Other contacts

Contact your legislator, the executive branch, or opinion-makers. Be well informed, courteous, and shove the Overton Window left!

Other: 

ewarrenlaw [dot] harvard [dot] edu

If you're inclined, send Elizabeth Warren an attagirl email. ewarren at law dot harvard dot edu

Where'd the bailout money go? Shhhh, it's a secret

You know all that money we gave the damn banks? Well, be grateful they took it and now go away.

Think you could borrow money from a bank without saying what you were going to do with it? Well, apparently when banks borrow from you they don't feel the same need to say how the money is spent...

"It is entirely appropriate for the American people to know how their taxpayer dollars are being spent in private industry," said Elizabeth Warren, the top congressional watchdog overseeing the financial bailout... Read more…

Great American Insurance Co. is trying to weasel out of paying the heirs/families of three victims of a 2007 Houston office building fire by claiming they didn't die directly because of the fire. Rather, they're claiming that the people died because of "polluted air" (created by the fire) and the ONE million dollar policy on the building doesn't cover "death by pollution".

Or as the article in Chron.com puts it: Read more…

'cause if they do we all should have voted for McPalin.

Says Meyers: Take Favreau to the woodshed. Myers, 31 years old when she was put in a high-powered White House position, admits she had to "grow up" to live up to the responsibility. Then again, as a female she was probably the equivalent of 54 62 in "Favreau Years" (where two male years only equal one female year). Here she is definitely risking her passport privileges to Versailles: Read more…

So I assume you know why today is an historical day. In the spirit of looking back and forward, and at ourselves, I thought I'd share a personal, family story about some of the things we're supposed to be thinking of, as we all break bread in thanks that we're not all speaking German.

My grandfather on my mother's side came from a sleepy, tiny, West Virginia town. During the time of his funeral, I got to check it out a little bit; can't say I really liked it or that it seemed so different than many other inwardly-looking small towns. Grandpa was one of those trouble-making types, and he had many reasons to be so. Bright, but not white. Poor, but not beaten down. Raised "right with god," but intellectually irreverent. And worst of all: light-skinned, handsome, and with a tongue that could shame the Devil. Read more…

McClatchy's top story today tells how a Kuwaiti subcontractor to our old friend KBR has been holding about a thousand men from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in warehouses near Bahgdad for three months. These poor guys paid more than $2000 for the privilege of being treated this way.

The story has more heartbreakers in it than I have time to extract, so go read. Just a taste:

A group of about 50 men living in tents about a mile away were even worse off than the men in the warehouses, and they appeared to be victims of human trafficking. They live in huts they built with tarps and pieces of carpet, and said they had no access to food or water.
... Read more…

UnitedHealth to Insure the Right to Insurance

For these economically uncertain times, the UnitedHealth Group has a first-of-its-kind product: the right to buy an individual health policy at some point in the future even if you become sick.

Yes, you read that right, they want to insure your future prospect to buy insurance. As Krugman said of the Busheviki, their solution to every problem is always to rationalize what they wanted to do anyway.

You may wonder how they came up with the idea, fortunately we have a secret tape of the meeting.

(Via The Consumerist by way of Bloomberg and WSJ

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke helped waive the 30-day waiting period, so that Amex could start to start loot/access the TARP (Trouble Asset Relief Program). Congress passed TARP to buy up troubled mortgage assets , which the Fed no longer wants to do now. So it appears that Bernanke wants to use it to help businesses that are facing problems from bad car loans, regular loans and credit card debt instead.

Oh, and Capital One is already in line to get a paltry $3.5 billion from the fund. I'm so glad home owners got some mortgage/debt relief from this bill.

History note from Bloomberg: Read more…

The economic meltdown isn't limited to the bailout. We're going to be paying for the risks taken by banks and insurance companies in lots of ways. Such as having to pay off 30 year bonds in 10 years. That will cost you. And I do mean you. (The cuts in programs are just starting.)

Here's how it works. Read more…

Rightwing radio is pushing a meme: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, precipitating the finance crisis, because of the federal law mandating loans to minority home buyers. It's a crock, people, and McClatchy has the proof!

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

But the truth has never played well over the likes of Limbaugh's radio shows, has it? Read more…

Hey! Now wait just one damn minute, Paulson helped us steal you last week fair and square!

Early last week, Citigroup Inc. agreed to buy Wachovia's banking assets for $2.1 billion in a deal brokered by the FDIC. In a surprising twist of events, Wells Fargo announced Friday that it agreed to acquire Wachovia in a deal worth $15.1 billion at the time, or $14.8 billion based on Wells Fargo's closing price Friday of $34.56. Wells Fargo's deal did not require any government support.

It's getting to the point where you can't trust your own fix anymore, and if you can't your own fix, what have you got? Anarchy!

Economic apocalypse my grandmother's wall-eyed three-legged cat's left hind foot. This is a money grab, and the orchestration is positively Rovian. Do any of y'all remember the S&L crisis of the early 1980s (Reagan pres, Bush VP, Neil Bush architect of a credit crisis that cost the American Taxpayers something like $10 billion before it was over)? Are we just gonna stand around and watch 'em do it to us AGAIN???

Jim Hightower:

The Wall Street giants get foreign employees to whom they can pay a fraction of American salaries. But what does our society get? The products and services are not improved, nor are they cheaper – the labor savings are not passed on to customers, but pocketed by those at the top. It further widens the disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of us, weakening America’s economy and undermining our democratic ideals.

If Wall Street doesn’t give a damn about Americans, why should America be underwriting Wall Street?

Outsourcing isn't new, but here's a side of it I haven't seen covered elsewhere: the banking bailout will siphon off how much of that 1 1/2-2 trillion dollars overseas, instantly??
Like Lambert keeps asking, And we get??? Read more…

they knew, and as early as early 2007 or 2006. As laid out in this piece (entitled "Perfect Storm in Default") by a mortgage default professional in response to a Wall St. Journal article:

Some "money" quotes, and a trend:

"In the movie the “The Perfect Storm” three storm systems converged to create the storm of the century which had a horrendous impact on the east coast of the United States and Canada. What does it mean when we have 16 major economic indicators pointing to problems with the housing industry and the national economy. It means “The Perfect Storm in Mortgage Default” is not only possible but extremely likely." Read more…

Steven Benen has the main points up.

Krugman appears to be at least somewhat impressed.

Chris Bowers at Open Left has the link to the PDF forty page document, plus some analysis that suggests Dodd's version carries some poison pills of it's own that Bush and Paulson will have a hard to impossible time swallowing. To which I say, great, no bailout, then.

A friend tells me that Barney Frank's House version is the better of the two, but I don't have any links on what it contains. Read more…

This post is largely an attempted response in the form of a summation to the long comment thread Lambert"s "Roubini" post of yesterday continues to produce. I have used so many tags because this crisis is the sum total of all the Bush/Republican/Rightwing shit we've lived through for the past eight years, and the similar shit stretching back to Nixon and Reagan.

Across the liberal blogisphere a consensus has been building that what Paulson is asking for is unacceptable. How to frame why it is unacceptable has been the on-going question, and how to best bring some kind of pressure on the congressional Democrats, but also on Obama to show leadership, presidential leadership, right now, when it'sneeded, to keep both the tax payers and liberal progressive ideas from becoming implicated in yet another disaster not of their making.

"Peter" seemed to feel, in that comment thread, that Lambert and others were failing to understand that there is a real problem in the economy.

No one doubts that. In fact, all kinds of progressives have been insisting that no one was paying attention to the fundamental instability which the housing bubble was creating, appeals to sanity which were ignored. In fact, even after the initial bailouts, this administration and Paulson had done nothing to stave off the freezing up of liquidity which happened last week. I believe it took them by surprise. But I also agree with Lambert that their instinctive reaction is precisely the one that Naomi Klein has been pointing out - to use the crisis to continue to advance the same policies that created the crisis. Read more…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, McClatchy's front page today lays the blame for the current financial crisis at Bill Clinton's feet. Over the headline "Wall Street crisis is culmination of 28 years of deregulation" we see a photo of Bill grinning and giving the thumbs up, captioned "Bill Clinton in 1999 signed legislation that overturned nearly 70 years of regulation of the financial industry."

The commenters strike back with the facts, supported by linky goodness: it was a Republican bill, passed in the Senate on a straight party-line vote with exception of the DINO Hollings. Read more…

From Jim Tankersley comes a link to an AP story. It's a fact that while Palin was mayor, Wasilla, AK charged victims or the hospital exams and associated services rendered after a rape. In fact, in 2000, after Palin had been in office for four years, then-Alaska governor Tony Knowles signed a bill outlawing the practice statewide, aimed specifically at Wasilla. Why would a woman who cared about the rights of other women, and had the power as mayor to stop such a policy, countenance such municipal behavior?

First, f*ck Tom Friedman and the T. Boone Pickens that he rode in on.

I had been planning on writing a similar post when I read and commented on Gob's post yesterday about alternative energy. Paul had a comment that I wanted to talk about because I think it frames the issue in a way that isn't helpful to understanding what is happening or what is going to happen. Namely, looking in political terms at energy and the new push by energy companies and their surrogates into alt.energy is just buying into their '$hell' game (so to speak). Read more…

From Jim Hightower's blog, I learn that the highly-compensated officers of corporate America's fiefdoms have discovered a way to ease the pain of having to pay taxes on their company-furnished jet plane rides, country club memberships, and the like. They're passing the buck to the shareholders.

You got shareholders? Too bad for you 'cause now you gotta buy your own plane tickets, pay the government fees and the fuel surcharges yourself -- and, oh, yeah: if your job reimburses you, uh, there's nobody to double-dip for tax relief from. So you only get to not-quite-break even, instead of piling on additional monetary benefits. Read more…

I heard it AGAIN at work today, the endless whine that "raising taxes will wreck the economy." The whiner referred to the Laffer Curve and claimed Ronald Reagan had proven the truth of this theory beyond question for ever and ever amen: "When you raise taxes you reach a point where people just refuse to participate. They disengage." Read more…

Doesn't it seem pretty obvious the McCain folks have been caught cheating?

Of course, you know they didn't just listen on the way to the Saddleback Forum.

It seems to me that someone (probably Warren himself) gave them the questions a few days early. That would explain why he kept talking about the "cone of silence" because all of that was a fraud -- and he knew it.

That's the only thing that explains how they got the rehearsed answers out of Mathusaleh the other night.

They weren't that good anyway, just talking points -- but they were far better than they would've been otherwise.

that is Maureen Dowd's mind, we find that contrary to what the Public Editor of her own goddamned newspaper very publicly said about her own goddamned columns not two months ago:

"Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.". Read more…

Ludacris 'Should Be Ashamed' Of Lyrics Bashing Bush And McCain, Says Barack Obama Rep

But those aren't the lyrics that have displeased the Obama team. On the song, 'Cris expresses other thoughts on the political climate, calling Hillary Clinton "irrelevant" and insinuating that Jesse Jackson's apology to Obama for some recent crude statements wasn't genuine. Like many of his peers, he also complains about President George W. Bush's "poor" job while in office. "McCain don't belong in any chair unless he's paralyzed/ Yeah I said it, 'cause Bush is mentally handicapped," Luda raps. Read more…

Jeebus, Jesse Jackson's name was placed in nomination when the Dems nominated Dukasis, and he didn't have near as many delegates as Hillary does, let alone a majority of the popular vote. So what if it's symbolic? What could be wrong with the symbolism?

So what is the party Formerly Known as Democratic thinking, if indeed it is thinking? Read more…