“Citigroup and Bank of America are hardly the only two financial firms to confront the issue. During the last three months of 2008, at least seven other firms receiving bailout funds — American Express, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, KeyCorp, Morgan Stanley, PNC and Bank of New York Mellon — all lobbied the government about the bailout, according to a review of their most recent disclosure reports.

The automakers that received billions under the same program lobbied as well: including General Motors; its financing arm, GMAC; and Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that controls Chrysler. Other recipients of federal financing also lobbied Congress, the Treasury or both about other matters. ” (Read more from nytimes.com)

Disgusting. How can all my liberal friends be so quick to forgive Obama for supporting the bailout?

See also:
AP: 9 in 10 execs at bailout banks remain on job -
Bosses whose banks made risky loans are now counted on to save system

Author, teacher, Marilynne Robinson commented on the light bulbs in this interview about her book Mother Country:

“We know that these new lightbulbs cut down on electricity, but where do they come from? China? Hungary? They have to be dealt with as toxic waste because they have mercury in them. So who’s being exposed to these chemicals when they’re manufactured and what are the environmental consequences in China or Hungary? What is the tradeoff in terms of shipping them long distances to save a little bit of electricity?”

Ron Paul is not alone! Freshman Rep. McClintock gave the following floor speech in support of H.J.Res. 3, which was a Republican measure to deny the authorization of the remaining portion of the $350 billion in bailout funds.

Obama’s Culture of Service adds insult to injury
“One of the things President Obama has been touting is his idea of a ‘culture of service’ in which we all do something to ‘give back’ and help the country. What? Seriously?

Last I checked, most of us spend the first several months of the year serving our local, state, and federal governments. The average person doesn’t start earning more than his annual combined tax bill until March or April (for the country as a whole, it’s known as Tax Freedom Day, and the date was April 23rd last year).

So in addition to the involuntary service government extracts from us under threat of violence, the Prez has the gall to ask us to give up even more of our life to serve the country? Talk about adding insult to injury. And on top of that he wants to use the money his agents confiscate from us to fund national service programs! Is there a better definition of insanity?” (Read more from nocoercion.com)

Why Do You Pay Taxes?
“Take this morning, for instance. We can credit the ‘ingenuity of the markets’, and specifically the ingenuity of John Thain, for moving annual executive bonus payments by Merrill Lynch up by a month last November, thus disbursing $15 billion in executive bonuses just before closing Merrill’s acquisition by Bank of America. Fast forward a few months, and the United States taxpayer just gave Bank of America another $20 billion in newly-borrowed funds to put a band-aid on mortar wounds in Merrill Lynch’s balance sheet.

Doesn’t that make you relish the withholding from your paycheck? Seventy-five percent of the cash payment from our latest Bank of America bailout went directly to Merrill Lynch executives.

. . . .

I’d encourage you to consider the American banking system as a new national park. You’ve paid over $350 billion already, with trillions in future guarantees. In the case of Bank of America, the most recent $138 billion bailout dwarfs its market capitalization, so you own it just as certainly as you own Yosemite.

Visit the offices of local TARP-receiving banks. Enjoy a cup of coffee, admire the decorations on the walls. If you’ve been laid off, evicted, or otherwise having trouble making ends meet, you might try camping in the parking lot or on the leather couches inside.”(Read more from unitedliberty.org

“Barack Obama has spoken often of sacrifice. And as recently as a week ago, he said that to stave off the deepening recession Americans should be prepared to face ‘trillion dollar deficits for years to come.’

But apart from a stirring call for volunteerism in his inaugural address, the only specific sacrifices the president has outlined thus far include lower taxes, millions of federally funded jobs, expanded corporate bailouts, and direct stimulus checks to consumers. Could this be described as sacrificial?

What he might have said was that the nations funding the majority of America’s public debt — most notably the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis — need to be prepared to sacrifice. They have to fund America’s annual trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. These creditor nations, who already own trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt, are the only entities capable of underwriting the spending that Mr. Obama envisions and that U.S. citizens demand.

. . . .

Currently, U.S. citizens comprise less than 5% of world population, but account for more than 25% of global GDP. Given our debts and weakening economy, this disproportionate advantage should narrow. Yet the U.S. is asking much poorer foreign nations to maintain the status quo, and incredibly, they are complying. At least for now.

You can’t blame the Obama administration for choosing to go down this path. If these other nations are giving, it becomes very easy to take. However, given his supposedly post-ideological pragmatic gifts, one would hope that Mr. Obama can see that, just like all other bubbles in world history, the U.S. debt bubble will end badly. Taking on more debt to maintain spending is neither sacrificial nor beneficial.” (Read more from online.wsj.com)

Who is Peter Schiff? President of Euro Pacific Capital, and the man who called the crash. Listen to the ridicule he dealt with:

“In his inauguration speech, President Obama singled out ‘honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and patriotism’ as ‘those values upon which our success depends.’

So why did Obama nominate a tax scofflaw to head the U.S. Treasury, which oversees the Internal Revenue Service?

. . . .

The tax issue: Geithner, who now heads the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes when they were due on income he received from the International Monetary Fund between 2001 and 2004.” (Read more from sfgate.com)

Obama = more of the same

See Also:
Meet the New Boss; Same as the Old Boss

From seekingalpha.com:

“If this doesn’t give you pause, nothing will. From East Coast Economics:

Here is a chart of federal borrowing through Dec. 2007.

Now, same chart through December 2008.

Anyone still think there are not some rough patches down the road?”

From invokemedia.com:

(click to enlarge)

Famous libertarian blogger Lew Rockwell records fantastic podcasts about the economic melt down and other issues. Find them here. I suggest downloading them to your audio players and listening during your commute. It’ll give you a perspective besides the Keynesian propaganda dominating the airwaves.

Here are some recent podcasts:

Jan 21st: Interview with Bob Murphy on the Great Depression and New Deal.

Dec 23rd: Ron Paul: There is Hope

Dec 21st: Bailout Crimes

“Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating “downvote bots” or scripts to bury stories which question the government.

. . . .

One free, simple scripting program to create automatic downvotes of certain topics or news posters is called “Greasemonkey”, which is commonly used on large social news sites such as Reddit.

. . . .

Propaganda agents obviously aren’t going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.

As one example of a publicly-available downvote bot, this script automatically downvotes any stories on 9/11, Gaza, torture, Guantanamo and a host of other topics, downvotes certain posters, and engages in other forms of cyber warfare.” (Read more from George Washington’s blog)