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END THE BAILOUTS
Posted by latewire • 9/22/08 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: end bailouts aig foreign banks taxpayer money
Announcing the establishment of EndBailouts.org ( EndBailouts.org ), an online resource and petition to end the bailouts :
In the four days since "Paulson is a Whore" was posted, the swine and his lackey Bernake managed to concoct an outrage so monumental that it makes the AIG bailout look like shoplifting.
No public liability for private debt!
One trillion dollars -- equivalent to the cost so far of the Iraq War -- of your money is now on the line to purchase the bad debt of big corporations. Including foreign banks! And unlike the AIG bailout, when the failed private businesses take your money under this plan, they don't surrender control of their company to you. Instead, you get the bad debt, and the reckless companies keep the good! So they stay solvent while your public debt is nearly ten trillion (!) dollars and the deficit in the budget is nearly half a trillion.
We don't have the cash on hand to bail out private companies who made bad bets. We're deep in debt to foreign interests including the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians, the Cayman Islands and numerous other entities whose aims may not exactly jive with ours.
Paulson and his slaves have tossed a grenade through our window. We must throw it back!
We must stand up right now and resist the establishment of a precedent of public liability for private corporate debts. There is no time to delay -- the swine are working all day and all night with coke-encrusted snouts to cheat your children and future generations out of their freedom.
Effective immediately, we're suspending all other creative activity in favor of resisting this crime. Stand with us!
Join EndBailouts dot Org at [url]EndBailouts.org[/url] and sign the petition, then write your Congresspeople directly and tell everybody you know to take action now! Don't wait -- these crimes depend on hesitation. Sign, write, call at this moment to preserve our values and our money for future generations!
User Comments
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send all the money to me instead -
This is one of the first things you've posted that I agree with.
Unfortunately, the economic result if we don't bail them out is even worse than if we do.
Then again, the Mr and I can easily and comfortably survive a depression- but I'm thinking that's not true for 99% of folks in the US.
Yup, we've gotten ourselves into a great big mess this time.-
You think and hope you can survive a depression. Most people screaming about the bailout think that.
Should the economy fail the decline in demand for gas won't cause the price to go down, India and China are both looking for all the extra they can get and would be more than happy if we cut demand. Less of a supply simply means station will have to charge $10 to $15 a gallon to be profitable.
Food prices will skyrocket, so unless you have a subsistence farm don't count on not being affected by doubling and tripling of food prices either.
Also no one should count on their job security either when the newly unemployed start offering to work for half of the going rate of other professionals.
There are untold ways this collapse will affect us, and it is nice to believe we can whether the storm, but the fact is it will hit all of us regardless of what we do for a living, what we believe, or how we vote in ways we can't even yet imagine. -
We grow our own veggies, hunt for meat, and ride our bicycles and/or use minimal amounts of gas to get to from distant places. We also use wild, and natually growing foods in our diet already, and use leather and fur from animals, as well as bone, etc.
We have a barter system set up in place already (and use it) where money is not needed to get whatever we need.
If push came to shove, and we couldn't get, say, electricity we would probably move in with others like us who have woodstoves to keep warm, and various technologies of self producing energy.
Yeah, we could easily survive a depression.
We're survivalists. -
You definitely could survive for a while. The point is how long will you need to live this way, rather than choose to live this way? How long will it be before others decide to start doing this and are willing to fight you for what you have or simply move into your territory because it looks rich enough to support them too? How willing are you to protect what is yours? How willing are you to kill another human being?
These are the unfortunate consequences of living in an over populated planet. -
Well, we actually plan on living this way for quite some time - and actually become even more self sufficient as time goes on (regardless of the economy's stability) so that question is kind of moot.
But, much like we are already doing, we are working collaboratively with others to live this way...there is no reason we couldn't expand this lifestyle to others, and help others survive in this manner. It just takes some teaching, and learning.
If we can do it, so can everyone else.
That's not to say that there would be those who would survive it - I'm sure there will be plenty who don't. Those who are unable, or unwilling to work together would not live long. -
You are right it does take some teaching and as soon as we learn to do something or that it can be done by someone, humans are willing to let greed settle in.
I don't know how bad it might get, but I do know how to survive somewhat. Like you I could hunt. I have never made leathers or much less my own clothes from it, but I could learn pretty quickly if I had too. What I do know is in my neighborhood there are over a hundred varieties of edible plants that I have cataloged, and more than twenty are in my backyard. I could survive on that, but my question is how long will it be before some tries to make me share? Or starts to copy what I am doing in the same places effectively ruining my little part of suburbian forest? I have a family to protect so woe be to those who think I will let them take what is mine, I am one of those scary liberals who likes guns...
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yes lets let them fail so we can turn ourselves into a third world economy which is exactly what will happen.
bradstinyworld.com/socio-polit/economy/the-true-cost-of-bailout/-
In a way I think we should do it. Just to help jump start people's understanding of our economic system, and allow us room to change it to something that won't implode every 70-80 years or so.
I mean, I'm being mean, I know...but at the same time I think that after two or three of these economic crisis's we'd have learned our lesson.
Maybe tough love is in order. -
Tough love sounds good and makes sense on the surface, but the results could be catastrophic. We are in a delicate balance and it isn't just our economy that will be affected. Economic turmoil is the biggest catalyst for civil wars. The US isn't immune to that possibility again either, nor would we or could we stand by while other economic powers do it either.
Tough love would definitely bring about a new world order and not necessarily one that we want to see. -
I agree - but a small part of me says "F*ck It, let 'em hang themselves".
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A large part of me wants to say that to them each and every one of them in person. The other part of me fears the food riots.
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I agree - I fear that there will be human losses, riots, casualties. That's not something I actually want.
But that small vindictive little me inside....is still there. -
If we didn't have that, we wouldn't be human, that or we we be so smug that someone would beat us to death...
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Don't bail them out. Instead, spend the money fixing our crumbling bridges, putting solar power on homes and businesses, putting windmills in middle America farm land, building cellulose to fuel plants, on work release programs for prisoners, on internships for high school kids, etc
Inject a heck of a lot of money on things we should be doing anyway. That much capital can do a lot of good things while putting people to work in decent paying jobs. That will reduce the number of foreclosures and bankruptcies. People who work buy things, which will keep a lot of businesses afloat.
Something must be done but it isn't saving Wall Street. Let it burn to the ground.-
We need to be doing those things but if we let the economy fail at the same time we are truly screwed and none of it will matter because we won't have the money to follow through with those plans.
We can't simply claim victory the way some do at the end of a battle and expect to win the war when we haven't even begun to fight it. -
I agree that the economy needs support now. My outline above is great stimulous package. It is more in line with the packages that brought us out of the great depression. Done now, I don't believe that we will go into a depression.
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If we take the real figures of the economy rather than the Bushed up numbers the government likes to feed us then readjust half a dozen times we could technically call what we are in now a depression. However, it could get a lot worse...
Will it be as bad as the depression of the thirties? In some respects it could be a lot worse. Twenty percent unemployment isn't hard to believe and could hit us a lot higher since most of our jobs now are not agricultural in nature. We could be looking at as much as 50% unemployment. Money won't be spent on new projects them, it will be spent on keeping people fed and housed through welfare programs. -
Which is exactly why we need to implement an investment on capital projects today. We can immediately start putting people to work. The great advantage of using the funds in construction is that much of the cost of construction is domestic, e.g. concrete and labor. Not only would the intial expenditure put money into the economy, most of that money would stay in the U.S. economy for a couple of cycles. Compare this with the stimulous checks which many people used to buy gas - sending money to the middle east for oil - or buying electronic toys - sending money to china.
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Now why you gotta go and be all logical and stuff?
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It's a weakness.
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I am in agreement we need to start on it now, we should have started on it during the carter administration when all the economists said this is what we need to do or we will screw the pooch in the long run. The opposition said the future is a long way away, besides we have to get reelected right now.
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Stimulus by public works doesn't really do much for long term economic problems.
Basically, we pay for that stuff by printing money or borrowing. In the case of printing money, it takes about 5 years for the inflation to catch up and start slowing the economy. This is among the reasons why FDR's New Deal is widely seen as lengthening the Great Depression.
The problem is that stockholders and other educated people see the writing on the wall with "fiscal stimulus" (stimulation through spending) and they start taking their money and putting it into commodities. The more they flee, the worse it gets, so the more others flee. FDR even had to make gold illegal after he started his spending projects, just to stop people from abandoning the quasi-worthless American Dollar.
As far as "crumbling bridges", I don't know if you know this but we spend gajillions of dollars of federal and state money on roads, bridges, and public transport. We have no crumbling bridges (it'd be unsafe--everything's safe in America, right?). Find me a crumbling bridge (other than ones we've abandoned because we don't nee them).
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There's no reason to believe anything the government wants to do with this ~$1Trillion bailout will do ANYTHING to save us. They even admit that. It could be we're wasting taxpayer dollars (PS: More than ever before) and hurting the economy even more by doing so in a vain effort that will only result in more debt and more power in the hands of the incompetent.
End bailouts
PS, I personally have few ties to endbailouts.org, it's my friend's new site (he's a writer for latewire.com). There are no ads or mailing lists, just a petition and some text (none of which was written by me personally).-
I will put a link to endbailouts.org. I have a petition for Demand the Debates ----- no ads, no mailing lists demandthedebates.com
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Indeed. Why should you bail out banks, banks that made tons of money on the back of middle-class Americans? To help the stock market? To help the very rich people who are in charge of the US? And it includes the Democrats.
Beats me really.
Excesses should not be bailed out, they should be paid for...
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