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Everyone Hates Harvard
theodp writes: Hedge fund manager John Paulson personally took home nearly $4 billion in 2007 after convincing banks to create securities of sub-prime mortgages he could bet against. Now Harvard, which originally passed on an opportunity to join alum Paulson in his big bet, is also reaping the rewards of the nation's financial crisis as it renames its engineering school the "Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences" after receiving a staggering $400 million donation from Paulson, the largest gift in the university's history. Quartz argues that Paulson's $400 million Harvard donation just reinforces inequality. Author Malcolm Gladwell took to Twitter to voice his distaste (sampling: 1. "It came down to helping the poor or giving the world's richest university $400 mil it doesn't need. Wise choice John!" 2. "If billionaires don't step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion." 3. "It's going to be named the John Paulson School of Financial Engineering.") And, in Everyone Hates Harvard, Philip Greenspun notes that even WSJ readers reacted with vitriol to the news. "I would have thought that Paulson would be a hero to market-following WSJ readers," remarks Greenspun, "not a villain."
Why isn't this guy in jail yet?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
convincing banks to create securities of sub-prime mortgages he could bet against
The article does not say that he did that. Instead, the article says that the banks bought insurance against mortgage defaults (credit default swaps), and that prices of such insurance was very low. John Paulson decided the price was too low compared to the risk, so he bought a lot of the same insurance. When the mortgages started defaulting and prices for insurance went up, he sold the insurance on to the banks at a profit.
If there had been a hundred John Paulsons out there, credit default swaps would have gone up in price much earlier, forcing the mortgage lenders to rein-in their subprime lending, thereby either defusing the crisis entirely or at least making it much less bad. Alas, there was only one, and he was good at not getting the word out, so not many copycats. John Paulson did everyone a service and should be rewarded, not punished. The people who lend out money to people who had no chance of paying back should be punished, not rewarded.
Anyway, I have not read other articles about him, so maybe he does deserve his apparently terrible reputation.
I am somewhat surprised that it has fallen to me to defend a 1%'er. This is not exactly my usual modus operandi.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This is article is completely incomprehensible. I have no idea what the author is trying to convey. Save this type of shit for Zero Hedge.
Big endowment schools are simply not the most effective place to donate. If you have a lot of money and it's really where you want to give--or more likely if you're trying to buy someone's way in--sure, nothing's stopping you from donating. But if your goal is improvement of almost anything, it's just dumb.
Donate $1/year to keep up your alumni participation numbers, which influences the ratings of your school and the value of your degree. Aside from that, give someplace where the dollars are more effective.
If you are going to give to a school, give to a school that does a lot of public interest work but has a low endowment-per-capita. (Georgetown Law comes to mind, for example--a law school with a strong public interest program and a small endowment per capita).
If you are going to give to to another non-for-profit, look for direct aid dollars. Better yet, look at the Gates foundation or the like--the people who are spending billions and their life's fortune on this hire pretty good people to run it, aiming at maximizing long-term benefit. That is kind of awesome. Leverage their investment to direct your own. Picking a charity on your own is *hard*--too many are scams or mismanaged.
Harvard is the place those mass-murdering politicians go. It doesn't turn them into it. They were on the road to it long before going there, and continued that path afterwards. It's just one of the steps in that career path.
Harvard (and the ivies in general) are not the places where the best students go. They are the places where the most spoiled, stuck up, rich little bastards who don't mind cheating and manipulating others to get ahead go to master their craft.
And if you take that bait, you're a sap.
The problem is that the banking system has been rigged in order to socialize risk. This guy exploited that fact, realized he made more money than an individual human being could possibly amuse himself with and decided to dispose of a big chunk of that were it might do a little good.
People are shouting "Harvard! Harvard! Harvard!" because they don't want you to think about the rigged banking system. They'd rather focus any anti-elitist backlash on intellectuals.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Like the "mass murderer" who brought us universal healthcare, drastically improving and saving countless American's lives?
You're thinking of the wrong school. Mass murderers have daddy buy their way into being a C student at Yale.
A derivative, is necessarily is a zero sum, it's a bet, it pays out or it does not, but it just moves money from one place to another. That's all a derivative is.
But what happened during the banking crisis was that the US Federal Reserve turned *FAILED* derivatives into cash by Quantitative Easing. Money was created from thin air, and assets were bought that had no value otherwise. Which had the effect of diluting the value represented by the dollar into more dollars. So people with real assets whose value was represented in dollars, lost part of their real assets.
These extra dollars were handed out largely to a derivatives traders that would have otherwise lost money on these garbage sub-prime bets.
So the worlds biggest bank heist was performed right in front out everyone's eyes and made billionaires of its participants.
And Harvard is a little upset that it received a share of the bank heist? Oooo diddumms, fucking thieves.
You're thinking of the wrong school. Mass murderers have daddy buy their way into being a C student at Yale.
Al Gore or John Kerry?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
LGBTQIA???
Bro, you're gonna run out of letters pretty soon.
Justy sayin'...
Well, I get the Lettuce Bacon and Tomato bit, but the other letters have me confused. Quinua?
I hate the useless spongers it creates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's pointless, uninteresting, completely outside of "news for nerds and stuff that matters"...
Fits perfectly with /., I agree.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you went to a Harvard, a Stanford, an MIT or a Texas A&M, and you happen to end up with more money than you know what to do with, you might be inclined to give a big pile of it to the university that got you started. And while that's a noble sentiment, you shouldn't. These places will continue turning out talented graduates no matter how much money you give them: you should give your money to a less-well-endowed institution, so that a larger number of students can get the same educational opportunity you had. Maybe your spouse went to a small liberal arts college. Maybe there's a place right down the road from your mansion that could use your help. But MIT and Stanford don't need your money, and they won't do much good with it.
A bit of data: Harvard's endowment amounts to $1.7 million per student. With a reasonable return on endowment investment, hey could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to. Just across the river is Boston University, a really excellent institution with a strong research focus and really great graduates, ranked #42 by US News. Its endowment per student is 1/25th of Harvard's.
Donating money toward improving education is a worthy goal, but don't get sentimental. Put the money where it'll do the most good for the most people.
(Full disclosure: I'm a professor at a liberal arts college whose endowment per student is mediocre at best.)
Neither, mass murderers get into Yale on their own but leave before graduation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D..., then get a Skull and Bones-er to do his will.
Somebody who isn't giving $400 million to the poor is criticising somebody else who isn't giving $400 million to the poor for not giving $400 million to the poor?
Ok - got it.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
The issue with Harvard and the other Ive League schools it the pretension they they as individual are better then everyone else.
Granted getting into Harvard takes a lot of work, but there are a slew of smart people who could have gone but chose not to for a huge set of reasons.
But what these schools do well isn't their education, but the people you get in contact with will keep you in the network of successful people.
Now being around these people has its pluses and minuses. You pick up good skills however sometimes general comparison is loss from being in an environment of competing ambition.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Obama is just cleaning up Bush's mess, you know. And he did get Osama, and he's facing a much worse situation now (ISIS) that was largely caused by Bush's failures in the middle east.
And besides, the middle east is just beyond fucked, US interference or not. Stone age religious stupidity running rampant is impossible to fix. I honestly say let them destroy themselves in a holy war and the whole world will be better off for it.
Now I know where the wage gap comes from. It's growing from the excrement that Harvard shat out.
Its time for quality education to go to kids that deserve it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Everyone doesn't hate Harvard. We hate being screwed over by people whose parents paid for them to go to Harvard and who think that manipulating markets to their own advantage and ruining the economy fur their own gain is a God-given right.
Yeah, those damn engineers screwing people over...
I don't blame people for their parents being rich. I do blame parents who send their kids to expensive schools.
If the overall level of engineering education rises as a result of this gift, great!
We don't get to decide what others donate to. Bitch too much about their giving, and they'll just stop giving, and that's not an improvement.
Have you willingly donated to a poorer engineering school lately?
It may be about networking in politics, law, and business. In the sciences, the benefit of those top schools is primarily about working with smart people who actually have done something significant, people you can learn from.
If you've got some bitcoin you can probably get some smuggled haggis on tor.
I never said that. All I said is Bush fucked up royally and left Obama with a messy situation, and that Obama is making sone progress, but the situation in the middle east is beyond hope.
Nice straw man though.
Many of them actually see the broken basic economics on an institutional level and actually end up exploiting nothing other than the institutional greed and myopia of Wall Street.
What? No. It doesn't work that way. When the Wall Streeters exploit someone and make money, other people have to suffer. It's a negative-sum game when we let them play at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reason you can't make the same bets Paulson can make is because "consumer protection laws" "protect" you from taking these kinds of risks. And make no mistake, Paulson's bets were very risky for him.
Whether those consumer protection laws and regulations are a good thing or not depends on whether you're more concerned about gullible small investors gambling away their nestegg, or smart small investors being prevented from participating in potentially very lucrative investment opportunities. What is clear is that you can't have both strong protection and high returns for small investors.
Wow, you sure pay a lot of attention to these groups.
No one starts with a clean slate. Every president inherits problems. That's the job they begged and pleaded for. Blaming the previous president after 7 years is BS.
and their ruling class. Harvard is just where their kids go to school.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Now they don't have one. What's wrong with this?
Its funny how muricans always blame their president for problems like these yet its the people of murica with their insatiable greed of consumerism that pretty much caused Bush and Obama to make sure their foreign interests are protected.
You blind haters haven't the slightest idea what you're saying. Large gifts to schools help pay tuition for the vast numbers of intelligent, ambitious students who don't have rich parents. Harvard has one of the most diverse array of students I've ever seen.
So who is going to solve problems, scholars or haters?
Caused another country to collapse?
Were you alive in September 2008? Because Bush made a pretty good start at forcing this one to collapse.
Iraq and Syria wer both his poor decisions catching up to us. It isn't Obama's fault that Bush fucked up in '06 and decided Maliki would be a great prime Minister. The man started wars t5hat killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Meddle East without managing to kill the one guy we were going for (Osama) This is Carter or LBJ-league in terms of foreign policy. Domestically he's Buchanan-league. His programs massively increased Federal spending (mostly by buying prescription drugs and paying for those wars), cut revenue, and the MBA fucked up financial regulation so badly that it's not an exaggeration to say that our economy did not survive his last four months in office.
Don't get me wrong. the man's a really nice guy, and apparently a wonderful father, and if a Pollster called me and asked me if I approved of him I'd almost certainly say yes. But objectively speaking his tenure was a disaster.
OTOH, Obama's solved the wars. He managed to kill that one guy we've been trying to knock off since Clinton. The economy is growing, and the deficit is shrinking. His major domestic policy accomplishment is working more or less as planned, despite the Obama Derangement Syndrome's insistence that some new data point nobody gives a shit about means that it's about to collapse on itself every six months. 10 years from now his "evolving" on gay marriage will be remembered as the brave stand that forced dead-enders to give up their Evil Opposition to the Civil Rights Issue of the Era.
No one starts with a clean slate. Every president inherits problems. That's the job they begged and pleaded for. Blaming the previous president after 7 years is BS.
Just crawl out from under a rock? We have present day politicians writing books blaming FDR for most everything. Or blaming Hoobert Heever for most everything. Only been a few years since eh?
Its not that I am all that wild about the present occupant, but it is pretty hard to blame him for firmly entrenching us in the eternal warfare practice of the middle east. Once you are in that club, you can check out any timer you like, but you can never leave. Presidency or party affiliation is irrelevent. Dubya and the neocons were hell bent on getting boots on the ground then, just as they are now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I take a lot of notes in my own personal wiki. For general knowledge subjects, I often copy a few paragraphs from the Wikipedia lead, and then trim it down to just the bits I care to remember.
There's a few things that I almost always redact from articles concerning people: Day and month of birth. Nobility and rank. (Even FRS.) These blatantly elitist and self-promotional Seminal J. J. Tractatus or Timothy Erasamus Highbrow or Jagadish Q. Deepocket professorships. (I even trim mention of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics.) If I named my toenail clippings, it wouldn't pass notability in Wikipedia. Why then do the names of these blasted chairs pass notability? It's not obvious to me.
I would seriously propose making the display of these ridiculous named professorships a user preference, so that for those of us who choose to unclick the Ivy League Liberace flag, the article just says that Donald Merlin is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, or something plain-spoken and useful of that general nature.
Those who actually work at a university and don't wish to make a career-limiting faux pas by not knowing this vital data or who harbour strange dreams of becoming a named chair themselves can leave their Ivy League Liberace flags alone.
(My apologies to Liberace, who never once—so far as I know—actually named the piano bench he perched upon.)
Wow, look at all the paid shills...
If you think anyone in the finance industry gives a rat's ass about rantings on slashdot then you are delusional. Go ahead and vent - I might even agree with you. But let's not pretend what we say here has much consequence in the real world.
He didn't con an old lady out of her savings; he made a bet with banks and other investors who should have known better.
Not entirely correct. If he is the architect behind the subprime mortgages then he did not directly con an old lady out of her savings but his actions indirectly wiped half the value off those savings. He deliberately designed an extremely risky investment vehicle to look to the banks like a low risk, high return investment and they did not spot the trick. It might have been entirely legal but it bears all the hall marks of a con and in such a case, while the mark takes some blame for letting their greed overcome their common sense, the person who devised the con takes most of the blame.
Is Harvard known for engineering?
Short answer is yes. They have a rather distinguished list of alumni. Some of the ones people here might know of include Bob Metcalf (inventor of ethernet), Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C), Fred Brooks (director of development for OS/360), Steve Balmer (yeah I know), Trip Hawkins (founder of Electronic Arts) and Bill Gates (didn't graduate but attended and yeah I know...)
Harvard engineering might not be on the level with MIT but it doesn't suck.
In the sciences you'd best be at MIT, Stanford, or at least at a smaller school with a specialization like Harvey Mudd.
You really need to check your biases.
There was an 11 year hunt for Bin Laden, But your going to assign all the credit to the guy who happened to be there at the end ?
Solved the wars
I love your use of the word solved. It's like solving power consumption issues with grenades.
They are greedy assholes. Even Adam Smith recognized that. The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.
Think of capitalism a bit like nuclear power. Capitalism is all about harnessing greed to the benefit of society. Unmanaged or poorly managed it results in a catastrophic meltdown to the detriment of all. With the right controls in place and good oversight (but not too much) it can be a hugely powerful force for good. This requires sensible rules fairly enforced. Too few rules and the meltdown occurs (see 2008 financial crisis). Too many rules and you don't get much benefit because nothing happens (the reaction shuts down). If things get too hot or a problem occurs you institute rules (like control rods) to throttle down the reaction before it blows.
High finance -> a gigantic shell game designed to fleece reveneue out of the mugs .. err I mean 'investors'.
:)
"Asset-backed credit default swaps are structured differently from other credit default swaps due to the nature of the instrument being hedged. For example, since many asset-backed securities amortize and pay monthly, the credit default swap will more closely match these features. The most widely used ABCDS transactions cover U.S. subprime mortgage tranches of mortgage securitizations"
Amd before you say it, yea, and it was all those liberals in the Clinton administration that caused the subprime crisis, mainly through selling mortgage to poor people and negros
But of course....he "inherited" the failures, but owns any "successes".
*yawn*
It's the whole "Success has many fathers, but failure is always an orphan" thing. But Obama being the narcissist that he is, many fathers = himself.
I'll be glad when the current clown show is over. The melt down of American foreign policy along with the rampant deficit spending has been breathtaking in its lack of foresight and heaping truckloads of incompetence. Jimmy Buffet singing to the French after Charlie Hebdo? Really?
Obama will still be blaming Bush when he's in his 90's and trips over his walker in the nursing home cafeteria.
Universal healthcare means everyone gets healthcare and it doesnt cost them anything. Obama didn't do that. He created a policy that was to force the states to fund health care and have the rich pay for the poor. That was rejected by almost half the states, So no we have no 'universal' healthcare. We have a tax if you don't have insurance.
Was there? The whole thing was classified at best. Keep in mind that Bush explicitly stated that he dhttp://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/07/0313256/everyone-hates-harvard#idn't care about Osama anymore, once he got into Iraq.
Since Obama care, my coverage has gone up, my premiums have gone down, and the local hospital has reduced its prices. A local representative from the local hospital came to our work to explain coverage and premium changes because we get our insurance through the hospital network. They said since more people in general have insurance, there are fewer people going to the ER and more people scheduling proper doctor visits, which is driving down costs because the hospital is no longer having to eat the costs of poor people unable to pay a $1k ER bill, but can afford a $80 doctor's bill.
You really need to check your biases.
There was an 11 year hunt for Bin Laden, But your going to assign all the credit to the guy who happened to be there at the end ?
Your biases are just as bad.
The hunt for Bin Laden started in '98. He died in '11. That's a 13-year-hunt. But you don't like Clinton, so you don't want to credit him for being the only one who took Osama seriously before S11.
And yes, I'm going to give full credit to the guy who actually finished the job. The previous two guys can get some partial credit (especially Clinton, because at the time his hunt for Bin laden was widely derided by everyone on both sides as the equivalent of Ahab going after the White Whale), but trying and failing does not result in full credit.
Solved the wars
I love your use of the word solved. It's like solving power consumption issues with grenades.
Technically he solved the wars by pulling the grenade-throwers out.
It would be a very good line if you'd use'd drone strikes. He still does those.
I'm far from propertied, but I'm sorry to say the majority of the rants in here smack of bitter jealousy. You have one vote, and short of beheading those in power, you're going to have to make the best of it.
Wow, he could have asked Greece to change the name of their country instead if he paid off their €300 million default to the IMF. He would have won a lot more adulation from most of the country for that. This world is so unbalanced it is literally insane.
Just because you think of it as an out-of-control chain reaction doesn't make it so. In fact, free markets are exactly the opposite: market mechanisms give you negative feedback, not positive feedback.
Please point out a single example of an unregulated free market that has never collapsed.
As Milton Friedman put it, your fallacy is that you assume that "government is a way that you put unselfish and un-greedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men."
You must be a conservative if you are quoting Friedman. Your fallacy is that you assume greedy men will work to the benefit of society when unconstrained by rule of law. I have centuries of evidence on my side that illustrates the fallacy of that notion. A reasonable amount of regulation is necessary for markets to function. As I said previously there can be too much regulation just as there can be too little. The trick is finding that spot where you have just enough to keep things moving in a positive direction.
Financial markets were heavily regulated even in 2008; the idea that the cause of the "financial crisis" was lack of regulation is ludicrous.
As someone who actually has worked in the finance industry you could not be more wrong. The cause of the meltdown was poorly regulated derivative financial instruments. People leveraged derivative contracts with huge counter-party risk without oversight well beyond what was prudent. Market forces were unable to keep the markets working because the regulation hadn't caught up to the state of financial practices. What regulations were in place were for problems other than the one that actually occurred. The "fixes" put in place after the fact probably still haven't appropriately addressed the problems. Markets are not magic and they need some amount of rules to actually function.
When Harvard scientists do something cool, everyone thinks that's great. When someone gives them money so they can keep doing cool things, that's evil? Come on people! Harvard is mainly a research university. That's doubly true for the engineering school. This money will be used to hire world class researchers and give them world class facilities so they can do great work. I'd think Slashdotters would appreciate that.
If you think Paulson is evil, fine. I won't argue it. But giving money to Harvard is not one of his evil acts.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Add? You think these things are new?!
Paulson has no engineering background. His Harvard time was at its business school.
Yet - instead of encouraging more "financial engineering" or business education, he selects the engineering school. Why I wonder? To avoid creating more competition? Maybe he realizes engineering is the thing that actually creates the real value in society? Other?
I found the selection of the engineering school intriguing.
Posting anonymously b/c of mod points, but it sounds like he wasn't exactly a good guy. (My username is captnjohnny1618.)
http://www.deepcapture.com/201...
Yes, he did be against the overvaluation of the market. The shifty thing though is that he utilized resources that nearly 100% of people didn't have access to and ultimately designed a financial object that was certainly going to fail, ensuring a huge return on his investment. Instead of calling attention and trying to fix this major major problem that would have an effect not just on our economy and our people, but economies and people around the world, he decided to take advantage of it and make a huge amount of money at the expense of millions. (If he had done that, while at the same time making a huge amount of noise about the ways he saw the economy about to fail, this would be a different conversation).
A comparable situation in our field would be a computer person ("hacker") with significant inroads to some big chip maker (Intel let's say) identifies a weak point in the chip design exposing some hugely powerful zero day attack. He helps designs a complex "fix" that ultimately looks like it will solve the issue, yet doesn't even come close, and starts selling that to the chip company for a few millions of dollars. The complexity of it helps to obscure (for a spell) the reality that it is actually a worthless patch, and he has maintained enough separation from the issue to deny at least some of the responsibility. Selling this makes a lot of money for a lot of people, but this guys waits a little longer to cash in for himself.
Where it really gets shifty is that this guy knows that the fix is going to fail and it's only a matter of time, so he starts betting on the fix failing (in reality, he starts "hedging" on it, which is complicated and I don't understand all of its intricacies). Lots of it. So when the fix fails, as he knew it would and maybe even planned it to, he gets to cash in, and look like one of the smart ones who saw it coming.
In reality he saw it coming because he had a big hand in creating it.
Now in IT/CS/etc. we call that guy a huge dick for not telling the rest of the world about the problem and letting the free software community try and come up with a fix. If he had even remotely tried to peddle his BS fix, it would've been noticed and obvious, and people would accuse him of attempted fraud. If he tried to somehow pretend like he didn't have a responsibility to tell everyone, politicians and lawyers would be all over him with some trumped up charges that feign social responsibility, when it reality are just trying to recover the money this guy took from them. This guy just doesn't have to put up with that shit because all of those politicians and lawyers are his buddies and probably walked away pretty ok from all of this while the rest of us have to sit around and pick up the pieces.
TL;DR: You didn't have some great insight into the problem if you win by betting on a fixed fight where you knew the outcome... and helped set up the fight... and helped invent boxing.
The comments quoted all point to the fact that Harvard doesn't need the money. It's already the richest school in the US, by far and away, with an endowment fund of twenty-six billion, (it was thirty-some billion, but they lost part of it, guess how?). There are more deserving schools, to whom four-hundred million wouldn't be a drop in the bucket.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
... This is how every university gets going and how the big ones stay well funded. They ask rich people for large sums of money... in the old days that was kings, lords, and the Church.
today... it is business tycoons and big fat government checks.
And from this we conclude Harvard is bad because a tycoon gave them 400 million dollars?
Shock... gasp.... horror.
This is about the part in an article where I ask the people that take it seriously to flip a coin.
https://youtu.be/OLCL6OYbSTw?t...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You're thinking of the wrong school. Mass murderers have daddy buy their way into being a C student at Yale.
Al Gore or John Kerry?
Not Al Gore, given that he went to Harvard, not Yale.
It's been pretty strongly demonstrated that a sitting president can pretty much do anything they want, regardless of congress, simply by issuing executive orders, or by ordering the military to do something (or nothing).
Want to close Gitmo? Order the soldiers out.
Want to get out of a war? Order the soldiers out.
Want to change the tax code? Issue an executive order.
Want to change how schools operate? Issue an executive order.
Want to integrate schools over the objection of the governor of the state? Federalize the national guard and do it by force.
Want to make a show of force to European involvement in the western hemisphere, but congress won't fund it? Order the navy to South America, and then let congress decide to pay for the fuel to bring them back (or not).
Want to stop riots in Baltimore or Ferguson? Federalize and send in that state's national guard.
(And if you think the state government has to ask or approve this:
"Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, assemblages, or rebellion make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State"
"The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy"
"Air and Army National Guard can specifically be called into Federal service in case of invasion, rebellion, or inability to execute Federal law with active forces"
So no.)
Sitting Presidents have a lot more power than you are giving them credit for; they may unilaterally do a hell of a lot of things. They may have to face impeachment charges after the fact, but this close to the next election, there's really nothing congress can do about it; the next elected president automatically pardons any crimes of their predecessor; this is traditional, and a president probably depends on this as part of running for office. It's a gentleman's agreement that goes back to the early 1800's.
Any mess he has not addressed via executive order or via his position as commander in chief is *his mess*.
It's depressing that people as stupid as you can vote.
It's also instructive. It explains why more vote fraud isn't needed to get these ridiculous outcomes. People are just goddamned dumb.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you forget that clinton actually had (at least one) chance to take out bin laden, he admits this much himself.... but didnt
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Whelp... That makes sense to me. I am going to assume it is so every time I see it now. If I reply I will be sure to include that. It is bound to make my life more interesting and more entertaining to those around me.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I am all about personal choice and freedoms. I, too, would have taken your haggis. I have tried haggis, it probably should be illegal in any first world country.
I kid... Mostly.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
For most of the 11 years absolutely fuck-all happened. We can say this with certainty because it's now been revealed that Bin Laden's 'fortress' was actually a Pakistani-controlled compound in which Bin Laden was under house arrest. So basically, Bin Laden spent the first 5 or 6 years roaming free in Afghanistan to do anything he wanted, then sought shelter in Pakistan for several more years until some people in the Pakistani government got tired of it all and tipped off the US. Then Obama staged this hilarious over-the-top SEAL campaign to go in there and execute him gangland-style (with a tie-in movie and merchandising!) though knowing full well that he wasn't going anywhere.
The entire thing is just so hilarious that it's almost unbelievable. Neither Bush nor Obama did anything of substance to get Bin Laden.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
And Republicans will be hating on Obama after he is dead for a century.
Do you fracking understand Saddam was our ally in the Middle East? He kept Iran subdued and under control. With him gone and ISIS going wild we were *forced* into allying with Iran, helping them develop nuclear technology in exchange for their help in the MEast. That's what Bush's fracking legacy is.
And you're Dorothy's scarecrow, believing that such a thing is possible.
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You're living in the tyranny of your own ignorance, that's worse you sad old fuck.
Ooh, thoughtcrime. You believe that people should be jailed for the contents of their minds.
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Their Saudi buddies want us back to do their dirty work just like in 1991 & 2003.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I wouldn't call it Pakistani-controlled. As far as I can tell nothing in Pakistan is actually Pakistani-controlled. It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Seymour Hersh's recent article on the issue isn't terribly credible, for the same reason the intelligence that got us into the Iraq War was not credible: the people making the allegations benefit from them. If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Unfortunately there isn't an Obama Half Dollar yet.
Thanks. I noted Frank's guilt above, but your post came before mine. Frank's co-conspirator in the Senate was Christopher Dodd, and no doubt Teddy Kennedy helped.
It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if W. had treated the law as Obama has, and shut down Freddie and Fannie by executive decree. Surely the same people now praising Obama for his actions and claiming the president can do whatever he wants, would have been rioting for impeachment.
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What you say is half true. Low interest rates ("free money", "juiced the economy"), have been notoriously ineffective in this "recovery", due to increased regulation and erratic (and hostile) leadership creating an unfavorable business environment. Early in the low interest rate period the common observation was "pushing on a rope".
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I have to agree, the only thing Obama has done was make Carter the second worst president in my lifetime.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Hersh's original article ("The Killing of Osama bin Laden") is plenty credible and the main points are backed up by numerous other sources. Some of the finer details have yet to be confirmed and I can't say about his later musings.
> It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Yes, it's called government. This sentence conveys no useful information. Are you saying Pakistan is an ochlocracy?
> If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Pakistan isn't a real country?
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
The Neocons want to nuke Iran NOW despite the strange situation where Iran is on our side and doing the heavy lifting against ISIS/Daash. That's even nuttier.
If you wanted a radical you shouldn't have picked someone as conservative as a constitutional lawyer.
A thing that lowers their reputation a great deal is that people like Baby Bush can get in there without a lot so work (due to family connections) and get a degree despite doing little other than cheerleading. It only takes a couple of those a year to put the entire bunch under suspicion.
Then there's the infamous MBA in shouting. Performance of graduates of that (as in a large number of scandals and spectacular failures) indicate that something is badly wrong - either the people going in or something in the Harvard MBA education/training process itself. You could also say that about some other MBA courses run along the same lines but Harvard has the high profile.
Nuke? Hyperbole much? There's no relevant political faction in the US that is calling for a nuclear strike on anything.
And really, is it the US that likes to have little death to Iran rallies? or is that Iran that likes to have death to america rallies?
Who is burning who's flag?
Come now. Perspective.
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While you might not have directly gone to a clinic in 45 years, you definitely have benefited from good healthcare services. Notice how the US doesn't have polio, ebola, or any other epidemic? You're welcome. Now you can also get some meds for the delusions of tyranny.
Maybe irrelvant and discredited, but definitely still existing and still nutty.
I get the feeling that Harvard does a poor job at covering ethics and human resource management.
I got an MBA from a different school (post Enron) and ethics were ingrained as part of every class.
When I hear people saying it is those MBA who do such evil, I remember taking MBA classes warning us about such actions and the long term consequences.
Perhaps my trading was unique, or Harvard is different because it prestigious name cases them to ignore actual changes in business.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If that's your view then you have fallen victim to misinformation about two Presidencies.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The only reason Bush cared about 9/11 was it gave him an excuse to get Saddam.
He had a hard-on for getting revenge on the guy who tried to assassinate his father.
In his first national security briefing after taking office he asked "How can I get Saddam?"
One of the first questions asked after 9/11 was "Can we use this to get Saddam?"
It took another several months of leaking talking points to the New York Times, but eventually he got what he wanted.
And in the process it only cost the country several trillion dollars, several thousand American lives, a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, destabilized three countries, and created a deeper quagmire than already existed in the region.
In the list of bad things to inherit from a previous President, this pretty much takes the cake.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Canada, the UK, and pretty much every other advanced nation in the world would like to have a word with you about the definition of "possible".
The US is pretty much the only exception amongst it's peers in this regard, and not in a good way.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So you needed a verbose way to proclaim you're a nutter ?
As usual for Slashdot, the article description doesn't track TFA (any of them) and misses the truth. First off, the cited article doesn't talk about this guy convincing banks to create products he bet against. Rather, he noticed that the market was using insane valuations for subprime mortgages and bet against them. That is smart, not evil. To use a tech analogy, what if IT Joe recognized a Zero Day exploit, implemented a fix, warned everyone, then sat back as his network survived and everyone else's were trashed? No one here would call IT Joe a villain. No the real reason Paulson is hated is envy. Just be real, he has more than you and you want it.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
Eat right, don't smoke, don't drink, exercise regularly - and still end up in ER because you got hit by a drunk driver....
And maintaining sanctions is a cause worthy of comitting high treason for ? Because that's what 43 Republican senators did.
When they are facing charges for that treason, you can start imagining you live in a country where everybody is equal before the law again.
You know, like when Reagan was charged with high treason over the Iran/Contra scandal... oh drat...
Right when Nixon was charged with high treason over the watergate scandal... oh drat.
I know when Bush and Cheney were charged... oh drat.
Wait, which republican high-up has ever actually been criminally charged over anything they did no matter how heinous ?
But the country did charge a president for getting a blowjob... now THAT is clearly a bigger scandal than selling guns to your enemies in order to fund a gang of drug-dealing, torture loving hooligans in Nicaragua.
The same enemy actually... that this generation's pubes rather badly want a war with. That should be fun - republicans sending American soldiers to get shot with American guns sold to their enemy by a Republican president.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Fifty bucks says he would have to google to find out what the Iran/Contra scandal was. And after he does, he'll have a million reasons why a president who committed high treason and got away with it is "better" than one who gave America it's longest time ever without an active war. And all one million of them will basically mean "because his name was Reagan".
That's the sad irony of the current Republican handling of Iran - it's likely to lead to yet another war where Republicans send American soldiers to get killed by weapons that republicans sold their enemies.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Hersh's original article ("The Killing of Osama bin Laden") is plenty credible and the main points are backed up by numerous other sources. Some of the finer details have yet to be confirmed and I can't say about his later musings.
No, it really isn't.
It's based on one source. the source added one true fact to the story (there was apparently a walk-in involved), and the rest is all fanciful BS that only a Film Major would take seriously.
For example, let's say you're Pakistan. you control Osama because he's constantly surrounded by men with guns. Your men with guns. Why the fuck do you bother bringing in a SEAL team to kill his ass? You can shoot him and feed his corpse to the pigs. You can cart him to the mountains, give the CIA an "anonymous tip," and then slip him a sleeping pill while the SEALs are on thew way so your troops can get away. You do not actually need to create a major assassination operation five fucking minutes from your military Academy, which will convince the entire fucking world your military is dumber then two sacks of shit for not noticing Bin Laden.
Hell, why involve some poor Doctor whose just trying to vaccinate your kids against a deadly disease? Seriously, the scenario that played out was pretty much guaranteed to convince half the damn country not to vaccinate their kids for polio, which means that it sickened hundreds of Pakistani kids. And Hersh is claiming the whole damn thing Pakistan's idea.
If Pakistan were run by people who have the common sense of a goat, they would not have involved themselves in this operation. It made hundreds of innocent Pakistani children seriously ill, humiliated the Pakistani Defense Establishment is worthless, risked blowing up a huge section of a fairly important Pakistani City, and there's absolutely no pay-off for them.
Which in turn means that unless the source is impeccable no sane person will take it seriously. the source isn't impeccable. the source is a member of the aforementioned Pakistani Defense Establishment, and he benefits if people believe that it was all their idea because otherwise they're laughingstocks.
> It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Yes, it's called government. This sentence conveys no useful information. Are you saying Pakistan is an ochlocracy?
Yes.
You wanna know what happened to the attempted assassins of Malala after they got sentenced to 25 years? Eight of the ten walked out of prison. The Pakistani Justice system claims the Prosecutor was lying when he said that all 10 had been convicted, and 8 got acquitted, but that's a rather odd thing for a Prosecutor to lie about. And it's quite strange that 8 Taliban gunmen, admitted members of a movement that seeks to overthrow the government by violence, got to walk out of Court.
Unless the government is too weak to a) admit that 80% of the defendants got off, b) keep all 10 in prison.
> If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Pakistan isn't a real country?
In the legal, formal sense? Yes.
In the sense that it actually controls it's territory? Hell no. There are active rebellions in most of it's landmass, residents of seven of the eight state-level government will identify themselves as Sindhi/Balochi/etc. before saying Pakistani, the supposedly secular government tries to support Islamist rebels in Kashmir (because part of Kashmir is run by India) while fighting an Islamist rebellion in it's Pashto areas, and appeasing Islamists in other regions by occasionally letting them lynch some random illiterate Christian whose equally illiterate Islamic neighbors swear he said bad things about Muhammed, etc.
It's a step above Somalia, but the step is damn short.
How many Harvard professors does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: It is an academic question, as they are all in Washington telling the rest of us how to live our lives.
The "Everyone Must Own A Home" easy credit debacle came close to destroying the global economy. People were able to buy homes with zero down, half of their gross income to payments, and APR increases after six years ("You can always refinance!").
In the aftermath, the nation's two legacy, blue city, propaganda streams successfully planted memes that blame wall street for the implosion, but the overall concept of risky easy credit dates back to the farm loans of the 1930's -- at least they had crops to use as collateral. The process was heavily expanded with the 2nd CRA (1977, not 1964). Sharing the risk out to wall street is only part of the disease.
Easy credit artificially boosts home values and reinforces the status quo of a largely unaffordable, overvalued real estate market. If we had a housing and urban development executive cabinet that used the scientific method, rather than simply house 8,000 party bureaucrats, enslaving the taxpayers at a cost of $ 30 B. a year, decade after decade, perhaps real innovation -- a process of goals, milestones, and a well-defined definition of success -- would create human primate habitats that are as affordable and easy to buy as cars.
Harvard elites? They rarely pay taxes -- why should they care about a government loaded with do-nothing bureaucrats. That's what their 4,000,000 words of IRS Tax Code is for, to give them loopholes to escape paying taxes entirely -- taxes are for the working class. It's probably no coincidence that the Rise of the Democrats, from their roots as the political arm of the KKK, practically mirrors the growth of the IRS Tax Code, legislated at an average rate of 40,000 words per year since ~1913. It all started with a simple, three level tax formula. The agency itself pleas for reform.
While wage and salary earners are puzzled about the 30% of their paycheck that gets vaporized into the government entity every two weeks, and the Ivy League Elites pay zero taxes (legally), the Modern Democrats offer workers an increase in the minimum wage. Of course the public unions, and government funded wages and salaries are all linked to the minimum wage, so it's entirely moot and dramatically inflationary. With a ratio of about 4:1 taxpayers per government funded employee today, inflation due to minimum age increases will quickly make any temporary reprieve from economic slavery moot, while accomplishing the two actual goals : wage increases across the board for the party faithful, and votes purchased from those at the base of the economic pyramid. It's a temporary increase in affordability, a vote buying scheme that the Democratic Party trots out as elections approach. The fact that increases in average American wages are in direct conflict with the three rounds of QE deflationary efforts -- which were intended to help American labor compete globally -- means nothing to vote-buying Democrats or their incumbency schemes.
Everything the government does -- from the minimum wage, to the tax code, to the massive bureaucracies -- is carefully crafted to favor incumbency, not to improve the lives of We the People. After pseudo-socialism overtook much of Europe and China, the political science departments of Harvard and the other Ivy League institutions thought the massive, centralized government model would rule the world. The US government bootprint on American lives quickly expanded to match -- huge government bureaucracies were created in executive cabinets below the Presidency, assuming that 100% government employment with the President as CEO would come to pass. Instead, China has dramatically evolved towards partnership with the private sector and the Soviet Union collapsed.
The massive US government bootprint has yet to reform, with the Democrats angrily pushing as much propaganda and vote-buying schemes through their legacy blue city propaganda distributors (Los Angeles and New York) as quickly as possible, hoping to prevent reform of their bloated, incompetent executive cabinetry. Amusingly, a true liberal, a true scientist,
KSM was the mind behind 9/11. Without him, it probably wouldn't have happened. Without bin Laden, it probably still would have.... KSM probably would have just gone to a different group besides al Qaeda, or formed his own.
Likewise with finding and killing bin Laden. Without the CIA, we wouldn't have found him. Without Obama, we probably still would have, and John McCain would be taking credit.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
High treason huh? For what? Cite it please. And I'll show you democrats doing the same thing. What is being cited as high treason is not high treason. If it were, they'd be charged with high treason.
Theyr'e not because it wasn't.
I'm stopping there. Your opening comment was so dumb that I don't have interest in going further unless you admit it was bullshit.
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Sorry, Dude. The US is now largely irrelevant in the Middle East. George W Bush nuked any remaining cred the US had. The harm Bush did will echo for decades. Obama is powerless as long as he (and the US generally) continue to give Israel a pile of cash and a free pass no matter what. Even Israel craps on the US...
Only boring people are ever bored.
Sorry, Dude. The US is now largely irrelevant in the Middle East. George W Bush nuked any remaining cred the US had. The harm Bush did will echo for decades. Obama is powerless as long as he (and the US generally) continue to give Israel a pile of cash and a free pass no matter what. Even Israel craps on the US...
Thanks I needed a good chuckle. But hell make your case. What state was the Middle East in when GWB left office where is it now ?
Come on please I am eager to see this.
Writing a letter to a foreign power undermining an on-going presidential negotiation. ...
That is unconstitutional and specifically an act of treason as defined in the Logan Act, which declares it treason for any American citizen (that includes senators) to make any contact whatsoever with a foreign power while that power is in negotiations with the president.
The law does however recognize that this particular form of high treason isn't as damaging as some of the others, which is why the prescribed sentence is only 3 years in prison.
But they ought to be charged. And just imagine if 43 republican senators including 2 presidential candidates were actually charged, convicted and jailed right now
You didn't actually consider any of my other examples, did you ? Hell at least Reagan had to give up a fall-guy to get away with his (much more severe and outright) act of high treason. These guys had the whole country, and the media, pointing out their crime - they made America a laughing stock when they proved that the foreign minister of Iran knows America's constitution better than the republicans in congress do.
It seems the only people who haven't figured out how criminal their letter was were chickenhawk republican voters and the rest of the government.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Which fact was wrong? Bush Jr openly blamed Saddam for making his father lose a second term. His handlers were happy with the personal vendetta because it made Haliburton and others billions of dollars.
Learn to love Alaska
First, the letter just said that any agreement Obama struck with Iran would either have to be ratified by congress or it wouldn't be enforceable past Obama's presidency. That's just a fact. There is no negotiation there. That is just reminding the Iranians how US law works.
Second, several democrats have done similar things throughout the years. This is my personal favorite:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/...
Third, I don't think you understand what "treason" means:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
""
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
LII has no control over and does not endorse any external Internet site that contains links to or references LII.
""
THAT is treason. Penning a letter to Iran which is something anyone in the US can do by the way... we do have freedom of speech which extends to sending letters to other countries. US senators and congressman can absolutely send letters to other countries and they do so all the time.
It is not treason unless you do so with the intent of undermining the United States.
Undermining a particular treaty you don't agree with is not treason. And if it were, a lot of democrats would have died in jail or been executed.
They weren't because it isn't treason. Its annoying when it happens but that's US politics for you. This isn't against our laws and the people that suggest otherwise are ignorant. Again, if it were against the law, then people would have gone to jail.
No one went to jail because it isn't illegal much less fucking treason.
As to the logan act, it isn't enforced if they did violate it. Again, senators and congress people make contact with foreign governments without authorization all the time. Both parties. Do you honestly think the democrats didn't try to undermine any Bush Jr's foreign policy by contacting other governments? Don't be naive.
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http://popcultureblog.dallasne...
Keep on going crazy person
You are the only crazy person here. Just because Bush asserts it is the truth doesn't make it so.
Learn to love Alaska
Stop playing with your tinfoil hat and show your proof.
While I agree with your sentiment in general, I think we need to avoid saying things like "it doesn't cost them anything". Universal healthcare most certainly does cost us something, but it costs us less in many ways than the current system (before or after ACA). When you say "it doesn't cost them/us anything", it gives the opposition something to latch on to because it is technically incorrect, though the underlying idea isn't. Then they'll crow and drown out arguments, and if someone responds "Well, yes, it does cost us something, but-" they'll exclaim "Aha! They've been lying to you this whole time!" Fallacies all over, but unfortunately fallacies work very well in society. Best to not give them that ammunition in the first place.
See also: "You didn't build that", "You have to pass it to find out what's in it", etc.
Proof of what?
Learn to love Alaska
You are correct but also you misunderstand. I said what people actually believed 'universal healthcare' to able be. The ability to go to any hospital, doctor or medic and it not cost them any money period. This is what they actually expected. Of course, thats impossible.
He picked the right Monty Python skit.
Solving Wars by threatening to gnaw people's legs off is the Bush doctrine, and it doesn't work very well.