The Business of Government ...

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

... is not business.

The business of government is to secure our inherent rights; the purpose of a corporation is to make a profit. Securing rights is not profitable, therefore, a government infested with businessmen has, and will, only lead to an erosion of the security of our rights in the name of profit for the few. This has been proven every time a President has enacted "pro-business" deregulation and union busting; the policies failed with Harding, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, each time causing a bubble followed by a crash. The empirical evidence is obvious but, as anybody who pays attention to Republicans can tell you, empirical evidence doesn't matter to Republicans; all that matters is blind faith.

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

The policies failed? So long as the top one-percent keeps getting richer, I think they are content to count that as a success, and they have been splendidly successful at this for the past thirty years. The game is just to con people to vote for them and give the appearance of having a consensus behind them.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Much win.

[paft.livejournal.com]

f: enjoy your Nike shoes, and your IPod...

Hope you can eat and drink them, folks, because once these multi-nationals succeed in getting their hands on both food AND water, that may be all you have left.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

What's the deal with the American left falling in love with Russia Today?

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Fallacy of origin; try again.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I didn't make a single comment on the piece, it's a question of the source.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Why does the phenomenon require explanation?

Here's why I appreciate RT and Al Jazeera, despite the apparent motives lurking behind these organizations: They provide what appears to be an intelligent, informed, and critical perspective on current events involving the U.S. that you don't find in just about any domestic mainstream media source. You have to read them carefully and with an awareness of their particular blindspots, but the same is true of any other news source.

If the insinuation you're making is that RT is just engaged in disseminating "propaganda," you're more than free to point out specific factual distortions or unmerited assertions made by these sources, and I expect that many of those who appreciate the RT's perspective would be capable of intelligently acknowledging or refuting your claims. These are not perfect journalistic institutions, but if we're going to throw out a source as unreliable just because its backer has an agenda, then we'll want to include the Murdoch empire, as well.

In the meantime, your "What's wrong with our usual echo chamber?" response ought to embarrass you more than you seem to realize.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Why does the phenomenon require explanation?

Why doesn't it? I understand why you "appreciate" such agenda-driven news sources, but I don't see why you think they're at all worthwhile for information in reality. As an outside perspective, it may give solid information as to how the power players in Russia and in the Arab nations view us, but it certainly doesn't provide a worthwhile perspective beyond that.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

What's with you being unable to cite a specific problem with the reporting being done here?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The specific problem is that it comes from RT. Heck, I might even hold Truthout higher.

[muses-circle.livejournal.com]

This has been proven every time a President has enacted "pro-business" deregulation and union busting; the policies failed with Harding, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, each time causing a bubble followed by a crash.

This isn't just about Republicans, either. The Clinton administration in the 90's supported the Frank-Dodd bill, basically telling banks that they had to give loans to everyone, regardless of income. That brought about the concept of the sub-prime mortgage loan, which lead to the housing bubble bursting in 2008.

While I agree that government's function is supposed to secure our Constitutional rights, its regulating business to the nth degree is just as dangerous. The video blames Republicans for all the country's ills, but the fact is that the federal government regulates businesses through taxes, personnel, wages, insurance, etc to the point that many businesses cannot afford to provide better health care to their employees and pay them at the same time. There's a reason why big business like Wal-Mart pushed their operations overseas: thank government for that (Republican AND Democrat).

Then again, if government is just supposed to secure citizen's rights, why have a budget...and why employ federal workers? Should government employ people if they aren't like a business?

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

This is pretty close to what I was going to say.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

You mean, you were going to treat us to an incoherent rant that's only vaguely related to factual reality?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

^ Agreed

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

Read my comment below.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> The Clinton administration in the 90's supported the Frank-Dodd bill, basically telling banks that they had to
> give loans to everyone, regardless of income. That brought about the concept of the sub-prime mortgage loan,
> which lead to the housing bubble bursting in 2008.



Great oggley moogley, where to start.

If, when you say 'the Frank-Dodd bill', you mean HR 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, recognize that this was introduced to the house in 2009, long after the sub-prime mortgage crisis had already metastasized into the economy as a whole.

Perhaps when you say "Frank-Dodd", you really mean the 1995 legislative changes made to the Community Re-investment act? This is the typical republican bugaboo blamed for the sub prime crises, and is also a bunch of fetid dingo's kidneys and revisionist history to boot. Anyone interested can track the failure rate of CRA based loans as compared to Loans nationwide and see that this was not causative. Anyone not convinced can see how lending practices had their radical change in 2004, some 9 years after the said changes to the CRA. There was easy credit and next to nothing downpayments for risky borowers who were in no way, shape, or form, covered by the CRA. By the early 2000's, Loaning under CRA was slower, and proven less likely to fail in the long term than un-mandated sub prime loans. The propensity for lenders to loan money to people who couldn't afford to pay them back has more to do with a perception of riskless lending based on the constant increase in housing prices (who cares if they can't pay, as long as you get the collateral back, and the collateral is worth more than it was!)

If you want to blame the Clinton Administration for something leading to the current recession under which we flounder, blame him for signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This is actually causative, in that it enhanced the ability of a housing speculation bubble to permeate through the rest of the economy.

Another failure of government would be the refusal to regulate or even monitor credit default swaps. It was the over hedging of such instruments that allowed large institutions to buy parts of enormously risky loans and pretend they were covered.


For an excellent and easily assimilated short story in how some people made ungodly amounts of money and some people lost their shirt, because of the combination of 1) lack of regulation of CDS instruments, and 2) the entanglement enabled by the deregulation under Gramm-Leach-Bliley, listen to This American Life's expose on Magnatar.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

By saying "great oggely moogely" and "fetid dingo kidneys" in the same post, you have mixed Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in the same reply....your argument is invalid.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Wow! You mean NOBODY was ever refused for a loan?

That's amazing.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

he Clinton administration in the 90's supported the Frank-Dodd bill, basically telling banks that they had to give loans to everyone, regardless of income. That brought about the concept of the sub-prime mortgage loan, which lead to the housing bubble bursting in 2008.

Um... no. That's fundamentally not what happened.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

This isn't just about Republicans, either. The Clinton administration in the 90's supported the Frank-Dodd bill, basically telling banks that they had to give loans to everyone, regardless of income. That brought about the concept of the sub-prime mortgage loan, which lead to the housing bubble bursting in 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street_Reform_and_Consumer_Protection_Act

The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Pub.L. 111-203, H.R. 4173) is a federal statute in the United States that was signed into law by President Barack Obama on July 21, 2010


[chessdev] Is there some other Dodd-Frank bill I'm unaware of?

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'Securing rights is not profitable, therefore, a government infested with businessmen has, and will, only lead to an erosion of the security of our rights in the name of profit for the few'

Assumptive leap.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

I don't feel like posting, but here's an anti-alarmist oped in the wall street journal that might be good: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html

And survey results: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/28/global-warming-skeptics-know-more-about-science-new-study-claims/

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

That's not an assumption. It's a conclusion based on empirical evidence.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

America is not a nation, it's a corporation.