Friday, December 19, 2008

The President Saves Two Million Jobs!

Today the Bush Administration announced a 17 billion dollar loan to the auto industry. Ford says they don't need it and GM and Chrysler are relieved. All the auto companies have to do is what the government "experts" tell them. This has to be the biggest nationalization of a country's industry since Russia in 1917. The left must be thrilled!

8 comments:

Mike West said...

I was disappointed with Bush about this. That kind of power is kind of scary; especially in the hands of someone like BO.

Brodad Unkabuddy said...

It can only get worse under Obama unless he wants to be known as being right of Bush. I don't think his lefty friends will ever let that happen.

Brodad Unkabuddy said...

Now that I think about it, you could be right of Bush and still be left with the way things are shaping up lately.

vwatt said...

At this point, unfortunately, I can't see how having the federal govenment running things(banks, wall street, autos) temporarily can be any worse. What's the free market solution-put Donald Trump or Frank Lorenzo in charge of the ecomic recovery effort? Look what unbridled capitalism has done to us over the past decade....this is a total economic disaster!! Whatever we were or weren't doing hasn't worked-it has essentialy bankrupted our country by giving Wall Street, banks, and big corporations a free pass to hide money overseas, set up ponzi schemes with charity money, terminate/freeze pension plans, bust unions, etc. etc. So, no, I don't believe in socialism, but until we get some oversight in place, you have to honestly ask yourself, how much worse could it be? Without the current Treaury actions(printing and loaning money) we would be a nation of beggars right now. Oe can run around screaming "socialism, socialism", all you want all you want, but as my bib overall bud in the Carolinas' said, "A man's gotta
eat". Seriously...

vwatt said...

Bingo-this guy has broken the code:

"In a frank and private memo sent today to Republican National Commitee members, the RNC chairman acknowledges that the GOP has grown too addicted to ideology, places politics before policy, and is bereft of ideas -- and that it's imperative that the party shift towards a genuine effort to develop concrete policy solutions to people's problems in order to rescue itself.

The memo, which we obtained from a Republican operative, was written by RNC chief Mike Duncan to explain the RNC's decision -- first reported by Politico -- to create a new in-house think tank called the "Center for Republican Renewal," which is devoted to coming up with new policies and ideas to chart a new direction for the party after November's devastating losses.

The memo -- which reflects just how deep a hole the party finds itself in -- also reveals some concrete details about the new think tank, including the appointment of Steven Duffield, the executive director of the GOP's 2008 Platform Committee, as the organization's new chief.

"Republicans have grown accustomed to having our party recognized as the `Party of Ideas,' but we must acknowledge that many Americans today believe the party is stale and does not deserve that label," reads one of the memo's starker assessments, adding that "we have not used our principles to provide solutions to the kitchen table concerns of middle-class America."

"We must recognize that being the `Party of Ideas' requires daily effort to apply principles to the particular public policy questions of the day," the memo says. "All Republicans have an obligation to develop principled solutions rather than falling back on ideology alone; we must show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems."

Brodad Unkabuddy said...

Selling people homes they can't afford, paying single women to have babies, sending checks to able bodied workers who don't work, refusing to drill or use nuclear power to achieve energy independence and raising taxes might have something to do with our present (and future) situation.

I agree with what Duncan wrote (if he indeed wrote it). The Republican party has lost its way. But so has the Democrat Party. You can look at the President and see where the Republicans have gone wrong, and you can certainly look at the Congress to see what's wrong with the Democrats. The whole ship of state is listing left and it could very well capsize.

vwatt said...

Yeah..plenty of blame to go around...especially with the current occupant:

White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire


Published: December 20, 2008, NYT

“We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.” — President Bush, Oct. 15, 2002


This article is by Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton.

WASHINGTON — The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President Bush and his economics team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for a briefing that, in the words of one participant, “scared the hell out of everybody.”

It was Sept. 18. Lehman Brothers had just gone belly-up, overwhelmed by toxic mortgages. Bank of America had swallowed Merrill Lynch in a hastily arranged sale. Two days earlier, Mr. Bush had agreed to pump $85 billion into the failing insurance giant American International Group.

The president listened as Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, laid out the latest terrifying news: The credit markets, gripped by panic, had frozen overnight, and banks were refusing to lend money.

Then his Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., told him that to stave off disaster, he would have to sign off on the biggest government bailout in history.

Mr. Bush, according to several people in the room, paused for a single, stunned moment to take it all in.

“How,” he wondered aloud, “did we get here?”

Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

BUT the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. BUSH'S OWN MAKING, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with DOZENS of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

As early as 2006, top advisers to Mr. Bush DISMISSED warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn; as recently as February, for example, Mr. Bush was still calling it a “rough patch.”

The result was a series of piecemeal policy prescriptions that lagged behind the escalating crisis.

“There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,” said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush’s former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. “Had we, we would have attacked them.”

Brodad Unkabuddy said...

This time the NYT really pi__ed off the the Bush Administration. (Finally!) A perfect example of reporters not reporting the what, where when, and why but reporting their own particular slant on the issue. Typical.