• http://thomaschronicles.com Thomas

    Bookworm,

    What the graph didn’t show and what people don’t understand is that this AIG debacle is smoke screen for the roughly $200 billion dollars Obama just handed to oversea banks in Europe. If the intellectual sloths get this far, they still don’t realize that this $200 billion dollars to the billionaires of Europe is further smokescreen for the $9 to $14 trillion dollars the Federal Reserve just quietly printed within the past few months.

    (Note: The Chinese just gave themselves a massive stimulus to their economy in the form of a “tax cut”. Last month, I believe, car sales in China jumped 25%. Since China’s economy has all but collapsed (look at the raw data on imports and exports), where did this money come from? How are they able to buy up our securities AND give their economy this massive “tax cut”?)

    Who they handed this money to is uncertain. Neither the Treasury nor the Federal Reserve can be questioned about where the money went. When President Bush and the Democratic Congress passed the initial stimulus bill, remember that one for the provisions in the bill states that it would be a crime, a federal offense, in fact, for any government official to so much as question where the supposed $700 billion dollars went (the actual figure is higher than that).

    Now that President Obama is slinging around trillions of dollars like frisbees to his favorite groups, a few billion to ACORN, a few billion to transform TV’s to HD rather than analog… if people are focusing on the couple hundred million dollars that AIG is handing to their people at our government’s insistence, they are missing the real story. It’s the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen.

    What is unclear at this point to me is: Is President Obama executing the American Republic or is he trying to save it by decoupling America from the world? Is President Obama bear-hugging the billionaires of the world who tried to crash America through sky-high oil prices and other financial schemes, or is the world bear-hugging America, divesting us of our wealth and forcing us into a new world order… a post-American world?

    I don’t know which.

  • Mike Devx

    It appears that the Bush-Paulson-Congress TARP $750 billion bailout package has been assigned to 2009. To my mind it ought to have been placed in 2008 – at least partially. I know I’m a heretic on this one, but I refuse to give Bush and Paulson a pass on this one.

    In one fell swoop, Bush betrayed what was left of his conservative principles, even going so far as to say – paraphrased – “I am violating and discarding all semblance of free-market economics to support this program.” It’s not the first time he’s chosen centralized big-government control over free-market approaches. See “No Child Left Behind”, which nationalized control of education while forcing states to pay for the unfunded national mandates, and Medicare-Plan-D, a truly massive big-government intervention into health care.

    Add to that in October 2008 Paulson coordinating strategy with Democrat leadership on the $750 TARP bailout package, and Paulson engaged in the deliberate attempt to destroy House Republican attempts to come up with a free-market approach to solving that problem…

    As Thomas pointed out – I think we’re talking about the same thing – the delivery of the AIG Bailout money to foreign banks – and to Paulson’s long-time interest Goldman Sachs – is very very troubling. Yes, in October we were told, we had weeks, at best, to unfreeze the credit markets, or we were all “doomed! doomed! doomed!” Six months down the road, they remain frozen, this money is being delivered to places that don’t appear to have anything to do with “unfreezing the credit markets”, and it appears we’re all being taken for chumps. And NOT just by the Democrats.

  • http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/ Ymarsakar

    Were the Dems lying when they said they cared about Bush’s deficits? You know they were, Book. They always are.

    I remember Bush once said, in a rare defense of his policies, that he is cutting the deficit in half every year. And the graph bears that out, up until the Dems got elected in 2006 and everything snowballed. Even at the height of the Iraq War, Bush was trying to cut the deficit. But he didn’t make it public, and so many people heard his enemies instead.

    Such are the fates of nations decided. Not by the big policy goals, which may or may not succede, but by the little successes and failures repeated a million fold across the landscape. That is the realm of propaganda and the control of the minds of people its fundamental source of power.

  • http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/ Ymarsakar

    Is President Obama executing the American Republic or is he trying to save it by decoupling America from the world?

    They are not mutually exclusive. One way to gain power is by making a situation so horrible that the people will turn to Obama for salvation. It is what they constantly accused Bush of doing.

    Of course, with Dems, what they say of their enemies were only ever true of the Dems themselves.