Geithner's Coming Out Party

[Crewleader]

Weekend Edition
February 13 - 15, 2009

"Not Ready for Prime Time"

Geithner's Coming Out Party

By MIKE WHITNEY


This week was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's coming out party. He was supposed to outline Obama's Financial Stability Plan to the Senate Banking Committee. Wall Street was looking for clarity, but it didn't get it. Instead, they got 25 minutes of political posturing and blather. The markets went into freefall. By the end of the day, the Dow was down 382 points. It was a complete fiasco.

Geithner is a smart man. He knows what Wall Street wants. They want a plan and they want the details. They don't want more gibberish. He knew that he'd get hammered if he didn't produce a workable scheme for fixing the banks, but he went ahead anyway figuring he could dazzle his audience with his brilliance. It didn't work. The markets plummeted and the pundits wrote him off as "not ready for prime time". Now his credibility is shattered just three weeks into the new administration. Why did he do it?

Most people who've been following the financial crisis know what needs to be done. It's no secret. The insolvent banks have to be nationalized. They have to be taken over by the FDIC, the shareholders have to be wiped out, bondholders have to take a haircut, management has to be replaced and the bad assets have to be written down. There's no point in throwing public money down a rathole just to keep zombie banks on life support.

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney02132009.html

[FrenchieCat]

1. Those opposed to Pres. Obama's policy plan would wish to make Geithner ineffective.....

as part of stablelizing the economy will come from restored confidence. If they can erode that confidence by questioning Geithner's competence; they hope to "win".

Of course Counterpunch hopes for the worse for this president as well....unfortunately.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Well, I know what you mean by the tone at Counterpunch...

...the word "negative" doesn't really adequately describe it (their tone and offerings are much more complex than this), but it will do to indicate vaguely what I mean. You come away from Counterpunch so overwhelmed by the problems in the world, and in our own country, with no solutions in sight, that you get criticism-fatigue, and you just want to go somewhere and read about some guy taking a homeless man into his home, and feeding him, and giving him a residence, instead of calling the police to remove the homeless man from his yard. SOLUTIONS! Somebody, somewhere, doing something right!

So I periodically abandon Counterpunch in despair. And yet, when I went there, just now, to read the rest of this article, there wasn't a single article in their list down the side that didn't draw my immediate interest. I bookmarked dozens of them.

For criticism of the corpo/fascists who are the real rulers of our country, and for true alternative viewpoints on issues and conflicts here and everywhere, Counterpunch is unparalleled in its offerings, from many different writers, many of them excellent writers and thinkers, some of them brilliant.

As for Counterpunch wanting Obama to fail (you wrote: "Of course Counterpunch hopes for the worse for this president as well....unfortunately"), that is not fair, given Counterpunch's wide offerings. They publish many writers--most of them providing good information and analysis of various political, economic, foreign and domestic problems, and actually none that I've seen "hoping for the worst" for Obama. If you've got examples of that, cite them--but are they typical? Not in my experience.

I became annoyed with Counterpunch when they didn't take up the stolen elections issue, and the fast-tracking of corpo-controlled 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines all over the U.S. It is clear to me, from study of this issue, that the true political agenda of the American people, which is driven by our desire for peace and justice, has been fraudulently and massively excluded from the halls of power, with these 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines being the latest and the worst method of corpo/fascist rule. Counterpunch writers, like many leftists, seem to accept that Bush-Cheney were elected and re-elected by the American people. The evidence that that is not so is extremely important to review and understand, and include in any current political analysis or analysis of the last decade. But it is very often missing from leftist discourse, with analysts often falling into the thoughtless habit of viewing the American people just as the fascists view them: 'sheeple,' peons, rabble.

I see election reform in the U.S. as THE No. 1 priority for anyone who wants real change. That is a solution you can point people to. That is something people can do something about. It is not everything. But it is the most fundamentally necessary condition for change: aboveboard vote counting. Clean elections, and grass roots organization, are the two most important factors in the vast, peaceful, leftist revolution that has occurred in South America.

Frankly, I think there is not a problem spot, injustice or conflict in the world, listed in Counterpunch's archives, that wouldn't be changed for the better by transparent vote counting in the United States.

It seems so obvious to me. I'm continually flabbergasted by leftist publications pretty much ignoring it.

Counterpunch does, however, help--and helps a lot--with that other enormous problem in our democracy: the corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies blockading alternative views, spewing fascist tripe 24/7, and demoralizing and disempowering ordinary people and the left especially. Counterpunch provides REAL alternative views--lots of them, well-written, fact-based, truthful, very informative. Just take an energy pill or something when you go there, so that you can recover later and start DOING something, somewhere, to help somebody.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Here's a good example of a Counterpunch article.

Does this writer want the "worst for Obama," or does she just want the best U.S. foreign policy?

------------------------------------

What Americans Can't See About Gaza
How Do People Keep Going?

By KATHY KELLY

People have asked me, since I returned from Gaza, how people manage? How do they keep going after being traumatized by bombing and punished by a comprehensive state of siege? I wonder myself. I know that whether the loss of life is on the Gazan or the Israeli side of the border, bereaved survivors feel the same pain and misery. On both sides of the border, I think children pull people through horrendous and horrifying nightmares. Adults squelch their panic, cry in private, and strive to regain semblances of normal life, wanting to carry their children through a precarious ordeal.

And the children want to help their parents. In Rafah, the morning of January 18th, when it appeared there would be at least a lull in the bombing, I watched children heap pieces of wood on plastic tarps and then haul their piles toward their homes. The little ones seemed proud to be helping their parents recover from the bombing. I'd seen just this happy resilience among Iraqi children, after the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, as they found bricks for their parents to use for a makeshift shelter in a bombed military base.

Children who survive bombing are eager to rebuild. They don't know how jeopardized their lives are, how ready adults are to bomb them again.

In Rafah, that morning, an older man stood next to me, watching the children at work. "You see," he said, looking upward as an Israeli military surveillance drone flew past, "if I pick up a piece of wood, if they see me carrying just a piece of wood, they might mistake it for a weapon, and I will be a target. So these children collect the wood."

While the high-tech drone collected information,-- "intelligence" that helps determine targets for more bombing, --toddlers collected wood. Their parents, whose homes were partially destroyed, needed the wood for warmth at night and for cooking. Because of the Israeli blockade against Gaza, there wasn't any gas.

With the border crossing at Rafah now sealed again, people who want to obtain food, fuel, water, construction supplies and goods needed for everyday life will have to rely, increasingly, on the damaged tunnel industry to import these items from the Egyptian side of the border. Israel's government says that Hamas could use the tunnels to import weapons, and weapons could kill innocent civilians, so the Israeli military has no choice but to bomb the neighborhood built up along the border, as they have been doing.

Suppose that the U.S. weapon makers had to use a tunnel to deliver weapons to Israel. The U.S. would have to build a mighty big tunnel to accommodate the weapons that Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar have supplied to Israel. The size of such a tunnel would be an eighth wonder of the world, a Grand Canyon of a tunnel, an engineering feat of the ages.

Think of what would have to come through.

Imagine Boeing's shipments to Israel traveling through an enormous underground tunnel, large enough to accommodate the wingspans of planes, sturdy enough to allow passage of trucks laden with missiles. According to UK's Indymedia Corporate Watch, 2009, Boeing has sent Israel 18 AH-64D Apache Longbow fighter helicopters, 63 Boeing F15 Eagle fighter planes, 102 Boeing F16 Eagle fighter planes, 42 Boeing AH-64 Apache fighter helicopters, F-16 Peace Marble II & III Aircraft, 4 Boeing 777s, and Arrow II interceptors, plus IAI-developed arrow missiles, and Boeing AGM-114 D Longbow Hellfire missiles,

In September of last year, the U.S. government approved the sale of 1,000 Boeing GBU-9 small diameter bombs to Israel, in a deal valued at up to 77 million.

Now that Israel has dropped so many of those bombs on Gaza, Boeing shareholders can count on more sales, more profits, if Israel buys new bombs from them from them. Perhaps there are more massacres in store. It would be important to maintain the tunnel carefully.

Raytheon, one of the largest U.S. arms manufacturers, with annual revenues of around $20 billion, is one of Israel's main suppliers of weapons. In September last year, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved the sale of Raytheon kits to upgrade Israel's Patriot missile system at a cost of $164 million. Raytheon would also use the tunnel to bring in Bunker Buster bombs as well as Tomahawk and Patriot missiles.

Lockheed Martin is the world's largest defense contractor by revenue, with reported sales, in 2008, of $42.7 billion. Lockheed Martin's products include the Hellfire precision-guided missile system, which has reportedly been used in the recent Gaza attacks. Israel also possesses 350 F-16 jets, some purchased from Lockheed Martin.

Think of them coming through the largest tunnel in the world.

Maybe Caterpillar Inc. could help build such a tunnel. Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of construction (and destruction) equipment, with more than $30 billion in assets, holds Israel's sole contract for the production of the D9 military bulldozer, specifically designed for use in invasions of built-up areas. The U.S. government buys Caterpillar bulldozers and sends them to the Israeli army as part of its annual foreign military assistance package. Such sales are governed by the US Arms Export Control Act, which limits the use of U.S. military aid to "internal security" and "legitimate self defense" and prohibits its use against civilians.

Israel topples family houses with these bulldozers to make room for settlements. All too often, they topple them on the families inside. American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death standing between one of these bulldozers and a Palestinian doctor's house.

In truth, there's no actual tunnel bringing U.S. made weapons to Israel. But the transfers of weapons and the U.S. complicity in Israel's war crimes are completely invisible to many U.S. people.

The United States is the primary source of Israel's arsenal. For more than 30 years, Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance and since 1985 Israel has received about 3 billion dollars, each year, in military and economic aid from the U.S. ("U.S. and Israel Up in Arms," Frida Berrigan, Foreign Policy in Focus, January 17, 2009)

So many Americans can't even see this flood of weapons, and what it means, for us, for Gaza's and Israel's children, for the world's children.

And so, people in Gaza have a right to ask us, how do you manage? How do you keep going? How can you sit back and watch while your taxes pay to massacre us? If it would be wrong to send rifles and bullets and primitive rockets into Gaza, weapons that could kill innocent Israelis, then isn't it also wrong to send Israelis the massive arsenal that has been used against us, killing over 400 of our children, in the past six weeks, maiming and wounding thousands more?

But, standing over the tunnels in Rafah, that morning, under a sunny Gazan sky, hearing the constant droning buzz of mechanical spies waiting to call in an aerial bombardment, no one asked me, an American, those hard questions. The man standing next to me pointed to a small shed where he and others had built a fire in an ash can. They wanted me to come inside, warm up, and receive a cup of tea.

-------------

Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, is writing from Arish, a town near the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza. Bill Quigley, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola New Orleans and Audrey Stewart are also in Egypt and contributed to this article. Kathy Kelly is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams (published by CounterPunch/AK Press). Her email is [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/kelly02102009.html

[Peace Patriot]

5. Here's another really interesting example of a Counterpunch article...

Does Raymond Lawrence want "the worst for Obama," or does he want to best for our country (including Obama)?

--------

When Things Fall Apart
A Country Awash in Money But Going Broke

By RAYMOND J. LAWRENCE

There is plenty of money in this country. Most of it just happens to be held by a very few people.

Those who know history are aware that an extreme imbalance in the possession of goods and power will at some breaking point result in the unraveling of the social fabric. Such unraveling is seldom a pretty sight. It's best to be 'out of town' when it occurs. The late 18th century French Revolution and the early 20th century Russian Revolution are two stark examples of wide discrepancies of wealth and power that resulted in disintegration of the old order. Sometimes the unraveling can be contained, as in the American Revolution, during which the powerful English king was made the object of contempt, and being far away and untouchable, the revolution proceeded with relatively little excess and instability.

The problem with predicting such break points in history is an intractable one, especially when one lives in the midst of it. However, the current situation in the U.S. is cause for at least a measure of concern. Vast amounts of wealth and power are currently vested in a relatively few people in the U.S. The political process which is allegedly free and open is largely determined by money, and a relatively few people currently have most of the wealth. They are not likely to give it up voluntarily, and it remains to be seen as time goes on how much tolerance will be shown by those who live from paycheck to paycheck, or worse. If the social fabric unravels it will likely do so with great speed, too fast for any rational response. We can imagine a scenario in which all are swept downstream, such as has occurred previously in history.

There is unimaginable wealth in this country. There are more than 400 billionaires and a great many more fabulously rich persons whose wealth amounts to something less than a billion.

It is not easy to wrap one's mind around a billion dollars. A billion is a thousand million. To grasp the difference between a million and a billion dollars, consider the following: If a millionaire spent or gave away a dollar a second, or sixty dollars a minute, continually around the clock, the million dollars would be exhausted in 13 days. On the other hand, if a billionaire were to do the same, the money would last for 32 years. This fact was pointed out in a New Yorker book review by John Lanchester, and it is so counterintuitive that I thought it a factoid. I had to stop reading in order to do my own multiplication before I could accept it, and continue reading.

There seems to be an unwritten sacred code in the U.S. that the possessions of the rich shall not be levied, only their income, and not much of that. Those who are not so rich, those whose wealth consists of little more than the home they live in - the majority of the population - are regularly taxed on their holdings, in the form of property tax. Why should not multi-millionaires and billionaires be similarly taxed on their financial holdings?

I propose that we levy a state or national “property tax” on all financial wealth above, say, three million dollars, and call it an “infrastructure fee” based on financial wealth. Of course it’s just another tax, but infrastructure fee sounds better. And it is eminently appropriate. People who become filthy rich in our economic system should feel as much pain in paying for the cost of running the country as those who live paycheck to paycheck.

Take the case of the State of Virginia, one of forty-four states now facing unprecedented budget shortfalls said likely to worsen as the economy remains weak. According to Governor Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia is facing a $2.9 billion shortfall over the next two years. In response he proposes to cut Medicaid funding, which provides health care for almost a million Virginians, reduce public school funding by 15%, cut school construction, release some number of prisoners early, cut 1500 state jobs, and borrow against the future.

This sounds like a prescription for remaking America into a third world country.

If the state of Virginia imposed a 15% infrastructure fee on its own Virginia billionaires, the state deficit would be entirely erased for the next two years, with money left over. The billionaires would hardly feel the pinch. And this does not include a possible similar levy on all those who are simply multi-millionaires.

New York State has about 50 billionaires who together hold about $115 billion. A fifteen percent infrastructure fee would close New York Governor Patterson’s $15 billion shortfall, with money left over.

States alone could not impose such a levy. The billionaires would flee across the state line and seek refuge elsewhere. Congress would have to impose the fee on all citizens, wherever they reside, and make the fee a condition of citizenship. Persons fleeing to the Bahamas without paying the fee should lose their citizenship and have their property attached.

If such an infrastructure fee were also imposed on the rest of the numerous very rich but not-quite-billionaires, say those with holdings of a paltry $10 million or more, government coffers would be awash in revenue. We could rebuild our highways and bridges, and perhaps even build a high-speed passenger rail system, one like other first world countries.

Too many people in this country feel like they have played Monopoly and lost. They are struggling to pass Go just to collect $200, without landing on Boardwalk or facing some other ruinous fee. More taxing of the moderately wealthy, and the middle and lower classes will not pull us out of the current crisis. Reducing essential services like health, education and transportation will spell further social upheaval. It is time to rope in the super wealthy and require them to assist in solving the current financial crisis. And they have the most to lose if the social fabric unravels.

None of this, of course, is likely to happen. The balance of power in Congress is in the hands of those possessing the most wealth. If the wealth of the super wealthy were levied, cries of socialism and communism would be long and loud in the media, frightening the public.

The economic playing field is thus not likely to be leveled even slightly anytime soon. More likely it will become even more uneven. History suggests it will take a convulsive event to bring about anything even remotely close to a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth. With the numbers and firepower of personal weapons readily available in this country, we should all sleep a little less easily unless the current political leaders have the wisdom and courage to tackle the ever-widening discrepancy in power and wealth in this country.

----

Raymond J. Lawrence is an Episcopal cleric, recently retired Director of Pastoral Care, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and author of numerous opinion pieces in newspapers in the U.S., and author of the recently published, Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom (Praeger). He can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lawrence02062009.html

[FrenchieCat]

2. Those opposed to Pres. Obama's policy plan would wish to make Geithner ineffective.....

as part of stablelizing the economy will come from restored confidence. If they can erode that confidence by questioning Geithner's competence; they hope to "win".

Of course Counterpunch hopes for the worse for this president as well....unfortunately.

[gne1963]

6. Geithner and Obama ought to be happy about this....

1. A closer look at jobs data revealed that companies are indeed hiring again and that the dismal unemployment reports are largely a result of November/December actions.
http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/jobs-data-take-clos...

2. Three major retailers demonstrated by their January sales announcements that its not all dismal in the retail segment.
http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/retail-growth-alrea...

3. The ISM's reports for January show deceleration of business activity declines, with some industry segments now reporting growth.
http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/contraction-also-sl...

4. Some emerging international markets are rebounding sharply to start the new year.
http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-brazil-automobil...

But perhaps the most dramatic two pieces of good news this week were two reports out yesterday:

5. The government reported that indeed the US retail segment as a whole rebounded by 1%! (a "surprise" to those gloomsters who had forecast a decline.)
http://positiveeconomicnews.com/2009/02/12/retail-sales-clim...

6. In the housing market in January foreclosures have slowed dramatically. The total foreclosure numbers were down 25% in January with "pre-foreclosure" filings down 12%. Further, California foreclosures are at their lowest level in over a year.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/US-FORECLOSURE-INDEX-bw-143196...


Happy Friday the 13th!
http://goodnewseconomist.com

[Crewleader]

7. Thank You for my valentine hearts...

they are specially nice to receive from those that care and my feelings are right back at ya friends! :loveya:



Anyone here that knows me, knows that I post Mike Whitney's articles from various sites and this time counter punch was the first to post his article. Many like to read what he has to say and I do too.
That's what I do; post the authors that are interesting and informative to me and share it with my fellow DUers. :hi: