Filed under: auto bailout, Barack Obama, Congress, Credit Crisis, DEBT, devaluation, Dictatorship, Dollar, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Fascism, Great Depression, Greenback, hyperinflation, Inflation, main street, middle class, Military, Military Industrial Complex, obama, obama stimulus, Senate, spending bill, stimulus, Taxpayers, US Economy, Wall Street, wall street bailout
Senate sends $1.1 trillion spending bill to Obama
AP
December 13, 2009
The Senate on Sunday passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill with increased budgets for vast areas of the federal government, including health, education, law enforcement and veterans’ programs.
he more-than-1,000-page package, one of the last essential chores of Congress this year, passed 57-35 and now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.
The weekend action underlined the legislative crush faced by Congress as it tries to wind up the year. After the vote, the Senate immediately returned to the debate on health care legislation that has consumed its time and energy for weeks. Senate Democrats hope to reach a consensus in the coming days on Obama’s chief domestic priority.
The spending bill combines six of the 12 annual appropriation bills for the 2010 budget year that began Oct. 1. Obama has signed into law five others.
The final one, a $626 billion defense bill, will be used as the base bill for another catch-all package of measures that Congress must deal with in the coming days. Those include action to raise the $12.1 trillion debt ceiling and proposals to stimulate the job market.
The spending bill passed Sunday includes $447 billion for departments’ operating budgets and about $650 billion in mandatory payments for federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Those programs under immediate control of Congress would see increases of about 10 percent.
The FBI gets $7.9 billion, a $680 million increase over 2009; the Veterans Health Administration budget goes from $41 billion to $45.1 billion; and the National Institutes of Health receives $31 billion, a $692 million increase.
All but three Democrats voted for the bill, while all but three Republicans opposed it. Democrats said the spending was critical to meet the needs of a recession-battered economy. “Every bill that is passed, every project that is funded and every job that is created helps America take another step forward on the road of economic recovery,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said after the vote.
Republicans decried what they called out-of control spending and pointed to an estimated $3.9 billion in the bill for more than 5,000 local projects sought by individual lawmakers from both parties.
The Citizens Against Government Waste said those projects included construction of a county farmer’s market in Kentucky, renovation of a historic theater in New York and restoration of a mill in Rhode Island.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of such projects, said it was “shameful” that so many had found their way into the legislation. Most Americans, he said, were watching football and not the Senate debate, adding, “If they knew what we are about to pass ….”
The legislation also contains numerous items not directly related to spending. It provides help for auto dealers facing closure, ends a ban on funding by the District of Columbia government for abortions and allows the district to permit medical marijuana, lets Amtrak passengers carry unloaded handguns in their checked baggage and permits detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to be transferred to the United States to stand trial, but not to be released.
The bill also approves a 2 percent pay increase for federal workers.
With the Senate concentrating on health care, attention on the upcoming jobs plan shifts to the House.
The defense bill that will be the basis for the package normally enjoys wide bipartisan support, but Republicans, and some fiscally conservative Democrats, are unhappy with the prospect of another jolt of deficit-swelling spending.
Congress must soon raise the debt ceiling, now at $12.1 trillion, so the Treasury can continue to borrow, and Democratic leaders are eyeing a new figure close to $14 trillion, pushing the issue past next November’s election.
But a bipartisan group in the Senate says a higher ceiling should be tied to creation of a task force on deficit reduction, and House Democratic moderates say their votes could depend on winning a “pay-as-you-go” law requiring that new tax cuts or spending programs don’t add to the deficit.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on CNN’s “State of the Union,” favored a deficit task force. He said he didn’t “see how this process where everybody kind of lards on is going to actually ever come to an end unless we finally have the discipline to do a straight up-or-down vote across the board on revenues and spending cuts.”
Proposals to put people back to work include tax breaks for new company hires, small business tax breaks, public works spending and federal aid to states.
Congress is also likely to extend measures, included in the $787 billion stimulus act last February, that provide jobless payments and health insurance subsidies for the unemployed.
Filed under: 2008 Election, auto bailout, bailout, bank bailout, Barack Obama, Bear Stearns, bernanke, brad sherman, bush, campaign for liberty, cash for clunkers, Congress, Credit Crisis, DEBT, devaluation, Dictatorship, Dollar, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Fascism, fearmongering, George Bush, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Greenback, House, housing market, hyperinflation, Inflation, jim kramer, main street, Martial Law, Media Manipulation, middle class, Military Industrial Complex, obama, obama stimulus, Paulson, real estate, Ron Paul, Senate, spending bill, stimulus, Stock Market, subprime, subprime lending, subprime mortgage bubble, Taxpayers, US Economy, US Treasury, Wall Street, wall street bailout, War On Terror
Houses Passes $1.1 Trillion Spending Bill
Antiwar.com
December 10, 2009
There was a time when the federal government’s annual budget was submitted by the president and decided by the Congress in a relatively straightforward fashion. A time when it wasn’t so difficult to figure out what the government spent taxpayers’ money on.
But this is, or soon will be, 2010, and President Obama’s promises of transparency aside, the new way of doing things in the perpetual wartime economy is to pass bulky spending bills filled with anything and everything Congressmen want on an accelerated schedule, every few months.
In today’s example, a 1088 page $1.1 trillion “compromise” spending bill passed through the House of Representatives in a 221-202 vote along partisan lines. The bill covers everything from veteran’s benefits to arbitration for car dealers and, of course, a hefty raise in the foreign aid budget.
The latest massive spending bill comes less than two months after the White House signed a $680 billion “Defense Spending Bill,” which included hate crimes legislation provisions and restarted military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
That bill itself came just a few months after a $106 billion “emergency” war spending bill, which included a number of “pet projects,” including the so-called Cash for Clunkers program that subsidized new car purchases in return for a promise to destroy what were in many cases serviceable used cars.
Which of course came not long after the $787 billion “stimulus bill” aimed at hurling enough money at assorted government programs that the economy would improve.
When President Obama took office, he promised a more transparent budget, particularly with promises to stop requesting “emergency” war spending bills to pay for what are now several year old wars.
This promise, like so many others, will likely be ignored, as the defense budgets have projected a more rapid pullout from Iraq and did not include last week’s massive escalation of the Afghan War, itself a $30 billion addition to the annual cost. Instead, America seems poised to continue the new way of doing things, piecemeal spending bills which provide ample opportunity to include the trendy projects that Congress craves and the unclear picture of the overall cost of war that keeps the voter largely in the dark about how much the nation’s assorted adventures really cost.
Look Who got the economy wrong and why are they still in charge
Filed under: auto bailout, bailout, bankruptcy, Barack Obama, Bloggers, corporatism, Dictatorship, Empire, Fascism, free press, general motors, government control, government takeover, internet, Mainstream Media, Media, media bailout, mediaopoly, Neolibs, obama, socialism, tax, Taxpayers | Tags: los angeles times, The Newspaper Revitalization Act
Obama Supports Newspaper Bailout Bill
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
September 21, 2009
President Obama has stated that he is happy to consider bailing out the corporate media, expressing concerns that alternative internet based news outlets will grow in popularity as a result of the downfall of newspapers.
Obama told editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade that preserving the print media is “critical to the health of our democracy”.
“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” Obama said.
He also indicated that readers should be made to pay for online news content in the near future:
“What I hope is that people start understanding if you’re getting your newspaper over the Internet, that’s not free and there’s got to be a way to find a business model that supports that.” he said.
Over the past year, scores of newspapers have gone out of business or shifted to online only output, due to the rise of the alternative media and the resulting loss of ad revenue. Several large newspaper corporations have filed for bankruptcy, including the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
Obama said he “would be happy to look at” legislation aimed at providing newspapers tax-breaks if they were to restructure as 50 (c) (3) educational corporations. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin has introduced the bill S.673 in this vain titled “The Newspaper Revitalization Act.”
Critics may point out that, far from being “critical” to democracy, a bailed out government subsidized media is the very antithesis of a “free press”.
Government Banking and Government Motors would effectively be joined by the Government Press if bailouts were to be granted.
Bailing out the corporate media would once again constitute rewarding outdated and failing monopolies with more taxpayer dollars, thus punishing innovative forward thinking competition.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no basis for bailing out the newspapers, given that they employ less than one percent of the labor force in the United States.
The dinosaur corporate media is dying because it has proven itself to be almost wholly untrustworthy, acting as an unquestioning mouthpiece for the establishment.
Denouncing all blog based media as unreliable or without context is laughable in the face of the mainstream media’s recent track record.
Filed under: 2-party system, auto bailout, Barack Obama, Big Banks, cap-and-trade, Censorship, Communism, Congress, Dictatorship, Dissent, Empire, Fascism, Federal Reserve, george soros, glenn beck, government bureaucrat, government control, government regulation, health care, health care reform, Healthcare, HR 3200, Income Tax, insurance companies, Kennedy health care bill, left right paradigm, Mainstream Media, media bias, media blackout, media censorship, medical industrial complex, medicare, Nancy Pelosi, nanny state, Nazi, neocons, Neolibs, obama, obama care, obama deception, obamacare, Oppression, patriot movement, Propaganda, Protest, public option, Senate, socialism, tax, Taxpayers, tea party, Tim Geithner, universial health care, US Constitution, Washington D.C., White House | Tags: D.C., dc march, dc protest, DC tea party, dc teaparty
Mainstream Media Cover-Up Implodes As World Discovers Millions Marched In DC
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
September 13, 2009
The Gray Lady of Operation Mockingbird, the New York Times, reports today that “thousands” of patriots protested against Obamacare, cap and trade, the bankster bailout, and unchecked federal government power in the District of Criminals yesterday.
“The demonstrators numbered well into the tens of thousands, though the police declined to estimate the size of the crowd,” the newspaper reports, attempting to downplay the historical significance of the protest.
The New York Times says the police declined to estimate the crowd — or rather the corporate media declined to report it — because the number was around two million, the largest protest in the capitol’s history.
The protest out-numbered Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. That march was estimated at around 200,000 people.
ABC News did likewise, pegging the turnout in the thousands. “Thousands of conservative protesters from across the country converged on the Capitol Saturday morning to demonstrate against President Obama’s proposals for health care reform and voicing opposition to big government, what they say is over-the-top spending,” the corporate propaganda outlet claimed on Saturday.
Ditto the War Street Journal — excuse me, the Wall Street Journal — although they put the number at tens of thousands. The Journal admitted the obvious: “While some Republican officeholders were at the rally, not everybody there called themselves Republicans.”
NPR, the news service of Soros and the foundations, did the same parlor trick with the math, putting the number at tens of thousands. NPR contradicted itself, however, and reported that as “the demonstrators walked along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the U.S. Capitol, the line stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. The crowd was so thick in places that it was difficult to move.”
As to be expected, the “progressives” (left cover bankster faction) attempted to portray two million patriotic Americans as racists. Think Soros, formerly known as Think Progress, posted a blog entry supposedly revealing racist placards at the event — in fact, none of the signs showed were racist — the worst the Soros operatives produced was a photo of a woman with a Confederate flag. The Soros clan said everybody at the event was white (as if they had examined the skin color of two million people).
It’s not going to work. The two million people who showed up to voice their outrage at a federal government out of control and in violation of the Constitution was but a small sampling of the millions of people across the country in opposition to Obama and the corporate-fascist agenda of his one-world masters.
If Obama and the Democrats ram the deathcare bill through the House by way of “reconciliation,” the opposition will redouble its numbers and once again take to the streets.
Judge Napolitano Interviews Glenn Beck – (9/1/4/2009)
9/12 demonstration a record DC turnout: National Park Service
American Thinker
September 13, 2009
The truth will out. Despite mainstream media attempts to characterize turnout as in the thousands, a spokesman for the National Park Service, Dan Bana, is quoted as saying “It is a record…. We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.”
Democrats and their media acolytes may wish this weren’t so, and they may even employ the Ostrich Strategy, burying their collective heads in the sand, pretending that a major important political movement isn’t happening. But they only hasten their own demise in doing so.
Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit compares the littler left behind on 9/12 with the aftermath of the Obama inauguration. It is a startling contrast.
White House Says Health Care Protesters Not in Mainstream
Private health insurance lobbyist throws fundraiser for Nancy Pelosi: Report
Filed under: auto bailout, auto industry, automakers, bailout, bailouts, Barack Obama, Chrysler, Congress, Credit Crisis, DEBT, deflation, Dictatorship, Dollar, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Fascism, general motors, global economy, GM, GM bailout, Great Depression, Greenback, hyperinflation, income taxes, Inflation, Nazi, obama, socialism, Stock Market, tax, Taxpayers, US Economy, Wall Street
Taxpayers will lose on auto bailouts
CNN Money
September 9, 2009
Much of the money given to General Motors and Chrysler to prevent them from collapsing will never be recovered, according to a report released Wednesday by the Congressional Oversight Panel.
“Although taxpayers may recover some portion of their investment in Chrysler and GM, it is unlikely they will recover the entire amount,” the report says, citing estimates from the Treasury Department and Congressional Budget Office.
The oversight panel, headed by Harvard University professor Elizabeth Warren, was created by Congress last year to oversee the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
GM and Chrysler were each teetering on collapse this spring when the Obama administration effectively forced both automakers into bankruptcy, lending them enough to survive. Both have shed billions of dollars in debt and are now rebuilding.
All told, since late last year, the government has provided or pledged the two companies, icons of American manufacturing, more than $60 billion in aid.
Treasury estimates that about $23 billion of initial loans to the two companies “will be subject to ‘much lower recoveries,’ ” the panel’s report says. In particular, $5.4 billion of loans to Chrysler are “highly unlikely to be recovered,” it continued.
“The initial loans made last fall as the industry was imploding and when no restructuring plan was in place are not likely to be repaid in full,” Warren said during a conference call with reporters.
How much of the remaining funds will be recovered is impossible to predict, Warren said, because the loans have been converted to stock.
“The American taxpayer is now an equity investor in Chrysler and GM,” Warren said. “And the return on its investment depends on what those companies are worth in a year or two.”
The government owns 10% of Chrysler and 61% of GM.
Filed under: 9/11, 9/11 Families, 9/11 Firefighters, 9/11 heros, 9/11 pension, 9/11 survivors, 9/11 Truth, 9/11 victims, 9/11 workers, auto bailout, bailouts, bank bailout, Big Banks, Censorship, christy todd whitman, CIA, EPA, fealgood foundation, first responders, giuliani, Ground Zero, Media, media blackout, New York, NYPD, Rudy Giuliani, We Are Change, World Trade Center
9/11 Hero: Bailout Us Sick First Responders
noworldsystem.com 