Yesterday’s news about JPMorgan taking a $2 billion trading loss shouldn’t surprise anyone, since virtually nothing has changed about how Big Banks operate since the 2008 Wall St. meltdown. And it’s more evidence that there’s nothing in place to prevent yet another repeat of 2008 and it’s just a matter of time until the next disaster hits.
The solution to the problem, like so many of our other big problems, is brain dead simple. You bust up all the big banks, and you re-create the banking industry like it was pre-1980. Specifically you limit the services a bank can offer to just savings and checking accounts, mortgages, and loans. Period. No securities speculation, no hedge funds, no derivatives — in short, NO GAMBLING. You want to speculate, that’s fine, you do it with institutions set up strictly for speculation, and not dependent on government backing or guarantees or average citizen’s deposits.
There’s no downside to this solution whatsoever. Yes, banks go back to being the boring, conservative institutions they were 50 years ago. But hey, if you are a financial wizard who wants to gamble, then set up your own casino on Wall St. and play all you want, but just not with other people’s money. And of course, that’s the catch. The way it’s set up now, the banking industry is a playground for the one percenters, yet another way for them to steal money from the rest of us. Without access to all the deposits of average citizens and without the government as insurer of last resort, the whole system collapses. They can only steal from themselves. And obviously there’s no future in that. Which is, of course, the point.
The national media is quite often a good reflection of what is wrong with our society, and the last couple of weeks have given us prime examples of this. First we had Hilary Rosen’s poor choice of words when she was criticizing Ann Romney. Anyone with an IQ higher than that of a rutabaga can listen to Rosen’s comments and understand that what she was talking about was the fact that Ann Romney knows nothing about what it’s like to have to work OUTSIDE the home while at the same time raising children — it was in no way an “attack on stay-at-home” mothers. And regardless of how you might twist the line to suit your right-wing fancies, there’s also this little problem that Rosen doesn’t work for the White House nor does she work for the Democratic Party. For gawd’s sake, she’s a friggin’ LOBBYIST! She actually worked for British Petroleum during the Deepwater Horizon disaster — how un-Democratic Party can you get? To represent her as someone who speaks for the Democratic Party is ludicrous.
Now you can hardly blame Republicans for jumping on what she said and trying to make the most of it, what with the way they are getting pummeled in the “war on women”. But how in the world can the media fall for this? Hello, facts and reality. Rosen in no way disparaged stay-at-home moms, and she is in no way a spokesperson for the Democratic Party. The whole story is a crock, so you give it two minutes on the nightly news, print the story somewhere below the fold, and that’s the end of it. Of course what happened was just the opposite — the media never did make an attempt to explain the facts, and over a week later is still pushing this nonsense.
Then this week we had the Secret Service Columbian scandal. The first umpteen times I read or heard this story, I convinced myself that it was just lousy reporting, that surely something happened that was a least in some way criminal, and the reporters were all just failing to convey that info in the story. But dig as I might, I couldn’t find anything. Best I can tell the involved agents were doing nothing illegal at all (prostitution is legal in Columbia), and they were not doing it while on-duty. They were simply relaxing and enjoying themselves while off-duty — nothing wrong with that at all. This one is a total non-story that should have been quickly dismissed by the media — and yet here it is, dominating the headlines, and incredibly, people are actually losing their jobs over it.
And where are the libertarians and the “freedom and liberty” Republicans? Here you have a classic case of the government telling you what you can and can’t do in your leisure time, and they are not only fine with it, but doing their best to make political capital out of it. If there’s a headline here, it’s the hypocrisy of the Republican Party on display yet again.
What an incompetent national media we have — but it does speak volumes about where our society is these days.
If there were any doubt about what a joke the Supreme Court has become, their recent ruling on strip searches pretty much ended that debate. Wow, so it is now OK for the government to strip search any citizen under pretty much any circumstances whenever they like. And this ruling came from the conservative wing of the court! Where is the right-wing outrage at this? You say you don’t like big government? Sheez, it doesn’t get any bigger than this. If the police can force you to strip and then fondle your genitals for no particular reason at all, just how much “freedom and liberty” do you have?
And this comes less than a week after the Court was arguing that the government didn’t have the right to require citizens to purchase health care? Are they seriously going to tell us that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, that it infringes on our personal liberties, but there’s nothing wrong with government employees sexually molesting innocent citizens?
First the U.S. House of Representatives became a total joke, and now the Supreme Court has passed them. I dread to think what’s next.
From Atrios:
“Right now we have one political party that is very up front about and proud of their desire to mug everyone in the non-millionaire club, steal all their money, and give it to rich people. It’s time for the other political party to recognize that the era of dumb compromises is over, and if they’d actually come up with a way to help people, instead of a plan to set up a program to provide the incentives to blahblahblahblahblahblah…. “
The question I have is what happens when you stop compromising and everything grinds to a halt. It’s easy enough to fault Obama and the Democratic Party for coming up short on the type of progressive change that we hoped we would see in his Presidency. But the reality is that with the current makeup of Congress, the only way he was going to get anything done was via compromise. And in the final analysis, there has been a lot of positive change over the last three years. I don’t see how refusing to compromise with the right wing would have made things better.
The sad reality is that we live in a society where a huge proportion of people are selfish, greedy, and uncaring. The sociopaths on the right don’t give a damn about the poor, the needy, the under-privileged, the handicapped, or even future generations of Americans for that matter. And politically that’s just impossible to overcome. How do you change these people? To them, “freedom and liberty” is all about their “freedom” to be greedy and bigoted. They seem to rejoice in their depravity.
Until there’s a sea change in society it seems to me that compromised solutions are as good as it’s going to get.
The two stories that are dominating the headlines these days — the Supreme Court hearing on so-called “Obamacare” and the Trayvon Martin case — are going to tell us a lot about the current state of our legal system. I’ve always been amused at right-wing rantings about “activist judges”. The law these days — heck, it’s probably been this way since the beginning of time — is so complex that even the simplest of laws can be interpreted in any number of ways. So ultimately any time a judge makes any kind of ruling, they are applying their personal values to the ruling and thus are being “activists”. There’s no such thing as a “passive” judicial ruling. That’s absurd.
So ultimately the decision on Obamacare is going to come down to whether or not SCOTUS thinks that all Americans should have access to decent health care. Both liberals and conservatives make excellent arguments about the legality of the Obama health care act, so all the legal mumbo-jumbo is irrelevant. The justices are going to pick the argument that jives with their political leanings and then use whatever legalese they see fit to justify that decision — which is, in fact, a very simple one. If you believe that the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, should be like every other developed country and guarantee adequate health care for all citizens, you find Obamacare legal. If you think only the wealthiest citizens should have health care, you strike it down. And given the right-wing “Let them eat cake” leanings of the majority of the Justices, I’m guessing Obamacare will get struck down.
What ends up happening in the Trayvon Martin case at this point is anybody’s guess. The obvious problem that few people seem to grasp so far is that the local law enforcement botched the investigation so badly that there appears to not be enough forensic evidence for anyone to be able to determine what really happened. Letting this George Zimmerman go scot-free would be a travesty for sure. But then convicting him of murder with what evidence there currently is would also be highly questionable. I’m afraid there will be nothing even close to a decent outcome here. It’s a lose-lose situation if I’ve ever seen one.
The real culprit in this case, though, is this ridiculous “Stand Your Ground” law. If any good is to become of this tragedy, every single one of these laws will be stricken down by courts everywhere. Basically what these laws say are that if you feel threatened by anyone, you can kill that person without any recourse. As we are currently seeing, for many people just the fact that someone is wearing a “hoodie” makes that person threatening, and thus makes it OK for you to kill that person. Think that’s an exaggeration? Again, we’re back to the fact that judges are always interpreting the law as their morals and ethics see fit. And as we are seeing in the news right now, lots of people are saying Zimmerman was justified for shooting Martin under the “Stand Your Ground” law. And the only thing threatening about Martin was his appearance. What makes this any different than the lynchings that were so common in the South after the Civil War and up to the middle of the 20th century? It’s all pretty simple — “Stand Your Ground” laws equate to legalizing lynchings. Hopefully we as a society are beyond that.
Update: On her show tonight, Rachel Maddow echoed exactly what I am saying about our legal system. But being smarter than I am, she used the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case of 2000 as the prime example. And of course, that proves the point better than any other example — that case was a 100% pure political judgment that had nothing whatsoever to do with the law. And then the exclamation point to the argument came with the Citizens United decision. Our court system is just as political as Congress is. The actual laws are irrelevant.
It’s been interesting to watch all the hoopla over Rush Limbaugh’s latest venture in to misogyny. Personally I think it’s great when bad things happen to bad people. This type of karmic justice doesn’t happen nearly enough, and Limbaugh is certainly way up there in the Top 10 List Of Bad People, and so rightfully deserves anything bad happening to him. But what is interesting is hearing all these right-wing nut jobs trying to defend Limbaugh on the basis of his right to “free speech”. Uh, where were these folks when the Dixie Chicks got run out of the music business when they dissed George Bush? Ah, Republican Party, thy middle name is Hypocrisy!
And then there’s the right-wing gospel of Free Markets. Isn’t that exactly what is going on with all the advertisers jumping ship from Limbaugh’s show right now? Why aren’t they all high-fiving each other, exclaiming how great it is to watch free markets in action? Welcome to reality, bitches.
These are interesting times. The Republican Party seems on the verge of imploding with a disastrous 2012 ticket of Santorum-Gingrich or whatever, and now the Rush Limbaugh show appears to be in dire straits. Could America actually be turning a corner here, and finally starting to reject the right-wing politics of hate and bigotry? I can dream, can’t I?
I’ve always been somewhat befuddled about exactly what “freedoms” conservatives are always so concerned about losing, a refrain you here pretty much every time someone proposes a law they don’t like. Often it has to do with increased taxes that in no way affect them directly, and yet they scream about losing their “freedoms”. So maybe to the conservative freedom equals money? That seems kind of odd equivalence, but then again it does give them cover for looking like the greedy, selfish jerks that they are. They say they oppose a single payer health care system because it “infringes on their freedoms”, but what they really mean is that they are afraid it’s going to mean higher taxes for them with all the benefits going to someone else.
Here’s what got me thinking about this — I live in a residential neighborhood that borders on a small commercial establishment. That commercial operation generates a moderate amount of traffic due to customers coming and going, and some of that results in parking and traffic issues in the neighborhood. But for the most part it’s tolerable, and the reality is that operation was there before most of us bought our houses in the neighborhood, so we knew what the issues would be before we moved in.
However, this commercial operation is now asking the city to re-zone the area so that they can triple in size! Not only that, they are asking to re-align one of the side streets to make it easier for customers to access their building. Net result for my residential neighborhood is that not only will traffic and parking problems triple, the effect of the street change is going to make my street pretty much a mini-highway.
Now it occurs to me that this is one major infringement on my “freedom” to live in a safe, residential neighborhood. What right does a business have to infringe on that? This is a perfect example of where it’s the responsibility of government to protect me from business interests. And hopefully the end here will be “big government” telling “big business” what they can and can not do in order to protect “individual freedoms” of the people in the neighborhood.
Which is exactly as it should be. It’s the role of government to make sure that the rich and the powerful do not harm citizens in their pursuit of more riches and more power. The rich can get as rich as they want and the mega-corporations can get as big as they want, but only as long as they don’t in the process trample on the quality of life for the average citizen. And as we have growing income disparity in this country and as mega-corporations control more and more of the economy, it’s going to be up to the government to see that individual rights and freedoms are not trampled on. Which is exactly why we must have government as big and strong as the richest Americans and most powerful corporations are. Big government doesn’t take away your freedoms, it protects your freedoms.
Why is this no-brainer so hard to understand for so many people?
March 11th, 2012 | tags:
Big Government,
Freedom
As the inevitability of Mitt Romney’s GOP nomination slowly sneaks up on reality, it occurs to me that the 2012 election is going to be a lot like the 2000 election, in which you may recall The Greatest Nation In The History Of The World somehow inexplicably elected The Village Idiot as president, and so began a non-stop eight-year train wreck, from which the jury is still out on whether or not that Greatest Nation will survive.
What got me thinking about the similarity is the non-stop lying machine that Romney has become. This is EXACTLY the campaign strategy used by Bush in 2000. You just make up shit out of the clear blue, and then rely on a feckless media to broadcast your message for you without bothering to challenge the veracity of it in even the slightest way. And now we have these demonic Super Pacs which can deluge the media with whatever lies they want with no accountability at all. It’s hard enough for Idiot Nation to digest and understand truth and facts. When it is bombarded with total lies, with the media doing absolutely nothing to point out what outrageous lies these are — poor Idiot Nation doesn’t stand a chance in hell of making the right decision. This Fall could be very ugly.
While the Republican War On Women is dominating the news headlines these days (and rightfully so), the Republican War On Education continues to fly very much under the radar. Krugman has a good column on this, and I’ve mentioned it several times recently (here and here). The Republicans are going to lose the War On Women, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But the War On Education they are winning, and big time. And as far as the future of this country goes, that war is probably the most significant one. More and more the political issues of the day require a modicum of intelligence to accurately understand — climate change, Keynesian economics, peak-oil and energy policy, Wall St. reform — and as long as the majority of Americans are too stupid to even begin to comprehend these issues, it’s too easy for the right-wing to manipulate them with lies, lies, and damned lies. Ultimately the answer lies in an educated citizenry. And right now we are headed in exactly the wrong direction.
Update: Just to be clear, the reason why the War On Education is the most significant issue is because if you win the War On Education, all the other wars simply disappear. With an educated population, there is no War On Women, no War On The Environment, etc. Everyone is educated enough to know what the right thing to do is, and politics simply becomes the process for setting priorities and policies for how you get that right thing done. And yes, I know, when pigs fly…….
March 11th, 2012 | tags:
Public Education
I normally do everything I can to avoid listening to Rick Santorum, but last night my local TV news broadcast slipped this Santorum gem by me before I could hit the channel changer:
“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!”
So Rick Santorum is opposed to the whole concept of a college education! This guy is so far out there I don’t think he can even see bizarro world from where he is. In my lifetime the U.S. has slipped from having the best educational system in the world, to not even ranking in the top ten countries in any skill category. And the “fix” that the right-wing promotes is firing teachers, closing schools, and cutting educational budgets. Yeah, that’s the ticket. And now along comes Santorum, advocating against going to college.
And here’s the scariest part — 44% of Americans say they would vote for this douche bag if he ends up being the Republican nominee. Idiot Nation marches on.