critical thinking

Now I’m plain angry. The GOP (there’s nothing grand about it) is so far up Wall Street’s ass they have zero interest in the public they claim to serve. On the very day Goldman Sachs announces over $5 billion in bonuses the GOP asserts it will filibuster Democratic action to regulate responsibility in Wall Street.

Obstinacy? Incompetency? How about greed. The stereotype of the Republican representative is old, white, and wealthy, and they seem gleefully eager to embrace it. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the only conceivable reason to oppose Wall Street regulation is to preserve the gaping holes of financial exploitation that led to the loss of 8 million jobs. It’s plain as day to anyone not gulping the GOP rhetoric Kool Ade. You don’t even have to be politically minded at all, much less a Democrat.

Goldman Sachs is being charged with fraud on a massive (massive) scale. From that same article in the Huff Post:

The U.S. charges against Goldman Sachs relate to a complex investment tied to the performance of pools of risky mortgages. In a complaint filed Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Goldman marketed the package to investors without disclosing that the pools were picked by another client, a prominent hedge fund that wanted to bet the U.S. housing bubble would burst. Within months, most of the mortgages had been downgraded as the U.S. housing boom went into reverse and the securities fell sharply in value.

To paraphrase, Goldman Sachs told consumer-level investors to buy a package investment including defaulting mortgages. At the same time, GS represented the same package to a hedge fund (large large money) that was betting against it. To put it another way, GS used the little guy to inflate the value of junk, so the big guy could make a boatload when that junk collapsed under its own junkiness.

Nice. The Republican party would have us believe that imposing regulation on the financial sector will somehow cause financial collapse, rather than protect us from it. As though it really hadn’t just happened because of lack of regulation. In all the world, Canada was least internally affected by the crisis, and it is demonstrably because of more strict oversight in the financial sector. Regulation.

Canada has a working socialized health care system too, courtesy of the NDP. Maybe the Republicans just hate Canada?

It used to be that I could justify the actions of the GOP by saying they believe they are defending Freedom (capitol F) no matter who gets crushed along the way. It’s painfully clear that the very corrupt GOP is deep in the pockets of the very corrupt Wall Street, and that includes Insurance and Big Pharma. I guess Freedom means you can use your position as Representative of the People to gouge those People for every penny you can swindle.

How much more clear can they make it?

up = down
slavery = freedom
Republican = For The People

Quoting Paul Krugman of The New York Times:

Health reform is the law of the land. Next up: financial reform. But will it happen? The White House is optimistic, because it believes that Republicans won’t want to be cast as allies of Wall Street. I’m not so sure. The key question is how many senators believe that they can get away with claiming that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and regulating big banks is doing those big banks a favor.

Some background: we used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises, resting on a combination of government guarantees and regulation. On one side, bank deposits were insured, preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression. On the other side, banks were tightly regulated, so that they didn’t take advantage of government guarantees by running excessive risks.

From 1980 or so onward, however, that system gradually broke down, partly because of bank deregulation, but mainly because of the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions and practices — like financing long-term investments with overnight borrowing — that recreated the risks of old-fashioned banking but weren’t covered either by guarantees or by regulation. The result, by 2007, was a financial system as vulnerable to severe crisis as the system of 1930. And the crisis came.

Now what? We have already, in effect, recreated New Deal-type guarantees: as the financial system plunged into crisis, the government stepped in to rescue troubled financial companies, so as to avoid a complete collapse. And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration, which claimed to believe deeply in free markets. There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out. In effect, debts of shadow banks, like deposits at conventional banks, now have a government guarantee.

The only question now is whether the financial industry will pay a price for this privilege, whether Wall Street will be obliged to behave responsibly in return for government backing. And who could be against that?

Well, how about John Boehner, the House minority leader? Recently Mr. Boehner gave a talk to bankers in which he encouraged them to balk efforts by Congress to impose stricter regulation. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves,” he urged — where by “taking advantage” he meant imposing some conditions on the industry in return for government backing.

Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, promptly had “Little Punk Staffer” buttons made up and distributed to Congressional aides.

But Mr. Boehner isn’t the problem: Mr. Frank has already shepherded fairly strong financial reform through the House. Instead, the question is what will happen in the Senate.

In the Senate, the legislation on the table was crafted by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. It’s significantly weaker than the Frank bill, and needs to be made stronger, a topic I’ll discuss in future columns. But no bill will become law if Senate Republicans stand in the way of reform.

But won’t opponents of reform fear being cast as allies of the bad guys (which they are)? Maybe not. Back in January, Frank Luntz, the G.O.P. strategist, circulated a memo on how to oppose financial reform. His key idea was that Republicans should claim that up is down — that reform legislation is a “big bank bailout bill,” rather than a set of restrictions on the banks.

Sure enough, a few days ago Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, in a letter attacking the Dodd bill, claimed that an essential part of reform — tougher oversight of large, systemically important financial companies — is actually a bailout, because “The market will view these firms as being ‘too big to fail’ and implicitly backed by the government.” Um, senator, the market already views those firms as having implicit government backing, because they do: whatever people like Mr. Shelby may say now, in any future crisis those firms will be rescued, whichever party is in power.

The only question is whether we’re going to regulate bankers so that they don’t abuse the privilege of government backing. And it’s that regulation — not future bailouts — that reform opponents are trying to block.

So it’s the punks versus the plutocrats — those who want to rein in runaway banks, and bankers who want the freedom to put the economy at risk, freedom enhanced by the knowledge that taxpayers will bail them out in a crisis. Whatever they say, the fact is that people like Mr. Shelby are on the side of the plutocrats; the American people should be on the side of the punks, who are trying to protect their interests.

Unquote. This essentially sums up what I’ve been observing about the Republican mandate for the past decade or so: the Orwellian Animal Farm policy of convincing an uninformed public that what is demonstrably worse for them is actually better. Deregulate the banks, keep the rich rich, and you’re really happier dirt poor and debt-riddled.

In this new era of the web, we no longer have any excuse. It’s not so easy to fool us any more. If we merely make the choice to become informed, the information is easily available. We can clearly see back in time and across as many news sources as we care to, and we can enforce responsibility and accountability on our elected officials. In short, we no longer have anyone to blame but ourselves. Education is everything.

Quoted from Nica24 at The Daily Kos:

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate
energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans…oh hell no.

Unquote. Full stop.

If you are of the opinion that government exists to improve the lives of its people, acting in the best interests of the majority, not just in the present but into the indefinite future (and I most certainly am) then you must, as a rational human being, be utterly at a loss as to why the Republican party and conservatives in general are so blindly and ignorantly opposed to public health care and literally everything else Obama and his administration have tried to move forward with in the past year. It smacks of childish obstinacy. Whiny spoiled brat tantrums and pouty stubbornness. Or worse — Old Guard cronyism and immensely powerful insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies. The truth is somewhere in the middle, I’m sure.

Democracy fails if one side of a two party system opposes progress simply to make the administration look impotent. It falls to the leading party to flex its muscle to continue serving its people. The simple fact is that somebody has to be the grownup. The interests of the public have to supersede political manoeuvring. The elected have a job to do.

So I applaud Obama for making 15 appointments while Senate was out. It saves untold truckloads of time and tax money that otherwise would have been wasted in political posturing and pointless bickering.

A year ago Obama’s approval rating was effectively near 80%. Now it’s about 52%. His administration has been besieged by an opposition bent on nothing more than taking the wind out of those sails. They have been effective in just that. And nothing more. Which is to say that the Republicans continue to beat the fuck out of a country that really doesn’t need it, rather than get on with their duty of helping America get back on its feet.

Those that disagree (but can still legitimately claim to have any understanding of the issue at all) will argue that Obama’s path gives too much power to the government. Too much regulation leads to a police state, or worse. We risk the freedoms we fought so hard for, and so forth.

It’s my personal belief that “freedom” means a certain level of protection from corporations that would otherwise cheerfully take every dime — and you know they would. “Freedom” also means safety from bankruptcy if I get sick — that’s not the case elsewhere in the world, but any country claiming to be “the best” should base that claim in the care it takes of its own, or so it seems to me. “Freedom” means confidence that if I pay into a system, that system will not fail me when I need it most. That means if I pay somebody for health insurance, they should not base their business model on denying my claim.

America has to become aware of the irony in resisting public health care while bailing out Wall Street and by proxy the insurers, in continuing to defend a system that will chew us up and look for more. Surely there has to be some way of waking everyone up to the fact that if we all agree to pay a little bit into a system that works for us, we will no longer have to pay a lot into a system designed to fail us, and it’s okay to give the government the power to mandate this on our behalf.

It is not in our best interest to let our vote be swayed by a very loud, very vocal minority party of very rich private citizens who represent very rich insurance and pharmaceutical companies. It does not make you a commie pinko to resist them. It makes you a sensible citizen. A Real American, if you like.

As far as I’m concerned, you stop being a sucker when you start thinking for yourself. And as soon as you do, you start wondering what the hell is up with the Republicans and why we put up with it at all.

Obama will not come out of this as a darling of the press. Fox will see to that. But he’s getting the job done, whatever it takes, and doing it well. I approve. Keep it up.