{"id":2179,"date":"2008-09-18T07:11:47","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T12:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=2179"},"modified":"2011-05-16T13:33:54","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T18:33:54","slug":"welcome-comrades-the-bailout-of-big-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/welcome-comrades-the-bailout-of-big-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Comrades: The Bailout of Big Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n

Writing about American election politics in 2008 is making me more and more an aficionado of Spanish surrealist\u0412\u00a0film director\u0412\u00a0Luis Bu\u0413\u00b1uel<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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\"Planet<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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Film still from Un Chien Andalou<\/a>\u0412\u00a0(An Andalusian Dog),\u0412\u00a0a surrealist film from 1928 by Luis Bu\u0413\u00b1uel.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

It seems as though we are in a Dada <\/a>universe, where logic has escaped\u0412\u00a0and that lack is celebrated. Considered par for the course. If we put an eye in\u0412\u00a0the martini glass and drink from it, would people notice that something is wrong? In this movie called America 2008<\/em>, I\u0412\u00a0guess not.<\/p>\n

Observing the\u0412\u00a0current economic climate and trying to connect the dots between job losses in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and around the country where people are losing homes,\u0412\u00a0the bailout of AIG by your American taxpayer dollars defies conventional logic, not just wisdom. It’s beginning to paint\u0412\u00a0the absurdist\u0412\u00a0picture of our American world in the era of regulation-free conservatism\u0412\u00a0more clearly.<\/p>\n

Around the blogs, I found these gems that so beautifully summarize our current\u0412\u00a0economic and political\u0412\u00a0condition\u0412\u00a0in a Daily Kos post entitled \u0412\u00a0Long Live the New Union of Socialist Republicans<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Now that the People own a major insurance company, it’s fair to ask how the People’s Insurance Company, along with the People’s Mortgage Companies and the People’s Investment Banks, will benefit the People who Own them. Can we expect lower premiums, equity sharing and corporate perks for our hundreds of billions of dollars? Should we start checking our mailboxes for dividend checks? Who gets paid first: claimants, bondholders, stockholders, or we the new taxpayer owners? We the Owners, want to know, and the Union of Socialist Republicans better damn well tell us, fast.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Total Bailout Bill=$900 billion<\/strong><\/a>.\u0412\u00a0Think about that for a minute. \u0412<\/p>\n

$900 billion dollars, racked-up before your very eyes. This at a time when the federal government is already bleeding money. \u0412\u00a0Note the following numbers from the Bureau of the Public Debt<\/a>:<\/p>\n

09\/30\/2007 $9,007,653,372,262.48
\n09\/30\/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
\n09\/30\/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
\n09\/30\/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
\n09\/30\/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
\n09\/30\/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
\n09\/30\/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
\n09\/30\/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Currently the total outstanding debt = <\/a>$9,634,090,464,815.55<\/a><\/strong>. And now, thanks to the geniuses in charge of the US government, we’ve got the following bills to add<\/a>\u0412 <\/strong>(emphasis in bold <\/strong>mine):<\/p>\n

– $200 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The deal puts the two housing finance firms under government control. <\/strong><\/span>\u0412 <\/strong><\/p>\n

– $300 billion for the Federal Housing Administration to refinance failing mortgages into new, reduced-principal loans with a federal guarantee<\/strong>, passed as part of a broad housing rescue bill.\u0412<\/p>\n

– $4 billion in grants to local communities to help them buy and repair homes abandoned due to mortgage foreclosures<\/strong>.\u0412<\/p>\n

– $85 billion loan for AIG which would give the Federal government a 79.9% (ownership)\u0412\u00a0stake and avoid a bankruptcy filing for the embattled insurer<\/strong>. AIG management will be dismissed. <\/span>\u0412<\/p>\n

– At least $87 billion in repayments to JP Morgan Chase for providing financing to underpin trades with units of bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers<\/strong> U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said over the weekend he was adamant that public funds not be used to rescue the firm. (<\/strong>In this instance, I suspect the government felt it untenable to bail out more than\u0412\u00a0one failed mega-financial business in one day, so they opted to\u0412\u00a0do a pass-through using JP Morgan Chase-FB)<\/strong><\/em>.\u0412 <\/span>\u0412<\/p>\n

– $29 billion in financing for JP Morgan Chase’s government-brokered buyout of Bear Stearns in March.\u0412<\/p>\n

All of the profits have been privatized. \u0412\u00a0Now the US taxpayer is responsible for all the losses<\/em><\/strong>.\u0412\u00a0\u0412 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

So now, after years of taking advantage of the little guy, unregulated,\u0412\u00a0to make obscene profits from untenable housing loans and mortgages that were never realistic, these\u0412\u00a0corporations are going straight to the public trough to bail them out for screwing up while they were screwing us<\/strong>. We can muse that this is all very interesting and perhaps funny. But its unfortunate\u0412\u00a0this is also the same government that we pay for with taxpayer dollars<\/strong>\u0412\u00a0that can’t seem to move very quickly when a natural disaster, not a financial one, takes place. As said before, this seems like a country whose government comes right out of a surrealist art film. Its priorities are absurd.<\/p>\n

I thought for a moment The Onion<\/em> made this next piece up, but its for real\u0412\u00a0and\u0412\u00a0falls under the category of\u0412\u00a0Cosmic Irony:<\/a>\u0412<\/p>\n

In an interview with CNN this summer<\/span><\/strong><\/a>, (Lynn Forester de Rothschild)\u0412\u00a0did not hide her distaste for eventual Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

‘This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don’t like him,’ she said of Obama in an interview with CNN\u0432\u0402\u2122s Joe Johns. ‘I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Forester is a member of the DNC\u0432\u0402\u2122s Democrats Abroad chapter and splits her time living in London and New York.<\/p>\n

Forester is the CEO of EL Rothschild, a holding company with businesses around the world. She is married to international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Any questions?<\/div>\n
Yours & truly,<\/div>\n
Fe Bongolan<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader, Writing about American election politics in 2008 is making me more and more an aficionado of Spanish surrealist\u0412\u00a0film director\u0412\u00a0Luis Bu\u0413\u00b1uel. Film still from Un Chien Andalou\u0412\u00a0(An Andalusian Dog),\u0412\u00a0a surrealist film from 1928 by Luis Bu\u0413\u00b1uel. It seems as though we are in a Dada universe, where logic has escaped\u0412\u00a0and that lack … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,52,267,251,270,117,269,268],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}