Political leanings

[alan1chef]

64% of Americans Believe US Can Win Iraq War

....according to a recent Gallup Poll

That increasingly optimistic view about Iraq extends to Americans' perceptions of the United States' chances for ultimate success in that war. Sixty-four percent now believe the United States can win the war, and 42% believe it will do so. Both are the best assessments Gallup has measured since June 2006.

http://www.shaneclapper.com/2009....anistan

[Torurot]

Of course you said you "won" in Vietnam too!


We have enough finacial people here. What about this, true or not??


Isn't Anyone Watching the Fed?
Bernanke's Shell Game
http://counterpunch.org/whitney08042009.html
By MIKE WHITNEY August 4, 2009

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is a man who knows how Washington works and uses that knowledge to great effect. His appearences on Capital Hill are always worth watching. He sits politely with his hands folded in front of him playing the bashful professor while one one preening congressman after another makes a fool out of himself. In contrast, Bernanke looks modest and thoughtful, faithfully upholding the public's trust. But things aren't always as they seem. The Fed chief is sticking it to the American people big-time and no one seems to have any idea of what's really going on. Former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler sums it up in a recent Wall Street Journal article, "The Bernanke Market". Here's a clip:

"By buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgages to increase the monetary base by $1 trillion, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn't put money directly into the stock market but he didn't have to. With nowhere else to go, except maybe commodities, inflows into the stock market have been on a tear. Stock and bond funds saw net inflows of close to $150 billion since January. The dollars he cranked out didn't go into the hard economy, but instead into tradable assets. In other words, Ben Bernanke has been the market."

What does it mean? .....

[smuttleydfs]

(alan1chef @ Aug. 04 2009,22:11) 64% of Americans Believe US Can Win Iraq War

Gee Your hero already declared that we had won the war on May 2nd 2003.............you're 6 years behind wannabechief!!!!

[alan1chef]

LOL....gee thx mutt...I didn't know that....




2009 Power Rankings: August 3
12 (8) Tigers 54-49 The Tigers are 23-33 on the road, the worst record for a division leader.

The Tigers won't even make the post season....the Chicago White Sox will go right on by them and win the division...

The Giants, on the other hand...will get to the postseason...wild card or division winner...

10 (12) Giants 58-47 Switch-hitting Pablo Sandoval is batting .359 against lefties, .313 against righties.

[smuttleydfs]

Just like the typical right wing loser......when getting spanked change the subject.........

[Lefty]

[Torurot]

Another useful post by Mr Roberts!

Tent City America
The Expiring Economy
http://counterpunch.org/roberts08062009.html
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS August 6, 2009

Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1 billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, to rival the one the Bush government build in Baghdad, Iraq.

Hard times have now afflicted Americans for so long that even the extension of unemployment benefits from 6 months to 18 months for 24 high unemployment states, and to 46 - 72 weeks in other states, is beginning to run out. By Christmas 1.5 million Americans will have exhausted unemployment benefits while unemployment rolls continue to rise.

Amidst this worsening economic crisis, the House of Representatives just passed a $636 billion "defense" bill.

Who is the United States defending against? Americans have no enemies except those that the US government goes out of its way to create by bombing and invading countries that comprise no threat whatsoever to the US and by encircling others--Russia for example--with threatening military bases.

America's wars are contrived affairs to serve the money laundering machine: from the taxpayers and money borrowed from foreign creditors to the armaments industry to the political contributions that ensure $636 billion "defense" bills.

President George W. Bush gave us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are entirely based on lies and misrepresentations. But Obama has done Bush one better. Obama has started a war in Pakistan with no explanation whatsoever.

If the armaments industry and the neoconservative brownshirts have their way, the US will also be at war with Iran, Russia, Sudan and North Korea.

Meanwhile, America continues to be overrun, as it has been for decades, not by armed foreign enemies but by illegal immigrants across America's porous and undefended borders.

It is more proof of the Orwellian time in which we live that $636 billion appropriated for wars of aggression is called a "defense bill."

Who is going to pay for all of this? When foreign countries have spent their trade surpluses and have no more dollars to recycle into the purchase of Treasury bonds, when US banks have used up their "bailout" money by purchasing Treasury bonds, and when the Federal Reserve cannot print any more money to keep the government going without pushing up inflation and interest rates, the taxpayer will be all that is left. Already Obama's two top economic advisors, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, are floating the prospect of a middle class tax increase. Will Obama be maneuvered away from his promise just as Bush Sr. was?

Will Americans see the disconnect between their interests and the interests of "their" government? In the small town of Vassalboro, Maine, a few topless waitress jobs in a coffee house drew 150 applicants. Women in this small town are so desperate for jobs that they are reduced to undressing for their neighbors' amusement.

Meanwhile, the Obama government is going to straighten out Afghanistan and Pakistan and build marble palaces to awe the locals half way around the world.

The US government keeps hyping "recovery" the way Bush hyped "terrorist threat" and "weapons of mass destruction." The recovery is no more real than the threats. Indeed, it is possible that the economic collapse has hardly begun. Let's look at what might await us here at home while the US government pursues hegemony abroad.

The real estate crisis is not over. More home foreclosures await as unemployment rises and unemployment benefits are exhausted. The commercial real estate crisis is yet to hit. More bailouts are coming, and they will have to be financed by more debt or money creation. If there are not sufficient purchasers for the Treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve will have to purchase them by creating checking accounts for the Treasury, that is, by debt monetization or the printing of money.

More debt and money creation will put more pressure on the US dollar's exchange value. At some point import prices, which include offshored goods and services of US corporations, will rise, adding to the inflation fueled by domestic money creation. The Federal Reserve will be unable to hold down interest rates by buying bonds.

No part of US economic policy addresses the systemic crisis in American incomes. For most Americans real income ceased to grow some years ago. Americans have substituted second jobs and debt accumulation for the missing growth in real wages. With most households maxed out on debt and jobs disappearing, these substitutes for real income growth no longer exist.

The Bush-Obama economic policy actually worsens the systemic crisis that the US dollar faces as reserve currency. The fact that there might be no alternative to the dollar as reserve currency does not guarantee that the dollar will continue in this role. Countries might find it less risky to settle trade transactions in their own currencies.

How does an economy based heavily on consumer spending recover when so many high-value-added jobs, and the GDP and payroll tax revenues associated with them, have been moved offshore and when consumers have no more assets to leverage in order to increase their spending?

How does the US pay for its imports if the dollar is no longer used as reserve currency?

These are the unanswered questions.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. This fall CounterPunch/AK Press will publish Robert's War of the Worlds: How the Economy Was Lost. He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Torurot]

What do you recon Al, single payer a good idea like in many other wealthy countries?

Why the Democrats Are Either Idiots or Shysters
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out
http://counterpunch.org/lindorff08062009.html
By DAVE LINDORFF August 6, 2009

President Obama and the Democrats who currently run Congress have been hoist on their own collective petard by their craven and gutless refusal to consider adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system to finance health care in the US, or simply to expand Medicare, which is a successful single- payer program, to cover everyone, instead of just people over 65 and the disabled.

Instead, because they are the recipients of tens of millions of dollars in legal (and probably plenty of illegal) bribes from the health care industry, they have cobbled together a "reform" in name only, which preserves not just the central role of the vampire-like health insurance industry, but also ensures the continued rapacious profitability of the other segments of the medical-industrial complex--the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the specialist doctors.

Now, like Hillary and Bill Clinton before them, these weasels and slimeballs who pose as the people's advocates are left with nothing but a Potemkin Health Plan that looks on the outside like a reform, but that changes little or nothing, leaves vast numbers of Americans uninsured, forces tens of millions to buy crappy plans from private companies, and that will end up doing nothing to halt the continuing rise in health care costs that is bankrupting the people, employers and the country.

Nice going guys!

Let's for a moment consider what could have happened (and what could still happen if the American people would descend on Washington with pitchforks and firebrands in hand to demand it!).

Medicare, which is wildly popular among seniors and the disabled according to every poll I've seen, currently covers 45 million of the highest-cost segment of this country's 300 million people--its elderly and its permanently disabled. It does this at a cost of $484 billion.

Now that's a heck of a lot of money--about 13% of the federal budget--but it's money well spent. We're talking about our parents and grandparents here, after all, and because they're all covered by a government single-payer plan that pays virtually all of their doctors' and hospital bills, we don't have to pay those bills for them out of our own pockets. Okay, there are problems--the drug industry managed during the Bush/Cheney dark ages to get a prescription drug law passed that bars Medicare from negotiating group discounts for drugs, and that has added enormous rip-off costs to the program, but that's just another example of corporate scamming of the system that needs to be fixed. And I know that Medicare is not as good as it should be--leaving out important tests, and requiring people to buy supplemental insurance. But it's still better than all but the most expensive private insurance plans.

The important point that needs to be made is that according to Medicare analysts, 10 percent of Medicare beneficiaries account for fully two thirds of the total annual cost of Medicare.

What that tells you is that the cost of treating that 10% of the elderly is $320 billion, while the healthier 90% of the elderly--roughly 40 billion people--only cost $160 billion a year to care for.

Now, given that the rest of the population under 65--about 255 million people--need on average far less care than the 90% of seniors who are in that lower-cost group, extending care to them all would clearly cost less than $1 trillion. Add in the cost of the 10% of high-cost elderly, and you've got a total bill of $1.34 trillion to care for everyone in America.

That's a big number, but now you need to subtract out the total cost of Medicaid--the crappy program that, primarily funded by the states through income and sales taxes, pays for the crappy care of the poor. That would be about $400 billion in 2009. So now we're down to $944 billion to care for all Americans. But from that we need to subtract the cost of Veterans health care--another successful single-payer program that already cares for veterans (or at least some of themit's grossly underfunded). If we had a single-payer system for all, we could just fold the Veterans Hospital system into the national program. That would mean eliminating another $100 billion that would be saved (because remember, we calculated that original expanded Medicare budget for covering all 300 million of us). So now we're down to an annual budget of $844 billion for a single-payer program to cover all Americans. Finally there is uncompensated care provided by hospitals to those 47 million Americans who have no health insurance but who don't qualify for Medicaid. This care, such as it is, is funded in two ways--one by state and county revenues, which come out of state income and sales taxes and also out of local property taxes, and the other is in the form of higher hospital charges and insurance premiums and Medicare costs for the rest of us. Uncompensated care is estimated to cost about $200 billion, all of which would be eliminated if we had a single-payer plan for all.

Okay, so now we're down to a total net cost for a national single-payer program of just $644 billion. Now remember, we're talking about expanding a single-payer program that we already have in place, that doctors and hospitals are already familiar with, and that the people who use it already like. And expanding it to cover everybody, instead of just the old and disabled would only cost an added $160 billion, or just 33% more than it costs now to cover only the old and disabled. In these days of trillion-dollar Wall Street bailouts, $160 billion is almost chump changeheck. Heck, it's less than the cost of a year of war in Afghanistan.

Sure it would still mean a modest tax increase for everyone (to figure out how much, just look at your check stub, find the Medicare tax deduction, and multiply it by 1.33. Then double that to account for the employer share of the added funds). But wait, all you anti-tax nuts! Before you start freaking out at a tax hike and waving those little teabags Fox TV got for you, there are more savings we haven't considered.

If everyone is covered by Medicare, that means no more out-of-pocket payments by you for doctor bills. No more co-pays. No more deductibles that you have to pay yourself before your health insurance kicks in. No more employee contributions to health insurance premiums, which these days more and more employers are forcing us to pay. That's a lot of money. For many families, it adds up to thousands of dollars a year. But there's more. Your employer, if the company is one of the one-in-three that still provides and pays at least something towards health benefits for its workers, would be off the hook. That would free up a lot of money that could go to higher wages and salaries for workers (especially if you have or get yourself a union to make sure that the managers pass the savings on to you and don't just pocket it or pass it along to shareholders). We're talking about big savings here. (Incidentally, we're also talking about ending the feudal relationship that has you afraid to talk union, or even to talk back, or speak up, to your employer, for fear of losing not just your job, but your and your family's health insurance. We're talking about liberating you from a major shackle.

So while yes, your taxes would go up a bit to expand Medicare to all, it wouldn't be by much, and on the plus side, you would be saving an enormous amount of money, making the added tax bite easy to swallow (and remember, your state and local taxes could be reduced).

Why didn't Obama and the Democrats tell you all this? Why does Obama continue to diss single-payer, as he did to the American Medical Association, and as he continues to do, claiming it is not in the American addition, as though he never heard about Medicare?

Well, as a matter of fact, some people in Congress, notably Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh), Anthony Wiener (D-NY) and 83 other members of the House are pushing a bill, HR 676, which would do exactly what I'm suggestingexpanding Medicare to cover everyone.

It is being opposed by the Congressional leadership to the point that advocates at one committee hearing were ejected and arrested for even mentioning the term single-payer. With the blessing of the White House.

Clearly, Obama and the Democratic Party and Congressional leadership are in bed with the health care profiteers. Otherwise, why wouldn't they at least have the Congressional Budget Office do a formal analysis like I just did here in simple form? Clearly too, they think we're just too stupid to understand that higher taxes to pay for single-payer would be more than compensated for by the amount of out-of-pocket savings we'd realize if we didn't have to pay for health care on our own.

There is no other excuse for failure to do the obvious, and have America adopt some version of the kind of health care system that has been proven to be more effective and far, far cheaper than our own in every other developed nation in the worldand in many less developed nations, too.

My question: How long are we going to stand for this crap?

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at [email protected]

[strocube]

"My question: How long are we going to stand for this crap?"[B]

I'm afraid, indefinetly.  As you know, most Americans are mouth breathing morons who wouldn't know their interests if they bit them in the ass. Our friend Alan is a case in point. Also, when you've got people saying things like, "Keep government out of my Medicare." That pretty much gives you an idea of what we can expect.
We will not have meaningful health care reform in this country, never mind anything like what the rest of the developed world enjoys, as long we are dominated by a corporate-owned media and a corporate-owned government. My analysis: we're fucked!

The U.S. is ranked 37th, globally in terms of health, below COLOMBIA AND COSTA RICA. Yet this country spends more on health care than any other nation. That money is clearly not going to sick people, it's going to insurance companies, drug companies and their CEOs.
This is from the WHO:


In Europe, health systems in Mediterranean countries such as France, Italy and Spain are rated higher than others in the continent. Norway is the highest Scandinavian nation, at 11th .
Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica and Cuba are rated highest among the Latin American nations €“ 22nd, 33rd, 36th and 39th in the world, respectively.
Singapore is ranked 6th , the only Asian country apart from Japan in the top 10 countries.
In the Pacific, Australia ranks 32 nd overall, while New Zealand is 41st .
In the Middle East and North Africa, many countries rank highly: Oman is in 8 th place overall, Saudi Arabia is ranked 26th , United Arab Emirates 27th and Morocco, 29th.

I like Obama, he's probably the smartest president we've had in my lifetime, and I'm pretty sure he means well, but he will not change the structural issues within the system that have led to the current situation.
It's free market uber alles up in this bitch (  ) and if you don't like it, well then you're just un-American. Never mind that surgery you need, here's a couple of discount coupons for NASCAR--praise Jesus!
America, fuck yeah!

[Torurot]

Not to mention the law that was changed so Big Pharma couldn't be challenged to discount drugs. Monopoly pricing. Why is it that US Americans pay MORE for the SAME medicine than other countries.. eg Canada.

[Torurot]

When "Not Bad" is the New "Good"
Economy on a Scaffold
http://counterpunch.org/whitney08072009.html
By MIKE WHITNEY Weekend Edition August 7 - 9, 2009

We're making this way too complicated. It's simple really.

The Fed has only one tool at its disposal; to create more money. Typically, the way the Fed adds to the money supply is by lowering interest rates. When the Fed lowers rates below the rate of inflation; they're basically selling dollars for less than a buck. That's a good deal, so, naturally, speculators jump on it and trigger a credit expansion. What follows is a frenzy of market activity that ends in a housing, credit, tech or equity bubble. Eventually, the bubble bursts and the economy goes into a tailspin. Then, after a period of digging-out, the process resumes again. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's always the same.

The moral is: Cheap money creates bubbles; and bubbles move wealth from workers to rich motherporkers. It's as simple as that. That's why the wealth gap is wider now than anytime since the Gilded Age. The rich own everything.

The Federal Reserve is the policy arm of the big banks and brokerage houses. Period. Ostensibly, its mandate is to maintain "price stability and full employment". Right. Anyone notice how many jobs the Fed has created lately? How about the dollar? Is it really supposed to zig-zag like it has been for the last decade? The central task of the Fed is to shift wealth from one class to another. And it succeeds at that task admirably.

The Fed's "mandate" is public relations claptrap. Bernanke hasn't lifted a finger for homeowners, consumers or ordinary working stiffs. All the cash is flowing upwards...according to plan. The Fed is a social engineering agency designed to serve as the de facto government behind the smokescreen of democratic institutions. Does anyone that a black, two year senator with no background in foreign policy or economics is calling the shots?

Obama is a public relations invention who's used to cut ribbons, consoling the unemployed, and convincing Americans they live in a "post racial" society. Right. (Just take a look at that footage from Katrina again.)

The Fed has complete control over monetary policy and, thus, the country's economic future. Bernanke doesn't even pretend to defer to Congress anymore. Why bother? After Lehman caved in, Bernanke invoked the "unusual and exigent" clause in the Fed's charter and declared himself czar. Now he has absolute power over the nation's purse-strings.
The $13 trillion the Fed has committed to the financial system since the beginning of the crisis --via loans and outright purchases of mortgage-backed garbage and US sovereign debt--was never authorized by Congress. In fact, the Fed stubbornly refuses to even identify which institutions got the "loans", how much the loans were worth, what kind of collateral was accepted for the loans, or when the loans have to be repaid.

In truth, the loans are not loans at all, but gifts to the industry to keep asset prices artificially high so that the entire financial system does not come crashing down. Check this out:

"In an analysis written by economist Gary Gorton for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's 2009 Financial Markets Conference titled, "Slapped in the Face by the Invisible Hand; Banking and the Panic of 2007", the author shows that mortgage-related securities ballooned from $492.6 billion in 1996 to $3,071.1 in 2003, while asset backed securities (ABS) jumped from $168.4 billion in 1996 to $1,253.1 in 2006. All told, more than $20 trillion in securitized debt was sold between 1997 to 2007. "

$20 trillion! How much of that fetid paper is sitting on the balance sheets of banks and other financial institutions just waiting to blow up as soon as the Fed asks for its money back? And the Fed will never get its money back because the prices of complex securities and derivatives will never regain their pre-crisis values. Why? Because these derivatives are linked to underlying collateral (mortgages) which have already declined 33% from their peak and are headed lower still. Also, these toxic assets were sold as risk-free (many of them were rated triple A) and have now been exposed as extremely risky or fraudulent. Because these assets were heaped together in bundles to strip out their interest rates, they cannot be easily separated which means that they are worth considerably less than the 33% that has been lost on the underlying collateral (mortgages) The securitization markets are not expected to rebound for a decade or more, which means that the Fed will have to find other more-creative way to goose the credit system to avoid a downward spiral.

But how?

Zero percent interest rates haven't worked because qualified borrowers are cutting spending and saving their disposable income, while people who need to borrow, no longer meet the banks' tougher lending standards. Bank credit is shrinking even though excess bank reserves are nearly $900 billion. When banks stop lending, the economy contracts, business activity slows, unemployment soars and growth sputters.

Presently, the economy is still contracting, but at a slower pace than before. "Less bad" is the new "good". All the recession indicators are still blinking red--income, employment, sales, and production--all down big! But it doesn't matter because it's a "Green Shoots" rally; plenty of cheap liquidity for the markets and a freeway off-ramp (for sleeping) for the unemployed.

The Fed's lending facilities are designed to pump liquidity into the system and inflate another bubble by generating more debt. Unfortunately, most people accept Bernanke's feeble defense of these corporate-welfare programs and fail to see their real purpose. An example may help to explain how they really work:

Say you bought a house at the peak of the bubble in 2005 and paid $500,000. Then prices dropped 40% (as they have in Calif) and your house is now worth $300,000. If you only put 5% down, ($25,000) then you are underwater by $175,000. Which means that you own more on the mortgage than your house is currently worth. (This is essentially what has happened to the entire financial system. The equity has vaporized, so institutions are using dodgy accounting tricks instead of reporting their real losses.) So Bernanke comes along and gives you $175,000 no interest, rotating loan to you so that no one knows that you are really busted and you can continue spending just as you had before. Not bad, eh? This is what the lending facilities are all about. It is a charade to conceal the fact that a large portion of the nation's financial institutions are insolvent and propped up by state largess.

But there's more, too.

Now that Bernanke has given you $175,000 no interest, rotating loan; you expect that eventually he will ask for his money back. Right? So your only hope of saving your home, in the long run, is to engage in risky behavior, like dabbling the stock market. It's like playing roulette, except you have nothing to lose since you are underwater anyway.

This is exactly what the financial institutions are doing with the Fed's loans. They're betting on equities and hoping they can avoid the Grim Reaper.
Here's how former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler summed it up last week in the Wall Street Journal:

"By buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgages to increase the monetary base by $1 trillion, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn't put money directly into the stock market but he didn't have to. With nowhere else to go, except maybe commodities, inflows into the stock market have been on a tear. Stock and bond funds saw net inflows of close to $150 billion since January. The dollars he cranked out didn't go into the hard economy, but instead into tradable assets. In other words, Ben Bernanke has been the market." (Andy Kessler, "The Bernanke Market" Wall Street Journal)

Only a small portion of the money that has gone into the stock market in the last 6 months (since the March lows) has come from money markets. The fed's loans are being laundered into stocks via financial institutions that are rolling the dice for their own survival. The uptick in the markets has helped insolvent banks raise equity in the capital markets so they don't have to grovel to Congress for another TARP bailout.

Everybody's elated with Bernanke's latest bubble except working people who have seen their wages slashed by 4.5%, their credit lines cut, the home values plunge, and their living standards sink to third world levels.

And the Fed's spending-spree is not over yet; not by a long shot. The next wave of home foreclosures (already 1.9 million in the first half of 2009) is just around the corner--the Alt-As, option arms, prime loans. The $3.5 trillion commercial real estate market is capsizing. The under-capitalized banking system will need more assistance. And there will have to be another round of fiscal stimulus for ailing consumers, otherwise, foreign holders of US Treasurys will see that the US can no longer provide 25% of global demand and head for the exits.

Bernanke's back is against the wall. The only thing he can do is print more money, shove though the back door of the stock exchange and keep his fingers crossed. The rest is up to CNBC and the other media cheerleaders.

The Fed chief has committed $13 trillion to maintain the appearance of solvency, but the system is bankrupt. The commercial paper market, money markets, trillions of dollars of toxic debt instruments, and myriad shyster investment banks and insurance companies are now backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US Treasury. The financial system is now a ward of the state. The "free market" has deteriorated into state capitalism; a centralized system where all the levers of power are controlled by the Central Bank. If Bernanke's Politburo withdraws its loans--or even if he raises interest rates too soon-- the system will collapse.

The economy is now balanced on the rickety scaffolding of the dollar. As the Obama stimulus wears off, the rot in the economy will become more apparent. Household red ink is at record highs, so personal consumption will not rebound. That means US assets and US sovereign debt will become less attractive. Foreign capital will flee. The dollar will fall.

The world needs a breather from the US. And they'll get it sooner than many think.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington dtate. He can be reached at [email protected]

[pacman]

    Recommended reading...        

Compare this tale of woe to Obama's attempts to introduce universal health care to the US, the only western economy in the world that doesn't have it.

The mobs are out in force screaming about the socialisation of the medical industry, the right wing media are painting this as some evil plot to introduce socialism by stealth.

Where are the voices of complaint crying out about the socialisation of the banking industry? While the people were pre-occupied with all the negative news they have been drowning in, this has now come to pass. It's a done deal.

The Land of the Free is now indebted to China, Japan, the Middle East, Central banks all round the globe & sovereign wealth funds.

They in turn are at the mercy of the Federal Reserve, their money invested holds them hostage to the whims of the Central Bankers.

There is no market, no practical market for US Bonds today, the massive printing of dollars by the Fed being used to buy up US debt, guarantees the loss of real value from any large scale sell down of US Bonds, etc.

This is the highest stake game in the world today. Nothing else comes close. Foreign governments would be sweating over plans on how to resolve this & get their money back. They know they can't ever get their original stake back but they do have skin in the game & the bargaining must be intense.

Some argue this will be the trigger to world war. I certainly hope not, but a collapse of the US dollar will leave the US with more enemies than they would know what to do with. They can't fight a war on every front.

I can only speculate on how this gets resolved. I love the crazy theories that see Hawaii & Alaska being surrendered to pay the debt. I know that won't happen but watch what China does. These people are the masters of strategy. Since before Sun Tzu wrote the Art of War, the Chinese have always played a long game. Their plan may take generations to unfold, but whatever they do, they will be negotiating themselves into the strongest possible position.

And there will be no regard for the US citizen, they will get what they wished for, a socialised banking industry & a non-socialised health industry. Exactly the opposite of what they need. How typical...        

[alan1chef]

I can always tell which posters are intelligent and which ones have a third grade mentality...the name callers fall into that third grade spot...."mouth breathing morons", "wannabechief", "burgerflipper"...really third grade. I won't waste anybody's time responding to their crap.

Turorot, I do like the single payer idea. I was just discussing this issue earlier today with a friend of mine. I also agree that the drug and insurance companies exert way too much influence on legislation, much like the auto and oil industries and it needs to be addressed.

However, I do not like seeing the government paying all the bills, nor do I think it is necessary for them to do that. We don't need a bloated bureaucracy overseeing everything and I believe that we can make that work by not eliminating the employee contribution portion of the plan. Let the users pay, not the taxpayers; allow consumers the ability to make choices to buy generic drugs without penalizing them; allow consumers to use supplements...emphasize prevention rather than treatment. In other words, get rid of the insurance and drug monopolies by opening up the medical market to competition. It is the insurance monopoly that makes medical and drug costs so outrageous in this country.

[Torurot]

Well that makes perfect sense but then the rabid right starts screaming "socialism". US Americans have NO understanding of what "socialism" is. It does NOT equal commie, but if you listen to the O'Reily mob you would swear it was worse than N Korea. Then we are back to square one and nothing done. "Capitalism" without rules is nothing less than theft and anarchy. Look at the "bankers" for current proof.

[smuttleydfs]

(alan1chef @ Aug. 08 2009,03:08) I can always tell which posters are intelligent and which ones have a third grade mentality...the name callers fall into that third grade spot...."mouth breathing morons", "wannabechief", "burgerflipper"...really third grade. I won't waste anybody's time responding to their crap.

You don't respond to my crap wannabechief because you can't compete........bottom line