Tuesday 9 September 2008

:: It's not a capitalistic move to nationalize Freddie and Fannie. This is a socialist scheme.

ozymandius Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 10:17 AM
Response to Reply #10
15. Good morning.
This is so very bizarre for the markets to behave this way. It's not a capitalistic move to nationalize Freddie and Fannie. This is a socialist scheme.

Pimco's Bill Gross cannot be too happy right now. He's been stuffing his company's gob with Fannie and Freddie stock with the expectation that their preferred shares would be protected. I'll bet Mr. Gross is in a foul mood today.

One common trait among obscene futures numbers mornings: failure to extrapolate the lines. Sure, the Federal government will guarantee the GSE's debt. But with what? The dollar is going down the crapper again, inflation is going to spike again, banks that own preferred shares of these two GSEs as a steady source of income are going to lose that. To extrapolate the lines on these conditions leads me to believe that bank failures, runaway inflation and higher transportation costs are the price we'll pay for Paulson's dumbass scheme of placing these companies into conservatorship.

Go a bit further and we'll see President Obama's hand being forced with crushing federal debt to abandon single payer healthcare, infrastructure improvements and the like. We see again a Republican dream: creating conditions such that the federal government cannot function.
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Roland99 (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 10:24 AM
Response to Reply #15
17. Norquist et al must be euphoric

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Prag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 12:14 PM
Response to Reply #15
33. I must respectfully disagree, Ozy.
"This is a socialist scheme." It may appear on it's face to be, but, like all things Supply-side it's not.

It's the death of the Middle-class and the New Deal. That's why Paulson is in such a hurry to do it.

A Shrugger's wet dream... They've been put into conservator-ship to be butchered with all of the choice cuts
going to those who already have too much, yet, yearn for more.

It's the ultimate Corporatist Move. Dismembering the regular people.

Is it any wonder we heard from Greenspan the other day.
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DemReadingDU Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 12:35 PM
Response to Reply #33
41. Where is Tansy Gold?

I'm sure she would have some especially nuanced opinions.
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Prag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 12:38 PM
Response to Reply #41
42. Yeah! Where is Tansy_Gold?
I've seen some recent posts.

Hasn't been here in the SMW, tho.
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Tansy_Gold Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 07:18 PM
Response to Reply #42
78. My dear, dear, dear SMW friendsUpdated at 3:28 PM
Oh, goodness, the last thing I ever expected to see in SMW was "Where's Tansy Gold?" You've got me all misty eyed now!

The past week has been an exercise in chaos, personally and of course politically, and I confess I spent far too much time (with far too little effect) over in GD-P trying to get my poor ravaged brain around the puke ticket. I'm still not sure I'm rational about it.

Then came yesterday's news about Fred and Fan, and so many other notions and nuances went flying out the window.

Understand, my friends, that I'm not an economist, not a financial whiz of any kind. I look at things with what I think is a more sociological eye and through definitely socialist-tinged lenses. My gut reaction, therefore, is that any kind of government "take-over" of F&F is too little, too late, and money thrown to the wrong wolves.

Not sure how many of you picked up on a post that ran late last week or over the week-end -- when nights and days run together, one tends to lose all track of time -- about the melt-down of what was one of the biggest housing booms in the country: the West Valley outside of Phoenix. That's where I used to live, and yes, it's as horrible as they say. The house I sold in Feb 2006 for $340K is now in foreclosure AGAIN with a listed price of under $160K. That's how bad it is.

I'll be back in a day or so, with whatever "nuanced" insights I can provide.

I love you all!


Tansy Gold
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DemReadingDU Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 10:22 PM
Response to Reply #78
91. Hey, I do remember reading about your house

Amazing the fall in value

You are one lucky gal to sell when you did, We love ya too!

:hi:
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Demeter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 11:15 PM
Response to Reply #78
97. Don't Be a Stranger, Hear?
And there's no point in trying to wrap anything except yesterday's newspaper around the GOP ticket. It's compost, and not well-rotted, either.
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Tansy_Gold Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 11:32 PM
Response to Reply #97
100. Yeah, it's fresh compost.Updated at 3:28 PM
As in, "What new hell is this?" or something along those lines.

I am off tonight to an artists' meeting, should be back in the world of the living-and-suffering tomorrow. Have been passing along all kinds of info to my son -- he called the other night and screamed, "WHY ARE THERE SO MANY STUPID PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY?" so I sent him the link to Bob Altemyer's "The Authoritarians."

Tansy Gold, getting ready to do battle with social security the end of this week and hoping for a reasonable outcome
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Ghost Dog Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 01:42 PM
Response to Reply #33
46. Agree with Prag. Updated at 8:37 PM
Edited on Mon Sep-08-08 01:56 PM by Ghost Dog
"socialize" in this context another buzzword they can spin, and rather insulting to democratic socialism as practised today.

As an example, here's a quick translation from Spain's El País newspaper, describing a speech from Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero delivered at the weekend:

Zapatero will raise minimum pensions 6% in spite of the crisis

Announces fight against unemployment is priority and says he "will not rescue corporations"

The President of the Spanish Government, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, announced yesterday an increase of 6% in minimum pensions for next year and of 25% for the (four-year) legislature. He presented this measure as symbolic of the response from his Government to the economic crisis. "If we have to make a special effort at the present time, we must start with pensions", he said in Rodiezmo (Leon), during a meeting organized by the Socialist Miners' Federation, with which he traditionally opens the political term.

Minimum pensions, which three million people receive, will rise in 2009 by a percentage similar to that of the last legislature. That percentage was between 28% and 36%, according to the type of benefit, Lucia Abellán reports.

Zapatero guaranteed that, in spite of the crisis, he will maintain his social commitments in the areas of unemployment benefits, pensions and assistance for dependent people, and warned that he will not dedicate himself to rescuing corporations. "I am going to dedicate resources to support workers, to those who lose employment, and to pensioners … But don't ask me for money to save businesses of the kind that have been receiving enormous profits through processes that, in many cases, have not been healthy for the economy".

…

He also announced that, at this stage of crisis, his Government will maintain productive investment that creates jobs, such as in infrastructure, and said that he aims for territorial equilibrium through projects such as high-speed rail in the northwest of Spain. "The country will continue working through the power of investment", he said.

…

Among the objectives that are to be maintained during the current term, he included assistance for young people to pay rent, international aid to poor countries (with the commitment to reach 0.7% of GDP this legislature) and the promotion of renewable energy. In relation to this last point, he ruled out opening new nuclear power stations.

/Original in Spanish... http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Zapatero/subira/p...

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Prag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 01:54 PM
Response to Reply #46
48. I do agree with the balance of Ozy's post, however.
Especially, the last paragraph.

But, TPTB must not be allowed to portray what they are doing as in any way an action of "socialism".

It's taken the Corpratists since the 1930's for the opportunity to destroy the Social Safety Net.

From what I understand, having Fanny and Freddie GSEs was never the intent in the first place. Making
them thus was planting the nascent seed of their eventual downfall. They weren't even really originally
part of the 'New Deal' and were added as a compromise with the Right-Wing later after they had used their
pet Supreme Court to gut most of the original initiatives.

Now that they've achieved their goal... What do they offer as a replacement. Only what their shallow
thinking provides... Nothing.
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ozymandius Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 08:06 PM
Response to Reply #33
80. I'll agree that killing the New Deal has been the arch-goal all along.
Edited on Mon Sep-08-08 08:38 PM by ozymandius
In terms of socialism: there's left-wing socialism and then there's right-wing socialism. For me the definition of left-wing socialism is Keynesian economics: a government stimulus for the economy. Keynesian economics will only work for awhile. But like in the 1930s - it is what we need now the most.*

The action Treasury just undertook was more of the right-wing soviet-style takeover. The intent is to kill the institution as a public service, skeletonize the carcass to benefit political insiders. It is no accident that the person put in charge of oversight is a member of the Carlyle Group.

Kill the middle class? 100% with you there.

Kill the New Deal? 100% too. What they could not take from Social Security, they will attempt to take by other means. Seizing the GSEs and putting under the supervision of a political insider is "other means".

By the way, about left-wing dictatorships and right-wing dictatorships: each is so far to the extreme ends of the political spectrum that they both look the same to me.


*By stimulus, I mean the WPA style projects of FDR's time - not the dumbass stimulus checks.
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Ghost Dog Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 08:57 PM
Response to Reply #80
84. Yes, I can agree with that, except to point out that right-wingUpdated at 8:37 PM
Edited on Mon Sep-08-08 09:01 PM by Ghost Dog
economic "socialism" is more usually termed fascism, is it not?

And to emphasise that the more democratic socialist countries that have been, I can't say 'flourishing' but certainly 'growing up', off and on, in Europe and now in Latin America (and they're not so very left-wing, except perhaps when viewed through lenses of the USA) have very little to do with dictatorial communism.

I'm not convinced that 'Keynesian remedies' only make sense in emergencies, just as I'm not so convinced that more 'laissez-faire' economics is capable of initiating and above all maintaining levels of productive investment in both physical and human (eg. health, education) infrastructure that an advancing, progressive society in the long run must require.


edit: Hope you had a productive day teaching, BTW. Do note that, like Tansy Gold, I'm more of a sociologist than an economist. I've just been carpenter and painter today. :hi:
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ozymandius Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 10:02 PM
Response to Reply #84
90. Indeed.
Fascism: the merging of state and corporate power.

I am not aware of Keynesian policy being practiced since the Nixon administration shut down the last vestiges of it. But still - I feel that some element of Keynes has weighty merit as much as a nation's infrastructure always needs upkeep. That, to me, is the most obvious application of Keynesian principles, where applied distinctly apart from the system of political patronage that is so embedded in American culture.

It is quite admirable what your adopted nation of Spain has managed to acquire for the populist movement.
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Prag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 10:54 PM
Response to Reply #80
94. Yes, and they are the same.
Authoritarian, Totalitarian... Many names for the same thing.

Well, we all know what the real solution to this economic problem is...

Bring back the value of labor. It's that simple, but, they will fight it to the death.
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Tansy_Gold Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Mon Sep-08-08 09:05 PM
Response to Reply #33
86. Absolutely correct, Prag, but you're too kindUpdated at 3:28 PM
Indeed it is a "corporatist" move, but the euphemism disguises the evil at the core.

This is fascism, a.k.a. "national socialism," a.k.a. naziism.

And we'd best be calling it what is is, or we won't know what hit us.


Back in early 2000, I wrote to my then-friend regarding the upcoming elections that if booooosh somehow got into the White House, he would become our Hitler. "I don't know who will be his Jews, but he will be every bit as disastrous for the U.S. as Hitler was for Germany and the world."

The analogy wasn't quite accurate, because there are fundamental differences in the physiology and the psychology of Germany 1933 and USA 2000, but I do believe we have moved closer to an equivalency in the past eight years.

What the take-over of Fannie and Freddie does accomplishes NOTHING toward fixing hte economy. NOT A FLIPPIN' THING. The economy remains based on the phoney baloney "wealth" of financial manipulations and not on the actual production of consumable goods and services. Unless and until that part of the economy is put to rights, NOTHING will help the housing market, the jobs market, the manufacturing sector, the infrastructure, or even the mood of the populace. Circuses without bread mean nothing.

I wish we had a statistician here to explain how national polling is conducted, someone who can put to rest my own suppositions as to how the demographic is calculated, how the sample is determined, who gets called, who doesn't, what responses are used and which are discarded. I think then we'd have a better picture of what might happen in the next 57 days. But then again, it all really comes down to what happens on that one single day.

So many of us have virtually nothing to fight back with. And as I said on that awful day almost seven years ago, you cannot expect people who have NO HOPE LEFT to act rationally.


Tansy Gold, clinging to rationality as to a life raft
. @

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