BOTH SIDES NOW by l.t. Dravis

By l.t. Dravis

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Monday, November 17, 2008 – We can’t afford to waste another minute watching the Bush Administration, the House of Representatives, and the United States Senate waste their time and our money with the absurd, nonsensical political gamesmanship that has defined the state of this government’s so-called efforts to ‘fix’ the economy.

Isn’t it time we told those geniuses what to do, how to do it, and when to do it?

Where do we start?

We’d be wasting our time trying to tell George Bush or Dick Cheney to get to work, so we have to get after Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

We have to tell them to get to work and stay at work until the economy is headed in the right direction . . . if that means no more recesses or holidays for the House and the Senate . . . so what?

Hey, Harry and Nancy . . . if you want to take off Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day . . . okay, but that’s it!

You and all your colleagues have been paid big bucks by taxpayers for years; we’ve paid your office expenses; we’ve paid for your health insurance; we’ve paid for your security; we’ve supported your staff; we’ve supported your cushy lifestyle for too long and, now, it’s time for you to earn your keep.

It’s time for you to fix the economy.

How?

You do two simple things.

1. You stop handing out billions of taxpayer dollars to financial institutions . . . it ain’t working.

2. You create jobs . . . because if you want people to spend, they need to work.

And, to make sure people work, you gotta create jobs.

By the way, if you want to keep your paychecks from bouncing, you need to create some tax revenue.

To generate tax revenue, you gotta create . . . yep, you got it . . . jobs!

Okay . . . now that the concept is clear, where do you start?

Simple . . . convene a joint session of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate to write legislation necessary to:

1. Implement Job Retention and Job Creation Strategy – Short-Term – 30 to 60 days from start to job creation

a. Convene a Small Business conference in each Congressional District to determine how best to use private and public funds to prevent layoffs and create new jobs

b. Provide private and public funding, technologies, and information to assist Small businesses to generate sales revenues, cash flow, and profitability required to retain employees and create new jobs as they develop, build, and rebuild community assets and infrastructure utilizing Green technologies and products

c. Provide fast-track contract bid processes for qualified Small Businesses to win contracts and retain employees and create new jobs as they build, rebuild, and repair infrastructure assets

2. Implement a Job Retention and Job Creation Strategy – Long-Term – 61 to 180 days from start to job creation

a. Convene General Business regional conferences in ten standard Federal Regions to determine how best to invest institutional, private, and public resources to increase Medium and Large business participation in product and service job-intensive, inclusive, and innovative markets

b. Assess occupational mobility to help Medium and Large businesses retain employees and create new employment opportunities as they develop, build, and rebuild community assets and infrastructure utilizing Green technologies and products

c. Provide contract bid opportunities for Medium and Large businesses to retain employees and create new jobs by rebuilding, repairing, and building infrastructure assets

3. Keys to Ensure Success

a. Create jobs that not only produce products and deliver services, but also provide pathways to meaningful, secure, upwardly mobile, long-term employment

b. Build-in the training necessary to prepare workers to perform job functions as required

c. Provide flexible, efficient, and proactive public service support for each Private and/or Public project

LIKE IT OR NOT, FOLKS, we’re in uncharted economic waters these days. The old saw about how government should allow markets to seek their own levels is as obsolete today as white wall tires.

The only entity that can solve the massive economic mess the Bush Administration left us is the Federal Government.

Who else has the resources?

Who else can borrow or print the trillions of dollars it’s going to take to get us back on our economic feet?

It ain’t Chrysler, GM, or Ford; it ain’t Bank of America, Citigroup, or Wells Fargo; it ain’t even Microsoft or Oprah!

It’s the government.

Don’t like it?

I don’t.

But what choice do we have?

As he said so often in the campaign, President-elect Obama understands that the only way to move consumers back into malls, restaurants, car dealerships, RV dealers, and realtors’ offices, is to put them back to work.

American workers need to keep the jobs they have or replace the jobs they’ve lost . . . NOW!

We have to create a new economy that continually expands its capacity to absorb more and more jobs; an economy that continues to create jobs as we shift from the initial, ‘rebuild-the-long-neglected-infrastructure’ phase to the production of high value products, services, and technologies.

I’m not talking about ‘make-work’ jobs . . . I’m talking about creating jobs that challenge workers to learn new capabilities and skills; I’m talking about jobs that provide a living wage; jobs that give workers and their families the security of knowing they’re covered by adequate health insurance; jobs that provide meaningful retirement benefits; jobs that generate significant local, state, and federal tax revenues.

I’m also talking about productive jobs that make businesses healthy by generating consistent revenues, cash flow, and profits.

Additional points to ponder include:

· Offer tax credits of up to $5,000.00 for each new job created . . . provided the employee is retained for two years

· Offer additional financial and contractual incentives for businesses that create products and technologies to reduce energy consumption and offer contract extensions for companies that cut costs, improve quality, and reduce delivery times

· Create mutually profitable training partnerships between private enterprise and public education to train workers to produce and deliver Green products and technologies (design, development, and production of high-efficiency wind generators, etc.)

· Create joint Public/Private partnerships to leverage investment in core business enterprises (infrastructure and transportation innovations)

· Establish electronically connected local Public/Private service centers to coordinate, manage, and monitor individual and joint projects

· Coordinate, manage, and monitor the delivery of funding for each project to maximize local economic development

· Invite union participation in training and job placement wherever and whenever possible

EPILOGUE: Come on, folks . . . we need to take a stand here! We can’t let Washington throw away the future of the nation because our Representatives and Senators are too busy with petty self-interest, obsolete ideologies, and foolish power plays to take care of the people’s business.

It’s time for Congress to look at this crisis for what it is, not for how each party can twist it to gain some stupid political advantage.

They can’t work their usual 3-day weeks any more.

They can’t take all their little ‘recesses’ and holidays.

It is time for each of the 535 Representatives and Senators to finally stand up and do their jobs by creating jobs.

It’s time for them to work as hard as we do!

Anything less – at this critical moment in time – would be shameful.

Isn’t it time to contact your Representative and your Senator and tell them what you want them to do?

If not now, when . . . ?

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, Email me at ltdassociates@msn.com (goes right to my desk) and since I personally answer every Email, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Want to go to a Blog that listens to you and speaks for you as well? GO TO bothsidesnowbiz.blogspot.com/ AND SPEAK UP . . .

Labels: The Bush Administration

By l.t. Dravis

NEW YORK – Tuesday, September 16, 2008 – The people we trusted to govern, lead, and protect our economy – the Bush administration, Congress, the Federal Reserve Board (FED), and the CEOs and boards of major financial institutions - the bunch who brought us the mortgage meltdown, bank failures, and Wall Street’s current collapse, are now busily making things worse.

Because federal regulators sat on their thumbs for decades and did nothing to protect individual and institutional investors and because the FED cut interest rates to make money dirt cheap, CEOs and boards of major financial institutions got greedy and pushed trillions of dollars in mortgage loans on anyone and everyone, whether or not they were creditworthy.

Trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities then became worthless because too many homeowners weren’t and aren’t able to make their mortgage payments.

The reasons are simple and predictable.

First and foremost, millions of homeowners have adjustable rate mortgages that ‘adjust’ their monthly payments beyond their ability to pay. This problem has been compounded by the fact that housing values have dropped precipitously, wiping out trillions of dollars in equity, which prevents people in trouble from refinancing to lower monthly payments. Secondly, hundreds of thousands of homeowners lost the ability to pay their mortgages along with their jobs . . . a fate that faces hundreds of thousands more homeowners as the economy continues to tank.

Financial institutions that sell, trade, and use mortgage-backed securities as collateral for operating loans have been particularly hard hit. So, it should have come as no surprise that venerable institutions like Bear Stearns, founded in 1923, would fail or that 158 year-old Lehman Brothers, the 4^th largest investment bank in the country, would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, or that Merrill Lynch, one of the most trusted names in the financial world, would be forced to literally give itself away to Bank of America to avoid liquidation.

The Bush administration, Congress, and the FED should have anticipated at least a year ago that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, quasi-governmental institutions, guarantors of trillions of dollars in mortgages, would run out of cash and would ultimately have to be taken over by the Federal Government.

Now, to make matters worse, American International Group (AIG), a major insurer of billions of dollars in corporate loans and mortgages held by banks all around the world is running out of cash. If AIG failed, all those loans would be uninsured and umpteen dozen banks would see their balance sheets tip the wrong way . . . many into insolvency . . . so the Federal Reserve will likely loan $85 billion taxpayer dollars to bail AIG out of its current crisis.

And that’s how the experts are making things worse.

They’re throwing billions and billions of taxpayer dollars at the wrong end of the problem.

Just this morning, the Federal Reserve dropped $70 billion in taxpayer cash on banks to encourage them to ease tight credit conditions with no guarantee that any of that money will ever be lent to businesses or consumers.

Dramatic?

Yes.

Effective?

No.

Throwing taxpayer money at the wrong end of the economy does nothing to change the fact that trillions of dollars in worthless mortgage-backed securities are destroying our financial institutions and threatening the future of the economy we’ve known and trusted for the past sixty plus years.

If the Bush administration, Congress, and the FED were serious about solving this crisis and preventing a reoccurrence next month, next year or the year after, they’d invest taxpayer money to bring back value to mortgage-backed securities.

Until that happens, financial institutions will continue to fail, taxpayers will continue to pay, and the economy will continue to fall apart.

How do you bring back value to mortgage-backed securities?

You give people the ability to make their mortgage payments.

For homeowners fortunate enough to still have jobs, you make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pay back a portion of their taxpayer bailouts by sending financial counselors out to renegotiate adjustable rate mortgages so homeowners can make mortgage payments within their current budgets.

For those who’ve lost their jobs, you create jobs across the country, in a variety of disciplines – from blue collar to professional - rebuilding our infrastructure, building wind farms, refurbishing schools, and cleaning up inner cities so homeowners can make their mortgage payments, support their families, stimulate the economy by consuming other products and services, and generate local, state, and federal tax revenues.

For those who’ll argue against government investment in creating new jobs, keep in mind that because of the unprecedented ineptness of the Bush/Cheney administration’s eight years in power, because of the hundreds of billions of dollars lost by the Bush/Cheney preoccupation with the Iraq war, and because of Congress’ inability to regulate the financial services industry to prevent the current economic crisis, the free market economy is no longer free to correct itself.

Why?

Because business and consumer credit is likely to remain tight for the foreseeable future, because hundreds of billions of dollars in investment capital has been lost through greed and mismanagement, because the national debt costs the American taxpayer nearly $2 billion a day in interest alone, and because historically high deficit spending for the past eight years puts the Federal Government in the position of competing with businesses and consumers for loans.

For these reasons, the economy is no longer free to raise the capital it needs to create, design, produce, and deliver products and services essential to grow and drive the its way out of this mess.

So, while the Bush administration, Congress, and the FED waste billions of taxpayer dollars on the wrong end of this economic crisis, while more and more people lose their homes and their jobs, remember that we actually elected these people . . . freely . . . to lead us to this place.

Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, Email me at LTDAssociates@msn.com (goes right to my desk) and since I personally answer every Email, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Labels: Mortgage meltdown, The Bush Administration, the FED, Wall Street crisis