Peter Schiff has been calling the mortgage crisis and the recession for years. This video shows Schiff battling the likes of Art Laffer and Ben Stein, who were arguing last year that the US economy was in great shape and that there was no problem with inflated home values or the sub-prime mess.
Laffer is the same guy saying the sky will fall if Obama institutes his tax plan. Why should we listen to this guy?
For years we were told that tax cuts would solve everything. Of course, we were just living it up on cheap money, and now the bill is coming due. Watch the video, and ask yourself who you should be listening to now.
Since 2006, Iran’s leaders have called for direct, unconditional talks with the United States to resolve international concerns over their nuclear program. But as an American administration open to such negotiations prepares to take power, Iran’s political and military leaders are sounding suddenly wary of President-elect Barack Obama.
“People who put on a mask of friendship, but with the objective of betrayal, and who enter from the angle of negotiations without preconditions, are more dangerous,” Hossein Taeb, deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.
“The power holders in the new American government are trying to regain their lost influence with a tactical change in their foreign diplomacy. They are shifting from a hard conflict to a soft attack,” Taeb said.
For Iran’s leaders, the only state of affairs worse than poor relations with the United States may be improved relations. The Shiite Muslim clerics who rule the country came to power after ousting Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a U.S.-backed autocrat, in their 1979 Islamic revolution. Opposition to the United States, long vilified as the “great Satan” here in Friday sermons, remains one of the main pillars of Iranian politics.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent Obama a congratulatory letter last week, but by Wednesday his welcoming tone had dissipated. “It doesn’t make any difference for us who comes and who goes,” he said in a speech in the northern town of Sari. “It’s their actions which are studied by the Iranian and world nations.”
Dictators and corrupt regimes need an external enemy in order to help them control their citizens. The demonization of the United States has been a useful tool in Iran, as it distracts the population from the economic misery caused by the government’s disastrous policies.
Now, the incoming Obama administration is ready to call their bluff, and the Iranian leadership realizes that they’ve put themselves in a box. If they refuse to negotiate, we gain a tremendous amount of leverage with the Europeans and Russians as we turn the screws with even tougher sanctions.
What should we do about the auto companies? It’s infuriating to think that we would have to bail them out, given the mismanagement over the years. On the other hand, the economy is on the brink, and letting GM go under in this environment could take down the entire economy. Also, given the financial bailout, throwing another $25 - $50 billion to save Detroit doesn’t seem like an outrageous idea.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Many, like Tom Friedman, want to throw out management as part of the deal. This doesn’t make sense. Certainly, Rick Wagoner and the rest of the braintrust at GM made tons of mistakes, but in the past year they have made substantial progress on innovative cars like the Chevy Volt and big changes to their cost structure with the UAW. Without the financial crisis they had a credible path to recovery. Ford is in less trouble, and their new CEO should not be blamed for past mistakes.
The real issue is how many strings should be tied to the bailout. Obama wants to see real progress towards building green cars here in the United States. Investing in this area would have significant short-term and long-term benefits. The cars companies are already moving in this direction, so getting agreement on these points may be possible.
The bigger issue raised by Friedman relates to those in Congress who supported the auto industry and their disastrous policies.
The blame for this travesty not only belongs to the auto executives, but must be shared equally with the entire Michigan delegation in the House and Senate, virtually all of whom, year after year, voted however the Detroit automakers and unions instructed them to vote. That shielded General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from environmental concerns, mileage concerns and the full impact of global competition that could have forced Detroit to adapt long ago.
Indeed, if and when they do have to bury Detroit, I hope that all the current and past representatives and senators from Michigan have to serve as pallbearers. And no one has earned the “honor” of chief pallbearer more than the Michigan Representative John Dingell, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who is more responsible for protecting Detroit to death than any single legislator.
This has led to a huge battle currently brewing in the Democratic caucus in the House.
In the first big post-election clash on Capitol Hill, two House heavyweights are battling to lead an influential committee that will have jurisdiction over global warming in the new Congress.
The fight pits California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, a key ally of environmentalists, against Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, who has ties to the auto industry. Waxman is trying to oust Dingell as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
While Waxman supporters say they think they’ve got enough votes to prevail, Dingell is fighting hard to keep the position.
In an interview with WJR radio, he called Waxman an “anti-manufacturing left-wing Democrat” and said it would be a mistake to have him in charge, particularly with the auto industry struggling.
If Waxman is successful in his attempted coup, it means that two Californians would take leading roles in the contentious debate over global warming. Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is the head of the Senate’s environmental committee, which has jurisdiction over the issue.
The 82-year-old Dingell, the most senior member of the House, has long resisted higher fuel standards and tighter limits on greenhouse gases.
Dingell needs to go. He’s a slave to the auto lobbyists, and nothing will get done if he’s blocking the move towards alternative fuels in the House. Hopefully, Waxman will prevail.
14 seats are open on appeals courts or will be by the end of January. Democratic appointees are a majority on one of the 13 federal appeals courts, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.
These are the courts that as a practical matter have the final say on everyday issues that affect millions of people because the Supreme Court accepts fewer than 2 percent of the cases appealed to the justices.
“Most of the action is in the lower courts, from labor and employment law to civil rights to punitive damages to affirmative action and how the death penalty is administered,” said Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.
The traditionally conservative 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, is the first court on which Obama can change the balance of power quickly. It has four openings and has five judges appointed by Republican presidents and five named by Democrat Bill Clinton.
Covering Maryland, the Carolinas and Virginia, the 4th Circuit hears a large share of national security and intelligence cases because Virginia is the home of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Shapiro estimates that within four years, Obama can name enough judges to give Democrats majorities on nine of the 13 appeals courts.
Both Clinton and Bush had trouble getting some nominees through the Senate. Bill Clinton wasted precious time in his first two years in office as he was slow to nominate judges. Then, he was stuck with a Republican Senate that made it much more dificult to get his nominees through the confirmation process. George W. Bush had epic battles with the Senate over judges.
Obama has the advantage of a healthy majority in the Senate. As we’ve seen from his transition team, Obama isn’t wastin any time. Expect the nominations to come fast in the first year.
The Washington Post highlights some of the immediate actions we can expect from Barack Obama’s administration. Items like stem-cell research and environmental regulations top the list.
Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.
A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.
In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.
“The kind of regulations they are looking at” are those imposed by Bush for “overtly political” reasons, in pursuit of what Democrats say was a partisan Republican agenda, said Dan Mendelson, a former associate administrator for health in the Clinton administration’s Office of Management and Budget. The list of executive orders targeted by Obama’s team could well get longer in the coming days, as Bush’s appointees rush to enact a number of last-minute policies in an effort to extend his legacy.
Things are starting to change. In Massachusetts, the voters overwellmingly approved a ballot initiative decriminalizing marijuana.
Defying the scare tactics of state and local officials, voters in Massachusetts and Michigan gave current marijuana policies a resounding vote of no confidence Tuesday. Massachusetts voters approved the first marijuana decriminalization initiative ever passed by voters, Michigan voters enacted the nation’s 13th medical marijuana law, and local reform measures appeared to be passing in several communities.
“Tonight’s results represent a sea change,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which sponsored the Massachusetts and Michigan campaigns. “Voters have spectacularly rejected eight years of the most intense government war on marijuana since the days of ‘Reefer Madness.’”
In Michigan, White House drug czar John Walters personally campaigned against Proposal 1, calling it an “abomination.” In Massachusetts, all 11 district attorneys warned of huge increases in teen marijuana use and other dire consequences should Question 2 pass, even though studies in the 11 states with similar laws, as well as Australia and Europe, have found no such increases due to decriminalization. Under Question 2, criminal penalties for possession of an ounce or less of marijuana will be replaced by a civil fine of $100, much like a traffic ticket.
This makes sense and I expect it to gain traction around the country. Marijuana cases are clogging the courts, so more jurisdictions will begin to consider these reforms.
Medical marijuana has made even more progress, and Barack Obama has pledge to stop the disgraceful practices of the Bush adminitration to use federal laws to prosecute users of medical marijuana.
We should expect significant changes in the Drug War as well. Obama will not apoint a drug czar who views medical marijuana as an “abomination” and he has been very critical of locking up non-violent drug offenders.
It’s encouraging, however, to see these changes coming from the bottom up.
It’s tempting for some of us to look at the election of the country’s first African-American president and conclude that our days of bigotry and inequality are behind us. Come January, a black man who anchored his campaign to the uplifting themes of unity and change will take office, a watershed moment in not only our country’s history, but the history of all humankind. Without question, this election stands as a promising sign for anyone who strives for equality and harmony, and believes that what unites us truly is greater than what divides us. But while it’s clear that the racial and gender divides (thanks to Hillary Clinton and, yes, even Sarah Palin) have narrowed as we head into 2009, the passing of gay marriage bans in California, Florida and Arizona shows that we still have a long way to go on the road to true equality in this country.
In the months leading up to election day, I posed the following question several times but never received a legitimate answer: How is banning gay marriage anything but discrimination? Why is it acceptable in the 21st century for someone to have their right to marry taken away because of their sexual orientation? For that matter, why is it acceptable for anyone to have any right taken away from them for any reason? Opponents of gay marriage claim they want to protect American families, but I’ve never understood what exactly that means. If the gay couple down the street was allowed to place a ring on each other’s finger and be recognized by the state as a married couple, would they then creep down to your house in the middle of the night and eat your children? Would they crash your weekly Family Game Night? Superimpose themselves into your family photos? Slash the tires of your minivan? Opponents also talk about protecting the sanctity of marriage and only allowing couples who can procreate to get married. If that’s the case, shouldn’t straight couples who cheat on one another or elect to not have children have their marriage licenses revoked?
The bottom line is that these bans on gay marriage are just another form of intolerance. Telling two gay people that they can’t get married is no different than telling an interracial couple that they can’t get married. Perhaps even more discouraging is the ballot measure that was passed in Arkansas prohibiting “unmarried sexual partners” from adopting children or serving as foster parents. The initiative applied to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples, but the intent here is crystal clear. Apparently it’s not enough to tell gay couples that they can’t get married; we also need to make it clear that they can never have a family, even when there are so many children in desperate need of a loving home.
I’m extremely hopeful that the election of Barack Obama will bring about a more open-minded approach to how we as a nation view the world and choose to legislate. After all, I’m not talking about “gay rights” here; these are human rights. Because Obama speaks so passionately about overcoming the bitter divisiveness that has fractured this country – black vs. white, men vs. women, democrats vs. republicans and, yes, gay vs. straight – many of us were hoping his message would help defeat the bigotry behind the initiatives in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. Perhaps we got a little ahead of ourselves. Instead, it seems apparent that Obama won the White House on the strength of his economic message more than his social views. At the same time, the fact that so many young and first-time voters were so engaged in the election suggests that this more open-minded shift could be on the way.
Electing a transformational figure like Barack Obama looks like an encouraging first step, but that transformation is obviously still a work in progress.
It’s embarrassing that the McCain campaign is clinging to Joe the Plumber in a final act of deperation. Mr. Plumber hit a new low when he agreed with a loon at a rally that the election of Barack Obama would lead to he death of Israel.
Shep Smith, one of the few voices of reason at Fox News, interviews Joe about his statement and unmasks him as a complete fool.
Tom Friedman writes about the huge problems facing Iran now that oil prices have collapsed.
I’ve always been dubious about Barack Obama’s offer to negotiate with Iran — not because I didn’t believe that it was the right strategy, but because I didn’t believe we had enough leverage to succeed. And negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is like playing baseball without a bat.
Well, if Obama does win the presidency, my gut tells me that he’s going to get a chance to negotiate with the Iranians — with a bat in his hand.
Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.
After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.
As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading Afghanistan abroad — and then the collapse in prices in the ‘80s helped bring down that overextended empire.
This is an example of the tremendous leverage we get by destroying domestic demand for oil by switching to alternative fuels.
The most recent poll in Ohio has some interesting news regarding the issue of immigration.
Let illegal immigrants stay here.
That’s what 56 percent of Ohioans said in a poll conducted this month by the University of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research — and people polled in Southwest Ohio topped that figure.
In this corner of the state, 60 percent said they favored a government policy that allowed undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and become U.S. citizens if they met unspecified requirements in a certain timeframe.
That puts Ohioans in sync with the rest of the nation, according to a Gallup Poll last year, said Eric Rademacher, the institute’s interim co-director.
If you only listened to Fox News, Lou Dobbs and talk radio, you would assume that the entire nation is outraged by the conecpt of earned citizenship for illegals (which some call amnesty). Last year many in the media assumed that this issue would be crucial in the 2008 elections. Yet we don’t hear anything about it.
All of the Republican candidates who tried to exploit conservative anger about immigration flamed out in the primaries. Even one-time “moderates” like Rudy Giuliani flipped last year and tried to demogogue the issue in order to get the Republican nomination. He got crushed in the primaries.
America is getting serious again. We’re going through tough economic times, so it’s harder for politicians to distract the electorate with side issues like Bill Ayers, guns and illegals.
The next president will have a huge opportunity to pass a common-sense compromise on this issue that beefs up border security and provides a rational method for illegals to earn the right to stay in this country. The political rewards from such a compromise would be significant as well.
We will be spending the next several years trying to understand the various causes of the financial collapse. As most agree, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
There’s no doubt that the credit rating agencies played a huge role in this crisis. I worked on bond deals in the 90’s that were very similar to the mortgage-backed securities at the root of this scandal. The role of the rating agencies was very clear. It was up to them to assess the risk tied to each security, and that process involved quite a bit of due diligence regarding the underlying income streams.
It has been clear for years that the rating agencies were not doing their jobs with respect to pooled mortgages. Now Congress is holding hearings in order to learn more about what happened. Needless to say, you can learn quite a bit by following the money.
Conflicts of interest were largely responsible for the disastrous performance of credit rating agencies in assessing the risks of mortgage-backed securities, two former high-ranking officials at Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s said in Congressional testimony on Wednesday.
The agencies are paid to issue ratings by the securities issuers, whose interests can eclipse those of investors, Jerome S. Fons, former managing director of credit policy at Moody’s until 2007, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“While the methods used to rate structured securities have rightly come under fire, in my opinion the business model prevented analysts from putting investor interests first,” he said.
And Frank L. Raiter, former head of mortgage ratings at Standard & Poor’s for 10 years, characterized the failures at that company by saying simply: “Profits were running the show.”
This reminds me of the problems we had with the accounting firms in the 1990’s. It was impossible to expect accounting firms getting huge deal fees to be objective when they were auditing the same client. Efforts were made to block this conflict of interest back then, but Congress blocked the reforms. Things didn’t get fixed there until we had the Enron and Worldcom debacles.
With the rating agencies, it’s painfully clear that more regulations are needed here as well. Let’s hope that we get it right going forward.
The McCain campaign can’t get anything right. They told they press that we would see a new economic proposal this week. Now McCain has abondoned those plans.
Presented with 30 options for new economic measures, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has – at least for now – chosen none of them.
His campaign had been planning to roll out new proposals this week that would be aimed at restoring confidence in financial markets and encouraging investors to return.
On Sunday, hours before attending a big strategy meeting at McCain campaign headquarters, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that McCain was planning “a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy, by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes.”
But when the meeting ended, so did plans for a new economy push. The campaign now says no new policy announcements are planned. Participants in the meeting refused to say what happened.
“We’re locked down,” said one official.
Politico reported McCain advisers’ descriptions of the plan in articles on Saturday and Sunday.
Jackie Calmes of The New York Times, who first reported the plan’s collapse on Sunday night, pointed to “internal confusion” about the matter.
General Petraeus repeats what most respected foreign policy professionals believe - we have to be willing to talk to our enemies.
Petraeus also came out unambiguously in his talk at Heritage for opening communications with America’s adversaries, a position McCain is attacking Obama for endorsing. Citing his Iraq experience, Petraeus said, “You have to talk to enemies.” He added that it was necessary to have a particular goal for discussion and to perform advance work to understand the motivations of his interlocutors.
All that was the subject of one of the most contentious tussles between McCain and Obama in the first presidential debate, with Obama contending that his intent to negotiate with foreign adversaries without “precondition” did not mean that he would neglect diplomatic “preparation.”
McCain, apparently perceiving an opportunity for attack, Tuesday again used Obama’s comments to attack his judgment. “Sen. Obama, without precondition, wants to sit down and negotiate with them, without preconditions,” McCain said, referring to Iran.
Yet Petraeus emphasized throughout his lecture that reaching out to insurgent groups — some “with our blood on their hands,” he said — was necessary to the ultimate goal of turning them against irreconcilable enemies like Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Petraeus favorably cited the example of one of his British deputies, who in a previous assignment had to negotiate with Martin McGuiness of the Irish Republican Army, responsible for killing some of the British commander’s troops. The British officer, Petraeus said, occasionally wanted to “reach across the table” and choke his former adversary but understood that such negotiations were key to ending a war.
Tech industry advocates in Washington said they were encouraged by the Senate’s addition of coveted tax incentives to the bill. Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said his organization is targeting 80 House bailout opponents who have a significant solar industry presence in their districts.
Until Tuesday, Resch said he was pessimistic about winning passage for the eight-year extension of tax credits for renewable energies. “Ironically, the failure of the bailout Monday in the House gave us a new lease on life to get this done,” he said. “This is an opportunity we can’t lose.”
He credited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada with “playing his cards close to the vest, and playing them at the right time” to get the tax-extension measures in the bill.
Resch called the tax-credit extension, which also would allow utilities to take advantage of the credits, “a game-changer” that will dramatically boost the solar industry and help create new business models.
Reid, in a news conference, predicted the renewable energy tax credits “will create tens of thousands of jobs right away.”
Swisher, the wind energy advocate, expressd similar sentiments: “I was depressed this was not going to get done. Then our hearts soared when we learned how the Senate would do this.”
Congress, Swisher said, should encourage new renewable energy businesses. He said 41 factories making wind industry products have opened in the United States in the past 18 months.
It’s stunning that these tax credits would not have been passed this year without the failure of the bailout bill earlier this week. It’s critical that we continue to encourage the development of alternative fuels, and the impact on our economy and our national security cannot be overstated. We cannot continue sending billions of dollars overseas to Russia, Venezuela and the Middle East. Instead, we can keep the money at home, and generate thousands of green jobs.
Congress has apparantly made a deal to bail out Wall Street. Warren Buffett thinks they had no choice.
Billionaire Warren Buffett told congressional negotiators that if they can’t agree on a proposed financial bailout, the nation will face “its biggest financial meltdown in American history,” two sources familiar with the talks said.
Word of Buffett’s omen came hours before Democrats posted a draft of the bailout bill online and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday afternoon she hoped the chamber would vote Monday.
Buffett, whom Forbes magazine has placed at No. 2 on its 2008 list of richest Americans, was one of several business experts whose opinions were sought, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, told reporters Saturday.
Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. His wealth is estimated at $50 billion. Buffett was consulted by telephone, Conrad said.
The whole thing stinks, but they really didn’t have much of a choice.
Update: The House has rejected the bailout deal. It seems some are happy to play chicken with our financial system.
Joe Biden has been a gaffe machine over the past several days. He said he didn’t approve of one of Obama’s ads about John McCain, and he jumped the gun saying that the government shouldn’t bail out AIG.
Fortunately, Biden has rebounded impressively this morning, with a powerful speech on foreign policy. He delivered a blistering attack on John McCain’s foreign policy positions while providing a very persuasive argument for a new approach under a Barack Obama administration. More importantly, he attacked McCain’s judgement, explaining how McCain’s bluster is counterproductive. He also ripped Bush and McCain for ignoring al Qaeda and Afghanistan. We must find and kill Bin Laden, and Biden made that absolutely clear.
The themes in this speech were clear and powerful. I suspect Obama will be repeating all these themes on Friday in the first presidential debate.
It’s tempting for some of us to look at the election of the country’s first African-American president and conclude that our days of bigotry and inequality are behind us. Come January, a black man who anchored his campaign to the uplifting themes of unity and change will take office, a watershed moment in not only our country’s history, but the history of all humankind. Without question, this election stands as a promising sign for anyone who strives for equality and harmony, and believes that what unites us truly is greater than what divides us. But while it’s clear that the racial and gender divides (thanks to Hillary Clinton and, yes, even Sarah Palin) have narrowed as we head into 2009, the 
