After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life is anyone surprised? The Congress care about increasing the power of the government and doing whatever it is they want to do when they're in power. They like the new powers when they are in power and criticize them when they are out of power. Though the Neocons just criticize how much they are used rather than their existence so I guess they're more consistent.
I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party?
I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part.
We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.
After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life
I guess you weren't alive in 2003 for the Guiness world record largest protest in human history against the Iraq war, including 400,000 in New York, 200,000 in SF, etc
Of course the difference is that tea partiers are upstanding Real Americans while the Iraq war protesters were dirty fucking hippies so they don't count.
This is a pretty poor comparison. You'd do better to cite a Congressional action that turned out to be a bad idea, like the Iraq War. When you cite TARP you're actually saying "the public is dumb and doesn't understand economics," which is a pretty accurate assessment, but not the one you were trying to make.
TARP probably saved us from a Great Depression, and IIRC the bailouts are in the black except for the segments bailing out the government mortgage banks and the car companies. FTR, the protests against Volcker's anti-inflation measures in the 70s were bigger, with farmers eventually blockading the Fed headquarters with their tractors. The protestors were wrong then, too.
> Oh really? How did forcing "loans" on Wells Fargo and other banks that didn't need money save us from anything?
Part of the force in economics is psychology. If enough people think the dollar will crash then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know if you were paying attention when, after Congress first rejected TARP, the stock market shot down severely again. There are many people out there that believe the dollar will crash - something Ron Paul has warned for a long time, long before our current economic crisis (a big reason for his sudden popularity). Many people still believe it's not a question of if but when. The scary thing is just how much everything flipped upside down, and Dr. Paul went from "kook" to genius, while at the same time Warren Buffet tells us he also noticed the shift, while attending a birthday party of well-to-do friends, where many started asking if their money-market investments were safe: "When people who drive Rolls-Royces are worrying about their piggy banks, you know you've got a problem" - Warren Buffet (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126056572135687829.html)
> I don't know if you were paying attention when, after Congress first rejected TARP, the stock market shot down severely again.
The stock market isn't the economy. Its moves now are somewhat independent of "life on the street". (That was even more true during the great depression.)
> There are many people out there that believe the dollar will crash
The dollar has weak for almost 10 years. It didn't and hasn't moved much.
I didn't suggest the stock market is the economy, but it is an important cog within our connected financial system. The key to my argument is in my first sentence about psychology. Did you read the WSJ article I linked to? Another quote from Buffet in the article: "I felt that this is something like I've never seen before, and the American public and Congress don't fully understand the gravity of the problem" General Motors needed to be rescued, and there are millions out of work, yet these items have little association with Bear Sterns, AIG, Wall St. etc., the financial institutions where the damage shook the pillars of our economy which rests upon the financial system and the dollar. The point being things are connected; significant trouble in one area knocks into the other, and you get a domino effect. The dollar is no longer backed by anything but promises, and people accept it because of our superior position as an economic and world power - even with all our escalating debt. However, we are not invincible (as Rome was not) and can experience a dollar crash if, as I said, enough people begin to think the dollar based system will not survive due to stress load (debt for bailouts/stimulus, future medicare). It's true the dollar has been fairly consistent for about a decade, and that's because our standing in the world has remained so - people still die to get in. However, a truer measure of faith in the dollar is the price of gold 10 years ago vs. today - $280 vs. $1080 respectively.
> Buffet in the article: "I felt that this is something like I've never seen before, and the American public and Congress don't fully understand the gravity of the problem"
Do you really think that Buffet has a "sense of the people"?
> General Motors needed to be rescued
No. General Motors needed to go into bankruptcy and have all of its contracts broken.
> and there are millions out of work, yet these items have little association with Bear Sterns, AIG, Wall St. etc., the financial institutions where the damage shook the pillars of our economy which rests upon the financial system and the dollar.
You're babbling.
> The point being things are connected
Yes, but that doesn't tell us that TARP was a good idea.
> The dollar is no longer backed by anything but promises
That's nothing new and TARP did nothing to change it.
> It's true the dollar has been fairly consistent for about a decade, and that's because our standing in the world has remained so - people still die to get in. However, a truer measure of faith in the dollar is the price of gold 10 years ago vs. today - $280 vs. $1080 respectively.
The price of the dollar relative to other currencies tells us the relationship between the US and other countries. The price of gold is a combination of absolute value and general skepticism.
Note that TARP didn't address any of that.
You do remember TARP. You're trying to argue that it was necessary. Yet, you've only mentioned generalities that are independent of TARP.
It's a bit too soon to be saying TARP was a good piece of legislation. It's also a bit of fantasy to say what would have happened if TARP hadn't passed.
The thing is, TARP hasn't led to any reforms in the financial sector. It simply shoveled taxpayer money at private corporations with very few strings attached, which propped up the banks long enough to say "hey, thanks, we would have been fine anyway, really, now piss off".
I think we'd be a lot better off without TARP. Your smug "the protestors were wrong" is unjustified.
The Great Depression was not caused by a sudden catastrophe but rather a crawling plague of failures that was reinforced every time the snooty holier-than-thou politicians living in Congress and the Fed refused to lend a hand to banks, even ramping up regulatory requirements in mid-crisis.
Nobody knows what would have happened for the current crisis, but history suggests attitudes like yours are not a good idea. The last thing we need right now is a nation of Hoovers.
I agree that we don't need any more Hoovers but that's all we have. If you read about the scope of Hoover's interventions into the American economy in 1929 after the crash until he left office you wouldn't suggest that he left the economy alone or did too little.
> The last thing we need right now is a nation of Hoovers.
I suggest that you re-read your history. Hoover was a progressive and was ramping up deficit spending and production controls. FDR ran against those policies but did a 180 when he got into office and basically just did more of the same.
That war on production is what made the great depression great. It didn't really end until WWII made it untenable - you can't have an empty arsenal of democracy.
Indeed. The banks paid TARP back very quickly. I imagined it was going to be something that would take place over 30 or 50 years, but it happened in a matter of weeks. Not a bad investment on the government's part -- they might have even made some money!
I think this misses a lot of points. For every person that lost money in savings accounts and smart investments (me), there is another person that got to buy their home with 4% financing instead of the 8 or 10%. So if your article wants to count losses from low interest rates, it should also offset them against gains from cheap loans. (Also, TARP probably didn't have much to do with this. It just meant that the name on your bank account stayed "Bank of America" instead of "Bank of the United States of America".)
> "I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this."
It is not in the interest of the ruling elite for this fact to become apparent. They control education and media, and have mastered the art of dividing society along various (ultimately facile and irrelevant) fault lines.
(Do you remember when Blue and Red state meme suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a cheap ready-made knockoff hanging in every one of our various media outlets? Is it a surprise that every time the country finally starts focusing on a substantial issue some completely random troll topic is pushed on queue; is the biggest problem facing USA the decision to allow gay marriage or to rescue this sinking ship of a state?)
"We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition."
You take that sentence and run it by a random sampling of 18 year olds in America. A certain proportion may be able to parse it; a subset of that may actually understand what is said; an even smaller subset would be able to reason about the proposition. Am I being completely pessimistic for thinking that the percentage that can even understand that as English is in single digit percentile?
How so many people in the comments thought that it was the actual Facebook login page, as it was (temporarily) Google's #1 hit for "Facebook login?" Well, have a look at their english. The grammar, the underlying argument structure, the confused-awkward lololols, the lot of it.
That's the majority of people in the US. Most adults stopped during or after high school. Remember high school? Remember the attitudes of students going through history & government courses? That's where they stopped, that was their final set of saved data on the matter.
And worse, they're still much better off -- even intellectually -- than many times their numbers across the planet: sustenance farmers, laborers, tribespeople, etc. (I'm speaking as someone born on the same land that my family spent centuries sustenance farming). A good portion of the human population's still living in the mode Ghandi called "more like animals than people." (rough quote from memory, sorry).
We're in agreement. However I'm not sure if you see this as an 'organic' phenomena (i.e. most people prefer to be mindless cattle that is educated only to the minimal extent necessary to be functional production units) or (as I do) as a systemic policy driven elite project to shape the human society. They haven't exactly been quiet or secretive about it.
The current elite clearly think that a systemic leveling across the board (aka domesticating the people identified by Ghandi) and homogenization is the only way to address the inherent contingent (your context) and intrinsic (your genetics) differences between humans.
My experience (obviously a tiny sample) is that the distribution is not smooth and quite lumpy, actually. I am not yet convinced that people generally prefer to be misinformed and deceived, and live lives of animals as opposed to a beings primarily distinguishing themselves by their possession of minds.
I do remember High School and do remember the history and government teachers (History: leftist progressive; Government: (presumed) future Bush voter). I remember (as memorable "learning" events) the woven tie of the history teacher and his half-hearted efforts to inject a bit of reality into the official version, and, the episode where the government teacher discussed "Deep Throat"[] with a flirting jock in class. No, I did not live in the ghettos among the disadvantaged and downwardly mobile; this is somewhere in a suburb around Washington DC -- the "Empire's capital" what a joke -- circa early 80s. in a county that likes to boast of the exceptional concentration of the highly educated amongst its residents. (Boggles the mind.)
[edit: The movie not the source. In any event, the film in question was actually "The opening of Misty Beethoven" ...]
I see it as people not caring about the truth as much as trying to be happy & safe. If that involves lots of accepted lies & illusions, then so be it. The mind's purpose is to assist the body in achieving darwinian goals -- knowing the truth of the world around them isn't terribly relevant. In parallel, those taking advantage of this situation aren't likely to spend much time thinking hard about it -- it works, that's all that matters. Justifying actions that bring you financial success is an art form driven over millennia of evolution & refinement.
Ha! I grew up in Springfield, VA, mid-late 90s for high school.
We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition.
Great choice of words. I love how it applies equally well to the USA and China. I agree, of course, and think it applies to most modern democracies, in whom I have zero faith.
I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party?
I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part.
We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.