(no subject)

[torasama.livejournal.com]

Comments

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Pretty much.

[blueduck37.livejournal.com]

Free-market capitalism at its finest!

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

Fraud is never free market capitalism. You should know that by now.

[syndicalist.livejournal.com]

You define it selectively so it just connotes good stuff; the bad stuff is bracketed out as "not free market." Private sector good, public sector bad.

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

You're wrong.

[blueduck37.livejournal.com]

What part of his statement that "You define it selectively so it just connotes good stuff; the bad stuff is bracketed out as 'not free market.' Private sector good, public sector bad." is wrong? Because that sounds like your general attitude here to a "t".

[syndicalist.livejournal.com]

Fraud and deception are part of the really-existing, everyday reality of free markets.

[blueduck37.livejournal.com]

The point I was trying to make I have since seen Frank Rich make (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=all) better-

“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree....

...What, if anything, have we learned from this decade’s man-made economic disaster? It wasn’t just trillions of dollars of wealth that went poof in the bubble. Certain American values also crumbled and vanished. Making quick killings by reckless gambling in the markets — rather than by investing long-term in new products, innovations, technologies or services that might grow and benefit America and the world — became the holy grail in the upper echelons of finance....

...On Wall Street over the past decade, the money usually came first, last and in between. There was no “thing” being made at all unless you count the slicing and dicing of debt into financial “products,” the incomprehensible derivatives that helped bring down the economy, costing some five million Americans their jobs (so far) and countless more their 401(k)’s.

We celebrated all of this Wall Street nonsense for years as if it was the be-all-end-all of the economy... and we still are, hence judging the state of the economy by the Dow, rather than by jobs gained or lost, or who can afford health insurance and who can't, etc. As far as I am concerned, all of this, all that is celebrated as free-market "ingenuity" is fraud. Of course, like the old "It's only cheating if you get caught" line goes, it's only fraud when they get caught.

We used to have higher standards (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJDhS4oUm0M) for ourselves as a nation. Now we are a nation that bails out billionaires with no hesitation (while complaining that healthcare and other social safety net programs are too expensive) and while expecting the majority of the country to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and wait for their wealth to trickle on down. That Wall Street v Main Street debate from the election seems not to have been settled.

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

So your argument is against capitalism which you illustrate by pointing to fraud and representing that as capitalism.

Like I said, fraud is not a free market principle.

Today's economic problems are a result of a combination of things, but the free market is not one of them. In a free market AIG would be dead and buried; not endlessly propped up with billions of taxpayer-backed loans. In a free market Chuck Schumer would not be allowed to cause a run on IndyBank without consequences. In a free market Chris Dodd could not get sweetheart deals from Countrywide while chairing the Senate banking committee and not suffer the consequences. In a free market Barney Frank could not put the kibosh on reforms of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and then claim that their later costly failures were a result of "free markets" and "deregulation" and get away with it. In a free market Barack Obama could not be party in a lawsuit accusing a bank of not making enough politically correct loans. In a free market a Massachusetts bank could not be sued because it was too financially sound and have that very soundness used as "proof" that it wasn't making enough loans to minorities.

The list is endless because there has been endless tampering with free markets.

[blueduck37.livejournal.com]

I'm not gonna defend the other things you mentioned, but I'll note that this one-- "In a free market AIG would be dead and buried; not endlessly propped up with billions of taxpayer-backed loans"-- was a decision made by George W. Bush and Hank Paulson, both Republicans. As long as you're naming names, let's be intellectually honest about it.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

Look up 'usury', and then explain how the way the banking industry operates isn't exactly that.

Capitalism is theft. Period.

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

That's kinda like the Obama budgets, except he doesn't bother to promise the 520% annual returns.

[torasama.livejournal.com]

Oh? How so?

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

BCUZ HE IZ TEH ANTIKRYST!!!!

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

I thought that was BusHitler!

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

No, most of us don't believe in an antichrist, or at least aren't preoccupied with his alleged coming, and so would never have attributed such an absurd role to even Bush.

[red-pill.livejournal.com]

i cant help but read that as bus-hitler, giveng me an image of a tommas the tank engine like bus wih a face on it, with a hitler stach and damanding that only BMW buses are on the road, not non area buses and trains, befor declering war on the london transport authorty...

sorry, but i needed to tell you XD

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

No he's a Socialist! Same thing, really, but we don't like to say that.

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

In that those really big numbers (the ones with all the zeroes in them) are like the spending items that Obama keeps signing into law (those "bill" things you see talked about here).

The result is a deficit this big: $3,000,000,000,000.00

That would pay off 30,000,000 mortgages of $100,000. Instead of that we're are going to subsidize failure (AIG); make loans to companies that are still profitable (Wells Fargo); drive other companies into bankruptcy (GM); etc.

What a deal!

[madscience.livejournal.com]

Obama didn't create that debt; Bush did. Obama just eliminated the accounting tricks that the Bush administration used to hide that debt.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

He may not have wrote the bill, but he put his name on it.

That makes him just as culpable.