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#11 said, “I will be accused of racism but that’s the truth.”
Yes it is true, you are. Just come out of the closet and admit it. We don’t even know your real name. Confession is good for the soul, right?
#16 & #19: Agreed. Would be nice if there were another field to play on — that mattered. But there is not. So, I propose we just suck each others’ cocks, call all the other people tools, and refine our theories of monolithic conspiracies, and, oh yeah, suck each others’ cocks. Let’s not forget to do that.
Regardless of what side you fall in the political spectrum, the one thing that we can all agree on is that the financial markets failed to act responsibly:
a) They made loans to people that were not qualified to receive the loans.
b) They played three-card-monte by bundling the bad loans and selling them to other people or institutions that thought that they were getting papers worth something.
c) They placed bets on bets on bets that the system would not fail, reaping money as they sold the bets in a huge pyramid scheme.
d) They lied and committed outright fraud in their financial advice.
e) They failed to act responsibly to help solve the problem, instead using the bailouts as a tool to further increase their profits while screwing the people outside their system.
Forget the past, and ask yourself which political party has made a more concerted effort to correct the problems with the financial system.
It has been the Republicans that have fought to the greatest extent possible any financial reform to address the issues that led to the current financial meltdown. They do not want to fix the problem. Period. If it were up to them, no changes would take place. None. On the contrary, the Republicans have pushed for LESS regulation of the financial sector.
So when you place blame, don’t look back at Frank and Dodd… they are old news… look at what is being done to FIX the problem, and who wants to implement rules that make the financial system more trustworthy and stable… it certainly is not the Republicans.
Free markets are great, until the free markets become crooked markets, then they need to be fixed. And the Republicans are fighting against fixing them in any way they can. Why? Do you really need to ask why?
I say regulate financial markets in every way that you can, and slowly give them back certain freedoms as they PROVE that they can act responsibly. And just plain outlaw many of their most egregious actions.
And when we elect the Republicans because they are the only ones who will promise to stop illegal immigration…….then there goes Social Security, there goes Obamacare, there goes medicare and Medicaid, there goes Unemployment Insurance. And after all that is gone to help balance the budget, who are they going to tax?
I have an idea! Lets not lose our social programs. Let’s put a special tax on companies who are raking in record profits from sending our jobs overseas. Companies like Intel, H-P etc. So called American companies.
Well, I must say the “nastier” comments seem the most well reasoned? Ha. ha.
Always the way when more than one issue is actually at play. Its not about being able to juggle more than one ball at a time with your facile minds: rather its you grab onto the first ball within your range and won’t let it go!
Ideas in your brain, like a banana in a narrow jug==to a monkey.
Awake: we agree so often, I hate to point out your short comings: “one thing that we can all agree on is that the financial markets failed to act responsibly.” And that is simply WRONG in that they aren’t supposed to act responsibility in theory, in law, in practice, as show by history.
AND THAT IS WHY they must be regulated. More or less regulation is the language of the f*cktard tool. What counts is the effectiveness of the regulations, the relevancy, and that of course goes hand in hand with enforcement. One means nothing without the other.
Whats the total so far in this fraudulent money shuffle: 2 or 3 people have gone to jail? So many deserve it.
When the guilty go free, it is we the people who pay.
tHE FINANCIAL markets were/are playing with Virtual money.
They are playing with enough money to make our GNP look like Change in a piggy bank.
WE the people dont have the Rights these folks have.
The money they were paid COULD have paid off MOST if not all of those loans.
it didnt happen. it WENT to wages to keep THEIR employees.
Your local bank does MORE to make sure you use your money wisely.. There were/are NO CHECKS to see that the money is used in a way to BENEFIT THE PEOPLE..
Spring rains come hard, fast.
Week to week, too high, too low.
Dams regularize.
#25: One cannot “simply” be wrong when the only angle of a attack from which you can muster a feeble jab is a tertiary assertion against an otherwise perfectly reasonable syllogistic deduction (I’d write “deducement” if it were actually a word, but it is not — but I still wrote it anyway. Hah! I have my goat and eat it too.)
I mean, really, WRONG? In capital letters? Man, Awake is trying to tell you something, and you’re just what, still asleep? Your argument amounts to something like “Yuk, you’re a retard because you don’t enjoy jacking off the same way that I do.” …when nobody was talking about jacking off in the first place.
This is called “Cutting off the nose to spite the face.” It is not a good strategy.
And ya gotta ask yourself…
How come these things only get passed under a Democratically controlled congress?
If I recall correctly this bill didn’t pass easily. It wasn’t until Obama and McCain both agreed to the bill was it going to pass. You can’t blame Bush any more than you can blame the entire Democratic Majority in Congress at the time. With that in mind we also must take a look at the real reasons for this bill being brought up for vote. That was not Bush’s fault, that was based upon very poor businesses decisions to take advantage of the housing and lending markets.
#22 . So, I propose we just suck each others’ cocks,..
Great idea but I’ll excuse myself from this one, thank you.
#24 are you serious?
the dems are the ones who voted to raid SS. It was locked away and safe till they decided “hey theree’s a lot of damn money sitting around over here, lets use it to buy more votes and drop an IOU in there, we’ll put it back in there with higher taxes to the fools who already paid in”
GOVERNMENT NEVER, NEVER SOLVES ANYTHING. GOVT IS THE PROBLEM.
Idiots
#27–Gilgamesh==the first “real” Haiku on this blog. Connects to nature, etc. Well Done.
Does show the power of context though. This here is a political thread. Seems to me the “general rule” notwithstanding, the Haiku, or in failure, the Haiku format, should apply to the subject at hand or as a response, spur, to the thread?
Not in a vacuum? Well, now that you have experienced the joys of creativity within set paramenters, we can move on to real creativity?
Gildamush, the fool.
Throws Up Gibberish.
Thinks it is valid.
#31–Dallas==I think all this c*cksucking is an unattributed reference to Harvey Keitels role as the Cleaner in one of the top films ever: Pulp Fiction.
Shows the difference between a Master’s Use of the term, and just a masterbaiter’s use of the term.
Much like attributing a moral position to anything the Repukes do.
There is NOTHING moral about the GOP. They are full of “Christians” who know nothing of the new testament and can only point in the old to
Didn’t Christ support paying taxes? What about that “render unto Ceasar” stuff? He recognized that the civil government is separate from religion from the beginning.
#34 bobbo – perhaps and I do agree that is one awesome flick! A few favs…
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48
It seems to boil down to two opinions:
1) The welfare queens caused it.
2) The Wall Street fat cats & their tame politicians caused it.
Hmmm…
Which group is more powerful economically?
Hmmm?
Personally, I tend to blame Harvard MBAs. All of them, as a class. Soulless robots, almost to a man. (I have to allow for the theoretical possibility that at least one of them, somewhere, is an actual human being, if for no other reason than because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.)
The most interesting part of his speech was the “how we got here” section, most notably he spent as little time as possible pointing out the irresponsible behaviour of commercial banks, and more time pointing out the irresponsible behaviour of mortgage borrowers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whilst not specifically naming a single other irresponsible bank. He also completely ignored in his explanation the credit rating agencies that gave the toxic mortgage backed securities the best possible risk rating and the conflict of interest from being paid by the banks selling the securities.
But the best bit, is when he claimed that this policy wasn’t designed to help banks but to help the economy.
They could have helped the economy and the lending gridlock by bailing out irresponsible mortgage borrowers instead of irresponsible mortgage lenders. This would have had the same effect, but with the added bonus for the economy of millions of solvent homeowners as well as solvent banks.
I don’t think either group should have been bailed out, but yet again the conservatives show that they only care about rich people, even when they are being just as irresponsible as poor people.