« First « Previous Comments 69 - 73 of 73 Search these comments
How is this BETTER than Anarchy?
Well, I don't have to worry about being murdered on the street (and there actually are streets to begin with). My life isn't a constant struggle just to stay alive. I'd count that as "better than Anarchy".
he US is the only country in the world where poor people are fat and have color tv’s.
...except for Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Japan...
I could go on. The US is not alone in being so rich that even the "poor" are reasonably well off -- nor are we alone in having some corruption in our government.
However, the corruption that exists with the democrats and republicans doesn't hold a candle to the corruption that you'll find in third world countries, or even China and India for that matter. Some people have really, horribly skewed perspectives on how the world works.
Corruption is inherent in any system where human beings are involved. Nothing will stop that, because you can't change human nature. This is why we have laws and regulations to begin with.
Why isn’t anyone outraged now that the bailout banks will be allowed to hand out million dollar bonuses after all? It has become a non-issue.
The cynic in me says apathy, but that isn't the complete picture: there really is no mechanism in place for the public to change anything regarding the issue. Populist rage/pandering is about all the hoi polloi can hope for.
That said, I still read people on here who keep their money with BofA and Citi. Indefensible.
"I think no one is outraged about the bailout bank bonuses because the bank topic is played down in the right-wing spin machine."
Here's a remote possibility. The President is playing down the bank topic. If I were a gambling man, I might bet on this strategy: 70% of the people want health care reform. I give them health care reform, they continue to give me majorities in the House and Senate in 2010. After 2010, I can champion the reforming of Wall St. because it is another populist cause that will play well in the 2012 election where I already have the advantage of being the incumbent. If this works, the House and Senate can ride on my coat tails to maintain majorities.
"Why isn’t anyone outraged now that the bailout banks will be allowed to hand out million dollar bonuses after all? "
Maybe the funds were segregated into restricted cash accounts vs general operating cash and used to fix the defaulted loans from homeowners, which came from the depositors of the bank. And now being repaid back with interest from sales of homes the bank resold sold to the public from their inventory. While the bonus came from the general operating cash account.
I dont think congress, populated with crony lawyers, who couldn't add two numbers together have the brains to figure out how bonus programs works. Hum! did they go after the CEO bonus only or everyone else's Christmas bonus who worked at the bank ? How about the CFO bonus who didn't factor in the risks? How about the sales and marketing VP guru's who created this mess in the first place for the banks?
The most effective anti-bonus program so far has been the proposal by Sheila Bair at the FDIC that all the big banks (or is it all banks?) must prepay their FDIC insurance for 2009-Q4 to 2012 at the end of 2009.
That ought to put a real crimp on all the recent and new-found bank profits, and therefore also the bonus programs, one can hope. I think Sheila Bair is being very clever -- she knows what the bankster bounus thieves are up to and at the same time has a valid need for the insurance premiums because the FIDC insurance fund is running low. For her and the American public it is a win-win situation to grab the profits while we can.
It's the ultimate clawback, so to speak.
Anyone else looking at it this way?
« First « Previous Comments 69 - 73 of 73 Search these comments
Great Post by Lu Cifer, http://Lu666Cifer.blogspot.com
"Dear Republicans,
I'm sick of this bullshit.
I'm sick of the way you've corrupted the public discourse. The way you've made it acceptable to hurl any insult you like at public officials. The way you blame us for the current atmosphere of hatred by accusing us of starting it with hating Bush. Like Bush didn't come on the heels of eight years of your tireless efforts to destroy Clinton by any means necessary, like Bush didn't give us good reason to complain. A couple of posters on a website compared Bush to Hitler and you've used it as free license to compare Obama to Hitler 24/7 and I'm sick of your hypocrisy, where it's acceptable to say things about Obama that you would have had an apoplectic fit (and did) if anything remotely similar had been said about your guys. Keith Olbermann calls Cheney a fascist when he was actually using fascist tactics and you think that gives you the freedom to call Obama a fascist, socialist, Marxist constantly for no reason at all. Forget your bullshit false equivalency.
I'm sick of the way you've made the populace stupid. Around a fifth of your populace thinks the sun orbits the earth, over half think evolution never happened. Your populace actually believe the media has a liberal bias. Not because it has, you have the most conservative media in the free world, but because you've shouted it so loud and so often that you've brainwashed the public into believing it, like the battered wife who parrots her husband's insults. You've got a whole segment of the populace shouting about socialism and fascism and none of them know what the words mean. You've convinced them that fascism is a left-wing thing. You've got them so turned around that some of them actually believe global warming isn't happening.
I'm sick of the way you try to destroy the whole concept of government. You've tricked the people into believing that government can't do anything right, always being careful to exclude the army because you love your bullets and bombs but you've so destroyed the public's ability to reason that they don't even think of interstate highways, the space program, the national parks program, etc. Government is always great when it's doing what you tell it and inevitably corrupt when it isn't.
I'm sick of your rewriting of history. You've bleated so loud and long that Reagan was a great president, that the New Deal didn't work, that cutting taxes increases revenues, that you actually have the people believing this bullshit. And these are the same people who will go on to become teachers and fill their student's heads with this self-same bullshit. Reagan was a mediocre president at best who had the good fortune to be in power when the USSR collapsed under it's own weight and you bastards have turned him into the Second Coming. You've rewritten history so that everything foul and hateful and wrong can be attributed to a Democrat while everything worthwhile is a Republican's glory.
I'm sick of your dragging the center ever further to the right. How many whackjob fringe ideas have you dragged into the mainstream? The aforementioned idea that tax cuts increase revenues, the Laffer Curve, the idea that Welfare harms the poor, the idea that there's rampant fraud in Welfare, the idea that whatever is good for corporations is good for the country. And you push these ideas through your corporate media and you do it so long and loud that they become part of the accepted political landscape and because it is easier to tell a lie than to debunk one, we never get away from this rancid dreck.
I'm sick of your casual criminality. Teddy Kennedy, a man who's boots you were not worthy to lick, was just buried and all I've heard from my rightist friends for days is Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick. Your golden boy raped the Constitution, mainly because he wanted to; tortured random people (and waterboarding is torture) essentially because he wanted to; spent like a drunken sailor, essentially because he wanted to; invaded a sovereign nation, essentially for the loot and destroyed people's lives, essentially for the evilulz and you bastards are obsessed with an accident a Democrat had decades ago? You don't go on about Laura Bush killing some guy decades ago.
I'm sick of you praising pure evil. You're letting Dick Cheney be the standard-bearer for Republicanism. Dick Cheney, a man so nakedly evil that even his friends call him "Darth"; a man so callous that Lex Luthor would recoil in terror; a man who probably has dismembered hitchhikers in those man-sized safes and kills plants by his mere proximity.
I'm sick of your attempts to tilt the playing field permanently in your favor. Democrats filibustered a few of Bush's most hateful judicial picks and you pricks started screaming about doing away with the filibuster but now you're in the minority, you're filibustering absolutely everything you can and whining when you don't get the chance. You ignored everything the Democrats had to say when you had power and now that you don't, you scream that everyone must be bipartisan. You don't budge an inch on anything but you insist that everyone must compromise to meet you. That's your idea of politics: Don't move an inch, force the other guy to come to the right to meet you and call the result a "compromise".
I'm sick of your corporatism. You dress it up in false populism but anyone with half a brain can see that you're the brought and paid for subsidiary of big business. You keep pushing tax cuts as the answer for absolutely everything, you keep sabotaging every attempt to control the excesses of big business. You genuinely think the world would be a better place if it was a combination of Bill Gibson's dystopian vision of a corporate dominated world and Ayn Rand's bullshit Objectivism, yet another entry in mankind's endless attempts to find a moral justification for naked greed. You've taken the clinically insane spewings of a woman literally to the right of Hitler (pardon my Godwins) and the 1984-like vision of a dystopian author and convinced yourselves that would be a good place to live. Big business is the enemy of the people, always has been. The ideal for the corporate class is to have a small pool of people rich enough to buy their crap and a much larger pool of people so poor and with so few options that they can be used and abused at the corporation's whim. A corporation's objective is not to look after you, it is to make ever-larger profits by any means necessary. You bastards want to reinstate slavery to the corporate class and you've made the public so stupid that they actually swallow the bullshit you're serving up, they actually want to enslave themselves to the corporations that abuse them at every turn. They actually care more about the corporations right to make obscene profits than they care about their child's right to live on a habitable planet. "
#politics