We Got Fooled Again!

one thing that we agree on

 

Rolling Stone just came and has a new article by Matt Taibbi about the corruption around Obama's Wall Street advisors. I haven't read it yet...

I like Obama and think he's doing a good job. But I am increasingly concerned about the depth of the sell-out to Wall Street. Having said that, I think it would be even worse under the Republicans.

 

if Obama is for the people then why did he bale out the banks and not the people?

 

Simple. The credit markets are the lifeblood of small business and consumer spending. If he had not bailed out the banks, the people would be suffering from even greater unemployment.

 

I seriously doubt it. What probably would have happened if the people were given the money is most people would have paid off most of their debt and the money would have gone back into the economy. Where as now it is in the pockets of the rich bankers of Wall Street and the people are going to suffer more than most of us would have ever imagined.

I don't like Palin we don't need someone with cuteness and personality we need someone as dry as burnt toast who will tell the truth and that person is Ron Paul. No he ain't real pretty but he is pretty real and he knows what is really going on. As long as people choose our leaders based on how they look and not what they really stand for we will continue to have candidates like Palin, Obama, Bush, McCain, Clinton, Gore who merely seek power they are all the same and they will all end up doing the same thing except Ron Paul and people who sees what he sees which is the truth no matter how much we don't like it..

Our nation is going down and not many seem to care very much. Fuck Palin and Obama they are both war mongering whores.

 

If Libertarians had a workable policy on the environment, I might be one. But as far as I know, they think it will all work out in law suits brought against the big polluters. I think that is a ridiculous idea.

 

Could you provide some examples of this?

 

The US economy was < close to totally collapsing in October of 2008. Something had to be done immediately to alleviate the crash, but of course I disagree with the way the bailout went.

On the positive, the US government invested 14 times more per person in renewable energy than Canada last year, and parts of the stimulus package are working to build a brighter future for Americans. The "Buy American" clause have caused a stir up in renegotiating NAFTA, and has since put some issues to the side.

People are becoming more aware of their consumption and are aware that they can't afford homes they simply... can't afford.

In many ways, it's really not Obama's responsibility to pick up the pieces of a broken system overall, such is in fact the state of the American politics and society in general. It's extremely difficult to be innovative as a President. I don't think we should be relying on a single person to alleviate some of our own day to day issues, it's just not viable.

It's extremely difficult to make changes to the American Constitution, to pass laws even (hell, you have to decide if you want to debate an issue by vote in Congress, then do the same thing in the Senate, then talk about it with subcommittees, then the final draft of a bill can take months to be passed through the Congress, then the Senate, and finally signed by the President.)

It's too hard to distribute power appropriately. I don't believe the US government is too large, but it's diffinitely a concern when the same person has 9 different jobs to do while in government. Interests blend.

Obama picked people he wouldn't agree with.

He said upfront to the public that he was choosing his administration because he felt the previous had too many "group think" complexes going on - he wanted to work with people who were going to make him compromise and take into account the other. Obama's received more death threats than any other president in history. There's a lot of gossip that goes along with the post, and I sympathize with him - I wouldn't want the job if I was offered all the money in the world.

But it's not just Obama, his administration, Democrats, Republicans, and the American people - it's the whole lot that is to blame for their own misfortunes and mistakes. Obama is just a man. He's not an intricate machine or a system that is build to make people suffer while others gloat among their offshore account balances.

 

There are plans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_environmentalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_libertarianism

Whether you think they're good or not is up to you


Also in terms of economics, the people of the United States are quite possibly the worst enemy of the people of the United States. Both in the fact we're incredibly uneducated to the point Sarah Palin could actually win the primary of one of our 2 large parties, and the fact the US no longer has any concept of savings. No, you don't need that new 50in plasma screen even if it was on sale on black friday, why does your TV definition need to be that good. I have a 24in from the mid 90's that still works great.

 

Sometimes I'm confused with this whole "Obama bailed banks out!" argument.

Most people on this Forum Board like to say that they support the idea of capitalism and rely on free markets to regulate themselves.

I find that people who tend to champion free markets yet oppose the bailouts to be exceptionally hypocritical.

It was free markets that led up to the crash, no real arguments against that. (Think you have one? No, you don't.) What do free market champions expect is going to happen, that freer markets are infallable to collapses? So why are you opposed to a government bailout? Should we have relied on Bill Gates to bail out pensions, social securities, the automotive sector and the housing markets? Of course not.

Free marketeers are just pissed that their system is flawed, and they're more pissed that the only entity with a moral conscious to actually take a loss and bail a broken system out is the government. Yeah, that's right.

 

No but we do have arguments, ask Balbus about them.

 

Hey, just wanted to thank you for this. I'm doing a paper on environmental protection and preservation through the lens of how it relates to basic free trade agreements and what it means to have linked economies = linked pollution.

But this viewpoint seems awfully limited to property rights. There are greater concerns like air quality. Who owns the air exactly? It's narrow in that this viewpoint doesn't quantify the fact that polluters are responsible for the production, distribution, and disposal (the entire process) of biohazardous materials. Putting a tax on them might allow the public sphere access to a new garbage dump site, but it doesn't entirely resolve the issue to begin with. While I do believe a tax is necessary for many reasons to be implemented to polluters, I don't think this view is realistic at all when it says that polluters clean up after themselves and therefore taxation or environmental regulation standards aren't that necessary to resolve the inherent problem with the act of polluting.

Like the previous poster, using tort laws to determine environmental regulation seems like a hodge-podge way of loosely coming up with real policy that's going to affect change on the environment and most importantly, the way that we interact with it.

 

Well this goes into more detail.


FactCheck.org: Who Caused the Economic Crisis?

 

Motion lets look at the list you linked to -

• The Federal Reserve which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Under the leadership of neo-liberal and free market supporters, like Alan Greenspan.

• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

All in line with a deregulated free market system.

• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

But tax cuts are a neoliberal/free market devise to stimulate the economy….And who voted in these people?

• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

Very free market.

• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

The same Clinton administration that pursued neoliberal policies and not only supported Alan Greenspan, but praised him and his ideas and actions?

• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Very free market.

• Former Federal Reserve Chaiman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Oh yes Greenspan the libertarian advocate of the deregulated neoliberal/free market system.

• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

Very free market.

• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

Oh yes the Bush admin that claimed to favour the deregulated neoliberal/free market system (until it collapsed)

• Collective delusion or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

But many pundits of the free market system claimed that a crash was unlikely but if it did the system they had in place meant it wouldn’t be painful and would recover quickly, because that’s what markets do. Basically they reassured people that everything was OK and they should carry on getting into debt.

*

Now let’s see is there a theme here or what?

The thing is that there are people here that still push the same neoliberal/free market ideas.

*

 

It is corporatism not capitalism that caused the crash. The free market is gone.

 

Yomama


Try reading



Free market = plutocratic tyranny.
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=353336&f=36

 

Thanks:

 

Corporatism does not exist outside of a capitalist system in the case of America. Hence, the proponents of capitalism are nurturing corporate greed.

 

In a real free market big corporations cannot influence governments to overly regulate their competition. This is what happened with hemp. Hurst's corporation's paper business saw that hemp was hurting his business. Instead of growing his own hemp he got the government to make this competeing fiber illegal so he could sell more wood pulp. Monsanto is trying to make organic farming illegal and take away our choice of what we eat. Big Pharma is trying to regulate the herb and vitamin business to the point of them having no potiency. This is what people are calling free market but, it is not.

 

What's a real free market exactly? Have you ever seen one? Does it look like Hobbes' Leviathan claim on the state of nature where people kill each other and act solely on self-interest to get what they want?

In a real free market, corporations do influence governments because that's what makes individuals the most free. Private enterprise takes precedence over any public enterprise in a free market, because any form of intervention is toying with the invisible hand.

You're not realizing that by championing free markets = you are legitimizing Big Pharmas right to seek out their self interests.

I mean, that's what the free market is all about - pursuing your freedom and own self-interest with no interference. It's like applying an "I do want I want" principle to governance. By allowing a freedom playing field for corporations to play on, the government becomes smaller and can only act as a referee, and is removed from being an actual player who has the ability score points for the interests of a collective of people.