🔥 Cheney is ace, shot his friend in the face
-
When government and high finance are too close, problems arise.
Absolutely. Somehow I suspect that if those financial institutions had been left to their own devices, meaning they assumed their own risk, they would have behaved very differently.The financiers should not have acted the way they did with it, but they profited a lot from it for a while and were quite free with their “campaign donations”.
Imagine if the federal government had never backed mortgages. We'd probably have fewer houses but there wouldn't be tax payer funds on the hook for bad loans. If a bank decided to act inappropriately it would affect that institution only and a bailout wouldn't have been necessary.I think these kinds of events are more common when the government gets involved in areas best left in private hands.
-
I'd expand that to include congress and at least the last 4 presidents.
I'd take Bill over Hillary or Obama.
At least Bill had the sense to work across the aisle for real, and stopped being so left once he realized half the country isn't that far left.
This does not match my experience. I've been looking for months, and I guess enough other people are looking (in my field, at least) that employers can afford to be picky about having the exact skill set they're looking for.
Lot's of people gave up looking. They're no longer considered on unemployment if they aren't interested in employment.
You have to look at underemployment to find the real stats.
-
That is a prime example of a lie. Many people were convinced they didn't. Blair and Bush knew they didn't. Read the papers.
There's two issues:
Did Saddam have WMD? (Concensus: probably not. Possibly well-hidden chemical weapons.)
Was Saddam in violation of like 16 UN directives? Oh HELL yeah.
-
@Lorne_Kates said:
They'd be test firing those things for a while.
There was exactly one test.
@Lorne_Kates said:
Big kaboom followed by radiation.
Nobody at the time knew the long-term health effects of exposure to that kind of radiation.
-
ISIS spread from a local threat to a world threat.
Libya is back into civil war like it never happened.
Are these things you assume are Obama's fault?
-
Imagine if the federal government had never backed mortgages.
There you go, sticking with a hopelessly parochial viewpoint that blinds you to the deep cause.
There have been periods in history when finance was nothing like as closely regulated as now, when things were much closer to the “ideal” of being unregulated. Booms and crashes still happened. People still made and then lost vast amounts of money. Admittedly they may have happened in other countries, but if you are going to go around asserting that people in the USA are fundamentally unlike anyone anywhere else in the world in their attitudes to matters to do with money, you're being insanely stupid.
The evidence is not that government has to be involved in crashes — even on the small scale it is inevitably involved now due to the presence of bankruptcy laws — but rather that crashes happen anyway. The true forces that drive them are not governmental, but rather the basic way that markets sometimes work, with everyone copying everyone else. That's the true engine that fuels both booms and crashes.
In this case, you've had government and finance in each others pockets. (Who instigated it? Hard to say, since we might not have good evidence.) That might have let the boom grow larger than it otherwise would have. On the other hand, it might also be possible to think about it in terms of a lot of hot money coming out of the tech boom and 2001 bust that desired somewhere to go with growth potential and thought it had found an angle in securitized real estate. And quite a lot of that money has then jumped into resources (a big growth area until the start of 2015 when China started to really slow). Where will it go next? I don't know, but there's always people about desperate for large amounts of profits at any cost.
-
@xaade said:
ISIS spread from a local threat to a world threat.
Libya is back into civil war like it never happened.
Are these things you assume are Obama's fault?
Not necessarily his fault, but it supports a proposition that ...
he already has won more than any president, much cheaper. He won Libya war, Egypt war, Sudan war, and Ukraine war.
... may not be entirely accurate.
-
... may not be entirely accurate.
I don't blame Obama.
But if you want to paint him like a foreign policy global leader superstar that deserves praise, you have to come with ideas that reality supports.
You can't say he "won" a war in Sudan.
You can't say he "solved" problems in the Middle East.
Iran Nuclear deal is suspect, because the entire reason we bothered was because they were refining material way past the grade needed for energy production.
That is a costly process that serves no purpose.
Playing nice with them is naive.
If you want to argue that Iran deserves to have their own nuclear stockpile if other countries can have them, that's entirely different.
I mean stuff like
The Heavy Water facility in Arak with help of international venture will be redesigned and modernized to "Heavy Water Research Reactor" with no weapon grade plutonium byproducts.
The spent fuel will be exported, there will be no reprocessing.Is great.
But
When the IAEA verifies Iran's implementation of its key nuclear commitments:
The EU will terminate all nuclear-related economic sanctions.
The United States will cease the application of all nuclear-related secondary economic and financial sanctions.
The UN Security Council will endorse this agreement with a resolution which terminates all previous nuclear-related resolutions and incorporate certain restrictive measures for a mutually agreed period of time.Um...
All those restrictions are ongoing...
Iran will be required to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency access to all of its declared facilities so that the agency can ensure about peaceful nuclear program.[18] According to published details of the deal which is published by the U.S. government, IAEA inspectors would have access to all of the nuclear facilities including enrichment facilities, the supply chain that supports the nuclear program and uranium mines as well as continuous surveillance at uranium mills, centrifuge rotors and bellows production and storage facilities. Iran will be required to grant access to the IAEA to investigate suspicious sites or allegations
Is this going to be a permanent forever access to regularly scheduled inspections?
-
There you go, sticking with a hopelessly parochial viewpoint
I wouldn't say it's hopeless. You've made some interesting points that I'll have to consider.if you are going to go around asserting that people in the USA are fundamentally unlike anyone anywhere else in the world
Never did.but rather the basic way that markets sometimes work, with everyone copying everyone else. That's the true engine that fuels both booms and crashes.
Agreed. I've never suggested that a recession wouldn't have happened, it probably would have. We seem to have a cycle of recession every 7-10 years. We'll never know the answer but it's interesting to consider that if the feds had not backed subprime loans whether this recession would have been as far reaching or harmful.I believe that if the banks would have been forced to assume their own risk, things would have been different. We can't know how much.
-
Playing nice with them is naive.
After watching North Korea unfold, it seems worse than naive.
-
Booms and crashes still happened.
True, and a lot of the deregulation that happened in the US removed exactly the regulations that were put in place during and after the Great Depression to prevent, or at least try to moderate, future crashes. I saw that deregulation happening and thought, Here we go again. (Of course I can't prove I actually predicted it with no documented predictions, but whatever...)
-
The problem is that the deal requires permanency of foreign oversight that I cannot see it guaranteeing.
It seems that they're just going to walk through a program and once everything is checked off, the sanctions stop and that's the end of it.
Not only that, these inspections have been hilarious in the past.
Waiting DAYS at the doors in Iraq...
If you can't allow surprise inspections, then the entire thing is pointless.
-
True, and a lot of the deregulation that happened in the US removed exactly the regulations that were put in place during and after the Great Depression to prevent
There is no amount of government regulation that would have stopped the oversight committee from pocketing campaign money to overlook subprime loans.
Not to mention the fact that Bush called them out on it and predicted what would happen.
Bush.... the idiot Bush.... saw it coming.
And yet the media... blamed BUSH.... who said, "Hey guys. This oversight committee is not oversightening..." (bushism added for effect).
Then they PRAISED OBAMA for bailing out big business and creating a whole new class of super-monopoly.
Had a Republican done that, it would be.... "OMG... big business right wing nutjob".
I mean, it's hilarious and eerily similar the Republican led and Democrat led governments are these days.
The fact that we continue to debate who is right on economics and politics is meaningless if they don't even actually follow those ideas. They freakin do what they always do, no matter who it is, and we sit here bitching about what should have been done, not realizing that the two parties are behaving exactly the same. All they change is civil rhetoric, on civil issues, that they never do anything about anyway.
No one has done true immigration reform.
No one has built a wall at the border.
No one has stopped monopolies, only entrenched them and enlarged them.
No one has helped push gay marriage through. (The Supreme court did, not Obama, not some political party).
No one has changed our strategy in the Middle East. We continue to attack based on whether the person in power is economically advantage to America.
No one has solved the rising healthcare costs.It's all just talking heads and band aids. The same ones... for both sides. (Obamacare was drafted by a Republican)
You think drones are just better than soldiers in Iraq, even though the collateral damage is even higher with drone strikes? Everyone was lined up to go to war in Iraq. They would do it again. It's only their rhetoric that changes.
First, "oh yeah, let's go."
Then when it's all going down, "there's no WMD in Iraq. Bush lied"
Then, "we knew those WMDs were there, Bush was saying there was more WMDs that we didn't know about. (
).Now that it's Obama.
"He's solved everything!!!"
Even though ISIS went from a contained problem to a worldwide plague....
It's pointless to debate about which ideology is correct, because neither is actually followed.
-
There is no amount of government regulation that would have stopped the oversight committee from pocketing campaign money to overlook subprime loans.
The problem wasn't overlooking subprime loans, but regulations that encouraged / required them!
-
@Lorne_Kates said:
but ain't it true that, contrary to those who run around like a chicken with it's head cut off, that a recession ain't always that bad? I mean, if the economy just kept inflating forever, well, we'd be in a might bit of Zimbby-way zillion dollar trouble, wouldn't we?
I'm not 100% convinced that money is actually real. For the purposes of science, I gave my credit card to a dog to see what would happen. It just did dog stuff. That proves something.
-
-
@Lorne_Kates said:
They'd be test firing those things for a while.
There was exactly one test.
@Lorne_Kates said:
Big kaboom followed by radiation.
Nobody at the time knew the long-term health effects of exposure to that kind of radiation.
Okay, then. Atomic-grade dumbfuckery it was.
-
If it was up to republicans, US was fighting 6 wars now. That is a mad ox, not a smart fox.
-
Was Saddam in violation of like 16 UN directives? Oh HELL yeah.
...by which measure Iraq was by no means the worst offender. If that in and of itself was enough to justify an invasion, there was a long list of countries more urgently requiring invasion than Iraq.
Iraq was not invaded because of anything in particular that Saddam was up to that a bunch of other dictators in a bunch of other places were not also up to. Iraq was invaded because a klatch of influential PNAC fantasists had it firmly in their minds that forcibly exporting American Democracy™ to the Middle East would create a kind of virtuous domino effect and wipe away all the sins of history.
The people will welcome us with open arms, they said. And so they have. Mostly small arms, with a sprinkling of IEDs and rocket launchers.
-
if you are going to go around asserting that people in the USA are fundamentally unlike anyone anywhere else in the world in their attitudes to matters to do with money, you're being insanely stupid.
Americans quite commonly believe that people in the USA are fundamentally unlike anyone anywhere else in the world, period. I don't think this is insane stupidity; I think it's insane parochialism propped up by the world's most competent propaganda machine.
-
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Steel/raw
Dwarf Fortress steel is stronger than real life steel. It doesn't get weak until it's completely melted.
Bully for Dwarf Fortress steel. Where can we get some to build real buildings?
-
Yep, Obama is pretty far left.
That's kind of my point.
His rhetoric is far left.
People aren't using policies to picture alignment, just rhetoric and party selection.
That's why nothing of worth is actually getting done, and these crap non-working band-aids are pretending to patch up problems, but are simply shifting the symptoms around and making things worse.
-
Are you blind or just too stubborn to admit when you're wrong?
-
What is amnesty?
What is expansion of welfare?
What is free college?
What is gay marriage?
What is immigration reform?Are these all right aligned policies? They are all things he's talked about doing. Yet, he ends up only instituting big large government policies and creating a massive authoritarian NHS, etc. Most of the big ticket items they hated about Bush, Obama has done. Yet he's considered left because of what he says he will do and the party alignment he has.
When I looked at the vote between Obama and McCain, I realized immediately that it pretty much didn't matter which I voted for.
-
You do realize the president only has the power to veto or accept bills, right? He can't just unilaterally decide that we're going to have a new law. The best he can do is temporarily stop enforcing old unfair laws.
-
He unilaterally decided military action, he unilaterally decided Iran deal. (In fact, anyone that disagreed and attempted to inform Iran otherwise was branded a traitor).
He expanded on Bush's abuse of executive orders.
He used them for amnesty.
He threatened to use executive order to push Obamacare through, and to halt the debt limit stalling of the Republicans.
His unchanging attitude was that, "If you don't pass this, I'll force it through" the entire time he's been President. It's almost his mantra for every issue.
-
More accurately, Obama the authoritarian.
Most of the policies labeled conservative by the page are more authoritarian than anything else.
-
@Lorne_Kates said:
I don't know why,
She swallowed a fly.
I guess she'll die.
I guess she'll die.The version I heard...
There was an old lady
Who swallowed a fly.
I don't know why,
She swallowed a fly.
Perhaps she'll die.
-
You do realize the president only has the power to veto or accept bills, right?
Not when he has a phone and a pen.
Actually, even discounting Obama's reckless lawlessness, your statement is very wrong. He also has the power to execute the laws passed by the legislature, plus some other stuff.
-
The CIA planned a coup in Iran
"Because we can, let's fuck up Iran!"Perhaps they'll learn.
Iranian mullahs got rid of the Shah:
"He's gone too far, let's fuck off the Shah!"
They toppled the Shah because of the plan
the CIA ran for the oil in Iran.Perhaps they'll learn.
US helped Saddam to fuck up the mullahs:
"Here, have our old gases, now go kick their asses!
The mullahs must pay for ditching the Shah!"
They toppled the Shah because of the plan
the CIA ran for the oil in Iran.Perhaps they'll learn.
Saddam lost the war and then gassed the Kurds:
"Hey what a turd, he's gassing the Kurds!"
He gassed the Kurds for supporting the mullahs
Iranian mullahs who toppled the Shah
They toppled the Shah because of the plan
the CIA ran for the oil in Iran.Perhaps they'll learn.
The Pentagon planned to get rid of Saddam:
"He used our gases, he must have masses!"
They toppled Saddam for gassing the Kurds
He gassed the Kurds for supporting the mullahs
Iranian mullahs who toppled the Shah
They toppled the Shah because of the plan
the CIA ran for the oil in Iran.Perhaps they'll learn.
-
I think you need to change the foil in your hat.
-
And you need a little more haemorrhoid cream on yours.
-
I think you need to change the foil in your hat.
I think it's not his foil at fault, I think it's CIA's.
