They certainly must for so many MTs to be all atwitter over this plan. Fred Thompson said it perfectly last PM.
So those "moneybags" need to stop griping about MQ and how crappy it pays. You think you have less in your pockets now? You think this crap he's promising is free? How ignorant!
Obama and ACORN...
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/07/05/obamas-acorn/
Obama supported the bailout too didn't he?
I respect your right to vote for who you want to, but why is it whenever something negative is said about Obama it is rumor but whenever something negative is said about Mccain it is fact? Shouldn't it go both ways. I mean I'm not dumb, I know that a lot of the mudslinging on both sides is pure crap, but there is some truth to both sides.
I'm praying with you too, but I'm not praying for one candidate over another. I'm just praying that God will put the person HE wants in there and He will work in their heart to help them make the right decisions. But sometimes I fear we may have already pushed God out of our nation to much and we it may be time for the judgment on America, just like what happened to Israel.
No matter who wins, it's time to batten (right word?) down the hatches and start saving and probably start stocking up on canned food! We are in for a llloonnnggg winter!
How did Obama vote in the bailout issue..... sm
and what did he have to say about it?
""To the Democrats and Republicans who opposed this plan yesterday, I say step up to the plate and do what's right for this country," he said. "And to all Americans, I say this: If and when I am president of the United States, this rescue plan will not be the end of what we do to strengthen this economy, it will only be the beginning."
Tony Fratto, White House spokesman said, "Obama blasted Congress Monday for not passing the rescue package, while McCain's campaign accused Obama and Democrats of putting "politics ahead of country." "
Looks to me like Obama is just as much at fault as the *gasp* Republicans for throwing good money after bad...or is bad after worse....money into a scheme with no real plan in place beforehand. At least they made the big 3 come up with a plan.
Also, with Obama's tax plan, even if you add the 3% he is talking about, that's what? Another 7500 - after you figure in your deductions, that ain't gonna be nothing.
And as far as their paying higher sales tax, that is a state tax - not a federal tax. And they choose to buy those more expensive items so that tax is their choice - they don't have to pay it.
MQ still pays more for ASR than other
companies. There was one company out there advertising 3 cpl for ASR. Their add said they need MTs who can "hit the ground running." It was on MTdaily a few days ago. There should be "ASR control" where they can't continue to lower our pay. Remember years ago when people voted for "rent control" and won? Time to sign those petitions for "ASR control."
That may be true about the rape kits, but I don't see any other mayor or former mayor saying that they are a maverick and running for VP.
The government pays for nothing....
...we have hired them to handle certain management tasks with OUR money.
We have grown too large to defend the country with just a militia. We have high-rise buildings and can no longer get by with volunteer fire departments. We need street crews because we have too much roadway, highways and freeways, and no longer can simply neaten up the road that runs past our property. We produce far too much trash to simply take it out back and burn it (if that were even still legal in some areas.) Some elements of modern life have grown just to large and complicated to handle on our own.
We have a system of compulsory schooling now that is doing SUCH a great job educating our children. Kids were far more literate and better educated when the bulk of their learning occurred in the home. Read anything written by John Taylor Gatto - Weapons of Mass Instruction is his most recent book - about the origins of public education.
I quote here what was in an earlier post: *If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until the government gives it to you for free.* What the government dispenses, the government rations. Do you really want a government bureaucrat in control of whether you get surgery or some diagnostic test your doctor says you need? Bad enough you have to fight about it with your insurance company now. You really want to turn this over to the government? Really?
Even he see the unfairness here. Some conservatives are fond of saying that Democrats want to tax the wealthy unfairly, but what I would like to see is the wealthy taxed equally. "Mr. Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent." Here is the entire article. It's a great read. Trust me.
June 28, 2007
Buffett blasts system that lets him pay less tax than secretary
Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.
Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion (£26 billion), said: “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent. Mr Buffett told his audience, which included John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Alan Patricof, the founder of the US branch of Apax Partners, that US government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.
The comments are among the most signficant yet in a debate raging on both sides of the Atlantic about growing income inequality and how the super-wealthy are taxed.
They echo those made this month by Nicholas Ferguson, one of the leading figures in Britain’s private equity industry, when he criticised tax rates that left its multimillionaire venture capitalists “paying less tax than a cleaning lady”.
Last week senior members of the US Senate proposed to increase the rate of tax that private equity and hedge fund staff pay on their share of the profits, known as carried interest, from the 15 per cent capital gains rate to about 35 per cent.
Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, acknowledged in an interview yesterday that there were justified concerns about the huge profits generated by private equity firms and that he worried that income inequality was “poisoning democracy”. He also said that he would be voting for the Democrat candidate at the next election. Mr Blankfein is the highest-paid executive on Wall Street, earning $54 million last year.
Mr Buffett, who runs the investment group Berkshire Hathaway and is widely regarded as the world’s most successful investor, said that he was a Democrat because Republicans are more likely to think: “I’m making $80 million a year – God must have intended me to have a lower tax rate.”
Mr Buffett said that a Republican proposal to eliminate elements of inheritance tax, which raises about $30 billion a year from the assets of about 12,000 rich families, would broaden the disparity between rich and poor. He added that the Republicans would seek to recover lost revenue by increasing taxes for the less prosperous.
He said: “You could take that $30 billion and give $1,000 to 30 million poor families. Or should you favour the 12,000 estates and make 30 million families pay an extra $1,000?”
I know I just took an inhouse job that pays me half what I make at home -
I am getting desperate to ensure that I have at least some income. My home-based job line counts are so low lately and I know it is because people are staying home. I am the only money maker in the family and I have to do something.
I am in college to get a degree to get out of this education, but have at least 3 quarters more before I am employable, and then who knows if I will be able to find a job then or not; with the way things are looking, more than likely NOT...
I wonder how it is going to help/hurt the economy and the illegal alien problem - I mean, will it make them go home or will they just draw more benefits off our government? If they go home, does that hurt or or help us?
WASHINGTON - The Republican Party says it still has a zero-tolerance policy for tampering with voters even as it pays the legal bills for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to thwart Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.
James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.
The Republican National Committee already has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly. The firm's other clients have included former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.
Republican Party officials said they don't ordinarily discuss specifics of their legal work, but confirmed to The Associated Press they had agreed to underwrite Tobin's defense because he was a longtime supporter and that he assured them he had committed no crimes.
"Jim is a longtime friend who has served as both an employee and an independent contractor for the RNC," a spokeswoman for the RNC, Tracey Schmitt, said Wednesday. "This support is based on his assurance and our belief that Jim has not engaged in any wrongdoing."
A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire's newest senator.
At the time, Tobin was the RNC's New England regional director, before moving to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.
A top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant already have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin's indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.
"The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters ... of their federally secured right to vote," states the latest indictment issued by a federal grand jury on May 18.
The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.
Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a "zero-tolerance policy" for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.
"The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position," Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.
Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean on Thursday questioned Mehlman's commitment to the policy. "This is just another example of his say one thing, do another strategy. Ken Mehlman tells crowds his party is against voter fraud and intimidation, while in the backrooms he supports Republican officials who engage in these dirty tricks," Dean said.
Dennis Black and Dane Butswinkas, two Williams & Connolly lawyers for Tobin, did not return calls seeking comment. Brian Tucker, a New Hampshire lawyer on the team, declined comment.
Tobin's lawyers have attacked the prosecution, suggesting evidence was improperly introduced to the grand jury, that their client originally had been promised he wouldn't be indicted and that he was improperly charged under one of the statutes.
Tobin stepped down from his Bush-Cheney post a couple of weeks before the November 2004 election after Democrats suggested he was involved in the phone bank scheme. He was charged a month after the election.
Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin's legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.
The new development "really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this," Twomey said.
Federal prosecutors have secured testimony from the two convicted conspirators in the scheme directly implicating Tobin.
Charles McGee, the New Hampshire GOP official who pleaded guilty, told prosecutors he informed Tobin of the plan and asked for Tobin's help in finding a vendor who could make the calls that would flood the phone banks.
Allen Raymond, a former colleague of Tobin who operated a Virginia-based telephone services firm, told prosecutors Tobin called him in October 2002, explained the telephone plan and asked Raymond's company to help McGee implement it.
Raymond's lawyer told the court that Tobin made the request for help in his official capacity as the top RNC official for New England and his client believed the RNC had sanctioned the activity.
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our money, frist by inflation and then by deflation; the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks) will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered"
-President Thomas Jefferson
here's your bailout
I think that all the CEOs of the big three along with all their members of the board and whatnot, all the big wigs, that have made millions screwing people over for years and years should dip into their OWN pockets and sell a few houses, cancel a few vacations, cash in a few money markets and get their own companies out of debt. Then, when the books are balanced, the people who have been making 80,000 a year to push a button should take a pay cut and NOT go on strike and live like the rest of real America. Then they should be fine.
Bailout
if they fail, do you realize it would affect everyone. Millions of jobs in the auto industry alone. If people don't have jobs, they can't spend money anywhere. Stores will start to close, etc. It will affect everyone.
Bailout
I totally agree 1000% with your analysis - the only time these greedy CEO's give a hoot about us is when they see their profits increase. You can bet your last five cents that if one of us went to them asking for money - they would call the police!! It would be interesting to see the salaries of CEO's in Europe as opposed to what these guys continually fleece us for...About That First Bailout
Do you remember who told us "we had to act now or we might face dooms day (sic)" with all that bailout money? It was Hank Paulsen and George Bush. We may as well have flushed that first TARP payment down the toilet. There was no accountability, and no one knows where all that money went.
At least the present stimulus package has accountability built into it and some limits as to what can and can't be done with the money.
the bailout IS making
the US a socialist country - compliments of your beloved GWB and McPalin. congratulations you got your wish.
There Is No Crisis--Summary by: Chris BowersTue Sep 23, 2008 at 16:22
Things are getting a little suspicious about this crisis.
1) Why did the Bush administration suddenly declare a crisis during the final two weeks when Congress would be in session during his presidency? Is it maybe because, after the election, Congress would know it wasn't dealing with Bush anymore?
2) If this is such a sudden crisis, why is it that the Bush administration was drawing up the plan for this bill for months beforehand?
3) Why is it that Congress is supposed to bail out many banks and firms that are actually quite successful and profitable right now, and not just those that are failing?
4) Why is Paulson blatantly lying to Congress about oversight?
5) Where did the $700 billion figure come from?
6) Why is Paulson urging that debate on the matter be held after the legislation is passed?The burden of proof should always be placed on those who are demanding a huge government bailout, not upon those who are skeptical that one is needed. And yet the questions keep mounting, with no answers in sight.
I am not saying that there is no need for government intervention. I am saying that the case for a $700 billion bailout is far from having been made. Until the case is made, there is no need to go forward. We will elect a new President in 42 days. We swear in a new Congress in 103 days. What is the rush? Why does this all of a sudden need to be done while the Bush administration is still in charge? The case hasn't been made, and answers are slow in coming, if they come at all. Chris Bowers :: There Is No Crisis--Summary
We have some savings, but we still live paycheck-to-paycheck, not wanting to touch the savings. I really don't agree that we taxpayers should have to fund this. I think that the higher ups that walked away with 100s of thousands or even millions should have to pay for this. Charge them with fraud and make them give it back. I certainly don't feel I've put anyone in this situation and therefore don't feel I should have to pay for it.
only 24% of us support the bailout
Yesterday it was reported only 24% of Americans support the bailout, 56% are opposed so 20% have no opinion. Senators' and reps' offices were flooded with calls and emails all day asking that the bailout be opposed. And I was one of those. Everyone should be contacting their own reps to express their opinions. That's they only way they will know what the people want.
Well.....look at it this way....if they don't push this bailout...
there are folks who know "where the bodies are buried." There is probably so much we DON'T know about all this...and yes, it is disgusting. Dodd and Frank, if they had an ounce of integrity, would apologize to the American people and resign. Pelosi, if SHE had an ounce of integrity, would demand it. So far John McCain is the ONLY one who has said someone should resign, and that was Christopher Cox, the Republican head of the SEC. He SHOULD resign. So should the treasury secretary, Paulson. Every member of that committee that voted back in 2006 to kill the bill McCain co-sponsored should resign. They should all be investigated criminally as well as far as I am concerned. I know the FBI is looking at Fannie/Freddie but talk about a day late and dollar short after Raines, Johnson, Howard, and Gorelick raped the American public for millions.
You're right. They should ALL have to go and start over.
SNL skit on the bailout. sm
Funny but sad because it is true.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/37758/saturday-night-live-c-span-bailout#s-p1-st-i1
TheSmokingGun/bailout
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1007083aig1.html
AIG spa trip, right after gov. bailout approved. This is disgusting.
Not a bailout, entirely voluntary (nm
x
I think we MT's need a bonus and a bailout!
nm
Again, I don't think the problem is the bailout itself, (sm)
but rather the way it's used, which right now leaves a lot to be desired. As far as the rest of the country being screwed, well that's coming either way. We have 2 choices--we can either do nothing, lose millions of jobs and go into a full-blown depression; or we can take a chance with bailing them out (preferably with stipulations) and owe a lot of money. I think my preference would be to pay more taxes if need be, but still have a job so I could feed my family instead of not being able to do either of the above.
But, the first bailout passed because
the dems had the majority of votes. Am I right or did I lose my mind? DON"T ANSWER THAT QUESTION, PLEASE. LOL
Bailout dies in Senate.........sm
It's over, at least for this year. I don't know, and the article did not state, whether there will be more talks after the first of the year.
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."
Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
Letter to Congress re the bailout. sm
The bailout has stalled. Please contact your reps and tell them NO to the bailout. Phone calls, emails, and letters are having an impact. People have already lost their homes and jobs. According to experts in economics, this is going to cause inflation to soar and a depression.
Letter below is from someone who is on the verge of losing their home, and gave permission to copy it.
Almost 300 years ago the founders of this country believed in freedom and liberty so much that they risked everything—their property, prosperity, comfort, honor, and even their very lives—on the near impossible gamble of taking on the world’s greatest superpower, at that time, to win the liberty that we enjoy today. That example has inspired Americans through the ages until the present day to reach for greatness despite the presence of risk and uncertainty. Against these dangers the intrepid push forward, knowing the price of failure, yet never succumbing to fear because our system is so robust in its scope that failure can be overcome and the rewards of hard work eventually achieved. In these troubled financial times, we are tempted by fear to shy away from the responsibility that liberty requires and instead hearken to the safety net of socialism. George Washington and his men had no safety net. The price of failure for them was certain death.
More money can always be made, but once we give up our freedom for socialism we can only buy it back with blood and death. CongressPerson, that is too high a price for the rescue of a few banks that should have known better. Let them suffer the consequences of their actions. Let the markets buy up their assets and redistribute them as only a free market can. Bring back sound money and the value backed currency the Constitution requires. Stop the central bankers at the Federal Reserve from ruining our country. There will be some pain, just like there was in the winter at Valley Forge, but in the spring, the economy will thrive again just as did the army that won our freedom.
I call on you now CongressPerson to fight for our freedom. Fight with all your might and strength the way our troopers did at Cowpens. Do not surrender. Do not sell us out. Fight for us and our liberty CongressPerson, as if we were about to lose it…because we are.
RJH
Norman, OK
PS I am a homeowner in distress. I stand to avoid the specter of foreclosure if you pass the bailout…but PLEASE DON’T PASS IT! I would rather lose my house than see America lose her freedom. In time I can buy another house.
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