Gentle People: This is an important message from the New York Times. Remember the recession! Well the Banks are going to do it to you again with the Oil cartels and the Bush family helping them.They just passed a bill in government allowing them to do it to you again! I suggest you elect only local pro-environment human rights activists into your State governments and do not borrow money from the Banks! If you are in a mortgage, lock it in now at a low interest rate! I also suggest you create local home mortgage lending associations that will lend money below Bank rates. Remember the movie "It's a wonderful life!" with Jimmy Stewart? Now imagine the corrupt Bank manager winning and extrapolate that scenario into real life and soon you will feel the results. Brace yourselves! P.S. I also suggest you create a third political Party from the working class. Call it the National Union Party.
Hiding Bad Policy in a Budget Bill
When the long-lost grail of bipartisan compromise finally re-emerged on Capitol Hill this week, the spending bill for 2015 turned out to be weighted with some of the most devious and damaging provisions imaginable for good government. Written in secrecy, presented as the take-it-or-leave-it alternative to a government shutdown, the bill, which narrowly passed the House Thursday night, includes two regressive “riders” aimed at warming the big-money hearts of donors who leave Congress increasingly vulnerable to special-interest corruption.
One rider would allow a huge increase in the size of checks that deep-pocketed donors can write to win inner-sanctum clout with the major political parties. A donor now held to a mere $97,200 under party limits would be able to give a staggering $777,600. In a further invitation to luxury shopping, a couple yearning for the inside track could triple-down and give $3.1 million to party committees. This is pretty much the coup de grâce for the McCain-Feingold law’s ban on large party donations enacted to end the “soft money” corruption of Watergate.
The parties claim they need this big transfusion of lucre to compete with the stealth millions being raised by independent political operatives. But in truth, the rider would only enlarge the political casino’s runaway action, without any hint of ethical controls.
The second rider, custom tailored for the banks of Wall Street, would kill a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank reform law aimed at curbing the banks’ reckless speculation in complex derivatives that fueled the banks’ ignominious collapse in 2008 and fed the great recession. The rider would effectively put taxpayers back on the hook to cushion the banks’ losses in risky derivative deals.
The White House complained but still supports the bill’s passage. The dirty secret is that many Democrats want this harmful repeal as much as Republicans do in the shabby, big-money symbiosis between Wall Street and Capitol Hill. Passage of this rider would also signal open season on the rest of the Dodd-Frank reforms when Republicans take control of both houses next year. Though a few Democratic senators plan a counterattack against the Dodd-Frank repeal, there clearly is little appetite on Capitol Hill for responsible, transparent legislating.
The omnibus bill includes a thicket of other regressive moves, including further budget cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency, always a favorite target of the Republican right wing. Most notoriously, the bill would enshrine a Bush-era rule that allows the mountaintop mining industry to continue dumping toxic coal waste in the streams of Appalachia.
The Internal Revenue Service, another conservative bête noire, would take one of the harshest cuts, $345.6 million, weakening auditing and taxation. The Fish and Wildlife Service would be banned from adding the greater sage grouse to the endangered species list — a victory for the gas and oil industry, which covets even more of America’s threatened Western landscapes than it already has access to. And so it goes — special industry giveaways, large and small, one after the other.
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