#4
A better questions is where are they going to get that $1T?
They have already spent this year's tax revenues, and are in deep deficit. Their typical source for enlarging the national debt, sort term T-bills, are in the basement. Nobody wants to buy them.
In 1895 was the last time the US Treasury about went bankrupt. And if nobody will lend the US government money, technically it is bankrupt right now. That is, literally no money in the bank to pay for *anything* else.
Literal bankruptcy. And there is absolutely nothing, zero, the US government can do about it. Their checks will no longer clear.
#7
Interesting times. Looks like the congresscritters, the executive branch, and the permanent bureaucracy have plundered us, the tax-payers, FBO themselves and the undeserving. BTW, we apparently will continue to pay bonuses and pensions to the people who drove Fannie and Freddie into the ground. It's time for a tax revolt: No taxation without representation.
#8
rjschwarz: But that's the point. Money just doesn't "go into the national debt." Every penny that goes in is owed to *somebody*, importantly somebody who credited the US for that debt.
If nobody is willing to be a creditor any more, then the national debt can't increase. Because there is no more money to spend.
The national debt is best described as like a casin* losing streak. The gambler has lost, so he bets double or nothing. But that only works as long as the casin* will cover his debt. Eventually, he is so deep in the hole that he wants to double the bet to the entire value of the casin*.
And for once, the casin* says "no".
"Pay up." At that point, the gambler is in very deep trouble. He can no longer bet, even though he wants to.
And if nobody will credit the US, it cannot spend money it doesn't have, either.
Interesting stuff, caught via AOSHQ
Barack Obama has slammed the banking industry for its predatory use of sub-prime mortgages, which are pushing millions of American homeowners toward foreclosure.
But his campaign's Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, owned a failed Chicago thrift that helped pioneer sub-prime financial instruments and faced accusations of abuse.
Superior Bank of Chicago went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in insured and uninsured deposits. This collapse came amid harsh criticism of how Superior's owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages. As part of a settlement, the owners paid $100 million and agreed to pay another $335 million over 15 years at no interest...
We've known about this in Chicago for a number of years; the Chicago Tribune covered it pretty well at the time. But Penny Pritzker has so much money she can pretty much buy whatever she needs, and especially can buy her way out of trouble, which is what her family did in the Superior fiasco. Someone should have gone to prison but didn't. Now she's Obama's finance chair. There's something about the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of wealthy families that makes them a positive argument for a 100% inheritance tax.
But this seven-year-old bank failure has relevance in another way today, since the chair of Superior's board for five years was Penny Pritzker, a member of one of America's richest families and the current Finance Chair for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the same candidate who has lashed out against predatory lending.
Though Superior Bank collapsed years before the current sub-prime turmoil that is rocking the world's financial markets -- and pushing those millions of homeowners toward foreclosure -- some banking experts say the Pritzkers and Superior hold a special place in the history of the sub-prime fiasco.
"The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages," Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told me in an interview.
"The sub-prime mortgages," Anderson said, "were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior's owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds."
In other words, if you traced today's sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago.
The drumbeat. It's always there. Day and night. Rain or shine. Winter or Summer. Sunday or Monday. It comes at you from every direction. It comes over the TV, the radio, at work, at school, in music, in the newspapers, from the politicians, in conversation with others, even in church. It wears you down. It robs you of the will to resist its message. Even short-lived victories, which stop it briefly, leave you with the knowledge that it will return; each minor victory bound to be lost to the redoubled efforts of this patient and persistent force. You can't escape it. It never stops. It never gives up. It never ends. It rains upon you from every possible angle, from every possible source.
It's the drumbeat of the left. It is political, philosophical, theological, and social. It pervades every activity. It is post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day. It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism.
It denies God, human exceptionalism, and the soul. We are reduced to Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness. It is a product of the nihilistic, existentialist philosophical movement, which went hand in hand with modern art, atonal music, scientific materialism and modern physics, and the generally discordant nature of the twentieth century.
It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth.
The cultural Marxists convince us that the truth is that there is no truth. And even though this unresolvable paradox lies at the very center of all this, the constant drumbeat keeps the masses in line, anesthetized enough to not make an issue of it. Fed a constant diet of sex, drugs, poisonous pop culture, materialistic trinkets, and unkeepable promises of security provided by huge leftist government, ever more globalist in nature, the masses are diverted from realizing, as they are told there is no truth, that this claim itself is subject to the same test. It is logically impossible for the leftist drumbeat to be true by its own axioms.
The principles upon which Western culture rests and upon which America was built are under attack by these slow acting but deadly forces. The drumbeat is grinding down the will of the West to maintain itself. The ideas of individual sovereignty and responsibility, natural rights, and objective truth have been derided by the left to the point that many of our young people reject them, if, indeed, they are even aware of them as the basis for our culture. All that ensures that a culture will pass its ideas down from one generation to the next is its cultural memory. The drumbeat is slowly but surely replacing our cultural memory.
As each school is renamed and the name of a Founder or other great person from our history is removed from its entrance way, we lose a bit of that memory. As our great authors and works of Western culture are replaced with those in line with the message of the drumbeat, we rapidly lose our cultural memory. As each school textbook is rewritten to reflect the new ideas of family and cultural heritage, our children are lost to the forces of the drumbeat as they learn to view America and traditional Western culture as oppressive and imperialistic. And it doesn't take long for there to be only a shell left, the substance of our culture sucked out and destroyed by the cultural Marxists.
If you believe that all this is a paranoid overreaction, you have plenty of company. Those of us who can still see the water and hear the drumbeat are subject to attempts to make us sound evil and foolish. To believe in traditional Western cultural values, American Exceptionalism, God, and moral truth is to be branded as old fashioned and foolish, even by the best assessments of those who have bought into the cultural Marxist's message. And by the worst of them, we are branded as stupid and evil, and in need of being destroyed.
It may be too late to do anything about this as the world plays out its story. The power-hungry arrogance of human beings seems to be the force that underlies the events carrying us forward to the final chapter. And as this arrogance and lust for power feeds the wills of those who would gain control of the world, humankind is gaining just enough knowledge to destroy itself in that arrogance. Never before in human history has there been such a confluence of forces. Technology, globalism, and the leftist drumbeat are joining together in a way that is allowing mankind to believe, on a worldwide scale, that it can control its own destiny.
The main thing that is being ignored in all this is human nature. It is all based upon the arrogant presumptions of the elitist cultural Marxists concerning how people ought to act. It leads to totalitarianism and destruction.
In truth, and in direct opposition to the drumbeat, each human being must be accorded his or her natural rights, individual sovereignty, and self responsibility to be in harmony with human nature. Each of us must have the freedom to succeed or to fail. Western culture, culminating in the great American experiment, has been perverted. Due to these perversions, many failures have already occurred, which have then, ironically, been used to justify further perversions of the same sort as those which caused the problems to begin with.
Generally, these perversions are manifested in bigger government, more laws, more bureaucracy, more regulations, more taxes, and government controlled redistribution of wealth, more collectivism, less individualism, and less freedom. We all hear it constantly from leftist politicians as they add their part to the drumbeat: government must do more to ensure Americans avoid the consequences of their choices. We all know the song, sung to the cheers of the unthinking throngs who would give up their very humanity for the promise of a free lunch. These are the joys of cultural Marxism.
#1
Pop a pill, guy. You'll feel better about things in a little while. The Left, with all it's many faces, carries the seeds of it's own self-destruction. Marxism evolved into Communism which degenerated into a corrupt dictatorship. American Communism deterrated into a thousand stupid causes. They all lock in on an ideal that they can't sustain because the have no means of self correcting their errors. People has an enormous tendency to sacrifice themselves to stupid, false gods. So, new pathetic players are added each year. Human nature.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
09/20/2008 15:01 Comments ||
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#2
"they have no means of self correcting theirthink they make no errors"
Fixed that for ya', Richard.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
09/20/2008 15:08 Comments ||
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#3
This drumbeat was FAR worse back when Reagan was President. Back before the Internet. Back before FoxNews. And back even before Rush Limbaugh. And yet, look at those Electoral Maps!
Posted by: Minister of funny walks ||
09/20/2008 15:56 Comments ||
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#4
Thing is, he has it right, except for the "inevitability" that he injects.
There are those of us who would rather fight and go down fighting than to believe that its all for naught.
But it does explain a lot of the hatred that Sarah Palin has drawn form these people -- she is the antithesis, and is successful, therefore a danger to them by revealing their psychoses.
. . . a political campaign is a matter of building support. A candidate goes on all kinds of trips, pays for all kinds of advertisements, attends conferences and debates and makes appearances all over the place, in hopes of gaining a few voters along the way. When I wrote yesterday that at first I liked Obama and disliked McCain, I was being honest, and trying to explain that they each made their case over time, one gradually losing my interest and the other gaining my support. OK, so it's no news flash that a life-long Republican comes around to cheering for the GOP candidate, but it does bear mention that there have been a lot of folks waiting all year for a candidate to convince them that he deserves their support. There really is not that much that Obama or McCain have said, which changes either of their initial platforms very much, so it would make sense to see each platform grow gradually, and about to the same degree, though with more people identifying themselves as Democrats, Obama frankly should be doing better than he is seeing in hard numbers. And that brings us to what, precisely, would be dragging him back. And that is where the trolls come in.
People plain do not like trolls. Some of us work for trolls, like the caveman who steals your work for his own credit, or the sadist who likes abusing his staff as far as he can get away with it. Some of us see them in traffic, the guys who cut you off in traffic while signaling a gesture that most parents would not want to have to explain to their kids. And of course, there are the political trolls. And like all trolls, people react to them adversely, but what sets them apart is that they also tend to damage their patron at times. And so it is, that Barack Obama's pet trolls have been chewing away at support he needs in the election, weighing him down and making his message look, well, like he's lying through his teeth. It's one thing for The Obama campaign to examine Governor Palin's record as an executive, but out of line to attack her family as their trolls have done so gleefully. And since Obama has not made much of an effort to rein them in, the implicit approval of their attacks has attached him to the stench of their conduct. So too, the smear attempts by trolls to deny John McCain's heroic service in Vietnam has come back to make people wonder about why Barack Obama has not tried much at all to make clear that he respects John McCain's service. Barack Obama has been a little too cute the past month, with monsters who - if not under his direction, they have certainly not been condemned by his campaign - have tried to damaged the public perception of John McCain and Sarah Palin, but have instead provided each a stage to defend their records (which they have done well) and to make regular folks question why a man like Obama, Mister 'Above the Rancor', would let his people act like thugs. While Obama has tried to distance himself from the dirty tricks, they are very similar to tactics he used to defeat Hillary Clinton in the primary season, further staining the image he tried to paint for himself.
It is true that Barack Obama can win this election. But he has a big problem with the trolls he set out to trip up his opponent. They are working, instead and with great energy, at tearing apart the underpinnings of Obama's own character and judgment, and at the moment, trolls like Brian are creating an increasing momentum - for the McCain campaign.
Posted by: Mike ||
09/20/2008 13:24 ||
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#1
McCain can't take credit for these guys. The only one who could possibly get them to change their behavior is Obama. There's not much danger of that, though. They're just one of life's freebies for Republicans.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
09/20/2008 15:08 Comments ||
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#2
It's the Kommie Komputer Klan (KKK). They operate just like the old one. This is just the beginning. First it's to scare and silence those they wish to strip away power from [they don't share]. They'll continue to escalate their efforts working themselves up to the next level of destructiveness and intimidation. We've detected the initial out break of vandalism. Meanwhile, the behavior gets a blind eye from the party that believes it gains something from the Klan members, just like it did for many generations from the old one. A wink, a nod, a tsk-tsk, but no call for harsh and swift criminal punishment.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
