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holfresh
Posts: 38679
Alba Posts: 0
Joined: 1/14/2006
Member: #1081
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GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:meloshouldgo wrote:GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:holfresh wrote:GustavBahler wrote:Nalod wrote:GustavBahler wrote:Nalod wrote:GustavBahler wrote:Bonn1997 wrote:Wow, there are reports now that George H W Bush is supporting Hillary! She is more conservative than he is. Bush's really have never shown to be "conservative", they tow the party line.
George H. and even W. really never shown a core conservative line. Im thinking for him to endorse Hilary is really calling out Trump the piece of shyt he is.
Don't forget, George H. and Bill Clinton relationship is very tight for many years. I thought for years George handed him the election and basically got to hand pick his successor.
Did Al Gore when W. was anointed a planned event? Did Gore not go along with the script?
Who knows, but George and Bill are as thick as thieves so its no surprise she gets a Bush endorsement. W. has a book about his paintings coming out. He is a far simple man. Bill will a hand in a Hilary presidency. Is that a good thing? Maybe if the Republicans didn't have a clown running there would be a viable choice. I'll take "BillAry" over Donald and Melania.
Where is Melania? OUt campaigning? Or locked up as not to further embarrass her self? True. Bill behind the scenes worries me as much as Hillary as president. If she ran openly as a conservative Democrat (which she is) her candidacy might be easier for me to handle. Its when she calls herself a progressive, that I have to change the channel. Nixon did some progressive things in office, maybe more substantial than Bill Clinton, but no one would suggest that he was a progressive. Bill and Hillary Clinton have done very little to earn that label.
. What can a president really do to enact change? Obama had 2 years where he had both houses until the tea party came in and did everything to make him look bad.
At this juncture we have a choice. Hilary is a gangster like most politicians and a women which is giving her big problems. Trump is a pure sociopath business man who only motivation is the accumulation of pleasure, money and power. A man who has flipped on most things I have now idea where he stands. I am disturbed by the apathy by the American public to his indiscretions where Hilary's have been blown out of proportion.
So I vote without enthusiasm not for Hilary, but to prevent a man I see not fit to represent and uphold the constitution that is the greatest document in the history of mankind to govern a nation. Its execution is not perfect but it is worth defending. This is my patriotic duty to honor all those who fought for our freedoms and many died for those basic rights. Trump is motivated to be president for his selfish reasons which is why he has no dignity and is shamelessly pandering to the public. You are assuming that Obama wanted to do anything but promote largely conservative policies while in office. His biggest hero by his own admission is Ronald Reagan. Obamacare was a Heritage foundation proposal from the 1990s. Obama enacted very harsh austerity measures on govt workers. They talk about Obama and big govt, but he laid off more govt employees than any other president, maybe ever. This hurt the recovery. He stocked a commission on "entitlements" with politicians and executives who wanted to gut social security and medicare. Guess what kind of a plan they came up with? Democrats and even some republicans pushed back hard. He extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the great depression, people who were much more able to bear the added expense in a time when tens of millions of people were losing their jobs, their homes. Obama made a deal with the pharmaceutical industry to prevent the govt from negotiating drug prices which keep pharmaceutical drugs the most expensive in the world in spite of the fact that we create most of them here, often with govt subsidies. He has prosecuted more reporters and whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. People talk about how he is a secret Muslim, but Im curious to hear what kind of Muslim they think he is that would regularly bomb 7 Muslim countries, more than any other president? You ask what a president can do? A lot when he sets his mind to it. FDR was facing a military coup engineered by the heads of some of America's largest corporations because of his anti-poverty programs. He told them that he "welcomed their hatred". Theodore Roosevelt was a trust buster. It all depends on how much you believe in what you say you represent. Obama sold himself as a progressive, but he pushed mostly conservative policies. The only reason he didnt push through more of them was because the republicans didnt want to work with him on anything because he was black, not because their views were so divergent from his. I understand the concern with Trump and I share it. Just dont believe any of us should believe that we will be less likely to get into more foreign entanglements with Hillary. She has an actual track record of militarism, unlike Trump. Dont believe either candidate should be taken lightly.
You are completely unrealistic of the possibilities given climate when Obama took office...Did we forget the global meltdown on hand..Saving Wall Street which saved our economy and the global finance as a whole might seem like a right wing thing to do...I'm sure that are a lot of socialist on the left whose 401k benefited as well...Maybe we should all be hunting for our food... Maybe we should just let the largest gap between rich and poor in several thousand years (no exaggeration) get wider. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that Obama did not get the outcome he wanted. You install and keep in place some same people who helped create this recession, when your proposed and enacted solutions are failed conservative policies, you are getting exactly what you want, and by enabling this type of behavior we are getting exactly what we deserve. You are promoting rhetoric that is opposite of the right wing nuts...If you don't get all you want then you failed...He wasn't able to get the health care plan he wanted so he compromised and took what he could get..20 million more people have healthcare..Failure??..Obama says himself yu can let the good be the enemy of the great..If great can't be done then take the good...He tried to get a budget that struck a "Grand Bargain" and Boehner couldn't get his guys to sign off..It would have been a huge deal fiscally for this economy...The FED is now left to manage the economy alone with no help from legislators to implement any structural reforms and we will pay the price..Dodd Frank has had an enormous effect on Wall Steet...It has shut down businesses that weren't even involved in any wrong doing with it's overreaching approach...Casualty of war I guess right...Regular people work at these institutions too..
But you talk about conservatives policies, point to the socialist system the is working better than this system...Lord knows you have many to choose from...
Obamacare would have been great with price controls. Never entered the conversation. The price of these plans are getting more expensive by the year, and offering less coverage. The "Grand Bargain" you speak of would have resulted in deep cuts to SS and Medicare while offering corporate America more huge tax cuts they dont need. Thats no fing bargain.
Social Security is the most successful anti poverty program in the history of the world. Medicare is more efficient than the health care industry. If anything we should be making medicare available to everyone, and expanding social security. You keep recycling that old tired "socialist" meme. I come from a long line of capitalists, I am a big proponent of capitalism, but I dont want everything privatized. Dont want a private police force, dont want a private firefighters, among other institutions. Hate to break it to you but those things as they are now is socialism. We saw what happened with private prisons Don't want everything socialized, but I dont want everything privatized either. Its about balance. Also dont want competition squashed which is happening right now with all this conglomeration and deregulation. You are the first person Ive read who actually defended the fed. Let me tell you what the fed did for the economy. After the crash happened, the fed gave the big banks hundreds of billions of dollars in almost interest free loans without any strings attached. You know what they did with the money? They didnt use it to lend money, (they actually jacked up cc rates) they used the money to buy T-bills. They used the money meant to spur the economy they got at a lower interest rate and made money off the T bills. The fed did nothing about it. The banks in effect lended our taxpayer dollars back to us. Thank you fed. They continue to loan money to the banks interest free which is boosting the stock market, boosting the bank accounts of the one percent, but did almost nothing for anyone else. And you want to praise these people? I used to think that republicans were the only ones who bought the party line whatever it is, but its clear that many democrats are just as bad. For some reason, you seem to think that the gyrations of the stock market doesn't affect the 99%...Please see job losses 2008-09..That is a result of a slumping stock market..The FED loan the banks 370 billion and got back 42 billion in interest..Not exactly free...So the FED give the banks money and the banks do what banks do..Your prescription was to keep making the loans that got the banks in trouble in the first place??..I don't get it..Do you understand what would have happened if banks were allowed to go under???..
There are many more points I can touch upon but don't have the time now...The problem with social security is that we have made more promised payouts than the money we actually have in the coffers...It has to be addressed.. Of course I understand that. Do you understand that 95 percent of the gains from the stock market during the Obama administration went to the one percent? How many times do I have to explain to you that almost all the economic gains went to only one percent of the population? You seem to be taking that in stride, to put it mildly, as in you dont seem to give a ****. As for the return on the investment. The amount the banks allegedly paid out, considering their role in the crash. The tens of millions of lives they shattered, the tens of thousands of people who were driven to suicide because their greed, without any jail time. They got off real easy. Social Security doesnt add one cent to the national debt. It was actually running a big surplus but the surplus went into bonds by law which were spent. W spent a big chunk of it. The system itself works, if anything it should be reformed so that the surplus cant be spent.
Of course I understand that..But what are you going to do, wave a magic wand and have it go to the 99%??..The banks had to be saved so we don't end up like Venezuela...The banks aren't being saved to prop up the stock market, The banks are being saved to keep your supermarket open....These banks owe 100s of millions of dollars in forward contracts to each other...If one or two go down then we are all screwed... You seem to be in the under the mistaken impression IMO that the only way this recovery was going to happen is if the people who were largely responsible for the crash would be the only ones to get bailed out, and everyone else would get the shaft. This was no accident. Look at the charts for every recovery since and including the great depression, and you will find that this is the first recovery that almost entirely benefited the rich. You really think this was an accident? Ask yourself which economy does better long term, one that benefits most of the population or a very tiny sliver of it? What happens when people are tired of getting the short of end of the stick? Too many put Trump signs in their yard and blame other races for problems brought on them mostly by white people. I agree that the economy works better when the 99% is getting paid..Even more so than the 1%, but again, what choice did we have?? There was a lot we could do. During the S&L crisis of the 90s, hundreds of bankers were perp walked, prosecuted (by the HW Bush administration) which helped restore confidence in the banking system and put the word out that the govt wasnt tolerating criminal activity, not enabling them. No high level exec has even been charged in the crash and there has been literally hundreds of billions in fraud commited by America's largest corporations since then which has resulted in zero jail time. Don't buy that these companies are too byzantine to prosecute. If they are, break them up. Too use a well worn expression, Wall Street was bailed out but Main Street wasn't. There was no serious mortgage relief for those in danger of losing their homes, but the banks and firms who caused this crash got billions no strings attached and no caps on executive compensation. The president didnt have to lay off hundreds of thousand of workers during what was for all intents and purposes a depression. Most of Obama's stimulus was tax cuts. This was almost entirely a neoliberal solution to this crisis. The IMF, who pushed austerity and neoliberalism like a drug dealer recently admitted that it was a bad idea. Again, this is the first recovery to only benefit the rich. The solution was to promote policies that helped make everyone whole, not just people who still had many times more than everyone else after the crash, which many of them helped cause.
HW Bush?? you are joking right??...Bush's son, Neil Bush borrowed(his business partner)100 million dollars from Silverado Savings and Loan, and never paid it back...Neil was on the board of directors...Thanks HW for the confidence..We bailed them out and covered that loss..Charles Keating was a major player in the S&L crisis and had John McCain basically on his payroll...He donated tons of money to influence 5 Senators who came to be known as the Keating Five...John McCain was his main dude...Keating advisor??..Glad you asked. none other than Alan Greenspan who was appointed FED Chairman by??????? HW Bush...We are being played dude...
Obama stimulus was about 650M and tax cuts was about 350M...That's the only thing republican would agree to...Obama is not a dictator..
I keep trying to point this out during our conversations but you are buying it for some reason...The economy has changed...GM and Ford no longer leads the economy but companies like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple...It's a different kind of worker..Not as many employees..These companies dwarf the old economy companies...The guys at the top are just naturally richer and are global powers..You are comparing apples and oranges...The numbers you are looking at are screwed across the board..But that doesn't mean there isn't a problem, there is a major problem..My point is that we can't look to the old world ways to resolved it, this is a completely different animal...It's going the get worse too...I just don't see how the small guy will recover from this...The small guy will get crushed by automation..But Trump is telling them he is bringing the jobs back tho...Keep hope alive, I guess... The fact remains that 100s of bankers were prosecuted, it did restore confidence in the system wether you want to admit it or not. Never said the Bush family was clean as a whistle, please. No one since the crash has been charged with anything, they continue to be allowed to loot the economy and paying pennies on the dollar in fines.
You seem to be ok with just about any kind of corruption. If anything I see someone doing their best to enable it. Why?
You were right that I was off about the stimulus, was still too small.
You keep going on about this "new economy". This economy has been structured to deliver almost all the gains of this economy to a handful of very rich people. You seem to believe that it just happened by accident, that the largest gap between rich and poor since before the roman empire, is a natural evolution of our financial system. Karl Marx predicted it, but Marx didnt deregulate Wall Street.
The reason it evolved like this was because in the 1990s Bill Clinton turned the keys to this economy over to Wall Street with massive deregulation. Now the financial services industry makes up the largest part of our economy. A big reason they keep their money along with companies like apple is through massive tax evasion.
There are literally trillions of untaxed dollars that are being hidden in secret bank accounts all,over the world, as well as corporate inversions. Corporations pay much less now in taxes than they have in decades past. Revenue from corporate taxes are the lowest they have been in decades. Guess who makes up the difference? Please dont tell me US corporations pay the highest taxes in the world. The effective rate, the rate they actually have been paying is much lower. We have over a trillion dollars in infrastructure repairs needed alone, this country needs all the tax dollars it is due.
To recap. Massive deregulation turned Wall Street into a largely unregulated casino. Trade deals were used to ship jobs overseas with no worker protection. Many of the largest corporations in this country, if not the world are paying no taxes. Massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Wages have been flat for decades because too many employers dont want to give workers their fair share like they used to. And you really want to try and convince me that this discrepancy in wealth was all a happy accident?
There is an easy way to solve this problem, pay people a living wage, corporations and millionaires do their duty and pay their taxes. Dont ship plants to other countries even if the plant and the parent company are very profitable. If you are in the financial services industry, dont bet against your clients like Goldman Sachs and other firms have done. Thats just plain greed, all of this is about greed, dont kid yourself into thinking that it was an accident.
As Harold Meyerson pointed out, we have gone from a stakeholder economy where the long term needs of the company are weighed along with whats good for employees, the community, the country, shareholders way down the list. We now have a shareholder economy which basically says F the long term health of a company, F the employees, F the community, and F the country. Its all about making the largest shareholders happy, whatever the cost. Thats your "new economy" hope its working for you. A lot of this is good, but some of it is also overstated. Clinton signed it into law yes, but it was a law passed by a Republican house and Senate. The subprime crisis would have happened even without above deregulation. The types of products that led to it were not and in most cases still are not understood by most people. Congress can't write laws to regulate these, they aren't even competent enough to understand them. But the economy has shifted. It is now Finance, Insurance and Real Estate based speculation driven.
But only the big boys get to play in it. I don't agree with the shareholder economy example. If you look at the large banks, or Enron etc these are being run to create larger and larger paychecks for their top tier leadership. Holding Citi Bank stock wouldn't have made you rich, their last two CEOs probably have enough cheddah to past for a pacific island or two of their own. One of the driving forces in the deregulation of Wall Street were members of Clinton's own cabinet Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers. None of this would have been possible without Clinton crossing party lines because he knows his own party would have never proposed and passed this legislation. Clinton embarked on a strategy called "triangulation" which tacked the democratic party further and further to the right. The subprime crisis happened for several reasons. One was deregulation. The housing market was deregulated, more than 85 percent of all mortgage fraud was perpetraded by lenders. There was very little oversight because of deregulation. Brooksly Born tried to warn anyone who would listen at the time of the dangers of not regulating derivates, there were people sounding the alarm when this legislation was passed Summers had a big hand in brushing her concerns aside. Once the derivatives market collapsed with Lehman Brothers failing, the entire house of cards came down. As for shareholder economy vs stakeholder economy, Im surprised that after seeing the end result, the massive discrepancy in wealth, that you dont believe its an issue. Robert Rubin went from Wall street to government, was instrumental in deregulating Wall Street, causing the crash, then went back to work at Citibank. You have any idea how much he and his buddies made since then? Most of the decisions made by corporate America today are made mainly for its largest shareholders. Thats why many corporations are doing massive stock buybacks. Thats good for the share price, but it does nothing to grow a company.
First of all, Greenspan was not part of Clinton's cabinet, he was the Fed Chair appointed by Bush...Your focus is on completely the wrong things...Glass Steaglle was repealed because our banks were uncommunicative compared to foreign banks who didn't have these constraints...They were a one stop shop for major US companies...We had to offer other products to keep businesses in US banks...As a whole it has been great with massive tax revenues in US coffers but yes nothing is perfect, we do have some bad apples..Bro, you have to look at the entire picture... You're right Greenspan wasnt technically part of his cabinet but he was reappointed, kept on by Clinton. Glass Steagal worked, doesnt matter how you try to spin it. Its a bad idea to invest depositors assets in risky investments. Banks being " uncommunicative" ? You are going to go have go into more detail. That does not explain why I should have my deposits put into risky ventures which affect the stability of the bank. Now by law if a bank fails. The creditors get paid first and the depositors bail them out. That wasnt the case until recently. The only thing I hear you saying is that banks werent making as much money as they wanted so the answer was to alter it until they got the lionshare of wealth from this economy. Thats what happened didnt it? Uncompetitive...spell check.. A few years back, I actually looked this up..Wall Street accounted for 40% of NYC tax revenues...The city tax officers actually wait with anxiety on the increase or decrease of Wall Street bonuses...Google it and see..It's a win win for everyone until something bad happens..But government step in and help and they get back their money... |
9/21/2016 8:24 AM
