Posts Tagged ‘Phil Gramm’

Fox News promoted the living shit out of it. Not surprisingly, they then backtracked from their full endorsement of it in a failed attempt at reporting it objectively. The mainstream media picked up on it. It’s officially news.

Now I could be speaking about any of the objectives of the Bush Administration’s platform, but I happen to be referring to the tea parties that were organized yesterday to coincide with Tax Day. And for all the attention Fox didn’t pay to hundreds of thousands of protesters of the Iraq War, they were all over these things yesterday like flies on shit.

Example A: Bush-league Fox News on-scene reporter referring to Democrats as fascists.

You get the feeling during that frothing display of partisanship that he was about to freak out and start killing folks at random.

But what is most enjoyable is watching what happens when you toss around words like socialism and fascism without also granting folks the ability to know what the terms actually mean. Bless CNN’s Susan Roesgen for trying to maintain a professional demeanor in what is obviously a hostile environment to any reporter who isn’t sporting the Fox News logo on their microphone. Also bonus points for calling out a social retard for tossing out the word fascist while obviously not having the slightest clue what it meant. I mean, aside from ascribing it to an image of Obama’s head on the body of a Nazi.

Wow. I want to buy her a cup of coffee. Remind me if I ever meet her.

Here’s the long and the short of it, folks, and take it with whatever grain of salt you wish:

Obama is cutting most of these people’s taxes. Anyone making less than $250K a year will get a tax cut. This is a fact. He ran on it and, long stretch here, was elected by a clear majority of the American people for it. The sad fact is that the only way out of this fiscal nightmare is to pay off the agencies holding the country for ransom — the ones referred to often as “too big to fail”. Then you regulate the living shit out them. You enact laws like the ones that were in place before Phil Gramm’s bill destroyed them that allowed these institutions to get so fucking big and you move on.

This is going to be comfortable for no one. That is something you’re just going to have to accept. Collectively the American people are that person you know with the huge gambling habit. They’ve run up their debts to the point where the loan sharks need to collect or lose their own shirts. So they’ve come to collect and we can either let us all fail or pay the motherfuckers and go to Gambling Anonymous and get it over with.

To assign blame on this crisis to any one person is ludicrous. And if you did your homework about this nightmare you’d know that already and you would’ve flipped off Limbaugh and Hannity a very long time ago for suggesting anything differently. It’s also not the fault of any one political party folks. Gramm’s bill passed 90-8. Had more folks listened to Sen. Dorgan or Sen. Wellstone back in 1999 there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be in this mess.

As for the tea parties themselves, there’s an awful lot of noise coming from the left that these events were the creation of the right-wing. True or not, the anger and frustration expressed by those who attended, tragically uninformed as they often seem to be, are very real. There’s a lot of pissed of people out there. Sadly, righties, I don’t think there are as many as Fox would like us to believe. Most polling suggests that Obama still has the clear majority of support from the American people. But in order for him to be affective in his goals, folks have to take a deep breath and let him try to do his job.

Barack Obama and Democrats in general are getting a number lies told about them as of late. Here’s a quick post to help alleviate any confusion one may be getting from the recent uber-campaigning that’s going on.

Barack Obama: is a terrorist / is associated with terrorists / throw puppies over cliffs and laughs

If you or anyone else around you is thinking that Obama is a terrorist, it’s more than likely stemmed from this overblown association that Barack had with William Ayers. Ayers was, at one point in his youth, a member of a domestic terrorist operation that planned bombings of several governmental institutions. He turned himself in to the authorities in 1980 but was never convicted of a crime. Since that time he has reconstructed his life and become a highly respected professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Barack met him in 1995 as the two served on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Ayers hosted the first political event of Barack’s career as a statesman. So to say that this association somehow makes Obama a terrorist is a total fallacy.

Oh, and if you heard that puppy thing about Obama, that wasn’t him — it was American soldiers who were so obviously jaded to violence and death that they filmed the event.

Blame Barack Obama / Liberals in Congress / Bill Clinton for our financial crisis!

Okay, this one contains such tortured logic that it must be from Gitmo. But it also requires a bit of explanation as this situation is a bit complicated. To keep it simple, ask yourself what party, historically, has preached “free market principles” and “government out of your lives” and “deregulation”. If your answer is anything but the Republican Party, hit yourself in the temple with a ball-pin hammer. Hard. Repeat if necessary until you get the correct answer. Republicans have been crying foul over any type of government regulation until it is simply no longer politically tenable for them to do so. Keep in mind that the House Majority Leader from 2003-2005 was a man named Tom DeLay, who was also nicknamed the name Tom “DeReg”. That ought to give you a clue.

But as I said this situation we’re in is messy. Otherwise we wouldn’t be so fucked right now. To those that haven’t been keying into the details of the mess, I thought the piece on 60 Minutes last weekend summed it up very nicely, without having to resort to the usual “we need to talk to you like you’re an idiot” style employed by most of the cable news outlets.

The argument, as I see it, is about what exactly should be blamed: Sub-Prime mortgages or Credit Default Swaps. The former was a product of Democrats wanting to rid the industry of a practice known as “redlining”, the latter is a product of Republicans — more specifically John McCain’s economic advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm. Oddly enough, since Gramm stated that America was a “Nation of whiners” who was only experiencing a “mental recession”, Gramm has not been seen in public.

But those who wish to pin this particular debacle, much like every debacle we’ve faced since 1992, on Bill Clinton, I wish to direct you to the co-author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the co-sponsor of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Phil Gramm. You see the Republicans want to cry “Bill Clinton signed it! He brought this foul curse upon our nation!!!” But that’s not necessarily the case, by which I mean it’s tantamount to a lie. While it is true that Clinton signed it on December 21, 2000, it was a bill that never saw the debate floor of either house of Congress that was attached to the omnibus spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Education and Health & Human Services for the fiscal year already in progress. Translation: Billy-boy couldn’t have vetoed this even if he had the political capital to do so.

But in case you missed it, I, along with a few economists who actually know a great deal about economics, am placing blame on Credit Default Swaps. When you’re selling insurance, for which you need not to have cash to actually back up for, and call it a swap because if you call it insurance you have oversight, you should at least be put in jail for raping the English language. Bare minimum. When you turn this activity in a $62 trillion industry and when it comes crashing down it takes the rest of the stock market with it, you should be anally raped with a chainsaw. It’s that simple. Thanks Phil Gramm.

I’ll get to more later…this is becoming a lot longer than I had hoped.