I do understand objections to bailing out banks handing out bonuses, golden parachutes and expensive parties and perks. So DeMint’s reticence to bail out banks seems reasonable and fair to me; bankers rode the free market float in their self-congratulatory parade to justify huge gains and huge bonuses. Now let them suffer the downturn.

There are other ways to bail out ordinary people, who are suffering and who are not responsible for this crisis - e.g., government as emergency creditor, government as health insurer, government as employer in national service projects like harnessing solar power in Western deserts - that do not involve bailing out banks.

Conservatives’ response to the crisis is: Bail out the banks and let everyone else eat cake. And God forbid anyone gets a condom.

I legitimately feel for guys like Joseph Cao until I remember that he decided to join the Republican party. Thanks to Governor Captain Exorcism in 2012 (that’s his full nickname), Louisiana may get hosed over as a whole.

Lindsey Graham is an asshat.  He supports bank nationalization but no stimulus plan?  Charming.  And DeMint had better check in with his betters.  Alan Greenspan now supports nationalization.

We forget all too soon: stimulus is only permitted for the ruling class.  Everybody else is not entitled to stimulus without risking heinous consequences.

Isn’t there language in the legislation that forces the states to use the stimulus by a particular date?

More than likely, this is all posturing by the retrograde repubs who will bluster and then siphon up the dollars.

Apparently, some of the Senators who didn’t vote for the stimulus are already puffing about the money they “got” for their state.

You know, the sad thing about what Jindal is doing is that it’s going to win him points in Louisiana.  This is really a win-win for him.  He can talk big about turning down the money, and people will hear and remember that and be impressed.  Then he can turn around and take it, or he can not take it just like he said. 

Nobody in Louisiana actually expects public infrastructure or services, much less quality infrastructure/services produced in a timely manner.  And the underlying meme there is, “oh, well, what can you do - the government is corrupt, always has been, always will be…”  Not to mention that, by and large, it’s not really a reality-based kind of place.  Louisianians will believe anything, and they will mindlessly parrot anything.  People will remember that Jindal said he’d turn it down, and that’s what will stick with them.

Bobby Jindal will “turn down all the stimulus money” in the same sense that Palin “just said no” to the bridge to nowhere. He’ll find some completely marginal and low dollar provision in the package that he can ostentatiously turn down and then spend the next 4 years trumpeting to the wingnut base how he stood up to the Democrat party while quietly collecting Louisiana’s share of the booty.

And in our famously liberal media another zombie lie will be born.

I’m just amazed GOoPer Senators and Governors are even being asked if they’ll take the money.  No shit they’ll take it.

If Obama had more political clout, it would be fun to watch the GOP Governors gobble up the stimulus money and completely squander it or abuse it in every way imaginable, then have the DOJ sweep in and bust the lot of them.  Because you know every dime that Jindal or Palin or Pawlenty spends will, in some way, be aimed at benefiting a future backer for his ‘12 Presidential campaign.

I legitimately feel for guys like Joseph Cao until I remember that he decided to join the Republican party.

I think poor Cao thought he had been elected because he was a Republican, not because he is Not William Jefferson.

He should probably pay some attention to the constituents who put him in office, or he’ll be out on his ass.  Incumbency doesn’t do you a whole lot of good when you’re a Republican in a heavily Democratic district.

I’m suspicious of anything that Greenspan recommends. Isn’t the goal of this proposed nationalization to make the government absorb the banks’ losses, but then cut the banks loose again when they begin to be profitable? In other words, socialize the losses and privatize the gains? I’d be supportive of nationalization if I thought the public would be allowed to keep the banks when they become profitable, but I just can’t imagine that being permitted.

Mnemosyne, according to Think Progress, there’s talk of a recall.  More here: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/19/cao-recall/

Purely on the basis of consistency, I would actually have a shred more respect for people like Jindahl than I do for the Repubs who have gone on about the great things the stimulus is going to do for their community ... especially after having voted against it on the basis of “wastefulness”, “big government”, and so forth. 

If they truly believed that money spent in places other than tax cuts would hurt the economy and their constituents as they all claimed, then the best thing they could do would be to return or refuse it all.

Amen.  They don’t seem to suffer any cognitive dissonance from bragging about what they put in the bill, saying they voted against it, and collecting the cash anyway. 

It was an interesting tactic, since they got it both ways ... It’s my hope that now, they’re going to get it from their constituents simply on the basis of the vote.

Does DeMint honestly think the government can just sit back and it will all right itself?

Yes.  We should cut more taxes, too.

Republicans honestly believe that we should be a banana republic and that the rich deserve to earn multimillion dollar salaries for no work.  Losses should be socialized, but we should never call it that.  Then when things are profitable, the gov’t should immediately return the banks or whatever to private hands so that the money stays with the right people.

Republicans really believe most of their fellow countrymen are fungible and detestable.  They are patsies.  They are to be used and discarded. 

I think poor Cao thought he had been elected because he was a Republican, not because he is Not William Jefferson.

I remember when Dan Rostenkowski was caught nipping money through postal fraud.  He had the decency to stop running ads and actively trying to win his seat, though it was too late for him to drop out. 

Michael Flanagan, a nobody, beat Rosty by a margin of eight points.  Republicans hadn’t even tried for the seat b/c Rosty had held it for years.  After Flanagan won, Republicans acted like it was destiny and that he was such a great guy.  It was during Gingrich’s ‘revolution’ so it was easy for them to delude themselves.  Lincoln Park is gentrifying, so the rich white folk are voting Republican now and forever!

Flanagan didn’t win so much as Rosty lost.  Rosty barely lost.  Had he run any sort of campaign explaining what a conservative twit his opponent was, he would have won.

Two years later, Flanagan was soundly defeated by a Democrat—Rod Blagojevich.  But Flanagan was such a nice guy that the local Dems showed up at a fundraiser to try to retire his campaign debt.

————
As for the current bunch of assholes…I think if they amend the bill and then vote against it, their amendment should be tossed immediately.  If they vote against it, they shouldn’t receive any funds, or at least have NO control over any funds going to their district.  It should be made clear that all the jobs created and any relief provided came over their objections.

Give them some credit for being radical: they are blowing smoke in the face of the A#1 premier rule of reelection: GOT PORK?

The FDIC has been nationalizing failed banks at a rate of about 3 a week for the past six months or so. They pay off the depositors according to the law, they sell whatever operations are left, and move on. It’s not a big deal. The only reason it would be a big deal with the megabanks is that they have more uninsured depositors, more hinky side operations, and more scope for embarassment when independent examiners go through their books.

Oh, and they have major shareholders who can buy media coverage.

On the stimulus thing, I don’t know which disgusts me more, the republican governors posturing as if they might not take the money, or the republican legislators sending out press releases crowing about how they’ve brought million of dollars of new federal spending to their districts even though they voted against the bill.

(DeMint)We just have to decide do we want a government-controlled economy, or do we want the private sector to work?

This weekend, my Dad was just boiling over one morning with a rant, obviously regurgitated from the MSM talking heads, that he inflicted on me regarding the allegedly unprecedented “ramming through” of the stimulus bill—the huge amount of “pork” the Congressmembers allegedly didn’t have time to read. (Well, I believe they didn’t read it cover to cover—but I think that’s standard procedure in Congress and other legislatures—you have aides, or even a special staff of aides shared by an entire party caucus, read it, probably in separate pieces, and rely on summaries. That’s how I think it was working routinely in the California legislature back in 2004 and before when Natasha used to go there to lobby for disabled people like herself). I sat and smiled and when I finally ventured to speak, asked what Dad thinks “stimulus” is anyway. This led us to him quoting chapter and verse of the dogma that “the market decides.” I pointed out “the market” has recently decided to shut itself down, and that it does this (on varying scales) every damn decade.

(I slander my Dad a bit by saying he was “regurgitating” the pundits; actually this is his ideology, which I was raised in myself, and it is probably more accurate to say the talking heads were regurgitating him. But all this emotion was clearly coming from propaganda overload at that particular moment).

Anyway we sort of talked past one another, agreeing more or less amicably to disagree.

This Tuesday, my brother lost his job. He and I work(ed) in the same place; he helped me find this job in fact. I am way down at the bottom of the hierarchy; he worked for this company for over 5 years, helping them set up a new plant on the East Coast before transferring here to Nevada. According to my co-workers (my day to day stuff didn’t put me in much official contact with him) he knew more than anyone in Reno about the background and details of our company; he was the go-to guy to fix a lot of things. He is married and they have a young baby. But the company has been going through some hard times. Our plant has the best track record of them all; the manager of another plant, near the company HQ, was also let go last week. My feeling is, the company management decided heads would have to roll; several did at the plants that were most problematic, but it would look bad if ours didn’t lose someone to keep them company. The line is, the “positions were eliminated”—thus, the manager in the central plant wasn’t fired for incompetence, oh no, it’s just that they suddenly realized that the overall personnel manager could also run the central plant…My brother’s position was eliminated in the same way—“we just don’t need anyone to do your job anymore.” This is a sick joke—a lot of someones will be scrambling to fill the hole.

(more—sorry, folks, but I’ve got to get this out and it wraps back to a point soon…)

(Continued from previous whine…)

I have a kind of survivor guilt. I really can’t afford to quit in solidarity, or even because my trust has been so badly shaken. It would do the family no good for both of us to be unemployed now.

But if it had to be one of us, it should have been me, from a cost-effectiveness point of view. I am paid considerably less than my brother was, but I am also far less productive. At the moment, the type of work I do is considered clearly revenue-producing, whereas my brother, being a sort of general troubleshooter, may have looked less vital on an organizational chart. But in terms of product processed, the way we measure “numbers,” I am far below the declared norm. I gather the norm is not unrealistic for my co-workers. I believe I do high quality work, but it definitely slows me down to do so, and frankly I don’t know how to go much faster without risking egregious and massive errors.

Firing me would not have saved as much as firing my brother, but if they fired a couple other guys I could name who go to the other extreme—committing errors that put entire contracts at risk—along with me, it would come out even.

But clearly it was managerial heads that had to roll, and my brother was wedged in there—higher up on paper but not an office politician.

I could have endured it better than him. I am still not done paying certain debts that take a huge bite out of my income—high in proportion to their size—other debts are much bigger and take a comparable bite, but these pressing ones double the burden in the short run. If all this crisis had held off half a year more, I’d be in a much better position to face unemployment. But if it had happened six months earlier, I’d be much worse off too. Anyway, I have no hostages to fortune beyond my own largely worthless self.

So it all seems terribly wrong and unfair, and yet I still have to keep showing up more or less cheerful, to work as best I can for these people who (at the top anyway—I’m not sure whether our local management had any say whatsoever in this situation) I can’t trust. I have no idea whether I will ride this out or get fired in turn soon enough (or the whole damn plant shuts down). But every day I do, I feel like a traitor.

My brother will probably muddle through somehow, with family help. The only “help” I am giving is indirect, by avoiding becoming more of a burden to my parents than I am already. So again I feel like a cheater.

And me and my Dad have not had the conversation where I say, “Hey Dad, this is how the market ‘adjusts’ itself, and that’s why quite a few of us don’t think much of it, and would prefer some other ways of adjusting things.”

This is truth, and I imagine I will say it sooner or later, the next time I hear about bowing down before the market’s superior wisdom. But it will be ashen in my mouth, however much it needs saying.

I sat and smiled and when I finally ventured to speak, asked what Dad thinks “stimulus” is anyway. This led us to him quoting chapter and verse of the dogma that “the market decides.” I pointed out “the market” has recently decided to shut itself down, and that it does this (on varying scales) every damn decade.

The market didn’t decide to shut itself down.  Just the bits that involve transferring money around.

Ask him sweetly how well he’s prepared to live off a barter system…

Wait a minute here…  All of a bloody sudden these shit-mongers are concerned with “damn[ing] the next generation” with debt?  NOW you’re worried and wracked with conscience? Really? 

Oh yeah, all the trillions the Repubs spent was for worthy TRULY causes:  preemptive war on sovereign nations, abstinence-only-until-het-only-marriage “sex-ed”, tax breaks for the richest of the rich folk, etc.  Not just some stupid, worthless “welfare” help for the country and its people.  No need to worry about the burden on future generations (generations!!!) here.  Move along y’all.  Nothin’ worth worrying your beautiful mind over.

<*screams in futile attempt to restore sanity to the world*>

It fucking astounds me how blind these jackasses are to their own GLARING hypocrisy.  Not to mention reality.

So it all seems terribly wrong and unfair, and yet I still have to keep showing up more or less cheerful, to work as best I can for these people who (at the top anyway—I’m not sure whether our local management had any say whatsoever in this situation) I can’t trust. I have no idea whether I will ride this out or get fired in turn soon enough (or the whole damn plant shuts down). But every day I do, I feel like a traitor.

This may be the understatement of the day on pandagon, but christ, does that suck.

Is your brother older than you, by any chance?  If so, that probably compounds the employment guilt.

Damn!  TRULY worthy causes.  That’s what I meant to type, though my fingers apparently thought otherwise.

And why am I still stunned by right-wing hypocrisy?  You’d think I, and everyone else, would be accustomed to it by now.

That really sucks Mark.  Wage/employment differences, in general but most certainly amongst family/close relationships, suck enough even in good times.  Times like these only serve to compound the guilt or resentment.

Isn’t the goal of this proposed nationalization to make the government absorb the banks’ losses, but then cut the banks loose again when they begin to be profitable? In other words, socialize the losses and privatize the gains?

Yes?

I don’t like Greenspan either.  I don’t think anyone does right now.  I think it’s interesting that a Randian is now talking about the importance and necessity of government action - albeit temporary - in stabilizing the tanking economy.  You know what his big idea is to strengthen government regulation?  Mandatory cash-on-hand (liquidity) laws.  But the idea of nationalization is a million miles closer to getting a better return on our investment in these banks than just buying their toxic assets or opening the spigot of taxpayer funds while we wait for the almighty “market” to figure out how to reprice these toxic assets.

It doesn’t really matter whether someone supports nationalization or a good bank/bad bank model where the govt funds the deleveraging of toxic assets off the good bank balance sheet onto the newly created bad bank’s balance sheet:  We’re going to lose a lot of money saving our economy.

We’re going to lose a lot of money saving our economy.
deep6 on 02/19 at 10:04 PM

And probably not “save” it either, if by “save” one means somehow or other returning to something like the status quo ante in anything less than 6-8 years, if ever. That’s because that status quo ante was itself part of the same gyrating cycle that demands downturns like this as the price of manic “upturns” that in turn set up collapses as inevitable “corrections.”

I think (and still think as I did before the axe bit so close to me personally, and will still think if it strikes again even closer—or if the worst has already happened and I and mine have relatively “good” luck henceforward) that the thing government should be concerned with first is saving people. Now I also happen to think that, not by accident, such priorities would also be the best way to work out a stable framework for a solid, if not spectacular, economy. (This is one of the disagreements I have with my Dad—he characterizes what I call “solid, stable, and fair” as the fast Hell-in-a-Handbasket route to becoming East Germany).

But obviously my views—which I suspect are now shared, in some vague form or other, by a solid majority of Americans—are completely out of step with the bozos who run our country.

The market didn’t decide to shut itself down.  Just the bits that involve transferring money around.

Ask him sweetly how well he’s prepared to live off a barter system…
Phoenician in a time of Romans on 02/19 at 08:44 PM

Um, the financial “sector,” broadly speaking, is the brains of capitalism. It’s what we have instead of a Leninist central planning bureaucracy. It is generally the case in most downturns that problems show up there first, which only makes sense considering they are both a reflection and the guidance system for the economy as a whole.

I reject the idea that a few reforms in the rules of running this or that sector, or even the whole financial system, will cure the problems. They appear to me to be rooted much deeper, in the inherent dynamics of private property in the means of production. This is one of those things that it would be good to be completely mistaken on, since if there is some relatively small, kludgey solution, then happy days may be here again fairly easily and soon, with no upsetting social/political revolutions necessary. But by that token, one has to ask how come the world’s essentially capitalist, more or less democratic nations have yet to come up with such an enlightened financial framework, after approaching two centuries of capitalist global economic cycles ticking away like a heartbeat every decade.

Anyway, it is pretty cold comfort to think, “hah, the bankers screwed up (again)!” Whether it was avoidable or not, their mistakes (or inevitable actions, as the case may be) avalanche through the system. The weeks when the bursting bubble popped mainly in banks are past; now we have cascading slowdowns, cutbacks, layoffs, shutdowns, and bankruptcies in all sectors, and every worker fired—it doesn’t matter in what sector—represents collapsing market demand (and increased demand on already underfunded and overstretched government “safety nets” like Unemployment insurance) that undercuts further the revenue of those firms still standing.

This is one reason I prefer to look deeper for the causes, because it would be nightmarish indeed if a particular sector, even the “brains” of the operation, could take down otherwise healthy and needed sectors. Easier to believe that the rot is pervasive—though that offsets happy thoughts of easy fixes.

Is your brother older than you, by any chance?  If so, that probably compounds the employment guilt.
deep6 on 02/19 at 09:29 PM

No, I’m the oldest. I was 13 when this brother was born. That compounds the guilt, because I feel I ought to be in a position to help him. But it’s the other way ‘round—or was until this week anyway.

Hitherto, he has been outperforming all his elder siblings, at least by most of the criteria my Dad values. He did not spend much time in college (unlike the rest of us) and avoided that category of indebtedness anyway; without any formal degrees he worked his way up. Not very far “up;” they were already filing for bankruptcy, due to unrecoverable expenses involved in relocating here from the plant on the East Coast he helped set up; their house there was unsellable on the market (over a year ago). But still, he was a marked contrast to my spectacularly uninspiring disappointments.

And may still be. We are still better off than a lot of people.

Mark - I’m sorry for your situation.  I’m reading more and more stories like your’s and your brother’s and it scares and saddens me.  Best wishes to you and your family.