Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) was prescient when he gave this speech in the Senate on November 4, 1999 regarding the Gramm Leach Bliley Act.
Yes, Virginia, Senator Dorgan saw a light at the end of the tunnel and he knew a train was coming. He knew it wasn’t sunshine and that the passage of the Gramm Leach Bliley Act would eventually bring down our economy.
Did you hear Senator Dorgan say “Too big to fail“? These words are so familiar to us. Unfortunately, Congress didn’t heed Senator Dorgan’s words. He predicted that we would be visiting the failures in 10 to 15 years as a result of passing the Gramm Leach Bliley Act and Congress didn’t listen.
Things are getting really rough out there. Retail sales are way down and everyone I speak with is concerned about keeping their job. Donations to charities have fallen. Even the recycling business is having a tough go of it. Our economy is slowly coming to a halt. The Republicans under the leadership of George W. Bush have given tax breaks to US companies to send our jobs overseas and the Democrats in Congress under the leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have remained silent. Can you believe this? Tax breaks for taking jobs away from the American worker. In the meantime, CEO’s keep receiving “cash rewards” while the workers lose their jobs. We don’t manufacture much in the US anymore so we have little to export. We just provide “service” and that “service” has moved to other countries with the blessings of both political parties.
The Republicans actually had the audacity to attack Union workers while at the same time stuffing money into the pockets of Wall Street CEOs. Remember the “crisis” in September where Congress had to approve a $700 billion bailout and the Bush administration didn’t want any oversight? Well, there still isn’t any “real” oversight and our tax dollars keep flying out of the US Treasury. The Chinese are now recruiting for the banking industry and this can only mean that the Chinese want to take over our banking system. The Bush administration has sold US outand the media is worried about 21 conversations that DIDN’T happen between Blagojevich and Obama’s transition team. No one wants to assume responsibility for our current crisis and the media remains silent.
A sign that the times are tough is when no one applies for a rental property. We own a few rentals and usually when one becomes vacant, we get a long list of interested people. Right now, we have an empty apartment and very, very few applicants. Without a job, no one will apply for a rental and we can’t afford to rent to someone without an income.
Bush doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of us. His only concern is his new portrait and making sure that he can pass the blame for his failures onto someone else. He is set for life and if things go crazy, he can always move to Paraguay. In the meantime, American workers must scrounge for “cake”.
This is thereal Bush legacy, the Depression of 2008. Times are tough. Hey, brother can you spare a dime?
No wonder John McCain says he doesn’t understand the economy. He was in cahoots with the Charles Keating where 20,000 Americans lost their savings when the Savings and Loan failed. John McCain pushed for deregulation then and he continues to push for deregulation now. And speaking of now, the taxpayers were presented with another bailout to the tune of $700 billion. John McCain still supports deregulation and he wants to deregulate health care and he wants people under the age of 55 to put their Social Security money in a failing stock market.
John McCain, bad for the economy.
Shorter video below:
UPDATE: John McCain and Charles Keating:
(excerpt from Rolling Stone – referencing John McCain’s first run for Congress)
To finance his campaign, McCain dipped into the Hensley family fortune. He secured an endorsement from his mentor, Sen. Tower, who tapped his vast donor network in Texas to give McCain a much-needed boost. And he began an unethical relationship with a high-flying and corrupt financier that would come to characterize his cozy dealings with major donors and lobbyists over the years.
Charlie Keating, the banker and anti-pornography crusader, would ultimately be convicted on 73 counts of fraud and racketeering for his role in the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s. That crisis, much like today’s subprime-mortgage meltdown, resulted from misbegotten banking deregulation, and ultimately left taxpayers to pick up a tab of more than $124 billion. Keating, who raised more than $100,000 for McCain’s race, lavished the first-term congressman with the kind of political favors that would make Jack Abramoff blush. McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating’s expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul’s estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as “Charlie Keating’s Shangri-La.” Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.
John McCain, more of the same. His economic plan is to “stop government spending”. Hello, it’s not government spending that created this downward spiral on Wall Street. It’s the deregulation that, Phil Graham, McCain’s economic adviser put into place back in the 1990’s. Yeah, McCain’s friend George W Bush wants Main Street to give him a blank check. Why? So he can run off to Paraguay with our money in January 09? I’ve said it before and I will say it again… NEVER TRUST A REPUBLICAN WITH YOUR MONEY. HOLD ONTO YOUR WALLET WHEN A REPUBLICAN TALKS ABOUT “CHANGE” BECAUSE IT WILL COST YOUR MORE MONEY.
What the news is not talking about is that small banks are doing just fine.
Organizing for Change 