In this Bill Maher segment, Naomi Klein argues that by transferring Wall Street's gambling debt to Main Street (what she calls crybaby capitalism), the shock doctrine will come into play:
"They have moved the disaster from Wall Street to Main Street by accepting those debts....But the bomb has yet to detonate.The bomb is the debt that has now been transferred to the taxpayers.
"So it detonates when/if John McCain becomes president in the midst of an economic crisis, and says, 'Look! We're in trouble. We've got a disaster on our hands. We have to privatize social security. We can't afford health care. We can't afford food stamps. We need more deregulation, more privitization.'
"You know the thesis of the Shock Doctrine is that you need a disaster to rationalize pushing through these very unpopular policies.
"So, the real disaster has yet to come.The real disaster is the debt that is going to explode on the American taxpayers.And then they do economic shock therapy."
Andrew Sullivan, author of The Conservative Soul and writer for TheAtlantic.com, argues with her, unsuccessfully.Klein retorts with, "This is socialism for the rich.Look, if we're socializing things, let's nationalize something profitable.Let's go for Exxon. They're socializing junk!"
In 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists. Initially focused on elections, she investigated the 2004 Ohio election, organizing, training and leading several forays into counties to photograph the 2004 ballots. She officially served at three recounts, including the 2004 recount. She also organized and led the team that audited Franklin County Ohio's 2006 election, proving the number of signatures did not match official results. Her work appears in three books.
Her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a legal investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor. She currently serves as a senior editor at OpEdNews.
All material offered here is the property of Rady Ananda, copyright 2006, 2007, 2008. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Tell the truth anyway.
A critical - and radical - component of the bailout package proposed by the Bush administration has thus far failed to garner the serious attention of anyone in the press. Section 8 (which ironically reminds one of the popular name of the portion of the 1937 Housing Act that paved the way for subsidized affordable housing ) of this legislation is just a single sentence of thirty-two words, but it represents a significant consolidation of power and an abdication of oversight authority that's so flat-out astounding that it ought to set one's hair on fire. It reads, in its entirety:
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.
In short, the so-called "mother of all bailouts," which will transfer $700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the distressed assets of several failed financial institutions, will be conducted in a manner unchallengeable by courts and ungovernable by the People's duly sworn representatives. All decision-making power will be consolidated into the Executive Branch - who, we remind you, will have the incentive to act upon this privilege as quickly as possible, before they leave office. The measure will run up the budget deficit by a significant amount, with no guarantee of recouping the outlay, and no fundamental means of holding those who fail to do so accountable.
The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street's dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson -- a provision that evokes the Bush administration's suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security.
Linkins points out widespread lack of media attention on this dangerous bill:
One cannot overstate this: Section 8 is a singularly transformative sentence of economic policy. It transfers a significant amount of power to the Executive Branch, while walling off any avenue for oversight, and offering no guarantees in return. And if the Democrats end up content with winning a few slight concessions, they risk not putting a stop-payment on the real "blank check" - the one in which they allow the erosion of their own powers.
Over in the Senate, Christopher Dodd has proposed a bailout legislation of his own, which critically calls for "an oversight board that not only includes the chairman of the Federal Reserve and the SEC, but congressionally appointed, non-governmental officials" and would require the President to appoint an "independent inspector general to investigate the Treasury asset program." In Dodd's legislation, Section 8 is effectively stripped from the bill.
Nevertheless, the fact that Section 8 of the Paulson plan seems to strike few as a de facto dealbreaker can and should astound...
But if we make it through this week with nobody in the press specifically informing the public about the implications of this single sentence - in the middle of a complicated bill, in the middle of a complicated time - then right there, you have the single largest media failure of this year.
by
Rady Ananda (128 articles, 290 quicklinks, 37 diaries, 1130 comments)
on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 11:01:03 PM
If the laws, business owners of large scale, the wealthy had not jimmied our economy since Reagan declared Morning in America, the average citizen would not have had to resort to using equity loans, personal loans and credit cards as income. Low and falling wages, relative to the rest of the economy forced people to make unpalatable choices they likely would not have made otherwise. To blame people who are in two worker families, or hold multiple jobs or both, is simply ridiculous. Sullivan just can't face the reality of the mess a philosophy such as his generated.
And I am not so sure that this will fall on the next administration and Congress. If we fight hard enough against the bailout, Bush could impose the continuity of government laws against us, can the election and stay in office for life.
This sounds as though I do not want to fight the bailout. I do, most emphatically. Obama and the Democrats are not going to rescue us. If we want change, we are the ones who have to stand up and demand it. It starts with us.
Klein is correct though. The bomb, the real bomb, has yet to detonate. It is ticking there, about to take out Main St and the middle class. What we are seeing here are the major tenets of Milton Friedman's capitalism coming home to the US.
Please start writing or calling your national representatives and demand they not support a Main St bailout for Wall St mismanagement and greed. Time is of the essence. It starts with us.
by
Jack Harrington (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 428 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 2:10:56 PM
So nice to see you use "feh". I have never seen anyone use it recently but me. And it so fits so many of our situations today. Perfectly used by you here. As well as your first line.
Sheila Parks, Ed.D.
Hand-Counted Paper Ballots (HCPB) activist
by
Sheila Parks (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 20 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 6:43:21 PM
there is NO reason that the economic bomb wouldn't force Obama to do the same things that McCain would do. If he didn't want to, Congress could force him to and override his veto. We only have a mere handful of Congressmembers who aren't in favor of the predatory disaster capitalism that they've been voting for and profiting from, and those few mavericks don't even have enough votes to get their own legislation out of committee.
Obama might regret, might weep, might tear his hair, but faced with the coming economic bomb, he would have no choice but to do the same things that McCain would do.
And that's not to mention that Obama has Chicago Boys-type economic advisors on his team and would probably only be feigning regret to fool the public. If he was sincere, he wouldn't have predatory and disaster capitalists as economic advisors, wouldn't be planning to increase the defense budget by expanding the war in Afghanistan and replacing U.S. military troops in Iraq with more costly private military corporations, and wouldn't have gotten a major party nomination in the first place.
Don't vote! This is the Congress whose deregulation got us into this mess. Not Bush. He couldn't have done it without Democratic votes and support. Both major candidates are Members of that totally corrupt Congress, and the election is rigged--if you vote for a third party or independent candidate, not only will they not win, but your vote can be flipped by the central tabulators to the candidate you most loathe.
They're robbing us blind. But they couldn't do it without our consent. Your vote is your consent. Don't vote!
(Not you, Rady -- I know you don't plan to vote. But the people reading this who think Obama would be free to act any differently from McCain, or who still think that their votes count.)
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 12:07:13 AM
Gotta love these bastards that blame the people for this disaster. As though it was them that made the rules.
I can remember when all the talk was "ownership society", how they were making it possible for everyone to own their own home, and they started this big campaign to get people to buy homes and tore down all the safe-guards and rules that would normally protect both the banks and people from going where no sane person dare.
"Come on in, here's the keys to your new house. Don't go in the cellar though, because there's no foundation."
And the worst part is that they dangled this carrot in front of people that never had anything to begin with. It's like opening a buffet to a starving person and expecting them not to pile food on their plates till it spills over the edges. The temptation is too great and you're preying on people that don't understand complexities of capitalism and money.
It's taking people that have been walking all their lives and allowing them to purchase a Rolls-Royce for the price of a Chevy, than as they drive it the costs go up and when it breaks down they point at the contracts fine print that says all repairs, costs and tha actual work of repairing it, are the responsibility of the driver.
This whole thing is a scam hundreds of years in the making and there's now only one way to set things right and I see neither the awareness nor the courage coming from the people of this country to do what's necessary to rid us of the cretins that put us where we are.
Things are going to get a whole lot worse before they ever get better, if they ever do. If we don't strike now, and we won't and can't, because as I've mention the awareness just isn't there, the cretins have a lot more in store for us than just poverty. They have Eugenics, CODEX Alimentarius, with it's mass starvation planned, pandemics they're getting ready to unleash, FEMA camps with their forced inoculations to kill us, and long with their wars and police state to complete their plan of eliminating 7 billion people from this planet.
And for those of you that say this is crazy, go research the Georgia Guidestones, they've put this plan in granite.
What we're looking at is a forced self-fulling prophesy of the End Times. It's as though people read the Book of Genesis and "fixed the facts around the prophesy" in order to achieve it's goal.
To what end this life was all for I do not know, but to see such loss of life just to satisfy a few pathological, megalomaniac, sociopaths tears at ones soul and questions the existence of a God.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 20 diaries, 1782 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 8:32:45 AM
I'd like to know in which way not voting is going to help our country. I can understand not voting for either Democrat or Republican and going Green but failing to perform one of our most important duties of citizenship is somewhat counter to a positive result. I earned the right to vote the hard way, perhaps if that right had cost everyone something it would seem more valuable.
Veteran '66-68
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Roger (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 393 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 8:43:49 AM
Not casting a ballot helps the country by not lending credibility to an electoral system thoroughly lacking in credibility. The system is managed from the top: Our candidates are chosen for us; our voting districts are gerrymandered by a collusion of Dems and Repubs behind closed doors; our voting machines and tabulators count ballots secretly using proprietary software; we don't have the right to vote directly for president/V.P.; we don't have the power to remove legislators once they're seated; and so on. Changing the system by systematically removing our consent may be difficult, but changing the system by casting ballots is impossible.
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Jim Eldon (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 138 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 9:52:16 AM
One: your vote has a 90% chance of not counting, either by not being tabulated or switched.
Two: we have a totally corrupt government. Voting validates that corruption.
Three: we're way beyond the point where voting for people that don't represent us is going to make a damn bit of difference. When you have candidates where neither one of them have any relationship to the people the govern, what's the point? And as pointed out, as long as votes are placed on machines that give no possibility of validating your vote actually counted what's the point of voting for a third party candidate when that vote could be switched?
Point being, until we have a proper paper-trail, publicly counted voting system we can not trust what we have now and voting in it validates a corrupt system.
If you fought for the right to vote you didn't fight for a false premise, the fight was worthy, it's just that the system has stolen your vote.
There might be only one election worth voting in and that's Sheehan against Pelosi, and that would be only to prove just how corrupt our election system is.
Currently CS is polling 90%, if this continues to hold true and Pelosi still winds-up winning it will shine a bright spot-light on just how deep this corruption is.
But, right now, November seems a long way away. With the collapse of the collapse of the economy, a very real possibility that bush&co will start another war, that any election can be easily stolen or even canceled for "national security reasons".
If voting could change things, they'd make it illegal.
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Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 20 diaries, 1782 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 9:33:43 AM
Naomi Klein makes her points, but then it's dominated by the other guy insisting the problem is the American people for taking out irresponsible loans. It is not refuted.
by
Maxwell (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 275 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 8:53:39 AM
As I write this, George W. Bush, The First Fool, is addressing the United Nations General Assembly for what will mercifully be the last time.
What is happening to our once-great nation is this: the American people are in the process of relearning a lesson they should have learned nearly a century-and-a-half ago during the Grant administration. The lesson is this:
CONSERVATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF GOVERNANCE DOES NOT WORK - PERIOD.
It never has. It never will.
Three times in our history, the "plutocracy" (Today we refer to it as the looney right wing) has seized control of all three branches of the government. Three times in our history they drove our beloved, once-great nation in the economic dirt.
Was lit many years ago when we fell for Ronald Reagan and all of that de-regulated trickle down BS.
Rady is right about the 32 words. They need to be erased and quickly.That paragraph is obscene in its' blatant promotion of dictatorial whimsy and disregard for the Consitution. Frightening and almost beyond my conception that someone would actually write that. This Bush/Paulsen combo is heretical to life in the USA.
Yes the bomb is set to explode soon and Obama alone won't be able to stop it, but some new blood can lessen the impact. And somebody has to try. The McCain Reign will perform exactly as outlined by Ms. Klein.
Mark, you are very consistent. While I admire that trait very much, the only problem is that you are also ALWAYS WRONG.
Not voting solves nothing, the guy on the video had a problem with being an automaton and having his mouth stuck on open. It is hard to refute or push back hot air. Why bother. Naomi did fine.
Mr. M, as much as like most of what you say, and I really hate to tell you this, but God didn't have a damn thing to do with any of this.
by
Ivan Hentschel (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 8 diaries, 264 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 9:36:03 AM
I'm not saying God had anything to do with any of this, other than man is a creation of God, after that man is on his own. This is all man's doing.
It's that it strains my belief in a God that would make beings that would be so evil as to cold heatedly plan the murder of 7/8ths of the people on this planet and stand a very good chance of pulling it off and getting away with it.
I'm not going to get into whether there is a God or not, I've had things happen in my life that defy any Earthly explanation that I can explain, so I leave myself open to the possibility.
My premise is that given our situation, being that there are people who have cold and calculatedly over a vast period of time planned to exterminate billions of people for no other reason than for their own sense of supriority and entitlement makes it hard to believe in a God when it looks as though they may indeed succeed in their sick plan.
About the only thing that would validate His existance is that because of what one can see of the workings of these cretins, I'm sure there is a Devil, and with one there must be the other.
But if than the Devil's work is so evident, where is God's? For if there ever was a time for divine intervention this would certainly be it.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 20 diaries, 1782 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 10:34:28 AM
Mark, you are very consistent. While I admire that trait very much, the only problem is that you are also ALWAYS WRONG.
Is everything I said wrong, Ivan?
I wrote that "there is NO reason that the economic bomb wouldn't force Obama to do the same things that McCain would do."
If that's wrong, then you should be able to state a reason that the economic bomb wouldn't force Obama to do the same things McCain would do.
I wrote that "If he didn't want to, Congress could force him to and override his veto."
Do you know something nobody else knows, Ivan? Do you know of a way to prevent Congress from overrriding Obama's veto?
I wrote, "We only have a mere handful of Congressmembers who aren't in favor of the predatory disaster capitalism that they've been voting for and profiting from, and those few mavericks don't even have enough votes to get their own legislation out of committee."
If I'm "always wrong," Ivan, then you should be able to name the majority of members of Congress who never voted for deregulation.
I wrote, "Obama might regret, might weep, might tear his hair, but faced with the coming economic bomb, he would have no choice but to do the same things that McCain would do."
If I'm wrong and Obama would have other choices, surely you could mention some of them.
I wrote, "And that's not to mention that Obama has Chicago Boys-type economic advisors on his team and would probably only be feigning regret to fool the public."
The fact that Obama has economic advisors up to their necks in this fiscal debacle isn't a matter of debate, it is fact. I can be wrong in my opinion that Obama would only be pretending to regret doing the same things that McCain would do, but not about his economic advisors. If I was "always wrong," I'd be wrong about everything.
I wrote, "If he was sincere, he wouldn't have predatory and disaster capitalists as economic advisors, wouldn't be planning to increase the defense budget by expanding the war in Afghanistan and replacing U.S. military troops in Iraq with more costly private military corporations, and wouldn't have gotten a major party nomination in the first place."
Do you have any proof that Obama was lying about his intentions with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan? If so, please post that proof.
I wrote: "Don't vote! This is the Congress whose deregulation got us into this mess. Not Bush. He couldn't have done it without Democratic votes and support."
Am I wrong about that Ivan? Could Bush have pushed through his agenda without Democratic votes? If so, please provide an example.
I wrote, "Both major candidates are Members of that totally corrupt Congress...."
Am I wrong, Ivan? Are McCain and Obama not Members of Congress?
I wrote, "....and the election is rigged--if you vote for a third party or independent candidate, not only will they not win, but your vote can be flipped by the central tabulators to the candidate you most loathe."
Is that wrong also, Ivan? Can you show that our elections are not rigged?
I wrote, "They're robbing us blind. But they couldn't do it without our consent. Your vote is your consent. Don't vote!"
Do you think I'm wrong there also, Ivan? Do you believe that our vote is not our consent? What do you think it is?
You wrote that I'm "ALWAYS WRONG" and you put it in capital letters. But you haven't shown a single instance where I was wrong.
If you can show ONE instance in which I am wrong, perhaps it would be possible for people to take you seriously and wonder if I might be wrong about other things also.
Try it.
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Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 11:16:41 AM
You wrote: "Is that wrong also, Ivan? Can you show that our elections are not rigged?" You know that I admire your zeal but in this case it overrode your intellect. You know full well that neither you, nor me, nor anyone can prove a negative.
Can you, or me, or anyone prove that not voting will impact or influence an election? I think not.
by
Harold Hellickson (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 52 comments)
on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 11:17:08 AM
