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Brociner seems to have settled on “Progressive” as the proper term for term our Leftists.
May I suggest “Neocommunist” as a more appropriate label.
In the early years of the Twentieth Century, a new Collectivist philosophy, originating in Europe in the 1800s, arose in the United States. Known first as
Posted by scorp on Oct 19, 2007 at 7:30 AM
The I.D. crisis is a universal political problem in the U.S. and has been for some time. It once was a given the Democrats were for labor and the Republicans for business
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 20, 2007 at 12:35 PM
CORRECTIONS: (For some reason the edit feature didn’t show up.)
3rd para
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 21, 2007 at 5:08 AM
WTH -
You have a charmingly naive and thought-free view of the world. Everything you don’t like, you find something or someone to blame it on, even if there is no correlation whatsoever. And you don’t let facts get in your way.
The I.D. crisis is a universal political problem in the U.S. and has been for some time.
Oh, come now. The American Revolution and the War Between the States are examples of true ID crises, when Americans fought against Americans over who they were and what kind of country they wanted. Far from being a “universal political problem”, this is the normal state of affairs world-wide. We are actually in a quite benign period. Such problems as we have are exacerbated by the Neocommunists, who pretend to support liberal American values while pusuing a totalitarian agenda.
The dollar is following the economy down the drain.
Horse shit. You, of all people on this thread, have complained, with no reason but your own sorry experience, about loss of jobs. The United States economy is the strongest in the world, with 65 months of growth and increased jobs. The lower dollar has made American goods more competitive, and the trade figures are already reflecting this.
The best jobs have been exported ...
Ummm, no. The cheap manufacturing jobs have been moved to cheap suppliers, and high paying technical and service jobs have replaced them, with substantial growth in the number of jobs and in the economy. We have produced net 1.41 million new jobs in the last year, most of them paying more than the manufacturing jobs which were eliminated.
http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/10/where-the-jobs-.html
We are now at a point where we could see either hyperinflation, or worse, deflation similar to what Japan has suffered for the last decade.
Well, which will it be? You do not have a clue, do you? The deflation that Japan experienced starting in 1991 was a direct result of the Japanese asset bubble, when the price of prime Tokyo real estate was $40,000 per square meter, and the 400 acres of the Japanese Imperial Palace was valued higher than the state of California. Well, yes, bubbles always burst, and always cause economic disruption when they burst, such as Japan has experienced and from which it is now slowly recovering.
You probably did not notice, but the USA was in quite a hefty dot.com bubble during the last four years of the Clinton Administration. The Bubba Bubble had a very large potential for economic devastation, but fortunately George Bush and Alan Greenspan applied the proper corrective action, minimizing the bad effects and leading to the unparalleled growth and prosperity we have experienced since then.
Let me tell you how you can become rich and famous. You always claim that the government is lying about jobs and prosperity. If the government is producing fictional numbers, this is the world’s largest conspiracy. Not only do the government figures have to be fictional, but a lot of other evidence must be fictional as well. For example, when Clinton left office, virtually all the states had terrible problems with their finances and budgets. But Bush’s tax cuts produced jobs, and jobs produced tax revenues, and tax revenues brought revenue surpluses to most states. So if the government is producing fictional job and prosperity data, the states could not possibly have revenue surpluses, now could they? So all the states must be lying, as well. A conspiracy that large cannot be concealed. By revealing this conspiracy to the world, you will earn everlasting fame and fortune. Go for it.
American voters are divided into so may special interest groups ...
It was always thus.
Posted by scorp on Oct 21, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Scorp,
Sorry, The Revolutionary and Civil wars were before my time. Let’s look at more recent history.
The disunity obvious to anyone willing to remove his rose-colored glasses is on the increase in the U.S.
We now have a combination of a mishandled war in Iraq
(look up “Gen. Sanchez’s Scream” this week at opinionjournal.com)
and an economic calamity much like the early 1970s (I was around then.) We could get the same kind of inflation or deflation. I won’t attempt to predict just to be prepared for either.
As I recall the last time we had this is agreement about the current state of the economy I said wait a year and see if you still think I’m off the mark. You may not need to wait that long.
You believe the U.S. economy is the strongest, the new jobs are better than the ones we gave away, the trade deficit is improving, over a million jobs have been created and the lower dollar is good for exports. You correctly described the Japanese asset bubble, but apparently missed our housing bubble, the credit pyramid scheme and the reality of inflation (including food and energy).
The tech meltdown during Clinton’s administration is in part what I meant by I.D. crisis. Clinton was no real Democrat just as neither Bush is a genuine conservative. They both serve the same small faction
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 21, 2007 at 12:01 PM
“Now I note that some Collectivists (Hillary, most notably) are again calling themselves Progressives. I suppose they are running out of labels with which to mislead people.”
Contemporary liberal politicians are only “Collectivists” according to the pseudo-ideology and intellectual quackery of Objectivism. Clinton most certainly supports such Liberal institutions as international free trade, a market based economy, rights-based restrictions on the power of government, protection of private property, rule of law, and checks and balances among governmental powers.
Liberalism has always acknowledged that there are certain functions that are too expensive, too unprofitable, or too specialized for the private sector to accomplish well. For poor (and many middle-class) people in this country, private health care has utterly failed, so many think that it makes sense to start experimenting with ways to make the system work, with varying degrees of government involvement. This, in my mind, is one of the main things Liberalism makes possible: the ability to experiment within a system that allows and encourages the creativity that arises from a pluralism of ideas. As I like to say, “If it’s broke, try to fix it.”
Hillary has never advocated nationalizing, say steel production, or agriculture, or lumber, or semiconductors, or services or etc etc etc. Nor has she called for any gross redistribution of wealth. Calling her, or any Democrat, a “Collectivist” is frankly ludicrous.
Posted by Matt W on Oct 21, 2007 at 6:38 PM
Matt -
(Hillary) Clinton most certainly supports such Liberal institutions as international free trade, a market based economy, rights-based restrictions on the power of government, protection of private property, rule of law, and checks and balances among governmental powers.
Hillary supports the rule of law? Does she now? I hadn’t heard.
Whitewater. Jim and Susan Mc Dougal, Susan went ot jail. Castle Grande billing records. Cattle futures. Billy Dale and the Travel Office. The FBI files. Hubbell, went to jail. Lippo Group. And the three separate fraudulent compaign contribution scandals involving illegal contributions by Chinese agents.
Every one of these incidents directly involved Hillary, and were morally reprehensible at best, and criminal at worst.
Your whole post is parody, right?
Speaking of Collectivists, you seem to be an expert. Identify who made the following statements:
Pop Quiz - How much do you know about Socialism?
By Evrviglnt | October 20, 2007
Can you tell us who said the quotes below?
1) “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”
A. Karl Marx
B. Adolph Hitler
C. Joseph Stalin
D. None of the above
2) “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few ... and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.”
A. Lenin
B. Mussolini
C. Idi Amin
D. None of the Above
3) “(We) ... can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”
A. Nikita Khrushev
B. Jose f Goebbels
C. Boris Yeltsin
D. None of the above
4) “We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own ... in order to create this common ground.”
A. Mao Tse Dung
B. Hugo Chavez
C. Kim Jong Il
D. None of the above
5) “I certainly think the free-market has failed.”
A. Karl Marx
B. Lenin
C. Molotov
D. None of the above
6) “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched.”
A. Pinochet
B. Milosevic
C. Saddam Hussein
D. None of the above
Answers:
(1) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/29/2004
(2) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 5/29/2007
(3) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
(4) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
(5) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
(6) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 9/2/2005
Hat Tip: Neal Boortz!
Posted by scorp on Oct 21, 2007 at 10:11 PM
scorp,
I won’t dignify your Clinton Chronicles litany with a response.
The quotes you pulled are either meaningless without context, or only objectionable to an Objectivist. The real point of the multiple-choice format is merely a low-brow attempt to smear Clinton via negative association. Do you have any substantive critiques?
Posted by Matt W on Oct 21, 2007 at 10:26 PM
Matt -
... a low-brow attempt to smear Clinton via negative association.
Clinton is not associated with her own quotes? Well, that is certainly a novel interpretation. Especially since she has said essentially the same thing in different contexts over a period of years. And the contexts are quite accessible if you care to look them up. I distinctly remember at least two of them from news coverage at the time.
So, you ignore (or embrace) Hillary’s criminal activity and her radical plans for the American people, the American economy, and the American government. Noted.
Of the several possible interpretations of your use of the term “Objectivist”, I think you are referring to Randian Objectivism.
I am hardly a disciple, but I can’t help but note that your Marxian (or Gramscian) philosophy, to the degree it is applied, has an uninterrupted history of death, destruction, and decay. Not to mention it’s dishonest and criminal aspects, as illustrated by Hillary.
Posted by scorp on Oct 22, 2007 at 6:47 AM
Oh scorp, so what are Hillary’s radical plans anyway? What evil will she do that makes you cringe in fear?
And how is Hillary not any more of a elite criminal than George Bush? Didn’t Bush fail to disclose his sale of stocks at Harkin Energy (he claimed he forgot) for many months? I won’t go into his other flirts with the law, because it is pointless. The reason it’s pointless is that all the top politicians are corrupt because they operate in a corrupt system.
In your history lesson you failed to mention the Populists eventually lead by William Jennings Bryant. They morphed into the progressives. It was more detailed than that but that’s the one-liner.
You scoffed at Henry Wallace losing badly, big surprise as ALL presidential third party candidates lose badly, from both the left and right. We are stuck with the duopoly. A two-party system that only allows third party candidates to have even a sliver of a chance at local levels. In the past it was a little easier for other parties, but not today.
It’s also funny how Greenspan apparently wasn’t involved during the Clinton era, yet stepped out to be a savior in the Bush era. So Greenspan was just a thumb-twiddler in the 1990s and superman for Bush? Is that your reality? Greenspan helped create the tech bubble and didn’t do anything about it. Of course he had help, all the corporate crooks running the Enron’s and Worldcom’s etc. ultimately they were the bubble poppers.
And of course the free market had to have the government step in and save the economy in 1998 because of Long Term Capital Management. And here we go again, the government is having to help the big New York banks from taking big losses due to exposure to sub prime loans. That’s the basis of free market economics, most of us have to live with our losses, but the big players will get their asses saved when they are too stupid with their money because if the big boys were to have to sink their companies the whole shebang goes down the tubes. The American economic house of cards, when those top cards are teetering along comes the government to hold them in place.
And of course Greenspan was deluded into thinking there would never be a housing bubble, when any loser like me was predicting it several years ago.
Posted by Jon B on Oct 22, 2007 at 9:32 AM
Clinton is not associated with her own quotes? Well, that is certainly a novel interpretation. Especially since she has said essentially the same thing in different contexts over a period of years. And the contexts are quite accessible if you care to look them up. I distinctly remember at least two of them from news coverage at the time.
I don’t care to look them up; I’m not trying to critique Clinton’s policies. If you wish to provide a substantive critique, it’s your responsibility to provide context for these remarks, which I note, you still haven’t done. The negative association I was referring to was (obviously) your pairing of Clinton with, you know, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Goebbels, etc. Geobbels??!? This type of attack is transparent, immature, and irrelevant. A real critique would describe her stated policy proposals and provide a rational counterpoint. Saying “Hillary is basically Hitler” is childish.
<blockquote>I can
Posted by Matt W on Oct 22, 2007 at 9:35 AM
Matt -
The negative association I was referring to was (obviously) your pairing of Clinton with, you know, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Goebbels, etc.
Ummm, no. I did not pair Hillary with anyone.
Posted by scorp on Oct 22, 2007 at 11:01 AM
scorp,
You still have failed to offer any substantive critique of Clinton’s policies. So far, you’ve said “Hillary is a Collectivist”, “Hillary is a criminal”, and “Hillary is about on par with Stalin.”
The free-market quote is from an interview done for Sojourners magazine and was specifically in reference to national health care. For reasons I’ve already stated, the free-market <i>has<\i> failed in this area, and asserting this does not contradict any principle of modern democratic liberalism.
The expansion of rights language from just property to universal enfranchisement, education, and collective bargaining represent one historical trajectory of liberal though since the 19th century. A parallel trajectory is the establishment of safety net systems like old age pensions, unemployment subsidies, public sector jobs programs, and medical coverage for the elderly and destitute. Health care (and I would submit child care) guarantees for poor blue-collar Americans represent the final steps in this “safety-net” trajectory.
Liberalism is not so much an ideology as a program for establishing mechanisms to control governmental power. Properly controlled, government power can be used to expand the sphere of opportunity for the exercise of private power, and provide a forum in which a pluralism of ideas can engage creatively to make our state stronger and more vital. An example of this is the role that government plays in providing a framework for markets to operate effectively, i.e. establishing and enforcing laws that protect private property and access to markets, regulate monopolies, provide services that markets can’t or won’t provide, etc etc. Within this framework, the creativity and competition that markets encourage increase the state’s economic power. Liberalism is above all about What Works. It’s about experimentation and continual refinement of principles and systems.
If we assume that access to health care is a right, and that the private sector is not providing it adequately, it makes sense to start experimenting with other solutions.
Don’t worry, I’m sure that the Clinton Chronicles will crawl back out of the muck if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. The creativity of the Republican political machine mainly engages at the level of “swift-boating” and “McCain’s black baby”. The Democrats are politically crippled because they actually care about ideas, and so only engage in such smear attacks half-heartedly and ineffectually, hence Bush is not generally considered to be a drunk, coke-sniffing draft-dodger, but to many, Kerry is still a flip-flopping, traitorous coward.
Posted by Matt W on Oct 22, 2007 at 12:23 PM
The Free Market
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 22, 2007 at 1:05 PM
Matt -
You still have failed to offer any substantive critique of Clinton’s policies.
Au contraire! I have done nothing else on this thread.
Did Lenin and Stalin tell the world that they were going to kill 40 million or so of their own people, and destroy the Russian economy? What would have been the effect if they had done so? We are blessed with the knowledge of Hillary’s assault on the health care system in the 1990s, and her repeated comments on her plans to assault the free market if she gets elected. If you don’t remember, review the quotes above. They will give you a good indication of where she intends to take us.
Liberalism is not so much an ideology as a program for establishing mechanisms to control governmental power.
Well, more or less. There are ideologies and then there are philosophies. The liberal philosophy was well thought out by the time of the American Revolution, and the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, is the finest statement of that philosophy, and of those Rights.
The government explicitly did not grant us Rights under the Constitution, but people owned the Rights, and the Constitution recognized the peoples’ ownership of those Rights. A principal function of the Constitution was to protect the peoples’ Rights. Most particularly, the Constitution recognized the Right of the people to protect themselves, including protecting themselves from obtrusive government power, as expressed in the Second Amendment. If the people cannot protect themselves, the other rights are subject to the government’s whim.
As envisioned by the Founders and their liberal philosophy, the people were sovereign.
The Socialist/Communist clap-trap that Hillary is pushing came much later. After the horrific imposition of Communism in Russia in 1918, American Communists could not win an election, so they began calling themselves Socialists. They still could not get elected, so they began calling themselves Progressives, thus corrupting a perfectly good social movement, of which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was a leading proponent in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Henry Wallace, businessman/politician/Communist/mystic, ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.
American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.” - Friedrich A Hayek, 1960
In fraudulently calling themselves Liberals, the radicals and Socialists corrupted the name of the very philosophy that was the basis of the founding of the Republic. Since the Constitution is a liberal document, and the Right “to keep and bear arms” is a fundamental Right specifically recognized by the Constitution, why do today’s “Liberals” seek to deprive the people of their Rights?
For that matter, why did Harry Reid and forty Democratic Senators fraudulently misinterpret Rush Limbaugh, and try to deprive Mr. Limbaugh of his freedom of speech? You have already stated that Democrats “engage in such smear attacks”, but I think the Democrats do so full-heartedly and ineffectually, not “half-heartedly and ineffectually”.
If we assume that access to health care is a right, and that the private sector is not providing it adequately, it makes sense to start experimenting with other solutions.
Only a Socialist would make that assumption, and would not recognize the destructive effect on health care that would result from that assumption. But socialized medicine is a fiasco wherever installed, and much of the high cost of American medical care is directly attributable to the partial application of Socialist bureaucracy and impediments.
Posted by scorp on Oct 22, 2007 at 6:05 PM
scorp,
It seems as though the VA (Veteran’s Affairs) health care could fit the description of “Socialized Medicine”
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 23, 2007 at 7:24 AM
It was reported on Democracy Now, Oct.19:
“new figures show Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton has emerged as the candidate most favored by the nation’s leading weapons companies. Clinton has received more than fifty-two thousand dollars from arms industry employees. That’s more than half the amount given to all Democratic candidates and sixty-percent of the total that has gone to Republicans.”
Yup, Hillary is a real threat, but this is from my opinion and shouldn’t be from those who think of her as some sort of radical leftist. When the weapons companies are surging to her campaign, you can figure out a few things. For one, her chance of winning it all are fairly good. And she represents the current Washington mindset, she’s nothing unusual in that town.
Hillary is nothing but another political elite beneficiary of name recognition. By the time her two terms are over it will be nothing but Bush/Clinton for 28 years. That should be historically amazing but not when you realize how complacent and ignorant voters are in regard to politics.
Scorp seems to think Hillary is some sort of leftist demon, she’s not even close. Progressives don’t like her but in the end will have no choice but to vote for her. They’d at least like a president with a “d” beside the name rather than the “r.” But they will be critical of her through her entire presidency. You can start with the Iraq War, progressives will vilify her every day she doesn’t act to pull troops out. Unlike conservatives that refused to say boo about Bush’s non-conservative actions until long into his second term, progressives will speak their minds very early on.
Progressives and Democratic Party are a contradiction in terms. Progressives keep hoping the Green Party becomes a political factor or that political parties themselves become obsolete some day but are realistic enough to know that the odds are long so the short term objective is to infiltrate the Democrats as the Religious Right did to the Republicans and become a significant factor. But progressives are also a bit like herding cats. Many are simply interested in concentrating on single issue pet projects and local concerns and don’t have any trust in Washington or national voting. It’s the nature of progressives to do more than vote, to become part of the solution and not just sit back and let politics control the issues.
Progressives have goals to change the world, improve things as problems emerge. They think in linear time, that advancement of the human race and our country as an important location of humans is the goal and always should be. Pining for an imaginary perfect past or maintaining the status quo is a conservative value. History for progressives is something to be learned from and to change what went wrong. It’s obvious that progressive comes from progress, that’s the deep root for the ideology.
Progressives fall in between the far left of communism or even anarchy and the middle-of-the-road Democrats of a Hillary and the faction called the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To a progressive the DLC is a Republican group masquerading as the left. The DLC is filled with status quo money loving career politicians.
If we don’t destroy ourselves and the world with our status quo ways, I’m confident enough to expect that progress of humanity will continue and that progressive thought will be a large part of that.
Posted by Jon B on Oct 24, 2007 at 3:45 AM
Jon B,
A rational essay and very well put.
The very first time I heard William Jefferson Clinton speak I thought, “Hey this guy’s a Democrat, but I like what he says
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 24, 2007 at 6:32 AM
WTH…“Progressive, Liberal or Conservative labels mean little when actions blur their differences.”
I’m assuming you mean actions at the political level. No matter what label people are given they do or don’t take actions at the local level, or for personnel issues.
A few weeks ago I accidentally heard some of Bill O’Reilly’s radio show. He was ranting about “the radical left” on the subject of national health care and Hillary. The rantings of these type of political pundits (pundit rather than expert) is simply propaganda. Polling has consistently shown for decades that a majority of Americans want some sort of national health care plan, that’s not “the radical left,” that’s middle America. It’s the O’Reilly’s of the world that use labels to deceive for their own agenda. And the O’Reilly’s naturally don’t have to worry about health care, they’re rich.
But political labels have become meaningless. Today conservatives can be quite outraged about Bush. Libertarian conservatives are upset about the attack on civil liberties, fiscal conservatives are bothered by Bush’s spending spree via the government credit card, isolationist conservatives don’t like all the war stuff and nationalist conservatives are driven crazy by the illegal immigrant problem that Bush seems to embrace. For awhile I’ve been referring to Bush as a radical conservative, because he is radically different from what I always thought was a conservative. Or if he’s not a radical than he is redefining what a conservative is.
From Wikipedia;
Conservatism is a term used to describe political philosophies that favor tradition and gradual change, where tradition refers to religious, cultural, or nationally defined beliefs and customs. The term is derived from the Latin, conservāre, to conserve; “to keep, guard, observe”. Since different cultures have different established values, conservatives in different cultures have different goals. Some conservatives seek to preserve the status quo or to reform society slowly, while others seek to return to the values of an earlier time, the status quo ante.
Now that is only a brief possible explanation of what a conservative might be, but how does Bush fit that description? He has in fact expanded the federal government, not the “drown it in the bathtub” that a Grover Norquist would want.
Now I’m not so concerned about an expanded federal government per se, seeing as how our population continues to grow it logically makes sense that the government would grow as do all the institutions in our society as the society grows. The debate is how the government changes and we all have different ideas about that. But many conservatives watch the population expand and then want the government to decrease, it doesn’t make sense. They want to keep a status quo or even return to a smaller government, yet the population’s status quo is changing, growing.
It’s an odd ideology to me, to reject a government of “we the people” and to consolidate the government power into the hands of a few. And then when I might say “OK, less government then let’s reduce the military” conservatives would scream. So, they want only parts of the government they like not to be touched and the parts they oppose (anything that resembles “socialism” or regulation) to be drowned in a bathtub. They spout about rule of law, then object to making of laws to control crime (at least the corporate crime through regulation). And no CEO will ever go to jail for hiring illegals, ignore the root cause and scream about a wall.
Posted by Jon B on Oct 24, 2007 at 8:41 AM
Jon B,
I see the labels as nearly meaningless partly because of the similarities in action (or in action) by people claiming to be of different parties, groups or political philosophies. As for Bush if he is a political conservative then I don’t know what I am. What I want conserved is summed up in the Preamble to the Constitution. If we are to continue to be a nation we must first and foremost support, defend and care for each other and for those who follow us. (The Wikipedia definition comes pretty close.) If personal gain is more important for most people than those goals stated 230 years ago, then we have already ceased to be a nation and are just a business.
Perhaps instead of “less government” I should say fewer committees and bureaucracies and better governing.
For example: The current sub prime loan mess. We don’t need new laws. We don’t need more committee meetings. No new agencies. We have all of those and they did not do their assigned jobs. Congress shirked their oversight. The rating agencies did not behave in a trustworthy manner.
Yesterday I read an article titled: “Big banks take responsibility for credit crisis”
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 24, 2007 at 2:08 PM
WTH..
Why are neither party doing anything is simple, the presidential campaign season is already upon us. Candidates from both parties are receiving plenty of cash from Wall Street currently. Many on Wall Street give to both parties and several candidates to hedge their bets, so to speak. I saw a list of contributions about a week ago in the Wall Street Journal. And at that point the Democratic candidates in total were ahead in the money race from Wall Street, a bit curious as usually the Republicans get more from that source. I think it was Dodd that received the most, naturally since he is ranking banking chairman. It seems Wall Street knows which way the wind is blowing for 2008 and which bed to feather.
Wall Street is a haven for crooks and incompetence. Did you see where Merrill Lynch just announced an $8 Billion write-off due to the sub-prime derivatives? This was after less than a month ago they claimed it would be about $4 billion.
Plenty of blame can be spread around about the mortgage mess. The ratings agencies (such as Moody’s) should be included, they were basically colluding with Wall Street, giving A ratings to that derivative junk. The thing is, I don’t think any laws were technically broken. Partly because there were basically few regulations on these CDOs and SIVs. It’s the same old story in American finance, find a way to deregulate or not regulate in the first place, combine the human element of greed, and then use the out-of-the-loop public as marks.
The Dow would never have reached the level it has if workers weren’t basically forced to use the market as a retirement fund through 401Ks. If you look at the Dow from the 1930s until the 1990s, the trend was a very slow up trend. Then you see it begin to sky in the 1990s coinciding with the 401K phenomenon. The market numbers we see since is nothing but supply and demand. 401Ks demanded more stocks to invest in, which provided more reasons for APOs. More stocks were needed to feed the 401K monster.
But it’s a racket. When there’s a downturn in the market 401Ks can’t make money going down by shorting the market (exception, there are a select few 401Ks as short funds) only the big money players can do that. In the 2002 downturn, the retirement funds suffered in contrast to the big rollers and insiders. And it will happen again the next big sustained downturn.
A prediction here. This mortgage debacle is going to take a few years to flush out, more than what is currently being predicted by most experts. The Fed will continue easing the rates, doing nothing to save the sub-prime mess and in turn continuing to weaken the dollar. So a double whammy on home owners, a depreciation of housing value combined with inflation. Yet also on the horizon is a possible deflation spiral like Japan is still mired in, if the Fed keeps uselessly dropping the fund rates. And the Dow sometime in the next year or two is going to plunge like in 2002, maybe worse.
Posted by Jon B on Oct 25, 2007 at 3:54 AM
WTH…
I’m worried plenty about the economy. We have a possible perfect storm brewing.
I see trends that aren’t comforting. I remember back in 1998 telling anyone who’d listen to buy gold, it was about $265 at the time. Now it’s at about $750. Wow, even I didn’t expect that huge jump in less than ten years. But gold prices are traditionally a marker of trust in the dollar, higher gold prices means less trust.
The housing bubble deflation is more serious than the tech bubble pop. Most of tech pop was suffered in paper assets, people that lost big (for instance owners of Enron stock, etc.) simply had to start over on retirement savings or delay retiring. But the housing bubble is going to force a lot of people to move out of their homes, that’s a deep personnel action.
It already has forced the shutting of many mortgage businesses and layoffs at surviving companies. It will also cause a slowdown in spending on consumer goods particularly the Home Depot’s and Lowe’s. Big ticket items such as washer/dryers, furniture, etc. will lag in sales because people buy them more when buying a new home. As people are forced to leave their houses for smaller places or apartments, they’ll keep their physical assets to take to their new place or sell them.
I look at the personnel savings rate of Americans and shake my head. The average is negative! People are massively in debt, and the average includes the rich who have large savings. Credit card debt is back up again, this came fast after the bankruptcy bill provided a window to declare bankruptcy before the new law went into effect. A record number of bankruptcies happened then. Now when people declare bankruptcy they can’t just clear all the debts. There is going to be another wave of bankruptcies coming.
Energy and food costs are rising. Two things not counted in government inflation figures. Wheat prices are significantly higher due to droughts in world wheat growing areas. Corn and soy (commodities that are in a lot of food stuffs) are rising due to increased use for ethanol and bio-deisel. And I’m a believer in peak oil, it’s hitting now, but within the next decade we are going to really feel it.
Higher education is rising in costs. They tell people to get an education, but who can afford it? It all goes on the red side of a persons balance sheet these days to burden the early years on the job.
And all this comes at the time of a credit crunch in banking. Are the big banks really going to finance like they have in the last decade for homes, cars, educations, credit cards, etc? I believe financing is going be reduced more than we think.
And if I’m right about a stock market downturn, baby boomers are going to go through another reduction in retirement assets and this time at retirement age.
And who knows how politicians will make any of this worse. Our national debt was purposely increased to $9 trillion just recently. Yesterday it was predicted our two wars would cost $2.3 trillion dollars for the next ten years and that doesn’t include a war with Iran that Bush is chomping for.
It certainly feels like America is a spent out empire, at every level of our society.
Posted by Jon B on Oct 25, 2007 at 4:38 AM
Jon B,
They say it takes money to make money and Wall St. will get their share and then some. In addition to the almighty buck the protection when schemes go bad like the current sub prime pyramid is like a blank check.
When Enron graduated form analyst’s favorite pick to Scam of the Century my congressman sent back a contribution from them. How much they spread around we’ll never know.
Interesting that we so seldom hear any long term comparisons like you just made. Much easier to cover financial illnesses by taking the temperature minute by minute. The 401(k) changeover was another great D.C. payoff.
Except for my military service and three years in a corporation, I was self employed from age 19 to 67. I never thought Social Security or Medicare would be there for me and saved accordingly, bought only what we could pay in cash (except for our house).
With massive revisions in the tax code and viewing Social Security as a collect on a needs basis we could afford to also provide health care for people unable to get it.
My conservative streak leans to emergency care only and only as much as necessary for as long as needed. I believe more people would give more if there were fewer “entitlements”.
I concur with your perfect storm view for the same reasons.
What is ignored by even the honest “experts” is just how much freedom is lost when money is in short supply and how whole communities can be straight-jacketed when their main industry is shipped to foreign countries.
The housing market is flooded (even before the sub prime) and it is your primary asset. Withdrawing retirement funds is penalized at 10 percent. You can’t afford to travel to a job interview. The passage of time increases the limitations.
Even with a premium priced education white collar jobs are now being exported and the number of visas being increased to bring in foreign workers with graduate degrees willing to work cheaper. Education may be necessary, but a bad financial investment.
I recently read a report (if I can find it I will send the URL) saying that credit tightening by choice (only to the most secure borrowers) leads to recession. When lenders don’t lend because they can’t it becomes “revulsion” leading to depression. The banks are now hoarding cash to back the bad paper out there and may be in a can’t loan situation.
Just a bit of perspective: From the Ken Burns special THE WAR: WW2 cost $304 billion which in 2007 dollars is $3 trillion. I’ve not heard a total dollar cost for 9/11, but the potential for destruction here is far greater both in money and people than WW2 when we lost six (6) civilian casualties in Oregon to a Jap bomb delivered by a balloon.
————————-
I have been having difficulty getting back to this thread
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 25, 2007 at 12:48 PM
WTH..
Back to peak oil…The president of Mexico announced that they have only 9 years worth of proven oil reserves left. Their biggest field has been dwindling rapidly, this was previously guessed at by those who believe peak oil is fast upon us, but now it’s official. Proven oil reserves and active oil field estimates is one of the most secretive statistics in the world. No oil producing country wants to let on that their oil supply is drying up until it becomes obvious. The opposite is more true, that proven reserves are overestimated to the world by the producing country. Mexico was in the first category, it was becoming obvious.
For what it’s worth, Mexico is our second leading source for oil after Canada. The Middle East is third, followed by Venezuela. Also for what it’s worth, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil field is also rumored to be waning fast, that they’ve been increasingly pumping water into it to force the oil out and as well using older technology to do so, thereby losing some production.
To change the subject a bit…Our national GDP has become skewed, it isn’t reflective of the true nature as much as it used to be. Why? Because the cost reductions achieved by US firms shifting production offshore are being miscounted as GDP growth in the US and that productivity gains achieved by US firms when they move design, research, and development offshore are showing up as increases in US productivity. Obviously, production and productivity that occur abroad are not part of the US domestic economy. Who knows what our real GDP would be today if the stat were to be adjusted for the offshoring.
Before offshoring became the rage, it wasn’t necessary to even think about how it affected GDP, but it has been long past the time to readjust GDP data collection to include the offshoring effect. This factor was discovered by an economist, Susan Houseman and was a cover story in Business Week back in June, but not much of a peep from the main media and the story has slipped into the media memory hole. I could imagine that no one really wants to address her theme as it would obviously show that America’s GDP isn’t what is claimed and that our country isn’t quite the economic powerhouse that we want to project to the world or to our own citizens.
Here’s the business Week cover story.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_25/b4039001.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives
Posted by Jon B on Oct 26, 2007 at 5:32 AM
WTH..
I forgot to mention another piece to the housing bubble/bust’s puzzle, Property assessments. In states and/or communities that have a property tax (most do) it’s based on the assessed value. As housing prices drop, people are going to be demanding that their assessment be readjusted to reflect the lower price. In turn as this happens, the tax base for the state and/or community will fall. In my state much of the property tax goes to K-12 education and my local city.
Now it will take a few years for the house price deflation and then the reassessments, but eventually my town and local education will feel the pinch as well.
I saw an “expert” on CNBC predict that housing prices will probably fall to the level of the early 1990s. Granted this expert is out of the conventional wisdom predictions, but that kind of drop would be a tough thing to deal with economically. Considering that so many people don’t have very much principal paid on their homes, there will be plenty of mortgages that won’t be worth making the payments.
There are some silver linings to the housing bust. It truly does depend on where one lives or if a person already paid off their home. A savvy investor will wait for the bottom and start buying up homes, but as always, when will the bottom be reached?
Last week stats came out about price drops in California and that for all intent and purposes nothing was moving, sales are so stale. But that reflected prior to the recent fires destroying something like 1,600 houses. Mother nature may have given a bit of a boost to their housing market, we shall see.
Posted by Jon B on Oct 26, 2007 at 6:14 AM
Jon B,
For years many “experts” have been debating whether we should be more concerned about the likelihood of runaway inflation or deflation. Just a few years ago I believe Greenspan (not a favorite of mine) mentioned it somewhere in the midst of one of his highly acclaimed wisdom marathons to a Congressional committee.
I expect some of each
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 27, 2007 at 9:08 AM
WTH….
Yeah, economics should never be thought of as a science. It’s theory that gets turned on it’s head every few generations or so. Partially that is because economics isn’t democratic in the sense that the mass of people have really much say in what happens in the macro-picture. It truly is the rich that run economics, either through politics or by way of controlling with their mass of money and both. Free market economics always has holes in it that allow for abuse by the wealthy at the expense of the masses, which is why repeatedly we have these pyramid schemes disguised as sound investments.
If we could have a free market where all information is available to everyone at the same time then it might have some merit, but that never happens because their are always insiders making judgments and decisions prior to the rest of us. Free market mantra, “let the buyer beware” but how can we be aware if we don’t get the same information? There are always politicians setting policies based on how much campaign cash flowed into their coffers and by whom it flowed. There are always people in high places that consider economics as a war to win against everyone else. And I suppose it’s probably true that you can’t legislate against every incidence of greed.
One free market mantra that just bugs the crap out of me….“vote with your dollars.” Yeah, right. I’d like to vote with my dollars for American-made products but that has become increasingly impossible. I can’t “vote” for an American-made TV or clothing or even a US flag. The free market has stolen my vote. You know that virtually all animated cartooning is now a foreign job, in other words I can’t even vote to watch a cartoon unless it’s an old rerun of say the classic Warner Brothers. I guess that should be a new mantra, “if it’s made in America, it’s a rerun.” Or maybe, “Buy American, by buying vintage.”
I guess I’m fairly down on American economics right now. I can’t think of a bigger insult to Americans than to encourage home ownership, a worthy goal, and then set up a scheme to enrich the Wall Streeters and CEO’s of mortgage and building companies while snatching back those houses due to the collapse of the scheme.
The CEO of Countrywide Financial Angelo Mozilo sold about $145 million in stock in the first half of this year, the SEC is looking into it. Unbelievable!!! This guy, supposedly a mortgage genius (he is the CEO after all), is now presiding over a company that is laying off 1,200 workers, is having to beg for cash to float the company and apparently couldn’t see a housing bubble that dumb guys like you and me (obviously I’m being sarcastic) could see a mile away. Mozilo, is he a crook, an idiot, a free marketer, or some combination of the three?
Posted by Jon B on Oct 27, 2007 at 10:41 AM
Jon B,
Stock options are a real sore point with me. As a graphic designer and illustrator I worked I worked on more than 60 annual reports for local clients. Most of the company officers were fine decent people. But there seems to be an invidious attitude which can creep in on even the nicest people as they acquire money and power. They may begin to think of themselves as entitled to more and more.
It
Posted by whattheheck on Oct 27, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Liberals, progressives, conservatives, whoever…
I am looking for a movement that realizes there are people struggling in the U.S. who are not uneducated, poor, and pregnant while a teenager.
There are people who do not own cars, let alone SUVs or Hummers. They do not own blackberries and some do not even own cell phones. Their computers are on dial-up and they see no reason to spend an extra $100-$200 a year for a higher-speed modem just because other people want lots of glitz on web pages.
There are still people who want a choice between decent and affordable rental housing and decent and affordable homeownership. They don’t want to have to prove they have never filed a complaint against a bad landlord, never filed for bankruptcy, and never made a mistake that ended up as a criminal record.
There are people who want a fair wage for a fair job but do not need or want a full-time job to have all the extras, such as a car and a cell phone. Some people want time to attend city hall meetings, school board meetings, to paint, to write, to enjoy life and are willing to trade luxeries, such as cable service, for time.
It is convenient to say we are a nation of the rich and of the poor, but America was built on the idea of choice, and that means we need choices along the full economic spectrum. Alas, too many political organizations have forgotten the true middle and moderate class.
Heck, maybe that’s what I want. Forget the Progressives. I want the Moderates. I want politicians who say ethanol is fine, in moderation. Homeownership is fine, in moderation. Urban redevelopment is fine, in moderation. I want somebody to stand up and say if we do not tax Internet access, we should not tax telephone usage. I want somebody to stand up and say that if health insurance works for anybody, it should work for everybody is not true. We need Moderation, not Progressivism.
Posted by SillyLeftist on Oct 29, 2007 at 9:54 AM
Scorp and whattheheck
Thank you for the entertainment!
Who made the following statement?
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering”
A. Stalin
B. Hitler
C. Mussolini
E. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Was he or she a
F. Communist
G. Socialist
H. Collectivist
I. Democrat
J. Republican
Answer: E+, F-J?
Greetings from a Swedish Communist
What good does it do to be informed about things we are powerless to do anything about? The reason so many have deserted the Left is that there are no apparent effective tools for change.
Peaceful demonstrations mainly serve to expand the NSA’s already swollen database of “miscreants.” Voting here in the land of the free is a sick joke. Guerrilla warfare? Not likely or even remotely plausible.
Parenthetically, as the nuclear power plants multiply through the rubber-stamping approval process of the NRC, chances are that one will “malfunction” in a very bad way, and windmills may finally come into vogue. But global warming has reached a point of no return, anyhow.
Again, parenthetically, I have no illusions about the connections between American military interventions and corporate profits, but think how much easier it would be for the loonies running the show n Iran to off writers like Rushdie who piss them off, once they have nuclear warheads!
Posted by AbbieRitter on Nov 9, 2007 at 11:20 PM
“....but think how much easier it would be for the loonies running the show n Iran to off writers like Rushdie who piss them off, once they have nuclear warheads!”
How would using a nuke for assassination be easier? There are probably hundreds of easier ways to assassinate. The reason they probably haven’t gotten Rushdie is that he spends much time in hiding.
I’m so sick of the fearful alarmists about Iran. Our own experts have said that the earliest Iran could even have a nuke would be about 6 or 7 years…that’s earliest. Most people don’t even know that the big mouth President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has no power. He is elected as nothing but a figurehead, a sort of elected Queen of England. He has no power, he can’t press a nuke button even if and when they get one.
And don’t forget about MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). If Iran ever did use a nuke, their country would get the response of nuclear annihilation.
Posted by Jon B on Nov 10, 2007 at 6:23 AM
Hi,Y’all !
I’ve been away for a while—school.
Is this article not laughable ? The left does not have an identity crisis. Rather ,what it has is a name-calling crisis. That is, it tries to dodge the names thrown at it by the Fox News crowd. Liberal has become synonomous with communist and the negative connotations that once held.
Personally, I believe in fighting fire with fire. It works when dealing with bullies which the right wing in this country has become. Anyone who uses the term liberal in a derogatory manner, to imply that their opponent is some sort of commie for wanting to use taxpayer money to help those who can’t help themselves, should be called a FASCIST!
After all, if one looks at history, one finds that fascists have always hated communists.
Ta- Ta !
Posted by Aunty Rightwing on Nov 27, 2007 at 2:10 PM
scorp’s idiocy prompted me to look up Neal Boortz. I found this great audio clip of Mike Malloy describing Boortz here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O7aMaQaqEU&locale=en_US&persist_locale=1
Posted by contents on Feb 19, 2008 at 12:44 PM
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Reader Comments
Brociner seems to have settled on “Progressive” as the proper term for term our Leftists.
May I suggest “Neocommunist” as a more appropriate label.
In the early years of the Twentieth Century, a new Collectivist philosophy, originating in Europe in the 1800s, arose in the United States. Known first as
The I.D. crisis is a universal political problem in the U.S. and has been for some time. It once was a given the Democrats were for labor and the Republicans for business
CORRECTIONS: (For some reason the edit feature didn’t show up.)
3rd para
WTH -
You have a charmingly naive and thought-free view of the world. Everything you don’t like, you find something or someone to blame it on, even if there is no correlation whatsoever. And you don’t let facts get in your way.
Oh, come now. The American Revolution and the War Between the States are examples of true ID crises, when Americans fought against Americans over who they were and what kind of country they wanted. Far from being a “universal political problem”, this is the normal state of affairs world-wide. We are actually in a quite benign period. Such problems as we have are exacerbated by the Neocommunists, who pretend to support liberal American values while pusuing a totalitarian agenda.
Horse shit. You, of all people on this thread, have complained, with no reason but your own sorry experience, about loss of jobs. The United States economy is the strongest in the world, with 65 months of growth and increased jobs. The lower dollar has made American goods more competitive, and the trade figures are already reflecting this.
Ummm, no. The cheap manufacturing jobs have been moved to cheap suppliers, and high paying technical and service jobs have replaced them, with substantial growth in the number of jobs and in the economy. We have produced net 1.41 million new jobs in the last year, most of them paying more than the manufacturing jobs which were eliminated.
http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/10/where-the-jobs-.html
Well, which will it be? You do not have a clue, do you? The deflation that Japan experienced starting in 1991 was a direct result of the Japanese asset bubble, when the price of prime Tokyo real estate was $40,000 per square meter, and the 400 acres of the Japanese Imperial Palace was valued higher than the state of California. Well, yes, bubbles always burst, and always cause economic disruption when they burst, such as Japan has experienced and from which it is now slowly recovering.
You probably did not notice, but the USA was in quite a hefty dot.com bubble during the last four years of the Clinton Administration. The Bubba Bubble had a very large potential for economic devastation, but fortunately George Bush and Alan Greenspan applied the proper corrective action, minimizing the bad effects and leading to the unparalleled growth and prosperity we have experienced since then.
Let me tell you how you can become rich and famous. You always claim that the government is lying about jobs and prosperity. If the government is producing fictional numbers, this is the world’s largest conspiracy. Not only do the government figures have to be fictional, but a lot of other evidence must be fictional as well. For example, when Clinton left office, virtually all the states had terrible problems with their finances and budgets. But Bush’s tax cuts produced jobs, and jobs produced tax revenues, and tax revenues brought revenue surpluses to most states. So if the government is producing fictional job and prosperity data, the states could not possibly have revenue surpluses, now could they? So all the states must be lying, as well. A conspiracy that large cannot be concealed. By revealing this conspiracy to the world, you will earn everlasting fame and fortune. Go for it.
It was always thus.
Scorp,
Sorry, The Revolutionary and Civil wars were before my time. Let’s look at more recent history.
The disunity obvious to anyone willing to remove his rose-colored glasses is on the increase in the U.S.
We now have a combination of a mishandled war in Iraq
(look up “Gen. Sanchez’s Scream” this week at opinionjournal.com)
and an economic calamity much like the early 1970s (I was around then.) We could get the same kind of inflation or deflation. I won’t attempt to predict just to be prepared for either.
As I recall the last time we had this is agreement about the current state of the economy I said wait a year and see if you still think I’m off the mark. You may not need to wait that long.
You believe the U.S. economy is the strongest, the new jobs are better than the ones we gave away, the trade deficit is improving, over a million jobs have been created and the lower dollar is good for exports. You correctly described the Japanese asset bubble, but apparently missed our housing bubble, the credit pyramid scheme and the reality of inflation (including food and energy).
The tech meltdown during Clinton’s administration is in part what I meant by I.D. crisis. Clinton was no real Democrat just as neither Bush is a genuine conservative. They both serve the same small faction
“Now I note that some Collectivists (Hillary, most notably) are again calling themselves Progressives. I suppose they are running out of labels with which to mislead people.”
Contemporary liberal politicians are only “Collectivists” according to the pseudo-ideology and intellectual quackery of Objectivism. Clinton most certainly supports such Liberal institutions as international free trade, a market based economy, rights-based restrictions on the power of government, protection of private property, rule of law, and checks and balances among governmental powers.
Liberalism has always acknowledged that there are certain functions that are too expensive, too unprofitable, or too specialized for the private sector to accomplish well. For poor (and many middle-class) people in this country, private health care has utterly failed, so many think that it makes sense to start experimenting with ways to make the system work, with varying degrees of government involvement. This, in my mind, is one of the main things Liberalism makes possible: the ability to experiment within a system that allows and encourages the creativity that arises from a pluralism of ideas. As I like to say, “If it’s broke, try to fix it.”
Hillary has never advocated nationalizing, say steel production, or agriculture, or lumber, or semiconductors, or services or etc etc etc. Nor has she called for any gross redistribution of wealth. Calling her, or any Democrat, a “Collectivist” is frankly ludicrous.
Matt -
Hillary supports the rule of law? Does she now? I hadn’t heard.
Whitewater. Jim and Susan Mc Dougal, Susan went ot jail. Castle Grande billing records. Cattle futures. Billy Dale and the Travel Office. The FBI files. Hubbell, went to jail. Lippo Group. And the three separate fraudulent compaign contribution scandals involving illegal contributions by Chinese agents.
Every one of these incidents directly involved Hillary, and were morally reprehensible at best, and criminal at worst.
Your whole post is parody, right?
Speaking of Collectivists, you seem to be an expert. Identify who made the following statements:
Pop Quiz - How much do you know about Socialism?
By Evrviglnt | October 20, 2007
Can you tell us who said the quotes below?
1) “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”
A. Karl Marx
B. Adolph Hitler
C. Joseph Stalin
D. None of the above
2) “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few ... and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.”
A. Lenin
B. Mussolini
C. Idi Amin
D. None of the Above
3) “(We) ... can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”
A. Nikita Khrushev
B. Jose f Goebbels
C. Boris Yeltsin
D. None of the above
4) “We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own ... in order to create this common ground.”
A. Mao Tse Dung
B. Hugo Chavez
C. Kim Jong Il
D. None of the above
5) “I certainly think the free-market has failed.”
A. Karl Marx
B. Lenin
C. Molotov
D. None of the above
6) “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched.”
A. Pinochet
B. Milosevic
C. Saddam Hussein
D. None of the above
Answers:
(1) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/29/2004
(2) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 5/29/2007
(3) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
(4) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
(5) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
(6) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 9/2/2005
Hat Tip: Neal Boortz!
scorp,
I won’t dignify your Clinton Chronicles litany with a response.
The quotes you pulled are either meaningless without context, or only objectionable to an Objectivist. The real point of the multiple-choice format is merely a low-brow attempt to smear Clinton via negative association. Do you have any substantive critiques?
Matt -
Clinton is not associated with her own quotes? Well, that is certainly a novel interpretation. Especially since she has said essentially the same thing in different contexts over a period of years. And the contexts are quite accessible if you care to look them up. I distinctly remember at least two of them from news coverage at the time.
So, you ignore (or embrace) Hillary’s criminal activity and her radical plans for the American people, the American economy, and the American government. Noted.
Of the several possible interpretations of your use of the term “Objectivist”, I think you are referring to Randian Objectivism.
I am hardly a disciple, but I can’t help but note that your Marxian (or Gramscian) philosophy, to the degree it is applied, has an uninterrupted history of death, destruction, and decay. Not to mention it’s dishonest and criminal aspects, as illustrated by Hillary.
Oh scorp, so what are Hillary’s radical plans anyway? What evil will she do that makes you cringe in fear?
And how is Hillary not any more of a elite criminal than George Bush? Didn’t Bush fail to disclose his sale of stocks at Harkin Energy (he claimed he forgot) for many months? I won’t go into his other flirts with the law, because it is pointless. The reason it’s pointless is that all the top politicians are corrupt because they operate in a corrupt system.
In your history lesson you failed to mention the Populists eventually lead by William Jennings Bryant. They morphed into the progressives. It was more detailed than that but that’s the one-liner.
You scoffed at Henry Wallace losing badly, big surprise as ALL presidential third party candidates lose badly, from both the left and right. We are stuck with the duopoly. A two-party system that only allows third party candidates to have even a sliver of a chance at local levels. In the past it was a little easier for other parties, but not today.
It’s also funny how Greenspan apparently wasn’t involved during the Clinton era, yet stepped out to be a savior in the Bush era. So Greenspan was just a thumb-twiddler in the 1990s and superman for Bush? Is that your reality? Greenspan helped create the tech bubble and didn’t do anything about it. Of course he had help, all the corporate crooks running the Enron’s and Worldcom’s etc. ultimately they were the bubble poppers.
And of course the free market had to have the government step in and save the economy in 1998 because of Long Term Capital Management. And here we go again, the government is having to help the big New York banks from taking big losses due to exposure to sub prime loans. That’s the basis of free market economics, most of us have to live with our losses, but the big players will get their asses saved when they are too stupid with their money because if the big boys were to have to sink their companies the whole shebang goes down the tubes. The American economic house of cards, when those top cards are teetering along comes the government to hold them in place.
And of course Greenspan was deluded into thinking there would never be a housing bubble, when any loser like me was predicting it several years ago.
I don’t care to look them up; I’m not trying to critique Clinton’s policies. If you wish to provide a substantive critique, it’s your responsibility to provide context for these remarks, which I note, you still haven’t done. The negative association I was referring to was (obviously) your pairing of Clinton with, you know, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Goebbels, etc. Geobbels??!? This type of attack is transparent, immature, and irrelevant. A real critique would describe her stated policy proposals and provide a rational counterpoint. Saying “Hillary is basically Hitler” is childish.
<blockquote>I can
Matt -
Ummm, no. I did not pair Hillary with anyone.
scorp,
You still have failed to offer any substantive critique of Clinton’s policies. So far, you’ve said “Hillary is a Collectivist”, “Hillary is a criminal”, and “Hillary is about on par with Stalin.”
The free-market quote is from an interview done for Sojourners magazine and was specifically in reference to national health care. For reasons I’ve already stated, the free-market <i>has<\i> failed in this area, and asserting this does not contradict any principle of modern democratic liberalism.
The expansion of rights language from just property to universal enfranchisement, education, and collective bargaining represent one historical trajectory of liberal though since the 19th century. A parallel trajectory is the establishment of safety net systems like old age pensions, unemployment subsidies, public sector jobs programs, and medical coverage for the elderly and destitute. Health care (and I would submit child care) guarantees for poor blue-collar Americans represent the final steps in this “safety-net” trajectory.
Liberalism is not so much an ideology as a program for establishing mechanisms to control governmental power. Properly controlled, government power can be used to expand the sphere of opportunity for the exercise of private power, and provide a forum in which a pluralism of ideas can engage creatively to make our state stronger and more vital. An example of this is the role that government plays in providing a framework for markets to operate effectively, i.e. establishing and enforcing laws that protect private property and access to markets, regulate monopolies, provide services that markets can’t or won’t provide, etc etc. Within this framework, the creativity and competition that markets encourage increase the state’s economic power. Liberalism is above all about What Works. It’s about experimentation and continual refinement of principles and systems.
If we assume that access to health care is a right, and that the private sector is not providing it adequately, it makes sense to start experimenting with other solutions.
Don’t worry, I’m sure that the Clinton Chronicles will crawl back out of the muck if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. The creativity of the Republican political machine mainly engages at the level of “swift-boating” and “McCain’s black baby”. The Democrats are politically crippled because they actually care about ideas, and so only engage in such smear attacks half-heartedly and ineffectually, hence Bush is not generally considered to be a drunk, coke-sniffing draft-dodger, but to many, Kerry is still a flip-flopping, traitorous coward.
The Free Market
Matt -
Au contraire! I have done nothing else on this thread.
Did Lenin and Stalin tell the world that they were going to kill 40 million or so of their own people, and destroy the Russian economy? What would have been the effect if they had done so? We are blessed with the knowledge of Hillary’s assault on the health care system in the 1990s, and her repeated comments on her plans to assault the free market if she gets elected. If you don’t remember, review the quotes above. They will give you a good indication of where she intends to take us.
Well, more or less. There are ideologies and then there are philosophies. The liberal philosophy was well thought out by the time of the American Revolution, and the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, is the finest statement of that philosophy, and of those Rights.
The government explicitly did not grant us Rights under the Constitution, but people owned the Rights, and the Constitution recognized the peoples’ ownership of those Rights. A principal function of the Constitution was to protect the peoples’ Rights. Most particularly, the Constitution recognized the Right of the people to protect themselves, including protecting themselves from obtrusive government power, as expressed in the Second Amendment. If the people cannot protect themselves, the other rights are subject to the government’s whim.
As envisioned by the Founders and their liberal philosophy, the people were sovereign.
The Socialist/Communist clap-trap that Hillary is pushing came much later. After the horrific imposition of Communism in Russia in 1918, American Communists could not win an election, so they began calling themselves Socialists. They still could not get elected, so they began calling themselves Progressives, thus corrupting a perfectly good social movement, of which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was a leading proponent in the early years of the Twentieth Century. Henry Wallace, businessman/politician/Communist/mystic, ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.
In fraudulently calling themselves Liberals, the radicals and Socialists corrupted the name of the very philosophy that was the basis of the founding of the Republic. Since the Constitution is a liberal document, and the Right “to keep and bear arms” is a fundamental Right specifically recognized by the Constitution, why do today’s “Liberals” seek to deprive the people of their Rights?
For that matter, why did Harry Reid and forty Democratic Senators fraudulently misinterpret Rush Limbaugh, and try to deprive Mr. Limbaugh of his freedom of speech? You have already stated that Democrats “engage in such smear attacks”, but I think the Democrats do so full-heartedly and ineffectually, not “half-heartedly and ineffectually”.
Only a Socialist would make that assumption, and would not recognize the destructive effect on health care that would result from that assumption. But socialized medicine is a fiasco wherever installed, and much of the high cost of American medical care is directly attributable to the partial application of Socialist bureaucracy and impediments.
scorp,
It seems as though the VA (Veteran’s Affairs) health care could fit the description of “Socialized Medicine”
It was reported on Democracy Now, Oct.19:
“new figures show Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton has emerged as the candidate most favored by the nation’s leading weapons companies. Clinton has received more than fifty-two thousand dollars from arms industry employees. That’s more than half the amount given to all Democratic candidates and sixty-percent of the total that has gone to Republicans.”
Yup, Hillary is a real threat, but this is from my opinion and shouldn’t be from those who think of her as some sort of radical leftist. When the weapons companies are surging to her campaign, you can figure out a few things. For one, her chance of winning it all are fairly good. And she represents the current Washington mindset, she’s nothing unusual in that town.
Hillary is nothing but another political elite beneficiary of name recognition. By the time her two terms are over it will be nothing but Bush/Clinton for 28 years. That should be historically amazing but not when you realize how complacent and ignorant voters are in regard to politics.
Scorp seems to think Hillary is some sort of leftist demon, she’s not even close. Progressives don’t like her but in the end will have no choice but to vote for her. They’d at least like a president with a “d” beside the name rather than the “r.” But they will be critical of her through her entire presidency. You can start with the Iraq War, progressives will vilify her every day she doesn’t act to pull troops out. Unlike conservatives that refused to say boo about Bush’s non-conservative actions until long into his second term, progressives will speak their minds very early on.
Progressives and Democratic Party are a contradiction in terms. Progressives keep hoping the Green Party becomes a political factor or that political parties themselves become obsolete some day but are realistic enough to know that the odds are long so the short term objective is to infiltrate the Democrats as the Religious Right did to the Republicans and become a significant factor. But progressives are also a bit like herding cats. Many are simply interested in concentrating on single issue pet projects and local concerns and don’t have any trust in Washington or national voting. It’s the nature of progressives to do more than vote, to become part of the solution and not just sit back and let politics control the issues.
Progressives have goals to change the world, improve things as problems emerge. They think in linear time, that advancement of the human race and our country as an important location of humans is the goal and always should be. Pining for an imaginary perfect past or maintaining the status quo is a conservative value. History for progressives is something to be learned from and to change what went wrong. It’s obvious that progressive comes from progress, that’s the deep root for the ideology.
Progressives fall in between the far left of communism or even anarchy and the middle-of-the-road Democrats of a Hillary and the faction called the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To a progressive the DLC is a Republican group masquerading as the left. The DLC is filled with status quo money loving career politicians.
If we don’t destroy ourselves and the world with our status quo ways, I’m confident enough to expect that progress of humanity will continue and that progressive thought will be a large part of that.
Jon B,
A rational essay and very well put.
The very first time I heard William Jefferson Clinton speak I thought, “Hey this guy’s a Democrat, but I like what he says
WTH…“Progressive, Liberal or Conservative labels mean little when actions blur their differences.”
I’m assuming you mean actions at the political level. No matter what label people are given they do or don’t take actions at the local level, or for personnel issues.
A few weeks ago I accidentally heard some of Bill O’Reilly’s radio show. He was ranting about “the radical left” on the subject of national health care and Hillary. The rantings of these type of political pundits (pundit rather than expert) is simply propaganda. Polling has consistently shown for decades that a majority of Americans want some sort of national health care plan, that’s not “the radical left,” that’s middle America. It’s the O’Reilly’s of the world that use labels to deceive for their own agenda. And the O’Reilly’s naturally don’t have to worry about health care, they’re rich.
But political labels have become meaningless. Today conservatives can be quite outraged about Bush. Libertarian conservatives are upset about the attack on civil liberties, fiscal conservatives are bothered by Bush’s spending spree via the government credit card, isolationist conservatives don’t like all the war stuff and nationalist conservatives are driven crazy by the illegal immigrant problem that Bush seems to embrace. For awhile I’ve been referring to Bush as a radical conservative, because he is radically different from what I always thought was a conservative. Or if he’s not a radical than he is redefining what a conservative is.
From Wikipedia;
Conservatism is a term used to describe political philosophies that favor tradition and gradual change, where tradition refers to religious, cultural, or nationally defined beliefs and customs. The term is derived from the Latin, conservāre, to conserve; “to keep, guard, observe”. Since different cultures have different established values, conservatives in different cultures have different goals. Some conservatives seek to preserve the status quo or to reform society slowly, while others seek to return to the values of an earlier time, the status quo ante.
Now that is only a brief possible explanation of what a conservative might be, but how does Bush fit that description? He has in fact expanded the federal government, not the “drown it in the bathtub” that a Grover Norquist would want.
Now I’m not so concerned about an expanded federal government per se, seeing as how our population continues to grow it logically makes sense that the government would grow as do all the institutions in our society as the society grows. The debate is how the government changes and we all have different ideas about that. But many conservatives watch the population expand and then want the government to decrease, it doesn’t make sense. They want to keep a status quo or even return to a smaller government, yet the population’s status quo is changing, growing.
It’s an odd ideology to me, to reject a government of “we the people” and to consolidate the government power into the hands of a few. And then when I might say “OK, less government then let’s reduce the military” conservatives would scream. So, they want only parts of the government they like not to be touched and the parts they oppose (anything that resembles “socialism” or regulation) to be drowned in a bathtub. They spout about rule of law, then object to making of laws to control crime (at least the corporate crime through regulation). And no CEO will ever go to jail for hiring illegals, ignore the root cause and scream about a wall.
Jon B,
I see the labels as nearly meaningless partly because of the similarities in action (or in action) by people claiming to be of different parties, groups or political philosophies. As for Bush if he is a political conservative then I don’t know what I am. What I want conserved is summed up in the Preamble to the Constitution. If we are to continue to be a nation we must first and foremost support, defend and care for each other and for those who follow us. (The Wikipedia definition comes pretty close.) If personal gain is more important for most people than those goals stated 230 years ago, then we have already ceased to be a nation and are just a business.
Perhaps instead of “less government” I should say fewer committees and bureaucracies and better governing.
For example: The current sub prime loan mess. We don’t need new laws. We don’t need more committee meetings. No new agencies. We have all of those and they did not do their assigned jobs. Congress shirked their oversight. The rating agencies did not behave in a trustworthy manner.
Yesterday I read an article titled: “Big banks take responsibility for credit crisis”
WTH..
Why are neither party doing anything is simple, the presidential campaign season is already upon us. Candidates from both parties are receiving plenty of cash from Wall Street currently. Many on Wall Street give to both parties and several candidates to hedge their bets, so to speak. I saw a list of contributions about a week ago in the Wall Street Journal. And at that point the Democratic candidates in total were ahead in the money race from Wall Street, a bit curious as usually the Republicans get more from that source. I think it was Dodd that received the most, naturally since he is ranking banking chairman. It seems Wall Street knows which way the wind is blowing for 2008 and which bed to feather.
Wall Street is a haven for crooks and incompetence. Did you see where Merrill Lynch just announced an $8 Billion write-off due to the sub-prime derivatives? This was after less than a month ago they claimed it would be about $4 billion.
Plenty of blame can be spread around about the mortgage mess. The ratings agencies (such as Moody’s) should be included, they were basically colluding with Wall Street, giving A ratings to that derivative junk. The thing is, I don’t think any laws were technically broken. Partly because there were basically few regulations on these CDOs and SIVs. It’s the same old story in American finance, find a way to deregulate or not regulate in the first place, combine the human element of greed, and then use the out-of-the-loop public as marks.
The Dow would never have reached the level it has if workers weren’t basically forced to use the market as a retirement fund through 401Ks. If you look at the Dow from the 1930s until the 1990s, the trend was a very slow up trend. Then you see it begin to sky in the 1990s coinciding with the 401K phenomenon. The market numbers we see since is nothing but supply and demand. 401Ks demanded more stocks to invest in, which provided more reasons for APOs. More stocks were needed to feed the 401K monster.
But it’s a racket. When there’s a downturn in the market 401Ks can’t make money going down by shorting the market (exception, there are a select few 401Ks as short funds) only the big money players can do that. In the 2002 downturn, the retirement funds suffered in contrast to the big rollers and insiders. And it will happen again the next big sustained downturn.
A prediction here. This mortgage debacle is going to take a few years to flush out, more than what is currently being predicted by most experts. The Fed will continue easing the rates, doing nothing to save the sub-prime mess and in turn continuing to weaken the dollar. So a double whammy on home owners, a depreciation of housing value combined with inflation. Yet also on the horizon is a possible deflation spiral like Japan is still mired in, if the Fed keeps uselessly dropping the fund rates. And the Dow sometime in the next year or two is going to plunge like in 2002, maybe worse.
WTH…
I’m worried plenty about the economy. We have a possible perfect storm brewing.
I see trends that aren’t comforting. I remember back in 1998 telling anyone who’d listen to buy gold, it was about $265 at the time. Now it’s at about $750. Wow, even I didn’t expect that huge jump in less than ten years. But gold prices are traditionally a marker of trust in the dollar, higher gold prices means less trust.
The housing bubble deflation is more serious than the tech bubble pop. Most of tech pop was suffered in paper assets, people that lost big (for instance owners of Enron stock, etc.) simply had to start over on retirement savings or delay retiring. But the housing bubble is going to force a lot of people to move out of their homes, that’s a deep personnel action.
It already has forced the shutting of many mortgage businesses and layoffs at surviving companies. It will also cause a slowdown in spending on consumer goods particularly the Home Depot’s and Lowe’s. Big ticket items such as washer/dryers, furniture, etc. will lag in sales because people buy them more when buying a new home. As people are forced to leave their houses for smaller places or apartments, they’ll keep their physical assets to take to their new place or sell them.
I look at the personnel savings rate of Americans and shake my head. The average is negative! People are massively in debt, and the average includes the rich who have large savings. Credit card debt is back up again, this came fast after the bankruptcy bill provided a window to declare bankruptcy before the new law went into effect. A record number of bankruptcies happened then. Now when people declare bankruptcy they can’t just clear all the debts. There is going to be another wave of bankruptcies coming.
Energy and food costs are rising. Two things not counted in government inflation figures. Wheat prices are significantly higher due to droughts in world wheat growing areas. Corn and soy (commodities that are in a lot of food stuffs) are rising due to increased use for ethanol and bio-deisel. And I’m a believer in peak oil, it’s hitting now, but within the next decade we are going to really feel it.
Higher education is rising in costs. They tell people to get an education, but who can afford it? It all goes on the red side of a persons balance sheet these days to burden the early years on the job.
And all this comes at the time of a credit crunch in banking. Are the big banks really going to finance like they have in the last decade for homes, cars, educations, credit cards, etc? I believe financing is going be reduced more than we think.
And if I’m right about a stock market downturn, baby boomers are going to go through another reduction in retirement assets and this time at retirement age.
And who knows how politicians will make any of this worse. Our national debt was purposely increased to $9 trillion just recently. Yesterday it was predicted our two wars would cost $2.3 trillion dollars for the next ten years and that doesn’t include a war with Iran that Bush is chomping for.
It certainly feels like America is a spent out empire, at every level of our society.
Jon B,
They say it takes money to make money and Wall St. will get their share and then some. In addition to the almighty buck the protection when schemes go bad like the current sub prime pyramid is like a blank check.
When Enron graduated form analyst’s favorite pick to Scam of the Century my congressman sent back a contribution from them. How much they spread around we’ll never know.
Interesting that we so seldom hear any long term comparisons like you just made. Much easier to cover financial illnesses by taking the temperature minute by minute. The 401(k) changeover was another great D.C. payoff.
Except for my military service and three years in a corporation, I was self employed from age 19 to 67. I never thought Social Security or Medicare would be there for me and saved accordingly, bought only what we could pay in cash (except for our house).
With massive revisions in the tax code and viewing Social Security as a collect on a needs basis we could afford to also provide health care for people unable to get it.
My conservative streak leans to emergency care only and only as much as necessary for as long as needed. I believe more people would give more if there were fewer “entitlements”.
I concur with your perfect storm view for the same reasons.
What is ignored by even the honest “experts” is just how much freedom is lost when money is in short supply and how whole communities can be straight-jacketed when their main industry is shipped to foreign countries.
The housing market is flooded (even before the sub prime) and it is your primary asset. Withdrawing retirement funds is penalized at 10 percent. You can’t afford to travel to a job interview. The passage of time increases the limitations.
Even with a premium priced education white collar jobs are now being exported and the number of visas being increased to bring in foreign workers with graduate degrees willing to work cheaper. Education may be necessary, but a bad financial investment.
I recently read a report (if I can find it I will send the URL) saying that credit tightening by choice (only to the most secure borrowers) leads to recession. When lenders don’t lend because they can’t it becomes “revulsion” leading to depression. The banks are now hoarding cash to back the bad paper out there and may be in a can’t loan situation.
Just a bit of perspective: From the Ken Burns special THE WAR: WW2 cost $304 billion which in 2007 dollars is $3 trillion. I’ve not heard a total dollar cost for 9/11, but the potential for destruction here is far greater both in money and people than WW2 when we lost six (6) civilian casualties in Oregon to a Jap bomb delivered by a balloon.
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I have been having difficulty getting back to this thread
WTH..
Back to peak oil…The president of Mexico announced that they have only 9 years worth of proven oil reserves left. Their biggest field has been dwindling rapidly, this was previously guessed at by those who believe peak oil is fast upon us, but now it’s official. Proven oil reserves and active oil field estimates is one of the most secretive statistics in the world. No oil producing country wants to let on that their oil supply is drying up until it becomes obvious. The opposite is more true, that proven reserves are overestimated to the world by the producing country. Mexico was in the first category, it was becoming obvious.
For what it’s worth, Mexico is our second leading source for oil after Canada. The Middle East is third, followed by Venezuela. Also for what it’s worth, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil field is also rumored to be waning fast, that they’ve been increasingly pumping water into it to force the oil out and as well using older technology to do so, thereby losing some production.
To change the subject a bit…Our national GDP has become skewed, it isn’t reflective of the true nature as much as it used to be. Why? Because the cost reductions achieved by US firms shifting production offshore are being miscounted as GDP growth in the US and that productivity gains achieved by US firms when they move design, research, and development offshore are showing up as increases in US productivity. Obviously, production and productivity that occur abroad are not part of the US domestic economy. Who knows what our real GDP would be today if the stat were to be adjusted for the offshoring.
Before offshoring became the rage, it wasn’t necessary to even think about how it affected GDP, but it has been long past the time to readjust GDP data collection to include the offshoring effect. This factor was discovered by an economist, Susan Houseman and was a cover story in Business Week back in June, but not much of a peep from the main media and the story has slipped into the media memory hole. I could imagine that no one really wants to address her theme as it would obviously show that America’s GDP isn’t what is claimed and that our country isn’t quite the economic powerhouse that we want to project to the world or to our own citizens.
Here’s the business Week cover story.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_25/b4039001.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives
WTH..
I forgot to mention another piece to the housing bubble/bust’s puzzle, Property assessments. In states and/or communities that have a property tax (most do) it’s based on the assessed value. As housing prices drop, people are going to be demanding that their assessment be readjusted to reflect the lower price. In turn as this happens, the tax base for the state and/or community will fall. In my state much of the property tax goes to K-12 education and my local city.
Now it will take a few years for the house price deflation and then the reassessments, but eventually my town and local education will feel the pinch as well.
I saw an “expert” on CNBC predict that housing prices will probably fall to the level of the early 1990s. Granted this expert is out of the conventional wisdom predictions, but that kind of drop would be a tough thing to deal with economically. Considering that so many people don’t have very much principal paid on their homes, there will be plenty of mortgages that won’t be worth making the payments.
There are some silver linings to the housing bust. It truly does depend on where one lives or if a person already paid off their home. A savvy investor will wait for the bottom and start buying up homes, but as always, when will the bottom be reached?
Last week stats came out about price drops in California and that for all intent and purposes nothing was moving, sales are so stale. But that reflected prior to the recent fires destroying something like 1,600 houses. Mother nature may have given a bit of a boost to their housing market, we shall see.
Jon B,
For years many “experts” have been debating whether we should be more concerned about the likelihood of runaway inflation or deflation. Just a few years ago I believe Greenspan (not a favorite of mine) mentioned it somewhere in the midst of one of his highly acclaimed wisdom marathons to a Congressional committee.
I expect some of each
WTH….
Yeah, economics should never be thought of as a science. It’s theory that gets turned on it’s head every few generations or so. Partially that is because economics isn’t democratic in the sense that the mass of people have really much say in what happens in the macro-picture. It truly is the rich that run economics, either through politics or by way of controlling with their mass of money and both. Free market economics always has holes in it that allow for abuse by the wealthy at the expense of the masses, which is why repeatedly we have these pyramid schemes disguised as sound investments.
If we could have a free market where all information is available to everyone at the same time then it might have some merit, but that never happens because their are always insiders making judgments and decisions prior to the rest of us. Free market mantra, “let the buyer beware” but how can we be aware if we don’t get the same information? There are always politicians setting policies based on how much campaign cash flowed into their coffers and by whom it flowed. There are always people in high places that consider economics as a war to win against everyone else. And I suppose it’s probably true that you can’t legislate against every incidence of greed.
One free market mantra that just bugs the crap out of me….“vote with your dollars.” Yeah, right. I’d like to vote with my dollars for American-made products but that has become increasingly impossible. I can’t “vote” for an American-made TV or clothing or even a US flag. The free market has stolen my vote. You know that virtually all animated cartooning is now a foreign job, in other words I can’t even vote to watch a cartoon unless it’s an old rerun of say the classic Warner Brothers. I guess that should be a new mantra, “if it’s made in America, it’s a rerun.” Or maybe, “Buy American, by buying vintage.”
I guess I’m fairly down on American economics right now. I can’t think of a bigger insult to Americans than to encourage home ownership, a worthy goal, and then set up a scheme to enrich the Wall Streeters and CEO’s of mortgage and building companies while snatching back those houses due to the collapse of the scheme.
The CEO of Countrywide Financial Angelo Mozilo sold about $145 million in stock in the first half of this year, the SEC is looking into it. Unbelievable!!! This guy, supposedly a mortgage genius (he is the CEO after all), is now presiding over a company that is laying off 1,200 workers, is having to beg for cash to float the company and apparently couldn’t see a housing bubble that dumb guys like you and me (obviously I’m being sarcastic) could see a mile away. Mozilo, is he a crook, an idiot, a free marketer, or some combination of the three?
Jon B,
Stock options are a real sore point with me. As a graphic designer and illustrator I worked I worked on more than 60 annual reports for local clients. Most of the company officers were fine decent people. But there seems to be an invidious attitude which can creep in on even the nicest people as they acquire money and power. They may begin to think of themselves as entitled to more and more.
It
Liberals, progressives, conservatives, whoever…
I am looking for a movement that realizes there are people struggling in the U.S. who are not uneducated, poor, and pregnant while a teenager.
There are people who do not own cars, let alone SUVs or Hummers. They do not own blackberries and some do not even own cell phones. Their computers are on dial-up and they see no reason to spend an extra $100-$200 a year for a higher-speed modem just because other people want lots of glitz on web pages.
There are still people who want a choice between decent and affordable rental housing and decent and affordable homeownership. They don’t want to have to prove they have never filed a complaint against a bad landlord, never filed for bankruptcy, and never made a mistake that ended up as a criminal record.
There are people who want a fair wage for a fair job but do not need or want a full-time job to have all the extras, such as a car and a cell phone. Some people want time to attend city hall meetings, school board meetings, to paint, to write, to enjoy life and are willing to trade luxeries, such as cable service, for time.
It is convenient to say we are a nation of the rich and of the poor, but America was built on the idea of choice, and that means we need choices along the full economic spectrum. Alas, too many political organizations have forgotten the true middle and moderate class.
Heck, maybe that’s what I want. Forget the Progressives. I want the Moderates. I want politicians who say ethanol is fine, in moderation. Homeownership is fine, in moderation. Urban redevelopment is fine, in moderation. I want somebody to stand up and say if we do not tax Internet access, we should not tax telephone usage. I want somebody to stand up and say that if health insurance works for anybody, it should work for everybody is not true. We need Moderation, not Progressivism.
Scorp and whattheheck
Thank you for the entertainment!
Who made the following statement?
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering”
A. Stalin
B. Hitler
C. Mussolini
E. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Was he or she a
F. Communist
G. Socialist
H. Collectivist
I. Democrat
J. Republican
Answer: E+, F-J?
Greetings from a Swedish Communist
What good does it do to be informed about things we are powerless to do anything about? The reason so many have deserted the Left is that there are no apparent effective tools for change.
Peaceful demonstrations mainly serve to expand the NSA’s already swollen database of “miscreants.” Voting here in the land of the free is a sick joke. Guerrilla warfare? Not likely or even remotely plausible.
Parenthetically, as the nuclear power plants multiply through the rubber-stamping approval process of the NRC, chances are that one will “malfunction” in a very bad way, and windmills may finally come into vogue. But global warming has reached a point of no return, anyhow.
Again, parenthetically, I have no illusions about the connections between American military interventions and corporate profits, but think how much easier it would be for the loonies running the show n Iran to off writers like Rushdie who piss them off, once they have nuclear warheads!
“....but think how much easier it would be for the loonies running the show n Iran to off writers like Rushdie who piss them off, once they have nuclear warheads!”
How would using a nuke for assassination be easier? There are probably hundreds of easier ways to assassinate. The reason they probably haven’t gotten Rushdie is that he spends much time in hiding.
I’m so sick of the fearful alarmists about Iran. Our own experts have said that the earliest Iran could even have a nuke would be about 6 or 7 years…that’s earliest. Most people don’t even know that the big mouth President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has no power. He is elected as nothing but a figurehead, a sort of elected Queen of England. He has no power, he can’t press a nuke button even if and when they get one.
And don’t forget about MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). If Iran ever did use a nuke, their country would get the response of nuclear annihilation.
Hi,Y’all !
I’ve been away for a while—school.
Is this article not laughable ? The left does not have an identity crisis. Rather ,what it has is a name-calling crisis. That is, it tries to dodge the names thrown at it by the Fox News crowd. Liberal has become synonomous with communist and the negative connotations that once held.
Personally, I believe in fighting fire with fire. It works when dealing with bullies which the right wing in this country has become. Anyone who uses the term liberal in a derogatory manner, to imply that their opponent is some sort of commie for wanting to use taxpayer money to help those who can’t help themselves, should be called a FASCIST!
After all, if one looks at history, one finds that fascists have always hated communists.
Ta- Ta !
scorp’s idiocy prompted me to look up Neal Boortz. I found this great audio clip of Mike Malloy describing Boortz here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O7aMaQaqEU&locale=en_US&persist_locale=1
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