Yesterday, Congress rejected the $700 billion Wall Street bailout proposal, and I for one am thankful that the politicians are actually showing some will power and acting in the interests of the people instead of the Wall Street people. Dennis Kucinich once again brought that heat and put it down for working and middle class Americans in his speech on the House floor.
The Bushies are proposing using $700 billion in taxpayer money to bailout the Wall Street CEOs who got us into this mess in the first place, effectively letting them off the hook with zero accountability for their terrible decisions and putting the burden on us, the people. Instead of talking about using tax payer dollars to bailout Wall Street as if that is the only option, why don’t we use that money to bailout the taxpayers themselves, by helping them pay off their mortgages?
“The reason the system is exploding is because the various financial institutions have been allowed–via deregulation–to act as banks and create as much credit as they choose without a sufficient capital base. When one reads about massive deleveraging, this relates directly to the fact that under-capitalized businesses were operating with too much debt in relationship to their capital. That’s it in a nutshell; forget about the CDOs, the MBSs, the CDS and the whole alphabet soup of derivatives garbage. They were all inserted into the system so Wall Street landsharks could expand credit without supervision and balance trillions of dollars of debt on the back of a one dollar bill. This is why Paulson wants to suspend the rules which would bring credibility and trust back to the system. After all, that might impinge on Wall Street’s ability to enrich itself at the public’s expense.”
It is actually a block of very fired up Republican legislators, as well as progressive Dems like Kucinich and Oakland’s Barbara Lee, who pushed to defeat the bill. What’s even crazier to me is the fact that when I read all the analysis of the situation, I’ve been finding myself feeling the comments made by Republican legislators who voted in opposition to the plan way more than the lame ass Democrats like Nancy Pelosi who are calling for the parties to unite in passing it. For example, Darryl Issa, R-Riverside County, states that “This is a manufactured crisis…the administration already has the tools it needs to inject banks with capital, [which would be] every bit as effective as the bailout.”
We’re in for some crazy times, ya’ll. Brace yourselves.
I first saw this video posted at Rage’s blog, Down on the Brown Side. His blog is awesome and I highly recommend folks check it out to see what this conscious brother is thinking and doing in NYC.
That being said, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich’s speech a couple days ago at the DNC was the shit. I was so sick of all the pundits on CNN talking about how “no one was firing up the crowd” on the same day that Kucinich gave this speech. See how fired up the crowd gets when you give them a progressive populist message? That’s because those are the kind of politics that the people are hungry for in these bleak times. And yet, the Dems continue to move to the right in an attempt to appeal to everyone (I was really not inspired by Joe Biden’s Cold War-esque jabs at Russia and China and his call to send tons of troops to Afghanistan in his speech last night). As one of the last staunchly progressive voices in the Democratic party, I hope that Kucinich doesn’t continue to get marginalized by his own party.
Also notice how Kucinich’s speech was only televised on C-SPAN, which brings me to my next schpeal. You don’t hear this too much on The Cheddar Box, but God bless this old white guy:
Who is this old white guy, you ask? That’s Brian Lamb, the founder and CEO of C-SPAN. I’ve come to appreciate C-SPAN more and more lately because of its position as a television station airing nonstop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs programming that is unedited, uncensored and commercial free. According to it’s wikipedia entry:
Uncommonly for a television network, C-SPAN is operated as a non-profit organization by the National Cable Satellite Corporation, whose board of directors consists primarily of representatives of the largest cable companies. C-SPAN accepts no advertising; instead, it receives nearly all its funding from subscriber fees charged to cable and DBS operators. Contrary to popular perception, C-SPAN receives no funding from government sources.
In its early days, cable companies tried to replace C-SPAN with revenue-producing channels. As stated above, C-SPAN is funded by the cable industry; thus, the industry loses money airing C-SPAN. However, C-SPAN had developed somewhat of a “cult following” among political junkies and citizens who had always wanted to see what was really happening with their elected officials. Avid C-SPAN viewers often refer to themselves as “C-SPAN Junkies,” “SPANners,” or “Spanheads”.
Over time, the cable companies and the general public realized that C-SPAN provided a desired and much needed public service; a “window” into the operations of Congress. C-SPAN has never had the ratings of major networks, but it has a devoted following.
It’s crazy to me that in the hyper-capitalist cable industry that is so centered on ad revenue, there is a space for politics that is unedited, commercial free, and paid for by the cable industry itself! That means C-SPAN’S existence actually loses money for the industry, but they keep it going because the people demand it. Bananas. So even though I might not always be glued to my seat while watching a four hour session of the joint House and Senate Printing committee, I appreciate knowing that if I really wanted to, I could watch it on C-SPAN.
With the presidential primaries in full swing, I thought the fact that Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich has been locked out of both debates in Iowa and New Hampshire is pretty fucked up. ABC and its parent company, Disney Corporate, locked him out of their televised debate last week in New Hampshire because he apparently didn’t reach a high enough percentage in a recent poll. Bullshit. The debates co-sponser, Facebook, held their own poll in which Kucinich reached a percentage far higher than ABC’s requirement of 5%. The man is a legitimate Democratic candidate who receives federal tax dollar funding under the law! His policy stances are the most progressive out of all of the candidates (besides questionable opinions on reproductive rights, but I’m not sure the more “electable” candidates are all that much better on the issue). His biting attacks in the debates are a threat to the corporate establishment, and thus a progressive voice is silenced by our current political system. Disney gets a fat “Fuck You” from The Box.
