12 Comments

1. dan:

$7.76 Trillion?!

I think the only appropriate response is: WTF.

Nov 26, 2008 - 3:02 pm 2. Herb:

I understand that the sum allocated to this exceeds the cost of the New Deal, WWII, the Marshall Plan, Korea, Vietnam and the Space Program.

Combined.

In current dollars.

Add to this the unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare, plus the various state and local pension arrangements which are hugely unfunded (see NJ and Calif). Plus when GM, Ford and Chrysler go under the Feds will pick them up too.

As the late Everett Dirksen used to say, soon or later we’ll be talking about real money.

Taxes will go up until the economy improves.

Don’t worry, Obama will make it better.

Nov 26, 2008 - 3:22 pm 3. hdgreene:

Are you sure about the 7.76 trillion dollar figure? I think you got to add on a 10 percent “finders fee.” That’s 776 billion. Then there’s shipping and handling, which is $4.95 (holiday special). But the handling is being done by the teamsters so add 3.24 trillion for “breakage.” So I make it 11.76 trillion. Oh, and $4.95 shipping and handling — if you order today.

Here is Spengler’s take on President Elect Obama’s financial wizards, from an article with some good background:

For a quarter of a century, the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills have known nothing but a rising trend in asset prices. About the origin of this trend, they were incurious. The Reagan administration had encountered a stock market in 1981 trading 50% below its the long-term trend. Reagan restored the equity market to trend by cutting taxes, suppressing inflation and easing some regulations. The private equity sharps were fleas traveling on Reagan’s dog. They simply rode the trend with the maximum of leverage…Without leverage, the clever folk around Barack Obama are fleas without a dog. None of them invented anything, introduced an important new product, opened a new market, or did anything that reached into the lives of ordinary people. They wore expensive cufflinks, read balance sheets, exercised regularly, sat on philanthropic boards, and assumed that their flea’s ride on the Reagan dog would last forever.

Apparently their new idea is “shock and awe” stimulation for the economy. Like the old joke says, when you have a hammer all your problems look like nails. The Real Estate bubble worked out well for Rahm Emanuel, Barney Frank and the Congressional Democrats. Their Wall Street Pals will “bail out” alright, too. Obviously, if you know how to create bubbles then when you see a slew of problems you break out the bubbly. So soon we’ll have a bubbly auto industry, a bubbly “alternative fuel” sector and a bubbly bath for the American people. I hope it is “for the children” since they are the ones who will pay for it.

Nov 26, 2008 - 3:37 pm 4. Jay:

I believe that they continue to expect that the Chinese, Japanese, and our buddies the Saudis will continue to buy our Treasury bonds by the trillions so as to keep our bond rates low.
We will default on our debt and destroy our economy. Perhaps that Russian was correct in his prediction yesterday on Drudge.

Nov 26, 2008 - 3:50 pm 5. wretchard:

People are led to their final dooms not by an exceedingly sophisticated scheme, but with an obviously stupid one. The more stupid, the better. Hitler was a clown. Stalin was a maniac. Jim Jones was Communist conman. And perfectly ordinary people followed him practically to a man, right to the end. The reason why these clowns succeed in duping their followers is because their message is so outrageous that all the clever either don’t them seriously or can’t believe anyone could lie so monstrously. And so it goes until the end. Consider Jim Jones’ life:

Before forming a church, Jim Jones had become enamored of communism and frustrated by the harassment communists received in the U.S. This, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones, as he himself described on a biography tape, where he stated:

“I decided, how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church. So I consciously made a decision to look into that pro— that prospect.”

—Jim Jones

Although he faced backlash for being a communist, Jones was surprised that a Methodist superintendent whom he had not met through the American Communist Party helped Jones into the church despite his knowledge that Jones was a communist. In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church in Indianapolis, but left that church because it barred him from integrating African Americans into his congregation. In 1954, Jones began his own church in rented space in Indianapolis, at first naming it the Community Unity Church.

Jones had previously witnessed a faith-healing service at the Seventh Day Baptist Church, observed that it attracted people and their cash and concluded that with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals. Jones and Temple members faked healings because they found this increased faith, which generated financial resources to help the poor. These faked healings involved using chicken livers and other animal tissue that existing Temple members and Jones claimed were cancerous tissues removed from the body.

In 1956, Jones bought his first church building in a racially mixed Indianapolis neighborhood and named the church Wings of Deliverance, and later that year the “Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church”, the first title incorporating the name “Peoples Temple.” Jones’ healings and purported clairvoyant revelations attracted spiritualists.

In order to increase publicity, the Temple organized large religious “conventions” with other Pentecostal pastors, though Jones continued to disguise his atheism and the fact that he was using religion to further social goals. Those conventions drew as many as 11,000 attendees. Jones and the other preachers conducted “healings” and impressed attendees by knowing private information – usually numbers, such as addresses, phone numbers or social security numbers – that private detectives could easily discover beforehand. …

Jones had read extensively about Father Divine, the founder of the International Peace Mission movement. Jones and Temple members visited Divine several times, while Jones studied his writings and tape recordings of his sermons. The Temple printed Divine’s texts for its members and began to preach that members should abstain from sex and only adopt children.

In 1959, in a sermon in his Delaware Street Temple, Jones tested the new fiery rhetorical style that Divine had used. His speech captivated members with lulls and crescendos, as Jones challenged individual members in front of the group.[11] The speech also marked the beginning of the Temple’s underlying “us versus them” message. Jones carefully weaved in that the Temple’s home for senior citizens was established on the basis “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” quoting Karl Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.” He did so playing upon the fact that his Christian audience would notice the similarities with text from Acts of the Apostles 4:34-35 which stated “distribution was made to each as any had need.” Jones would repeatedly cite that passage to call Jesus Christ a communist, while at the same time attacking the text of the Bible.

Nov 26, 2008 - 3:58 pm 6. dan:

Oh god. The Communists. What major malfunction allows these scum – perhaps you, Reader – to proliferate through otherwise healthy society, and disfigure or devour it.

Religion is the opium of the people? Marxism is the AIDS of human civilization.

Nov 26, 2008 - 4:54 pm 7. wretchard:

Oh god. The Communists. What major malfunction allows these scum – perhaps you, Reader – to proliferate through otherwise healthy society, and disfigure or devour it.

The really scary thing is how many people thought that Jim Jones was sane, ‘progressive’ man. When he set up the Jonestown commune, the Prime Minister of Guyana described references to “Vice President Mondale, Rosalyn Carter and Mayor Moscone”. When “when [Guyana's] Deputy Minister Ptolemy Reid traveled to Washington in September of 1977 to sign the Panama Treaties, Mondale asked him ‘How’s Jim?’, which indicated to Reid that Mondale had a personal interest in Jones’ well being.”

Jones made frequent addresses to Temple members regarding Jonestown’s safety, including statements that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were conspiring with “capitalist pigs” to destroy Jonestown and harm its members. After work, when purported emergencies arose, the Temple sometimes conducted what Jones referred to as “White Nights”. During such events, Jones would sometimes give the Jonestown members four choices: (1) attempt to flee to the Soviet Union; (2) commit “revolutionary suicide”; (3) stay in Jonestown and fight the purported attackers or (4) flee into the jungle. … After the Six Day Siege, Jones no longer believed the Guyanese could be trusted. Jones directed Temple members to write to over a dozen foreign governments inquiring about immigration policies relevant to another exodus by the Temple.[68] He also wrote the U.S. State department inquiring about North Korea and Stalinist Albania.

Nov 26, 2008 - 6:58 pm 8. Unsk:

Republicans on their own, through some RNC endorsed committee process with public hearings, need to find out what exactly happened, what went wrong, and what is the problem now, in this subprime mess. Then the Republican party needs to propose clear, well reasoned solutions. And fast.

Congress under the Democrats will never do it, because the Democrats know they are the real culprits.

Unless this mess is investigated , the real problem, or better said, the entangled multiple layers of problems won’t be clearly identified.

The Fed and the Treasury are clearly flailing about, just throwing trillions in bailouts at the problem, with no clear idea of what is the true scope of the problem.

These guys are in over their head. Back in July, Bernacke and Paulsen said that the Fannie/Freddie problem was a 100 billion dollar problem. That’s it. Knowing what we now know with trillions is bad sub prime mortgages and credit default swaps, how could they even have said that? Were they totally misinformed? Was it a lie? What’s going on here?

Back in July and August of 07, many financial prognosticators were blaming the speculators. Boy were they wrong. Many of the people I know were really worried about the downside risk to the economy then. Bernacke didn’t seem to care, and didn’t start lowering rates till i believe November.

I know of a property in a gang infested area of LA right next to a freeway, where the owners got a $575,000 loan in 06 on a house worth now $275K.
Then mid November 07, they got an additional line of credit on the house of $315,000! From WaMu of course. How is that even possible?

Wouldn’t you have thought back in mid -07, that at the first signs of crisis in subprime loans, that the Fed and the Treasury would immediately cut back the subprime loans?

Constitutionally, how does the Treasury and the Fed have the authority to just hand out $7.76 trillion? Is that the carte blanche that ’s written into the bailout bill? That ’s over three quarters of the entire accumulated US debt since 1789! Where’s the accountability? Just think of the billions upon billions that the Dems and ACORN can skim off the top!

This is unbelievable.

Nov 26, 2008 - 7:07 pm 9. wildernesscalling:

Wretchard, what was the Orwellian 1984 saying, something like “When deceit is everywhere the truth is horrifying” (I am close just a little foggy it has been so long) in each instance you describe it rings clear, all those followers when the truth appeared could not beleive it and chose to keep beleiving the lie as they drank the kool aide, here in the USA, the truth is unbelievable, so unbelievable that people do not want to face it and will follow the piped piper playing the melody that sooths the ears and eases the mind as they march off to the trap! As the bible says, the truth will be considered a lie and the lie will be the truth, also says something about the false prophet will be clothed as the savior, get what you want from it… I think “0” has had more bitten off for him then anybody realizes, we will have a very hairy ride over the next two to four or more years, personally the 2 thousand year cycle is close at hand and so we will really find out just how bad it isn’t yet as each year goes!

Nov 26, 2008 - 8:50 pm 10. njcommuter:

Like the old joke says, when you have a hammer all your problems look like nails. …

I think you mean “When all you know how to do is spend money, every problem looks like a shopping spree.”

Nov 26, 2008 - 9:41 pm 11. Barry Meislin:

Actually, Orwell said:
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Of course, the problem then becomes, what is truth?….And these days, civilization seems to hanker after believing the psychopathic liars.

No matter. Up the revolution!!

Nov 26, 2008 - 11:01 pm 12. Thrasymachus:

Spengler nails it. The Ivy Leaguers have turned out to be high IQ morons.

Nov 27, 2008 - 12:00 pm

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