US Election 2008

[Guest alex]

http://www.aboyandhiscomputer.com/Dem_Rep_compare.html

[Happy Face 29]

http://www.aboyandhiscomputer.com/Dem_Rep_compare.html

 

 

"You have to believe that homosexuality is evil (despite the fact that it occurs in nature)"

 

Reminds me of March of the Mallards.

 

 

"There's those Mallards. Fuckin' their dead friends in the Ass"

[Happy Face 29]

President-elect Barack Obama has named his top economic advisers to oversee a huge economic stimulus package.

 

Timothy Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, will be the next US treasury secretary.

 

Lawrence Summers, himself a former treasury secretary, will become the new head of the White House's national economic council.

 

Christina Romer of the National Bureau of Economic Research will chair Mr Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.

 

Melody Barnes will become director of the Domestic Policy Council.

 

At a press conference in Chicago, Mr Obama said he had sought leaders who could offer "fresh thinking".

 

"Even as we face great economic challenges, we know that great opportunity is at hand - if we act swiftly and boldly. That's the mission our economic team will take on," he said.

 

"We need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape."

 

He said his priority for the US economy would be to create 2.5 million new jobs.

 

Timothy Geithner - who also serves as vice chairman of the interest rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee - was key to the bailouts of insurance giants AIG and Bear Stearns, and in the decision to let Lehman Brothers collapse.

 

Obama's top strategist David Axelrod said Mr Geithner was "intimately involved with the situation now in his role as president of New York Fed. By temperament and experience, he's the right man to lead the Treasury now."

 

Lawrence Summers, was President Bill Clinton's last Treasury secretary, and will now be director of the National Economic Council, which is tasked with co-ordinating the president's economic plans.

 

Mr Summers has a reputation for blunt speaking. He resigned as president of Harvard University in 2006 after a series of run-ins with faculty and students, including his assertion that men may be innately better at mathematics and science than women.

 

Christina Romer, a co-director at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will chair Mr Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.

 

She is an expert on the impact of tax cuts on economic growth - a central plank of Mr Obama's programme to resuscitate the US economy - and has written extensively on the Great Depression in the 1930s.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7746501.stm

 

 

Change I can believe in? Bollocks.

 

Timothy Geithner - Worked for Kissinger, Lawrence Summers, at the IMF, arranged the rescue of Bear Stearns, involved in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand.

 

Lawrence Summers - Clinton's Treasury secretary, ardent proponent of free trade and globalization thogh he signed a memo acknowledging that "free trade would not necessarily benefit the environment in developing countries", supports Andrei Shleifer (Russia's privatisation program fucker-upper).

[Happy Face 29]

...and the pundits agree

 

NAOMI KLEIN: I have to say it is a profound disappointment. It really does represent a very safe choice, but let’s remember Barack Obama won this election saying that taking the status quo, staying with the same policies that have been governing the country for the recent past, was actually a very dangerous course. I think in many ways we are paying the price of the intellectual dishonesty of the progressive liberals left during the bush years. Because Obama said again and again during the campaign that the crisis on Wall Street represented the culmination of an ideology of deregulation and laisse-faire trickle-down economics that had guided the country for the past eight years.

 

The truth is, it was not just eight years, they guided them under Reagan and also under Clinton.

That is where Larry Summers comes in because he was the last treasury secretary under Clinton. He along with Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin were the key architects of the policies of deregulation that created the crisis that we’re living now. And those key policies are the killing of Glass-Spiegel that allowed a series of very large but mergers that created these institutions that are too big and too intermingled to fail we’re told again and again.

The deliberate decision to keep the derivatives out of the reach of financial regulators- that was also a Summer’s decision. And also allowing the banks to carry these extraordinary levels of debt. 33 to 1 in the case of Bear Sterns.

 

Now, in my book the Shock Doctrine I started chapter with a quote from Larry Summers in the context in which he says it was 1992 and it was when he was making World Bank economic policy as it related to Russia, in the midst of a financial crisis. What he said and this is why I quoted him because it really shows the extent to which he is truly an ideologue and a follower of the very ideology- not just a follower but a propagator of the very ideology that Obama ran his campaign against. And here’s the qoute. This is Larry Summers in 1992: “Spread the truth. The laws of economics are like the loss of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” And then he laid out those laws a little bit later.

He referred to the three “ations”, and those were privatization, stabilization, and liberalization. So he has been preaching the doctrine. He is by no means an innocent bystander. He is a dyed-in-the-wool privatizer, free trader. And he along with Tim Geithner, his deputy play key roles during the economic crises.—along with Timothy Geithner . They preached more deregulation, more privatization and economic austerity to disastrous results. I think this is really troubling. One thing that Obama said is that Larry Summers set the terms of the debate for this financial crisis and that once again is very worrying. Because if Barack Obama thinks that these are the only terms, the parameters of the debate, then there’s very very narrow.

 

ROBERT KUTTNER: Mostly, I’m not quite as pessimistic as she is because first of all, Obama is the president, and not Summers. I certainly wish someone other than Larry Summers had been appointed. My candidate had been Sheila Bear , the head of the FDIC, who has been much more proactive not just throw money at banks but to take them over. I totally share Naomi Klein’s view of Summers, but I think there are a couple of differences. Number one, we have reality on our side in the sense there is a very serious crisis. And if Obama follows the advice of the 1990’s version of Larry Summers, he will be politically toast.

 

I think even Larry Summers, because he is such an opportunist, has lately been calling for very large stimulus package, has been calling for tighter regulation of banks. Now you have no way of knowing whether that is sincere or whether it is posturing, but I think Summers is smart enough to recognize that partly because of its own policies, things are in such disastrous shape, different policies indicated whether he can be the instrument of change is an open question. I can point to a couple of silver linings. Number one, in Obama’s own speeches on the subject, Obama has been very much on the side stringent re-regulation of financial institutions as the price of recapitalizing them and also as the necessary policy. There’s a very good person who is going to be in charge of the specifics of what banking regulation should be going forward, Dan Torillo, one of the two or three progressives present at a fairly senior levels inside the Obama administration. I completely agree with Amy’s assessment of Larry Summers, I’m not quite as despairing.

 

Mark Ames: Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis. Hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal.

[Park Life 71]

He'll need all these insiders for the infighting that is coming his way.

[Fop 1]

Change I can believe in? Bollocks.

 

Chaaaaaaaaaaaaangggge......

[Fop 1]

Obama victory prompts US gun rush

[Park Life 71]

Obama victory prompts US gun rush

 

Well they think he's planning on banning new gun sales of summink.

[Fop 1]

Obama victory prompts US gun rush

 

Well they think he's planning on banning new gun sales of summink.

 

He can't be going that far, he will get shot (as would Bush or anyone else). Maybe just banning new anti-tank weaponry sales?

[Park Life 71]

Obama victory prompts US gun rush

 

Well they think he's planning on banning new gun sales of summink.

 

He can't be going that far, he will get shot (as would Bush or anyone else). Maybe just banning new anti-tank weaponry sales?

 

Some kind of gun control has to be on the way....There may be trouble ahead...(in a slightly sing song manner)..One gun per person for a start (some of these blokes have a cellar full of em).

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3902]

I dont understand the problem. The constitutional amendment does not mention guns but allows the right to bear arms. Fucking moronic Americans. Why not just say that the only arms allowed are piss weak air rifles. And it was written over 200 years ago. I hate codified constitutions.