April 29, 2009:
Senator Dick Durbin: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place," he said on WJJG 1530 AM's "Mornings with Ray Hanania." Progress Illinois picked up the quote.
Republic game changers, first decade of the new millennium:
January 2001: Bush installed as POTUS by U.S. Supreme Court.
9/11/2001: Terror attack on U.S. soil.
9/14/2001: Authorization of Use of Military Force Against Terrorists; joint resolution passed by Congress.
March 2003: Invasion and occupation of Iraq; war of choice, not necessity.
Spring 2004: Torture at Abu Ghraib.
Fall 2004: Failure of the Democratic party to defeat the worst president in U.S. history.
March 2006: "Radar Altimetry Confirms Global Warming Is Affecting Polar Glaciers".
2007-2008: Start of the "Great Recession".
Obviously I'm covering much ground; I'm not going to address all of these milestones in this diary. Plenty of diarists here have done so already in the recent past, and done it well.
Nor am I implying these are the ONLY game changers. I am simply stating what I think are the game changers-- and I strongly feel that many of us, including myself, are not doing enough in response.
_______________________________________
On the economic front:
Ludwig von Mises and Paul Samuelson = Economic geniuses. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke = Economic dunces.
Paul Samuelson:
And this brings us to Alan Greenspan, whom I've known for over 50 years and who I regarded as one of the best young business economists. Townsend-Greenspan was his company. But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: 'Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good.'
However, unlike someone like Milton, Greenspan was quite streetwise. But he was overconfident that he could handle anything that arose. I can remember when some of us -- and I remember there were a lot of us in the late 90s -- said you should do something about the stock bubble. And he kind of said, 'look, reasonable men are putting their money into these things -- who are we to second guess them?' Well, reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.
But now Greenspan admits he was wrong.
Because we had, instead of three standard deviations storm, a six standard deviation storm. Well, we did have something unprecedented. I think looking for scapegoats and blame can be left to the economic historian. But, at the bottom, with eight years of no regulation from the second Bush administration, from the day that the new SEC chairman -- Harvey Pitt -- said 'I'm going to run a kinder and gentler SEC,' every financial officer knew they weren't going to be penalized.
Self regulation never worked as far as macroeconomic events -- whether we're talking about post-Napoleonic War business cycles or the big south sea bubble back in Isaac Newton's time, up to today's time. The pendulum just swings back in the other direction.
Get that, folks? "But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult....". Everyone please read Anne Heller’s excellent biography of Ayn Rand. In the book you’ll see Greenspan was indeed an early devotee of the teabagger/clownservative hero Ayn Rand.
And did you get, "self regulation never worked..."?
It’s no surprise the simple-minded teabagger mob fully embraces Ayn Rand, who like them, based her entire "philosophy" on a child-like, comic book-based type of Hero and Heroine worship. It IS a surprise that any sort of reasoned, intellectual person embraces the now totally discredited Rand.
Matt Taibbi:
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.
How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.
'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."
Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.
On the ecological front:
There's no question in my mind the next decade will bring increased ecological disaster, with possibly a singular event in the U.S. such as the letting loose of the New Madrid Fault. The Midwest is not even remotely prepared for and which could be devastating for Chicago and St. Louis.
I wish all well, and thank you Markos and volunteers for keeping the forum going.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://mises.org/
http://correspondents.theatlantic.co...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...
http://www.rollingstone.com/...