Wall Street Wins-We Lose

Dear editor:

It’s already started. The plan of Sect. of the Treasury Henry Paulson to “save” our Wall Street financial system and help Main Street Americans from losing their homes to foreclosure has expanded to where $700 billion of additional debt will probably be just a beginning and will balloon to well over $1 trillion. How will this happen? Mr. Paulson has already changed the program with new interpretations of the ground rules. News reports are now showing that banks, investment and brokerage houses, financial institutions of all types, their CEOs and executives will be the true beneficiaries of this program. And not just domestic corporations, but also foreign ones.

Even as our Congress is being pushed by the administration to pass the Treasury’s “simple” program with no strings attached to protect the American taxpayer, Wall Street is already playing its money making games. Not only do the financial institutions want to be relieved of their bad debt for their own poor, money grabbing lending practices involving mortgages, they want all manner of troubled investments covered. In other words they want the American taxpayer to relieve them of all their bad debt, return them to profitability, turn their falling stock prices around, and reap huge benefits at our expense. This would increase the value of their individual stock portfolios, open the door for raises of pay and perks, and allow the return of year-end bonuses that boggle the mind.

The Treasury Department has increased the proposal to buy up bad assets not only of residential mortgages but also commercial mortgages and “any other financial instruments.” Small banks are now pushing the government to buy loans they made to home builders and commercial developers. Some bankers are even pushing for government support for municipal securities. It’s becoming a fire sale at our expense. But, it doesn’t stop there.

It has now been reported in the news that, ”Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully to be able to sell their bad American mortgage debt by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as United States banks.” This would make the open-ended nature of the Treasury’s plan to mean that the government was open to acquiring any asset, anywhere in the world.

The real kicker, though, is that many of these firms are now vying for the opportunity to manage the assets that Treasury acquires which could earn them $1 billion a year. They want to (and probably will) make huge dollars thanks to our losses, that they created in the first place.

Per usual, the American taxpayer will come out last in this program and will have to cover the cost of interest on our new $11.5 trillion dollar national debt. It can never be paid off. Many important domestic programs that we now enjoy, and the plans of whoever becomes our next president, will suffer because of this gigantic give-away of our money. This will not solve our financial problems but rather exacerbate them.

Seven and a Half Cents

Dear editor:

Back in the 1950s there was a musical comedy show on Broadway (later made into a movie) called "Pajama Game” which featured a song called “Seven and a Half Cents,” that pushed the demand of labor in a garment factory for a small raise in the hourly wage in that amount. It explained that seven and a half cents didn’t “mean a hell of a lot” in the overall pay picture of the average worker, but given every hour, every day that same worker would have his or her entire life changed. That number, seven and a half, is once again important and when counted every hour, every day, for that number of years, has changed our entire lives. I speak about the seven and a half years of the Bush Administration and what it has done to the fabric and life of America.

First look at our current financial situation. Joblessness is up. Personal bankruptcy is up. Home foreclosures are way up. Inflation is up. Home construction has hit a seventeen year low. The value of the American dollar is way down. Our balance of payments with the rest of the world continues to flow out. The national debt is so high, and continues to grow in leaps and bounds, that there is no way that even our great, great, great, great grandchildren will be able to pay it off. And now comes the debacle of Wall Street brought about by a laissez faire attitude of oversight and loss of regulation that threatens our entire financial system. In saving Bear Sterns, IAG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this administration has spent over $300 billion of our tax dollars. Now add on top of this its plan to save banks and investment firms by taking over their bad debt at an estimated cost to us of half a trillion dollars (or more.) Our government is now becoming the biggest home mortgage holder in the country. Talk about Big Brother and the danger of this situation. But Mr. Bush says that we are financially “basically sound.”

Next is our military. We have been at war for seven years in Afghanistan and there is no end in sight. Even our top military people have said that we, supposedly the world’s greatest and modern service, are not winning this conflict. We bungled this fight by going to another country (Iraq) and starting a conflict that has cost us half a trillion dollars, over 4,000 service deaths and over 25,000 casualties. Our military is stretched so thin that other countries, i.e. Russia, feel they can take advantage of our weakness and do as they please. In addition we now seem to be spreading this disaster to Pakistan. All this thanks to Mr. Bush and his team who only speak of the need for “victory” while bringing us anything but.

And what about our personal freedoms as Americans? Let us just say that our personal freedoms, as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, have vanished under the guise of keeping us safe. This administration has shown that their so-called need to know trumps any desire for us to have personal, well protected information lives. They talk about our Founding Fathers quite often, but these same men would turn over in their graves if they could see Britain’s King George’s tyranny running amok in Washington today.

Internationally American has done nothing but lose respect from the rest of the world. Guantanamo, our treatment of prisoners (I know, we don’t torture…Ha) and our go it alone policy saying we know better than anyone else, has cost us the respect and leadership we have earned over the years.

All of this, and more, has happened under the watch of the man from Texas. You may say that Congress bears part of this blame, but responsibility rests at the top dog’s door and with the accomplices surrounding him. Don’t forget that six of those congressional years were handled by his own party’s rubber stamp majority. And now there’s a lady from Alaska running around the country talking about the danger of the extreme terrorists who are out to destroy America. Sorry lady, they could never do the damage to our country that George W. Bush has done in just “seven and a half years,” which does “mean a hell of a lot.”

Other People's Money

I want to make sure I understand this. The government bailed out Bear Sterns at a cost of $29 Billion, took over Fannie May and Freddie Mac at a cost of at least $200 billion, and assumed control of AIG Insurance Co. at a cost of $85 billion. This comes to a total cost to American taxpayers of $314 billion. To do this they are printing money on an overtime basis which in turn will devalue the American dollar further than it already has.

Today (9/18/08) the stock market recovered 400 points of its current loss due to a report that the Federal government may create an entity that will take over banks’ bad debt. No cost has been attached to this yet, but it is going to be huge.

All of this has been done under the guidance, authorization and direction of Sect. of the Treasury Paulson and the Federal Reserve’s chairman Bernanke. Isn’t it wonderful that these two unelected men have the power to put us, the American taxpayer, further into debt without consultation, advice and permission of anyone. Now they are going to have to go to China, Japan, and Middle Eastern oil potentates to borrow more money that will wind up being used to buy more of our country's assets.

Why do we hold elections for a president and congress?

Who pays for the political conventions?

Dear editor:

Well, the political conventions are over, and I hope you enjoyed them. After all, you paid for them. Really? Read on.

There was a time when the national political conventions served a purpose and truly selected the nominees of their parties, even though it was not as democratic as today’s system of primaries. I remember as a child listening to the conventions on the radio and on early (black and white) television. When it came time for the selection of the presidential nominee I would take a piece of paper and down the left side list all of the states alphabetically, and across the top number wide columns 1, 2, 3, etc. These would be for the many ballots it would take to choose a presidential nominee.

First would come the nominating speeches, seconding speeches, and the endless parades and displays for each candidate. Then, as the roll call of the states was called I would enter into the first column the votes placed for each of the candidates. I can still hear it now, “The great state of so and so places 23.5 votes for Jack so and so, 14 votes for Bob so and so and 8.5 votes for Ted so and so.” At the end of the first roll call it was rare for a candidate to have enough votes for the nomination, unless of course they were dealing with the re-election of a sitting president.

And so, when no one had the majority of votes, the states and caucuses would go into closed door, smoke filled meetings to see if they would change their votes and back what they considered an electable nominee. Was it democratic? Of course not. But that was the purpose of the convention….to find a nominee. Then would follow roll call two and three and however number of roll calls it would take for one candidate to garner enough votes to win the nomination. One convention took 17 days and endless roll calls to find a leader. The last time it took more than one roll call for a Democratic nominee was in 1952 when the party nominated Adlai Stevenson. Adlai who?

After this was done the party would then take up the matter of a vice-presidential nominee, and go through the same routine. Of course the presidential nominee would name his choice, but the convention didn’t always follow that advice. Not like today when one person chooses who will be the running mate that is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Even though they weren’t democratic, the conventions served a real purpose and were more than the party oriented, paid for, four day advertisements and food filled parties that they are today. They are nothing more than speech filled days aimed at getting America’s vote. And nominees didn’t always give acceptance speeches. In fact, in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first nominee to appear at a convention and give an acceptance speech.

So how do we pay for the conventions, as I noted in the first paragraph? The U.S. government pays the two parties $34 million ($17 million each) to hold these useless parties. That’s right, $34 million of our tax monies. Now that amount of money against a country that has a national debt of $9 trillion may seem like chump change. But guess who the chumps are.