If you are trying to contact your representative in Washington you're out of luck. There website is overloaded and down. www.house.gov House websites slowed by e-mails on bailout bill By Brendan Sasso Posted: 09/29/08 06:53 PM [ET] Public interest and concern over the bailout bill has caused a significant slowdown on the website of the House of Representatives. E-mail traffic in recent days has increased in volume by three or four times the normal rate, according to Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer. He attributed the resulting slowdown to âthe extraordinary interest in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and a dramatic increase in the number of constituents e-mailing their members of Congress surrounding the bill.â On Sunday night, after a draft of the bill was put on the House Speakerâs website and the sites of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees, those sites could not be accessed because of the increased traffic. But even before Sunday, members had been receiving a high volume of constituent e-mails. Ventura could not recall another time that the House website slowed down so significantly due to public interest in an issue. âThis is a whopper. This is historic,â Ventura said. He noted that the bailout plan has attracted global interest. He also predicted delays would continue. âHouse computer experts are monitoring the situation and are attempting to address the tremendous increase in Web traffic to the House's websites to provide improved access to House Internet services, but expect the delays to last as long as demand remains this high,â Ventura said in a statement. Frederick Hill, spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said that his office had received 642 e-mails regarding the bailout package by Friday. Issa voted against the bailout and was one of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who rallied against it on the floor on Monday. Peter Kovar, chief of staff to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), said that his office has seen a substantial increase in the number of e-mails, phone calls and letters in recent days. Frank is the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a key figure in negotiations on the bailout plan. Frank voted for the bill. E-mail volume also has been noticeably higher than normal in the Senate, according to sergeant at arms spokeswoman Becky Daugherty. However, she said, the Senateâs servers so far had not been overwhelmed.
Hate to break it to you, but the U.S. is actually a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic. Calling it a simple republic or democracy doesn't give the founding fathers their due for what they gave us. It's pretty damned brilliant.
Im not clear on one thing..... where and how did this $700B rescue package originate?I know a bunch of people pushed it through to the voting stage, but there must have been a core set of lets say 3-6 individuals who created the plan. 1)what are their names? 2)I publicly state they need a thorough mental evaluation,and personally I dont think they are fit to be elected members of Congress. I cant get over the audacity of putting together a plan to save Criminals at the expense of hard working taxpayers.And how did they come up with a $700B price tag?Is that a random number? I mean, this kind of shit has to stop.This isnt the 1930s with no internet no cps no free flow of information.The public cant be brainwashed anymore. If anyone knows their names post 'em.Ill take care of the rest.
Keep your insults to yourself, "friend". Consider this: GE has approx. $100BN in CP and approx. $63BN in bank credit lines. Tell me does this mismatch make sense - even for a company as big as GE. Then again GE is also another potential time bomb a la AIG; but I digress Perhaps there is a reason why GE wants to have such mismatched liabilities. Perhaps there is a reason why up until recently 40% of GE's financing came from CP. The reason: excessive leverage and poor balance sheet mgmt. Businesses have always borrowed to fund capital projects or to serve as bridge financing...wise and prudent companies don't borrow to make payroll as a matter of course/routine, companies don't borrow via CP to leverage up their balance sheets. This "my friend" is the issue. companies borrowing excessively, foolishly and imprudently. Last point, i've watched you on this site for many years and you are always quick to insult others , always quick to assume some superior knowledge.. .plenty evidence of a personality complex and lack of knowledge. Good Luck and Good Night "my friend" .
Landis is insinuating that he's more intelligent and versed in economics than Joseph Stiglitz. Interesting. I'm just waiting for a single person to explain how the money Paulson wants will be used, with some specificity, and what measures will be implemented to ensure that the assets purchased won't be worth less than the acquisition cost. There's no methodology to even appraise or value most of this 'paper.' Mark-to-market isn't available, and mark-to-model isn't even possible...
There really is no magic in this plan. The 600 billion will go to waste I think. You're in effect trying to re inflate a bursting bubble (with a big hole in it). The govt is actually making the problems worse right now because money isn't flowing at higher rates because all these institutions are saying scew that, we'll just wait on the treasury to give us cheap money in effect freezing a credit market even more so.
You are right. There is no such thing as too big to fail. Remember though that the biggest institution at risk isn't any of the banks or financial institutions, it's something called the United States.
"You're in effect trying to re inflate a bursting bubble (with a big hole in it). " that is it, in a nutshell as long as real estate is in a downward trend, there will be no desire to loan for it - because the downward trend guarantees 'de-collateralization' of the loan it has to be allowed to hit bottom, and reverse - and that cant happen until it is basicly affordbale to someone who works for a living (without 'counting' on apprciation to bail out the purchase price). in a globalistic era of stagnant/downward wages, housing prices for workeing people really had no business going up at all - it was total credit gamesmanship - and now that credit bubble has blown up bubbles are stupid and painfull, and on an economically necessary thing like housing, devestating (nobody had to buy a tech stock) money borrowed to bail this out only arrests the process, AND sucks up 700 billion of money available to borrow and worst of all, puts the credit of the USA in question - THEN, we're fucked we may be fucked without the bailout, but i think we're just as fucked WITH it maybe more
Inflate a bubble? Hardly. $700 billion isn't enough to inflate bubbles. Maybe not even enough to inflate arteries enough to get money flowing to the still healthy parts of the economy. If the clog is allowed to persist, however, amputations might be necessary even of healthy tissue that could have been saved. Taking lots of drug medication or surgery isn't healthy true but there are worse possibilities.