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US House Limits Constituent Emails
Plechazunga passes along this note from The Hill: "The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill. As a result, some constituents may get a 'try back at a later time' response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote."
Dear Constituent,
We know you are a human being, or at least you believe that matters to us, but sadly, our mailboxes are too small and cannot possibly handle the number of emails you people wish to send. We lose them anyway and we never read them so why bother. Also, when we built the mailboxes, we only anticipated hearing from 0.001% of our constituents, not this whopping 1.02% contact ratio we're experiencing!
We have assessed the situation and believe that you fall under one of the following categories:
1. You are whining about something that we did to hurt your feelings.
2. You want us to do something.
3. You have a complaint.
Here are some generic responses to help you cope:
Category #1: (You are whining about something that hurt your feelings.)
Sorry. Vote for me in 2008!
Category #2: (You want us to do something.)
We are already doing everything we can. KTHXBYE. Vote for me in 2008!
Category #3: (You have a complaint.)
GTFO. Canada is that way -------> Vote for me in 2008!
Therefore, while we will gladly take your taxes from you, we have some bad news. We can't hear you. La la la la la la la la what? can't hear you! la la la la la...
No no... that's all you have to say.
Besides, we'll do whatever we want to anyway.
Vote for me in 2008!
Kind Regards,
Your Douchebag Government
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Please shut up, we do not want to hear from you on important matters.
We know what's best, so just get over yourselves.
Signed
House of Representatives
Subject says it all!
then I have this week. And by republican i mean REAL republican, not a neo-con like in recent years. Regardless of the fact that some house republicans were going to vote for it, it was enough in the end that an individual's ego made them stick to their principles.
Website Hosting
... we can't hear you ! la la la la la la .... something about blood of tyrants and patriots comes to mind.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is just good system administration happening. The systems can't handle the load so the admins have programmed the mailservers to drop a percentage down /dev/null until the load drops back to manageble levels.
My mail server (and almost certainly yours) has many such throttles built in, It will stop accepting mail if the load average is too great, if available mail spool is too low, etc.
Democrat delenda est
You must mean conservative, Republican has meant many things, before and since the Reagan-conservative bit.
I would like to take this chance to encourage everyone to support groups working towards open government, from Black Box Voting to Verified Voting, and everything in between.
The government is supposed to work for us; until we limit how often lobbyists talk to them, what right do they have to limit how much we talk to them?
Just because you don't like the truth, does not make it false.
Given that they're all probably receiving thousands of e-mails asking them to reject the bailout, I doubt they're really doing much with them. I'd actually be surprised even you get the standard form-letter reply if they're so overwhelmed.
But I think the overall message is clear. It's not a cacophony, it's thousands of people singing the same message: reject the bailout or we'll reject you in a few weeks!
Ultimately, they're doing the worst possible thing right now, which is preserving the hope of a bailout. This leads to a further credit freeze, because banks won't sell their troubled assets at the (very low) market price because there's still the possibility that they'll be getting a much better price from Uncle Sam.
If you want to free up credit again, we really need one of the presidential candidates to stand up and say, "There will be no bailout." That will force banks to start doing transactions again. Some might go under, but that's OK. We just need to end this idea that a bailout might happen, because right now that uncertainty is what is preventing people from liquidating their assets.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The phone number for each member of the House and Senate is posted on their respective web pages. A phone call is so much more personal. I've got my Senators and Representative programmed into my cell phone.
Buyout one of the failing bank's data-centers, use it for email.
Last time I checked, Canada was to the North of the US... Ummm wait, do you live in Alaska?
Especially if they're stupid enough to try to run the constituent email through the same mailserver (probably a MS Exchange box) that they use for their "business" email (ie, who's having lunch where, and which lobby is paying for it).
You are a protosocialist abolitionist?
They could each get a gmail account. Google will keep their servers up...
The way my laptop is oriented, the direction is right on.
I don't know about how email lobbying works, but I've been involved in lobbying campaigns before. When you call a representative's office, you tell them you're for or against the bill in question and say which way you want them to vote on it. The operator say "OK, I'll let him know." They then count the number of people calling in on either side of the issue, and pass that info on to the representative. Of course you can't send bribes by phone, so whether or not this is effective is open to debate.
I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest. I'm glad to see the American public sitting up and taking notice of important things for a change instead of just vegetating in front of reality TV and celebrity gossip while politicians try to take money out of the public's pockets to cover their own failure to properly regulate the finance industry. Maybe there's hope for American democracy yet.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Ha! The US government has been slashdotted by its' own subjects. Sounds like it's time to write a script that will continuously submit an email until it's accepted (or forever, you know whatever).
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
This is why when the goverment asks us for 700 billion to bail them out, we must tell them to "COME BACK LATER". Like waaaaaaaaaaay later.
Besides do you really think they read the majority of mail they get?
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
My monitor faces east, you insensitive clod!
You mean fiscal conservative don't you?
And didn't have to rely on a separate service, web, being available?
Are you Canadian by any chance ? I am in Canada and if I follow that arrow for a really long time I'll end up right back where I am.
How freakin' cool is that ? As you said, spot on!
I got a follow up phone call 8 months later. Dare I say I was stunned! I know it was 8 months later, and the person who called me worked for some vendor trying to clear the backlog of emails, but it's nice to know they didn't just delete it.
How is that different from a Libertarian?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Pardon me, I am somewhat new to Slashdot... Is it the norm here for pro-Republican to be insta tagged as Trolling? Last I checked the URL it was news.slashdot.org and not obama.slashdot.org or democrats.slashdot.org or for that matter republicans.shasdot.org... People are entitled to their opinions one way or the other. I am not looking for a fight or to hurt anyones feelings - cant we all just behave like grownups and display our allegiances without fear of punitive tagging?
But here goes: I have to say a big thank you to the house republicans. They did the right thing, which this time was the conservative thing by voting against the stupid bailout.
Now the the real issue
System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we appreciate your patience.
So what are they doing to fix this exactly? Hoping everyone looses interest so they don't have to increase their capacity? I dunno if thats gonna work - people seem pretty pissed (I am one of those people by the way).
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Is it? Have you asked the people who have their money in those banks, and rely on it to survive?
Sorry about the misunderstanding. I thought you tried to send me to Cuba.
Libertarians smoke pot.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Back when they were pursuing the Broadcast Flag unfunded mandate, I had my objection hand delivered for a fee by http://www.congress.org/
I got a nice letter back explaining why I was all wrong and the broadcast flag was the greatest thing since sliced peaches, but at least they got my letter.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Of course you can't send bribes by phone, so whether or not this is effective is open to debate.
All you need to do is offer your credit card number. I'm sure they can figure out how to process a transaction, they're the government after all.
You must be new here.
(BTW, I agree with you on principle, but certain opinions always get modded up or down, based on whether or not people agree with this opinions, and it has nothing to do with how the person presented those opinions. For instance, try suggesting that Windows is superior to Linux in every way, or that Apple sucks. See how you get modded.)
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I once sent my senator a letter that said, paraphrased:
I got a response that said, paraphrased:
The cake is a pie
Bush proposed it. I don't know if it is fair to say that Republicans tried to push it through, when by percentages they have been the ones most opposed to it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
A bank "going under" does not take all the depositors' money with it. If bankrupt, the bank is given time to reorganize and recover intact. If sold or taken over, assets, which include bank accounts, investments, and deposits, are sold to another company which will maintain the customers. There is also FDIC and other regulations in place to ensure you'll get your money back unless you did something stupid.
The days of "sorry, no money, we're closed" are gone (unless we suffer a vast & total meltdown of our economy, which is still far off).
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The current "selling line" I hear now is that we may make money on the deal. We "might" pay something like 20 cents on the dollar. I have seen many homes go in foreclosure (have been in the market for the last 1.5 years). I looked up there records, found out how much they were purchased for and then followed how much they sold for. Are banks loosing money yes, but not 80%! So far they have lost 20%-30% why would they sell for less.
Sum
Second the prices are obviously out of wack because to many people were in the market due to to the credit handout. That won't happen again so why will these house prices recover. It's like saying your recover from a cancer that just fell out by growing the cancer again. It was a false economy the prices were not supposed to be that high and yes we were not doing as well as we thought.
The other thing they whine about is "now credit." Well rather than bail out banks that obviously did not run their business well, why not just borrow directly from the Fed. We have everything in place we just need to open the doors to regular people than just banks.
No thanks take your snake oil somewhere else and if we need more credit (which got in to this mess) I don't need to fund a middle man.
THAN you have, this week. THAN. Comparing A to B means you use an A. THAN.
I'm feeling like a democrat - as I usually have. I dunno. I don't think I'm all that proud of either party. But I'm pleased that it didn't pass, too.
(too, as in also. see - two o's because there is more than one. THAN one. GUH)
Yeah, yeah. -1, troll, offtopic, uptight, etc.
That fact escaped you, or are you going to be like the rest of the herd, ignore history as recent as last week, and pretend this was a Democratic proposal?
Speaker Pelosi gave a rousing speech in favor of this monstrosity; President Bush did so, as well. Guess which party has clean hands in all of this?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Quite right.
The idea here was that EVERYONE was supposed to get their ...you know, a bi-partisan sort of effort.
heads together and figure out a solution that EVERYONE
could live with...
There's probably enough blame to go around but NO ONE
should be feeling "proud" about any of these guys right
now. They were set to a task and failed to do it.
Ok, so the right answer isn't a "bail out". That doesn't
mean you end up at the end of the process with nothing
to show for it.
This was not the Texas Gerrymandering debacle.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Last I checked the URL it was news.slashdot.org and not obama.slashdot.org or democrats.slashdot.org
That hostname (news.slashdot.org) is now a CNAME entry that points to socialism.slashdot.org
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
F@#$, that's my problem. No wonder the Canada I found looks a lot like Mexico.
GTFO. Canada is that way ------->
Dude, you must be lost - that's the way to Mexico.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
That's the first I've heard of it. Could someone explain what's this is all about, please?
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Agreed. I consider myself a Goldwater republican, but it's gotten to the point where people ask my affiliation, I mumble something about being a Libertarian and change the subject.
Good on the House Republicans...
... and I bet I could get the government some infrastructure that can handle the load
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Saying your a "real" republican is like saying you are a real "hacker" and the other guys should be called "cracker". If you are a Republican, then you are part of the fuckin' problem. If you want to be something else, classical liberal, Old Right, or what have you - then use the appropriate term. Republican is already being used.
Not all of us do.
You do realize that it wasn't conservative ideals that led them to vote no? It was the annoying strings attached to the corporate welfare.
The only fiscally responsible option is 'no way'.
How is that different from a Libertarian?
See here. If you're fiscally *and* socially conservative, you're not a libertarian.
Good on the House Republicans...
Yeah, but we really owe something to the 40 Dems who broke rank on this. They have a majority in the House and could have passed it on a party-line vote.
I even wrote my 99%-Pelosi rep a thank you note. OK, so I added a push for a capital gains tax holiday in the thank you note reflexively too.
The Dollar is lucky this happened so close to an election.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Are you also proud of being in the party of the deregulators then led us to this mess?
Republicans want into your bedroom. Democrats want into your wallet. Libertarians want neither.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Most of the conservatives here are fiscal and civil liberty conservatives, not moral and social conservatives.
In other words, they're Libertarians, not Republicans.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
After Monday, I must humbly retract these views, and state that only 33% of the Republican party are fiscal socialists. The number of Al-Qaeda like religious extremist are unknown.
The fact that only 1/3 of democrats voted against it is troubling, but what can be done. Democrats tend to give money away, but usually in small amounts so we don't tend to end up with a trillion dollar bill at the end of the administration. Much better to pay in out in manageable installments of 10 billion dollars a month, like the war. The war was a much more civilized way to move one trillion dollars from the middle to ultra rich. It has a the proper finesse, not so much obvious theft involved.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You're right, Bob Barr probably doesn't. ;)
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
A fiscal conservative Republican is different from a Libertarian because there are no Libertarians in Congress... wait... never mind.
Maybe we can go back to the days when Democrats were Democrats and Republicans weren't just War-mongering Democrats. There's still hope for 2012...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
When did they move Canada into the Pacific Ocean?
They may, but the key part of their policy is that they won't go out of their way to harm you, if you smoke pot. Smoking pot themselves, is an orthogonal concern.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I've been involved both in lobbying and in a Congressional (House) office (as an unpaid intern). Constituent contacts really do matter: a significant fraction of the staff's time is spent reading and distilling these letters for the Congress(wo)man. On this issue, the letters are nearly universally against the rescue package, which is the only reason Congress went against the opinions of the vast majority of economists (my favorite is Paul Krugman) to vote down this bill. If you think your voice doesn't matter to your Congressman, you're crazy, even though (s)he won't always agree.
I know this is hard to believe, but direct bribes don't work. Organizing large numbers of constituents to call/email a Congressman does often work, largely because it demonstrates that you could also organize voters to challenge the Congressman at the ballot box. (That kind of organization takes money, so if anyone wants to consider that a bribe, fine; I consider it democracy.) However, an office will get tens or hundreds of copies of the same form letter from large numbers of constituents; those identical letters count less (though not hugely less) than personally written letters or phone calls.
(As of 4 years ago, when I interned in DC, phone calls, emails, faxes, and snail-mail letters count equally, but snail-mail letters take multiple weeks to get to the DC office because of anthrax-related security. Letters from in-state but out-of-district are read but carry less weight than contacts from constituents and are unlikely to get a response; letters from out-of-state or without a name and mailing address go straight to the recycling bin.)
You ARE new here.
Just don't let the bastards get to you.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The present financial crisis in the U.S. is a repetition of a theft scheme used earlier.
The government regulations that required oversight over the real value of Savings and Loan assets were removed, which allowed the Savings and Loan organizations to buy land of little value and sell it back and forth to each other until its "value" was artificially high, then use the inflated value towards the calculation of their assets. Obviously this scheme would eventually crash, leaving the S&Ls bankrupt. It was understood in advance that the U.S. taxpayer would pay for the bankruptcy.
In December of 2000, soon after George W. Bush was elected, the regulation of financial institutions was changed to allow the present theft scheme. The new lack of regulation made it profitable to pretend that people with little money were buying houses. Obviously, that scheme would eventually crash, also. It was again understood in advance that the U.S. taxpayer would pay.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulsen is a former Goldman Sachs investment company executive. Goldman Sachs will benefit from his financial plan to get the taxpayers to pay.
Paulsen is one of the group of people who engineered the present corruption, starting when Nixon was president. That group includes oil and weapons investor Dick Cheney. Paulsen has made a fortune estimated at $700 million.
There is a similarity between Paulsen's scheme and Cheney's scheme. Cheney arranged that the U.S. government invaded Iraq, got control over the oil there, and restricted the supply of oil so that the price would rise. The similarity is using U.S. government power to make some individuals rich, while at the same time making the average citizen poorer.
Cheney's company, Halliburton, benefited enormously from the invasion of Iraq. Cheney had arranged that it would be legal for the U.S. government to give contracts secretly without bidding. Halliburton got many of those contracts.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. My congressman was saying on Meet the Press last Sunday that he was getting flooded with calls to his office by his constituents and that they fell into two categories (talking about the bailout plan):
"No"
and
"Hell no"
To be fair, he did vote against it. Personally I think that's the wrong vote to make since something drastic needs to be done. But he can truthfully claim that he was doing what the people he represents want.
Socialism, lets say Fascism, is what YOUR republican government is doing! But you can't see that because you dont care if our country is owned by Chinese WSFs since you are a pathetic white wacko from the Appalachia!
You GOPPERS wanna see what you are buying? If you get close to win this election I will use my second amendment right to blow each mofo republican I see.
You wanna a damn civil war? You will get one!
This is nothing - look at some of the vitriol hurled in the journals. Not so much modding - but the only hug you might get is death grip.
A lot of the other journal stuff is fine & funny but the political side is rough.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
you must be in south america, up here in USA, the northern hemisphere, we face all our computers to the EAST! your arrow should point ------ , kind of like the swirl going the wrong way thing.
"Dear Sir, you are esteemed Member of Congress. You want bigger member?"
This has "clogged the email arteries" of the US government.
"If you just can send a small advance of $700 billion, or a blank check, for administrative costs, then we will be able to unclog the arteries forthwith."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Partisan politics are our only hope. When we unite and agree on everything, we will be truly fucked.
Average people really sit up and take notice when they clearly perceive that their way of life is being threatened. If that's not happening, most people just go on about their lives without paying too much attention. That's why when people were warning about this stuff LONG before, it wasn't a big deal for the average person. Unable to meet mortgage payments? People said, "Well, that's not me and it's not most people, so why should I worry?" Now that stuff has gotten to the point where the average person is threatened, they're suddenly saying, "Wait, bailout? huh? wtf?" And no, I'm not an economist or financial guy, so my explanation is simplistic and incomplete. But I don't think I'm too far off base.
Humorless sig goes here.
The solution to the email overload is probably being diverted to DHS for their review,
and awking/googling the text for buzzwords. The buzzwords matching and counting is
probably,
Mod +1 to the count for the email that sounds Republican.
Mod -1 to the count for the email that sounds Democrat and post to the terroist watch list.
To be fair, he did vote against it. Personally I think that's the wrong vote to make since something drastic needs to be done.
This reminds me of a slashdot sig I once saw:
The government: Something must be done, this is something, it must be done.
I will agree that something needs to be done. I don't think that the deal they had was it though.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I do think that the defeat of the bill was a sign that we still have influence on our government. This current situation is just a compressed event representing consistent government policy for sixty years.
The problem is, however, that "conservatives" and "democrats" alike have been using paranoia and fear mongering to steal hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people every single year. As of 2001, the Pentagon could not account for 2.3 trillion dollars. Yes, that's trillion. Strangely enough, even Donald Rumsfeld commented on this very topic on September 10th.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRqeJcuK-A&feature=related
(with some relevant clips)
This is just as much our fault as it is that of the politicians and corporate leaders, though they are currently in control of the media, and as a result, it's a subject that simply isn't covered. As a culture, we have to make the choice between war and peace, even if that means converting our weapons based economy to something else.
How about spending 100 billion on xprizes for electric cars, halve the military budget, and ending the federal deficit in 10 years?
My Newspaper (Grand Rapids Press) reported this: "With Election day a little more than a month away, many lawmakers appeared to pay greater heed to their constituents than their party leaders." Wait one second... Shouldn't they always pay attention to their constituents and ignore their party leaders? (Cause Bush is doing such a great job.) I thought that was what a REPRESENTATIVE Democracy was. Guess the jokes on me.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
They don't want to hear from us via e-mail, then they will get faxes and telephone calls.
If they don't like that and limit the calls we will go to their local office.
If they stop that we will march on Washington.
And if they dare to stop that..
Politicians needs to understand they are NOT our leaders, they are our representatives. We run this place, NOT THEM!
Assuming you mean "Republican" as in a member of that party, and not a "republican" as in "one who favors a representative form of government" - it's not the same at all. The Republican Party is an organization that one chooses to join; hacking and cracking are activities one engages in. If an organization changes its policies and you don't like it, you leave; if people mislabel the activities you're doing, you correct them.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Guess which party has clean hands in all of this?
Mine! Woo hoo, Green Party!!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
See, Ted was right. The tubes to DC clogged up somewhere in Tennessee. They had to hire moonshiner to swab them out.
I think you missed the 'REAL Republican' part. I don't know too many Republicans who consider the Bush administration to be real Republicans, but rather a 'lesser of two evils.' He was referring to the 133 House Republicans who voted against this downright socialist (READ: not classic Republican) bill.
I am not particularly pro-politician, but it has been my experience that when the constituents make the effort to send a letter or email to their congressmen, they will receive a response.
In most cases the response may be written by an employee of the congressman, but the answer comes from them at some level.
In this bailout vote, almost all of the politicians who were in jeopardy of losing their seat because of the upcoming election listened to the messages as whole, and voted against this crazy bailout; although it was for reasons of self-preservation, instead of public interest.
Sure, their email system is not capable of handling mass emails from the 300,000,000 people in the U.S. that are pissed off about the proposed bailout, but seriously... how many systems could handle even 50% of that kind of traffic?
I am open source, and Linux baby!
Pardon me, I am somewhat new to Slashdot... cant we all just behave like grownups and display our allegiances without fear of punitive tagging?
Ha Ha He Haha Heee HAHAHA MwwWAAHHAHAHAHAHA MwwWAAHHAHAHAHAHA *cough* *splutter* *wipes tear from eyes*
You'll learn.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Are you also proud of being in the party of the deregulators then led us to this mess?
I wish I had mod points because this should not be moderated as Troll. It is all too true.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I must agree. Conservatives and frightened Democrats prevented a massive take-over by the political class.
Folks, it's a credit bubble. It's not the first and it won't be the last. There are no innocents; individuals have been racking up debt with large, adjustable, flex-pay, no money down liar loan mortgages, second mortgages, equity credit lines and third mortgages. They've been voting for members of both parties to make it happen; the left does it to buy 'low income' votes and the right does it for their Lehman buddies.
Credit bubbles pop. At some point the accumulated crap must be flushed. That doesn't mean we must turn our Government into the investor of last resort. That's exactly how Fannie and Freddy got us here.
Some fraction of all debt is presently considered 'toxic.' 30 seconds after that $700 billion gets legislated into existence the fraction of 'toxic' debt will multiply; the banks will be happy to invent as much 'toxic' debt as your Government thinks it can get away with buying.
Screw that. I'm not under and mountain of debt and I'm not afraid of those of you who put yourselves under one. Life is too short to live in fear of morons.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
You're not a Republican. You're a fiscal conservative as am I. While there are some like us in the Republican party, certainly more than there are in the Democrat party, we're still a minority voice within the party. So much so that I don't consider myself a Republican anymore. There are very few Republicans like Tom Coburn in the Senate and Ron Paul and Jeff Flake in the House that are truly fiscal conservative today and were truly fiscal conservatives during their years in the majority. Most of the party just plays it lip service when it suits them.
If there wasn't all of this public outrage at the bailout and if this wasn't right before Congressional elections I'm afraid you wouldn't see as many Republicans stand up for fiscal sanity. Where was this new found love for fiscal discipline during the Bush years when Republicans had control of the White House and had majorities in both Houses of Congress? They allowed the size of government, the size of the deficit, the size of the total national debt, the size of entitlement programs, and the size of future unfunded liabilities to grow at a rate not seen since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Programs of the 60's. That is the exact opposite of fiscal discipline. That's fiscal insanity. Especially when you consider that Social Security and Medicare are basically both ponzi schemes that only work if the working population stays larger than the population of retirees and we already know that isn't the case with the baby boomers.
If the Republicans were in the majority now in Congress I question whether the majority of the party would be against this bailout. After all, if a serious economic downturn occurs people tend to blame the party in the majority and even though the public may blame Republicans for this mess right now if things still look bad a year or two from now and Democrats are still in the majority you can be sure the voters will begin to revolt. It benefits Republicans to oppose this measure because they are in the minority and won't be held accountable for the economy if it's still bad and Democrats remain in control a year or two from now. They can afford the courage of their convictions because it won't hurt them politically. I highly doubt if they'd be so willing to do the same if they were in the majority and were worried about the political impact of an extended downturn.
I'm firmly opposed to this plan but I understand that not passing it means tougher times in the short and possibly medium term in order to have a better fiscal and economic position in the long term. Adding another 700 billion in debt on top of the 11 trillion we're already in debt is fiscal insanity when you consider the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare. In order to be healthier in the long term we can't keep adding to the debt, we must start reducing it and that means no bailouts and it also means cutting spending. Not reducing the rate of growth, but cutting spending to free up the funds to begin paying down the debt. It may even mean reverting back to the tax brackets that existed in the 90's. None of these are popular, but they are necessary, and I highly doubt Republicans would have the will to advocate for any of them if they were in the majority and we're primarily concerned with short term conditions so they could remain in power rather than worry about medium and long term conditions.
I have a new policy when it comes to voting for Senators and my Congressman. I'll always vote for a true fiscal conservative but if neither candidate in the race is a fiscal conservative then I'll vote against the incumbent, whatever party he or she may belong to.
Something drastic is being done.
Quit jabbering on the phone while driving. You are not that important.
I agree. Sure they screwed up the economy for 8 years and should shoulder a large portion of the blame for the mess. But, on the night, they finally said no! (Reportedly because Pelosi hurt their feelings by pointing out how they screwed up the economy for the past 8 years).
Gives ya a lump right here in the throat, doesn't it...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Yup. That's how they get people to Guantanamo now that it has a bad rap.
"Get on the plane. It's going to Toronto. It'll be lots of fun."
Hoping everyone looses interest...
Don't you mean "loosens"?
The way my computer is oriented you would wind up in well the Maritimes if you kept going long enough so yeah I guess it's about right.
oh and the captcha for this is "aborted" like the legislation in question. Heh Heh
Yeah, it can. It's called "regulation" and it's what certain sections keep ranting against.
Simply put, make it illegal for the bank to write a mortgage unless certain criteria are met.
If we had stuck to that then we wouldn't be facing this crisis today. It would probably be a different crisis. But it wouldn't be this one.
Boy, and they thought house.gov was having traffic problems before. Welcome Slashdot!
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
But only the *best* pot.
What I want to know are the statistics of the content. More for our against bailout?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Imagine your bank deciding that it wanted to loan your money away to thousands of people who had no ability to pay it back.
Imagine that, when they discovered this was happening, the government decided to increase the national debt from 9950 billion to 10650 billion dollars (a ~7% increase), where the effects will be felt by you, your children, and your grandchildren.
Imagine your family tree being screwed by uncle sam for the rest of your life.
Now, to be fair, this is only my opinion, as gathered from the few sources I've read online about what the costs would be. Many economists (notably of the austrian school, like Ron Paul, which was linked yesterday on Slashdot) feel the bailout is a Bad Idea, and that it's better to let the market stabilize and start recovery sooner. I've not yet read a convincing explanation on why it's a GOOD thing for the banks to be bailed out for failed lending practices (esp since most of us small fish are already insured by FDIC/NCUA) -- if anyone HAS a good link to a counterpoint, I'd love to find it as a reply to this ... as it'll make my researching it easier. ;)
In a word: YES!
You're right... Both have socialized health care, I can't even tell them apart!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Many fiscal conservatives are Libertarians. Some are Republicans. (Some even have other party affiliations.)
Except inasmuch as it can be difficult to be both a hawk and a fiscal conservative (because war is expensive), the Republican party has traditionally been thought of as "the" fiscally conservative party, although that's changed in the past eight years and as the Libertarian party has gained more visibility.
Republicans who joined the party because they believe in fiscally conservative policies are more likely to talk about a return to the traditional values of the Republican party, feeling that the party has been hijacked in recent years by other interests.
Or at least, that's what I've observed.
(I don't currently have any party affiliation.)
Is it the norm here for pro-Republican to be insta tagged as Trolling?
I guess not. Grandparent is back up to (Score:5, Insightful) as I post this. I guess the "And by republican i mean REAL republican, not a neo-con like in recent years" identified teknopurge as a Republican from Ron Paul's wing of the party, not Bush/McCain's gang of neo-con-men.
Mailservers? It sounds to me like the problem isn't a mailserver at all, but a submission form on a webserver.
Are there really enough monkeys typing in the States to overflow a competent mailserver? In a world where mailservers are surrounded by defenses against spam-generating botnets? I have my doubts.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Also, the Obsessive-Compulsive Party. But frankly they aren't going very far what with their platform of opening every door three times before going though and not shaking hands with anyone or kissing any babies.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I dunno. We already have a process to deal with the problem. It's called bankruptcy. The real assets get sold to somebody who probably can better conserve them, and the shit gets flushed. If there is a problem with this, maybe the bankruptcy code needs tweaking, but they sure as hell don't need a bailout.
You've made my point. Thank you.
What exactly I'm not sure, but I got a canned reply back from one of my Senators. The Congresswoman and other Senator didn't reply. Call their local office. It may be just as effective.
After all the fear mongering, the sun came up today and markets traded... No Great Depression 2.0 either. Just banks borrowing from the Fed. The bill isn't needed.
Bottom Line: the banking system is trying to avoid eating the sh!t sandwiches they never want marked to market and generate some banking fees working for the Federal Reserve. (It's in the bill)
Most importantly, they want the $700 billion now so that when they have to report losses under GAAP rules they'll ask for (and get) another trillion dollars.
Banks want the taxpayers to make them whole and perpetuate the asset inflation scheme with $1.7 trillion dollars.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
We've got a list-in-progress of politicians pages here on our wiki ... other links (and formatting cleanup) greatly appreciated.
jon
You are also a moron! The sentence should read and I misquote "I have never been more proud to be a republican THAN I have this week". PLEASE people at least get the english you know correct. BTW these REAL republicans were called Democrats the last time they thought like this, but that was when Reagan was a Democrat.
Why bother
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Amendment X.
There is something unclear about this? POWERS NOT DELEGATED, the key phrase. All that is not permitted explicitly is EXPLICITLY forbidden. There MAY be arguments as to the extent of the power of Congress which could be made with regards to commerce and regulating the money, but they are at best weak arguments. The point is, your analysis is simply wrong and not only directly contravened by the 10th amendment, but also discussed at length by the authors in the Federalist Papers (in all fairness Hamilton made some arguments similar to yours, but it is a dangerous position to take).
What if Congress decides that 'the common welfare' would be served by having the FBI throw you in a pit for 30 years? Is that OK because 'hey, it is good for everyone else, and they can do whatever they think is good'. Sorry, not in my United States.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Never should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You do realize that the only reason the Republicans voted this down was that it was too restrictive on the Fed and Treasury, right?
This is yet another one of those votes where both parties showed how against the US Citizen they really are. Unless you were all for giving Paulson a blank check with no strings attached, I don't understand why you're so hip to be a Republican.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
The word is "lose"; if you loose interest you are setting it free not misplacing it.
Why bother
Way to use the "Preview" button. You need to use '<' to do a '<'.
Unless you're in Windsor. Then you look north to see Detroit. Iâ(TM)m from the Left Coast, so that concept is particularly odd to me.
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
mark-to-market (MTM accounting, which is rule 157) no doubt isn't helping the banks, but the real problem IMHO is the way these mortgages were packaged.
Say you make a mortgage for $100k to someone for 20 years, and the total repayment is $250k principal plus interest. Now you take 10 of these things and you package them up and sell the paper for $1.5 million (150k per mortgage). SOUNDS like a good deal, except what happens if ONE of those mortgages goes bad? The buyer of the paper is now out 250k and all of a sudden the return on his paper is approaching zippo grande and it is now basically a worthless piece of paper.
In theory the paper might still be worth quite a bit, but the holder IS going to lose money, and the risk on the paper is still the same.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Not all of us do.
The others smoke meth?
A denial of public service attack?
(Oh no, wait... denial of public service is what Congress is doing now...)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Sure, their email system is not capable of handling mass emails from the 300,000,000 people in the U.S. that are pissed off about the proposed bailout. . ."
I also wonder if you don't sometimes end up with certain motivated individuals and PACS setting up systems to automatically send the same email 20 times/sec to representatives. Note, I will distinguish between a 'form-mailer' page where actual constituents go to the page, fill in their name, and click submit to send a form-email with their name on it, as that, at least nominally, is really a 'new' letter from a unique individual.
Man, what is up with these comments? Who has the time to come up with these wacky conspiracy theories? It's kind of creepy that someone just sits in their basement all day and ruminates on this kind of stuff.
Was it from Diane Feinstein? She is notorious for doing that.
You mean the Atlantic?
It's Fascism either side of that fence. You bring one form, the neocons bring another.
What's the difference?
Bailing out the banks that've tumped isn't going to keep the money coming. The reason they're tumping over is because they're overleveraged on speculations on VAPOR.
Not even mortgages. Derivatives, of all things. Derivatives aren't even real assets. We shouldn't have allowed funny paper to be treated as real in the first place.
These money "losses" we have people keep going on about aren't real money in the slightest. The reason that the "securities" are illiquid are because they're worth NOTHING. Pouring money into that mess is good after bad. We've got crumbling infrastructure. We've got industry in disrepair.
The real reasons we're in this mess is complex, and includes more things than just the part we're seeing, and we probably ought to be worrying about THOSE pieces first as this mess will keep rearing it's head time and time again, each time getting worse.
It seems to have escaped most peoples notice that Asian banks are not participating in the current financial meltdown extravaganza and there is a reason for that.
The US banks have been behaving very very badly and have already been bailed out a couple of times in the past.
The "bubbles" you've had in the last two decades were the results of government bailouts designed to stave of a recession, and they worked. Sort of.
The problem is, if you keep bailing out these numbnuts they will just continue carrying on as before and you will continue having to bail them out and each rescue will be more flamboyantly extravagant than the last.
At some point you will HAVE to take your medicine and let things collapse. Economics is cyclical, you have periods of growth and periods of stagnation. You can't change that, no matter how much you might want to. The US government has been postponing the down cycle for years but all they have done is ensure that when the down cycle inevitably happens it will be a monster one.
If they get bailed out again this time, the next time will be even worse.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Libertarians smoke pot.
Yes, some of us do. Thanks for noticing.
Never forget that Carter set the stage for this and then Clinton made it even easier for us to get into this mess- this is by passing into law, a bill that was made by the Dems, to make it easier to get mortgages, and encouraged the players to get into this game.
The blood for this is on both parties' hands- never ONCE let them forget this.
The Green Party never has clean hands, they're always dirty from digging in their gardens. ;)
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
As stated by Jon Stewart in regards to Michelle Obama and the assertions that she must "prove" that she's Patriotic:
"She's got to. She's a Democrat. She must PROVE she loves America. As opposed to Republicans, who everyone KNOWS love America, they just hate half of the people living in it."
This could be taken that they want to limit mail so that it appears that less people are pissed off on * subject.
Oh wait was I supposed to say something witty here?!?
Thank you, Hubert Humphrey.
I actually had a conservative friend say that Humphrey was the best President ever. Wow. That boggles the mind. I'm shocked at the disconnect between reality and ideology which would even allow that kind of statement to slip out of his mouth.
Conservatives and frightened Democrats prevented a massive take-over by the political class.
:-) Sorry, but that reminds me of how some Trotskyists liked to insist that the Soviet Union, before it broke up, had ceased to be socialist and instead was ruled by a "bureaucratic class" which somehow qualified it as capitalist.
Let's not fool ourselves here. There is no "political class". We only have the super-rich, who are in power, and all the others, who aren't.
Property is theft.
... I mumble something about being a Libertarian and change the subject.
Don't be afraid to admit it! There are tons of us out there, and you'd especially be surprised how many people have told me they're leaning Libertarian now, after being a life-long Republican. Plus, our candidate, Bob Barr, has been speaking out against this bailout crap all along.
Go ahead and say it with me: My name's ____, and I'm proud to be a Libertarian.
Disclaimer: I am a member of the Executive Committee for my state's Libertarian Party.
Yeah, as someone pointed out recently, it's odd how they tightened the screws on PERSONAL bankruptcy, but now want to open the money spigot for INSTITUTIONAL failure. I suppose it's because the market doesn't crash when it's just my boss running up credit card bills he can't pay, but still....
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The post you replied to was never modded Troll. What post are you talking about?
Libertarians: gun toting economists on drugs.
thank goodness you said that. I keep wondering why conservatives vote for Republicans. Republicans aren't conservative! They never have been! Reagan grew the government three times as fast as Clinton! Bush is the most spendy President we've ever had (literally)! How far back do you have to go to find a Republican who was actually a fiscal conservative? There certainly hasn't been one in the last fifty years. If you're conservative, then for the love of all that is holy please start voting for conservatives, instead of Republicans!
Are you also proud of being in the party of the deregulators then led us to this mess?
I wish I had mod points because this should not be moderated as Troll. It is all too true.
Dumbass partisans. This shit goes all the way back to Carter, with every president and congress in between having a hand in it. I could detail for you all the ways they helped, even. You think it was all done by Phil Gramm? Please. This mess predates the '99 deregulation. Which party has had the White House since '76? Which party has controlled congress since '76? That's right: BOTH OF THEM!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Do the polar bears and moose wear sombreros?
Hah! Yes, it was! It was when I wrote to tell her how boneheaded the Patriot Act was!
At least Boxer was good enough to respond with "I am sorry you disagree, but here's why I support it".
The cake is a pie
> What part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does Congress not understand?
> Congress shall make no law ...
I'm guessing it would be the word "law" because shutting down your email server due to overload is not the same as passing a law saying you cannot contact them.
Looks very much like it is pointing at France to me.
Canada has computers that aren't older then I am.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Actually, this time ALL of the investment banks have fallen, the only remaining ones all converted to traditional deposit holding banks which are more tightly regulated. Not that regulations helped this time around since they were neutered by the Republicans and the financial wizards had created instruments so obscure that even THEY didn't really understand them. I hope next time the regulators can't understand an instrument they force the quants to explain it or if it can't be explained sufficiently then ban it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There was a run on the Bank of East Asia in Hong Kong; and I think you will find in good time that Chinese and Japanese banks have lost a lot of money in subprime mortgage bonds.
The worst thing is that the US has been telling other countries to "take their medicine" and learn to swallow their own economic crisises without goverment intervention.
It is no wonder that people in Brasil, Argentina and Mexico are now calling the bluff on US hipocrisy.
No sig for the moment.
Wake up sleepy head! It's a credit crunch.
The well of easy short term credit has dried up. Financial institutions are currently experiencing a rather nasty bought of collective hysteria and as a result are grasping too tightly to what money they still have. They're not loaning any money to one another because they're afraid they and all their buddies are going to go belly up like Lehman Brothers in the very near future. They all need they all need every penny they have to pay off the loans they already took out from each other, because now they wont lend to each other because they're all afraid they'll all go under.
Confused? That's because you think that modern financiers are either rational or competent at what they do. They are neither.
It doesn't matter what the bill was about. The purpose of the bill was to act as a placebo for hysterical traders who literally have no idea what is happening and who cannot be relied upon to either calm down or trade rationally. I don't mean collectively speaking. I mean on an individual basis. That bill was a mass Valium prescription for a mass of people who are a danger to themselves and society. Taking it away was like dosing a crazy person with amphetamines, putting them in room 101, then giving them explosives and a loaded shotgun. Predictably, the traders and money men completely lost the run of themselves, and had a good old fashioned Panic Attack.
This is not getting resolved by market forces. This is not going to correct itself. This cannot be left to the whims of Wall St, unless you think its a good idea to leave the world's financial systems in the hands of people with the mentality, reasoning and emotional state of a crashing meth junkie. Wait as long as you like, there's nobody home.
No. This is going to require some good old fashioned Government Intervention. There's that taboo word. I'll say it again to drag Slashdot even further into disrepute. This Crisis Needs Government Intervention . You can deny this fact while you wait for your local junkies to start scrubbing the pavements out of civic responsibility, or you can wake up to reality and help clean up the mess that your mistaken opinions helped create.
May the Maths Be with you!
He might, now that he reversed his stance.
God, that's the worst thing about Canada...they all speak f*in Spanish.
I wrote my local representative about a law that (I felt) was being misused to jail a visitor to the US. I received two responses (the same content, two separate envelopes) agreeing with my concerns about the treatment options for kidney dialysis patients. (?!)
Close. It's actually "Get on the plane, or we'll take you to Toronto where you'll be forced to watch the Leafs."
No wonder so many picked Guantanamo.
Pretty much my thought; I've no economics degree, but it seems eminently logical... I mean, I could be crazy, but since when is printing more money a solution to anything?
No, the dude must be in Alaska.
Good grief, I am aware that banks around the world have been affected by this problem, albeit mostly indirectly.
Banks all around the world lend each other lots of money all the time. The sub-prime problem is so huge that often these banks have been hit by holding loans that are two or more levels higher than the underlying sub-prime credit they can be traced to.
So, Bank A has a whole lot of poor loans based on the ridiculous idea that home prices will forever rise and that if their loser "ninja" customers default on their loans (which they will) they can swoop in and sell the house at a profit anyway. This is a great, if somewhat morally bereft plan until the prices of houses stop rocketing up.
But Bank A needs the cash to provide these loans so they turn to Bank B.
Bank B also sells access to this credit in the form of investments to other banks or firms who are not even aware that the investment they have is ultimately underwritten by Bank A and based on inherently bad loans.
Eventually the housing market collapses and Bank A follows and the flow on goes right out to the fringes.
Any falls on Asian banks pale into nothingness when compared to the US banking sector. Their falls are in sympathy with what is happening in the US, not as a result of their own bad practices.
If the banking and trading sectors weren't generally operated by 30 something whiz-kids who have no memory of past economics downturns then they wouldn't have fallen for the sucker idea that markets go constantly up in order to service their bottomless greed.
I say let them fall. The whole damn lot of them. Then we'll at least have a few more years before the next generation of whiz-kids come along to make the same mistakes again.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
the US Government is a democracy designed to represent the people it governs -- it's my damn money and I can spend it any damn way I want.
Last I checked, management your mainframe is not a democracy, and I'll bet you've had a higher up from time to time tell you how to manage it.
Other than that, you're right, managing mainframes is EXACTLY like running government.
Wouldn't a flood of emails crash a mail server rather than a web site? I sure hope they're not running their web sites on a single machine that doubles as a mail server too!
My e-mail server supports Very Large Mailboxes which provides over 14 messages per US citizen (currently 305,302,563) per folder or 4,294,967,295 messages. How big is yours? (Note that the 2^32 is PER FOLDER...not per account or user.)
You can always still call...
Yeah, according to a few of the online political allignment surveys I most closely fit in with the Green Party. My problem is things like
funding environmental crime units for district attorneys in counties with significant pollution problems.
and
We oppose the development and use of new nuclear reactors, plutonium (MOX) fuel, nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear fusion, uranium enrichment, and the manufacturing of new plutonium pits for a new generation of nuclear weapons.
Which are two of the only technologies likely to allow for us to continue with a modern way of life AND avoid doing serious damage to the planet. Wind is the only other large scale power source that doesn't produce insane amounts of toxic waste per lifetime KWhr and it's neither scalable enough or reliable enough to run a modern society.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I AM in a mountain of debt (not entirely due to my own actions, but here I am nonetheless) and I do not support this bill. I can't and shouldn't expect the government to rescue me from myself even if my actions have effects on others; why should we expect big corporations to be bailed out cause they spent all their money on $20m parachute retirements for their CEOs? Fuck that, let the economy BURN.
Some Wall Street Bailout Humor
Treasury Secretary Henry "Hank" Paulson Explains the Wall Street Bailout to the Average American
http://www.jmcgowan.com/Hank.pdf
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Explains the Wall Street Bailout to the Average American
http://www.jmcgowan.com/Ben.pdf
The Pompous Conservative Explains the Wall Street Bailout to the Average American
http://www.jmcgowan.com/pompous.pdf
The Concerned Liberal Senator Explains the Wall Street Bailout to the Average American
http://www.jmcgowan.com/concerned.pdf
Super Trader Chauncey Wigginbotham IV Explains the Wall Street Bailout to the Average American
http://www.jmcgowan.com/chauncey.pdf
The Conservative Planning Meeting on the Wall Street Bailout
http://www.jmcgowan.com/conservative.pdf
John
"This Crisis Needs Government Intervention."
I don't think that is a given. We probably could go with either:
A. A huge government intervention
B. No government intervention
I favor B. I think it will be fine if all the businesses and individuals that did stupid, risky things end in total ruin. That's what you get and deserve when you taken excessive and misguided risks in a free market. I think the bailout plan proposed by the Bush administration is mostly designed to bail out their fat cat Republican constituency before Bush and Paulson are kicked out the door. That is why they wanted $700 billion NOW, with no oversight, so they could blow it all bailing out their friends before Obama gets in the white house, and the orgy of cronyism and leeching off the government the last 8 years is over, or at least it switches to a Democratic orgy. It looks a lot like the bailout was a last orgy of wealth redistribution to the wealthy and as is typical for the Bush administration they used fear mongering to try to shove it through Congress without anyone questioning. Its cool it did get questioned and I hope Congress holds their ground though I doubt they will.
It might actually be good if American business and American people can't get business loans, credit cards, mortgages or home equity loans. I saw earlier today that the "average" American is carrying a $10,000 balance on their credit card. That is insane. I have a $0 dollar balance on my credit cards and so do a lot of others so that probably means the credit junkies are carrying $20,000 on their credit cards probably at a steep interest rate. In the last 10 years or so the savings rate by the average person in China has risen from like 30% to something like 45%. During the same period the average savings rate for an American has plunged to 0%. We don't save everything. The little we do save is canceled out by staggering debt burden.
The U.S. desperately needs to go cold turkey from their credit addiction, business, individual and government. Seizing of the credit markets is a sure way to make it happen. I'm really glad I no longer get 3 credit card offers in the mail every week. That was insane.
A complete freeze in our credit markets may actually start compelling American people and businesses to live within their means, as in don't spend money you don't have. If you want to buy something work for it first.... gasp. It may hammer the housing and auto industries.... tough.
The silver lining in the housing crash is home prices in the U.S. were astronomically inflated. If they crash 30-50% that will just bring them down to a sane level. It totally needs to happen, its not a bad thing. Sure its going to hammer people's net worth but if your net worth came from riding a housing bubble then it was a sham in the first place. The same can be said for the stock market. There is no law that says your stocks have to always go up/ If you've invested in the stock market for a while you made a lot of money, tough luck that you've lost 20% this year. Deal with it, stop whining and stop expecting the government to FORCE the stock market to always go up. Real markets don't do that. They should only go up when your businesses are really profitable and productive. Most American companies really aren't.
Bottom line is most Americans were engaging in a giant Ponzi scheme the last few years, a lot of you made a lot of money on it. It crashed. Ponzi schemes always do. If you were taking out huge home equity loans, flipping houses, etc. its time to take your medicine for doing something foolish.
Meanwhile we need to learn to make things again, we need to learn skills that have real economic value on the global stage. We need to rebuild our infrastructure and break our dependence on imported oil. Seriously, you aren't entitled to money for nothing and chicks for free no matter what the song says. The rest of the world is eating your lunch and unless you get off your butts and do something worthwhile you a
@de_machina
That is the very first thing that I noticed, I wonder how they did that.
"it was enough in the end that an individual's ego made them stick to their principles."
Fear of being shitcanned next election by their constituents (tell my redneck buddies they need to be taxed to death to bail out some rich pig and see how THAT goes over) had nothing to do with this sudden outbreak of concern...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I sent Feinstein and Boxer letters a few years ago about copyright litigation. I got an email from Boxer's office that said "Thanks for your interest!." I got a personal, well reasoned response from Feinstein. She and I have written back and forth once a month ever since, sometimes with her emailing just to ask what I think about related legislation. For all I know it could be one of her staffers, but every email shows a lot of thought and is signed with her name.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm John Scherer, the video professor!
Try my product! (or I'll sue your ass)
Bah, a bill to encourage loaning money to low income people isn't what got us here. Even with the financial craziness that got us here the truely poor people weren't buying houses and even if they did it was a $40K shack in the hood, it was the HUGE amounts of funny money the fed pumped into the economy for the last 8 years. The fact that it went into housing is fairly inconsequential, it was just an area that was easy to move money into due to relaxed regulation. The fundamental problem is that to get us out of the last minor recession the fed created inflationary pressure that built up in a bubble that suddenly burst. It just so happens that the bubble bursting took out the financial sector which is making things worse then they should be because normal, credit worthy businesses can't access credit to perform their normal operations. I don't know if anyone knows how to get us out of this without making things worse in the long term, but the pill is going to be awfully hard to swallow if some way of cushioning things isn't found because this is basically a double recession (the harsher downside of the last one combined with this one).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not that regulations helped this time around since they were neutered by the Republicans
I keep hearing people say this, but I've never seen anyone point to any specific deregulation. Please enlighten me.
It seems to me that this whole mess was largely caused by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government sponsored enterprises. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/09/distorting-history.html
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Unfortunately, your understanding of the constitution is fundamentally flawed. It has a few things that it explicitly tells the federal government it can do, and the 10th amendment says, "If we didn't explicitly say you can do it, it's none of your business."
As pointed out by the above poster, the federal government *was* explicitly told that this is something they can do. The articles of the Constitution that he actual cited (as opposed to your general parapharsing) are known as the Taxing and Spending Clause and the General Welfare Clause in Constitutional Law. There is absolutely nothing in the bailout plan that was unconstitutional. Unwise or unfair, maybe, but not unconstitutional.
Furthermore, the 10th Amendment is generally considered to have little judicially enforceable restraint on Congress. Pretty much the only thing barred by the 10th Amendment currently is commanding the states to enact legislation or to enforce federal legislation (though the government is free to give incentives to do so with money spent under the Spending Clause). (See New York v. United States (1992).)
Everything else you've posted is just whining about the Supreme Court not interpreting the Constitution the way you wished they would. Well, too bad! The Constitution is what the body invested with the power to interpret it says that it is. (See Marbury v. Madison.)
In other words, when it comes to Constitutional Law: "Lurk moar, n00b."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
P.S. If you're a lobbyist or a big corporation, please use my secret yahoo mail email address for a personal reply.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A very similar scenario happened in Asia about ten years ago. I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about when you mention "[taking] your medicine and [letting] things collapse" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_financial_crisis
Two people have sent me the below e-mail. The problem of course is that 85B/200M=425 not 425,000. The people were both intelligent, one is an electrical engineer and the other is a former coworker of mine in the accounting field. /. rejected it because some of the lines had few than 28 letters. So there is a link instead.]
[I was going to paste the email below - but
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.artists.springsteen/2008-09/msg05897.html
Please see Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
http://mises.org/story/3098
Is this the basis for the criticism of Republicans? I found it linked from the wikipedia article for the financial services modernization act.
Has austrian economics gone mainstream?
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Oddly enough, when I look up that Bill, I find it was approved by both Parties (90 votes for in the Senate, 343 in the House), and signed by a Democratic President (Clinton was President in 1999, remember?).
If it was an evil Republican plot to rob the dear people, then why did the "Defenders of All That is Good and Right" (aka the Democrats) approve it? Remember, most of them voted in favour of this also.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The problem is, if you keep bailing out these numbnuts they will just continue carrying on as before and you will continue having to bail them out and each rescue will be more flamboyantly extravagant than the last.
At some point you will HAVE to take your medicine and let things collapse.
It's almost a shame we have Wikipedia, because it obviates any advantage to establishing the Encyclopedia Galactica at Foundation.
Because it certainly looks like some sort of Seldon Plan is needed here -- i.e. if you're right, it may be better to start planning now on how to pick up the pieces afterwards, than expend more energy trying to arrest an inevitable fall.
Or to put it another way, in order to pop that sequence of bubbles for good, perhaps you need a different sort of prick.
>>>>Not that regulations helped this time around since they were neutered by the Republicans
Actually it was just ONE democrat.
In 1999 President Clinton signed into law regulations allowing traditional banks to invest in stock. He over-turned a rule that had stood ever since 1929's crash, and no surprise we're getting a repeat. Our great-grandparents in Congress passed that "banks cannot invest in stock" regulation for a reason (experience with bank failures), and President Clinton ignored that experience, figuring he knew better.
At first everything was okay, but now the mortgage stocks are crashing, and banks are going with them.
Other Democrats also deserve blame for passing laws allowing banks to give mortgages without any downpayment ("every person deserves a home even if they cannot afford it"), but that's a minor flaw we probably could have survived, if the original 1930s law requiring banks to have real money backed by real assets (no stocks) was still in effect. Thanks Bill. This is *another* fine mess you've gotten us into.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
"I will agree that something needs to be done."
Me too. Nothing. This is about a whole lot of stupid decisions going up in smoke. Sucks to be them.
http://mises.org/story/3132
Bad decisions and investments should end up this way. Poof. Now we go after the fools who made it happen, and toss 'em in jail. They did the same (in result) as Enron.
The alternative is mortgaging your children's future. They'll be the ones paying the bill if the bailout happens.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I recall a few years back when they were down for days back in the code-red worm days while the executive branch was not. The executive branch was using Lotus Domino. The Bush administration pulled Domino mail and went to Exchange. Since then, they "lost" a ton of incriminating evidence by failing to make proper backups.
In any case, any system could fail under the kind of load they're likely dealing with.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Hm, works for me. :)
Comment of the year
That is what I was referring to. Perhaps I should have been clearer, thanks for doing that for me.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
[...]Taking it away was like dosing a crazy person with amphetamines, putting them in room 101, then giving them explosives and a loaded shotgun.[...]
Where do I sign up?! I've got Adderall, bottle rockets, a .22, and a varsity letter in Rifle. Will this be acceptable? =)
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
For all I know it could be one of her staffers
For all you know? Dude, do you really have any doubt? Diane Feinstein is not emailing you once a month to debate policy. One of her college interns is cut-pasting text into an email to you.
Advice: on VPS providers
I have nothing to say to that but "holy shit!".
Maybe that's sad.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Calling to say 'vote no' is great and a nice checkpoint for the graph. By all means, do that!
But if you're going to take the time to write please try to have something positive in your message. Suggest an alternative, identify why this isn't something you agree with, anything besides 'That suxors'.
I've been starting to write both my Senators and my Representative about issues. Of course, I note at the bottom that I've sent copies to the others. I need to take some time and put up the interesting differences in responses on my blog. But the point is that the United States has a representative government and that only really works when you take the time to tell your representatives what you want.
As I said in my messages about how I think the bail out they all want should go - this is MY money you're spending and I have a say in how it should be done.
Put their Washington office numbers in your cell phone and bookmark their web pages where you can submit comments. Let 'em know!
They can't run an email system.
Yet they know how to untangle the $700,000,000,000 bad assets.
so does Kit Bond when he bothers to respond to me. Claire McCaskill has only done that to me once IIRC, but it was on the FISA bill, so she can drown in diarrhea.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Like I said, this statement is unequivocally false. And despite your stunning ability to look up cases on the internet, the Congress still has to give lip service to a grant of authority before it passes a law. Usually it's the Commerce Clause, which after Wickard v. Filburn is ridiculously broad, but the Rhenquist court did manage to reign it in just a little bit. So no, Congress can't just go off willy nilly and do whatever it wants.
Then it's a good thing I never said there was. In fact, the ill-advised bailout is one of the most direct regulations of interstate commerce I can think of. Stupid, yes. Unconstitutional, no.
And I stand by my analysis of the New Deal. Everybody knew it was unconstitutional. They just decided it was so extraordinarily important that they were going to do it anyway. Similarly, everybody knows this bailout is stupid. We just think it's so extraordinarily important that we're told we should do it anyway.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
"Libertarians smoke pot."
I'll bet J. Edgar Hoover smoked pot. What's your point?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
tl;dr
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Mark-to-market may have been the last straw, but this was a problem long in the making as more and more people noticed the over-leveraging and therefore the "real" value of mortgage-backed securities was dropping fast. Banks made all sorts of accounting acrobatics to hide these but the missing data started to transpire from their statements.
That, and the wholly unregulated, wild CDS (credit default swaps) market which has blown AIG up.
Cuba ought to be a really nice place to live. It's a tropical paradise for goodness' sake. Somehow, though, many would rather be HomeSec prisoners than live on the other side of that fence.
Canada on the other hand has no business being a nice place to live. It's cold for much of the year, and in some places it's dark for almost half of it. They have to send supplies to their diamond mines and oil fields over a dangerous frozen highway during a three month window in the dead of winter. Yet, somehow they manage to export delicious bacon, entertainment, and fast food restaurants.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I run into canadian border patrol that tell me i have to go back because I don't have any previous employment as a manager.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
"REAL republican"?
you do know that since the civil rights era, republicans have been all about representing the intolerant, invasive (explatives deleted) the dixie-crats abandoned?
That's the "real republican" party.
I believe you're referring to libertarian.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
no it's not.
The norm is for wingnut-right astroturfers to mod anything democratic into oblivion, and make sure posts outright disparaging the poor as lazy, extolling the "fair and balanced" virtues of the american information ministry.. i mean fox news, and calling obama a muslim get to and stay at +5
Other such issues being astroturfed by sock puppet mods are:
net neutrality
copyright
corporate abuse
Please refer to page 1 of "political blog campaigning 101".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They also gutted bankruptcy protections for "main street", including student loans.
My how compassionate of them!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That's my position exactly. I support the Socialist Party, but if I could vote (I'm not American), I would vote Democrat, because third-party votes are wasted in today's America.
In my own country, I vote for parties with the position of Social Democrat or Labour, depending on the exact crop.
Canada on the other hand has no business being a nice place to live. It's cold for much of the year, and in some places it's dark for almost half of it.
I'm pretty sure, on average, it's dark half the time everywhere.
JADBP
Well, that would certainly explain a few things.
Everything else you've posted is just whining about the Supreme Court not interpreting the Constitution the way you wished they would. Well, too bad! The Constitution is what the body invested with the power to interpret it says that it is. (See Marbury v. Madison.)
In other words, when it comes to Constitutional Law: "Lurk moar, n00b."
This is insightful? All you've posted is that the Constitution says whatever the Supreme Court says is does. The GP was pointing out that the government(all three branches) simply ignore the 10th Amendment. This goes against the entire premise of rule of written law.
Here is the email I sent to my congressman & senators:
---
Please vote against the proposed 700 billion dollar taxpayer funded bank bail-out. I do not want my taxes going to pay bankers, speculators, and risk-taking borrowers. I should not have to pay for their financial sins.
Know this - I will not vote for you in the future if you support a bail-out bill. I will also advise my friends to not vote for you if you support a bail-out.
This is a capitalist country (at least it used to be). Let the markets run their course. We're in a credit bubble. Don't prolong the bubble with bad legislation. Don't increase our national debt and burden future generations of Americans to bail-out bankers, speculators, and risk takers. Don't be a such a socialist.
Thanks,
xxxxx xxxxx
Just as an aside - was it an executive order, or did both sides vote on this? If the latter, what was the breakdown (for vs against) for each side?
Blame Clinton all you like, but it's likely that both sides supported this, and the intervening Bush presidency did nothing to re-introduce those laws.
On this one, both sides are to blame, but your economy has been further stressed by massive war spending which certainly hasn't helped.
Like I said, this statement is unequivocally false.
One can make an argument that it's not. It's really no different from from the analysis you gave, except for your faulty assumption that the 10th Amendment has strong teeth. The Constitution grants the government several powers to pass laws (removing some rights from you) and the Bill of Rights takes several powers away from the government (granting some rights to you). What it says nothing about is left alone, presumably to the states.
The 10th Amendment has long been viewed as little more than an affirmation of the obvious and not a hard limit of restraint. Beyond the limits I've mentioned on compelling action from the states, it's toothless. That changed for a while with the Usery decision but was revoked by Garcia. O'Connor's decision in the aforementioned New York v. United States is the law on the 10th Amendment currently, and I've already explained how little it restrains Congress.
And despite your stunning ability to look up cases on the internet, the Congress still has to give lip service to a grant of authority before it passes a law. Usually it's the Commerce Clause, which after Wickard v. Filburn is ridiculously broad, but the Rhenquist court did manage to reign it in just a little bit. So no, Congress can't just go off willy nilly and do whatever it wants.
Maybe. Gonzales v. Raich 545 U.S. 1 (2005) blows most of Morrison out of the water by resurrecting the rational basis test and severely muddying the waters on what is and isn't economic activity. While Congress still applies the fig leaf of "that affects interstate commerce" to the legislation it passes, what exactly is interstate commerce is once again very broad. It's hard to reconcile Raich with Lopez in my opinion, given the government's argument in the latter case.
(I'm frankly surprised you know much about what the Rehnquist court decided though, given how wrong your 10th Amendment analysis is. I was providing links because I figured (based on 2/3 of your post) that you were talking out your rear end. I again recommend reading a Con Law textbook.)
And I stand by my analysis of the New Deal. Everybody knew it was unconstitutional. They just decided it was so extraordinarily important that they were going to do it anyway.
I assume you're referring to West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parish (1937). The only reason anyone would've considered the New Deal unconstitutional was because of Lochner, widely considered today to have been one of the most awful and ill-conceived Supreme Court verdicts of all time. Yes, the court was under pressure due to Roosevelt's threat to pack the court, but the writing was already on the wall with Nebbia v. New York, 3 years earlier, and even in striking down some New Deal legislation in United States v. Butler, the court upheld a relatively broad interpretation of the Spending Clause and General Welfare Clause. By the time Wickard v. Filburn was decided, the landscape had changed.
Honestly, the argument "they knew it wasn't Constitutional" presumes two things:
1) There is an inherent, natural law concept of constitutionality that objectively lies outside of the decisions of the Supreme Court.
2) That the Supreme Court chose to ignore that objective standard and place a politically motivated substitute that has no moral authority behind it.
Neither of these are the case. Constitutional is what the body reviewing constitutionality says it is. I may not like Scalia's grotesque reading out of the Constitution of the 2nd Amendment's militia requirement in District of Columbia v. Heller this year (making a mockery of his own touted philosophy of originalism), but that is the law of the land. That is what is constitutional, and all the whining in the world doesn't change that.
(And frankly, if you're honestly arguing that we should roll back our notion of Constitutionality to the pre-New Deal, Lochner era, I think you're a loon.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is insightful? All you've posted is that the Constitution says whatever the Supreme Court says is does.
And? That's how things are. Deal with it. As I say in my reply to his reply to the above post, there is no such thing as a platonic, ideal notion of Constitutionality. Constitutionality is entirely a concept of the law as applied, based on our English-inherited common law system -- i.e. judge-interpreted law.
The GP was pointing out that the government(all three branches) simply ignore the 10th Amendment. This goes against the entire premise of rule of written law.
No. They interpret the 10th Amendment in a way different from what you would like. Words on paper are meaningless without interpretation, and if you learn anything when studying law, there's no set of words on paper that two people can't come up with different interpretations for.
There is no One True God-Given Meaning of the 10th Amendment, and you should not mistake your interpretation for it for the one that's right nor for the one that's controlling in the law. That's for the body invested with the power to interpret the law to decide. (That's not you, by the way.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
One popularization of this was from the British series "Yes Minister". Also related - the Politician's Apology. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/26/1763692.aspx
If we were a year out from an election instead of a month, the bill would've passed with 100 votes to spare. They just can't risk annoying the ideological simpletons who don't understand what a serious economic issue is.
This crisis doesn't need government intervention. That is to say we don't need to have a $13 trillion GDP or a stable economy for the next two years. But I'd sure as hell call them "nice to have."
The biggest problem I see right now is that most people have absolutely zero idea of how this calamity is going to affect them. They believe that the losses are largely either imaginary, or limited to some financial segment of the population that will never concern them. They believe, as some argue rationally ignorant individuals ought to, that this won't ever affect them.
When the recession comes (well, when it deepens) these same people will blame "Wall Street Fat Cats" and the government having gotten us into this mess in the first place. They will never blame themselves for opposing the bailout or for not understanding the inherent interconnectedness of the "streets" they're so fond of talking about.
For what it's worth, the bailout was a shit sandwich. It was a terrible plan, with too much cruft and not enough oversight in the right places. But it was definitely better than playing Russian roulette with the economy. There's a slim chance that the credit markets will come back without getting rid of the toxic securities floating around - and if they do, the naysayers will have been right, but for the wrong reasons.
I do have to take issue with this thought, though:
That's because you think that modern financiers are either rational or competent at what they do. They are neither.
Modern financiers know very well what they are doing, and if you were in their shoes you would have been wise to do exactly the same. The first lesson of economics is this: people respond to incentives. The problem this time, as with most crises is that the incentives were skewed.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
This act was also known as the Gramm Leach Bliley act. It was written by a Republican controlled congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
You may have heard of one of the sponsors, Phil Gramm. He is the Gramm in Gramm Leach Bliley... He also wrote John McCain's economic policy and was John McCain's presidential campaign co-chair and his most senior economic advisor, until he made a gaffe on the campaign trail and said "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," and "We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline." Whoops. I guess McCain had to let him go after he said that on national television.
I love it how the right-wing media is trying to spin this that "it's all Clinton's fault" when we have a law passed by a Republican controlled congress, written by McCain's senior economic advisor. I know you guys like to try and stretch the facts about everything, but the people are starting to get sick of all of the lies and deceit.
Let's face it, deregulation has failed our economy and our nation. Voting for John McCain would be putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The articles of the Constitution that he actual cited (as opposed to your general parapharsing) are known as the Taxing and Spending Clause and the General Welfare Clause in Constitutional Law.
You're not going after the 'general Welfare as an enumerated power' angle, are you?
There is absolutely nothing in the bailout plan that was unconstitutional.
Specifically, which enumerated power in Article 1, Section 8 provides the Congress with the power to purchase toxic assets from the financial industry?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For those of us who aren't fucking retards, and know how to live within our means, the necessary credit crunch at the end of a credit bubble is of little consequence.
That is, unless all you whining fuckers that don't know how to manage money finagle the government into taxing those of us who were responsible to cover your ass.
This is getting resolved by market forces. All you idiots that made bad choices, bad investments, promised money you don't have and have no way of ever paying back, are getting exactly what you fucking deserve for all your damn lies.
You do not deserve the house you cannot afford. You do not deserve item you have to buy with a loan. You deserve to get a fucking job, save your money, and buy what you can with what you fucking have.
I do not deserve to pay for your irresponsible, me-first, entitlement attitude.
I for one, welcome some deflation. I have nothing to loose and everything to gain from it. And yes, I know what it entails. The magic trick my single-income family performs on a monthly basis is that we can subsist on less than -half- of my TAKE HOME pay.
And So to you, and all the dumbshits living in debt, I extend a hearty FUCK OFF.
Does anything think that this is erosion of democracy? They're taking away the right of free speech for a chunk of people. I mean, I know there are other ways to contact the government to let them know what you think of them (F^$# *&%$# !@#), but surely it'd be in our best interests to pay for a decent mail exchange than to build another missile? This really isn't the best way to deal with the situation, its like shoving it under the carpet.
You're not going after the 'general Welfare as an enumerated power' angle, are you?
The "Taxing and Spending Clause," "Spending Clause," and "General Welfare Clause" all refer to the same text (just different parts of it):
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
Court cases have consistently found no limitation on what Congress can spend your tax dollars on since United States v. Butler. That clause gives Congress the ability to spend tax dollars to purchase toxic assets from the financial industry.
We may not like how they're exercising that power, but there's absolutely no question that they have it to anyone who's studied Supreme Court precedent on the matter.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Dude,
That's like saying: "Hey, I'm from the Martian Party -- My hands are clean!!!"
Okay, congratulations, you've proved you have free Westlaw access, which means you're a student (but shame on your for not having Blue Book-correct cites; I hope you're not on Law Review), and so you deserve a little more respect that J. Random Slashdotter who thinks he knows the law. But you still have yet to refute my original point, which is that the 10th Amendment does not "just leave the rest alone." It says "the rest doesn't belong to the Federal government." Sure, you've shown that you favor a more expansive Commerce Clause than I do, but that's orthogonal to my point, which is that the 10th Amendment does, in fact, say something about it ("strong" teeth is your phrase, not mine). You're talking about matters of degree, which are up for reasonable debate. But like I pointed out, the fact that probably 9 out of 10 people in the U.S. don't even know there is such a thing as a 10th amendment is a pretty good indication to me that we've screwed it up. In any case, all constitutional theorists agree that the states have some powers reserved to them (if you can dig up a single remotely credible scholar who says otherwise, I'd like to see it; even Ginsburg will occasionally defer to the autonomy of the states).
Now, setting aside my original point (which I think I may have mentioned you failed to address in your eagerness to unleash your KeyCite prowess), you raise some interesting philosophical points. Is there such a thing as "constitutional in the abstract?" Or is the Supreme Court always right because they go last? Is three generations of imbeciles enough because the Chief said so in Buck v. Bell? Or is it possible he's wrong, even if four guys in black robes agree with him? (Remember, Buck v. Bell hasn't been reversed, so eugenic sterilization is still constitutional). And what was that case with the separated parents and some random guy knockin' up mom, but the estranged husband was the father (it has nothing to do with the conversation, but it was kind of amusing in an embarassing Jerry Springer kind of way). Perhaps you and I just disagree about this on a fundamental level. I can certainly grant you that it's the law of the land, and I'm not saying toss out Marbury v. Madison. But Carnival Cruise Lines is the law of the land too, and that was kind of dumb (I'm sure you remember this case; it can't have been very long since you took Civ Pro) (and I'm even a fairly strong freedom of contract proponent). But then, I am also a loon, as you say. I'm not even entirely sure I agree with the vague "Correlative Rights" doctrine of Crandall v. Nevada. Even for a results-oriented decision, it seemed sort of unnecessary to make stuff up when they could have disposed of the case on Congress's plenary authority over interstate commerce. And don't get me started on the contortions we've had to do with privileges and/or immunities to avoid complete incorporation.
So I've got this loony theory that maybe the federal government should just do the stuff we told it to do in the Constitution, and then we should pretty much leave the states alone to govern themselves so the local people can have some control over their own communities, unless they want to do something in violation of the constitution (because, you know, privileges, immunity, the first eight amendments, Rep. Bingham and all that jazz). It's actually a pretty radical theory, especially if you're taking Con Law from the Ghost of William Brennan, as you apparently are. And really, I'm the first loon to think of it, except a couple of nobodies like Hugo Black and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and (really, if you break it down) John Marshall. And Scalia and Thomas to an extent. And we'll see about Alito.
So bottom line, there is a 10th amendment, you haven't proved otherwise, we disagree on a bunch of stuff that reasonable people can disagree on, you don't get full cites from me because some of us have to pay for Westlaw access, William Brennan is dead, and Hugo Black pwns a11 u SUXORZ!
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Your hands are not clean, the're a grubby green, they will remain so, because now governments can say "No monies available for you clean anything"
"Bad decisions and investments should end up this way. Poof. Now we go after the fools who made it happen, and toss 'em in jail."
Precisely, except the "poof" you mention is not their money dissapearing it's ours, and since I am not an American I cannot vote to punish them. Doing nothing and hoping the ideology in your link can clean up the mess it created is akin to having a blow tourch held against your face and refusing to move because it "sucks to be them".
"The alternative is mortgaging your children's future. They'll be the ones paying the bill if the bailout happens."
The history of reserve bank interventions around the world over the last 3-4 decades shows that assumption to be incorrect. Your nation has borrowed too much, the rest of the world want their money back, they have no interest in seeing the US economy resemble the disaster that occured in Argentina, (for now) your nations creditors are the only ones keeping you from another great depression.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Jesse Helms used to do that too.
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
Actually, a staffer might be better in some ways. Do you think the politicians themselves have the time to write, or even read, those multi-hundred-page bills they vote on? It's the staffers that do all that, and if you have the ear (umm, the eye, it's email) of one of them in the right place, you've a very valuable policy shaping instrument indeed!
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
Kind of convenient isn't it?
I almost wonder if this wasn't part of some greater plan.
Huh? If their web server is crashing due to too much email, why not just move the mail server onto a different box?
WTF?
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Okay, congratulations, you've proved you have free Westlaw access, which means you're a student (but shame on your for not having Blue Book-correct cites; I hope you're not on Law Review), and so you deserve a little more respect that J. Random Slashdotter who thinks he knows the law.
Damnation. You're a practicing attorney, aren't you? Alright, I've got to be a little more humble and back up my arguments a little more forcefully. (And I'm not following formal style because this is just an informal internet geek fight. I'll add some links for people who don't have access to services like Westlaw.)
It says "the rest doesn't belong to the Federal government." Sure, you've shown that you favor a more expansive Commerce Clause than I do, but that's orthogonal to my point, which is that the 10th Amendment does, in fact, say something about it ("strong" teeth is your phrase, not mine). You're talking about matters of degree, which are up for reasonable debate. [...] In any case, all constitutional theorists agree that the states have some powers reserved to them (if you can dig up a single remotely credible scholar who says otherwise, I'd like to see it; even Ginsburg will occasionally defer to the autonomy of the states).
I'd agree on the last point. New York v. United States 488 U.S. 1041 (1992) makes clear that Congress can't compel state action through promises of penalties. (See Part B(1) of the majority opinion). The rest of the opinion provides good support for the notion that even if you can't use the stick, you can use the carrot.
For Commerce Clause purposes, Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority , 469 U.S. 528 (1985) threw the Tenth Amendment out the window. The court rejected the standard introduced National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833 (1976) which required courts to examine whether a law passed by Congress interfered with "areas of traditional governmental functions."
"Our examination of this 'function' standard applied in these and other cases over the last eight years now persuades us that the attempt to draw the boundaries of state regulatory immunity in terms of "traditional governmental function" is not only unworkable but is also inconsistent with established principles of federalism and, indeed, with those very federalism principles on which National League of Cities purported to rest. That case, accordingly, is overruled."
Garcia at 531.
The problem following Garcia is that they never replaced the Usery standard with anything new! Blackmum explicitly refused to do so: "These cases do not require us to identify or define what affirmative limits the constitutional structure might impose on federal action affecting the States under the Commerce Clause" (Garcia at 556). No case following it has ruled that an exercise of Commerce Clause power violated the Tenth Amendment. Looking back to what preceded Usery, all we have is post-Lochner caselaw that treats the 10th Amendment as a mere truism.
For example, take the following frequently cited quote from United States v. Darby Lumber Co. , 312 U.S. 100 (1941) (which overturned prior precedent that gave effect to the 10th Amendment):
"The amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
>>>our economy has been further stressed by massive war spending
No not really. The U.S. spends about 10 billion per year on Iraq/Afghanistan, which is just small change compared to the 700 billion bailout, or the 6000 billion lost in the stock market since September 1st.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
And mine! Jefferson Party! High five!
I wish you'd posted logged in because i wish to subscribe to your newsletter. No sarcasm involved. I have nothing on the line and no debt. I want to see heads roll.
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
Other Democrats also deserve blame for passing laws allowing banks to give mortgages without any downpayment ("every person deserves a home even if they cannot afford it"),
Together with lending substantially more than the value of properties. The initial effect of this being to drive up property prices and make banks money out of the first few sets of defaulters. Problem is that a high rate of property price increase can't be sustained in the long term. People who have money are going to be reluctant to take out mortgages they can't afford because they are risking their own money.
but that's a minor flaw we probably could have survived, if the original 1930s law requiring banks to have real money backed by real assets (no stocks) was still in effect.
These banks might not be in a good financial situation, but they'd unlikely to be bankrupt.
Bill of Rights takes several powers away from the government (granting some rights to you).
I think it's time to go back to law school until you get this part right.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Let's not bring Bugs Bunny into this.
Gerry
The U.S. is spending about 10 Billion a month, not a year.
Gerry
Please, find out how laws are made.
The president can only veto a bill, he/she does not make laws. A good president respects the democratic process and only vetoes a bill when there is extremely good reason to do so. It's only president Bush who has distorted the procedure with signing statements.
It's sad when a foreigner has to point out how your political system works.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
My children's future is gone. They spent it already. This is mortgaging my grandchildren's future.
Perhaps regulation would have helped. But the "financial instruments" are the market adapting to a changing playing field. A playing field the US government changed when they decided to artificially adjust markets by guaranteeing almost every mortgage in the country on the foolish idea that everyone deserves a house. Remove Fannie and Freddie from the mix and suddenly banks have to be much more cautious about the loans they hand out because they are on the line for it.
The free market didn't fail this time, the free market wasn't given a chance to work.
If you assume that Congress has UNLIMITED AUTHORITY, then why do we have a Constitution at all? The Constitution is a compact between the people, of the comity of the people, WITH EACH OTHER which vests certain defined and limited portions of the absolute sovereignty of the people in a Congress, etc. That power is clearly and explicitly limited. What part of 'reserved to the people' is not clear here?
When Congress assumes for itself powers not vested in it they are overthrowing the authority of the people. MY ancestors stood literally in the face of British cannon fire in order to guarantee EVERYONE the protection of those rights. Now, does anyone doubt that it does us dishonor if we fail to respect that? I WILL NOT yield those rights, not to Congress nor to anyone else. And if fools insist on giving them away, then I will withdraw my permission for those people to use those rights, and there is NO LIMIT to my right to do so, nor to the just means which I may avail myself of in that cause.
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa00.htm
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Please vote against the proposed 700 billion dollar taxpayer funded bank bail-out. I do not want my taxes going to pay bankers, speculators, and risk-taking borrowers. I should not have to pay for their financial sins.
Maybe instead those responsible should be putting their hands in their pockets.
I think part of the problem is that when these mortgages were 'packaged' and sold, the securities were sold at values which were far in excess of the reasonable value of the underlying surety (the home). Frankly I doubt most of the people who bought them really understood that.
Deregulation has lead to a scenario where the large financial institutions dealings have become almost totally opaque. Trust but verify became 'oh, what the heck, everyone is doing it.'
The SCALE of the insanity is almost impossible to even measure. Credit default swaps for example (basically insurance taken on these instruments) reached a total net payout value of 74 TRILLION DOLLARS in 2006. The total net asset value of the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE is only about 54 trillion dollars!!! The entire thing was literally insane, beyond any conceivable reason.
No bailout is going to fix all this because the fundamentals simply cannot support the whole way the industry is being run. Truth is the banking system porked itself. Time to start thinking about how money works. Deep thinking required now.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
They WILL do so. Personally I'm not one of the rabid originalist type. I think society has to function and OK, it is true that the original intent was probably that gold and silver were the only money Congress was allowed to make. Yet our modern society could not function on that basis. Unfortunately the debate was never had as to how the authority of Congress should have been altered in order to accommodate changing circumstance.
Instead the existing terms of the document were stretched out of all recognition one small increment at a time.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
This comic nails the public's reaction to this:
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2947
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Still teeny-tiny compared to the 6000 billion lost in stock market investments this past month. Even if the Iraq War spending disappeared completely, it would not have any measurable impact on the economy
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I run into canadian border patrol that tell me i have to go back because I don't have any previous employment as a manager.
Well now we know you're lying; Canada has no border patrols. And no, the beavers and moose do not count. **sotto voce** Shh... don't let them know we have real beer and better health care or they'll all want some.
*puts on mountie hat and waves to tourists*
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I would 'try back at a later time'; like at Election time, in the ballot box.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The purpose of the bill was to act as a placebo for hysterical traders who literally have no idea what is happening and who cannot be relied upon to either calm down or trade rationally. I don't mean collectively speaking. I mean on an individual basis. That bill was a mass Valium prescription for a mass of people who are a danger to themselves and society. Taking it away was like dosing a crazy person with amphetamines, putting them in room 101, then giving them explosives and a loaded shotgun. Predictably, the traders and money men completely lost the run of themselves, and had a good old fashioned Panic Attack.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to gives these people actual benzodiazepines though...
Also, the Obsessive-Compulsive Party. But frankly they aren't going very far what with their platform of opening every door three times before going though and not shaking hands with anyone or kissing any babies.
And the Procrastinators who have just delayed the 1967 convention for the 41st time.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I'm pretty sure, on average, it's dark half the time everywhere.
Nope. Not really. It gets light about 30 mins before dawn and dark about 30 mins after sunset, so I'd say it's dark about 11/24 of the time on average.
Sam Johnson (HR, TX) has done the exact same to me.
Twice.
I see the Gulf of Mexico that-a-way.
No, they're Republicans, because they register as Republicans, and self identify as Republicans.
Your party affiliation isn't tied in lockstep with your political choices.
An as an aside, you sound like an ass telling people what political pary you think they are in when the only relevant criteria is what they choose to identify as.
Except they originators WEREN'T on the line for the mortgages because they securitized them and sold them off to banks which were acting as both a bank and a highly leveraged investment house, if they had been required to act as a BANK then they would have been looking closely at these mortgages instead of simply buying commercial paper.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This has to be the funniest and yet the most true statement I could ever read.
If only governments could be held accountable, we would, wait a minute......I think they can....
Has anyone seen my stocks lately???
I'd say it's dark about 11/24 of the time on average.
11/24 == one half for a greater portion of the US than any other industrialized country!
JADBP
That's not "lost". It was imaginary money in the first place.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
You're not a Republican. You're a fiscal conservative as am I. While there are some like us in the Republican party, certainly more than there are in the Democrat party, we're still a minority voice within the party. So much so that I don't consider myself a Republican anymore. There are very few Republicans like Tom Coburn in the Senate and Ron Paul and Jeff Flake in the House that are truly fiscal conservative today and were truly fiscal conservatives during their years in the majority. Most of the party just plays it lip service when it suits them.
I'm a registered independent. I used to consider myself more of a republican when I was a kid but their behavior turned me off in the 90's. I was never a big dem fan but since Bush have allied with them out of a sense of self-preservation. But they've been fairly awful, especially on the national level. There's really not that much difference in Congress between ownership-class reps and ownership-class dems, they're all working against the American people.
Philosophically, I believe in only using as much effort/money/resources required to do the job right and no more. Just throwing money at a problem does nothing to solve it if the money is not spent wisely. Throwing government at a problem does nothing if there's no plan of action, no leadership. And letting unregulated business get their hands on anything just turns it into a fuckfest like our current stock market.
As far as government goes, I believe that sovereignty rests with the people, is granted to a governing authority as needed, and thus gives the people a controlling interest in that government, and thus the authority to remove management if they are performing poorly. The government's duty is to the people and any action taken that harms the people is thus treason. By this standard, pretty much everyone in Congress is guilty of treason. On a practical matter, the role of government is to provide for the security and safety of the people by providing services that cannot be entrusted to the hands of private enterprise.
As far as finance goes, I'm a conservative. To hell with this casino bubble economy. The whole point of having an economy is to make the individual lives of citizens better through cooperation than it would be if everyone worked individually. Business activity that has a neutral impact upon the populace is permissible, it does no good and no harm. Actively malicious business would be prosecuted. But as for larger corporations, the original charters historically were granted because the corporation would perform some net good for the community while providing a reasonable return for the people investing in it. A charter to build a bridge or a toll road was a net gain but if the corporation did harm to the community, the 20 year charter might not be renewed. By this standard, I think most companies in America would be facing revocation of their charters.
Socially, I'm very liberal. And it harm none, do what thou wilt. You want to have orgies and stick furniture up your ass? Do it in your own home and I don't give a rat's ass. Be gay, be bi, be a sexual omnivore, it's all good. Pray to God, pray to Allah, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I don't care. Want to be a furry? I think you're a sick motherfucker and wouldn't ever want to associate with you personally but what the fuck, so long as you don't come after me in a fursuit, I'll support no law against you. And I'll rain fire down on morality police who say that God cries when someone puts a penis in their bottom but says nothing when a televangelist defrauds his flock.
I wonder if there's a party for me. I'm voting Obama but I don't know if he can clean up the dems. Those fuckers were sent back to Congress with a mandate to stop the war and impeach Bush but their record over the past two years has been one of cowardice and shame. "Impeachment's off the table!" says Pelosi. Fuck her and fuck Reid.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Don't worry, the left-wing media is spending time talking about how laws passed by a Democrat controlled congress are all Bush's fault.
Face it, the guy in the hot seat, right behind the "The Buck Stops Here" sign gets the blame or credit for whatever bad or good happens, even when it's not especially his fault. I note that, as an example, Clinton got a fair amount of heat for a recession that was really the fault of the previous Bush Administration.
But do remember that everything that goes before Congress now does so with the approval of the Democrats, who have been in charge there for most of Bush's presidency.
Note, by the way, that the author(s) of a Bill aren't nearly so important as the people who vote for it. There hasn't been a bill before Congress in the history of the country that was passed because all the authors voted for it, and everyone else voted against.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That legislation repealed the part of the Glass-Steagall act of 1933 that prevented a bank holding company from owning other financial companies, allowing an entity to engage in banking and investment banking simulataneously. Since none of the traditional investment banks were particularly interested in commercial or consumer banking, the practical effect was to allow large, well-capitalized, diversified institutions like B of A, JP Morgan and Citi to enter the investment banking industry.
It is precisely the new entrants to investment banking that have survived the crisis, whereas the victims have been either old-fashioned investment banks (Bear, Lehman, Morgan-Stanley ... all of them, really) or old-fashioned banks (Countrywide, WaMu, Wachovia.) So on the evidence, the Financial Services Modernization Act has made the situation better, not worse.
That is not to say regulation could not have prevented the problem. One obvious possibility would have been to make it illegal to lend mortgages that don't meet minimum downpayment and income requirements. The only problem is that such a regulation would have been just as unpopular with voters as the bailout package; the politicians who voted for it would probably be out of office now ("why do you want to stop Americans from owning their own homes?!")
Another problem is that it is not enough to invent regulations; one must also enforce them. AIG would never have failed, for instance, if they had not been allowed to circumvent existing insurance industry regulation in a rather crude and obvious way by guaranteeing captive subsidiaries.
In any case, the general difficulty in preventing a financial crisis is to know what the right regulation is before the problem, not afterwards. Just randomly making up rules always makes things worse because the ratio of harmful to helpful regulations is infinite.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
I want some of whatever it is that you're smoking. The Repubs have been in control of both houses from 1994 up to 2006. It was only in 2006 that the Dems got the slimmest of majority in congress, and even still it is not a veto proof majority so they can't really do much except go along with Bush... I wish they would stand up to him a little more.
I would say that when you have the author of one of the worst finance bills in the history of our country that also writes the economic policy for a potential future President, that is a big deal . These guys are crooks, liars, and have been giving special perks to their cronies for decades now. We're just starting to see the real downside emerge.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
That's basically the ONLY response I've ever gotten about anything that concerned me.
I was never quite sure how relaxing royalties facing net radio broadcasters had anything to do with troubling times.
Move all sig!
We (as represented by Andrew Carnegie) tried that already; the result was what we call the Great Depression. The problem is that it is not just (or even primarily) the "Republican fat cats" who "did stupid, risky things" who will suffer. Most have them have stupidly and riskily amassed large fortunes in safe assets like US treasuries. The people who will suffer most are everybody else - i.e. you. If the government waits to act until its constituency figures this out (because tens of millions of them are out of work), the resulting depression will be much worse than it need have been.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
Mea culpa. You're right. I was thinking the 2002 elections forced the issue, not the 2006 one. Though I should point out that the Dems controlled the Senate from 2000-2002, after Jeffords switched parties.
Note that if you require a veto-proof majority to do anything against the will of the President, that pretty much noone has had that since Johnson was President (though Jimmy Carter had a veto-proof House for two years,and Ford's last two years included a veto-proof Democratic House). Certainly Republicans under Clinton didn't. So if lack of a veto-proof majority is justification for blaming Bush for the actions of Congress, then it's justification for blaming Clinton for the actions of Congress.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Go Further.
there's ANYONE who thinks that women can't be congressmen.
so use congressmen. We know there are both sexes doing that job.
Wouldn't it come out to 13/24, taking the time average over a whole year?
And, as long as the prices go down, the rich will not invest their cash in it. It's FAR better to loan the money to some poor sucker who needs to buy a house.
'cept that has to be done through a bank.
Which aren't letting go of ANY cash to loan out.
The parties are BRAND NAMES. its all marketing.
Degradation of party principles has been in exponential decay for over a generation. To the point where both appear to be too similar to anybody on the edge out outside the NARROW perspective between the two.
The new democrats were corporate sell outs and their success only helped move their party in that direction. The republicans sold out much sooner and obviously degraded to an even worse condition where in the last 8 years they completely oppose their founding principles. Both parties continue to market themselves on the principles they no longer have because IT WORKS.
People who notice the loss of values in the society that used to be reflected (metaphorically) in the parties are often confused as to what is going on-- I came to this conclusion from observing how both parties spend considerable effort trying to win over these people who know there is something wrong but are unable to figure out what it is. Such as, blaming inequity, media, secularism, elitism, etc falsely to label the cause of the problems and then marketing against those and the people who oppose it. Sure, the best thing is to pick something with some truth to it but its purpose is marketing and distraction not to actually solve anything.
What is interesting is how the few honest politicians on both sides seem to agree so much and sometimes even point out some of the real things going on-- which makes them too unpopular to succeed. The SOCIETY is degrading and it is reflecting in the leadership they re-elect and since this manifestation is observable people fail to see the connection between their personal involvement (or they don't want to accept blame.)
Americans can't accept any blame. Selfishness has increased to where the old 2 party beliefs of one for all or preserving liberty are empty slogans -- even the slogans are weak in that they work on a smaller segment of the voting public than they used to.
As a kid, my church got rid of a priest because about 1/3 of the members didn't like his application of the morals to THEM. He'd point out the hypocrisy. They just wanted to be made to feel good about themselves and probably made to feel better than other people. This group took over the church and it was a trend. (FYI, it was not my choice to go, and if I was still a believer I wouldn't likely find an honest church left in this city.)
This is the Century of the Self.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Theoretically yes. However, the president can also make signing statements that can dramatically effect how the law is interpreted and this president has used that power more than any other.
The president also makes executive orders which can be quite powerful. Guam became a part of the US via an executive order for example.
As for making laws, in modern history the initial budget proposals start in the executive wing and then are passed to their party's congressional leaders to revise before putting them to a vote. That's why we call the tax cuts 'Bush' tax cuts because they were proposed by his administration.
Before the FISA vote, i emailed both of my senators. I received a response from both of them months after the fact in which they were both using the same form letter and to thank me for my support.
I think it's time to go back to law school until you get this part right.
Are you disputing this? Do you have any logical basis for this statement or are you just asserting that I'm wrong without any supporting evidence that might allow one to question your own knowledge? This is how Amendments like the 1st through 5th, 8th, and 9th are viewed, after all.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yes, I'm disputing it. The logical basis for the statement is obvious to anyone that's read basic high-school US history. Alexander Hamilton spent a great deal of energy in Federalist #84 arguing against the inclusion of an explicit bill of rights in the new constitution on the basis that it would be misinterpreted exactly as you've done.
The Constitution grants the government specific rights. The first ten Amendments do not grant anything, but rather enumerate rights held by the people by virtue of the fact that they're human beings. The whole idea of the Constitution is that the government can only derive its power from the consent of the governed. *Any* power the government has is that which the people explicitly give it, and any power not mentioned is implicitly held by the people.
From your viewpoint, exactly how is the government supposed to have come into possession of the rights that it so magnanimously gives back to its citizens?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The way my laptop is oriented, the direction is right on.
For me it's.. possibly the Pikes Place market, but definitely the pacific ocean. North-ish but will probably miss the San Juans and hit one side or the other of the Bering straits. I think.
Signing statements don't have the power of law. They are judgments on how the law should be enforced, which is the purpose of the executive branch. FWIW, I don't believe Bush invented signing statements either, although I seem to recall that he brought them to the forefront with one that said "The law says this, but I take it to mean this" - with that latter, of course, being the opposite of the former. The executive branch has always had this power, and the ability to selectively enforce laws. GWB just made one statement that was really dumb, and got everyone's attention.
Learn about Photography Basics.
The first ten Amendments do not grant anything, but rather enumerate rights held by the people by virtue of the fact that they're human beings.
Semantics. Rights only exist so far as they can't be taken away from you. Your right to live only exists because it's illegal for people to murder you. Your right to free speech only exists because it's illegal to restrain your speech. In absence of those restraints against other parties, your rights don't exist.
By banning the government from taking certain actions against you, the Constitution creates those rights, but there is nothing that gives you those rights if you live under a government that doesn't protect them. There are only inherent human rights in an abstract, moral sense and not in any real, concrete sense. It's up to us to make them real.
The whole idea of the Constitution is that the government can only derive its power from the consent of the governed. *Any* power the government has is that which the people explicitly give it, and any power not mentioned is implicitly held by the people.
Only because the Constitution says so. The problem is that we explicitly gave the government very broad powers in the main body of the Constitution -- powers that people thinking of ratifying the Constitution were afraid of. The Bill of Rights was created to take back the powers that the people felt were too much for the government to have.
And now to take a point out of order...
Alexander Hamilton spent a great deal of energy in Federalist #84 arguing against the inclusion of an explicit bill of rights in the new constitution on the basis that it would be misinterpreted exactly as you've done.
And that's why the people created the 9th Amendment to explicitly state that that's *not* what the Bill of Rights is. It's the catch-all, "just because we didn't think of it doesn't mean that it's not a right" clause.
From your viewpoint, exactly how is the government supposed to have come into possession of the rights that it so magnanimously gives back to its citizens?
The citizens granted those rights to each other. The citizens gave rights to the federal government in the Constitution by accepting the power of the government over them, and the citizens took back rights in the Bill of Rights by barring the government from using its power in certain ways. It is the citizens who define what our rights are. Our rights only exist, just as the government does, with the mandate of the people.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That is pretty good. Nicely done.
I will use my second amendment right to blow each mofo republican I see.
You can blow me, tardboy.
We may not like how they're exercising that power, but there's absolutely no question that they have it to anyone who's studied Supreme Court precedent on the matter.
Right, but just because they've adopted a binding system of stare decisis in a manner incompatible with Constitutional rule doesn't make it Constitutional. A persuasive system would allow the judges to uphold their oaths.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just to put this into perspective.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
You mean putting the allosaurus in charge of the henhouse? Yeah, that's a bad idea. Vote Cthulhu!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Well, I was replying to you, but I was agreeing with you disagreeing with him... ;)
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Bailing out the institutions needn't be the same as bailing out their managers, shareholders or employees. You'll need experienced bankers to run those institutions, of course, so you may need to let off a good few of the less tainted....but I'm sure there's a pool of completely untainted bankers, too - those involved only in retail banking and not mortgages, for example.
It's not as if the 700bn is just going down the toilet...the US government would get a large amount of loans for that. The original intention was to buy them at roughly their true value so the taxpayer should get about 700bn back - with interest. There's still a good chance of a loss, of course (if defaults are higher than anticipated) - but not a 700bn USD loss. In the absence of someone with a few hundered billion dollars who feels like setting up a few new banks (and employing those no longer working for the stricken ones), I don't think you've got a better option.
You still don't understand... The repubs have controlled congress for 6 of 8 years of Bush's presidency. How can you even call it a Democrat controlled congress when it wasn't the case?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
it's real though.
take a look at canadian immigration sites.
they wont give you canadian permanent resident status unless you:
a - have family there
b - are a "professional" (no, degrees don't count, you have to be middle manager or higher.. good luck in this economy)
c - you are kennedy rich, and looking to move your business there
A long time ago I remember hearing you only need a bachelor's degree. I guess a few years of conservative rule have resulted in borders shut tighter than a duck's ass.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
In case no one has noticed, the TV media is now clearly showing their complete lack of credibility on the bailout issue, as all the stories (at least that I've seen so far) have been totally pro bailout-- with essentially, "it's necessary, we know better but can't really muster a cogent argument, but those who oppose it are ignorant morons," treatment.
I think it's REALLY nice to see that the public just isn't buying it, despite the media pulling out all the stops.
I think we should all remember this, and not hold ONLY the Congress' feet to the fire in November, but remember the media's role in the matter.
Right, but just because they've adopted a binding system of stare decisis in a manner incompatible with Constitutional rule doesn't make it Constitutional. A persuasive system would allow the judges to uphold their oaths.
A persuasive system would make it no more or less constitutional than a binding system. After all, "constitutional" would still be a matter of court interpretation. All you do is shift around the authority to do so.
A persuasive system has the worse side effect of substituting rule of man for rule of law. While you take serious issue with the binding precedent of "wrong" decisions, you overlook the importance of binding precedent for right decisions. Take the case of Watts v. Indiana , 338 U.S. 49 (1949). This is a horrible case involving two young black men who were arrested for a murder they didn't commit, tortured into confession, and then had their confessions admitted as evidence at the trial court over their objections. The Indiana State Supreme Court ruled that admitting such confessions did not violate the prisoners' due process rights and affirmed their conviction. The United State Supreme Court rightly overturned this decision.
Now, in a binding precedent world, no court of this nation finds itself free to allow confessions under torture to be admitted in court. In a persuasive precedent world, the state of Indiana (and all other states with racist judiciaries) would find themselves free to merely consider that opinion "persuasive" and continue to allow black people to be tortured into confessing to crimes they didn't commit. The rule of law against torture and coerced confessions would be subverted to the rule of man in favor of racist policies and injustice. Precedent means only as much as a judge's personal prejudices allow it in such a system, and the justice system would become one of personal fiefdoms and local corruption instead of a uniform system of the law.
The only matter of recourse would be to have each decision appealed up to a higher level, and as that article notes, the Supreme Court (and Circuit Courts) can only hear so many cases per year. A single corrupt judge who cares little for what is constitutional might have all of their decisions overturned, but if the problem becomes endemic, then a lack of binding precedent would prevent courts from tackling the system efficiently and would frankly render the appeals process pointless when every judge is an equal peer for determining constitutional muster.
You may complain about how there are "unconstitutional" decisions by the body invested with the power of deciding what is and isn't constitutional, but you are too quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Minor correction. There was only victim in this case. I was confusing the facts of this case with another one involving two men being beaten with leather straps that I also dug up for a paper on torture. The due process issue that was the core of my argument is still correct, though.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
McCain tried at least twice and Bush once (with McCain) to deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but the Democrats blocked it and it didn't get through.
War spending has done great things for the economy in my part of the state. Raises/bonuses are up and the only major companies doing layoffs are the casinos.
What actually STARTED this mess, however, was the Community Reinvestment Act, which was signed in by Jimmy Carter and used during the Clinton Administration by Janet Reno to threaten banks in order to force them to make more high-risk loans.
Since then there have been more culprits. As evidenced by the fact that many banks are still holding steady, keeping to a bare minimum of CRA cooperation doesn't necessarily mean sinking your business. There have been a lot of companies willing and able to make risky loans thanks in part to the government's relaxations and encouragements in order to attempt to allow ANYBODY to get a mortgage. A lot of people have accepted deals that, if they had enough financial sense to outdo their greed, they never would have TOUCHED.
Why hasn't this caused trouble until now? Simple: The housing bubble burst. As long as interest rates were low and housing prices were high, we were not set up for trouble. Once interest rates rose, fewer people were buying, and prices therefore fell, suddenly a ton of these risky mortgages started to fail. Interestingly enough, this started around 2006, when the Democrats regained a majority... but that's probably coincidence.
Blaming Republicans alone is silly... blaming Bush is sillier, as he tried to fix it and wasn't allowed to... blaming McCain is sillier, as he tried to fix it multiple times and was rebuffed. But the silliest of all is to blame capitalism.
Certain phrases can be used to identify certain ideals. Once you learn them, you can often identify certain types of economics (or religions) by their catchphrases. This crisis boils down to: "You deserve/have the right to [item] regardless of your ability to pay." This is not a capitalist catchphrase. This is socialism at work.
Why? Congress hasn't yet been able to pass a bailout bill because the constituents oppose it so strongly that the legislators are afraid to vote Yes. This in spite of those who get on the news and claim that our economy will "come to a stop" if we don't bail them out.
I think it's clear that the majority of Americans favor 'taking the medicine'. What's the hypocrisy in fighting government intervention?
There's this thing a president can do... oh I keep forgetting... it rhymes with veto... oh wait, it is veto.
And at the time there were plenty enough democrats voting against it (54-44 was the margin it passed in the senate) to allow a veto to hold. So clearly enough democrats wanted it too.
You obviously didn't read my post before you replied to it. I think I was cheering on a Depression as the appropriate remedy for a nation that en masse was indulging in a giant Ponzi scheme. I think I said the average American's who are running up $20K balances on credit cars, taking out adjustable rate mortages with total disregard for the fact the rates WOULD go up, and who were flipping house cashing in on a bubble deserve to suffer just as much as the Wall Street bankers and mortgage brokers that were running the Ponzi scheme.
Dishing out $700 million to the same companies that created this miss is INSANE. On CNBC I saw some lady from a small community bank. She basically said they aren't in trouble. They only made loans to people who could pay them back, no subprime loans, they required down payments so the borrower had "skin in the game". Her loan practices hadn't changed in 20 years and they are doing fine. The only companies in trouble are the one thats were either stupid or criminal. Buying all their shit from them is just giving them a get out of jail free card.
I'm not rich but I also don't borrow money and I don't invest in risky stupid investments. Returns on my assets aren't huge as a result but they are OK and safe. Why the FUCK should my tax dollars go to bail out people whore are credit whores, stock market gamblers, and who weren't complaining when they were racking in huge profits and bonuses last year and they year before, and aren't given any of their ill gotten gains back. Sure most of the fat cats have gotten their parachutes and are invested in gold now but nothing I can do about that. I can say NO to handing another $700 billion to the incompetent and criminal companies and people who created this mess.
@de_machina
Don't worry, the left-wing media is spending time talking about how laws passed by a Democrat controlled congress are all Bush's fault.
The whole left wing media bullshit is even more played out than the the rest of your bullshit. Hot tip, you fucking moron. All of the mainstream media is owned by large corporations. You know, the "elite" that the right wing by definition is dedicated to?
Perhaps you should learn what the left and right are and why they both fucking suck?
Think about it you pea brained asshat. How is repeating the bullshit propaganda of fascists actually helping you? Unless you're extremely rich, it's not.
But do remember that everything that goes before Congress now does so with the approval of the Democrats, who have been in charge there for most of Bush's presidency.
Let's see.. 2/8 is "most of" 1?
Yep, you're about twelve different sorts of stupid.
You're correct, he certainly didn't invent it (although it is a fairly recent development for all practical purposes, with only 75 being written before Reagan).
It certainly has become controversial with Bush because he has challenged so many laws and tried to use it as a line-item veto tool. See here for more details.
"You deserve/have the right to [item] regardless of your ability to pay." This is not a capitalist catchphrase. This is socialism at work.
No, that is not *necessarily* socialism at work. It depends entirely upon who the "deserving" party is.
If it's some poor entity, then it's socialism.
If it's a rich entity then it's fascism.
That's the difference between the left and the right. Whose benefit they want to use the state to fuck everyone else over in favor of.
So, when you see somebody claiming some big government bullshit is necessarily "socialism" without paying attention to the details which make all the difference, you can easily recognize them as a big government ninny state right wing extremist fascist shitbag.
Oh, and that's you, by the way.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
Mind the frickin' laser...
Not exactly.. Guam was first captured during a bloodless event in the Spanish-American War in 1898, then lost to the Japanese in WWII. After regaining control, the Navy effectively (and officially) had control over the island, until it was transferred to the custody of the Dept. of the Interior in 1949. Nonetheless, the citizens of Guam didn't become citizens of the US until the Organic Act was passed by Congress in 1950. You could argue semantics, I suppose, but I think most people would agree that qualifying as a "part of" a country includes citizenship in that country. Yap, Palau, and Chuuk, for example, were controlled by the US for about 30 years, but the residents do not enjoy US citizenship (although they do have special US immigration and residency privileges, particularly on Guam). See also: Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and Federated States of Micronesia.
I actually lived on Guam until recently.. spent about 6 years there. Great strip clubs, nice diving, though Palau has much better diving from what I'm told.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'm a trifle deaf in this ear. Speak a little louder next time.
No worries, your sort is well known for spouting meaningless bullshit and babbling nonsense like that when called on your ignorance and lies.
Too bad you're incapable of actually defending your nonsense position, but common decency does demand that you stop spouting such idiocy given that. I certainly don't expect anything like that to stop you though. You wouldn't be making such idiotic statements in the first place if you were concerned about decency or anything of the sort.
You're right, I wasn't being precise. The correct thing would have been to say that Guam was put under civilian control via executive order. Control of the island was transferred from the navy to the Secretary of the Interior by Truman's executive order 10077. I would still argue that's a pretty powerful thing to do by one person, transferring control of a territory from military to civilian leadership.
Of course it's not a state, but that doesn't mean it's not part of America. Puerto Rico also doesn't have state status but is a territory of the US just as Guam is. For a large part of the history of the US territories have existed that certainly were considered parts of America. Most current states were first territories at some point and people in those territories certainly considered themselves to be a part of America.
Coming from someone who, without knowing who I am or how I came to my conclusions, decided I was a "big government ninny state right wing extremist fascist ****bag", that's rich!
In case you hadn't noticed, that's also when I ceased to believe that you were someone who could be reasoned with, hence my decision to not even bother defending or explaining my viewpoint to you.
I wasn't the one to break the rules of common decency. Judging from the moderation on your original response, I am not the only one who noticed that.
Coming from someone who, without knowing who I am or how I came to my conclusions, decided I was a "big government ninny state right wing extremist fascist ****bag", that's rich!
Typical. You made a blatantly false statement which could only have been done out of malicious intent or gross ignorance making a massive untrue generalization. I made an accurate generalization in the same vein and you have nothing to respond with but whining.
In case you hadn't noticed, that's also when I ceased to believe that you were someone who could be reasoned with, hence my decision to not even bother defending or explaining my viewpoint to you.
Your viewpoint is entirely indefensible. It's based on your ignorance of the meanings of the terms you're misusing, so there's no point in you trying ot defend it. You're wrong as I clearly pointed out. The fact that you can't take what you're trying to dish out is a character flaw.
I wasn't the one to break the rules of common decency.
Sure you did. You tried to declare anyone who made a statement to be a socialist. Trying to ignore the existence of fascists and the other right wing shitbags and pretend that that whole side of the spectrum doesn't even exist is completely disgusting. My grandfather fought against the monsters you are actively trying to cover for. That is far outside the bounds of decency. Lie all you like. I'll be happy to continue demonstrating your deep dishonesty. It's not difficult, you're that deeply ignorant.
Unfortunately, your "accurate generalization" was dead wrong. I am not a big-government fascist s***bag. I am a libertarian, and as such I see elements of socialism in both Communism and Fascism - indeed, in any group, including those of the left or right wing who seek increased government control "for the good of all".
Sorry to hear about your grandfather fighting against extremist Republicans. My grandfather was not in any war, but my father fought communists in Vietnam and my great-uncle fought fascists in WW2.
I find your claim interesting that "'You deserve this despite your ability to pay' sounds socialist" breaks the bounds of common decency but "You are a fascist s***bag" does not. Good luck with that.
Flamebait? Evidently the Cubans are touchy about being compared to Canadians.
JADBP
Unfortunately, your "accurate generalization" was dead wrong. I am not a big-government fascist s***bag. I am a libertarian, and as such I see elements of socialism in both Communism and Fascism - indeed, in any group, including those of the left or right wing who seek increased government control "for the good of all".
Oh, ok, I get it.
You're a fucking idiot.
You use a term to mean something completely different than what it actually means, it just so happens to be a redefinition pushed by the fascist shitbags in this country for the purpose of marginalizing the specific ideology that you claim to be a supporter of, and then whine that you get pegged as a supporter of what you actually are working to support.
Right, my bad.
No, fuck that. Your bad..
Socialism is Communism light. To get from Socialism to Fascism you have to skip completely over Liberalism (Classical Liberalism, not what idiot Americans allowed the founding philosophy of their nation to be redefined as. It's pretty much what you think you believe in ) to the complete polar opposite. Now for you to claim that they're the same, you have to be an extremely stupid piece of shit, and that's a fact.
Increased government control for the good of all is the cry of the Left and the Right. It's what people like myself are against. You are for it, but you're too fucking stupid and ignorant to realize it as evidenced by that delusional shit you spouted. You're just helping try and redirect the blame by your spouting of fascist propaganda. And again, you're too fucking stupid to notice it.
. My grandfather was not in any war, but my father fought communists in Vietnam and my great-uncle fought fascists in WW2.
Hot tip idiot. Your father was not fighting communists in Vietnam. He was fighting for fascists. Pull your head out of your ass and think, nay, learn. My father and step father were in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and various other places which it was illegal for them to be in. Unlike you and presumably your father, they were young and dumb, but they actually managed to pull their heads out of their asses and learn.
Did you know that Ho Chi Minh was probably the biggest booster of America that ever lived? He loved the hell out of every good thing we ever stood for. He wrote letters to our Presidents begging us to help them throw off oppression and help them become like us. This is the place where if you were not a complete douche, you'd actually look that up. I doubt you will. (That doubt is my contempt for shitbags like you.) Yet, arguing with France over how liberty is a good thing didn't fit with our weapon's industry's goals so we told him to fuck off and be a good slave (amusingly enough, that was the same take Jesus had in the Bible on slavery). Now after fighting and fighting for a free society (you know, that thing you'll lyingly claim you believe in as a libertarian. Not that libertarians are liars, but you are) for years and begging for help from us and being pissed on repeatedly he turned to the USSR. Not because he liked them, not because he liked communism (he hated it far worse than you), but because it was that or live as a slave....of the fucking French.
So then, as soon as that happened, all of a sudden, from out of nowhere, we magically had enough resources to stage a false flag attack on our own fucking ships to sell the war to the public on the basis of the domino theory with a fucking domino *we* set up.
So no, your god damned father did not ever in his fucking life fight communists. He fought for fascists.
I find your claim interesting that "'You deserve this despite your ability to pay' sounds socialist" breaks the bounds of common decency but "You are a fascist s***bag" does not. Good luck with that.
Well, again, it's your failure to know what the fuck you're talking about that makes it true.
If I said that that bum I passed on the corner deserves your wallet, then that would be socialist. If the board and executives of a bunch of ba
Lots of big numbers in financial news. Kucinich assaulted us with Half Quadrillion last week. How big is that? Have a look: http://njmalhq.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/the-big-picture/
You, sir, are correct. It is a large factor, but certainly not the whole story.
In 1/2008, we were at 4.6 house value-to-income, compared to 3.3 in 1/1990. So there is a need to account for a 39% increase in income deflated house values if we believe that this value should be constant. Adjusting for just medical compensation will account for about a third of this effect. By 7/2008, we were closer to 4.2 house value-to-income, or around 27%, where adjusting for medical compensation would be about half of the effect.
However, I think its unclear if this house value-to-income variable should be stable. Some of the financing innovation and government home ownership program effects may increase this ratio permanently. I'm not a real estate economist and I really don't know.
(Today's workers get about 28% of compensation in medical insurance [$8100 per capita in medical insurance, $51k median household income, 2.6 people per household, 16% uninsurance rate], while in 1990 that was about 19% [$2800 per capita in medical insurance, $30k median household income, 2.6 people per household, 14% uninsurance rate]. A little algebra shows a real wage dollar today is about 13% more compensation than a real wage dollar in 1990.
We went from CSXR of 82.3 in 1990 (median household income of $30k), to 100.0 in 1/2000 (median household income of $42k, median house value of $120k), to 196.1 in 1/2008 (median household income of $51k). Thus, we went from 3.3 house value-to-income in 1990, to 2.9 in 2000, to 4.6 in 1/2008.)
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested