Senator Richard Shelby has been leading the charge for the conservative Republicans in their rejection of the bailout plan. Even Rachael Maddow has given him time on her show to pimp the hazy Republican plan that would involve setting up some kind of insurance scam as an alternative to the deal the Democrats had worked out. But nobody is doing any research on Senator Shelby’s positions on the issues generally and in my opinion, they should. Go to his site and see what he is proposing. You will see that it is nothing more than "let’s keep more of the same". http://shelby.senate.gov/...
No one likes the fact that it appears that taxpayers will have to bailout Wall Street Robber Barons. It infuriates me. The problem is that there appears to be no alternative. We are going to have to pay for their mistakes one way or the other. It seems unavoidable. So the 1 trillion dollar (+) question is: How do we do it? I am not an economist. I am not here to support one plan. However, I do think we ought to know about the men who are leading the conservative Republican rejection of the plan worked out yesterday before we allow them to de-stabilize the situation even further.
Senator Shelby is a believer in the flat tax. A scheme that would disadvantage the poor and allow his rich Wall Street buddies to continue to loot the treasury at our expense. Senator Shelby. He opposes abortion and supports the Federal Marriage Amendment. He wants English to be the sole language of the U.S. government. He voted "yes" on FISA and "No" on SCHIPP. He voted in favor of the bill to fund the border fence. He voted "yes" on the Military Commission Act. He voted against timetables on troop withdrawals from Iraq. He voted against stem cell research. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/...
The FBI investigated Shelby and concluded in 2004 that he leaked classified information on June 19, 2002 to Carl Cameron, then the Chief Political Correspondent for Fox News. Shelby had received the information minutes before at a closed Congressional briefing. The information revealed that on September 10, 2001, the NSA intercepted two messages which confirmed the impending attack, although these messages were not translated until after 9/11. A Grand Jury was empanelled to hear the case but the Justice Department, declined to prosecute. The incident was referred to the Republican controlled Senate Ethics Committee who dismissed the probe in 2005.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Dick Shelby is the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. He has blocked legislation that would have helped to reform the title insurance industry and to reduce the costs homeowners pay when they re-finance their mortgage. http://www.forbes.com/... This should not be surprising when one realizes that Dick Shelby founded a title insurance company, Tuscaloosa Title Co. Inc. and earns up to $1,000,000 per year from his holdings in that company.
According to Open Secrets, Senator Shelby received almost $2,000,000.00 between 2003 and 2008 from Investment Banks, Banks, and Real Estate Firms. His top contributors include Citibank Corp., and Morgan Stanley. http://www.opensecrets.org/...
Maybe its just me, but I think that Wall Street firms don’t want to limit their future opportunities to rob us blind, or overpay their executives and so they are pulling the strings of their various legislative puppets like Shelby to ditch this deal.
Shelby and other conservative Republicans seems to be proposing that we adopt an insurance plan for troubled mortgages by which mortgage losses would be covered by premiums. He appears to be attempting to model it after the FDIC. There are two problems with this. First, the FDIC is not funded by taxpayers. It is funded by premiums that banks pay into the fund. A well-kept secret is that the FDIC no longer has sufficient funds from the premiums it collects because of covering the numerous, but under-reported bank failures. This may explain why the FDIC merely closed WaMu and immediately sold it to Morgan Stanley at the fire sale price. Second, who will pay the premiums under this Republican proposed insurance plan? The banks have no money, to pay premiums that would be sufficient to cover the losses from the mortgage backed securities. No. The taxpayers would be required to cover this insurance fund. How then is it any different than the bailout plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson? It is the same thing by a different name. You can call excrement CcCa, but its all still shit!
The real problem that Dick Shelby and other conservative Republicans have with the deal that was worked out is that the new deal calls for accountability, Congressional oversight, limits on executive compensation, and the potential for taxpayers to recover their money, someday. They also want to present John McCain as the "savior of the world" and rescue him from certain defeat. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we should believe anything that Dick Shelby and others of his ilk are saying now?
Now I could do the same amount of research on the other conservatives leading this debacle. But I have to go staff an Obama table at the local grocery store. I hope that others will do some research on the men who are leading the McCain sponsored conservative Republican revolt. People need to see their records before the blindly give them prominent speaking time on the broadcast networks.