Wall Street

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Banks, And Student Loan Rates

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Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is a treasure to behold, and the legislation she has just introduced, to give college students the same low loan interest rate that the big banks get from the Federal Reserve when they borrow money, is a wonderful idea!

Instead of a doubling of student loan interest rates from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, Warren suggests that the rate be what Wall Street gets from the Federal Reserve–0.75 percent!

Why not, as the big Wall Street banks have caused the Great Recession of 2008, and are still victimizing mortgage holders and credit card owners with outrageous rates, and also forcing many into bankruptcy by intimidation and manipulation?

The big banks need to be put under tight regulation, but of course the Republicans in the House refuse any such thought, and if this is not enough to convince sane people that the GOP is out for the wealthy alone, then what will?

Warren should be applauded for her effort on student loan rates, and fight for fairness, even though it is a long term battle!

And if Hillary Clinton decided ultimately not to run for President, then Warren needs to become the alternative female candidate for President of the United States! She would be an inspiring leader for the American middle class and the poor!

“Socialist” Barack Obama And The Doubling Of the Dow Jones Industrial Average

Ronald 3 Comments

It is amazing how the right wing continues to call Barack Obama a “Socialist” and worse, and yet the Dow Jones Industrial Average has doubled from its low point in March 2009, due to the Bush Great Recession, and is now at its all time high!

Wall Street is doing fantastically, while Main Street is not, due to the refusal of the GOP and the corporations to cooperate, since their goal is to make Barack Obama a failed Presidency, but even with that, five million jobs have been created in the past four years, recovering the losses under Bush and in the early months of Obama, and beginning to gain beyond the massive losses, the greatest since the Great Depression.

But of course, Obama is made out to be the “devil”, and no matter what occurs, it is always rejected, with the goal being to propagandize so that Obama will be perceived as a total failure in all areas.

But the American people know differently, and a majority twice have chosen him because he is not a captive of the corporations, and is out to regulate Wall Street through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the strong advocacy of holding Wall Street to account of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts!

Republicans Seem To Be Suicidal In Reluctance To Change Course

Ronald 37 Comments

The Republican Party is in its death throes more and more each week.

The country is no longer interested in their agenda, in their candidates, in their goals, and in their promotion of fear and hate!

The GOP has lost five of the last six popular vote totals for President, despite spending inordinate amounts of money, the most ever in 2012, due to the Citizens United case of the Supreme Court in 2010.

But they have elements that are destroying them from within like a cancer!

These destructive elements include:

The right wing conservative talk show hosts on radio and Fox News Channel, who are making massive amounts of money promoting hate, fear and division, and until the GOP tells Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and their ilk to go somewhere, they will be going down the road to destruction!

The power of the National Rifle Association and Wayne La Pierre, and its campaign to defeat any candidate who wants any reasonable gun regulations, is going to cause the defeat of Senators and Congressmen, who are unwilling to sell their souls to this powerful pressure group!

The Tea Party Movement, which wants to wipe out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and is furious at Republican Governors, including the latest convert on ObamaCare, Florida Governor Rick Scott, making it a total of seven Republican Governors who have decided to accept that program, has plans to run candidates against anyone who does not wish to support their desire to go back to the 19th century and wipe out all aspects of the welfare state, so Maine Senator Susan Collins is on a hit list, as is even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for not being conservative enough! Do not forget that the Koch Brothers and other wealthy billionaires are the brains behind this movement, which is lower class populism gone wild, but they have the ability to harm the Republican Party establishment! And Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are the lead elements in this Tea Party uprising, who might cause the Republican Party to go down to defeat in many races, because of their loony libertarianism!

The right wing evangelical Christian movement, which will fight any move toward acceptance of gay rights and gay marriage, abortion rights, immigration reform, and gun regulation, as well as their desire to promote religion in the education curriculum, rejecting science and history, and promotion of a theocracy in states that have large numbers of their believers.

The “NeoCons”, Neoconservatives, who want more money spent on defense, advocate overseas military interventions, and glorify wars in the name of American capitalism and profits! They had power under George W. Bush, but are now trying to defeat Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary.

And finally, the no tax increase crowd, led by Grover Norquist of Americans For Tax Reform, a group which is starting to see some Republicans abandon them, but not enough, and willing to back corporate loopholes and the wealthy, at the expense of the middle class and the poor, these two groups failing to understand that this elite has no concerns, except to back the establishment on Wall Street and in the corporate world, even at a time when corporate profits are soaring, and the stock market has doubled under Barack Obama!

These are the destructive elements in the Republican Party, and will cause its total dissolution very soon if the direction of the party is not changed to appeal to the moderate center, the tradition of the party under Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and YES, even in the time of Ronald Reagan, when moderates were still a major part of the party success, and Reagan a conservative but not an extremist, as these various elements of the party are in 2013!

Former Vice President Dick Cheney And Obama Foreign Policy: Total Hypocrisy!

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the disastrous Bush foreign policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now denounced the Barack Obama foreign policy as a failure, and termed his appointments of John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and John Brennan as dismal and second rate. when the Bush team, including Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and others demonstrated total arrogance and total incompetence in their leadership of our foreign policy for eight years!

The fact that Obama has fought terrorism effectively is ignored, an amazing development when it was under Cheney and George W. Bush that America was attacked. Imagine if Al Gore had been President on September 11, 2001, and the literal hell that Gore would have suffered for such an attack occurring!

Cheney predicted that the war in Iraq would be won easily, and the fact that more than 4,000 Americans were killed in that war does not concern him, or the tens of thousands of men and women disabled by the war.

Cheney helped contribute to a feeble war effort in Afghanistan, and ten years later, we are still in that nation, with over 2,000 Americans killed, and still with 68,000 troops there facing threats every day of loss of life or serious disabilities.

This man also said that deficits and the national debt were not important issues, but of course, now his party emphasizes that, after the destructive financial policies they pursued, including NOT raising taxes in time of war, and helping the top two percent gain the biggest tax cuts in history, and yet see total abuse by Wall Street and the corporations, leading to the Great Recession!

The fact that this most despicable man of recent times has the nerve to even speak up on Presidential leadership, when his own President was a true disaster in so many ways, shows he has no shame or feeling of guilt or responsibility for what he and George W. Bush have wrought!

Good Question: Would Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, And Dwight D. Eisenhower Be Republicans In 2012? ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Ronald 2 Comments

When one looks at the sad state of the Republican Party in 2012, having lost the popular vote FIVE times in the past six elections, and when one analyzes the kinds of groups and viewpoints of their base—right wing social and religious extremists, neoconservatives, Grover Norquist inspired economic viewpoints, Wall Street elitists, and the Old Confederacy view on racial matters, the feeling that develops is that the Republican Party has lost its moorings, and will not reach national power in the Senate and the White House until they change radically, and back toward the moderate center.

But one has to wonder, would three of the icons of the Republican past even wish to be associated with the present mess that is the GOP?

Would Abraham Lincoln be a Republican today? Clearly, the answer is no, as his views would not conform with today’s GOP, including the racism, the movement toward secession by extremist elements, and the religious foothold in the party.

But neither would Teddy Roosevelt, with his belief in regulation of big business, trust in national government, promotion of the environment, and dislike of wealthy corporate leaders who exploited labor.

And neither would Dwight D. Eisenhower, affectionately known as “Ike”, who was basically nonpartisan, who could have just as easily become a Democrat in 1948, when offered a chance to run for President, but turned it down. With his ultimate election as a Republican, he ended the debate among conservatives in the party about attempting to repeal the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and announced acceptance of what it had done.

Imagine: the three most respected and honored leaders of the party, if alive today, would have broken with the Republicans, and would have found the Democratic Party much more to their liking, with its platform of change, reform, and progress!

And all three would have been proud of a nation that not only elected the first African American President, Barack Obama, but went ahead and reelected him as well!

Why Do So Many Ridicule A Person, Such As Barack Obama, Who Becomes A Community Organizer?

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One of the most frustrating comments this author has heard over and over again from people who worship money and the corporate world, is that Barack Obama was a “community organizer”, said in a derisive manner!

Why is this so?

Why is it that enriching oneself in equity capital, being a “vulture capitalist,” as Mitt Romney has been, even stated so by his own Republican opponents in the primaries, is so honored, while someone, who wishes to help the poor, the disadvantaged, the people in the ghettos who have difficult lives, is ridiculed? Is it because there is the image that only minorities, not white people, are poor, which is far from the truth!

Why is our moral and ethical standard based on being wealthy, even if one exploits workers, shuts down businesses, acts in a privileged way, has no regard for people who one hurts, and sees things only in dollars and cents?

Being a “community organizer”, or being in the Peace Corps, or being a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, is a great experience of caring about others, helping others, doing (without being religious), God’s work on earth!

We are supposed to be “our brother’s keeper”, not our “brother’s exploiter” for personal gain!

What Barack Obama’s Election To A Second Term As President Means

Ronald 3 Comments

The second term victory of Barack Obama has many meanings, including:

ObamaCare is here to stay, although there will be tinkering and fine tuning of the program. Who would have thought that Chief Justice John Roberts would save it, and that the ability of the Republican Party to smash it would be a total failure?

The Supreme Court is safe from a right wing tilt, as it is now Barack Obama and a stronger Democratic Senate who will have control over future Court appointments, and lower court nominees as well, and therefore, Obama’s effect on constitutional law will be massive.

The advance of gay rights and gay marriage is now guaranteed, and expect that the Supreme Court will rule on it soon, very likely favorably, and that never again will any state or any religious group be able to deny a basic human right to anyone, the right to marry a person you love.

The environment will be advanced greatly, and likely, often by executive order. Expect that Barack Obama will accomplish enough reform, that he will rank with Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter as an environmentalist.

The labor movement, in deep trouble for a long time, will now have a champion who will help to revive it, and gain the respect of the American people for the importance of unions.

There will be attempts to deal with the problem of poverty, and expect that Obama will attempt to do what Al Gore planned, had he been inaugurated as President in 2001— a War on Poverty.

Wall Street knows it will have a President who intends to fight them on the subject of regulation, as the voters made clear they wanted government oversight of the financial industry in the public interest.

The right of women to control their reproductive lives, and to have equal pay and respect, will be championed by Barack Obama. No more disrespect for women will become part of the agenda.

The ability to help Latinos and Hispanics achieve advancement in America will be promoted, as they made a dramatic difference in this election, and a plan for immigration reform will move forward, as even sane people in the Republican Party, such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, know it is essential for political survival, as well as being what is moral and ethical.

Taxes will go up to make up for past irresponsibility on paying for two wars, and is essential to make budget cuts less onerous, and the rich will go back to paying the rates they paid under Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and they will simply have to understand we are all going to have to sacrifice for the good of the nation and its future.

The possibility of engagement in foreign wars, including against Iran, will be lessened dramatically, although there can never be a certainty that America can avoid foreign conflict, but at least we have a President who will make every effort to avert it.

America will have a President who does not dismiss any percentage of the population, but instead a President who is sincere, genuine, caring, decent, and will work as hard as he can for our advancement. And if he makes mistakes, he will be accountable for them, and will always come across as someone who dedicates every waking moment to our success as a nation.

Barack Obama will have our back, and we will come to appreciate him in the long run of history!

American Jews, Israel And Barack Obama: Why Two Thirds Of Jews Will Support Obama Over Mitt Romney

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With two days to go until the election, the Republican Jewish Coalition has been actively trying to convince American Jews that Barack Obama is not supportive of Israel, and that they should support Mitt Romney for President.

Will the RJC succeed? To some extent, yes, in the sense that while 78 percent of American Jews backed Barack Obama in 2008, the number will be down to about 60-63 percent in 2012.

There are those Jews who are extremely wealthy and do not wish to pay more taxes, such as the group which met in Boca Raton, at the infamous gathering where Romney talked about the “47 percent”. Those who are corporate, Wall Street, and banking related will wish to have the government abandon any regulations, so they can go about their merry way abusing their industries, as they did in 2008. and earlier, without any care for the damage they were doing to the American economy!

Those who are highly religious will use it as a means to promote prejudice, based on the belief that Obama is a secret Muslim, and of course, being black, is not a plus to highly religious people, whether Jewish or Christian, a sad commentary on what the meaning of religion is all about!

Those who look at Israel as the number one issue will wish to allow Benjamin Netanyahu to influence American policy, even though if any other foreign leader ever attempted to interfere as Netanyahu has, they would be infuriated by such boldness of a foreign leader!

But American Jews, while caring about Israel, will not allow Netanyahu, or religiosity, or counting their money, to be the key factors in their voting. So yes, the percentage will be down, but Jews who do not allow any of the above to influence them will remember that Obama and his party are the party of the New Deal and Great Society reforms, which Romney and the Republicans wish to destroy!

They will know that it was REPUBLICAN Presidents who made life much more difficult for Israel, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, even though the RJC conveniently manipulates the truth about that

They will know that Defense Minister Ehud Barak (a former Prime Minister); Shimon Peres (Israel’s President); Haaretz (the oldest Israeli daily newspaper); Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel; and most prominent American Jewish leaders have all endorsed Obama, or said that he has been the best friend of Israel of all American Presidents.

They will know that most American Presidents either never visited Israel, or not in their first term, despite the lies of the RJC.

They will know that Obama has supplied Israel with the IRONDOME missile defense system, and more than $3.1 billion in security spending beyond that, and has defended Israel consistently in international organizations, including the United Nations.

They know that George W. Bush also talked about the 1967 borders as a beginning point for negotiations, the same thing that Barack Obama said.

They know the Jewish tradition of being activists in civil rights; of supporting women’s rights; of being big promoters of labor unions; of being involved in promoting education and the environment on a regular basis; and advocates of aid to the disabled; and of always being against the negativism of the Republican Party on domestic matters, always resisting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and every other social, economic and political reform the Democrats have promoted over the past century.

They know that the party of the people is NOT the Republicans, but the Democrats, and they are not about to abandon the party that has done so much good, particularly when we could see the alternative of the most right wing threat in American history since Barry Goldwater in 1964!

American Jews are OVERWHELMINGLY oriented toward reform, progress, change, compassion for those who are discriminated against and less fortunate, and they are intelligent and wise enough not to vote for the party of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and right wing evangelicals who wish to take away our civil liberties and civil rights!

So close to two thirds of American Jews will repudiate the RJC, and support their President, Barack Obama!

October 29, 1929: Greatest Economic Disaster! October 29, 2012: Greatest Natural Disaster?

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On this day, 83 years ago, in the year 1929, the United States experienced the Great Crash on Wall Street, the greatest economic disaster in American history, the beginning of the ten year long Great Depression. After three and a half years, the nation elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, who came up with plans that helped to alleviate these terrible economic conditions, and the New Deal changed America!

Now on this day in 2012, the Atlantic coast of the nation, with 60 million people, is about to be hit by the potentially worst, most costly natural disaster in American history, Hurricane Sandy, and we have a President, Barack Obama, facing a challenging political situation to win reelection in just eight days, and he now has an opportunity, but also a challenge, to deal with this crisis which could decide whether he will be inaugurated for a second term on January 20, 2013.

It is ironic that October 29 will go down in history for being the date of two important turning points in American history!

Sesame Street And Education Vs. Wall Street And Mitt Romney!

Ronald 1 Comment

Mitt Romney jokingly talked about stopping funding of PBS and Sesame Street during the Presidential debate, and “Big Bird” and the educational community is up in arms over the pettiness of what Romney is promoting!

As Barack Obama said yesterday, we need a war NOT on Sesame Street and PBS, which represents one one thousandth of a point of the national budget, but to crack down on Wall Street abuses, and prevent more tax cuts to the wealthy!

PBS and Sesame Street represent the future of America—education and knowledge–and the Republican Party is only concerned about the elite wealthy, and yet Romney lies through his teeth incessantly that he “cares” about the “one hundred percent”, and claims the “47 percent” comment was just a slip in one of hundreds or thousands of statements or speeches during his campaign!

Of course, the “47 percent” speech was NOT to a politically rally, or to a journalist, but to a group of super wealthy contributors in Boca Raton, and one can certain that this shows the TRUE Romney, and that his statement is NOT a mistake, except for the fact it got out to the public, and has caused the rapid decline in Romney fortunes!

By making 27 lies in 38 minutes of the Presidential debate, and attacking Sesame Street and “Big Bird”, and then claiming the “47 percent” statement was a slip up, when it was not, and only is seen as so because the American people know about it, Mitt Romney has “shot himself in the foot” yet again, and his Presidential fortunes will be no better on November 6!