DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Religious Dick on September 25, 2008, 05:49:14 AM
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TimesPeople
The New York Times
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September 25, 2008
Lawmakers? Constituents Make Their Bailout Views Loud and Clear
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON ? Americans? anger is in full bloom, jumping off the screen in capital letters and exclamation points, in the e-mail in-boxes of elected representatives in the nation?s capital.
?I am hoping Congress can find the backbone to stand on their feet and not their knees before BIG BUSINESS,? one correspondent wrote to Representative Jim McDermott of Washington.
?I?d rather leave a better world to my children ? NOT A BANKRUPT NATION. Whew! Pardon my shouting,? wrote another.
Mr. McDermott is a liberal Democrat, but his e-mail messages look a lot like the ones that Representative Candice S. Miller, a conservative Republican from Michigan, is receiving. ?NO BAILOUT, I am a registered republican,? one constituent wrote. ?I will vote and campaign hard against you if we have to subsidize the very people that have sold out MY COUNTRY.?
The backlash, in phone calls as well as e-mail messages, is putting lawmakers in a quandary as they weigh what many regard as the most consequential decision of their careers: whether to agree to President Bush?s request to spend an estimated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the financial services system.
Around the country, Republican and Democratic voters are rising up in outright opposition to the White House plan or, at the very least, to express concern that it is being pushed through Congress in haste.
Lawmakers, in turn, are agonizing over what to do. Mrs. Miller said she had been ?trying to be very deliberative about it,? listening to administration officials like Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., consulting with bankers from her district and independent experts. She sounded torn Wednesday, saying she was looking for guidance from Republican leaders and hoping they would come together with their Democratic counterparts on a bipartisan plan.
?I would say it?s the most concerned I?ve been since I?ve been in Congress,? said the congresswoman, a former Michigan secretary of state who won her House seat in 2002. ?I appreciate all of the input that I?m getting from my constituents, but I?m just not reacting to that ? I can?t until I understand it better and feel comfortable with my vote. And I?m not sure how I?m going to be voting yet.?
Meanwhile, the complaints keep coming, and several Congressional offices agreed to share them with reporters, though only on condition that the senders? names not be published, for privacy reasons.
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, has received nearly 17,000 e-mail messages, nearly all opposed to the bailout, her office said. More than 2,000 constituents called Ms. Boxer?s California office on Tuesday alone; just 40 favored the bailout. Her Washington office received 918 calls. Just one supported the rescue plan.
Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said he had been getting 2,000 e-mail messages and telephone calls a day, roughly 95 percent opposed. When Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent who votes with Democrats, posted a petition on his Web site asking Mr. Paulson to require that taxpayers receive an equity stake in the bailed-out companies, more than 20,000 people signed.
?We certainly have never brought in 20,000 names in a day and a half,? Mr. Sanders said, sounding astonished. ?For us, that?s off the wall.?
It is much the same on the Republican side. Aides to Senator Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican who has called the bailout plan ?un-American,? said the senator had received more constituent reaction to the bailout plan than to any issue since the immigration debate.
Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois, said he had not seen such an outpouring since President Bill Clinton?s impeachment trial in 1999.
Constituent communications, of course, are no shock to lawmakers, especially since the age of e-mail messages and automated ?robo-calls? make it possible for voters to vent en masse. But members of Congress say reaction to the bailout does not appear orchestrated or coordinated, but rather individual expressions that come from the grass roots and run across the philosophical spectrum.
War opponents, for instance, are telling lawmakers that they are tired of an administration that, in Mr. McDermott?s words, has ?cried wolf? and played ?the fear card? too many times by leading the nation into war in Iraq to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and curbing civil rights in the name of pursuing terrorists.
?The last time that Congress hurriedly passed legislation that the administration presented as ?urgent? we got the Patriot Act, with its mix of necessary reforms and onerous civil rights abuses,? one of Senator Brown?s constituents wrote. ?Do not fall into this trap again.?
Others, invoking the Bush administration?s efforts to expand executive authority, are irate over the idea that one person ? Mr. Paulson, and then his successor ? would control so much taxpayer money. ?So many people have said to me, ?This is a democracy; this isn?t a dictatorship,? ? Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, said.
Fiscal conservatives, on the other hand, see the White House abandoning core principles, marching down a treacherous road toward government intervention in the markets. ?We are turning into a socialist country,? one voter warned an aide to Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico. ?Let the markets work.?
But in the end, from the right or the left, lawmakers say the message is the same: Slow down, catch your breath and do not make any rash decisions, no matter what the White House says.
?This is too serious a problem for the administration to expect us to just rubber-stamp a $700 billion proposal and rush to get out of town,? said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. ?That?s something my constituents definitely won?t tolerate.?
Contributing reporting were Robbie Brown in Atlanta, Christina Capecchi in Minneapolis, Rebecca Cathcart in Los Angeles, Bob Driehaus in Cincinnati, and Katie Zezima in Boston.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/business/25voices.html?_r=1&oref=login&ref=business&pagewanted=print (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/business/25voices.html?_r=1&oref=login&ref=business&pagewanted=print)
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Note how Bush-KoolAid Drinkers here are oddly silent.
They're seething now that their precious market is being thwarted with socialist ideals but they want to keep on keeping on with Bush 'cause he's the decider. (Oh, except for that one little point here or there just to keep up the appearances of fair and balanced.)
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Que sera, sera.
Let it fall
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<<Que sera, sera.
<<Let it fall>>
LOL. So anarchism has its attractions, eh? But who woulda thunk . . . for BT?
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No biggie.
I've always been able to fend for myself.
I'm just not real confident in a lot of other people being able to do the same.
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Not just an anarchist, but a humanitarian too. BT, you de man.
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I wrote Mel Martinez and told him that the bill as Juniorbush proposed it sucked mightily. He previously sent me e-mail about how great a deal it was.
He has gained about 50 lbs. since becoming a senator. Really larded up.
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<<He has gained about 50 lbs. since becoming a senator. Really larded up.>>
He's as slim as he ever was. Just doesn't trust the banks to hold all those "campaign contributions."
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He's as slim as he ever was. Just doesn't trust the banks to hold all those "campaign contributions."
You think he ate the money?
Cuban food is very fattening, so I wouldn't expect him to lard up so much in DC. Maybe they are bribing him with chicharrones and masas de carne de puerco. (fried pork rinds and pig chunks).
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He has gained about 50 lbs. since becoming a senator. Really larded up.
Why do democrats always criticize people for their appearance?
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Why do democrats always criticize people for their appearance?
I didn't do it because I am a Democrat. I did it as a constituent.
Martinez has bloated up bigtime. He resembles a frightened blowfish.
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He has gained about 50 lbs. since becoming a senator. Really larded up.
Why do democrats always criticize people for their appearance?
Because they look good while you fatfucks dont.
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He previously sent me e-mail about how great a deal it was.
I keep getting those emails from him, too. Since I can keep track of what he is doing through the local paper, I pretty much ignore the emails. When he was running for office, he was on the air bragging about how he made it from poor Cuban immigrant without any special treatment from the guv'mint. Hell, as I understand it, if a Cuban can make it to dry land, they get to stay here. I'd say that was special treatment, since we don't do the same for Mexicans, Jamaicans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, or pretty much anybody else from central or south America or the Carribean.
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He previously sent me e-mail about how great a deal it was.
I keep getting those emails from him, too. Since I can keep track of what he is doing through the local paper, I pretty much ignore the emails. When he was running for office, he was on the air bragging about how he made it from poor Cuban immigrant without any special treatment from the guv'mint. Hell, as I understand it, if a Cuban can make it to dry land, they get to stay here. I'd say that was special treatment, since we don't do the same for Mexicans, Jamaicans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, or pretty much anybody else from central or south America or the Carribean.
It is because Cubans that are anti-Castro tend to be the fascists of the Spanish speaking world.They fatten the Repub coffers and stuff their ballot boxes better.
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I'd say that was special treatment, since we don't do the same for Mexicans, Jamaicans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, or pretty much anybody else from central or south America or the Caribbean.
And you would be right. But the INS still socks all sorts of fees to even Cubans now. They charge $200 and take two weeks to process a set of fingerprints, and there all sorts of other fees that are far more than any justifiable cost of the bureaucracy.
Cubans have is easier than everyone else, but they still stick it to them. On the other hand, I know at least six Cubans who arrived here in their 50's, have never worked a single day, and managed to get qualified for disability and are collecting SSI. One gets them to provide a nurse for her to help her with her meds, but she has worked out a deal with the nurse (another Cuban) to split the money the govt. pays. Everyone in Cuba knows, before you come, get a birth certificate that claims you are older, because that way, you can get SSI even sooner. If you come from Mexico or Santo Domingo, the government double checks birth dates, but never Cubans.
Some of this is bound to backfire. There is this one Cuban woman I know who is a registered nurse. She married an older guy (also a Cuban, but now a US citizen) and had a three of kids with him. When she got divorced she got the house. But she is the only one of 6 people working that lives there (she has a new younger boyfriend, her three kids and her disabled mother), and she needed some money for liposuction and a boob job and a mice pickup for the new boyfriend (a stranger body you will never see), so she transferred the house to her mother, and they got a $120K reverse mortgage on it (it's worth at least $180K). Being as the paperwork said that the reverse mortgage is government approved, these folks think it is the government's money.
However, the mother is still somewhat disabled with arthritis, diabetes and hypertension and never exercises at all. She's at least 70 and looks older. I am pretty sure that they are unaware that when she dies, the mortgage holder will get title to the house and they will all be thrown out in the street.
If one is Cuban and one does not like to work, all one has to do is get an ailing parent or two to the US. They can collect disability and profit from homecare scams and send money back to Cuba, where no one pays rent. It used to be possible to import cousins, uncles, grandparents and aunts, but Bush limited the relatives to parents and siblings.That way the Cubans in Cuba get a nice subsidy, and don't have to work, and the ones here can also get paid for being old and sick. There are lots of Cuban doctors who are really good at writing convincing tales of how old and sick they are.
The Haitians have scams that rely on the fact that no one except them speaks Creole, so you have to hire Haitians just to give them handouts.
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Que sera, sera.
Let it fall
The wife and I both said "let it all burn" this morning.
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Good.