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Countdown-Jonathan Alter visits, discusses the politics of the New Congress and the stimulus
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Day: February 11, 2009
Obama, like Bush, is Throwing Public Money into a Black Hole by Rodrigue Tremblay
by Rodrigue Tremblay
Friday, February 13, 2009
“The [financial] crisis was not a failure of the free market system and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. …Government intervention is not a cure-all.”
– President George W. Bush, Thursday November 13, 2008“There is no cause to worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue.”
– Andrew W. Mellon, Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury. September 1929“While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There is one certainty of the future of a people of the resources, intelligence and character of the people of the United States – that is, prosperity.”
– President Herbert Hoover, May 1, 1930
Tuesday, February 10, may be the date when the U.S. economy officially entered into an economic depression. This was when President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, announced that the Obama administration was about to expand Bush’s Secretary Paulson’s $700-billion plan to rescue large U.S. banks from insolvency, euphemistically called the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The purpose now, as it was previously, is to use public capital, loans and guarantees to remove toxic financial assets from private banks’ balance sheets and to transfer them to the Government and/or to willing private investors (hedge funds, private equity firms and other investors). One must keep in mind that Mr. Paulson and Mr. Geithner were the principal architects of last October’s original plan. This was then, and it is now, a plan designed primarily to use hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to prevent banks from declaring bankruptcy, while in fact doing little to accomplish its presumed primary objective of getting banks to resume normal lending. Such a cure has failed in the past and is likely to fail now. Saving insolvent banks is not the same as fixing them and making them viable.
Maxine Waters Questions Bailed Out CEOs + Paul: The Fed Is the Source of Our Problems!!
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Ron Paul: The Federal Reserve Is the Source of Our Problems!!
February 10, 2009 C-SPAN
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The Recovery Plan From Hell – What Wall Street Wants by Michael Hudson
Jim Rogers: Geithner caused the crisis
Richard Cook: “It’s Time to Fix the Monetary System” by Mike Whitney
The Recovery Plan From Hell – What Wall Street Wants by Michael Hudson
by Michael Hudson
ICH
February 11, 2009 “Counterpunch”
Tuesday’s announcement of the Obama-Geithner recovery plan is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson plan – yet more giveaways to financial insiders, with a view to concentrating the U.S. banking system into a cartel of just a few large banks. This is not altogether bad news for the still relatively healthy part of the banking system (healthy in the sense of still avoiding negative equity). Smaller, less troubled banks will be bought out by the large “troubled” ones, to the personal financial benefit of their stockholders. This cannot solve today’s financial problem: the fact that the debt overhead far exceeds the economy’s ability to pay. In fact, it will spread the distortions that the large banks have introduced, until the entire system presumably looks like Citibank, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo.
But this clearly is only Stage One of a two-stage plan that has not yet been announced, although the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page has provided enough hints trickling out for the past three months to tip the hand of Wall Street’s “dream recovery plan.”
It is not exactly what most people are hoping for. In fact, it threatens to be a nightmare scenario for the economy at large. Watch for the magic phrase: “equity kicker,” first heard in the S&L mortgage crisis of the 1980s.
Cardoso, Gaviria, Zedillo Urge Obama to Decriminalize Marijuana
By Joshua Goodman
Feb. 11 (Bloomberg)
Former presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia said the U.S.-led war on drugs has failed and urged President Barack Obama to consider new policies, including decriminalizing marijuana, and to treat drug use as a public health problem.
The recommendations by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, along with Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, were made in a report today by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
Among the group’s proposals ahead of a special United Nations ministerial meeting in Vienna to evaluate global drug policy is a call to decriminalize the possession of cannabis for personal use.
“We need to break the taboo that’s blocking an honest debate,” Cardoso said at a press conference in Rio de Janeiro to present the report. “Numerous scientific studies show that the damage caused by marijuana is similar to that of alcohol or tobacco.”
[…]
h/t: ICH
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http://www.ssdp.org/briefthechief (sign a letter to the new Drug Czar)
Dennis Trainor: The End Of America
President Obama’s stimulus package is intended not only to shore up the economy, but the U.S. psyche. The American Dream itself. But what if we euthanize the American Dream?
Apocalypse Nigh? by Cindy Sheehan (+ Action Alert)
by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan for Congress
February 11, 2009
What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.
George Wilhelm Hegel
I would like to stipulate for this essay that Barack Obama is honorable and really wants to do the right thing for this country and this world.
But I also want to go back in that so easily manipulated concept called “history.” Barack Obama glorified the Vietnam debacle by honoring two war criminals, John McCain and Colin Powell during the coronation ceremonies in DC and he honored those who fought “for us” at Khe Sahn so are we now officially re-writing history that Vietnam was an honorable war and that it was justified or moral in any way? That the 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese who were killed were killed for a “noble cause?” No war is honorable or noble, no matter if it is “legal or justified,” but our religion of state is WAR and the robber class’s god is PROFIT and if Obama was the stipulated honorable man of this essay he would reject it, not glorify it.
I realize how seductive the mantra of “looking forward” is and how tempting it would be to want to forget the history of the last eight years and move on from the horror, but we cannot move on when we are smack dab in the middle of the horror that has in no way alleviated, nor will, if we continue to put blinders on and not face reality to avert pending disaster.
Gaza & Aftermath – Noam Chomsky interviewed by Assaf Kfoury
By Noam Chomsky and Assaf Kfoury
ZNet
Noam Chomsky’s ZSpace Page
February 09, 2009 Continue reading
Jim Rogers: Geithner caused the crisis
Jim Rogers said on 2009.02.11 that Geithner caused the crisis and we must let banks fail.
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Jim Rogers: I took my money out of UBS + Let IMF sell its gold
Richard Cook: “It’s Time to Fix the Monetary System” by Mike Whitney
Whoever forms government, Israel moves right + Lieberman not ‘far right’
Updated: added Part 2
Arthur Neslen: Whether Livni or Bibi form the government, the Knesset has taken a big step to the Right.
Mesmerized by Melodic Rhetoric by Joel S. Hirschhorn
[Note: new tag for the economy sucks: The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2]
by Joel S. Hirschhorn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.foavc.org
February 11, 2009
“I’ve been through Y2K and I’ve been through 9/11. I have never seen people so afraid as what we are seeing right now,” said gun shop owner Scott Moss recently. With more guns per capita – easily 250 million privately owned ones – and certainly more people in prisons than any other democracy, the intriguing question in this still worsening economic calamity is: If Americans found the courage for political rebellion now, would it preempt massive criminal violence, social havoc and armed rebellion later?
What we see President Obama and Congress doing and debating seem inadequate to restore financial health and security to the vast majority of Americans before millions more lives are devastated. Billions of tax dollars have gone to banks, corporations and others but have not stopped the hemorrhage of our financial lifeblood. More than half a million jobs continue to be lost a month; 3.5 million in the past year. Millions are losing their homes, health insurance and ability to buy food. Those with jobs are afraid to spend money.
As Nobel Prize winning and gloomy economist Paul Krugman said the other day after condemning what is going on in Washington, DC: “the economy is still in free fall” and we may be “falling into an economic abyss.” Harsh words for a harsh reality.
Mosaic News – 2/10/09: World News From The Middle East (Israeli Election)
Warning
This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Mosaic needs your help! Donate here: http://linktv.org/contribute
Headlines coming soon. Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani.
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Election too close to call in Israel + Mystery surrounds Israel political future
Countdown: War Crimes + The Near Miss on Complete Financial Collapse + Leahy + Kanjorski
Jonathan Turley discusses Obama administration prosecutions of Bush and Co. war crimes
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The Near Miss on Complete Financial Collapse
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Life and Debt – Globalization and Jamaica (2001) + Coping With Babylon
Added another similar video Aug. 3, 2014
Utilizing excerpts from the award-winning non-fiction text “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid, Life & Debt is a woven tapestry of sequences focusing on the stories of individual Jamaicans whose strategies for survival and parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the U.S. and other foreign economic agendas.
By combining traditional documentary telling with a stylized narrative framework, the complexity of international lending, structural adjustment policies and free trade will be understood in the context of the day-to-day realities of the people whose lives they impact. http://www.lifeanddebt.org/about.html
Election too close to call in Israel + Mystery surrounds Israel political future
The vote count is underway in Israel as the country prepares the way for a new Prime Minister. Two main candidates are vying for the position and each has a different approach to the issue of national security.
Dandelion Salad 