"Anyone that has a clue how the economy works is smart enough to not be in politics."
I bring forth Hank Paulson to disprove your claim. In 2004 while CEO at Goldman-Sachs he lobbied to get the leverage cap on the top investment banks raised from 12-1 to 40-1. This allowed him and his friends three years of nearly obscene profits and bonuses as they leveraged up. He then deftly jumped in to politics just in time to hand out another trillion dollars of tax payer funds to bail out his friends when that 30-1 plus leverage house of cards collapsed. I contend that Hank Paulson is in politics and outrageously smart in lining the pockets of the fat cats on Wall Street. Only people who question his character are all the working stiffs, retirees and tax payers who are being cleaned out.
The thinh most people forget about politicians, thinking they are all poor civil servants, is they often get both obscenely rich before entering politics and the can most definitely get obscenely rich when they leave when all the payoffs start rolling in from all their rich friends who appreciate the tax breaks, sole source contracts, low interest loans, and tax payer subsidized profits from things like Medicare D, Sally Mae, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac.
The smart people realize the real profit potential is in the revolving door in and out of government.
Its important to note Social Security has been running surpluses since Congress jacked up the rates in the early 80's so it isn't a reason for deficits. In fact the surpluses have been offsetting the deficits caused by excess spending elsewhere and income tax cuts. Its still a few years before Social Security goes in to the red.
"Your boss needs you as much as you need him or her"
True if your boss and you are in a service industry so your job isn't mobile. If you are in things like manufacturing or IT, where your job can be offshored any where on the planet, in fact your boss doesn't really need you much at all. Sure there is a price for off-shoring but if you can get worker for a fraction of the price and still get the job done more or less, you are in a "wage slave" industry now.
This is one reason unions in the U.S. are only surviving in service industries that can't be off shored like police, fire, teachers, truckers, civil service etc. and aren't even doing well there. For example there is a push lately to allow Mexican truckers greater ability to drive trucks in the U.S. If you are in a manufacturing union like autos or airplanes its just a matter of time before either your union is gone and your wages plunge, your company moves your job off shore, or your company goes bankrupt like Ford, GM and Chrysler.
Here is a contrasting way to look at this issue for you to think about.
Low and middle income working people pay 12.5% of their wages to payroll taxes, counting both employer and employee contributions. Splitting it that way was a deceptive tactic to hide from workers how really high the payroll tax is, but the employer contribution is coming out of what the worker would get paid so it counts too. A pretty average middle income worker's wages can easily be taxed at 25% income tax. Its pretty easy for a middle income worker to be taxed at 40%+ total, factoring in regressive sales taxes, property taxes, state taxes, etc.
By contrast most rich people make all their income off capital gains and dividends on stocks. Thanks to the Bush administration those are taxed at 15%. Sure a low or middle income person can invest in stocks too, but they have a lot less disposable income to invest there than the rich do.
Don't you think the current Bush/McCain strategy is redistributing wealth too, letting the "investor class" keep 85% of what they make, while workers keep 60% of what they make. Its no accident wealth distribution in the U.S., in fact around the world is spiraling out of control, in the favor of the top couple percent. This doesn't even factor in the fact that most corporations and the "investor class" can afford extensive accounting services and tax shelters that cut their effective tax rate even further while most working people don't.
Its something the right rails against but you HAVE to have progressive taxation, because it is vastly easier for people with a lot of money, to make a lot more money. The Bush administration has implemented an extremely regressive tax scheme and that is why the rich were getting richer at a furious pace, at least until the stock market crashed. Yes the rich pay a rather large percentage of income tax but they also make a lot more money than the lower and middle classes do. By the time you factor in payroll taxes there is no way you can contend the rich are paying their fair share now. Anyone being intellectually honest knows it, just ask Warren Buffett.
"It's tough to believe but there just isn't enough waste to cut,"
That's a silly statement.
You can start with farm subsidies. Especially the ones that pay farmers to not grow crops, especially since a lot of them go to rather affluent people who buy land just to collect the subsidies on it and don't actually ever farm. When many areas of the world are starving, and especially a few months ago when food prices were spiking out of sight, subsidizing farmers to not grow crops is borderline criminal. Can you get rid of them, probably not, because there is a powerful block of Congressmen mostly from the Midwest that will fight to the death to keep them. Subsidizing ethanol is another borderline crime. Making Ethanol from corn is a horrible idea, and is a net energy loss. It also drives up food prices. The only reason Ethanol from corn exists is because Congress mandates and subsidizes it. Why, because the Midwestern congressmen saw it as a way to enrich their states. Most of the Ethanol producers may go bankrupt anyway. You want ethanol make it out of sugar, but historically the U.S. blocks sugar importants and for a while Ethanol made from sugar to protect big polically connected sugar growers in the U.S.
Turn to the Defense budget. It is a full 2X what it was when Bush came to office and its hard to even figure out what it really is with black defense and intelligence spending, and the bills for Iraq and Afghanistan paid the way they are, outside of the formal budget process. You could easily pull out of Iraq and cut defense spending in half and be no worse off than we were 10 years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, but most intelligent people have come to the conclusion pouring in more troops and killing more civilians is making the situation worse not better. Its a lost cause at the moment because the current U.S. hand picked President is incompetent and his entire government is so corrupt and entwined with the Opium trade no one in Afghanistan will support it. The Taliban looks good in comparision. The obstacle here is the defense industrial complex has massive power between defense contractors, their lobbyists, the military and congressional hawks. You cut their budget at your own risk. I assure you spending way over a billion dollars on a single B-2 and way over $100 million on a single F-22 isn't actually necessary in this world.
The spiraling cost of health care is also a major contributor to Federal spending. Medicare and Medicaid costs are out of control. Partially its just better, ever more expensive equipment and treatment. But a lot of it is a lot of fairly corrupt corporations milking it for all its worth. You ever wonder why there are twenty companies constantly advertising to sell motorized wheel chairs for the elderly? Because they can charge Medicare for every one of them and make a tidy profit on every one. Drug companies are also a sector flush with cash. In the case of Medicare-D its written in to law the government can't negotiate drug prices, because the drug companies bribed the Republican Congress to write Medicare-D that way. Drug companies can jack up their prices whenever they feel like, especially on drugs that are still under patents, and the tax payers just pay.
One thing you can't blame is Social Security, because its been running surpluses since the Congress jacked the rates up to a criminal 12.5%. counting employer and employee contributions. Unfortunately all the surplus disappeared in to the hands of Congress and Presidents who squandered it offsetting their budget overruns. When social security goes in the red and the Federal government is broke, chances are high they will raise the retirement age, slash benefits or jack up the rates on workers again. No matter how you slice it eventually current generations wont get back what they paid in or workers will be payroll taxed in to poverty. The only way out that wont kill the poor and middle class is tax the rich to make up for the shortfall and the squandered surpluses which is basically what Obama is proposing.
"I'll send you a few bundles of fliers for No2ID or Liberty to hand out in your local shopping centre"
I forgot to add, in America most shoppers in the local "shopping centre", we call them malls here, are going to think you are "nutters" trying to hand them fliers on politically controversial topics, not sure how it is in the U.K. Most will get thrown away or they wont even take them. You see most good Americans are told how to think by the "tele" and aren't going to appreciate your fliers telling them otherwise. I doubt fliers will make even a perceptible blip in how they think about their world.
You see most Americans go to malls to spend all their harder earned wages on stuff the "tele" told them need but actually mostly don't. They were also told its patriotic to spend all their money to support the economy. The savings rate for Americans is therefor around zero, or maybe its negative by now. In fact its ideal if they buy all their goods with money they don't have using credit cards so they can pay userous 10-15% interest rates to the now state owned banks who need the money more than the working people do. If they spend all their money it A) makes the corporations richer and it makes all the working people broke. People who are broke are easy to control, as long as they bought lots of toys to distract themselves with before they ended up broke.
A key mistake the Republicans made is around 2005, thanks to Katrina and Iraq, and probably Jon Stewart, they somehow lost control of what the television was saying about them. It started telling people to hate Republicans, so they did. Is the "tele' in the U.K. saying to hate Blair and Brown yet?
I don't even know you and since you started out calling me a nutter I'm not even particularly fond of you. Me sending you any form of contact info is the last thing on earth that is gonna happen here. This being the internet it is a complete toss up if you do actually work on behalf of all those causes or spent a few minutes fabricating a nice sounding resume. I will commend you for actually saying something of substance on this subject finally but, no, I'm not gonna give you a medal for throwing a resume of unknown veracity on to the Internet and I'm not going to play that same game because its meaningless in this medium for anyone to pat themselves on the back. Only thing I can say is if you have been working on behalf of all those causes its sad your efforts have been such a failure because your causes are losing and losing badly. Might I suggest the thing you probably need to do most is to work to throw your Liberals out of office and hope your Conservatives will do better. Blair and Brown are nearly as scary as Bush and Cheney.
"I'll send you a few bundles of fliers for No2ID or Liberty to hand out in your local shopping centre"
I'm thinking me handing out flyers in the U.S. for UK civil liberty causes would in fact make me look "nutters" so I'll take a pass. Are you nuts or just trying to make me look nuts:)
At the moment the best thing we American's can do, and are doing, me included is work to throw the Republican party completely out of power in the U.S. The nightmare scenario is McCain/Palin wins, McCain dies and we have a President that makes Bush look good. Until that party is defanged all the causes you list as they apply in the U.S. have been exercises in futility. The EFF for example has tried to do some good things, but the Bush administration has completely frustrated them. You and the rest of the world should hope we succeed, but in a country that still has a horrible, easy to rig voting systems, its impossible to tell what will happen in a couple weeks. One small victory I can claim is where I vote we use paper ballots, a cause I've championed locally. Oops, patting myself on the back and I said I wouldn't.
We then have to hope Obama and a Democratic Congress can return to some form of sanity in American government though its a lot to ask of a party that is only marginally better than the Republicans and have empowered them through most of the excesses of recent years, invading Iraq, the Patriot act, Rendition, spying on Americans and state capitalism.
There are good people who are Republicans, their party used to stand for good things, I was one when I was younger and subscribe to small government and low taxes. There are a lot of good people, still or former Republicans, who are completely aghast at the horrible transformation that started with Reagan and ended in the horror we have today.
I seriously don't like Democrats but they are the lesser of two evils now so I'm supporting them every way I can for now. After the practical experience of the last eight last years the nuts who've seized control of the Republican party have for all practical purposes turned it in.... dare I say it... the American Fascist party. Its not a Fascist party with jack boots and swastikas, but a velvet gloved Fascism. No one is allowed to call it that, of course, without being called "nutters" but that is what it is. It has all the classic hallmarks, penchant for aggressive, preemptive wars based on fabrications, massive military spending, complete contempt for civil liberties and privacy, election manipulation, power grabs especially using crisis as an excuse, using nationalism to destroy all who oppose them, flag waving and lapel pinning, massive use of propaganda to manipulate the populace, use of scapegoat groups to unify the populace against "enemies", support for book bans(like book burning, one of the first thing Sarah Palin tried as mayor), using religion as a manipulative tool of the state, and despite
"Ooh, now who's resorting to ad-hominem!:D My "blatherings"
Blathering is not much of an ad hominem compared to your rhetoric, like just dismissing me as a "nutter" with no explanation of why. blathering just means nonsense and since your defense of your position has been sparse to nonexistent you probably qualify until you start making a case for your position other than "hope".
"Could you please quote where I've made that claim?"
Since you called me a "nutter" for suggesting that Fascism is where the U.K. is heading it follows that you are making that claim that the U.K. isn't heading to Fascism.
"No, because I didn't claim that democracies (and politicians) never go bad; of course they do. That's not what I'm arguing."
OK at this point I don't even know what you ARE arguing other than you are "hoping" the tide of police state measures being enacted in the U.K. might start receding in the future, because you are "hoping" Blair, Brown and friends don't deep down want a police state though in the wake of the London bombings every action they've taken suggests they do. You however have no more evidence to support your "hope" than I do in my suspicion it may end in a full fledge police state.
Some of the stuff the U.K. is doing makes the U.S. police state look pretty tame by comparison, though I'm not aware of the U.K. aggressively pursuing torture like the U.S., maybe they just hide it better.
In economic terms you still haven't refuted the fact that Brown's rush to nationalize the U.K. financial system could easily be defined as or at least end in state capitalism. His actions differ little from similar actions being taken in Russia, for example, and that is a system which is know most definitely state capitalism bordering on Fascism.
Have you ever read or studied any history or is your education and world view confined mostly to reading British tabloids as it appears?
You might for example want to read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Shirer. It documents in excruciating detail a case history that contradicts everything you've said here. It shows how the Nazi party ascended to power in a representative democracy and then proceeded to use Democracy as a cover as they turned Germany in to a state capital based dictatorship(a.k.a Fascist state) in a matter of a few years.
It is a history those of us you call "nutters" remember, while you apparently don't or never knew in the first place. That means you are probably doomed to repeat it. Even if my accusations about modern Fascism prove to be wrong, I would rather be a "nutter" who protested prematurely than join the ranks with the citizen's of 1930's Germany who sat silently as their nation was sold to the devil, or the citizen's of 21st century China who've opted for prosperity over freedom(though in their defense their country was sold to the devil long ago and entrenched Fascist states are nearly impossible to topple from within).
Chmcginn's response to your blathering is to priceless to top so I wont even try.
Just because you chose to pretend Fascism can't exist doesn't make it so. China is indisputably the largest Fascist regime on the planet and is the envy of capitalists around the world, much like Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy were in the 30's and 20's. As we forgot the lessons of the great Depression we were doomed to repeat them. As we forgot the lessons of Fascism in the 20th century it appears we are doomed to repeat them. It unfortunate our society has forgotten the importance of studying history so we don't keep making the same stupid mistakes.
I'm assuming the U.S. and U.K. are so envious of China they decided to switch instead of fight. The U.S. and U.K have so thoroughly screwed up free market democracy through arrogance, incompetence, corruption and greed its open to debate if it is a system worth saving. It relies far to much on the competence and ethics of its politicians, bankers and citizens and we have none any more.
Unfortunately as the 20th century showed Fascism is a very dangerous model. Once people in power become completely intoxicated with their their absolute power their atrocities know no bounds. Fascism is wonderful and efficient system as long as your leaders are competent and you stay on the right side of the party in power, but life threatening when you and they are not.
You keep saying it doesn't follow but you never actually make a case for why it doesn't follow other than you "hope" it doesn't follow.
Bad laws are passed all the time. As long as the politicians involved keep it under a threshold that it doesn't totally piss off their constituency so they get thrown out they get away with it. In the wake of 9/11, London and Madrid bombings it is trivially easy to pass completely bad oppressive laws, like detention for long periods without trial, because people foolishly think it will make them safer. The closer you are in time to a terrorist attack the easier it is to pass bad law. In Nazi Germany its highly probably the Nazi's burned the Reichstag themselves, or if they didn't they found a convenient scapegoat the wanted to blame, so they could use it as an excuse for a tide of repressive measures during a time when they were still ostensibly in a representative Democracy.
All your protestations about bad laws not passing in Democracies completely fails in the face of the historical example of Nazi Germany. They came in to power through Democratic elections, though elections they used their thugs to manipulate, and initially used democratic means to pass one bad power grabbing law after another until they had turned a democracy in to a dictatorship, their political opponents were in concentration camps, and their constituency was either cheering them on, or to afraid to do or say anything to stop it until it was to late.
This isn't insightful, this guy didn't even read the/. front page.
This video analysis doesn't have to be from satellites, the example in the submission is explicitly a Predator which is a UAV. The video has the resolution to see your every movement, just maybe not tiny objects in your hand. In fact the goal appears to be to analyze video from UAV's like Predator and Global Hawk, and there are a number of similar systems for blimps and high altitude balloons. This surveillance isn't even remotely new, its been going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the U.S. on the Mexican border for years. In fact its been happening in the U.S. from news and police helicopters since the 70's. I'm pretty sure they've had Infrared video for years too. It sounds like DARPA is just advancing the state of watching the video with computers especially to go back and scan archive footage for an event of particular interest to kick it back to a human to look at to save expensive human time staring at video playbacks, and maybe to allow a dramatic increase in the number of surveillance cameras deployed....somewhere....without the corresponding expensive increase in humans to watch them.
Its not particularly of concern for spying on Americans in their homes since most of the DOD UAV's are in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the borders, unless you live on the border. On the other hand there is nothing stopping it from being turned to spy on people in the U.S. in the name of homeland defense, other than a few flimsy laws, the Bush administration has probably already thrown aside. I news pieces on the blimp video systems were definitely being aimed at the domestic market to watch big sporting events and the like. Of course since we've had news and police helicopters spying on us since the 1970's nothing new here, move along, other than DARPA is funding moving image recognition software.
If you value your privacy close your curtains and buy lots and lots of insulation.
"However not all politicians seek more power for the/state/."
Yes, but some politicians do seek to grab more power for the state, since its more power for them while they are in office, and more power for their party if they are succeeded by their own. Also, once the power is grabbed it is almost never returned to the people by a later more benevolent politician, so the power for the state tends to increase more than it decreases.
In the U.S. Bush, Cheney and Rove were engaged in an multiyear campaign to establish the supremecy of the Presidency over the other branches of government and eliminate many of the Constitutional limits, checks and balances on the Executive. He and Bush have authorized torture contrary to U.S. and International law, illegal spying on American citizens contrary to U.S. Law, started a war based on complete fabrication, used thousands of signing statements to unilaterally chose which parts of laws passed by Congress they would adhere to and which they would ignore(not something authorized by the Constitution, its either sign it or veto the entire bill), attempted to have all the VP's papers hidden from public view and kept out of the National Archives after he leaves office, attempted to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate so they could pass laws with a simple majority to seize complete power from the Democrats back when they had a majority in the Senate. The power grab in the Senate was only stopped by 7 moderate Republican Senators who teamed with 7 Democrats to frustrate Cheney's power grab.
Their dramatic expansion of Presidential power, an expansion designed to persist after their eight years are up, may be something they live to regret if there is an Obama in the White House. But you see from 2000 through 2006 when these power grabs were at their peak the Republicans were riding high and thought they were going to have a lock on the Presidency and Congress for decades if not generations to come so they thought they were in essence grabbing power for their party for generations. It was only through massive incompetence on their part that they so completely alienated the American electorate that they lost their stranglehold on power. If they had been somewhat more competent they may well have held power for generations and their power grab would have served their party well. They no doubt also thought the more power they had the more they could use and abuse that power to insure they won elections and maintained their control of that power.
Perhaps you should try to word a rational rebuttal explaining why this is so, instead of launching a juvenile ad hominem with no basis for your assertion. It just makes you look like you can't defend your position.
"Brown's picked up a short-term lift on account of how he does look good wearing a dark tie and a solemn expression whilst appearing to save the world from economic catastrophe."
He may or may not have saved the world from "economic catastrophe", that remains to be seen, but he most definitely did rush the world deeper in to state capitalism over night and without much beyond a whimper of dissent. State capitalism is also known as Fascism. Fascism and police states go hand in hand. The two events, the government seizing control of the financial system, and introducing ever greater surveillance are complimentary parts of the same agenda. All of the surveillance measures insures an orderly society, greater productivity, quells disruptive unrest and helps to enhance profitability. Seizing control of the financial system insures an orderly society, greater productivity, quells disruptive unrest and helps to enhance profitability.
Fascism became a dirty world during World War II but its making a comeback with a vengeance today, though most people are just afraid to call a spade a spade, making it so much easier for it to return to acendency since everyone is afraid to says its name, kind of like Voldemort in Harry Potter. It makes people feel better if they tell themselves they still live in free market Democracies. Just as 9/11 and the London and Madrid bombings were used to justify the police state, the financial crisis was used by ruthless politicians to justify a plunge in to state capitalism. Its kind of sad so much was expended in World War II to stop the tide of Fascism for it to just return through the back door 60 years later.
Its especially disturbing how its playing in the U.S. Goldman Sachs Trading Company and its "investment trusts", Shenandoah and Blue Ridge, were one of the original exercises in leverage in the U.S. financial system. Goldman Sachs created this highly leveraged scheme in 1928 during a bubble, right before the great crash. They sold them for $104 dollars a share, and they ended around a $1 a share. They were after that widely reviled to as a Ponzi Scheme shrouded in the legitimacy of Wall Street. Its somewhat ironic that with Goldman Sachs checkered history its CEO, Henry Paulson, was the point man in 2004 in successfully lobbying the SEC to lift leverage limits on the big Wall Street investment banks from 12-1 to 40-1 so they could once again create highly leveraged, Wall Street backed, Ponzi schemes. All the investment banks promptly ran their leverage up to 30-1 or more. It insured the investment banks would collapse at the slightest down turn. Leverage is hugely profitable in an up market because of the multiplier. But it works both ways and the slightest down turn, wipes out the leveraged company's capital reserves in a heart beat as it just did. It was entirely predictable leaving you to wonder either how could they be so incompetent, so ignorant of their own corprate history or what was the ulterior motive.
The crashing of the Ponzi scheme wasn't a problem since Henry Paulson had since become Treasure Secretary, and under the guise of a program that was supposed to buy distressed mortgage backed securities, and unfreeze the credit markets, instead he is handing the entire $250 billion first installment to Goldman Sachs and the rest of the over leveraged banks to undo a problem he while the whole world cheers the largest bank robbery in history. Are the banks going to loan out the money to unfreeze the credit markets... no. Are they going to help distressed home owners with it.... no. Does it get distressed assets off their books.... no. They are going to put it in their vaults to replace the capital that was wiped out due to excessive leverage and for them to draw their leverage back down to something like 15-1, where it was before Paulson's little scheme. He is using a quarter trillion in tax payer money to undo the damage he himself inflicted on the financial system. Only in America and only on Wall Street could a crime of this magnitude
"their growth rate of ~10% would make up for the loss in ~1yr."
I don't imagine its well understood but China is still dependent to some extent on Western capital and I wager a large percentage of the investment in their stock markets are from Americans and Europeans. If they pulled out of China's stock markets en masse they could probably do as much damage to China as China could do to the U.S. withdrawing from purchase of treasuries. Besides which, due to the current crash there is excessive demand for short term T bills, that's why their yields are just slightly above zero, so the U.S. isn't really dependent on China at the moment to fund their debt, people fleeing stock markets and banks are.
A lot of China's exports are also actually exported and sold by multinationals, like GE and Philips, that are based in the U.S. and Europe. China mostly just does contract manufacturing for them. They would need to do a lot of work to eliminate their dependence on western multinationals to market their products. Most of those multinationals could also easily move their manufacturing back to Mexico where much of it was originally. Many already were because shipping costs from China were spiraling out of control with $140 oil. Many were also already moving to places like Vietnam because China's wage rates have started to spiral to the point China is becoming "expensive" for manufacturing. China also recently passed labor laws to reduce some abuse of their workers. Multinationals like workers with no rights so they started to move to new shit holes. Globalization is awesome because there is a an great ability to shift manufacturing to the place with the poorest, most oppressed workers.
Not sure if its been definitively proven but I heard on CNBC over the weekend that China's growth rate may have slowed to something around 4% in recent months. The world is entering in to a serious recession in case you hadn't heard due to the comoddity shocked followed by a stock market panic that decimated capital around the world. This is one reason oil and other commodity prices are crashing. It might be a China's growth has slowed some since they were starting to run out of workers, inflation, and wage inflation in particular, was becoming a serious issue with 10% growth. On the other hand China is starting to rely on 10% growth to support their people and economy and when they come back down to earth it might cause social issues.
All in all, China isn't quite as rosy a picture as many people think. Their brutally enforced one child policy is starting to have serious consequences for them. At a time they need a lot of workers their pool of young workers is starting to shrink, and the sweat shop dormitory conditions in their manufacturing regions are disliked by older workers. It is nearly inevitable they are going to have major problems due to a huge elderly population, and not enough young people to support them, worse than Japan or the U.S. by far.
They also have massive corruption problems, the milk scandal being just the most recent manifestation. Officials apparently suppressed news of the scandal so it didn't break during the Olympics and probably killed and sickened a lot of children as a result.
They also have serious problems in their rural regions where farmers are fed up with the people in the cities getting filthy rich in free markets where they are still stuck in communist farming system. Though I saw last week China was finally going to start some program to privatize farms though I didn't see the details.
"Can you cite a single fact to back this up or are you just coming up with wild theories with nothing to back them up?"
Only anecdotal, I've seen such a glut of info on the economy in recent weeks.
I recall an article on Paulson arguing the SEC for relaxation of the 12-1 limits on leverage on the big investment banks one of the rationale's was their modeling of risk had become so good everything would be fine.
Someone on CNBC yesterday, I can't remember who, blamed the "propeller heads" for some of the problems in the derivatives markets.
I'm pretty sure much of the devastation in our economy today is directly attributable to propeller heads, math majors, who took their computers to Wall Street and thought they could rule the world's economy using math, for example by writing algorithms to assess risk of Credit Default Swaps, and to use computerized trading to keep investment banks and hedge funds with 30 to 1 leverage from imploding. They failed. Maybe teaching math isn't always a good idea:)
You might save American education if you could identify and funnel America's best and brightest in to boarding schools that value academic excellence and not competitive sports, just intramural sports to promote good health and and team skills. At the same time do your best to funnel the best teachers to the same institutions and pay them very well. Not sure where you get the money now that America is broke. Full scholarships are important to make sure they are a meritocracy and not a plutocracy like current elitist prep schools. Its kind of an elitist concept since it would stratify education and make the existing public school even worse than they already are. Liberals will hate it because its elitist, the right wingers will hate it because its a meritocracy instead of a plutocracy, so maybe its a good thing it pisses off both fringes equally.
"No Child Left Behind" being the complete fixation of the U.S. education system is insane. It is completely focusing the system on the least able students and totally abandoning gifted students. It is a system designed to destroy American global competitiveness. To compete globally America needs the elite students, it doesn't really need to do a better job of educating people who will end up in fast food joints and on assembly lines, if there are any assembly lines left in America.
True but in a classic sense Fascism is designed to pander to the rich and powerful, as long as they are loyal members of the party in power. Socialism is supposed to focus on the needs and well being of workers. So far, in practice, Socialism usually ends up pandering to the well being of the politicians and bureaucrats in power along with deadbeats who dine at the state's welfare teat, and get a free ride, while people who actually work are taxed in to poverty to support all the people who aren't working.
Its quite an interesting time for this crisis to be occurring, with Bush and Paulson engaged in a blatant power grab, and trying to create a Fascist regime just as they are about to be pushed out of office in January. It appears they will be replaced with someone they despise, Obama. The only two things I can think of is they were planning to transfer as much money as possible to their friends before Obama takes power leaving him in charge of broken and destitute country where he is certain to fail and be thrown out in four years, or they are planning to use the crisis to eventually declare martial law to prevent Obama from taking office or just rig the election so McCain wins. Phil Graham, McCain's economic advisor and probable Treasury secretary, has Fascist written all over him.
By my definition if the Republican's are running it, its likely to look a lot more like Fascism and if its the Democrats its a bit more like classic Socialism. As best I recall workers actually did quite well under Nazism as long as they didn't run afoul of the police state and end up in an oven, and until their country was turned in to rubble.
"You never said exactly what forces this country to accept the loan."
Just a guess... if the politicians accepting the loan are thoroughly corrupt, which most politicians are, their plan is to siphon off a large percentage of the loan, as it comes in to their country, and store the proceeds in to Swiss bank accounts. After that they don't care if the their home country can't pay off the loan they are rich globe trotters, gambling in the best casinos and serviced by world class hookers. They never go back to the bankrupt third world shit hole they destroyed to get rich. One of Wolfowitz's big themes when he was running the World Bank was corruption and that corruptiom had to be rooted out before money flowed to a country. I don't think he was very successful at that since it turned out he had his own problem with corruption, giving a high paying job and raises to his mistress. And of course the Bush administration in which Wolfowitz served has proved to be one of the more corrupt administrations in U.S. history. Corruption is hard to fix when everyone is doing it.
I'm quite curious what the IMF and World Bank would say about the U.S. economy in recent weeks. The massive nationalization of the U.S. economy would seem to be totally contradictory to the rhetoric the U.S., through the World Bank, has spewed at the third world for decades. The U.S., U.K and many first world countries seem to have rushed to state capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism) or Socialism almost overnight in seizing control of major banks, massive attempts at market manipulation, etc. It appears free market reforms are only appropriate for economic crisis in the third world. As soon as their was a real crisis in the first world they rushed to the nationalization to solve it, something they have railed against elsewhere forever.
As an aside I learned just the other day one of the top executives at Lehman Brothers whose collapse triggered the current panic is George H. Walker IV. He is George W. Bush's cousin. His name sake, George Herbert "Bert" Walker, is one of the patriarchs of the Bush clan and rumored to have been a first class schemer. The Bush's are all named George Herbert and George Walker in tribute to him because he started them on their rise to power and riches. There is irony that one of George W's cousins is central to the economic collapse that he is using to turn the U.S. in to a Fascist/Socialist economy (Fascist if the Republicans are in power, Socialist if its the Democrats that takes the reins).
"Police scanners are legal"... though many police and emergency agencies are migrating to digital radios that can use encrypted signals and when they do its either much harder or nearly impossible to listen to them any more. Many agencies are getting Homeland Security money to do the transition. Anecdotally I hear the 800 MHz digital radios tend to suck compared to their analog counterparts but they are considered.... progress. It is probably a good thing that private citizens can't listen to police and EMT transmissions since it often violates the privacy of the peoples whose personal information is transmitted over them, and its probably a plus people committing a crime can't listen to the police response. On the other hand its about the only mechanism citizens have to know when there are crimes or other emergencies in their neighborhood especially if you don't live in areas with blanket media coverage and news helicopters. Maybe as they transition to encrypted digital radios communities should create a public broadcast system on the old analog channels and intentionally announce sanitized updates on crimes and emergencies in the community.
"I'm glad they don't waste debate time talking about it."
Right you are. Net neutrality doesn't really rate at a time when the global economy is collapsing and governments around the country, led by the U.S., are seizing control of their economies, turning them in to Fascist or Socialist states overnight without consent from their peoples.
Of course judged by the debate earlier this week I don't think they are actually managing to debate anything of substance at all. McCain-Palin have returned to the tried and true Swift boating strategy with accusations Obama is practically a terrorist and a secret member of the Weather Underground or Black Panthers because he knows Bill Ayers, though Ayers was a radical when Obama was 8 years old and is now a reformed part of the Chicago establishment, focusing his energy on education and being a respected university professor. The standard Republican debating points aren't designed to really talk about issues because they are failing on the ground on every issue that matters. Their talking points are designed to fear monger and distract the electorate, and to wedge voters in to voting for them using abortion. "terrorism" and homophobia. Palin was giving a speech recently and accused Obama of associating with "terrorists" and someone in the audience shouted "kill him" which tells you where this campaign is headed.
Not like the Democrats are really much better though. Obama is mostly just promising to tax the rich and spend on government programs that will magically make everything better for the average Joe..... which they wont... especially when the Republican establishment, you know the people with all the money and economic power, and the defense industrial complex, start fighting him at every turn...like Kennedy.
Besides which, the Bush administration, Paulson and Greenspan have so bankrupted the U.S. government its unlikely McCain or Obama will be able to do anything requiring money. About all they can do is stop digging, since we are in a hole we can't get out of and are so deeply in debt all that can be done is slash spending or raise taxes. There is a line of thought that Bush has been intentionally bankrupt the U.S. government so by the end of his tenure so there will be no money for the Democrats to spend on anything any more.
About all I want is for the Republican's to go away because they are doing everything in their power to screw up everything ans screw all the average Joe's that voted for them in 2000 and 2004. The Democrat's nanny state isn't any better. I've reached the point I mostly just want my government to just STOP. All I want out of it is to provide a basic defense force, not a nation building, meddling, staggeringly expensive offense. I also want a basic rule of law, not spying, not torture, not a Minority Report style pre-crime approach making people guilty who haven't done anything wrong. I want minimal regulation to stop greedy ass hats like the ones on Wall Street from running a muck and screwing responsible, self reliant people like myself who had nothing to do with their Ponzi scheme. A little regulation to insure net neutrality is fine but it sure doesn't rate very high as a priority right now. Wall Street sure didn't want any government involvement when their scheme was making them rich with their staggering bonuses in 2004-2006. They sure don't need my tax dollars baling them out now that they screwed the pooch.
Conspiracy theories ran wild in my head when I discovered for the first time the other day that George H. Walker is one of the managing directors of Lehman brothers. If the name isn't familiar to you he is the descendant of one of the scheming founding forefathers of the Bush clan, Bert Walker. George H. Walker IV is a cousin of George W. Bush, and one of the key executives at Lehman Brothers when it collapsed. Lehman Brother's mismanagement and collapse triggered the current panic as their bankruptcy created a cascade through credit default swaps and nearly took down AIG. There is just
I saw recently Ridley Scott is doing a new movie based on "Brave New World". He's of the opinion "Brave New World" is a lot closer to the current situation than 1984. Rather than the heavy handed manipulation of 1984, most people are just being inundated with a glut of information, most of it trivial, and no longer have any grip on what is important and what isn't. Most people spend more time worrying about sex, drugs and iTunes and their credit cards, while their government is completely screwing them. In that situation the people in power have just as much power as a 1984 scenario but its generally easier to manage. "Brave New World" was also pretty heavy on worship of corporations, with worship of Ford being the new religion. This was back at a time when Henry Ford and the Model T dominated American culture so the Christian cross was replaced with a "T" in "Brave New World".
The current financial turmoil is causing some amazingly rapid transformations in our culture. It will be interesting to see where it ends. The Bush Administration along with Gordon Brown's seem to be using a financial crisis they manufactured to rapidly replace free market Democracy with state capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism). I've been of the opinion, and said it for years here, the Bush regime's overriding goal was to reintroduce Fascism as the dominant model in the U.S. and the world. Events of the last few weeks are I think proving me correct. The introduction of Fascism in the U.S. is no longer moving slowly or inconspicuously, nationalizing the financial system is either Fascism or Socialism plain and simple. Before this economic crisis is done the U.S. government is going to completely own the financial system, and through the financial system everything else. Its more than a little suspicious that Hank Paulson, while at Goldman Sachs in 2004 championed elimination of SEC constraints on the big broker's leverage and capitalization. They immediately leveraged up to 30 to 1 and were certain to fail in the face of the slightest downturn. There is a chance Paulson helped engineer this economic crisis as far back as 2004 and is now using it as an excuse for Bush and himself to completely seize control of the economic system.
Fascism does in fact work quite well as an economic system. When Mussolini introduced it in Italy it was considered a miracle and was the envy of the world. It propelled both Germany and Italy to amazing economic progress while the rest of the world languished in depression. There were shadowy indications Fascists were planning to seize power in the U.S. during the 30's and Roosevelt prevented it, though he countered it with Socialism which is a close cousin. During this same period George W's grandfather Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thyssen family. They Thyssen family bankrolled Hitler's rise to power and Prescott's Union Bank was closed down in 1941 for trading with the enemy. It was quite an embarrassment to the Bush clan at the time since they were basically branded as Nazi sympathizers.
The problem with Fascism is it has some nasty tendencies. One is it tends to end in totalitarian dictatorship and police states where maintaining order is prioritized over civil liberties. The U.S. is certainly far along towards police state with these "lists", unchecked spying on its citizens and state sanctioned use of torture. The other is that once the state starts intervening in markets it almost inevitably starts picking winners and losers in the economy somewhat arbitrarily. Actually its not really arbitrary, the corporate "winners" are usually the loyal and well connected members of the party in power, and the "losers" are owned by the people who oppose the party in power.
The big paradox is that the Bush administration is completing creation of its Fascist regime just as they are about to be thrown out of power.... What will they do? One possibility is that they are hoping for or encouraging the current economic crisis to spiral out of control so there will be a complete c
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.
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"Anyone that has a clue how the economy works is smart enough to not be in politics."
I bring forth Hank Paulson to disprove your claim. In 2004 while CEO at Goldman-Sachs he lobbied to get the leverage cap on the top investment banks raised from 12-1 to 40-1. This allowed him and his friends three years of nearly obscene profits and bonuses as they leveraged up. He then deftly jumped in to politics just in time to hand out another trillion dollars of tax payer funds to bail out his friends when that 30-1 plus leverage house of cards collapsed. I contend that Hank Paulson is in politics and outrageously smart in lining the pockets of the fat cats on Wall Street. Only people who question his character are all the working stiffs, retirees and tax payers who are being cleaned out.
The thinh most people forget about politicians, thinking they are all poor civil servants, is they often get both obscenely rich before entering politics and the can most definitely get obscenely rich when they leave when all the payoffs start rolling in from all their rich friends who appreciate the tax breaks, sole source contracts, low interest loans, and tax payer subsidized profits from things like Medicare D, Sally Mae, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac.
The smart people realize the real profit potential is in the revolving door in and out of government.
Its important to note Social Security has been running surpluses since Congress jacked up the rates in the early 80's so it isn't a reason for deficits. In fact the surpluses have been offsetting the deficits caused by excess spending elsewhere and income tax cuts. Its still a few years before Social Security goes in to the red.
"Your boss needs you as much as you need him or her"
True if your boss and you are in a service industry so your job isn't mobile. If you are in things like manufacturing or IT, where your job can be offshored any where on the planet, in fact your boss doesn't really need you much at all. Sure there is a price for off-shoring but if you can get worker for a fraction of the price and still get the job done more or less, you are in a "wage slave" industry now.
This is one reason unions in the U.S. are only surviving in service industries that can't be off shored like police, fire, teachers, truckers, civil service etc. and aren't even doing well there. For example there is a push lately to allow Mexican truckers greater ability to drive trucks in the U.S. If you are in a manufacturing union like autos or airplanes its just a matter of time before either your union is gone and your wages plunge, your company moves your job off shore, or your company goes bankrupt like Ford, GM and Chrysler.
Here is a contrasting way to look at this issue for you to think about.
Low and middle income working people pay 12.5% of their wages to payroll taxes, counting both employer and employee contributions. Splitting it that way was a deceptive tactic to hide from workers how really high the payroll tax is, but the employer contribution is coming out of what the worker would get paid so it counts too. A pretty average middle income worker's wages can easily be taxed at 25% income tax. Its pretty easy for a middle income worker to be taxed at 40%+ total, factoring in regressive sales taxes, property taxes, state taxes, etc.
By contrast most rich people make all their income off capital gains and dividends on stocks. Thanks to the Bush administration those are taxed at 15%. Sure a low or middle income person can invest in stocks too, but they have a lot less disposable income to invest there than the rich do.
Don't you think the current Bush/McCain strategy is redistributing wealth too, letting the "investor class" keep 85% of what they make, while workers keep 60% of what they make. Its no accident wealth distribution in the U.S., in fact around the world is spiraling out of control, in the favor of the top couple percent. This doesn't even factor in the fact that most corporations and the "investor class" can afford extensive accounting services and tax shelters that cut their effective tax rate even further while most working people don't.
Its something the right rails against but you HAVE to have progressive taxation, because it is vastly easier for people with a lot of money, to make a lot more money. The Bush administration has implemented an extremely regressive tax scheme and that is why the rich were getting richer at a furious pace, at least until the stock market crashed. Yes the rich pay a rather large percentage of income tax but they also make a lot more money than the lower and middle classes do. By the time you factor in payroll taxes there is no way you can contend the rich are paying their fair share now. Anyone being intellectually honest knows it, just ask Warren Buffett.
"It's tough to believe but there just isn't enough waste to cut,"
That's a silly statement.
You can start with farm subsidies. Especially the ones that pay farmers to not grow crops, especially since a lot of them go to rather affluent people who buy land just to collect the subsidies on it and don't actually ever farm. When many areas of the world are starving, and especially a few months ago when food prices were spiking out of sight, subsidizing farmers to not grow crops is borderline criminal. Can you get rid of them, probably not, because there is a powerful block of Congressmen mostly from the Midwest that will fight to the death to keep them. Subsidizing ethanol is another borderline crime. Making Ethanol from corn is a horrible idea, and is a net energy loss. It also drives up food prices. The only reason Ethanol from corn exists is because Congress mandates and subsidizes it. Why, because the Midwestern congressmen saw it as a way to enrich their states. Most of the Ethanol producers may go bankrupt anyway. You want ethanol make it out of sugar, but historically the U.S. blocks sugar importants and for a while Ethanol made from sugar to protect big polically connected sugar growers in the U.S.
Turn to the Defense budget. It is a full 2X what it was when Bush came to office and its hard to even figure out what it really is with black defense and intelligence spending, and the bills for Iraq and Afghanistan paid the way they are, outside of the formal budget process. You could easily pull out of Iraq and cut defense spending in half and be no worse off than we were 10 years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, but most intelligent people have come to the conclusion pouring in more troops and killing more civilians is making the situation worse not better. Its a lost cause at the moment because the current U.S. hand picked President is incompetent and his entire government is so corrupt and entwined with the Opium trade no one in Afghanistan will support it. The Taliban looks good in comparision. The obstacle here is the defense industrial complex has massive power between defense contractors, their lobbyists, the military and congressional hawks. You cut their budget at your own risk. I assure you spending way over a billion dollars on a single B-2 and way over $100 million on a single F-22 isn't actually necessary in this world.
The spiraling cost of health care is also a major contributor to Federal spending. Medicare and Medicaid costs are out of control. Partially its just better, ever more expensive equipment and treatment. But a lot of it is a lot of fairly corrupt corporations milking it for all its worth. You ever wonder why there are twenty companies constantly advertising to sell motorized wheel chairs for the elderly? Because they can charge Medicare for every one of them and make a tidy profit on every one. Drug companies are also a sector flush with cash. In the case of Medicare-D its written in to law the government can't negotiate drug prices, because the drug companies bribed the Republican Congress to write Medicare-D that way. Drug companies can jack up their prices whenever they feel like, especially on drugs that are still under patents, and the tax payers just pay.
One thing you can't blame is Social Security, because its been running surpluses since the Congress jacked the rates up to a criminal 12.5%. counting employer and employee contributions. Unfortunately all the surplus disappeared in to the hands of Congress and Presidents who squandered it offsetting their budget overruns. When social security goes in the red and the Federal government is broke, chances are high they will raise the retirement age, slash benefits or jack up the rates on workers again. No matter how you slice it eventually current generations wont get back what they paid in or workers will be payroll taxed in to poverty. The only way out that wont kill the poor and middle class is tax the rich to make up for the shortfall and the squandered surpluses which is basically what Obama is proposing.
"I'll send you a few bundles of fliers for No2ID or Liberty to hand out in your local shopping centre"
I forgot to add, in America most shoppers in the local "shopping centre", we call them malls here, are going to think you are "nutters" trying to hand them fliers on politically controversial topics, not sure how it is in the U.K. Most will get thrown away or they wont even take them. You see most good Americans are told how to think by the "tele" and aren't going to appreciate your fliers telling them otherwise. I doubt fliers will make even a perceptible blip in how they think about their world.
You see most Americans go to malls to spend all their harder earned wages on stuff the "tele" told them need but actually mostly don't. They were also told its patriotic to spend all their money to support the economy. The savings rate for Americans is therefor around zero, or maybe its negative by now. In fact its ideal if they buy all their goods with money they don't have using credit cards so they can pay userous 10-15% interest rates to the now state owned banks who need the money more than the working people do. If they spend all their money it A) makes the corporations richer and it makes all the working people broke. People who are broke are easy to control, as long as they bought lots of toys to distract themselves with before they ended up broke.
A key mistake the Republicans made is around 2005, thanks to Katrina and Iraq, and probably Jon Stewart, they somehow lost control of what the television was saying about them. It started telling people to hate Republicans, so they did. Is the "tele' in the U.K. saying to hate Blair and Brown yet?
I don't even know you and since you started out calling me a nutter I'm not even particularly fond of you. Me sending you any form of contact info is the last thing on earth that is gonna happen here. This being the internet it is a complete toss up if you do actually work on behalf of all those causes or spent a few minutes fabricating a nice sounding resume. I will commend you for actually saying something of substance on this subject finally but, no, I'm not gonna give you a medal for throwing a resume of unknown veracity on to the Internet and I'm not going to play that same game because its meaningless in this medium for anyone to pat themselves on the back. Only thing I can say is if you have been working on behalf of all those causes its sad your efforts have been such a failure because your causes are losing and losing badly. Might I suggest the thing you probably need to do most is to work to throw your Liberals out of office and hope your Conservatives will do better. Blair and Brown are nearly as scary as Bush and Cheney.
"I'll send you a few bundles of fliers for No2ID or Liberty to hand out in your local shopping centre"
I'm thinking me handing out flyers in the U.S. for UK civil liberty causes would in fact make me look "nutters" so I'll take a pass. Are you nuts or just trying to make me look nuts :)
At the moment the best thing we American's can do, and are doing, me included is work to throw the Republican party completely out of power in the U.S. The nightmare scenario is McCain/Palin wins, McCain dies and we have a President that makes Bush look good. Until that party is defanged all the causes you list as they apply in the U.S. have been exercises in futility. The EFF for example has tried to do some good things, but the Bush administration has completely frustrated them. You and the rest of the world should hope we succeed, but in a country that still has a horrible, easy to rig voting systems, its impossible to tell what will happen in a couple weeks. One small victory I can claim is where I vote we use paper ballots, a cause I've championed locally. Oops, patting myself on the back and I said I wouldn't.
We then have to hope Obama and a Democratic Congress can return to some form of sanity in American government though its a lot to ask of a party that is only marginally better than the Republicans and have empowered them through most of the excesses of recent years, invading Iraq, the Patriot act, Rendition, spying on Americans and state capitalism.
There are good people who are Republicans, their party used to stand for good things, I was one when I was younger and subscribe to small government and low taxes. There are a lot of good people, still or former Republicans, who are completely aghast at the horrible transformation that started with Reagan and ended in the horror we have today.
I seriously don't like Democrats but they are the lesser of two evils now so I'm supporting them every way I can for now. After the practical experience of the last eight last years the nuts who've seized control of the Republican party have for all practical purposes turned it in .... dare I say it ... the American Fascist party. Its not a Fascist party with jack boots and swastikas, but a velvet gloved Fascism. No one is allowed to call it that, of course, without being called "nutters" but that is what it is. It has all the classic hallmarks, penchant for aggressive, preemptive wars based on fabrications, massive military spending, complete contempt for civil liberties and privacy, election manipulation, power grabs especially using crisis as an excuse, using nationalism to destroy all who oppose them, flag waving and lapel pinning, massive use of propaganda to manipulate the populace, use of scapegoat groups to unify the populace against "enemies", support for book bans(like book burning, one of the first thing Sarah Palin tried as mayor), using religion as a manipulative tool of the state, and despite
"Ooh, now who's resorting to ad-hominem! :D My "blatherings"
Blathering is not much of an ad hominem compared to your rhetoric, like just dismissing me as a "nutter" with no explanation of why. blathering just means nonsense and since your defense of your position has been sparse to nonexistent you probably qualify until you start making a case for your position other than "hope".
"Could you please quote where I've made that claim?"
Since you called me a "nutter" for suggesting that Fascism is where the U.K. is heading it follows that you are making that claim that the U.K. isn't heading to Fascism.
"No, because I didn't claim that democracies (and politicians) never go bad; of course they do. That's not what I'm arguing."
OK at this point I don't even know what you ARE arguing other than you are "hoping" the tide of police state measures being enacted in the U.K. might start receding in the future, because you are "hoping" Blair, Brown and friends don't deep down want a police state though in the wake of the London bombings every action they've taken suggests they do. You however have no more evidence to support your "hope" than I do in my suspicion it may end in a full fledge police state.
Some of the stuff the U.K. is doing makes the U.S. police state look pretty tame by comparison, though I'm not aware of the U.K. aggressively pursuing torture like the U.S., maybe they just hide it better.
In economic terms you still haven't refuted the fact that Brown's rush to nationalize the U.K. financial system could easily be defined as or at least end in state capitalism. His actions differ little from similar actions being taken in Russia, for example, and that is a system which is know most definitely state capitalism bordering on Fascism.
A quick question ... I forgot in my last post.
Have you ever read or studied any history or is your education and world view confined mostly to reading British tabloids as it appears?
You might for example want to read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Shirer. It documents in excruciating detail a case history that contradicts everything you've said here. It shows how the Nazi party ascended to power in a representative democracy and then proceeded to use Democracy as a cover as they turned Germany in to a state capital based dictatorship(a.k.a Fascist state) in a matter of a few years.
It is a history those of us you call "nutters" remember, while you apparently don't or never knew in the first place. That means you are probably doomed to repeat it. Even if my accusations about modern Fascism prove to be wrong, I would rather be a "nutter" who protested prematurely than join the ranks with the citizen's of 1930's Germany who sat silently as their nation was sold to the devil, or the citizen's of 21st century China who've opted for prosperity over freedom(though in their defense their country was sold to the devil long ago and entrenched Fascist states are nearly impossible to topple from within).
Chmcginn's response to your blathering is to priceless to top so I wont even try.
Just because you chose to pretend Fascism can't exist doesn't make it so. China is indisputably the largest Fascist regime on the planet and is the envy of capitalists around the world, much like Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy were in the 30's and 20's. As we forgot the lessons of the great Depression we were doomed to repeat them. As we forgot the lessons of Fascism in the 20th century it appears we are doomed to repeat them. It unfortunate our society has forgotten the importance of studying history so we don't keep making the same stupid mistakes.
I'm assuming the U.S. and U.K. are so envious of China they decided to switch instead of fight. The U.S. and U.K have so thoroughly screwed up free market democracy through arrogance, incompetence, corruption and greed its open to debate if it is a system worth saving. It relies far to much on the competence and ethics of its politicians, bankers and citizens and we have none any more.
Unfortunately as the 20th century showed Fascism is a very dangerous model. Once people in power become completely intoxicated with their their absolute power their atrocities know no bounds. Fascism is wonderful and efficient system as long as your leaders are competent and you stay on the right side of the party in power, but life threatening when you and they are not.
"That does not follow"
You keep saying it doesn't follow but you never actually make a case for why it doesn't follow other than you "hope" it doesn't follow.
Bad laws are passed all the time. As long as the politicians involved keep it under a threshold that it doesn't totally piss off their constituency so they get thrown out they get away with it. In the wake of 9/11, London and Madrid bombings it is trivially easy to pass completely bad oppressive laws, like detention for long periods without trial, because people foolishly think it will make them safer. The closer you are in time to a terrorist attack the easier it is to pass bad law. In Nazi Germany its highly probably the Nazi's burned the Reichstag themselves, or if they didn't they found a convenient scapegoat the wanted to blame, so they could use it as an excuse for a tide of repressive measures during a time when they were still ostensibly in a representative Democracy.
All your protestations about bad laws not passing in Democracies completely fails in the face of the historical example of Nazi Germany. They came in to power through Democratic elections, though elections they used their thugs to manipulate, and initially used democratic means to pass one bad power grabbing law after another until they had turned a democracy in to a dictatorship, their political opponents were in concentration camps, and their constituency was either cheering them on, or to afraid to do or say anything to stop it until it was to late.
This isn't insightful, this guy didn't even read the /. front page.
This video analysis doesn't have to be from satellites, the example in the submission is explicitly a Predator which is a UAV. The video has the resolution to see your every movement, just maybe not tiny objects in your hand. In fact the goal appears to be to analyze video from UAV's like Predator and Global Hawk, and there are a number of similar systems for blimps and high altitude balloons. This surveillance isn't even remotely new, its been going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the U.S. on the Mexican border for years. In fact its been happening in the U.S. from news and police helicopters since the 70's. I'm pretty sure they've had Infrared video for years too. It sounds like DARPA is just advancing the state of watching the video with computers especially to go back and scan archive footage for an event of particular interest to kick it back to a human to look at to save expensive human time staring at video playbacks, and maybe to allow a dramatic increase in the number of surveillance cameras deployed....somewhere....without the corresponding expensive increase in humans to watch them.
Its not particularly of concern for spying on Americans in their homes since most of the DOD UAV's are in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the borders, unless you live on the border. On the other hand there is nothing stopping it from being turned to spy on people in the U.S. in the name of homeland defense, other than a few flimsy laws, the Bush administration has probably already thrown aside. I news pieces on the blimp video systems were definitely being aimed at the domestic market to watch big sporting events and the like. Of course since we've had news and police helicopters spying on us since the 1970's nothing new here, move along, other than DARPA is funding moving image recognition software.
If you value your privacy close your curtains and buy lots and lots of insulation.
"However not all politicians seek more power for the /state/."
Yes, but some politicians do seek to grab more power for the state, since its more power for them while they are in office, and more power for their party if they are succeeded by their own. Also, once the power is grabbed it is almost never returned to the people by a later more benevolent politician, so the power for the state tends to increase more than it decreases.
In the U.S. Bush, Cheney and Rove were engaged in an multiyear campaign to establish the supremecy of the Presidency over the other branches of government and eliminate many of the Constitutional limits, checks and balances on the Executive. He and Bush have authorized torture contrary to U.S. and International law, illegal spying on American citizens contrary to U.S. Law, started a war based on complete fabrication, used thousands of signing statements to unilaterally chose which parts of laws passed by Congress they would adhere to and which they would ignore(not something authorized by the Constitution, its either sign it or veto the entire bill), attempted to have all the VP's papers hidden from public view and kept out of the National Archives after he leaves office, attempted to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate so they could pass laws with a simple majority to seize complete power from the Democrats back when they had a majority in the Senate. The power grab in the Senate was only stopped by 7 moderate Republican Senators who teamed with 7 Democrats to frustrate Cheney's power grab.
Their dramatic expansion of Presidential power, an expansion designed to persist after their eight years are up, may be something they live to regret if there is an Obama in the White House. But you see from 2000 through 2006 when these power grabs were at their peak the Republicans were riding high and thought they were going to have a lock on the Presidency and Congress for decades if not generations to come so they thought they were in essence grabbing power for their party for generations. It was only through massive incompetence on their part that they so completely alienated the American electorate that they lost their stranglehold on power. If they had been somewhat more competent they may well have held power for generations and their power grab would have served their party well. They no doubt also thought the more power they had the more they could use and abuse that power to insure they won elections and maintained their control of that power.
"Nonsense. You, sir, are a nutter. *plonk!*"
Perhaps you should try to word a rational rebuttal explaining why this is so, instead of launching a juvenile ad hominem with no basis for your assertion. It just makes you look like you can't defend your position.
"Brown's picked up a short-term lift on account of how he does look good wearing a dark tie and a solemn expression whilst appearing to save the world from economic catastrophe."
He may or may not have saved the world from "economic catastrophe", that remains to be seen, but he most definitely did rush the world deeper in to state capitalism over night and without much beyond a whimper of dissent. State capitalism is also known as Fascism. Fascism and police states go hand in hand. The two events, the government seizing control of the financial system, and introducing ever greater surveillance are complimentary parts of the same agenda. All of the surveillance measures insures an orderly society, greater productivity, quells disruptive unrest and helps to enhance profitability. Seizing control of the financial system insures an orderly society, greater productivity, quells disruptive unrest and helps to enhance profitability.
Fascism became a dirty world during World War II but its making a comeback with a vengeance today, though most people are just afraid to call a spade a spade, making it so much easier for it to return to acendency since everyone is afraid to says its name, kind of like Voldemort in Harry Potter. It makes people feel better if they tell themselves they still live in free market Democracies. Just as 9/11 and the London and Madrid bombings were used to justify the police state, the financial crisis was used by ruthless politicians to justify a plunge in to state capitalism. Its kind of sad so much was expended in World War II to stop the tide of Fascism for it to just return through the back door 60 years later.
Its especially disturbing how its playing in the U.S. Goldman Sachs Trading Company and its "investment trusts", Shenandoah and Blue Ridge, were one of the original exercises in leverage in the U.S. financial system. Goldman Sachs created this highly leveraged scheme in 1928 during a bubble, right before the great crash. They sold them for $104 dollars a share, and they ended around a $1 a share. They were after that widely reviled to as a Ponzi Scheme shrouded in the legitimacy of Wall Street. Its somewhat ironic that with Goldman Sachs checkered history its CEO, Henry Paulson, was the point man in 2004 in successfully lobbying the SEC to lift leverage limits on the big Wall Street investment banks from 12-1 to 40-1 so they could once again create highly leveraged, Wall Street backed, Ponzi schemes. All the investment banks promptly ran their leverage up to 30-1 or more. It insured the investment banks would collapse at the slightest down turn. Leverage is hugely profitable in an up market because of the multiplier. But it works both ways and the slightest down turn, wipes out the leveraged company's capital reserves in a heart beat as it just did. It was entirely predictable leaving you to wonder either how could they be so incompetent, so ignorant of their own corprate history or what was the ulterior motive.
The crashing of the Ponzi scheme wasn't a problem since Henry Paulson had since become Treasure Secretary, and under the guise of a program that was supposed to buy distressed mortgage backed securities, and unfreeze the credit markets, instead he is handing the entire $250 billion first installment to Goldman Sachs and the rest of the over leveraged banks to undo a problem he while the whole world cheers the largest bank robbery in history. Are the banks going to loan out the money to unfreeze the credit markets... no. Are they going to help distressed home owners with it.... no. Does it get distressed assets off their books.... no. They are going to put it in their vaults to replace the capital that was wiped out due to excessive leverage and for them to draw their leverage back down to something like 15-1, where it was before Paulson's little scheme. He is using a quarter trillion in tax payer money to undo the damage he himself inflicted on the financial system. Only in America and only on Wall Street could a crime of this magnitude
"their growth rate of ~10% would make up for the loss in ~1yr."
I don't imagine its well understood but China is still dependent to some extent on Western capital and I wager a large percentage of the investment in their stock markets are from Americans and Europeans. If they pulled out of China's stock markets en masse they could probably do as much damage to China as China could do to the U.S. withdrawing from purchase of treasuries. Besides which, due to the current crash there is excessive demand for short term T bills, that's why their yields are just slightly above zero, so the U.S. isn't really dependent on China at the moment to fund their debt, people fleeing stock markets and banks are.
A lot of China's exports are also actually exported and sold by multinationals, like GE and Philips, that are based in the U.S. and Europe. China mostly just does contract manufacturing for them. They would need to do a lot of work to eliminate their dependence on western multinationals to market their products. Most of those multinationals could also easily move their manufacturing back to Mexico where much of it was originally. Many already were because shipping costs from China were spiraling out of control with $140 oil. Many were also already moving to places like Vietnam because China's wage rates have started to spiral to the point China is becoming "expensive" for manufacturing. China also recently passed labor laws to reduce some abuse of their workers. Multinationals like workers with no rights so they started to move to new shit holes. Globalization is awesome because there is a an great ability to shift manufacturing to the place with the poorest, most oppressed workers.
Not sure if its been definitively proven but I heard on CNBC over the weekend that China's growth rate may have slowed to something around 4% in recent months. The world is entering in to a serious recession in case you hadn't heard due to the comoddity shocked followed by a stock market panic that decimated capital around the world. This is one reason oil and other commodity prices are crashing. It might be a China's growth has slowed some since they were starting to run out of workers, inflation, and wage inflation in particular, was becoming a serious issue with 10% growth. On the other hand China is starting to rely on 10% growth to support their people and economy and when they come back down to earth it might cause social issues.
All in all, China isn't quite as rosy a picture as many people think. Their brutally enforced one child policy is starting to have serious consequences for them. At a time they need a lot of workers their pool of young workers is starting to shrink, and the sweat shop dormitory conditions in their manufacturing regions are disliked by older workers. It is nearly inevitable they are going to have major problems due to a huge elderly population, and not enough young people to support them, worse than Japan or the U.S. by far.
They also have massive corruption problems, the milk scandal being just the most recent manifestation. Officials apparently suppressed news of the scandal so it didn't break during the Olympics and probably killed and sickened a lot of children as a result.
They also have serious problems in their rural regions where farmers are fed up with the people in the cities getting filthy rich in free markets where they are still stuck in communist farming system. Though I saw last week China was finally going to start some program to privatize farms though I didn't see the details.
"Can you cite a single fact to back this up or are you just coming up with wild theories with nothing to back them up?"
Only anecdotal, I've seen such a glut of info on the economy in recent weeks.
I recall an article on Paulson arguing the SEC for relaxation of the 12-1 limits on leverage on the big investment banks one of the rationale's was their modeling of risk had become so good everything would be fine.
Someone on CNBC yesterday, I can't remember who, blamed the "propeller heads" for some of the problems in the derivatives markets.
I'm pretty sure much of the devastation in our economy today is directly attributable to propeller heads, math majors, who took their computers to Wall Street and thought they could rule the world's economy using math, for example by writing algorithms to assess risk of Credit Default Swaps, and to use computerized trading to keep investment banks and hedge funds with 30 to 1 leverage from imploding. They failed. Maybe teaching math isn't always a good idea :)
You might save American education if you could identify and funnel America's best and brightest in to boarding schools that value academic excellence and not competitive sports, just intramural sports to promote good health and and team skills. At the same time do your best to funnel the best teachers to the same institutions and pay them very well. Not sure where you get the money now that America is broke. Full scholarships are important to make sure they are a meritocracy and not a plutocracy like current elitist prep schools. Its kind of an elitist concept since it would stratify education and make the existing public school even worse than they already are. Liberals will hate it because its elitist, the right wingers will hate it because its a meritocracy instead of a plutocracy, so maybe its a good thing it pisses off both fringes equally.
"No Child Left Behind" being the complete fixation of the U.S. education system is insane. It is completely focusing the system on the least able students and totally abandoning gifted students. It is a system designed to destroy American global competitiveness. To compete globally America needs the elite students, it doesn't really need to do a better job of educating people who will end up in fast food joints and on assembly lines, if there are any assembly lines left in America.
"Fascism has always been a flavor of Socialism."
True but in a classic sense Fascism is designed to pander to the rich and powerful, as long as they are loyal members of the party in power. Socialism is supposed to focus on the needs and well being of workers. So far, in practice, Socialism usually ends up pandering to the well being of the politicians and bureaucrats in power along with deadbeats who dine at the state's welfare teat, and get a free ride, while people who actually work are taxed in to poverty to support all the people who aren't working.
Its quite an interesting time for this crisis to be occurring, with Bush and Paulson engaged in a blatant power grab, and trying to create a Fascist regime just as they are about to be pushed out of office in January. It appears they will be replaced with someone they despise, Obama. The only two things I can think of is they were planning to transfer as much money as possible to their friends before Obama takes power leaving him in charge of broken and destitute country where he is certain to fail and be thrown out in four years, or they are planning to use the crisis to eventually declare martial law to prevent Obama from taking office or just rig the election so McCain wins. Phil Graham, McCain's economic advisor and probable Treasury secretary, has Fascist written all over him.
By my definition if the Republican's are running it, its likely to look a lot more like Fascism and if its the Democrats its a bit more like classic Socialism. As best I recall workers actually did quite well under Nazism as long as they didn't run afoul of the police state and end up in an oven, and until their country was turned in to rubble.
"You never said exactly what forces this country to accept the loan."
Just a guess... if the politicians accepting the loan are thoroughly corrupt, which most politicians are, their plan is to siphon off a large percentage of the loan, as it comes in to their country, and store the proceeds in to Swiss bank accounts. After that they don't care if the their home country can't pay off the loan they are rich globe trotters, gambling in the best casinos and serviced by world class hookers. They never go back to the bankrupt third world shit hole they destroyed to get rich. One of Wolfowitz's big themes when he was running the World Bank was corruption and that corruptiom had to be rooted out before money flowed to a country. I don't think he was very successful at that since it turned out he had his own problem with corruption, giving a high paying job and raises to his mistress. And of course the Bush administration in which Wolfowitz served has proved to be one of the more corrupt administrations in U.S. history. Corruption is hard to fix when everyone is doing it.
I'm quite curious what the IMF and World Bank would say about the U.S. economy in recent weeks. The massive nationalization of the U.S. economy would seem to be totally contradictory to the rhetoric the U.S., through the World Bank, has spewed at the third world for decades. The U.S., U.K and many first world countries seem to have rushed to state capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism) or Socialism almost overnight in seizing control of major banks, massive attempts at market manipulation, etc. It appears free market reforms are only appropriate for economic crisis in the third world. As soon as their was a real crisis in the first world they rushed to the nationalization to solve it, something they have railed against elsewhere forever.
As an aside I learned just the other day one of the top executives at Lehman Brothers whose collapse triggered the current panic is George H. Walker IV. He is George W. Bush's cousin. His name sake, George Herbert "Bert" Walker, is one of the patriarchs of the Bush clan and rumored to have been a first class schemer. The Bush's are all named George Herbert and George Walker in tribute to him because he started them on their rise to power and riches. There is irony that one of George W's cousins is central to the economic collapse that he is using to turn the U.S. in to a Fascist/Socialist economy (Fascist if the Republicans are in power, Socialist if its the Democrats that takes the reins).
"Police scanners are legal" ... though many police and emergency agencies are migrating to digital radios that can use encrypted signals and when they do its either much harder or nearly impossible to listen to them any more. Many agencies are getting Homeland Security money to do the transition. Anecdotally I hear the 800 MHz digital radios tend to suck compared to their analog counterparts but they are considered .... progress. It is probably a good thing that private citizens can't listen to police and EMT transmissions since it often violates the privacy of the peoples whose personal information is transmitted over them, and its probably a plus people committing a crime can't listen to the police response. On the other hand its about the only mechanism citizens have to know when there are crimes or other emergencies in their neighborhood especially if you don't live in areas with blanket media coverage and news helicopters. Maybe as they transition to encrypted digital radios communities should create a public broadcast system on the old analog channels and intentionally announce sanitized updates on crimes and emergencies in the community.
"I'm glad they don't waste debate time talking about it."
Right you are. Net neutrality doesn't really rate at a time when the global economy is collapsing and governments around the country, led by the U.S., are seizing control of their economies, turning them in to Fascist or Socialist states overnight without consent from their peoples.
Of course judged by the debate earlier this week I don't think they are actually managing to debate anything of substance at all. McCain-Palin have returned to the tried and true Swift boating strategy with accusations Obama is practically a terrorist and a secret member of the Weather Underground or Black Panthers because he knows Bill Ayers, though Ayers was a radical when Obama was 8 years old and is now a reformed part of the Chicago establishment, focusing his energy on education and being a respected university professor. The standard Republican debating points aren't designed to really talk about issues because they are failing on the ground on every issue that matters. Their talking points are designed to fear monger and distract the electorate, and to wedge voters in to voting for them using abortion. "terrorism" and homophobia. Palin was giving a speech recently and accused Obama of associating with "terrorists" and someone in the audience shouted "kill him" which tells you where this campaign is headed.
Not like the Democrats are really much better though. Obama is mostly just promising to tax the rich and spend on government programs that will magically make everything better for the average Joe..... which they wont... especially when the Republican establishment, you know the people with all the money and economic power, and the defense industrial complex, start fighting him at every turn...like Kennedy.
Besides which, the Bush administration, Paulson and Greenspan have so bankrupted the U.S. government its unlikely McCain or Obama will be able to do anything requiring money. About all they can do is stop digging, since we are in a hole we can't get out of and are so deeply in debt all that can be done is slash spending or raise taxes. There is a line of thought that Bush has been intentionally bankrupt the U.S. government so by the end of his tenure so there will be no money for the Democrats to spend on anything any more.
About all I want is for the Republican's to go away because they are doing everything in their power to screw up everything ans screw all the average Joe's that voted for them in 2000 and 2004. The Democrat's nanny state isn't any better. I've reached the point I mostly just want my government to just STOP. All I want out of it is to provide a basic defense force, not a nation building, meddling, staggeringly expensive offense. I also want a basic rule of law, not spying, not torture, not a Minority Report style pre-crime approach making people guilty who haven't done anything wrong. I want minimal regulation to stop greedy ass hats like the ones on Wall Street from running a muck and screwing responsible, self reliant people like myself who had nothing to do with their Ponzi scheme. A little regulation to insure net neutrality is fine but it sure doesn't rate very high as a priority right now. Wall Street sure didn't want any government involvement when their scheme was making them rich with their staggering bonuses in 2004-2006. They sure don't need my tax dollars baling them out now that they screwed the pooch.
Conspiracy theories ran wild in my head when I discovered for the first time the other day that George H. Walker is one of the managing directors of Lehman brothers. If the name isn't familiar to you he is the descendant of one of the scheming founding forefathers of the Bush clan, Bert Walker. George H. Walker IV is a cousin of George W. Bush, and one of the key executives at Lehman Brothers when it collapsed. Lehman Brother's mismanagement and collapse triggered the current panic as their bankruptcy created a cascade through credit default swaps and nearly took down AIG. There is just
I saw recently Ridley Scott is doing a new movie based on "Brave New World". He's of the opinion "Brave New World" is a lot closer to the current situation than 1984. Rather than the heavy handed manipulation of 1984, most people are just being inundated with a glut of information, most of it trivial, and no longer have any grip on what is important and what isn't. Most people spend more time worrying about sex, drugs and iTunes and their credit cards, while their government is completely screwing them. In that situation the people in power have just as much power as a 1984 scenario but its generally easier to manage. "Brave New World" was also pretty heavy on worship of corporations, with worship of Ford being the new religion. This was back at a time when Henry Ford and the Model T dominated American culture so the Christian cross was replaced with a "T" in "Brave New World".
The current financial turmoil is causing some amazingly rapid transformations in our culture. It will be interesting to see where it ends. The Bush Administration along with Gordon Brown's seem to be using a financial crisis they manufactured to rapidly replace free market Democracy with state capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism). I've been of the opinion, and said it for years here, the Bush regime's overriding goal was to reintroduce Fascism as the dominant model in the U.S. and the world. Events of the last few weeks are I think proving me correct. The introduction of Fascism in the U.S. is no longer moving slowly or inconspicuously, nationalizing the financial system is either Fascism or Socialism plain and simple. Before this economic crisis is done the U.S. government is going to completely own the financial system, and through the financial system everything else. Its more than a little suspicious that Hank Paulson, while at Goldman Sachs in 2004 championed elimination of SEC constraints on the big broker's leverage and capitalization. They immediately leveraged up to 30 to 1 and were certain to fail in the face of the slightest downturn. There is a chance Paulson helped engineer this economic crisis as far back as 2004 and is now using it as an excuse for Bush and himself to completely seize control of the economic system.
Fascism does in fact work quite well as an economic system. When Mussolini introduced it in Italy it was considered a miracle and was the envy of the world. It propelled both Germany and Italy to amazing economic progress while the rest of the world languished in depression. There were shadowy indications Fascists were planning to seize power in the U.S. during the 30's and Roosevelt prevented it, though he countered it with Socialism which is a close cousin. During this same period George W's grandfather Prescott was the U.S. banker for the Thyssen family. They Thyssen family bankrolled Hitler's rise to power and Prescott's Union Bank was closed down in 1941 for trading with the enemy. It was quite an embarrassment to the Bush clan at the time since they were basically branded as Nazi sympathizers.
The problem with Fascism is it has some nasty tendencies. One is it tends to end in totalitarian dictatorship and police states where maintaining order is prioritized over civil liberties. The U.S. is certainly far along towards police state with these "lists", unchecked spying on its citizens and state sanctioned use of torture. The other is that once the state starts intervening in markets it almost inevitably starts picking winners and losers in the economy somewhat arbitrarily. Actually its not really arbitrary, the corporate "winners" are usually the loyal and well connected members of the party in power, and the "losers" are owned by the people who oppose the party in power.
The big paradox is that the Bush administration is completing creation of its Fascist regime just as they are about to be thrown out of power.... What will they do? One possibility is that they are hoping for or encouraging the current economic crisis to spiral out of control so there will be a complete c
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.