Bush has left enough of a mess behind that we will be lucky if anybody can clean it up. But guys like you will blame whoever inherits the mess. Bush had 6 long years of getting everything he wanted from his own congress and they didn't do any drilling. He has had two years with a do nothing congress that have given him everything he wants and still there is no progress anywhere. The country is way worse off than we he took over yet guys like you still think his $hit don't stink.:shrug:
Define--Windfall profits
- Thread starter DOGS THAT BARK
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Bush has left enough of a mess behind that we will be lucky if anybody can clean it up. But guys like you will blame whoever inherits the mess. Bush had 6 long years of getting everything he wanted from his own congress and they didn't do any drilling. He has had two years with a do nothing congress that have given him everything he wants and still there is no progress anywhere. The country is way worse off than we he took over yet guys like you still think his $hit don't stink.:shrug:
ok, i stood in front of my washer and dryer and looked at the pile of unfolded laundry... and i chanted "Bush sucks"
The laundry didn't fold itself. Guess I'm actually going to have to do something for myself.
I don't know what any of that has to do with the fact that Bush is leading the country into Bankruptcy while guys like you wave the flag and tell the rest of us to fold our own laundry. You are in complete denial that this country is in terrible condition and not because of the welfare cheats but because of Big Oil and Iraq both supported and brought to you by Bush. We are talking about pornographic profits by oil companies charging high prices while the whole country feels the negative impact. But that's ok with you.
Not hardly. I agree and am disappointed in the direction the country is heading. It's a downtime for us right now - there is no arguing that. Do I blindly blame the "pornographic profits" the oil companies make? nope.
The country is falling to shambles because of a variety of reasons that can be seen just looking around yourself. Look at the housing market and mortgage industry for example. It was crumbling well before the price of oil went skyrocketing. Let's blame our woes on that instead - maybe even blame Bush and Cheney for skyrocketing home prices in the early part of this decade.
When did you ever expect to see homeowners mailing the keys to their houses and just walking away? Perhaps if people didn't feel so damn entitled to everything they wouldn't have bought more home than they could afford, bought the extra large size truck that gets 8 mpg, and instead been more fiscally responsible so that, now, when the day is here that it paid to save your nickels, you can live comfortably.
It reminds me soooooo much of the story of the grasshopper and ants. Except that grasshopper didn't have bush and cheney to blame in the story.
Why do you not blame our leaders for the mess we are in? Why do you like Bush, if apparently, he has nothing to do with nothing. We might as well elect Paris Hilton at least her energy policy makes sense? :shrug:
Blame is part of the process.Either you agree Bush is doing everything right and you are happy with the direction this country has taken or you think he is doing something wrong and that something must change. Now I proposed a change, to regulate the Oil Companies. That was my solution. Not to the whole problem the country faces but to a small part of it. We also have to come down hard on the Health Care Industry, Insurance Companies, Banks, and of course, our number one problem, stop pissing all of our money away in Iraq. If that will solve everything, probably not, but I think it will help. So that is much more than just "blaming Bush" as you claim I do. You don't have to agree with my points but please don't think you are going to get away with saying I am just a Bush hater and I blame Bush because my laundry doesn't fold itself.
Stevie maybe we can blame the housing crisis on a sneak like this who like always is on the side of the people Marine blindly supports. These type of things just don't happen unless evil is behind it. Read on.
NEWS: Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown.
By David Corn
Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.
Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited?at one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms?setting off a wave of merger mania.
But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry?friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career?came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead?even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.
It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiwork?far from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps?and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."
Subprime 1-2-3
Don't understand credit default swaps? Don't worry?neither does Congress. Herewith, a step-by-step outline of the subprime risk betting game. ?Casey Miner
Subprime borrower: Has a few overdue credit card bills; goes to a storefront lender owned by major bank; takes out a $100,000 home-equity loan at 11 percent interest
Lending bank: Assuming housing prices will only go up, and that investors will want to buy mortgage loan packages, makes as many subprime loans as it can
Investment bank: Packages subprime mortgages into bundles called collateralized debt obligations, or cdos, then sells those cdos to eager investors. Goes to insurer to get protection for those investors, thus passing the default risk to the insurer through a "credit default swap."
Insurer: Thinking that default risk is low, agrees to cover more money than it can pay out, in exchange for a premium
Rating agency: On basis of original quality of loans and insurance policy they are "wrapped" in, issues a rating signaling certain slices of the cdo are low risk (aaa), medium risk (bbb), or high risk (ccc)
Investor: Borrows more money from investment bank to load up on cdo slices; makes money from interest payments made to the "pool" of loans. No one loses?as long as no one tries to cash in on the insurance.
It didn't quite work out that way. For starters, the legislation contained a provision?lobbied for by Enron, a generous contributor to Gramm?that exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight, allowing Enron to run rampant, wreck the California electricity market, and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. (For Gramm, Enron was a family affair. Eight years earlier, his wife, Wendy Gramm, as cftc chairwoman, had pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined the Houston-based company's board, and in the following years her Enron salary and stock income brought between $915,000 and $1.8 million into the Gramm household.)
But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It's like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm's bill?which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers?a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.
In essence, Wall Street's biggest players (which, thanks to Gramm's earlier banking deregulation efforts, now incorporated everything from your checking account to your pension fund) ran a secret casino. "Tens of trillions of dollars of transactions were done in the dark," says University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, an expert on financial markets and derivatives. "No one had a picture of where the risks were flowing." Betting on the risk of any given transaction became more important?and more lucrative?than the transactions themselves, Partnoy notes: "So there was more betting on the riskiest subprime mortgages than there were actual mortgages." Banks and hedge funds, notes Michael Greenberger, who directed the cftc's division of trading and markets in the late 1990s, "were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets."
These unregulated swaps have been at "the heart of the subprime meltdown," says Greenberger. "I happen to think Gramm did not know what he was doing. I don't think a member in Congress had read the 262-page bill or had thought of the cataclysm it would cause." In 1998, Greenberger's division at the cftc proposed applying regulations to the burgeoning derivatives market. But, he says, "all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder."
Now, belatedly, the feds are swooping in?but not to regulate the industry, only to bail it out, as they did in engineering the March takeover of investment banking giant Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase, fearing the firm's collapse could trigger a dominoes-like crash of the entire credit derivatives market.
No one in Washington apologizes for anything, so it's no surprise that Gramm has failed to issue any mea culpa. Post-Enron, says Greenberger, the senator even called him to say, "You're going around saying this was my fault?and it's not my fault. I didn't intend this."
Whether or not Gramm had bothered to ponder the potential downsides of his commodities legislation, having helped set off an industry free-for-all, he reaped the rewards. In 2003, he left the Senate to take a highly lucrative job at ubs, Switzerland's largest bank, which had been able to acquire investment house PaineWebber due to his banking deregulation bill. He would soon be lobbying Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department for ubs on banking and mortgage matters. There was a moment of poetic justice when ubs became one of the subprime crisis' top losers, writing down $37 billion as of this spring?an amount equal to its previous four years of profits combined. In a report explaining how it had managed to mess up so grandly, ubs noted that two-thirds of its losses were the fault of collateralized debt obligations?securities backed largely by subprime instruments?and that credit default swaps had been "key to the growth" of its out-of-control cdo business. (Gramm declined to comment for this article.)
Gramm's record as a reckless deregulator has not affected his rating as a Republican economic expert. Sen. John McCain has relied on him for policy advice, especially, according to the campaign, on housing matters. The two have been buddies ever since they served together in the House in the 1980s; in 1996, McCain chaired Gramm's flop of a presidential campaign. (Gramm spent $21 million and earned only 10 delegates during the gop primaries.) In 2005, McCain told a Wall Street Journal columnist that Gramm was his economic guru. Two years later, Gramm wrote a piece for the Journal extolling McCain as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, and he's hailed McCain's love of tax cuts and free trade. Media accounts have identified Gramm as a contender for the top slot at the Treasury Department if McCain reaches the White House. "If McCain gets in," frets Lynn Turner, a former chief sec accountant, "we'll have more of the same deregulatory mess. I like John McCain, but given what I know about Phil Gramm, I wouldn't vote for McCain."
As a thriving bank exec and presidential adviser, Gramm has defied a prime economic principle: Bad products are driven out of the market. In John McCain, he has gained an important customer, so his stock has gone up in value. And there's no telling when the Gramm bubble will burst.
Another great post by our sponge.The truth on this forum is hard to come by.You have those that cut and post goverment stats like the Bush government would tell the truth about anything.They are master chefs at cooking the books.
Don't need truth on this issue--try common sense
You got corps paying bulk of taxes and producing jobs and owned by working/productive americans via stocks and 401ks
---and you got political party wanting to take away profits of corp/stockholders and pass it on to their less/nonproductive base.
Not really to hard to understand--:shrug:
Maybe you'd like to explain how 10% profits on billion corp are windfall profits and 60% profit on million corp is not.
Here is Fortune 500 list of 50 most profitable companys as % of revenue in 2007--you won't see Exxon on it --in fact they wouldn't break top 100.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fort...rformers/companies/growth_in_profits/1yr.html
Dogs, your tax and stock explanation is an outright lie. Example, take a look at all the industries hurt and the jobs lost because of the high cost of fuel. Now tell me again how this helps taxes and 401 k's? It is a lie created by Big Oil and passed along by the sheep.
O-K I'm so stupid that gas might go to 4.00 a gallon. Wait a minute I hadn't heard that. You may believe that this thief don't know what's going on .A reporter knows but the president of our country don't know that oil and gas is going sky high.Give me the common sense to know better.It's a game that there selling and I'm not buying it.
Now this is what I think about this bullshit. Bush/Cheney are oil men and their best friends are oil men,and working together they have raped the country.No oil shortage just in bed sleeping with the enemy.OPEC and Bush #1 and Bush #2 are in bed together.So wag the dog,start a war over oil,drive the price sky high,continue war at all cost and constantly talk of war with Iran.You have been played like the sucker that you are if you can't see it.
To wrap this profit bullshit up. 100% profit of zero is a big fat 0. So give me 10% of a trillion hell give me 1% of a trillion and let me fix it where oil goes through the roof and the natives get restless and they give me all the land and oil rights so I meaning BIG OIL will have the sheep fucxed for ever. 10% of a trillion or 50% of millions. Which one do you want.Volume=small % of trillions works best for me.
Why not fight a war over oil,wars have been fought over salt.But the SOB'S want call a spade a spade they will never tell you the truth,but you,unlike myself, like being fuxked in the ars the difference is you call it sweet sex and I call it rape.
8 years of this and maybe 4 more with McCaine.Then here comes John Ellis to take us into 2020.Call me names if you like,but I don't need to copy some right wing nut that does nothing but to insult my common sense.Their plan is to divide and cause hate of all people.
Now this is what I think about this bullshit. Bush/Cheney are oil men and their best friends are oil men,and working together they have raped the country.No oil shortage just in bed sleeping with the enemy.OPEC and Bush #1 and Bush #2 are in bed together.So wag the dog,start a war over oil,drive the price sky high,continue war at all cost and constantly talk of war with Iran.You have been played like the sucker that you are if you can't see it.
To wrap this profit bullshit up. 100% profit of zero is a big fat 0. So give me 10% of a trillion hell give me 1% of a trillion and let me fix it where oil goes through the roof and the natives get restless and they give me all the land and oil rights so I meaning BIG OIL will have the sheep fucxed for ever. 10% of a trillion or 50% of millions. Which one do you want.Volume=small % of trillions works best for me.
Why not fight a war over oil,wars have been fought over salt.But the SOB'S want call a spade a spade they will never tell you the truth,but you,unlike myself, like being fuxked in the ars the difference is you call it sweet sex and I call it rape.
8 years of this and maybe 4 more with McCaine.Then here comes John Ellis to take us into 2020.Call me names if you like,but I don't need to copy some right wing nut that does nothing but to insult my common sense.Their plan is to divide and cause hate of all people.
Donny how about Saddam threw out those rotten oil companies and paid for it with his life. The simple reason im not for the death penalty. You get a bunch of rotten creeps framing you, they can have you killed any time they want and feed the public some bogus reasons. I heard Saddam even offered this corrupt administration a pretty sweet deal but they didn't want anything to do with it.
Lots of people that get in there way don't do so well.This shit has been going on for sometime.Wellstone is a real good example.Bush #1 hated this guy.MUSHARRAF maybe the next one.Neo-cons need to go to war and Pakistan may need a new RULER. The powers that are in control started war in Iraq because they could.Bush the smoking gun is in reality a devout coward.A real school yard bully.Just my opinion.But I've had to hustle all my life to make it and there is one thing that I know and that is how to size up people and judge what there made of.Cheney would kill some one in the drop of a hat.It's possible that Cheney may be related to the Devil.Bush is not capable or clever enough to dictate the policy that they have pushed upon us.That damn Cheney is.
Our government is all show,in TEXAS they say all hat and no cattle,anyway they posture and say shit that looks good back home,but they have no real power .They are clowns,puppets in a show that is controlled by the ELITE, I honestly believe that a NEW WORLD ORDER is coming and there is no way to stop it.
Banks the money changers,starting with the FED then the central and world banks are the real corruption.They want it all and some day they will have it,and our leaders will say how much is in it for me. ME-ME-ME. And it don't matter what side of the wide world of corrupt politics that you'er on.Big deal that you'er a corrupt Democrat,so what that you'er a corrupt Republican.Either way you cut it you'er a SLAVE to the system.
Our government is all show,in TEXAS they say all hat and no cattle,anyway they posture and say shit that looks good back home,but they have no real power .They are clowns,puppets in a show that is controlled by the ELITE, I honestly believe that a NEW WORLD ORDER is coming and there is no way to stop it.
Banks the money changers,starting with the FED then the central and world banks are the real corruption.They want it all and some day they will have it,and our leaders will say how much is in it for me. ME-ME-ME. And it don't matter what side of the wide world of corrupt politics that you'er on.Big deal that you'er a corrupt Democrat,so what that you'er a corrupt Republican.Either way you cut it you'er a SLAVE to the system.
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A good example of their lies is this one that DTB is spreading. "Look how many people have oil stocks in their 401 k's" Has this guy checked what the high oil prices have done to the market? He tries to make the average dork think they profit when Big Oil profits when in fact it is the other way around.
When you pay over10% more for a product in less then 60 days some one should ask why. Of course if you have something that cost 500 bucks to start with that is a little different. But gas 3.60 to 4.05. Total B S. By the way when are we going to get that great American Co Exxon to stop selling 40% of it to Japan. Maybe if we keep our own oil we would not have to listen to the 10 Rebs standing in the dark in W DC still trying to scare folks.
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Try getting your info from financial publications instead of your liberal blogs/obama/pelosi etc.
Lets try something you might be familiar with--cause its evident you can't/won't read financials
Maybe you can put the following in perspective-
Washington - With this summer's high gas prices, Americans are trading in their traditional vacations for "staycations" ? vacations much closer to home.
But compared with other things Americans might do, driving is still a bargain.
Consider, for example, the costs of going to a movie:
To take a family of four to a movie at an AMC Theatre, it will cost anywhere from $55.75 to $71.50, depending on whether the family shares movie snacks or not, and this does not even include gasoline.
For that same $71.50, the family could purchase enough gas for their car (of decent gas mileage) to drive from Disneyland to Las Vegas and back again. And for the price of tickets and extra-large refreshments, , they could drive from Disneyland to the Grand Canyon and back again.
Where are the calls for federal investigation into price gouging at concession stands?
For years, populist politicians have dragged oil industry executives to Capitol Hill and accused them of price manipulation. Every time gas prices increase, liberal lawmakers direct the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil industry price gouging. To their chagrin, the FTC has never found oil industry price manipulation.
What evidence does congress use to back their price gouging claims? Try none.
In 2005, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington responded to a question on whether she believed oil companies were price gouging, "[a]bsolutely." she said. "I just don't have the document to prove it."
And this past May, in a speech on the House floor, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) of Florida targeted oil company executives when she said, "I can't say that there's evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are."
Shouldn't we demand more from our politicians than unfounded accusations?
These congressional hearings are often followed by attempts to impose so-called windfall profits taxes on oil companies. The process is reminiscent of the medieval practice of trial by ordeal, in which the accused are subjected to a painful ? possibly fatal procedure ? with the expectation that the truly innocent will be saved.
So far, the oil companies have survived. The most recent attempt to impose such a tax on "unreasonable" profits failed in June.
And just what do congressional advocates of a windfall profits tax consider unreasonable?
In the first quarter of 2008, Big Oil had a profit margin of 7.4 percent. Over that same period, the pharmaceutical and medicine industry earned a 25.9 percent profit, the chemical industry earned 15.7 percent and the electronic equipment industry earned 12.1 percent. What about those movie theater refreshments? Four large popcorns and four large sodas cost $31.50. The total raw ingredient cost is approximately $7.56. That equals a 76 percent gross margin. Where is the political outrage over that figure?
Still believe it is the oil companies gouging us? Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to.
Ms. Pelosi has called oil company profits "obscene," and recently supported yet another measure to investigate alleged oil industry price gouging.
Let's take a look at where each dollar spent at the pump goes. In the first quarter of 2008, the majority ? 70 cents ? was spent to purchase crude oil, 17 cents was spent on refining and retailing, and 13 cents on paying taxes.
American oil companies cannot change the largest factor influencing gasoline prices ? the cost of crude oil.
In The New York Times, columnist Edmund L. Andrews asked satirically last year "if the oil industry is so powerful, why did it let gasoline prices fall through the floor throughout the 1980s and part of the 1990s? For that matter why did it let gasoline prices fall sharply after they spiked in 2005 and 2006?"
Pelosi never decried this "obscene" lack of profits and shareholder abuse. Instead, she seeks to punish an industry that makes a modest profit margin on a high demand good.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
now instead of changing topic to bush-iraq etc
take a crash course in econ 101--
then come back and tell us how ---
In the first quarter of 2008, Big Oil had a profit margin of 7.4 percent. Over that same period, the pharmaceutical and medicine industry earned a 25.9 percent profit, the chemical industry earned 15.7 percent and the electronic equipment industry earned 12.1 percent
--equates to windfall profits.
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