So much for :“change we can believe in”.

Obama remains true to form.

In the Illinois Legislature he was working hard at reaching his next plateau. In the Senate his much vaunted seat was never warmed before he was off on the presidential campaign trail.

Remember the impressive list of names on his economic advisory team? Volker, Buffett, Pete Peterson and others seem to be AWOL now that he is in the Oval Office. (Well, he has a key and I assume may spend more time there than Blago did in Springfield.)

This new “leader” allowed Pelosi and Reid a free hand in whipping up their wish list of sidetracked projects to add to the “Emergency-Funding-to-Prevent-Crisis-from-Turning-into-Catastrophe.” ;

Allowing the same people who brought us the subprime/derivatives scam to keep their jobs, with phony limits and not outing those in congress who enabled and abetted them — is appalling!

most americans don’t realize that this bush administration initiated wall street bailout (and greatest heist in the history of money) under then treasury sec. paulson is not the stimulus bill. the problem is most americans get their information from the teevee and tawk radio. when republicans ruled, the rationale was that since they controlled both houses, it was only logical to put 2 repugs on the air for every 1 dem (be they blue dog dinos or not). now, i’m not sure what their rationale can be - but know that their boards of directors are supporters of this destruction of the once strong middle class built by the ‘new deal’.

hello out there!!!!! they are two separate bills.

1) bailout - this one is blackmail of our government and taxpayers by the financial, investment class ... you know, the ones who get all the tax-breaks, and are left with lots of cash and have to think up ways to make money on their money. most of the ways they think of leads the economy and rest of us to suffer and pay for their booms and busts. they have told our reps, ‘give us the dough or we crash your system, got it?’

this blackmail ensures that there will be no money for all those things that the american people want and need. education. healthcare. not a chance, and they will come after social security within months as a logical thing to do to save the union.

what the bankers and stock dealers and financial holding houses (who all became the same under deregulation) have been doing is issuing bets on bets on bets totaling several trillion $ and tying them up in pretty packages that can’t be opened or sorted out. and world markets are now awash in replicating derivatives somewhere around $600 trillion.

we could outright buy all the stock of the failed banks (and much more cheaply) and sort them out like the FDIC does with troubled banks all the time before re-privatizing them ... let the players eat their losses and not the public who suffers under this casino system. but no - we have to borrow more money to feed to the failed system, cuz it’s too complicated for us unsophisticated non-billionaires to understand.

2) the other is a - stimulus bill - poorly named as hartmann would say - it is a jobs bill. $1 trillion is already too little too late. and what are tax breaks doing in a jobs bill? only 40% of the jobs bill now has anything to do with jobs. insanity prevails. the republicans are screaming about 1 trillion dollars to give people jobs and money to spend? people spending is what we need. our fractional banking system expands the money supply when they loan and contracts when they don’t. they are not loaning, because they are using your tax dollars to buy well-managed-smaller banks and infecting them with the same failed management practices and a too big to fail strategy.

your wars on terra aren’t even on the books remember - and your troops are coming home to nothing worth coming home to: lots of homelessness and medical denials from the va.

where were all these outraged republican voices when the bush administration put us $8 trillion in debt. obama? this mess is why mccain became cranky in the campaign just as he was closing the gap (americans are indeed amazingly stupid and fearful) and then selected palin. our ruling elite couldn’t keep the bad news quiet any longer.  they allowed obama to be elected because hope will keep you home (when he tells you to) instead of on the d.c. mall with tar and feathers and pitchforks.

Obama is the best president in my lifetime, and has done more for ordinary people in this country in a month than all the other presidents in my lifetime.  I was born in 1963, so admittedly this is not a very high standards, and naturally as a progressive and social democrat, I wouldn’t mind at all if he started to break with capitalism and move moved toward a mixed economy.  I don’t care if some of these big banks are nationalized and operated as public services, for example.  I also have a lot more trust in him than any of the experts he has appointed, who are obviously part of the old crowd, basically trying to prop up capitalism while only half realizing that it is one very dead horse.  It died by its own hand—again.

Time will tell…

Michael C. McHugh