Imagine that. This is yet another example of how the Bush/GOP-FDA has sided with business over consumers. They don't care if humans suffer the consequences as long as business gets what it wants. Having an effective FDA working for everyone costs money but there are just too many ongoing problems for consumers as a result of GOP hacking. Isn't it time we start considering individuals instead of just business?
A chemical in some plastic food and drink packaging including baby bottles may be tied to early puberty and prostate and breast cancer, the U.S. government said on Tuesday.
Based on draft findings by the National Toxicology Program, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, senior congressional Democrats asked the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider its view that the chemical bisphenol A is safe in products for use by infants and children.
The GOP Congress and Bush years will be looked back on for years by big business as the best of times. Competition was frowned upon, government regulation was changed to self regulation, war profiteering seemed to become patriotic to the GOP, taxes were cut and companies were allowed to easily move beyond the US borders in the name of free enterprise and now, the proof is there that big business is held to another standard in terms of taxes. We have problems ranging from banks begging for cash around the world, food crisis in terms of quality and quantity, higher cost of living and stagnant pay and now small business being punished while the big guys get another free ride. The best democracy money can buy.
The tax audit rates of the largest companies are less than half what they were 20 years ago while more small and mid-size businesses are coming under scrutiny, according to an organization that monitors the Internal Revenue Service.
UPDATE: Oil now at $97.48 but rally "lacks conviction" according to CNBC.
Oil back over $96. The GOP Congress of not so long ago were all tripping over themselves to give even more corporate welfare to Big Oil and don't think they won't try it again. They love helping the least needy, whether in the corporate boardrooms or the oil fields.
That's because Republicans are the "fiscal conservatives" I suppose, whatever that's supposed to mean. Democrats need to learn how to shove this right back in the face of Republicans because the spending never seems to end with the GOP despite their big talk. Republican Senator Isakson from Georgia, who comes from the real estate business, wants to add even more tax credits for home buyers. Sounds great if you want to keep the price of housing inflated well above where it ought to be. Is he paying attention to the problems faced by the country or just his own special interests?
Also in the Senate, Democrats are offering rebates for the wealthiest Americans so that Grassley and other "fiscal conservatives" in the GOP will accept a few million for unemployment benefits. Can you imagine, Republicans holding out benefits for the unemployment casualties of their own economic failures just so the richest Americans can get a few extra dollars? As if they haven't been rewarded enough in recent years. This is repulsive and Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves. Democrats who fail to make this an issue at election time also ought to be ashamed of themselves. If the tables were turned, you know how the Republicans would react.
We kicked off 2008 with the price per barrel at double the starting point from 2007. Prices declined to the high $80's though bounced back over $90 when the news of the stimulus plan was announced. Prices could free fall, but as long as the Federal Reserve continues with its pro-inflation policy, prices appear more likely to stay high. Within that context, Big Oil will be rolling out financially impressive profit figures this week. Remember when Bush and the GOP wanted to give them even more tax breaks and handouts?
Shell will be at the centre of a political storm this week when it posts profits of almost $27bn (£13.6bn), the highest earnings ever made by a British company.
The record-breaking profits, on the back of soaring oil prices, seem likely to stir fresh allegations of profiteering. The price of petrol has been increasing sharply, rising from 71p a litre five years ago to about 104p a litre today, according to the AA.
Texas-based Exxon Mobil, the world's largest privately-owned oil company, is expected to improve on its own previous record on Friday by reporting earnings of $39.6bn, the biggest annual profits that the US has ever seen.
The year 2000 delivered many new possibilities to friends of the GOP. A full food trough was just sitting there and many were puzzled, not quite sure what to do.
After the jump, a happy bunch who understood the full potential of a permanent GOP majority.
Mmmmmm, Iraq...oil, reconstruction contracts and security forces. Yummmmm. Post Katrina rebuilding. Delicious. Tax cuts for the richest Americans and send the bill to the middle class. You have what? No regulations for financial markets? Great! Just keep dishing out favors to millionaire farmers and throw in a splash of a dismantled consumer protection and we'll be set, for now.
Besides delivering the pork to wealthy farmers in GOP south (they need help about as much as Halliburton) the new farm bill protects another GOP special interest, the junk food industry. Heaven forbid we modernize school nutrition standards which have not changed since 1979. America's collective weight gain problem has noticeably spiked during this period of time. The industrial food/chemical industry has also made strides in delivering strange chemical concoctions (olestra, apartame, hydrogenated oils and other goodies) to foods during this time as well.
While this was a great win for the GOP and their friends, American children will pay the price. This is of course the same GOP who never stops talking about protecting human life, though you would never know it by their disgraceful actions. This will only lead to more health care problems and costs down the road for everyone. Protecting GOP special interests, yes. Protecting America's kids, no. It's all just SOP for the Republicans.
Bush can conveniently blast the Democrats for spending but nobody can deliver destruction to the economy the way Bush can do it. Some of his greatest hits include:
- Largest decline in housing prices since 1991. - Crumbling US dollar, weakest showing against leading five currencies since early 1970s. This includes 37 year low against Canadian dollar. Against the UK pound, it's over $2 to buy only one. - Skyrocketing and "out of control" oil prices, record highs at the pump. - Billions of US taxpayer dollars lost, missing, and who knows what from Iraq. Costs for war to drag out for decades. - Record high budget deficit, compounded by GOP spending boondoggles.
I think some people need to step back and look at the devastation triggered by complete GOP rule in our government and think about where we go from here. For decades Republicans (much like Bush yesterday) talked a big game, telling anyone who would listen that they were the financially responsible party but the results say something else. Their rule is setting new records, none of which are good for the country, yet some of them still have the audacity to blame the Democrats. Sorry folks, but check again.
What exactly does it take to get this administration to take action? How many people have to get sick or even die before they think it's time to announce a problem? How many more examples such as this does Congress need before they modernize the food recall system? Let's take an honest look at what the Gingrich-GOP Congress "let business self-regulate" has delivered. Businesses hate to report problems like this because it's embarrassing and bad PR which is bad for business. They have too much to gain hoping that it somehow blows over, as it easily can since the government has no authority to announce recalls and must wait in the business to deliver a recall.
Meanwhile, people are becoming ill and we even see the extreme cases where consumers even die. Is it so difficult to find a middle ground here? Can we not find a solution that protects consumers and makes it easier for businesses to cooperate? The administration loves to talk about how they are keeping Americans safe though with food, they only people they want to protect are corporate food executives. Somehow relying on a grocery store chain to provide the first line of support for consumers is not very comforting.
A quick glance at some of the heavy hitters in banking and finance that the GOP would love to use for the outsourcing of American Social Security. I can accept that money makes the world go 'round and that greed keeps the Wall Street machine moving but considering some of the incredibly bad decisions the "experts" on Wall Street have made lately, is this the team we really want? Social Security may not be much, but most Americans would be unable to cope with such staggering losses.
Can you imagine the rubbish they would be pushing on average Americans who are trying to build and maintain their social security plan? If they can't even practice common sense in banking - their profession - why should the American public trust them to take care of something as important as Social Security? With this news it's no surprise that Bush and the GOP have been quiet on this subject. If you think we have problems because of the subprime failures, just wait until this group - including Republicans in Congress and Greenspan types - get their hands on Social Security.
Try for a moment to forget about the numerous food safety problems including the recently announced recall of 22 million pounds of beef and instead focus on the GOP plan for just about everything: let industry self regulate. OK, so we already know that is a big reason why we are even in this current mess because industry has failed time after time to properly self regulate, probably afraid of the negative business impact of a new announcement. So here we are, years down the path of self-regulation and what's the new plan being proposed by the special new commission created by Bush? Uh huh, more of the same.
Worse still, the Washington Post delivers cover for this failed policy and manages to not even mention the 22 million pounds of beef that were just recalled, though they did mention the infamous E. coli recalls in spinach from a year ago. The Post article also fails to question the "new" approach which is hardly new, other than "new" statements made yesterday which only repeat the same plan as before. Is it not possible to ask questions or do anything besides regurgitate what the administration wants to say? What a terrible job by the Post on this story.
Yesterday, Mike Leavitt, secretary of health and human services and chairman of a panel established by President Bush to study the safety of imported food, reflected that point of view when he said: "We simply cannot inspect our way to safety."
This quote pretty much says everything we need to know about how the Bush administration plans to make food safer. There is no interest whatsoever in protecting consumers. The only interest is in protecting the businesses and their failed system. They can also quit blaming China because many, if not most of the problems are with American companies, unless the beef and spinach is suddenly being imported from China.
Sounds like a few issues that will need to be addressed in the banking and financial market. Citibank Q3 earnings to plummet 60% and UBS to report losses of almost $700 million for the quarter. Plenty more problems ahead in the banking and we can remember to thank them and their GOP enablers as the economy tumbles. Let's see raised hands out there for all of the Republicans in Congress who thought easy money was a great idea. And Mr. Bubble...hello...still there for comment?
Partially rescued, at least. But hey, it's the 1980s all over again! Now how did a savings and loan collapse manage to somehow - mysteriously, really - not get mentioned until late in the day on a Friday? Do they have a loyal Bushie working there or something? It's not exactly a Northern Rock-like failure but it's not insignificant either. At issue with the failed NetBank is over-exposure to loan defaults. Customers have the standard $100,000 FDIC guarantee but it is not clear what happens with deposits that were above that amount though the bank has been purchased by Dutch giant ING.
While dozens of mortgage companies have closed due to soaring defaults of home loans made to borrowers with weak, or subprime, credit, those problems previously had occurred among non-bank lenders such as New Century Financial Corp. NetBank, in contrast, is federally regulated.
Loose mortgage standards in recent years — especially among lenders catering to subprime borrowers — have resulted in a spike in home loan defaults.
Bert Ely, a banking consultant based in Alexandria, Va., said NetBank was in "deep trouble" before the subprime mortgage market's woes accelerated this year. Regulators, he said, "should have closed it a long time ago."
"Regulators?" What regulators? The GOP has made sure such old-fashioned ideas such as oversight and regulation were made a thing of the past.
The sub-prime loans are only part of the problem with the economy. The shortfall and run on the bank at Northern Rock in the UK was due to the recent fad in the financial world - mastered in the US by the largest banks, that we suddenly had to have in recent years - where the banks hold little and extend themselves significantly by borrowing from other banks and then selling off their loans in bits and pieces. It's the same old story that when things are going up, hooray, people make money. This becomes a problem when the market softens and then suddenly the banks are overextended (holding cash to support a loan is soooo yesterday) and nobody is interested in buying the once high-flying bits and pieces. Suddenly a once large (perhaps inflated is better) bank is scrambling to find money and everyone else is already scrambling to keep themselves afloat so that cash is no longer available.
Bernanke is finally talking about regulation but whether it is too late is another question. Mr. Bubble had been completely asleep at the wheel and even talked about the problem being exclusively the sub-prime loans. Of course, they are part of the problem but banks overextending themselves may turn out to be a much bigger problem for the economy. As the higher rates kick in for adjustable loans and defaults increase, finding cash will be even more difficult because who wants to buy such risky securities now that the floor is collapsing? Northern Rock - a bank which is now worth a few billion less and had to be propped up by the Bank of England - could very well be setting the example for what is in store for US banks.
The global rejection of the dollar is another sign of the problems that are ahead. The movement towards the euro and other currencies is signaling a lack of faith in the US economy which is burdened with the high cost of Iraq plus the problems with the diving real estate market and the soft economic forecast. The sub-prime problems are clearly a problem, but only the most immediately obvious problem. Mr Bubble will surely be called into question again and again as the US banking industry stumbles as the market for selling off loans dries up. As the US learned in 1929, over-extending with small cash reserves to cover loans that are 10-20+ times the value eventually result in a messy situation. Just remember who failed to regulate and provide over site as this fantastic new system was rolled out.
The culture of corruption through the Bush II/GOP Congress years is sinking to new lows every day. Why are Republicans always so concerned about tax money when it's their friends at the top but for most Americans who are stuck funding the bulk of this war, the problems never are resolved? Oh sure, there's outrage and plenty of talk, but what has to happen for the GOP to take action as they do if we're talking about a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans? Then it seems to be critical and the world will end in five minutes of tax cuts are not launched that very second. Meanwhile, we have problems such as this over and over and over.
Military officials said Thursday that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — were under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon had previously disclosed.
In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and matériel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.
Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.
Listening to Mattel CEO Robert A. Eckert cry about his problems and the problems his company has inflicted on small children would almost be amusing if the problems were not so serious. While it's nice to see business think about consumers instead of their profits and luxurious compensation plans, the greed factor is why we are here in the first place. China deserves plenty of blame for selling tainted products but let's not kid ourselves and pile on China because the businesses who were purchasing this rubbish should have had quality systems in place and the government could have also shown a little interest in refusing tainted products. Even though this should have been in place - industry regulating itself, for example - it wasn't. Heavens, it might have added a few pennies to the cost.
Mattel has fired several manufacturers and is beginning to inspect toys before, during and after paint applications, Eckert said. He said he plans to visit China soon to check on the inspections. [Note from Chris - how nice that such programs are only now being reviewed.]
One of the agency's commissioners said "we are all to blame" for a system that allowed children to be exposed to lead-tainted toys. That includes "those who stood by and quietly acquiesced while the commission was being reduced to a weakened regulator," said Thomas H. Moore, in the first of two days of hearings before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee.
Moore thanked lawmakers for rejecting a Bush administration budget proposal that would have required cutting full-time staff by 19 people. He urged Congress to pass legislation that would give the agency better tools to protect consumers from product safety hazards.
Republican "let industry self regulate" economics in action. Where are all of the GOP members of Congress who allowed the mortgage market to go unchecked these days? They had no problem allowing this new system to discard decades of common sense so they should have no problem stepping up and explaining themselves today. There's no rush though, since this problem will not be going away any time soon.
"The jump in foreclosure filings this month might be the beginning of the next wave of increased foreclosure activity, as a large number of subprime adjustable rate loans are beginning to reset now," James Saccacio, RealtyTrac's chief executive, said in statement.
The number of bank repossession filings rose dramatically, pumping up the month's foreclosure numbers, Saccacio said.
All valid criticisms but let's not forget who had one of the most (if not the most) influential economic positions in the US, perhaps in the world. Greenspan accepted all of this bad policy including radical tax cuts during a war plus and he ignored traditional reason with the sub-prime lending programs so to listen to all of his criticisms today is an amazing display of chutzpah by the former Fed chief. As much as Mr Bubble loves a microphone or interviewer today, it's clear that the man knows how to work the media and exert influence so to pretend as though he could do nothing to stop Bush and the GOP when he was at the Fed is laughable.
It's unfortunate for Greenspan that we lived through that period and when all of the insane GOP policies were being shoved through Congress, he offered no criticism and did nothing to stop the insanity. In fact, Greenspan even went on the offensive against Hillary when she dared to ask questions and criticized the 2001 tax cuts. Funny how it was fine to attack Hillary but it was so difficult to criticize the GOP. I hope Hillary reminds him again that not everyone was wrong about the 2001 tax cuts which he embraced. His selective memory routine is getting old.
President Bush, meanwhile, is continuing to get low marks for his economic stewardship. Just 37 percent approve of his handling of the economy in September, down from 41 percent in August, according to a separate AP-Ipsos poll. Only a third of the public is satisfied with the president's overall job performance, the poll found.
Individuals' feelings about the economy's prospects and their own financial fortunes plunged to 14.4 in September, compared with 43.9 in August. The new reading was the fourth weakest showing on record.
Credit problems in mortgage and other markets make it likely that the worst housing slump in 16 years will persist well into 2008. Foreclosures and late payments are spiking. Lenders have been forced out of business. The carnage -- especially in the ''subprime'' mortgage market involving borrowers with spotty credit histories -- has wreaked havoc on Wall Street.
History will not be kind on Bush and the GOP for this failed venture. Just think how historians will judge the administration in total when they include Katrina and the economic disasters that they brewed up.
The pessimism expressed by most people — including significant minorities of Republicans — contrasted with the brighter picture offered by Gen. David Petraeus. The chief U.S. commander in Iraq told Congress on Monday that the added 30,000 troops have largely achieved their military goals and could probably leave by next summer, though he conceded there has been scant political progress.
I suppose since the the media has fallen for the false outrage against Petraeus we can just call him General Sunshine or General Honesty and Beyond Reproach. Strangely enough, I just scratch my head and wonder where these people were back when similar attacks were made against anyone who dared question the intelligence of invading Iraq. Somehow those who criticized were anti-American and it was fair game to label war doubters like myself as America-haters and that was all OK. If the media was fine with those attacks a few years ago, they ought to be fine with the criticisms of Petraeus today. He's a big boy and can handle it and I don't see him as being any more or less of an American than anyone who spoke out against the invasion and who was smeared. If the GOP and their friends want to play like this - as they did back when the war was so popular - they should expect to receive as much as they dished out. If Petraeus is going to serve as the yes-man mouthpiece for the administration, he too should expect to take a bit of heat.
