Saturday, January 31, 2009

BAILOUTS MAKING MONKEYS OUT OF US ALL

BAILOUTS MAKING MONKEYS OUT OF
US ALL
IT GETS WORSE!
READ:
AP Investigation: Banks sought foreignworkers

A friend of mine sent me the below clever forward about the first bailout package set forth by the Bush Administration. I thought, GOOD ANALYSIS, FOR SURE, THE WALL STREET GANGBANGERS MADE MONKEYS OUT OF YOU AND ME... Bailouts make no sense at all... Especially the bonus part... (giving billions and billions of bonuses to top executives for failure... YIKES! BEAM ME UP SCOTTIE!)

Goes to show you... only the very rich can expect government help... THE POOR? Well the hell with the poor... Reagan started bashing the poor when he coined the phrase WELFARE QUEENS...

WELFARE QUEEN: The term entered the
American lexicon during Ronald Reagan's 1976
presidential campaign when he described a
"welfare queen" from Chicago's South Side.
Since then, it has become a stigmatizing label placed
on recidivist poor mothers, with studies showing that
it often carries gendered and racial connotations.
Although american women can no longer stay on welfare
indefinitely, the term continues to shape American
dialogue on poverty.

So when Governor Ronald Reagan aimed his political
ambition to the White House, the legend of the
so-called welfare queen became a rhetorical red meat
for Mr. Ronald Reagan, who had conveniently
“employed the graphic anecdote as a devastating
campaign weapon” given the fact that the poll at
the time showed that the food stamp program was rated
the most unpopular social welfare program. As the
president of the United States, Ronald Regan
continued doing what he had been doing since he was
the Governor of the State of California –
cutting social programs in the names of fighting
"waste, fraud and abuse,” cutting domestic
programs like food stamps and school lunches,
preaching fiscal frugality and distrust of
government; forcing welfare mothers to work; feeding
of rugged individual heroism, as he stated in his
1981 inaugural address – “We have every
right to dream heroic dreams…I am addressing the
heroes of whom I speak – you, the citizens of
this blessed land.” – meaning, everyone can
pull themselves up by the bootstraps; poor people are
heroes too who can take care of themselves; they are
not society's or government’s responsibility.
from this site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen


You're on Welfare... if you get help from the government to feed your children but if you are a wealthy corporate executive, you are not a Welfare recipient, you are just getting a BAILOUT to help the American Economy... WHAT? Scottie where the hell are you? thinkingblue
Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.

He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 ... and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.


They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys!



Now you have a better understanding of how the
WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WORKS!

IN A NUTSHELL

What Does Greater Fool Theory Mean?

A theory that states it is possible to make money by
buying securities, whether overvalued or not, and later
selling them at a profit because there will always be
someone (a bigger or greater fool) who is willing to pay
the higher price.

-OR-

When acting in accordance with the greater fool theory,
an investor buys questionable securities without any
regard to their quality, but with the hope of quickly
selling them off to another investor (the greater fool),
who might also be hoping to flip it quickly.
Unfortunately, speculative bubbles always burst
eventually, leading to a rapid depreciation in share
price due to the selloff.

The GREED goes on and on while America sinks. thinkingblue

also on youtube

The Bailouts - Welfare for the rich!



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

January 27, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Same Old Song

By BOB HERBERT

What’s up with the Republicans? Have
they no sense that their policies have sent the country
hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from
reality that in their delusionary state they honestly
believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and
their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the
very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining
President Obama’s effort to cope with the national
economic emergency by attacking the spending in his
stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican
mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the
size of this package and all the spending in this
package, we don’t think it’s going to
work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio
Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on
NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said
of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough.
Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised
exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company
Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs,
Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home
Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an
emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John
McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that
the pain was all in our heads, that this was a
“mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging
jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the
millions. The stock markets and the value of the family
home have collapsed, and there is virtual
across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up
in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.


The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.


The question that I would like answered is
why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies
have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class.
(Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not
even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully
engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those
already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a
remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk
about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the
G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages
of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike
McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal
bailout money for the financial industry, which was
handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any
strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the
Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but
the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the
Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to
loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the
economy. But as the article pointed out, there were
bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman
of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an
address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm
Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our
business model or our credit policies to accommodate the
needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make
more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public
interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in
taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of
Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire
described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent
clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey,
“not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride
out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in
a position to take advantage of opportunities that
present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the
plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans
have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media,
that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously
balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big
income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits.
We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A
trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and
then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that
still wants to put the torch to Social Security and
Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between
Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald
Reagan in a heartbeat.


Why is anyone still listening?


http://thinkingblue/blogspot.com

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