all levels of American government have no incentive to share legislative power with the people.
Therefore, we pledge our efforts, for as long as it takes, to circumvent government inertia by directly voting to enact, as the law of the land, the National Initiative for Democracy. This federal ballot initiative amends the Constitution in a manner similar to the precedent set in Article VII. It creates an Electoral Trust, separate form representative government, to implement, on behalf of the people, legislative procedures established in an accompanying federal statute.
The enactment of the National Initiative essentially creates a Legislature of the People in every government jurisdiction of the United States, operating in a legislative partnership with elected federal, state and local legislative bodies.
Enacting the National Initiative in the United States––or for that matter in any country––continues the major advances in direct democracy begun by the Swiss in 1848 and improved upon when copied by 24 American states and hundreds of American local governments over the last 100 years.
The global impact of empowering people to vote directly on public policy issues that affect their lives will change forever the paradigm of human governance––a goal worthy of pledging our lives, our property and our sacred honor. UNQUOTE
******************
QUOTE When in the course of human events, unattended grievances make it necessary for citizens to reexamine the structure of their government and bring about change.
We were once a great nation, created by immigrants from foreign lands who populated a bountiful continent.
We now witness our nation’s prestige and our domestic liberties considerably diminished.
We, who suffer the consequences of a dysfunctional system of government, seek to reaffirm our founding principles and to improve upon the structure of representative government.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, Government is instituted in society, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
However, if a Government controlled by special interests becomes unconcerned with the public’s wellbeing and destructive of the people’s rights, it is the duty of the people to change that government to provide security and happiness for its citizens.
The malevolent corrupting power of money on the body politic has caused repeated injuries to the public interest.
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a suffering nation and a disillusioned world:
The Presidency and the Congress are steeped in the cult of secrecy that denies a free people knowledge of what their government is doing to them and to others in their name. Secrecy is the foremost destructive force to democracy.
The Presidency and the Congress have failed, after the oil shock of 30 years ago, to provide leadership to end our dependency on oil. Continued reliance on oil distorts our foreign policy and causes Americans to disproportionately pollute the environment.
The Presidency and the Congress have been complicit in permitting a small, rapacious, greedy minority of money managers and corporate titans to manipulate the U.S. and global financial markets for their selfish gain.
The Presidency and the Congress have redefined the criminal act of terrorism as an act of war in order to maintain the nation in a constant state of war, which in the words of James Madison is the worst of all evils in that it facilitates the control of the many by the few.
The Presidency and the Congress have obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing the right of habeas corpus to fellow human beings, regardless of national origin, and by transporting them to secret prisons in foreign countries to be tortured and held without knowledge of their crimes or their accusers.
The Presidency and the Congress have plundered our treasury to fund unnecessary and illegal wars and foreign military adventures based on lies and misinformation.
The Presidency and the Congress wage psychological war on their own citizens to induce unfounded and unreasonable fear of non existent threats in order to militarize America’s culture and make acceptable ludicrous defense expenditures––greater than all the rest of the world combined––when in fact there is no nation capable or desirous of threatening our security.
The Presidency and the Congress, in pursuit of an illogical “war on drugs,” export military weapons that violently destabilize foreign democracies. Their “war on drugs” ravages America’s inner cities, destroys the families of our most disadvantaged citizens, and puts more of its own citizens in prison than any other country in the world.
The Presidency and the Congress encourage and fund our self-appointed role as “the world’s policeman,” becoming the basis for American Imperialism and for distorting our nation’s budget priorities with excessive funding for the military-industrial complex.
In every electoral contest, Americans vote for change. Yet real change is never realized. Despite creative advances in the private sector of human society, our public sector––government––is mired in partisan stalemate, unable to respond to the complex global demands of the 21st Century.
The political structures of our current representative democracy were designed in the 18th Century and are not susceptible to change.
Therefore, We Citizens of the United States of America, in our capacity as the sovereign creators of our government and its Constitution, solemnly declare that we seek a greater role in our own self-governance, beyond that of merely voting and giving away our power to politicians on Election Day.
We choose freedom––the right to participate in the central power of government––the right to initiate and vote on laws––in partnership with those we elect to our governing legislative bodies. As sovereign human beings we have the innate right to collectively make majoritarian decisions on the policies that affect our lives.
We, the people, recognize that elected officials at all levels of American government have no incentive to share legislative power with the people.
Therefore, we pledge our efforts, for as long as it takes, to circumvent government inertia by directly voting to enact, as the law of the land, the National Initiative for Democracy. This federal ballot initiative amends the Constitution in a manner similar to the precedent set in Article VII. It creates an Electoral Trust, separate form representative government, to implement, on behalf of the people, legislative procedures established in an accompanying federal statute.
The enactment of the National Initiative essentially creates a Legislature of the People in every government jurisdiction of the United States, operating in a legislative partnership with elected federal, state and local legislative bodies.
Enacting the National Initiative in the United States––or for that matter in any country––continues the major advances in direct democracy begun by the Swiss in 1848 and improved upon when copied by 24 American states and hundreds of American local governments over the last 100 years.
The global impact of empowering people to vote directly on public policy issues that affect their lives will change forever the paradigm of human governance––a goal worthy of pledging our lives, our property and our sacred honor. UNQUOTE
******************
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Fannie, Freddie, The Banks and The Government
In trying to better understand the Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac mortgage debacle through reading news today I came across this impassioned tome calling for us to, like the doughty French, take to the streets to avoid being bankrupted by our own apathy and our weaselly government. This is a longish read but I encourage you to bite the bullet and read it. The knowledge may help you and yours. These giants of American business and finance aren't going down without dragging a lot of us with them. The current administration has argued for years, as part of its grandiose vision of an “ownership society”, that more Americans have been able to join the ranks of home ownership. They failed to note that it was being accomplished through artificially low interest rates, gimmick - sleazy mortgages, and non-existent lending restraint. So much for George W. Bush’s “ownership society”. Fasten your seat belts.
Here's a sample:
QUOTE Even worse, Fannie and Freddie, who guarantee their own bond issues, started buying their own paper. That is, they are writing insurance on a hurricane when they are both the writer of the insurance and the loss payee. This looks brilliant in that the "expense" of providing that insurance effectively disappears, thereby making the entirety of the spread they get from their source-of-funds to their paper issue theirs to keep, but that's the wrong way to look at it.
In fact that paper is uninsured, because the money comes from one hand goes to the other, attached to the same body.
Where were the regulators? Congress? Intentionally asleep. Remember that back in 2003 and 2004 both firms were found to have improperly accounted for their results. This should have led to an immediate clampdown and forced deleveraging to no more than 10:1 on an audited basis.
It did not, and in fact neither firm timely filed accounting statements until last year, more than three years after the "errors" were discovered.
But for Congress, The Fed and OFHEO looking the other way on purpose most of the Housing Bubble could not have happened, as the money necessary to fuel it simply would not have been available.
Now we are faced with the reality - Fannie and Freddie, under fair value accounting rules, are insolvent (if you listen to Bill Poole.) What does that mean? It means that if Fannie and Freddie were to sell their assets and net it out today, you'd wind up with a negative number. That is, its assets are less than its liabilities.
The question now comes down to "what do we do about this?"
There are several choices, all of which will have bad side effects. It is critical, however, that we understand those side effects and choose the path forward that represents the least risk to the broader economy and to the government, not just the most expedient or the one that the people who would lose will scream most loudly about. UNQUOTE
In fact that paper is uninsured, because the money comes from one hand goes to the other, attached to the same body.
Where were the regulators? Congress? Intentionally asleep. Remember that back in 2003 and 2004 both firms were found to have improperly accounted for their results. This should have led to an immediate clampdown and forced deleveraging to no more than 10:1 on an audited basis.
It did not, and in fact neither firm timely filed accounting statements until last year, more than three years after the "errors" were discovered.
But for Congress, The Fed and OFHEO looking the other way on purpose most of the Housing Bubble could not have happened, as the money necessary to fuel it simply would not have been available.
Now we are faced with the reality - Fannie and Freddie, under fair value accounting rules, are insolvent (if you listen to Bill Poole.) What does that mean? It means that if Fannie and Freddie were to sell their assets and net it out today, you'd wind up with a negative number. That is, its assets are less than its liabilities.
The question now comes down to "what do we do about this?"
There are several choices, all of which will have bad side effects. It is critical, however, that we understand those side effects and choose the path forward that represents the least risk to the broader economy and to the government, not just the most expedient or the one that the people who would lose will scream most loudly about. UNQUOTE
"NO MATERIAL HERE CONSTITUTES "INVESTMENT ADVICE" NOR IS IT A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL ANY FINANICAL INSTRUMENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO STOCKS, OPTIONS, BONDS OR FUTURES. "
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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