rhadamanthine

Today the U.S. Senate adopted the credit card overhaul bill, falling a single measure short of providing consumers with what consumers need most - relief from 30 to 41% interest rates. The Senate provided no cap on interest rates.

Clearly, the measures adopted by the Senate are measures the credit card industry can easily accommodate. The industry furiously lobbied the legislators, regardless. Comparative shopping is ok by the credit card companies. So, too, is advance notice of rate changes, and free electronic payments. The credit companies even can live with parental approval for under-21 cardholders, and - if they have to, but they really rather not - the abolition of the universal default rule. What the credit card companies will not withstand is a cap on interest rates.

News also spread today that credit card companies now will target their triple-A customers, with a host of new charges, charging annual fees and interest upon purchase, eliminating the grace period, and curtailing rewards and cash-back incentives.

As statistical default rates rise on the books of credit card companies, they and the U. S. Senate show no mercy toward their continuing economic enslavement of America citizens. A debt carrying an interest rate of 40% can take more than a decade to repay. This is longer than the indentures of Colonial era immigrants to America, who contracted their enslavement for a passage to freedom.

Today there is no promise of economic freedom from credit card companies. Nor is any offered in the legislation of the U. S. Senate. With no cap on interest rates, can 100% or 150% interest rates be far behind? Who will stop them?

This stimulas package seems to good to pass on.

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. - Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire.
Forty million job openings = Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American car.
Forty million cars ordered = Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house, or pay off their mortgage. = Housing Crisis fixed.

Too bad the middle class doesn't have a lobby.

Mr. President, no one is asking for retribution for torture and war crimes. What America wants is justice. When you turn your back on justice, as did Mr. Bush and his administration, you turn your back on America as they did.

Now is not the time for reflection, as you counsel. America already has reflected. We reflected on the torture we saw our own government inflict, and we have rejected it. We reflected on our loss of liberties, and we have rejected it. We have reflected on the damage done to our Constitution, and we have rejected it. We - America - reflected upon those transgressions already, and we rejected them.

And for our remedy, we elected you our agent of change.

Admirably, you did not hesitate, nor shirk, against pirates on the seas. Why now do you hesitate and shirk against the pirates of our Constitution and liberties?

Admirably, you’ve stood on the world stage to make amends. Why will you not stand before us at home now to rectify our house?

It’s admirable that you want to “right the course,”as you say. Please, proceed. But proceed with justice, not blind forgiveness. Blind forgiveness forgives nothing. If we as Americans are to forgive, we must know for what we are granting forgiveness.

Think again, Mr. President...please! We already have been divided too long. We can be divided no further. Let us unite in justice, and not more failure. Let us be known again at home and in the world for justice, and not injustice.

Here starts the point at which we will know whether we have the president we elected, or not.

Evidently the witch doctor didn’t do such a great job on exorcising Palin's witchcraft. Here, Palin's witchieness turns children not only into denigrators of community service, but also prospective racists. Simply put, the witch is a sicko.

Why can’t Bush, Paulson, media, or anyone else explain the current financial debacle? Because in today’s world the answer requires an understanding that money is not currency. Money is debt.

The fact is, our money supply requires a perpetuation of debt creation in order to sustain itself. Now, that perpetuation has reached saturation status and no longer can sustain itself.

That’s why George Bush fears America’s banking system is going to collapse on his watch. That’s why Congress is panicked. That’s why Wall St. doesn’t want a bailout, but bankers do.

Nowhere in the public debate of the present crisis can an explanation be found of what’s behind the current monetary crisis. However, Barrack Obama may have a clue.

Obama has campaigned on weaning America off foreign oil as a non renewable resource. The exploitation of non-renewable resources, like the generation of debt itself, is a fundamental requirement to sustain the monetary system currently in place. It’s also a requirement for creating world wide economies without borders, that enrich the select at the expense of the world’s general populations.

Obama also calls for rebuilding the infrastructure of America. Something that can be done far less expensively if money wasn’t debt that required the payment of interest. Instead, money could function as a form of non-profit service.

Obama has referred only obliquely to a growing requirement to address monetary reform. Fresh solutions are required not just for present economic debacle, but also for a new century.

Monetary reform should assess the actual function of money, what money is, and how money itself can be transformed to eliminate debt, the need for interest, and the ultimate transference of political power to predatory and exploitive entities that rely upon debt creation as wealth formation.

If all that is too cerebral or intellectual, take 47 minutes to view the following cartoon. You’ll never look at money the same again. And you’ll have more insight into what’s behind today’s economic crisis than the Senate Banking Committee, Congress, George Bush, or John McCain & Sarah Palin.

John McCain's best judgement for a vice president candidate is Sarah Palin, a former beauty queen. How did McCain overlook this stunning candidate?   Or,,,will she become President Palin's choice for a VP?

Bush’s plan to reward the ingenuity of the marketplace goes from eco-nomic to comic in this interview by two British comedians.

Close your eyes and you almost can hear Vice-President Sarah Palin reminiscing about the Bush bailout plan, as President John McCain gambles in the great American casinos, called the U. S. Treasury and Wall St..

Oh, for the days of noun, verb, and 9/11 . . .

Financial markets appear to be taking McCain’s monkey wrench in stride. Following the late night seizure of WAMU, the stock market opened Friday to a modest decline that offered no evidence of panic. In fact, analysts are looking at WAMU’s seizure coolly and analytically. No draconian job losses. Impactful discounts on assets and junk mortgages that can filter into the marketplace. No collapse of the dollar. No demand upon Main St.’s taxpayers to ante up for WAMU’s losses.

Instead, McCain’s monkey wrench appears to be tightening the screws on Republicans. The split between McCain’s populist free marketers and Bush’s Wall St. protectionists is engaged. Chaney has dumped his schedule today to ride to Bush’s rescue. Some remedy plan still is expected by Monday.

McCain’s monkey wrench leaves unresolved whether McCain’s multi-tasking abilities will tighten up in time for his scheduled debate with Obama tonight. Warrior McCain, who always appears committed to victory at all costs, has put his savior complex on the line. No plan by tonight, or as McCain says no "appearance of a plan," leaves McCain a loser in the forge.

Meanwhile, Wall St. reacts patiently. And Main St. is entertained by David Letterman and Paris Hilton’s bemusement over the folly that has become of John McCain as McCain tinkers with America’s future.

The following is the fuil text of the Agreement of Principles that John McCain had no time to read.

Agreement on Principles

1. Taxpayer Protection

a. Requires Treasury Secretary to set standards to prevent excessive or inappropriate executive compensation for participating companies

b. To minimize risk to the American taxpayer, requires that any transaction include equity sharing

c. Requires most profits to be used to reduce the national debt

2. Oversight and Transparency

a. Treasury Secretary is prohibited from acting in an arbitrary or capricious manner or in any way that is inconsistent with existing law

b. Establishes strong oversight board with cease and desist authority

c. Requires program transparency and public accountability through regular, detailed reports to Congress disclosing exercise of the Treasury Secretary’s authority

d. Establishes an independent Inspector General to monitor the use of the Treasury Secretary’s authority

e. Requires GAO audits to ensure proper use of funds, appropriate internal controls, and to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse

3. Homeownership Preservation

a. Maximize and coordinate efforts to modify mortgages for homeowners at risk of foreclosure

b. Requires loan modifications for mortgages owned or controlled by the Federal Government

c. Directs a percentage of future profits to the Affordable Housing Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund to meet America’s housing needs

4. Funding Authority

a. Treasury Secretary’s request for $700 billion is authorized, with $250 billion available immediately and an additional $100 billion released upon his or her certification that funds are needed

b. final $350 billion is subject to a Congressional joint resolution of disapproval

Hours after John McCain threw his politically motivated monkey wrench into what was expected to be an approved bipartisan plan to bail out Wall St., a small measure of justice was delivered to Main St. The FDIC seized the $310 billion of assets of Washington Mutual, the nation’s #1 savings and loan, and delivered the institution to J.P. Morgan Chase.

Ironically, the FDIC seizure came unexpectedly for WAMU, much as it had when WAMU’s mortgage borrowers unexpectedly lost their homes to the mortgage lender.

While the thousands of homeowners who lost homes to WAMU’s predatory lending practices and criminally skewed mortgage products will never see their homes again, the fall of WAMU resounds as the justice Main St. was seeking, but wasn’t getting from the Poulson-Bernenke plan.

Tomorrow will tell if the apocalypse George Bush predicted in his address to the nation will actually now occur. Or, perhaps the lie will be given to one more Bush stampede to fear.

Maybe legislators now can take a deep breath and view this event as the example it will become of just how the marketplace can absorb $310 billion of assets and junk mortgages, without taxpayers having to assume the burden.

A funny thing happened at Bush’s podium as he addressed the nation on its economic crisis. No one listened.

Bush’s penchant for lying didn’t turn off America’s ear. Bush still embedded a few more of his whoppers to knosh on. The plain fact is that America already has made up its mind about the crisis, as it already has about Bush. America doesn’t want a bailout of Wall St., and it doesn’t want any more of George Bush.

With remarkable disregard for the price Americans already have paid for Bush’s failed economic policies, and for the pain Americans already have experienced, and continue to experience, Bush offered a clinical and sanitary outline of failures and blame, that curiously made his own economic system appear as the principal victim in the crisis.

Bush blamed foreign investors who invested for more the a decade in America. Bush blamed the climate of easy credit, but did not recognize his own role in creating a guns and butter economy. Bush blamed mortgages lenders, and he blamed Americans themselves who sought mortgages. Finally, Bush blamed an overheated economy, the very same overheated economy he himself failed to control.

Never once did Bush recognize the roll of Wall St. and its banks in creating faulty mortgage instruments, that were predatory and equity grabbing. Nor did Bush acknowledge the deceptive procedures and policies that now so clearly shifted wealth from the lower and middle classes to the upper and corporate classes. Instead, Bush presented the need for saving the criminals and their outlaw corporations that created the crisis.

Bush proved his own irrelevance as president. Ever so slyly and slick, Bush recognized, “...the situation becoming more precarious by the day.” He said, “Earlier this year, Secretary Paulson proposed a blueprint that would modernize our financial regulations.” What Bush didn’t recognize is that, despite his apparent lenghty knowledge of the developing crisis, Bush did nothing about it.

In the pantheon of presidential speeches, George Bush delivered a message with a message like no other president. Bush told America, we are about to go to hell in a hand basket. “The government's top economic experts warn that, without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold.” For the first time in his career as the nation’s executive his rampant powers of executive order fell mute to do anything.

Bush delivered one more whopper in closing. Bush stated that our “democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised.” No one in America listened to George Bush. But this final stated fallacy of the Bush administration is being recognized throughout the world’s capitols. Taking their cues from Amer