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Comments: 660 +- News: Nothing To Fear But Fearlessness Itself? on Sunday November 01, @01:28PM
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theodp writes "In a post last August, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now his fears are echoed in a WSJ opinion piece by Peggy Noonan titled 'We're Governed by Callous Children.' She writes, 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?"
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Come to California... (Score:5, Insightful)
...to really see it in action. The state legislature approval rating was approaching single digits last I heard.
Do you think a single one of those scumbags give a gnat's fart about it?
They don't have to- not with district boundaries drawn like fractals and the vast majority of you voting the Party line.
Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been in our own self-made depression for over a decade.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:4, Insightful)
You should have elected the Republican. He was a businessman who, even in Michigan's power economy, managed to succeed and had plans to use his contacts to bring more business to Michigan, so everyone could get jobs.
Instead you re-elected Granholm, who had done nothing her first four years and hasn't done anything the second four years. She's just perpetuated the "do nothing and government will take care of you like a big daddy" welfare state. She's encouraged sloth not industriousness.
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/facepalm (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, you don't need Einstein to tell you than when you offload real risk from the lending institution to investors, that the lenders and their middle-men will make crater-loads of money, while people that buy the products that they off-load the risk to have no real idea of its trustworthiness. The fact that investment banks that then sold off these packages while at the same time making exotic and wildly speculative bets against (or on) them completely destabilized the international financial system.
If you want to blame the Community Reinvestment Act or other similar legislation to kickstart lending to low-income areas, you are free to, but to convince others you better have some real evidence to back it up.
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Re:/facepalm (Score:5, Informative)
This crisis could have been prevented in 2005, via Republican-led
If only Republicans had controlled Congress and the White House in 2005.
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Re:/facepalm (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. On the one hand, the law allowed ACORN and other pressure-groups to force banks to give mortgages to people, who didn't qualify for them. On the other hand, the pressure on the Fannie Mae (and Freddie Mac) forced them to lower the requirements on the mortgages, which they would buy from the banks. It is no surprise, that the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac were the first to experience major problems [wikipedia.org] — long before the rest of the market.
And what the banks could not sell to the government-controlled (if not outright owned) FMs, they did try to sell to others in various forms.
The bottom line is this — if the government (and government-allied pressure groups) didn't try to arm-twist the banks into giving mortgages to people not qualified to receive them, none of this would've happened. It was a wrong thing to do in the first place, and how exactly it damaged the economy is rather secondary.
When a partisan states, that "we are all to blame", he is admitting, that the bulk of the responsibility is on his side... I'll accept that.
That's a nice strawman you got there. Wow! No, the politicians I'm blaming are all very well off. It is not the poor, whom I blame, but the attempts to help them: "oh, if only they could get a mortgage, they'd be fine". No, they wouldn't be — in a Capitalist economy home loans bring profit — banks want to give them to everyone already, so if there is someone, who can't get it, the problem is not with the bank, but with that someone: "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required". No shit...
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Re:Come to California... (Score:4, Informative)
And here is the 1999 New York Times article [nytimes.com] matter-of-factly reporting on Fannie Mae easing credit to aid mortgage lending:
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Informative)
"How is it that, with such easy access to information, people still think the crash had anything to do with business? "
More right wing lies.
As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.
Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.
Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.
Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height vrom 2004 to 2006.
Federal Reserve Board data show that:
_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.
In Slate, Daniel Gross, senior editor of Newsweek, lays out the right wing mantra on the financial crisis:
http://www.slate.com/id/2201641 [slate.com]
On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.
The thesis is laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail. John McCain said yesterday, "Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity." The subtext: If only Congress didn't force banks to lend money to poor minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto put it, "I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."
* * * * * * * *
The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glo
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Insightful)
the vast majority of you voting the Party line.
I think that's the real cause of a lot of problems with our elected officials.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Insightful)
People who always vote for the same party. It is simple really. People go on about how votes for third parties doesn't count. But that is a pure lie.
The only vote that doesn't count is the vote that always stay the same, the predictable vote. Because no one has to make an effort to gain that vote. It is simply free.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Informative)
It's funny how that didn't happen in the 1800s. We had all kinds of parties in Congress, like the Anti Masonic, Nullifier, Whig, Conservative, Law and Order, American, Free Soil, Greenback, Labor, Populist, Liberal Republican, and so on.
Today's Congress has none of them. Not one. What's changed? The Lie. "Don't vote third party," is the lie. Third parties won seats in Congress in the past and most-certainly can win seats today.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's changed?
The number of voters represented by each congressman.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Insightful)
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California (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and California? What a perfect example. The Granola State (home of Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes) deserves what they got for electing who they elected.
That's callous and unreasonable. (1) We haven't had any good alternatives in a long time. (2) Everyone is too caught up on the lesser-of-two-evils mentality brought about by our first-past-the-post method of election (I'd be surprised if you lived somewhere different in this regards). Combine that with gerrymandering, and congress stagnates. (3) California is said to have the 5th largest economy in the world. Our government hurts our economy (without question) which ripples throughout the rest of the states. (4) The country as a whole has a tendency to follow California's lead. This doesn't predict the future, but it's worrisome. (5) Only the federal government is more beholden to a plethora of special interest groups, making real action nearly impossible to mobilize. (6) Not every Californian voted for these idiots. You're blaming a lot of innocent people. Yes, I've voted for third party candidates before. (I'd support an actual third party if any of them reflected my political views.)
I'm not asking for an apology. Just be careful who you lump in with the "Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes".
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Re:California (Score:5, Informative)
I've recently read on another forum that California is also hampered by a large negative balance of payment [calinst.org] between it and the federal government
"Last year, Californians sent nearly $20 billion more to Washington in federal taxes than the state received back in federal spending. The state’s 1998 deficit of $19.4 billion marked the largest such imbalance for any single state in the history of the nation, eclipsing the previous record of $14.3 billion, set also by California in 1997"
So it seems California is bankrolling the federal level even while going bankrupt itself.
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Re:It's not fearlessness that's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The education system (run by the left wing for the past 30 years)
As I'm not living in the US, could you expand on that a bit? Not living in the US anymore, the only time I hear about political fighting in the schools is when religions zealots [wikipedia.org] complain about not teaching their world view(creationism/ID) as fact. That, and not forcing everyone to adhere to their own religious practices in school. Neither of those sound very left/right to me, more sanity vs. disturbed.
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Re:It's not fearlessness that's the problem (Score:4, Informative)
As the context is discussion of the Republican Party, I mean the American definition of "social conservative". Mostly the "religious nuts" you mention: anti-feminist, pro-death-penalty, against the teaching of evolution, against sex education in the schools, against legal recognition of same-sex marriages, supporting censorship of "indecent" material, and usually in favor of state establishment of religion as long as it's Christianity. The old "Moral Majority" and the "Christian Coalition" would be the exemplars.
Parent
Re:It's not fearlessness that's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is an example ... my son won't eat honey because it 'exploits' bees. I explained to him then that he had better stop eating many fruits, because the fruits are also pollinated by those same exploited bees. He simply grabbed onto an idea without really looking at what 'exploited' really means because it suited his purpose, not eating honey.
This is a really stupid example. Fruit is not the product of a bee's labor. They are out there pollinating plants, so that they can make their own food. Which is then "stolen" by a beekeeper. This is very different from what humans do when they eat fruit, even though bees are often tangentially related to that process.
Here's what "exploit" means:
1.To employ to the greatest possible advantage: exploit one's talents.
2.To make use of selfishly or unethically: a country that exploited peasant labor. See synonyms at manipulate.
3.To advertise; promote
Which of these do you think your kid meant? Obviously, number two. You seem to think number one is the ONLY definition that matters. You said as much when you insinuated that your kid "latched on" to an idea without even understanding what the words meant. Your son has an ethical issue with stealing food from animals. There is no contradiction between that and still wanting to eat the products animals help produce but do not consume.
In short, your kid is right. And you are wrong. And an insincere debater, at best.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Apparently just voting them out doesn't have very much of an effect anymore."
Oswald spengler wrote about this a while ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West [wikipedia.org]
Go down to "Democracy, media and money"
"Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever."
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Re:Come to California... (Score:5, Informative)
America is a Republic. So No to the first question.
In the second question you seem to miss the Electoral College in both fact and concept. The President is elected by a group that may vote as they please (not necessarily as they were expected to vote by those that elected them). This non direct coupling applies to all levels of government --once elected they may chose to do things much differently then you believed they would when you voted for them. So a yes as to vote, but at best a maybe on 'does who I voted for actually do as I expected him/her to, once in office' --the implied part of the second question.
These sort of yes/no questions are rarely productive, except to frame the answer in a way the questioner wants.
Example: "Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no. --either way you answer you confess to being a wife beater.
For most people political issues ARE emotional issues. This is possibly regrettable, but one should learn to deal with reality, if you want to change that reality into your own personal version.
If Sarah Palin is both a nitwit, and smarter then most people, then is she not of above average intelligence and therefore as qualified as anyone (and apparently more qualified then most) to have an opine? Just asking --it's rhetorical --and intentionally side steps Palin's actual value or lack thereof.
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Re:Come to California... (Score:4, Informative)
And who controlled congress during the Bush spending spree before the Democrats took over congress? Who controlled congress during the reductions in deficit in the 50s-80s? It's right here [about.com]. The Democrats controlled both branches of congress right up until Reagan took the presidency and the Republicans took the senate. You can't have it both ways: you can't blame the president when it was Bush in the white house and then blame the Republicans in congress when it was Clinton who was president.
But, since you trotted out the same argument you always hear, here [bev.net] is the data that shows that on average, the deficit is reduced under democratic control of congress as well as under democratic presidents. The correlation just isn't as strong. The bottom line is that, statistically, Democratic party governments do a better job at reducing the deficit!
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Yet another right-wing nihilism hit piece (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, the thesis of this piece is the same thing the right wing has been pushing since Reagan's time: government can't work. Nothing that comes out of government can ever be good. We might as well just give up.
Maybe she's right, but history isn't on her side. So this sounds more like sour grapes: Peggy has no hope, because her people have no relevance, and she doesn't like who's in power. So she hopes we will listen to her and lose hope as well, because that way nobody will have hope. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the independents, not the geeks. In that nihilistic world, her folks can waltz in and take over the government and keep pouring our tax dollars into their pockets the way they did under Reagan and both Bushes. Government doesn't work. Might as well send your tax money to Halliburton and Xe.
Re:Yet another right-wing nihilism hit piece (Score:4, Insightful)
I always found it odd that people are pushing for more government when they've just been victimized by the last one. Massive corporate welfare, war and rampant waste. Bush was one of the greatest examples of government gone wrong and people actually believe that more of that is a good thing. These corporations are using the power of government to rob the people. Bush wasn't anti-government. After all, his administration passed the patriot act, instituted torture, started two wars, began a massive trillion dollar bank bailout, increased spending more than LBJ... What did he do exactly that makes people believe that he in any way represented the view that "government doesn't work." If anything, it's one of the examples of government that doesn't serve the people by violating rights and through sheer incompetence.
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Re:Yet another right-wing nihilism hit piece (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you'll find that the people who actually make the decisions are decidedly not strictly anti-government types. They're whatever benefits me at the moment types and if weaker government furthers that then they'll push for it and if stronger government furthers their goals, they'll push for that. Everyone to some extent is the same way, they try to further their own interests in the ways that they can. The problem comes when the two major power groups feed off of one another and screw the populace. The lesson here is that concentrated power in both its major forms is generally dangerous.
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Re:Yet another right-wing nihilism hit piece (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the current president has shown no signs of reversing damage that the last administration had done and is starting to add more things which may or may not be bad on top of that. I don't consider opposition to the government expansion that Bush did to be an extreme position. Nor criticism of state spending habits when the maintenance of bridges and roads take a back seat to everything else. Bush exploited the power given to him through government; he was a warning sign that something is very wrong with the system.
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Why are they still employed? (Score:5, Insightful)
If any employee caused this kind of damage the customers/consumers would sue and employees would be terminated. Yet in this case, we have companies (and hence employees) that are "too big|valuable|important too fail" so they get bailed out.
If I did this at my company (I manage a large mainframe storage environment at a recognizable financial institution on WallStreet), say by blowing away a ton of customer data, I can guarantee I would be walked to the door before the end of the day.
People in peer departments of mine (like those than manage the networks, server admins etc) that have no input to the investment direction of this company's holdings, have lost bonuses, haven't been able to purchase equipment and staff has been cut. We had nothing to do with this bullsh!t, and yet us like the rest of American's are having to suffer while the MBAs reap in the dollars that the Federal Gov't is handing out.
I wish I could get a $200k bonus for blowing away a PetaByte of mainframe storage. Maybe I'll go power off the z10 and see if Obama will bail out my unemployed ass.
atlas yawned (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:atlas yawned (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
We have exactly three types of politicians: the ones who inherited money (didn't lift a fucking finger to earn it), the lawyers (the ones who make their living by making contracts so incomprehensibly complex that people have to hire lawyers just to read the damn things), and the racist fucks who get donations everytime they say something stupid (see also: Robert "KKK" Byrd, Sheila Jackson Lee, etc).
Ok, we have that one guy over there who isn't, but he's a used car salesman. Would you trust a used car salesman either?
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Re:atlas yawned (Score:5, Interesting)
i don't buy noonan's premise. most elected officials i know (and i know hundreds) don't come from any so-called privileged "leadership class," whatever that is, they come instead from nearly all walks of life and bring with them the experience of extremely diverse backgrounds, including poverty and marginalization.
Every presidential nominee since 1988 has graduated from either Harvard or Yale. More than 25% of the 108th Congress was from the Ivy League. Twenty percent of Congress attended private schools before college. Fifteen current Representatives attended community colleges. No Senators did so.
The average Senator has more than $15,000,000 in disclosed assets; the average Representative, more than $5,000,000; in fairness, the wealthiest in Congress have hundreds of millions, while the poorest have millions in liabilities. (Most also have considerable assets they aren't required to report, such as private home values.) A few Reps come from backgrounds of poverty, and quite a few more are from blue-collar families. All current Senators, as far as I can tell reasonably quickly, have backgrounds of upper-middle-class or higher.
I'm sure state and local politicians have more diverse backgrounds, but at the federal level there's unquestionably a tendency toward lifelong wealth and privilege.
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Re:atlas yawned (Score:5, Insightful)
I think she was talking about the Wall Street bankers and stock brokers who disproportionately come from wealthy families, go to prep schools, get degrees from ivy league schools and then go work at Goldman Sachs, Citi and JP Morgan. They also end being treasury secretaries, on the Federal Reserve and New York Fed (which is the body that actually runs Wall Street though its more like Wall Street runs it) and the President's economic advisors.
If you remember the resignation letter [distressedvolatility.com] of Andrew Lahde after making a killing of the ivy leaguers and quitting rich:
"The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."
The U.S. Senate also tends to be a rich kids club and is also the place that tends to do the most looking out for the rich, since one senator can often block legislation in the public interest to the benefit of special interest. John McCain for instance wasn't really rich enough so once he got out of Vietnam he dumped the wife that had stood by him while he was a POW and married a more attractive women who happened to be an heir to a sizable fortune of an Arizona beer distributor, and who were politically connected enough in Arizon to get him elected to the Senate.
And of course the Bush clan are the epitome of the stereotype though they've only been a part of America's new aristocracy for about a century.
One reason Carter, Clinton and Obama were so skewered in the White House is the rich WASP/Jewish aristocracy considers them to be poor trash and not worthy of running their piggy bank. Clinton and Obama in particular had stellar educations but were born to poverty so aren't acceptable by "the establishment".
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Re:atlas yawned (Score:4, Insightful)
At the local politics level, what you say is often true. Local politics are often the most useful, anyway.
However, at the national level, this is almost never true. National politics are popoulated nearly entirely by the priveledged old boys club.
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Illinois Wants Insurers to Cover Prayer Treatments (Score:5, Interesting)
Should prayers be covered? [chicagotribune.com]: "As the health care battle moved forward last week, Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science church official, hurriedly delivered bundles of letters to Senate offices promoting a little-noticed proposal in the legislation requiring insurers to consider covering the church's prayer treatments just as they do other medical expenses. Critics say the proposal would essentially put Christian Science prayer treatments on the same footing as science-based medical care by prohibiting discrimination against "religious and spiritual health care."
She's without hope, so we must be? (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, so in pretty Peggy's view anything that government does by way of governing won't work. (Didn't she write Reagan's line, "Government is the problem"?) Since Democrats to some extent believe government can be, and should be, effective - well, we should just give up on this. We should become disheartened as Democrats. If "most everyone else" knows that government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities - is "not a path through," we're left asking "Who is this 'everyone else'?" Pretty clearly it's the shrinking demographic which still identifies as Republican: prevalently old, white, and living in the Deep South - people who last liked government when it was run by Jefferson Davis.
Well, I'm middle aged, white, and live in New England. I'm hopeful. The way through looks obvious, and I see an administration with a fairly good vision of it - even if they're not going nearly far enough in regulating Peggy's friends on the street her Journal's named after. It's so brightly obvious, it's almost blinding. It's based on government, businesses, and individuals each doing our part. Yes, government should not go too far in controlling businesses; but in return businesses have to back way off, as they've gone much too far in recent years into endeavoring to control government. Why do people like Peggy never worry when businesses control government too much?
Re:She's without hope, so we must be? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the more basic reasons "governing wont work" is that politicians and regulators are easily captured by special interests who have the money, the time, the connections and the motivation to manipulate the government. A few million well placed lobbying dollars and campaign contributions can yield multi-billion dollar windfalls at the expense of the American people.
You kind of have to wonder why the conservative Republicans complain so much about big government because for at least the last 10 years, and really a lot longer than that, they have been the most adept at exploiting it for their own gain. Only reason they are complaining about lately is they aren't in power as of 2006/2008. The potency of their vitriol against big government only spikes when they aren't in power. When they are in power they tend to be more OK with it, and their complaining about is empty rhetoric which acts as cover while they are looting it.
I often shudder to think what this country would be like if the Libertarians won and everything was completely deregulated. Chances are the foxes would devour all the chickens. But, when you see how our government actually works, especially lately, the Libertarians actually have a point. Much of the pillaging and devastation is being aided, abetted or actually initiated by politicians and regulators who have been captured by special interest, so they give legal cover to the pillaging, and trillions of dollars are transferred from unlucky powerless groups to lucky powerful ones. For example, senior citizens are completely looting younger working people to get 20, 30 and 40 years of Medicare and Social Security though they actually paid very little in to the system. Oayroll taxes were jacked up from nothing to 12.5% in the early 80s so most seniors didn't pay anything in but are taking huge sums out.
It is quite possible things might actually work better under real Libertarianism where Wall Street bankers get absolutely no assistance from the Fed, Treasury, Congress or the President. They get no tax shelters, no government backed loan programs and most importantly NO bailouts when they screw up and should fail. The absolute worst thing done in the last couple years was the complete destruction of moral hazard which is the most crucial foundation of Capitalism. If you know that if you fail the government will bail you out you don't have free market capitalism any more, you have state capitalism(i.e. Fascism) which is what I think we have now.
Chances are a few banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs would still end up running the world under Libertarianism but I have reached a point that I would like to see the government get the hell out of it and let them sink or swim on their own. It couldn't be any worst than what we have now.
Unfortunately I've come to the conclusion there is NO political/economic philosophy that actually works in practice. Every one devolves in to some small group acquiring all the wealth and power and screwing it out of everyone else. In some systems its party members and bureaucrats, in others it politicians, and in others its bankers and CEO's. As Shakespeare thoroughly outlines a long time ago, we are a species with vicious tendencies that spiral completely out of control in the people who aspire to power and wealth and there seems to be no way to stop those people.
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Why should we be surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
The "top" people in both government and business are spoiled children. From Bill Gates to GW Bush, they had everything handed to them, and when things got tough, their parents bailed them out. In the socio-economic stratosphere of the US, it has never been about merit. It's always been about money, and now we can see what that has bred.
We hear a lot about the sense of entitlement among the baby boomers, but it's almost always in the context of Medicare and welfare for the relatively poor. Now we see what this sense of entitlement does on the grand scale. It's ridiculous when GM assembly line workers expect health care in perpetuity. It's mind blowing to see the same attitude applied to C level executives who think they are entitled to year over year growth, and bonuses, regardless of how bad things really are.
And things are bad. The financial wizards of Wall St. have, almost literally, destroyed trillions of dollar in wealth over the last year. None of them think they did anything wrong, and any who are taken to task for this colossal screw up will cry about how unjust it is. When will people realize that handing the reigns of power to spoiled brats, who have no concept of the consequences of failure, is a stupid idea? Doesn't look like they've learned it this time. Maybe in 10 more years when the next economic crisis is screws everyone but the people who caused it.
Re:Why should we be surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, no, I don't think it's ridiculous for someone in the modern era, in a first world country, to expect health care in perpetuity.
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Re:Why should we be surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you on some sort of highly potent, neurologically destructive crack cocaine? "Indefinitely"? The average lifespan in the first world average something under 80. Considering a retirement age of 65, that's about 15 years average of medical care. The "worthless" (what are you, a sociopath?) "incapacitated" elderly people will make up a minor percentage of that group. Of course, those that need the most expensive care will likely die sooner than 80, on average.
Oh, did you want an actual answer as to who is going to provide this care? The answer is you. And then, when you get old, someone else will pay for yours. See how this works out? No, you probably don't. Don't like it, do you? Nobody cares.
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It's simply the consequence of corporate psychopat (Score:5, Insightful)
Psychopaths have the desire to reach leadership positions because that way, they can gain the most profit for themselves (not just monetary profit), and they also have the best tools to reach leadership positions, by manipulating others - something psychopaths excel at.
Psychopathic executives will not blink to destroy their own company, a whole industry, or cause food poisoning, water and air pollution, lower the standard of living of hundreds of millions - as long as they have profit out of it. Wake up, guys, with the few exceptions of people like Warren Buffet, corporations are run by highly functional psychopaths.
The "problem" (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem, is that there is no simple answer. Only a complex one.
Is capitalism or socialism the answer? Yes.
Yes, because BOTH are the answer, at the same time.
Allow me to try to explain this, before you explode.
There are things government does well and things private individuals do well, but they are NOT restricted each to a field.
This means that private individuals should be free to engage in business, but not without any controls and limitations. And government should be allowed to interfere if it serves society as a whole better.
You had a little while ago the laughable story about the US press. You saw several posts commenting that either a state run media or a company run media are the only alternatives.
How idiotic, everyone knows that in Europe, BOTH exists, besides each other, fighting each other tooth and nail. THAT is how you get progress. If you think a state run media alone can be independent, you are insane, although not nearly as insane as the idea that company run media will be independent. Fox News is company owned. Case closed.
The US needs to accept that you need a healthy balance between the state and the individual and that this balance can NEVER be achieved, you always will end up with a pendulum swinging back and forth. Things only go wrong if the pendulum is either hanging still or doesn't swing back.
The problem is that you can't get elected with this policy. You need to pick a side and that means in the US that the pendulum can be pulled to far of the center. That is what happened with the credit crisis, to many administrations, from both sides, who did not excersise the control of the state on the financial institutions.
We need to get away from the idea that their is ONE ideology that is the answer. Uncontrolled financial markets are clearly not the answer but neither is total control. What you need to have is the right control at the right time but that can't be achieved, so you need to accept the situation that sometimes there is a bit to much control and sometimes to little without going to extremes.
This middle path is NOT taking the road of least resistance, on the contrary, you will face opposition from all sides, but it is the only one that has been proven to work.
WSJ full of Right-Wing Mantra (Score:4, Insightful)
The WSJ article is highly un-balanced. While it talks repeatedly about the "sins" of too much government, it barely mentioned the role that deregulation played in the current mess.
Here's an exmaple:
The implication made is that they left mostly because of taxes. However, they never justify that with a reason-for-leaving survey, etc. They simply run with that assumption. The WSJ does this often, as do most Murdock-own publications.
Re:Money for Something (Score:5, Insightful)
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods.
Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans, which is the most straightforward way of making money from money. That means no new small businesses, no student loans, no mortgages.
Right now, one of the most interesting ideas in improving life in poor countries is precisely to introduce making money from money. Small loans, with interest, help create vital services. The interest helps fund the continuation as some projects fail.
Capitalism is not the automatic win that the "laissez-faire" crowd presents it as; the problems are real and do not fix themselves (at least not without harming vast numbers of innocent people in the process). But neither is it the automatic evil socialists imagine it to be.
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Re:Money for Something (Score:5, Insightful)
No. In capitalism, the aristocrats -- the owners of capital -- are left free to make their own choices, and succeed by them, or be rescued by their cronies. The working classes -- including the professionals, all the folks who actual do productive work rather then skim off the top -- are left to scurry around in the footsteps of the giants, trying not to get crushed.
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Re:Money for Something (Score:5, Insightful)
Right; because there's no difference between someone who supports a family on $50k per year with no inheritance and someone who:
a) is supported their whole life and gets $millions in inheritance/giveaways
or
b) gets a job that pays $hundreds of thousands per year (or millions) because of who they/their parents know
All of those people have equal opportunity to invest, by which I mean be owners of the expensive things necessary to get work done rather than the people actually doing work.
I'm not saying people who start with no money can't succeed, or people who start with money are guaranteed to succeed. I'm saying people with a healthy start (or ludicrously easy start) discount just how many times they can fail without consequences, and how much easier it is to succeed, in comparison to people with a middling or disadvantaged start.
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Re:Socialism and capitalism both suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the conservative view on every topic of import: the status quo is the best system possible. (That the capitalist his or her self enjoys some privilege under the status quo is, of course, merely co-incidental.) "I can't imagine any system better than our slave plantations. It's always been this way and people don't change."
"I can't imagine any system better than keeping women in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. It's always been this way and people don't change."
"I can't imagine any system better the segregation. It's always been this way and people don't change."
This is always the heart of the conservative view -- at least, that of mainstream American conservatism, of the sort that stands athwart history yelling "Stop!". It's always wrong, and always gets bowled over.
I suggest Tim Kreider's essay [thepaincomics.com] on the subject:
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Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
These are the people who (amongst other things) think offshoring technology is a good idea. They don't see the danger, and they don't worry about the implications. Money is money.
It's news that affects nerds at least.
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Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't believe it does affect them. If they have money, then that money can be relocated, so they don't care whether the software company they own is in the USA or in India or wherever. And if some of the owning class still choose to live in the USA, then that's fine for them too because their wealth disparity will be all the greater.
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Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if your an American....not if you are a US citizen and wanting a home and to feed your family. At that point...you don't give a flying fuck about giving your job to 2 people abroad.
It is one thing to give and care about others in the world, but, rarely is someone altruistic enough to do so at the expense of their quality of life.
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Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right in the fact that in a certain sense it is a good idea, and outsourcing to quality people(and as much as I've wished in the past it wasn't so, there are some damned good and highly qualified IT folks in India) isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The problem with the American version of outsourcing is that it's very short sighted, like a lot of US policy government or otherwise.
Outsourcing is immensely profitable because you can buy goods at foreign prices and sell them to Americans at American prices. The problem with this is that as you lower employment in the US and move money overseas, there is less of it in the US to support US prices. Eventually the standard of living in the countries you outsourced to will rise increasing your outsourced costs, and the standard of living in the US will lower decreasing your revenues.
There's certainly something to be said for the idea that averaging out the world standard of living, but it's not a particularly great long term strategy for the US market. Particularly not luxury markets which may be cut out entirely if standard of living drops sufficiently.
That said, the United States economy is probably irrevocably fucked anyway at this point. The national debt skyrocketed out of control under Bush(even worse than it was under Reagan), and though I believe that most of the changes are necessary there's really no money left for any of Obama's plans to fix anything(isn't it funny that Reagan and the Dubya who are supposed to be from the party of small government are responsible for the vast majority of US debt?). The dollar is no longer considered safe and will likely continue dropping against nearly all major foreign currencies(possibly excluding the GBP which is also screwed). Most importantly, the US has done almost nothing to change any of the factors which got it into the position it is currently in. There has been no change in attitude towards sustainable economic policies(and I'm talking finance not environment here), or towards any of the economic stabilizers like workers rights and protection from unfair termination(you'd be amazed what having the vast majority of your population fairly confident they're not going to be randomly fired can to for keeping your economy a bit more stable). The US has been digging a hole under itself for a long time now, and it is about to fall in. It's going to be a long fall, and it may not be possible anymore to prevent it.
Personally this doesn't particularly please me for all that I live in another country now. I see a lot of people who want to see the US get its comeuppance, but I'm not sure how thrilled I am with the prospect of a world in which the primary super power is China. The US has made and continues to make an awful lot of mistakes, and it may be that the only way for us to learn from those mistakes is to face the consequences, but at the same time a large proportion of the western world depends on the US for military security. Even without that, while US foreign policy is often short sighted and misguided, it is largely well intentioned and I still hope that it isn't too late to prevent the coming fall.
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Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, I don't care about Indians or Chinese, nor do I think we ought to be supporting their welfare unless they want to become the 51st and 52nd states.
China you can argue is a country that is going to at least make good on the money we give it, an investment there is an investment in someone's future. However it stands for pretty much the exact opposite ideals that we stand for in the USA (and that Europeans generally want to believe in). They haven't met a civil liberty that they wouldn't trample. Their commitment to communism equals only their commitment to capitalism: the people may suffer as long as the status quo marches on. India? Replace evil ideals with poverty and corruption. Investing there is like flushing money down the toilet. How does that help anyone?
So in the process of impoverishing that American, you're also hurting his country, and also hurting the ideals that enable the free world to be free. You don't have to like America, but you would be a complete moron to not understand that the free world is safe, as long as we're here doing whatever we do. It doesn't matter if we're fighting a war that doesn't need to be fought in Iraq, or if we're late to show for world wars you do happen to care about, the key point is top to bottom we do value what we have and we will help protect it, as long as we have the resources and know how to do so. That doesn't mean that a few very short sighted people will not sell us out to make a quick buck, and then wake up one day wondering why the villagers are lined up outside their castle with pitchforks and torches.
It doesn't matter if you end up with a cheaper power tool if you lose the jobs required to pay for it, or you lose the edge on technology required to build more and better tools. Talking about "unskilled factory jobs" moving offshore was 30 years ago, we're losing science and engineering jobs at record rates. The only thing we're keeping are service jobs and managerial jobs, none of which is going to keep us in a position of power for very long. I don't know how many managers it takes to invent a light bulb, but I suspect it will get lost in committee before we find an answer.
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Re:News for nerds? (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly! Our bosses are people who have never experienced anything but the need to consume. We emphasize sports and music over learning. We reward people who spend outrageous time looking good with ridiculous contracts to read the news. We spend obnoxious money on marketeers who don't even know what they're selling.
I'm saddened. We discourage engineers and technical workers from executive level positions. And we do so to our detriment. There was a time when engineers were prized in such positions. However, for some reason the Philosophy and English teachers declared us techies illiterate. I'd be laughing my ass off if they weren't so dogmatically obnoxious about it. Today, we have ignorant marketeers, corrupt accountants and lawyers running companies. And they don't know what their companies even do for a living.
No wonder we're in trouble.
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