jack8007
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Joined: 8/14/2007
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quote:
talking about two different sets of people. 1. Home buyers
By & large I would normally agree. We've got a variety of more or less predictable procedures to allow borrowers and lenders to regulate themselves.
But all of those are grounded in some basic economic assumptions, eg., money is going to be worth something, and that nobody is going to deliberately manipulate the market.
So do you think those assumptions have held? The economy is only afloat because the govt threw all principle out the window and called on the taxpayers to underwrite an insolvent financial industry. And yes, the markets were deliberately manipulated. Sure, they weren't very good at it - but that's what they did.
Now my view is that the people who pull the strings are the ones who should bear the responsibility.
Do you see that happening here? Do we see the rules changing on Wall Street?
As I see it, these Masters of the Universe pressured their whores in the government to relax the rules to the point that explosion was inevitable - and then they engineered the explosion - and then they told us that if they go down, we go down too. And they were right, and that's why Bush and Obama agreed on TARP.
What the Republicans would never have agreed to, and Obama hasn't, is accountability for the principals of the industry. A lot of these motherfuckers should be in jail, right alongside Madoff. The financial industry is developing, and there aren't adequate rules to keep the playing field level, and keep them from screwing everything they touch. But for these people to say they didn't see it coming is a lie - they DID see it coming, and they hedged against it, and then got bailed out on the backs of the taxpayers! Those motherfuckers should be working their asses off in salt mines paying the mortgages they blew up - except that their only skill is cooking books.
Look - the normal order of capitalism is that somebody sooner or later drives his competitors out of business. And that fucks the consumer, and that is the reason we have anti-trust regulation, and that regulation was the reason that US markets were more prosperous than anywhere else in the world, because they were more trusted. Too big to fail is too big.
But then along came the Republicans with their invisible hand, that the market will correct itself. Yeah, it'll correct itself - if the taxpayers pay for it.
So here we have people running the country that tell us this excuse - "who could have known? Who could have known that some pissed off raghead would fly an airplane into a building? Who could have known that if the industry creates a bubble, that it might burst like in 1929?"
And then of course it comes out that they did actually know - aircraft as weapons had been gamed, and they did have warnings; and the major investment banks bet against the products they were touting - they just were thinking of something else, like how they wanted to run up the score, never mind that it was pretty likely to do many multiples more damage to the country than bin Laden could dream of.
So what I'm saying is here that key political and financial leaders fucked up BIG TIME, and yet they're still running the show, and the people who take it in the shorts are the poor idiots who say, "gee, it was MY fault that the economy crashed. God hates me because I don't hate fags enough, or maybe it's the fault of those Mexicans selling oranges on the freeway, and we all need AKs to protect ourselves from the Mexicans" or whatever other drivel distraction they heard from Glenn Beck last night.
Yeah, I really sympathize with the banks that were required to make bad loans. The Feds held them down with a gun to their head, and forced them to tell buyers everything would be OK.
So if Joe Neighbor decides to even things up with a bank by asking "who could have known my check would bounce?" I'll tell you I'm laughing, because that's pretty much what the leadership of the financial industry did to America.
Now, to add insult to injury, we have the same sort of (shall I say Republican) stupidity driving our reaction to 9/11. We have 2 wars that are immensely expensive (wars are, you know, and this bullshit about the Iraqi war paying for itself was more neo-con delusion based in total ignorance of what wars are about) and most importantly, we got into them with NO FUCKING PLAN to get out of them. So here we are, bogged down in trying to win the hearts and minds of people who could only hope that we get the fuck out of their lives.
Now do you think that was an accident? Do you think that within the entire US government, nobody asked, where the fuck are we going with this? Bush's entire cabinet couldn't ask that question? You know, I can't believe they are that stupid. And where do you go when you believe that they realized that these wars could be more or less steady-state, ongoing? Is that going to bankrupt a leveraged economy, or what?
Now Dems and Republicans are political animals, and they share a lot of ideas, and that's as it should be, normally. What happened is that we've seen a "stupid and proud of it" movement emerge, and it's the Republicans who decided to go for those voters, and the Reagan administration was the 1st to exploit that, by organizing through the religious right. The Republicans didn't invent the religious right, but they did sell their asses to it for votes - and the religious right is the point of the "stupid and proud of it" movement, and the Republicans find themselves captive to it. And the other Republican constituency is of course Wall Street, and that's how it works - the unholy alliance of corporate money and religious fanaticism.
So when you elect that, in the person of GW Bush, what are you going to get? Well, a deserting-ass polydrug abuser who loves Jesus, but isn't too keen on asking questions about WTF is going on. So it can't be much of a surprise that he would eventually invade the wrong fucking country, and leave the economy in ruins.
If you or I were that reckless in our jobs, we would be in jail. But these twits (individually and as a class - and Boehner is a stereotype) have you and most Republicans convinced that they don't need to do their job, if we just stick with traditional values, ie shooting Mexicans and paying for whatever ripoff the Koch-sucking GOP comes up with.
We pay our leaders to think, and keep us out of trouble. That's their ONLY job. But the only thinking we've got out of the Republicans is a bastard combination of Pat Robertson and Bernie Madoff, and the miracle is that the Chinese, Saudis and Germans haven't already foreclosed on our collective ass. Some Republican idiot stopped the House today for 45 minutes to rant about Democrats being "anti-Christian" today. What can I say, Republicans aren't worried about the budget, they're worried about religion.
Now here's the difference between Americans and the Mexicans. The Spanish started out with the idea of fucking over the natives, and over 500 years, they've done a pretty thorough job. But the Americans, on the other hand, started out with the idea of self-sufficiency, and did a pretty good job until recently - then they decided to just voluntarily bend over in the name of capitalist Jesus, and hand their country over to the most rapacious and ignorant leaders we could find, and now the Republicans are well on their way to imitating the Spanish, using negotiable instruments instead of arms.
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RE: What kind of Gun Regulation Makes Sense? - 
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