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Nothing To Fear But Fearlessness Itself?
theodp writes "In a post last August, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now his fears are echoed in a WSJ opinion piece by Peggy Noonan titled 'We're Governed by Callous Children.' She writes, 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?"
i don't buy noonan's premise. most elected officials i know (and i know hundreds) don't come from any so-called privileged "leadership class," whatever that is, they come instead from nearly all walks of life and bring with them the experience of extremely diverse backgrounds, including poverty and marginalization. it's true that the profoundly destitute among us, the homeless, the institutionalized etc rarely make it past the intention to run but this recurring conservative refrain that the country is held hostage by an arrogant and privileged elite (by definition "liberal") is nothing more than a constant whine from a group of philosophically bankrupt extremists who don't have the intellectual firepower to understand why we're not all in thrall to alissa rosenbaum and her fifty year old adolescent fairy tales.
Should prayers be covered?: "As the health care battle moved forward last week, Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science church official, hurriedly delivered bundles of letters to Senate offices promoting a little-noticed proposal in the legislation requiring insurers to consider covering the church's prayer treatments just as they do other medical expenses. Critics say the proposal would essentially put Christian Science prayer treatments on the same footing as science-based medical care by prohibiting discrimination against "religious and spiritual health care."
"Apparently just voting them out doesn't have very much of an effect anymore."
Oswald spengler wrote about this a while ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West
Go down to "Democracy, media and money"
"Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they possess no positive influence whatsoever."
Exactly! Our bosses are people who have never experienced anything but the need to consume. We emphasize sports and music over learning. We reward people who spend outrageous time looking good with ridiculous contracts to read the news. We spend obnoxious money on marketeers who don't even know what they're selling.
I'm saddened. We discourage engineers and technical workers from executive level positions. And we do so to our detriment. There was a time when engineers were prized in such positions. However, for some reason the Philosophy and English teachers declared us techies illiterate. I'd be laughing my ass off if they weren't so dogmatically obnoxious about it. Today, we have ignorant marketeers, corrupt accountants and lawyers running companies. And they don't know what their companies even do for a living.
No wonder we're in trouble.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Those are pretty isolated cases. Remember the media rules: they go after the loony stuff. And yes, that's not just the USA media. I have family all over Europe, so I know it's the same over there. The pro-creation side is generally aligned with the right wing, though.
Most teachers I had were pretty liberal, but students (and kids in general) tend to be rebellious, so the schools don't exactly turn out legions of the indoctrinated. That's why I laugh at folks who say the schools are trying to politically indoctrinate kids. They either never went to school or they're totally senile and don't remember.
I had a college Political Science prof who was a card carrying Marxist. On day one he said to always question authority, so I questioned him every single class. :-) He gave me an A, so I give him props for standing behind his philosophy. I promised him if he ever got into power I'd personally lead the rebellion against him. He said he'd hold me to that. ;-) Good times.
Try RTFA you are clearly misinformed.
"There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on packages of subprime debt"
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/misunderstandin.html
Yes. On the one hand, the law allowed ACORN and other pressure-groups to force banks to give mortgages to people, who didn't qualify for them. On the other hand, the pressure on the Fannie Mae (and Freddie Mac) forced them to lower the requirements on the mortgages, which they would buy from the banks. It is no surprise, that the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac were the first to experience major problems — long before the rest of the market.
And what the banks could not sell to the government-controlled (if not outright owned) FMs, they did try to sell to others in various forms.
The bottom line is this — if the government (and government-allied pressure groups) didn't try to arm-twist the banks into giving mortgages to people not qualified to receive them, none of this would've happened. It was a wrong thing to do in the first place, and how exactly it damaged the economy is rather secondary.
When a partisan states, that "we are all to blame", he is admitting, that the bulk of the responsibility is on his side... I'll accept that.
That's a nice strawman you got there. Wow! No, the politicians I'm blaming are all very well off. It is not the poor, whom I blame, but the attempts to help them: "oh, if only they could get a mortgage, they'd be fine". No, they wouldn't be — in a Capitalist economy home loans bring profit — banks want to give them to everyone already, so if there is someone, who can't get it, the problem is not with the bank, but with that someone: "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required". No shit...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seriously, have a look. A fascinating take on how the basic structure of our no-longer-so-representational government has changed over the years, watering down the significance of any single member of the electorate.
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."