Bailout Manure Heap!
About: the end of wall streets boom - national business news - print - portfolio.com


1/30 - I guess I don't have to spend nights looking through the stimulus pork bill since a google search yields ~ 6,120 articles on the subject!
2/7 - I thought it appropriate that we look at the term slush fund which is appropriate for the so-called bailout of ~ $$$$80billion.
Tags
- bailout
- stimulus pork
- stimulus bill
Comments





Here is a contest to find some of the other goodies & pork in the bill - win $100 - the manure is here.


President Obama pressed the Senate to move quickly on his massive economic-stimulus plan, saying Saturday that Americans "have little patience" for political bickering and noting that while the bill isn't perfect, it can jump-start job creation.








One wonders when, if ever, Republican style hyperpartisansip is going to change and start parsing out what makes real differences - like for example "subsidizing equity holders in insolvent banks" rather than just letting them fail and be replaced by healthy ones. It seems to me that standing up for real capitalism, even when it hurts, would be a good place for Republicans to start getting serious. Ask yourself why this is not happening? Seems to me it is not the "warm bodies" who are looting the country ... rather it is the wall street mentality who have invented the concept "too big to fail" and are now taking it to the bank (pun intended).

One wonders when, if ever, Republican style hyperpartisansip is going to change and start parsing out what makes real differences - like for example "subsidizing equity holders in insolvent banks" rather than just letting them fail and be replaced by healthy ones. It seems to me that standing up for real capitalism, even when it hurts, would be a good place for Republicans to start getting serious. Ask yourself why this is not happening? Seems to me it is not the "warm bodies" who are looting the country ... rather it is the wall street mentality who have invented the concept "too big to fail" and are now taking it to the bank (pun intended).









"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.



As it stands now, says David Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general, the bill appears to have no mechanism for directing spending. It's left up to those state and local officials, who may or may not have the ideas or the means to spend it appropriately. And that will lead to "a series of disappointments that it's too late to do anything about," Walker says.
The bill does make it possible for lawmakers and the public to track the money ��" but only after it's spent. And that, he says, will lead to bad surprises.

How do we square the double standard in reporting required of Chrysler and GM, whose combined request is in the range of $40 billion, with the inability of even a pit bull like U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, to get answers as to exactly where and to what end the TARP money has gone?
It may be that the situation on Wall Street is so complex, and the stakes so high, that lawmakers themselves have little confidence in their abilities to map a successful recovery for the industry, so they are relying on the sheer magnitude of their spending and the ingenuity of those left standing on Wall Street to work their market magic and revive the economy.


So, after all that restructuring & closings will the emerging auto companies still be too big to fail? Will they be solvent?
The bad news: it won't happen until late in President Obama's first term, if at all, and in the meantime they will eliminate at least 50,000 jobs this year alone, close even more plants than previously announced and discontinue several of their most recognizable lines of cars.
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