Democracy for New Mexico

"Bailout" -- Express Yourself

Congress.org makes it easy to email the people who count on this. Or click here to find phone numbers and other contact info for New Mexico's Congressional delegation.
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I agree with what Bob Herbert at the NY Times says:

Does anyone think it’s just a little weird to be stampeded into a $700 billion solution to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by the very people who brought us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

How about a second opinion?

We're supposed to take seriously a $700 billion "solution" proposed by the very forces that caused the debacle in the first place? And Congress is supposed to totally surrender its oversight duties to the Treasury Secretary (formerly of Goldman Sachs)? And nobody will ever get to challenge what's done with the money? This is absurd on its face. How did they even arrive at the $700 billion figure? Why not $100 billion or $650 billion or, better yet, how about increments of $10 billion where the T. Sec. has to come back for an OK from Congress every time? $700 billion seems like it was pulled out a hat. And it probably was, a nice round figure like that. Who will challenge it?

Granted, Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd is making noises about holding down executive compensation at the failed institutions, tossing some crumbs to those whose homes are being foreclosed and demanding some very minor oversight -- but he and other powerful Dems are essentially buying into the unprecedented buyout of toxic debt hook, line and sinker. They don't seen to care that not one strong argument has been offered as to why it would even work to solve the real problems we're up against.

Read Andrew Sorkin's A Bailout Above the Law for more on why the response of the Democrats so far is entirely inadequate. Quote:

Let put aside the bill’s most offensive aspect — the raw power it gives the Treasury Department, and the lack of oversight it provides — and take a closer look at the practicalities. First off, there is nothing in the bill that will prevent these problems from happening again. The bill doesn’t address adding greater transparency in investments in subprime loans and securities and credit derivatives, which led directly to the debacles atLehman and A.I.G. The bill does nothing to rein in the credit-default swap market, which has turned out to be the weapon of financial mass destruction that Warren Buffett always said it was.

Nor are the Democrats going to help matters with their own changes. It is all well and good that they hope to use the bill to restrain executive compensation, and add stipulations to help people in danger of losing their homes. But nothing the Democrats have suggested so far tackles the core issues of oversight, transparency or regulation.

Enough! -- As Obama said at his acceptance speech at Mile High. Clearly, the only chance we have to stop this thing, or at least improve it drastically, is to CONTACT OUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS et al. and let them know in no uncertain terms what we want from them.

Congress.org makes it easy to email them. Or click here to find phone numbers and other contact info for New Mexico's Congressional delegation.

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NM-02: Teague Agrees to Special TV Debate on Economy

Teague at one of the community dinners he's been hosting

According to an AP story Democrat Harry Teague has agreed to debate NM-02 Congressional race rival Ed Tinsley on the economy and how it's affecting voters in southern New Mexico. The special economy debate will be taped October 23 at KOB-TV in Albuquerque and aired on October 25. The campaigns also are seeking to arrange a joint televised appearance in the El Paso TV market, which broadcasts in Las Cruces. The economy debate was added to a schedule that includes a forum October 8 on KRWG-TV in Las Cruces, a debate October 19 at KOAT-TV in Albuquerque and a forum October 21 in Hobbs.

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(Updated) Obama Releases Reform Plan for Financial Crisis

Update: The Sunlight Foundation has posted the two primary, competing bills regarding the bailout and is providing an opportunity for you to comment on the proposals. Go ahead, weigh in.
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From the Obama-Biden campaign: Earlier today Barack delivered a major policy address in Green Bay, WI on reforming our politics, our government and our regulatory system during this financial crisis. He also unveiled his plan to reform the greed and excesses of Washington. His plan includes curbing the influence of lobbyists and special interests, spending taxpayer money wisely and modernizing financial regulation.

Curb Influence of Lobbyists and Special Interests
• End the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors
• Shine a light on government spending and special interest tax breaks
• Enforce ethics rules in the Executive Branch
• Stop the revolving door between federal procurement officials and the contractors they supervise

Spend Taxpayer Money Wisely
• Create a high-performance government
• Eliminate ineffective government programs
• Reform government contracting

Modernize Financial Regulation
• Give the Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority
• Strengthen capital, liquidity and disclosure requirements
• Streamline overlapping and competing regulatory agencies
• Crack down on market manipulation

You can read the entire plan below the fold. What do you think?

The Change We Need in Washington - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: The Change We Need in Washington

Guest Blog: Treasury Secretary Paulsen Proposes a "Nation of Racinos"

This is a guest blog by the irrepressible Scot Key of Burque Babble whose real job is teaching Humanities and Film at an Albuquerque middle school. We need some chuckles this morning, don't we?

Earlier this week, U.S. Government officials announced a proposed $700 billion bailout of a banking system run amuck. Now it has been learned that Treasury Secretary Paulsen, working with State of New Mexico officials, has come up with another audacious plan to prop up the economy. Paulsen will urge, in fact demand, that Congress and President Bush authorize construction of a "Racino" on every street corner in America.

"I was at Yonkers Raceway trying to calm my nerves after a crazy week when it hit me," Secretary Paulsen explained at yet another hastily called press conference Sunday morning. "I looked around the track and video gaming casino areas and noticed that people were betting like crazy. They didn't care that the entire U.S. banking and credit systems were about three seconds from collapse. They just wanted the number seven horse to win in the second race. And then my Harvard-trained M.B.A. mind starting whirring, just like those wheels on the video poker machines I love so much.

"Trust me, my brain works way too fast to explain here, but in simple terms what crossed my mind was that without a completely unregulated banking system in this country, thousands and thousands and thousands of soon-to-be-unemployed credit/security market M.B.A.s won't be able to basically gamble with the American economy. Myriad billions of dollars will no longer be up for capitalistic grabs on a daily basis by stiff white-shirted brainiacs. What are these soon-to-be bailed out, unemployed traders to do with all the taxpayer money we give them along with a pink slip not allowing them to short stock, straddle options and execute questionable loans? And what is credit/security trading if not gambling?"

The Secretary scanned the room, noting that several reporters had fallen asleep. "Huh? Huh? Hey sleepy press, did you hear my questions? Are you even paying attention? What's the difference between unregulated banking and betting exactas at a harness track. Nothing, I tell ya, nothing!

"Then I get home yesterday from playing video poker and do some Googling. I see this story in a New Mexico newspaper about some beautifully monopolistic deal where the State of New Mexico offered up damn few "Racino" licenses to investors from all over the place. I didn't even know what a "Racino" was until I read that story, but it got me to thinking. And when I start thinking, you know what that means.

"You got a large population of poorer people who will do anything to get their minds off the fact they're probably gonna lose their job in about a month, can't pay their mortgage or sell their place in this burst bubble housing market, and will do anything, including throwing money on the seven horse in the second race at Yonkers. Then you got all these bailed out M.B.A.s who just love thinking up ways to make money in deregulated markets. Hey lazy reporters...put two and two together (no calculators you lazy swine) and what do you get?"

A fairly lengthy tense silence ensued before a reporter finally, haltingly answered: "You build Racinos all over the country, staff them with ex-banking and credit market professionals and provide diversionary entertainment to the poor, jobs to the criminally entrepreneurial, and tax money to a government who just went "all-in" on the banking bailout?"

Secretary Paulsen then motioned for one of his Treasury Department to offer the reporter a job running one of the new Racinos. The reporter gleefully threw his press notebook into the air, dancing a crazed jig, while other reporters looked on enviously. The now suddenly alert press instinctively started throwing their hands into the air, some to ask questions about the Racino proposal, but most to ask if, they too, could find employment at the Racinos.

"Now you pay attention! You people are pathetic," Paulsen said trailing off. As the commotion in the press room died down Secretary Paulsen added, "licenses for the new Racinos will be auctioned off on a special Treasure Department EBay web portal called 'Gamble For America'. Racino site locations are hurriedly being picked out right this second by Treasury staff on Google Earth. If we see any unused land on any street, anywhere, we're throwing eminent domain on it pronto. Hell, in this depressed real estate market we can buy 50,000 large empty lots for less than $700 billion! Maybe 100,000. Just think of the ancillary improvement that will have on property values, and now all those illegals in the construction trades will have something to do instead of going back home.

"I tell you, it's beautiful man, beautiful. Am I the smartest guy in the room, or what?"

This is a guest blog by Scot Key. If you'd like to submit a post for consideration as a guest blog, contact me by clicking on the Email Me link on the upper left-hand side of the page.

(Updated) If This Isn't Enough to Make You Sick ...

Update: Sen. Chris Dodd, the Dem who heads the Banking Committee, has proposed some improvements to the We Love Wall Street Giveaway Bill, but I'd hardly call them "populist" as the Politico article does. More like very basic, bare minimums to give this fiasco just a wee bit of fairness and make the power of the Treasury Secretary a wee bit less absolute. We'll see how tough the Dems are prepared to be to get even these changes included in the deal. Any bets?
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If this isn't enough to make you sick, I don't know what will: .

How about we push for mortgage and credit card debt to be wiped out for those who make under a certain threshold? Or even a lowering of credit card interest rates to the teens when so many are paying "late fee" punishment rates of 25-35%. No, we don't need that. We've got Nancy Pelosi pushing for an increase in unemployment benefits and more spending on infrastructure. Go get 'em Nancy. My favorite is Chuck Schumer, who doesn't want to muddy up the current horror of a bill with add ons for the people. Maybe some side bill can help people getting thrown out onto the street. Don't hold your breath. Also get the new plan to use U.S. taxpayer money to bail out FOREIGN-OWNED banks too. Oh, the largesse for The Monsters is neverending.

Caving Economy: How Did We Get Here?

I'm sure you'll agree that the complexities of how we ended up with a teetering world economy are difficult to absorb, even if one finds a source that presents factual analyses. I've been poking around trying to find understandable material and ran into this diary on Kos by Devilstower. I think it provides an excellent rundown, starting in 1982, of the major "deregulation" spurts concocted by Reagan, lobbyists, former Sen. Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan and John McCain, among others. These efforts resulted in the savings and loan fiasco, the Keating Five scandal, the Enron debacle, massive bank consolidation, insane speculation, the current mortgage crisis and many other horrors that helped bring us to this place.

Of course there have been a myriad of other factors in play here, but the diary explains how legislation pushed by certain "conservatives" purposefully opened the floodgates to rampant thievery, fraud, damaging speculation and nefarious money grubbing. It details the major milestones that helped to create the immoral economic landscape we've experienced since the "magic hand of the market" was decoupled from common sense rules and oversight.

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Treasury Secretary to Get Absolute Power?

Think about this:

Fascism always wraps itself in the flag, always seeks absolute power, always brands opponents as traitors, always relies heavily on propaganda for dissemination of its ideas, always invokes subversive enemies (at home and abroad), always embraces militarism and permanent war, always favors politicizing of police functions (and expanding them and the surveillance state), always scorns intellectuals, artists, and bourgeois democratic values, always is hostile to leftist and labor movements, and is obsessed with idealized images of a mythic "better time" of the past (while at the same time destroying that past, and the nation as a whole).

David Neiwert / Orcinus, The Rise of Pseudo Fascism

And then consider this. From NPR's Money Blog about The Monsters' proposal for "bailout" of The Monsters:

The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.

I understand that they wanted freedom to respond and an ability to move quickly, but to designate the Treasury Secretary full power to oversee the, uh, Treasury Secretary's decisions seems unusual. Especially given that Congress only gets a report twice a year ...

This graph really stands out:

"Decisions 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."

Whoa. So, for the next three months, and then an additional six months after that, the Treasury Secretary can do anything he deems appropriate without anybody anywhere looking it over. That seems like an awful lot of absolute power. Am I wrong? Is this typical bureaucratic langauge? Or is this as strange as it seems?

What will the Democrats in Congress do? What can we do?

The Human Face of Climate Change: 9/29 in Santa Fe & ABQ

From Oxfam America: You're invited to The Human Face of Climate Change, divided into two very special events. On Monday, Sept. 29, Oxfam America welcomes to Santa Fe and Albuquerque two women who truly represent the human face of climate change. These women will inspire you, as they’ve inspired many, to join the fight against climate change.

Mrs. Woré Gana Seck from Dakar, Senegal, and Sharon Hanshaw, of Biloxi, MS, will be with us to discuss the impacts of global warming on their regions and outline the policies needed to build communitywide resilience to climate change, reduce gender inequality, and help overcome poverty.

The first Human Face of Climate Change event will be a luncheon at Santa Fe Community College:

Monday, Sept. 29, 2008, Noon–1:30 PM
6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87508
A $10 donation per adult and $5 donation per student are requested. Sponsors for the event are Oxfam America and the League of Women Voters of New Mexico.

The second event will be at the University of New Mexico:

Monday, Sept. 29, 2008, 5:30–7:30 PM
Kudo Lecture Room 122, Northrop Hall, University of New Mexico (map). The event is free and open to the public and sponsored by Oxfam America, 1Sky New Mexico, the League of Women Voters New Mexico, New Mexico Youth Organized, and the UNM Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Africana Studies.

Bios:

Mrs. Woré Gana Seck is the director of Green Senegal and president of CONGAD, a consortium of 160 national and international nongovernmental organizations. Seck will speak on the increasing impact of climate change on the lives of families in rural West Africa. Her organizations focus on creating resilient and sustainable rural communities in Senegal.

Sharon Hanshaw, executive director of Coastal Women for Change, is the national ambassador for the Sisters on the Planet initiative. Hanshaw's organization has been integral in the rebuilding process following Hurricane Katrina. Her current work centers on creating a broad infrastructure that will help communities in the Gulf Coast better prepare for and respond to climate disasters.

For more information, please email jfrench@oxfamamerica.org.

Sign Oxfam's petition to the presidential candidates urging them to deal with global warming and the related issues of pollution, poverty and more.

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The Party That Ruined America

Just read it: A Ripe Moment by James Howard Kunstler. Now repeat after me: "The Party That Ruined America." Say it again. Put it in every email, every blog comment, every diary, every post. Pass it on. Mention it to those you canvass and those you call. Tell it to your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues. It is the truth and we can use it to beat them, at last, as we must. And then we can see if that means anything. And it must. And it will, if we unite and make it so. (h/t to my fellow traveler in Ft. Worth)

Would You Buy a Used Economy From This Man?

Make no mistake about it. This is the Conservative-Bush-McCain-Gramm economy come to fruition, with even more nightmarish consequences lurking on the near horizon. What we're experiencing today is the creation of those who call themselves "conservatives" -- but the only things they seem to want to conserve are their own hides and their own riches. Now they're even failing at that. And we're supposed to want more of the same for the next four years? A used economy based on the failed policies of the tired and discredited, trickle down, deregulation mob that's been calling the shots in Washington for decades? Yeah, that's what I want when I think of "change."

Here's what this bunch believes:

--Government itself and government rulemaking that provides commonsense oversight over any aspect of the economy or any economic players are intrinsically bad.

--The "wisdom" of the markets will prevail if we just remove all meaningful rules and regulations that have been designed to protect consumers, taxpayers, transparency and fairness.

--Global trading and global capitalism should be allowed to run wild without governing rules or protections for workers, the environment or anything or anyone else.

--If you end up struggling in this economy, you deserve no help from the government. Only failing corporations run into the ground by reckless, fraudulent operators should get such help.

--Money will magically trickle down to ordinary folks if we give almost all of it to the very tip top of the investor class.

I could go on, but you get the picture. This anything goes value system, to use the term loosely, is what got us to this place. Even worse, now that all the sleazy maneuvers and underhanded dealings have produced a free fall in our economy and the world's, these greedy bastards are demanding that they all be bailed out by -- you guessed it -- the taxpayers. What a deal. They socialize all the risks and privatize all the profits, and when things go badly they blackmail the government by claiming if they don't get our cash, the entire economy will crumble.

McCain, Gramm and the Deregulators
So what does all this have to do with John McCain? For starters, he chaired the Senate Commerce Committee when a significant amount of this "deregulation" BS was injected into the economy. He loved it. He pushed it. He believed in it. He trumpeted it. As the ProPublica reported today,

This morning's New York Times probed the candidates' actual records. It concludes that McCain "has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation." Indeed, the Times says, McCain "has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms."

Now consider that McCain's best friend and ally has long been former Senator Phil Gramm -- you know, the moral misfit economy professor who claims that the recessiion we're having is only a "mental" aberration and that we're simply a nation of "whiners."

Gramm, the former Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was one of the biggest cheerleaders and legislators of the "deregulation" movement, ever ready to do the bidding of those who make their "living" by sucking capital out of institutions, companies and markets using underhanded, pushing-the-envelope means. Gramm thinks all the money should go to the investor class with as little as possible "wasted" on those who actually work for a living. Workers are mere, replaceable widgets -- and the costs of their wages, benefits and working conditions need to be held down at any price to human dignity and fairness. He's quite a guy.

Gramm was McCain's top economic advisor until he made a fool of himself with the "whiners" remark, and he has long been touted as McCain's choice to serve as Treasury Secretary in a McCain administration. Even though he has officially withdrawn from the McCain campaign, he's clearly still providing advice and he's still the odds on favorite to head the Treasury Department if McCain manages to lie his way into the White House.

Read this excellent piece by Joe Conason about Gramm's history, which includes close connections with the savings and loan debacle, Enron and the huge deficits run up by Reagan's misguided tax cuts for the rich. And check out Gramm's parting shot:

Before he retired from the Senate in 2002, he wrote the Gramm-Bliley bill, an act broadly deregulating the financial industry -- and now blamed by many economists for the epidemic of speculation and fraud that has shaken the global economy.

... Over and over again, from the savings-and-loan fiasco to the Enron shock to the global banking meltdown, the golden promises of deregulation have turned to leaden ruin. Perhaps nobody cares about the lobbyists surrounding McCain, but someone should ask him why he would cherish the advice of a man whose devotion to ideology has already done us so much damage.

What Specific Changes is McCain Proposing?
It might also be useful to ask McCain exactly which policies he proposes that would mark him as a "reformer" or "maverick." He should be asked specifically how and why he would rock the boats of the vipers who have run Washington and our economy into the ground under his party's rule. And why, exactly, he's still loyal to one of the top honcho vipers who engineered the fall -- Phil Gramm.

McCain is a definitive part of the problem, which is why it's so awful (and dangerous) that he's willing to say anything now to try to sell himself as part of the solution. The operative words in McCain's campaign? Lie. Sell.

This is what we have to get across each and every time we knock on a door or make a phone call for Obama. Pass it on.

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