>> ^quantumushroom:
To his worshipers, Obamarx IS the messiah, but the greatest ally for left-wing radicals to win any office is unbridled ignorance. Crack a fking history book once in awhile and learn what happens to economies with high tax rates.
When Obama and the States raise taxes on an ailing economy and worsen it, he'll get his ass kicked in the 2010 elections and the stables of Congress can finally be swept clean.


You mother fucking asshole. What the fuck do you think is happening to us right now? Who the fuck did that? Who voted for the people who did it? You did. Twice.

You are a god damned disgrace. You are a fucking bane on this country. You are a god damned disease. We will never be rid of you. You are a cancer unto us all.

Where did the "ailing economy" come from you fuck-stick? It was from you and your cock-sucking piece of shit jungle-warfare butthole rip-off artists who saw a chance to fuck our country out of billions and took us all for everything they could.

I.E. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Paulson et al.

Look what you have done to us you mother fucking meat head.

^Did Paulson really say that?

^ It's the Obama recession to them. Space and time bend for conservatives, seeing how they lost their attachment to reality, science, or the linear flow of time.

Even Paulson said the economic crisis is the fault of "future administrations".

Cramer was cracking jokes about looking under his car (for bombs) after criticizing Paulson and Rubin, a.k.a. the fatcats and props of the Bush administration.

Not too far fetched.

I don't understand why the auto union FAILout is getting so much press. Doesn't anyone besides Ron Paul, you and me remember the bastards already gave away close to a trillion dollars to fktard bankers? Half of that money has mysteriously evaporated and Dickhead Paulson, patron saint of all thieves, won't tell or doesn't know where it's gone!

Complaining about this pissant 15 billion auto union bailout is like getting upset over the blood stains in the carpet in a roomful of dead bodies.

That said, Ron Paul says the right things but is simply too far out in some of his views to garner mainstream acceptance. Damned shame.

January 21, 2009: Arrest Bush.

And toss Paulson in the clink for good measure.

Does Paulson have a single daughter of marrying age?

These are abominable (but expected) news, seeing that, since the beginning of this century, whatever happens in the US echoes a generic mediocre Hollywood plot.

Still, is this Paulson individual getting away with his greed-whim?

I've never understood how such a smart man can be on the Fox News Channel.

But I digress...

Everything he said in this was obviously correct, and it bothers me that nobody is walking up to Henry Paulson with a summons to his court date.

Ridiculous.

We're watching our country being looted.

Paulson should be in chains.

I'd say they're all three correct. Thirlwell is entirely right about most economists right now -- they're criticizing what came before without putting forth a new theory (or plan of action) to guide us in the future.

Klein is also right; the derivatives market is a prime example of what happens when capitalists are truly left to their own devices -- a mess of hideously complex, opaque interactions that pile up until no free market actor can accurately gauge risk, reward, or value, much less make reasonable predictions about the future state of their investment.

Stiglitz is also right about corporate welfare being the real paradigm of the Bush administration, though their rhetoric had swept in some market fundamentalists too. Compromise between those two camps leads to things like the 3-page Paulson plan or the "equity injection" with no nationalization that are worse than what they'd do if they'd just been pure market fundamentalists or purely corrupt corporate socialists.

I think the real failure is that the corporate socialists didn't realize they were socialists. It's like someone told them wealth would "trickle down", as if that was some sort of law of economic gravity.

It seems that no ideology frees people from having to react to situations intelligently. They need to learn that rather than creating hard, fast rules for dealing with economics as a whole (e.g. less government is always better), they need to apply some common sense to what role government plays, and how people will really behave when left to their own devices.

I'm somewhat inclined to push for sports rule-makers take over the government. They don't seem to get into this asinine debate about "more rules" or "less rules", they just go with what works, and get rid of what doesn't, and listen when people bitch at them for getting it wrong.

I think that's how democracy is supposed to work, and for the life of me I don't know how things got so far off course.

I'm still up in the air about the bailout. I'm well aware that this one is dividing down party lines, and that's always what makes me suspicious about things like this.

The bailout for the Financial industry was called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). It was intended to buy, well, Troubled Assets from financial institutions, and now Paulson and the Bushies are saying, $350 billion already spent, "oops, let's try buying stock instead"...which liberals like Paul Krugman had been saying from the beginning.

What pissed me off about that whole mess was that Democrats didn't even try to push Krugman's plan, they just acquiesced to the Bushian demands for $700bn, no strings attached.

What Paulson seems to have done is handed the cash over to his friends on Wall Street, and placed no conditions on the use of the money, or the management structure of the recipients.

It's the same old Bush strategy -- execute Big Govermnent intervention as poorly as possible to try to sour people on the very concept, in the hopes that it drives people into the waiting arms of the "conservative" Republican party, and their radical socialist agendas to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the top .5%. Joe the Plumber^TM is a poster-boy for what "success" looks like for these asshats.

So here's my deal. GM sucks, the Escalade wasn't really offensive to me, what was offensive was that GM's first foray into Hybrids was to add 2-3mpg to their SUV's, not to try up the mpg of their small cars into a Prius-like 45mpg. They had a working electric car, and they killed it, and now they want to make a hybrid for $40,000 called the Volt and say "see, we're modern".

That said, they employ 3 million people directly, and countless millions more via their suppliers. I don't want those people unemployed. I want GM to survive, even if it takes taxpayer support -- but I want Wagoner and Lutz's heads on lances. Failing that, I want them fired without benefit, and stocks & options confiscated. Same goes for anyone whose fingerprints are on the killing of the electric cars.

So here's what I want Democrats to do: force GM into Chapter 11-style restructuring, but use taxpayer money to make sure they keep operating throughout and don't let them slip into outright liquidation. No golden parachutes, no shareholder dividends, no bonuses and no retention at the executive level.

Then, we take the other $350 billion and do across-the-board single-payer universal healthcare, so GM, Ford and Chrysler don't have to worry about healthcare benefits for their employees anymore.

If the Republicans go into a froth, and fillibuster it, let 'em. We'll just pass it in January to the loving applause of the entire Great Lakes region, and Indiana and Ohio will both stay blue states for the forseeable future.

its a complex question because one person can't predict the "natural rate" but they could set it according to better guidelines than they currently do. if they set it closer to the market value (or were removed from the picture altogether) the market would become extremely resilient and its inherent protection against booms/busts would be restored. price fixing removes the equilibrating effect of the price system which protects against both depressions and artificial "booms". if this occurred right now, our economy would recover and prosper in less than 8-12 months.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, because I know little about economics. But I'm curious. What do you think would happen if the Fed suddenly stopped fixing the interest rate? If they simply set it at a natural rate, and left it?

In reply to this comment by imstellar28:
>> ^chilaxe:
^I have a lot of respect for Greenspan. Can you back up your allegations?


sure, what specifically would you like to know? Greenspan was originally close to objectivism, even writing letters for objectivist publications. He was also friends with Milton Friedman who was a prodigy of the Austrian school, at one point meeting face to face with F.A Hayek (until he too got in bed with the fed as a result of his monetarist leanings). Almost all economists in America are taught in the Chicago/Keynesian school, they never learn what Austrian economics is much less the theory behind it. They can be accurately classified as "ignorant." Greenspan knows better, he knows what Austrian economics is and thus he knows the moral and economic implications of his job at the federal reserve and he choses money and power over the economic well being of the country. He knows that when he fixes interests rates low he is creating "bubbles" which eventually burst, often violently as we are seeing today. Under his watch he set interest rates to an unheard of 1% after 9/11, creating a negative interest rate against inflation (very bad) and an artificial demand in housing, which resulted in large increases in both construction and price. These prices are not real or sustainable and must be eventually corrected, which is what is happening right now. However, the extent of monetary irresponsible has made it such that this is not contained in any one market but instead infects the whole economy.

He is not a man who should be respected, he is a man who should be despised with utmost tenacity. He is knowingly using misinformation to commit fraud against the American people. Paulson is probably aware of the consequences of his actions as well, but certainly does not have the background Greenspan does.

Dude. Sometimes... I never said the other people bare more responsibility. I said, the entire economic crisis should not be hoisted on Greenspan's decisions as chairman of the Fed.

My point was: it is ridiculous for congress and the senate to treat him like he is entirely responsible.

Netrunner: It is true this video does not blame Greenspan. It seemed like things were getting pretty heated at the senate hearing that this comes from. I was trying to point out the context where this came from, and voice my disappointment at the direction of those hearings.

>> ^deedub81:
MycroftHomlz: Greenspan was wrong. He should have done things differently. Suggesting that Paulson, John W. Snow, or Ben Bernanke should hold more blame than Greenspan is absurd. He's even admitting that himself.

>> ^chilaxe:
^I have a lot of respect for Greenspan. Can you back up your allegations?


sure, what specifically would you like to know? Greenspan was originally close to objectivism, even writing letters for objectivist publications. He was also friends with Milton Friedman who was a prodigy of the Austrian school, at one point meeting face to face with F.A Hayek (until he too got in bed with the fed as a result of his monetarist leanings). Almost all economists in America are taught in the Chicago/Keynesian school, they never learn what Austrian economics is much less the theory behind it. They can be accurately classified as "ignorant." Greenspan knows better, he knows what Austrian economics is and thus he knows the moral and economic implications of his job at the federal reserve and he choses money and power over the economic well being of the country. He knows that when he fixes interests rates low he is creating "bubbles" which eventually burst, often violently as we are seeing today. Under his watch he set interest rates to an unheard of 1% after 9/11, creating a negative interest rate against inflation (very bad) and an artificial demand in housing, which resulted in large increases in both construction and price. These prices are not real or sustainable and must be eventually corrected, which is what is happening right now. However, the extent of monetary irresponsible has made it such that this is not contained in any one market but instead infects the whole economy.

He is not a man who should be respected, he is a man who should be despised with utmost tenacity. He is knowingly using misinformation to commit fraud against the American people. Paulson is probably aware of the consequences of his actions as well, but certainly does not have the background Greenspan does.