Economic Stimulus = Treasury Bonds, Paid Back by Future Generations

I had a chat about economics with my family on mothers' day and I remember the question of China's loan for the economic stimulus checks. At the time I hadn't read too much detail about the stimulus checks so I didn't have an educated opinion of the subject.
It seems the answer was simpler than I thought; foreign owned treasury bonds bought by countries like Japan, China, UK and groups such as OPEC (see chart) pay for stimulus checks sent out to U.S. taxpayers. These countries own our country's debt.
Take a look at #4 on the chart, "oil exporters," footnote #3 lays out the list of included countries who are also under OPEC, which is important to note that its members started trading in Euros instead of Dollars (U.S. isn't part of OPEC) shortly before the U.S. began invading it's member countries. How many countries in that footnote were part of Bush's "axis of evil?" What a coincidence.

chart -Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Bonds

http://www.xe.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC

"After the introduction of the euro (1999), pre-invasion Iraq decided it wanted to be paid for its oil in euros instead of US dollars causing OPEC to consider changing its oil exchange currency to euros, although after Iraq's invasion, the interim government reversed this policy, and the subsequent Iraq governments stuck to the US dollar.[16] Member states Iran and Venezuela have undergone similar shifts from the dollar to the Euro.

In 2000, Chávez hosted the first summit of heads of state of OPEC in 25 years. The next year, however, the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan,"
the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt against Hugo Chavez, "and 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation prompted a surge in oil prices to levels far higher than those targeted by OPEC during the preceding period.
On November 19, 2007, global oil prices reacted strongly as OPEC members spoke openly about potentially converting their cash reserves to the euro and away from the US dollar."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC#Responding_to_war_and_low_prices
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Venezuelan_coup_d%27état_attempt


"The Bureau of the Public Debt borrows money needed to operate the Federal Government, accounts for the resulting debt, and provides reimbursable services to other Federal agencies. The bureau pays interest to investors and redeems investors' securities. Borrowings total about $5 trillion each year through 220 or so marketable securities auctions and savings bond sales at over 40,000 locations throughout the U.S. The Bureau of the Public Debt sells securities directly to and maintains accounts for investors in its TreasuryDirect system."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_the_Public_Deb

Right now the only presidential candidate with clear plans to prevent future generations from having to take the burden of paying off these debts is Ralph Nader.
"In recent years, the big five oil companies - ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP and Shell - have booked record profits - a big chunk of which result from oil industry market manipulation and anti-competitive practices. (For example, oil companies have exploited their market position to intentionally restrict refining capacity by driving smaller, independent refiners out of business.)

Nader/Gonzalez would strictly regulate the oil industry - clamping down on speculators and enforcing the antitrust laws.

Nader/Gonzalez would also revoke federal subsidies to the oil industry, repeal multi-billion tax breaks and impose a windfall profits tax to fuel a transition to a solar energy economy.

Nader/Gonzalez would cut the bloated, wasteful military budget.
(Hillary Clinton and Obama have committed themselves to increasing the armed forces by tens of thousands of troops. John McCain would outdo them both.) http://www.votenader.org/issues/military-budget

Corporate crime costs Americans hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Tens of thousands of Americans are killed each year and hundreds of thousands of Americans injured and sickened each year by preventable corporate-bred violence.

From pollution, medical negligence, procurement fraud, product defects, and financial fraud, to antitrust, public corruption, foreign bribery and occupational homicide, corporate crime is widely ignored by politicians – yet acutely felt by all Americans.

Nader/Gonzalez would crack down on corporate crime and violence with a twelve point program: http://www.votenader.org/issues/corporate-crime/

Nader/Gonzalez proposes a straightforward carbon tax—set to annual benchmarks to bring, with the expansion of solar energy, US emissions to at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

A phased in initial price of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions would harness $300 billion annually—money that would be put back in the pockets of American taxpayers, and money that would finance a green industrial revolution, providing a boon of 10 million new green collar jobs (in efficiency retrofits, cogeneration, geothermal, solar energy generation, and green grid enhancements) in the first five years. http://www.votenader.org/issues/carbon-tax/

Ralph/Gonzalez would work to end corporate personhood
http://www.votenader.org/issues/corporate-personhood/


Also check out:
http://www.votenader.org/issues/speculation-tax
http://www.votenader.org/issues/single-payer
http://www.votenader.org/issues/taft-hartley
http://www.votenader.org/issues/corporate-personhood
http://www.votenader.org/issues

Corporate Personhood

from VoteNader.org

In 1886 the Supreme Court, in the case of in the pivotal case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, was interpreted to have ruled that corporations were “persons”—before women were considered persons under the 14th amendment to have the right to vote.

Ever since, corporations have enjoyed most of the same constitutional rights granted to real people.

But corporations are not humans. They don’t vote. They don’t have children. They don’t die in Iraq.

The people who work for the corporations are of course real people, but the corporate “entity” should never be given equal constitutional rights to real human beings.

Even Business Week magazine, in a 2000 editorial, declared that “corporations should get out of politics.”

We cannot have equal justice under law between real people and corporations like Exxon Mobil.

Multinational corporations can be in 1000 places around the world at the same time obstructing governments, states, buying and renting politicians, and going to Washington to get bailed out by taxpayers.

Congress did not legislate corporate personhood. The courts performed this jolting display of runaway activism all by themselves.

The courts destroyed the semblance of equal protection under law because there is no way even an individual billionaire can approximate the raw power of these large corporations with their privileged immunities, and their control over technology, capital and labor.

Nader/Gonzalez will work to end corporate personhood.

Nader/Gonzalez will work to subordinate the artificial corporate entity to the constitutional sovereignty of the people.

Right now it is the reverse. The sovereignty of the people is subordinated to the sovereignty of the giant multinational corporations.

But the constitution still reads, “we the people”, not we the corporations.

Corporations were chartered in the early nineteenth century by state governments to be our servants, not our masters.

They are now are masters.

Time to restore the supremacy of real people.
References:

* Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann
* Taming the Giant Corporation
* The Corporation
* Center for Corporate Policy
* Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy

Debating the Role of Third Parties in the U.S.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5

Esoteric Agenda

You may want to take a break to watch this, it's definitely worth a watch.

Jeremiah Wright's Sermon: Democrats Distancing Themselves from Truth

I can't say I disagree with anything Rev. Jeremiah Wright is saying in these quotes. Really the only thing I'm iffy about is the AIDS conspiracy. I don't know much about AIDS/HIV so I don't know if I'll every come to the same conclusion as Jeremiah Wright.
Obama and Clinton both have a history with this guy, but are both trying to politically distance their campaigns from him.

"It's as if we took the five dumbest things that I've ever said or you've ever said in our lives and compressed them and put them out there - I think that people's reaction would, understandably, be upset."^[14]
-Barack Obama, "ABC's Charles Gibson Talks to Barack Obama" ABC News March 28, 2008.

"..words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialog, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue."
-Barack Obama, "On my Faith and My Church" Huffington Post, March 14, 2008.

"Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church."
-Barack Obama, "Obama Would Have Left if Wright Stayed".Associated Press, March 28, 2008.

Barack Obama denounced the harshness of Wright's words — not because they were false, he said, but because they did not acknowledge the strides that the U.S. has made in the fight against racism. Obama said his own candidacy shows how far the country has come. (All Things Considered, March 18, 2008)

I think condemning the statements is a mistake, but then again, Democrats seem to be trying to cater to conservatives and do not want to seem too controversial. In my opinion, these topics are only controversial to people who do not study history and/or not directly affected by our government's military decisions. In other words, Democrats are catering to those who are quite possibly some of the most ignorant constituents:

Excerpts from Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermon (in context here):

"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News. This is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out — did you see him, John? — a white man, he pointed out, ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true — America's chickens are coming home to roost."

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and The Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

"Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that."

"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness."

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, as long as she pretends to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent."

“The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African American men with syphilis. Governments lie. The government lied about bombing Cambodia and Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, ‘Let me make myself perfectly clear…’ Governments lie. The government lied about the drugs for arms Contra scheme orchestrated by Oliver North, and then the government pardoned all the perpetrators so they could get better jobs in the government. Governments lie. The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie. The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9.11.01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie.”

Lincoln Chafee: 'Against the Tide' Toward the Center

Listen to the interview on Fresh Air

Excerpt: 'Against the Tide'

by Lincoln Chafee

NPR.org, April 16, 2008 · Early in December 2000, Senator Specter asked Richard Cheney, our Republican vice presidential candidate, to have lunch with us on Wednesday, December 13. The vote-counting fiasco in Florida was under way and no one knew whether Texas Governor George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore had been elected the nation's 43rd president. Then, the night before we were to meet with Mr. Cheney, the news broke: the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the Florida recount unconstitutional. The Court authorized Katharine Harris, Florida's Republican secretary of state, to declare Bush and Cheney victorious.

We Republicans had won the presidency by a single vote in the Electoral College and a single vote in the Supreme Court. In the executive branch, winning by a whisker is as good as winning in a landslide, but not so in the Senate. For the first time in a century we had a Senate split down the middle, 50-50, with a Republican vice president available to break a tie in our favor. That whisker-thin margin of victory had real consequences to my way of thinking.

It meant that our small club of five moderate Republican votes would be vital to President-elect Bush if he had any hope of getting his legislative initiatives through.

That was why Vice President-elect Richard Cheney came to our lunch that day: Not to say he needed us, but to tell us that he and George W. Bush were in charge and no one else.

In steady, quiet tones, the Vice President-elect laid out a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter. President-elect Bush had promised that healing, but now we moderate Republicans were hearing Richard Cheney articulate the real agenda: A clashist approach on every issue, big and small, and any attempt at consensus would be a sign of weakness. We would seek confrontation on every front. He said nothing about education or the environment or health care; it was all about these new issues that were rarely, if ever, touted in the campaign. The new administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us. I knew that what the Vice President-elect was saying would rip the closely divided Congress apart. We moderates had often voted with President Clinton on things that powerful Republican constituencies didn't like: an increase in the minimum wage, a patients' bill of rights, and campaign finance reform. Mr. Cheney knew this, but he ticked off the issues at the top of his agenda and did it fearlessly. It made no difference to him that we were potential adversaries; he was going down his to-do list and checking off Confrontation Number 1.

Senator Arlen Specter spoke first. As the most junior member, I would have my say last, if at all. I could hardly sit still as I waited to hear my respected friend wade into this outrageous manifesto.

And then, in a moment I can only describe as infuriating, Senator Specter took no leadership role in representing the moderate point of view. He acquiesced, and others followed his example.

As each of my colleagues spoke in turn, I waited for one of them to push back. Surely one of them would have the presence of mind to say, Whoa! Time out! What are you talking about, Mister Vice President? You weren't elected to scrap international agreements. You never said to the voters: Elect us and we promise to bring back deficit spending and drive the next generation into debt.

But no one resisted. We sat there and listened as Mr. Cheney made divisive pronouncements of policy that would come as a complete surprise to many of the Americans who had voted to elect the Bush/Cheney ticket. I stopped waiting for someone to challenge Mr. Cheney when I saw my Republican friends around the table nodding in agreement as he held forth.

I was at a loss to explain my colleagues' compliant behavior then. I remain so now. It may have been an all-too-human response to the circumstances of the time. Anxious weeks of uncertainty were finally over. Now we knew the outcome of the election. The bitterness of the Florida recount was behind us. My colleagues seemed happy and relieved just to know who was in charge. And they seemed a little awestruck. This is the Vice President of the United States.

The contentious and destructive agenda that Mr. Cheney dropped on us was troubling enough, but what really unnerved me was his attitude. He welcomed conflict. We Republicans had promised America exactly the opposite. In the presidential debates, moderator Jim Lehrer asked Governor Bush to describe the foreign policy he would adopt, if elected. Candidate Bush said he would be humble in foreign affairs; that if we were arrogant, other countries would resent us. Now his running mate was telling us the new administration would make a point of being arrogant and divisive. Mr. Cheney was brazen in his pronouncements. A humble foreign policy? His attitude was anything but humble. He said that the campaign was over and that our actions in office would not be dictated by what had to be said in the campaign. And he pronounced this deception with no emotion or window dressing of any kind. He was fearless, matter of fact, and smug.

I wondered, where does Cheney get the confidence to say these things a few hours after the Court established him as our Vice President-elect? Where did he get the authority to make this radical departure from the President-elect's own campaign rhetoric?

I had supported Governor George W. Bush over Senator John McCain in the 2000 Rhode Island presidential primary. I met the Texas Governor for the first time in 1999, when he came to Rhode Island to raise money. I contributed and sincerely applauded his remarks to supporters at the Providence Convention Center. He had good campaign patter, and I was impressed. He said all the right things. I thought he could win on his pledge to bring a new, unifying atmosphere to Washington, and that he might even be as good and decent a president as his father had been. He seemed moderate enough to win support from all sides, and he had the Bush name. After the bitter partisan atmosphere of the Clinton impeachment, voters looked back with affection at the governor's father.

I liked that the governor had worked cooperatively with Democrats in the Texas Legislature. If leaders in both parties could rally around him, he was just what the country needed. America stood at the summit of power, emerging from the Cold War as an economic, cultural and military force without equal. We had wasted valuable years in partisan bickering, but our moment in history was still at hand. What a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to do good things in the world.

Then came that devastating first day after George W. Bush and Richard Cheney prevailed in the Supreme Court. If we were to believe Mr. Cheney, the President-elect would not only reignite the partisanship of the Clinton-Gingrich era but would make it even more toxic. Mr. Cheney tore our best campaign promises to shreds and the moderates acquiesced instead of pelting him with outrage. It was clear to me then that there would be no key bloc of moderate votes helping to shape legislation and reunite America over the next four years. In any event, Cheney was not asking for support – he was ordering us to provide it. The President-elect had his agenda; we were just along for the ride.

My heart sank as my colleagues peeled away, one by one. It was the most demoralizing moment of my seven-year tenure in the Senate.

When it was my turn to speak, I made the case that our five votes would be crucially important in a 50-50 Senate. I chose my words carefully, and probably stammered with the effort to contain my fury. We were on the cusp of a new millennium that held enormous promise for American leadership in the world, and what I had just heard was petty, arrogant and irresponsible. It threatened to lead in exactly the wrong direction.

I spoke in the perhaps too-optimistic hope that I might yet rally the moderates to seriously apprehend the implications of the new agenda. When I told Mr. Cheney, "Our votes at this table are important," he could hardly be bothered. He gave me the back of his hand with a truism: "Every vote is important."

There was no support to be had, and lunch was over.

Excerpted from Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, by Lincoln Chafee, with permission from Thomas Dunne Books. Copyright (c) 2008 by Lincoln Chafee. All rights reserved.

American Blackout

Nader: Obama "stays on a very high plane of generality and abstraction"

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Ralph Nader, three-time presidential candidate. Will he make it four? He has just formed an exploratory committee to decide whether to run for president here in this year, 2008. Ralph Nader, the issue of running and taking away votes from the Democrats, take that on, something that has made many people very angry, feeling that you took the race from Al Gore at a time that was absolutely critical for this country.

RALPH NADER: Well, if you ask Al Gore, he’ll give you ten reasons, each of which independently was a cause of his losing. He believes he won—I agree he won—in Florida, but it was stolen from him before, during, and after the election by the Secretary of State and Jeb Bush, all the way from Tallahassee to that atrocious political decision by the Supreme Court. There are a lot of “what if’s,” Amy. What if he got Tennessee? What if he got Arkansas? What if the mayor of Florida didn’t go to Madrid and not bring out thousands of his votes?

Anybody who looks at an independent or third party candidate, whether it’s a Green Party candidate or Independent Party candidate, and uses the words "Are you taking away votes from the Democrats?” in my view, is basically saying that small party candidates are second-class citizens. Either we have an equal right to run for elective office in our country, or we are basically developing a two-tier system, where the two dominant parties, with all their commercial support, control the votes in this country. So either none of us are spoilers, because we have an equal right to run, or all of us, because we’re trying to take votes from one another, are spoilers. There’s no stratification. When that word “spoiler” is used to attach to a small party candidate, that, to me, is clear political bigotry, just as if it was used against a class of voters years ago during the pre-civil rights era. So I think ballot access is a major civil liberties issue, and people in this country, whether they like it or not, must recognize how discriminatory that word is and must try to adhere to what the polls tell us, that they really want more voices and choices and that about 60 percent of the people of this country want a viable third party, even though they may not vote for that party.

So we have to get over it, and liberals especially have got to get over their easy abdication of least-worst voting for the Democrats, where they don’t put any pressure or they don’t make any demands on the Democrats, because they fear that the Republicans are worse. That sets up a system where the corporations are pulling 24/7 the Democrats in their direction to become corporate Democrats, like the corporate Republicans, and no one is pulling the other way. Why? Because they’re all freaked out by the Republicans, and they’re going for least-worst voting. All the bargaining power of progressives and liberals atrophy with that attitude.

So if they don’t want to support a small party candidate, if they don’t want to go to our website, naderexplore08.org, and see the reasons in that remarkable letter by my supporters that’s on that website, see the reasons why we are testing the waters, then they at least have to make demands on the Democratic Party, which they did not make in ’00 against Gore and they did not make against John Kerry. In fact, they had a moratorium on demonstrations against the war in ’04.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, you, a while ago, said that if Hillary Clinton were the Democratic presidential nominee, you would run for president against her. What is your assessment of Barack Obama?

RALPH NADER: My assessment of Barack Obama is that he knows what the score is in terms of the male distribution of power. He knows what he has said in the past about the Israeli-Palestinian issue and the need for Palestinian rights and a two-state solution. He knows that this war was a criminal war in Iraq and we’ve got to get out of it in a responsible, expeditious manner. He knows that corporations have too much power over workers and consumers and small taxpayers and elections and the government.

But when you watch him, he stays at a very high plain of generality and abstraction about change, and we’re one nation, and we’re one people. And that may sing with the desire of people to feel like they’re part of a unity, but it doesn’t do much for the productivity of the political dialogue. He does not get specific enough. Therefore, I think his main problem is he’s censoring himself, and that is not sufficiently rationalized by saying that’s just a tactic to win the primaries and get elected. After awhile, day after day, week after week, when you self-censor yourself, you become a different person, and it’s a reflection on character.

I also think that if he didn’t self-censor himself, if he started reverberating to the many mainstream press reports on corporate crime, fraud and abuse against pensions, against workers, against small investors; on the labor laws that are obstructing workers from organizing; on the need to have a foreign policy that isn’t militaristic; on the need to have an efficient military budget, where he said he wants to enlarge and modernize the military, which is already absorbing half of the federal government’s operating expenditures; on the need to direct taxpayer money to the necessities of the American people and not to pour them into corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts, which we call corporate welfare; on the need to protect consumers, especially in the inner city, from the rapacious practices of lenders; etc., I think he would enormously advance the number of people who would support him. And he certainly has the intellect to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he has different positions than Hillary Clinton? And what is your assessment of her?

RALPH NADER: His declared positions almost fit the definition of protective imitation (nature or politics). They’re too close to Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a corporate Democrat. There’s no better evidence of that than the Fortune magazine cover story in June of last year, which basically said business loves Hillary. Hillary is a big business candidate.

And so, I think the healthcare proposal is a perfect example by Barack Obama of this protective imitation. Why doesn’t he go for full Medicare? Why doesn’t he go for a deeper analysis of the healthcare problem in this country, namely the need to emphasize prevention of disease and trauma, the need to knock out $220 billion of billing fraud and abuse, according to the Government Accountability Office and Malcolm Sparrow at Harvard University, against the need to reduce malpractice and stop blocking action to go to the courts for the tens of thousands of people who are injured or killed because of the small percentage of reckless doctors operating in this country who should have their license suspended? He should also focus on the enormous administrative expense savings from full Medicare—one payer, not 1,500 payers and cross-billings, etc., that are now taking about $300 billion to $400 billion.

Civics Quiz

I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
- Thomas Jefferson

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
- Abraham Lincoln

Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.
- Woodrow Wilson

The citizens of the United States must control the mighty commercial forces which they themselves called into being.
- Theodore Roosevelt

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
- Dwight Eisenhower

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves - and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.
- Thomas Jefferson

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Civics Quiz

Which of the following candidates for President of the United States best reflects values expressed above?

a) John McCain
b) Hillary Clinton
c) Barack Obama
d) Ralph Nader

The answer?

d) Ralph Nader
(voteNader.org)