“Hold Your Heads Up”

In reference to Bob Herbert’s column in today’s New York Times admonishing Liberals to buck up and “Hold Your Heads Up”

To be fair you need to say what Conservative Republicans have given our country. You cannot blame the invasion and occupation of Iraq on Republicans only. Sure the Bush Administration’s neoconservatives gleefully invented an imaginary connection in Iraq to the attack on New York City and Washington; but unless we fully embraced solar, wind and other renewable energy sources some sort of invasion or treaty to grab the oil in Iraq would have occurred.

What the Republican (so-called) conservatives really gave us is deregulation so complete that except for ethical and moral reasons corporations no longer have any inhibition against stealing and cheating. At least from the outside, no one is watching. They only get caught when an officer or employee with a shred of conscience left rats on them. Even then the sentence for a CEO is usually a multi-million dollar severance package. After all when every major corporation operating in the USA has cheating and stealing built into their DNA an honest, moral and ethical company operates at a disadvantage; or so the reasoning goes until they are caught and everybody connected with the company looses big time (see Enron Corporation).

From, FBI saw threat of mortgage crisis, By Richard B. Schmitt
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, August 25, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mortgagefraud25-2008aug25,0,6946937.story

“Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible.

"It has the potential to be an epidemic," Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004. But, he added reassuringly, the FBI was on the case. "We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis," he said.

Today, the damage from the global mortgage meltdown has more than matched that of the savings-and-loan bailouts of the 1980s and early 1990s. By some estimates, it has made that costly debacle look like chump change. But it's also clear that the FBI failed to avert a problem it had accurately forecast.”


• The Republicans gave us Enron, Bear Stearns, Getty, (it turned out that Getty’s profits came from not paying state and federal gas pump taxes and not from the alleged former Russian mobster CEO’s financial genius), and now Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac.

• The Republicans gave us; Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Carl Rove, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales.

• The Republicans have taken a national budgetary surplus and in just 7 years through a combination of profuse reckless spending and tax give always to the extremely wealthy turned it into a monstrous fast growing budget deficit of $407 Billion.

• The Republicans have made foreign countries, chiefly China the “landlords” of our national debt and the financial owners of the United States. The desperate moves to shore up Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac is to keep those nations, mostly China from losing all confidence and abandoning the USA to the fiscal graveyard and moving on with building their country’s wealth.

From The Nation, The Silence of Lambs, posted by William Greider on 09/08/2008 @ 3:08pm http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/356921/the_silence_of_lambs
“Facing the crisis honestly would not fit very well with the flag-waving campaign themes. The United States is financially busted and utterly dependent on lending from foreign powers--both friends and rivals around the world. The government rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could not be put off until after the election, as insiders had hoped, because foreign creditors were beginning to back away from lending any more capital to the two failing US firms. The major creditors are led by China, Japan and other Asian nations, plus oil-rich Arab states and even Russia. The Bank of China has reduced its $376 billion in lending to Fannie and Freddie by 25 percent since July and other nations threaten to do the same.
So the Treasury arranged a deal that throws Fannie and Freddie shareholders over the side, but promises to protect the creditors, foreign and domestic. Bill Gross, chief investment officer of PIMCO, the mammoth bond house in California, issued an ominous warning in advance. If Washington didn't "open up the balance sheet of the US Treasury" and pump lots of public money into the ailing financial firms, the major lenders would sit by and let the great deflation of Wall Street proceed to its ruinous climax. Without the big lenders, credit would dry up through the US economy and the destruction could prove bloody historic for all. The Treasury Secretary heard the message.”
If this last ditch effort does not work; what ordinary people are threatened with is double digit interest rates, plunging property values and very high unemployment. That is what the Republicans can so very patriotically clam as their contribution to the citizens of the USA.
Jim Pitcherella

________________________________________

September 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Hold Your Heads Up
By BOB HERBERT
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/opinion/09herbert.html?hp