Bernie Sanders is a Socialist Politician.
I am just being nit-picky, but I think he is simply a "scumbag". He just happens not to be the typical-"Hi, I am on Fox!" variety such as Glenn Beck.
Bernie Sanders is a Socialist Politician.
I am just being nit-picky, but I think he is simply a "scumbag". He just happens not to be the typical-"Hi, I am on Fox!" variety such as Glenn Beck.
Last edited by Beskar; 10-11-2011 at 15:59.
Days since the Apocalypse began
"We are living in space-age times but there's too many of us thinking with stone-age minds" | How to spot a Humanist
"Men of Quality do not fear Equality." | "Belief doesn't change facts. Facts, if you are reasonable, should change your beliefs."
Sorry, I know this is spammy, but I couldn't resist...
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The problem is the left in America has no voice.
You are forced to choose between a hollowed out Trotskyist like Chomsky or some underemployed fool who parrots Chomsky but can't even begin to comprehend the subject he's talking about.
The left in America is infatuated with the abstract, not the tangiable. Everything has to be some giant black & white struggle. So kudos for excersising your rights as citizens but [...] shave the beard, put on a suit and speak coherntly you hippie. Clamoring on with no clear agenda other than "hurr derr kill the bankers" is asinine.
Last edited by Ser Clegane; 10-12-2011 at 19:20. Reason: language
There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford
My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.
Look, I don't much sympathize with hippie drum circles, but they're reacting to a real problem. The financial sector is overpaid, overgrown and out of control. They privatize profits and socialize losses, as the bailout showed. It's almost a textbook-perfect example of a rigged game. The rest of us work hard and play by the rules; not so the securities folks.
Again, I hypothesize that the average investment banker or stock broker is more parasitic and destroys more wealth than a welfare mother. (Some numbers: Annual cost of all means-tested entitlements (Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance (AFDC), supplemental security income (SSI), child nutrition programs, refundable portions of earned income tax credits (EITC and HITC) and child tax credit, welfare contingency fund, child care entitlement to States, temporary assistance to needy families, foster care and adoption assistance, State children's health insurance and veterans pensions) is around $354.3 billion; estimates for true cost of financial bailout vary, but $4.6 trillion seems to be a not-unrealistic number.)
Not to mention this absurd and counter-factual meme that the financial crisis was created in Washington rather than Wall Street. Read up.
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Last edited by Lemur; 10-12-2011 at 18:54.
So you're saying that if securities industry counts on government bailouts? What do you do when your children steal cookies? Do you give them more or cut their hand off?
Well, neither, I hope, but it looks like you're saying the (federal) government is the problem but it's Wall Street's fault. Is Wall Street a branch of the government?
It also seems like you agree with me that too big to fail is an oxymoron. Time for a little AT&T action!
Last edited by Vladimir; 10-12-2011 at 20:01.
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
Ik hou van ferme grieten en dikke pintenOriginally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Down with dried flowers!
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
I don't see how that is arguable. See moral hazard.
If a rhetorical question falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a noise?
I do not believe "government is the problem," and did not make that argument. The really crazy sub-prime lending mostly happened in a three-year period and was the majority preserve of private banks and investment firms. They did this for the same reason a dog licks its privates; because they could. And after they cashed in and took their bonuses, they demanded that the public bail them out. If that doesn't make you angry you're not breathing.
Last edited by Lemur; 10-12-2011 at 20:05.
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
Ik hou van ferme grieten en dikke pintenOriginally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Down with dried flowers!
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
It's the golden rule: him with the gold makes the rules. A politician usually does what s/he's paid to do. I think it's more accurate and useful to examine the role of the paymaster than the employee.
Very possibly. But I haven't endangered the entire economy of the world and demanded trillions in guarantees, so that's really between me any my employer, now isn't it?
Last edited by Lemur; 10-12-2011 at 20:24.
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
Ik hou van ferme grieten en dikke pintenOriginally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Down with dried flowers!
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Well, if you're going to wander off spouting nonsense, my only answer would be this.
But what's the point of protesting at the bankers? So that they can enjoy the show from their penthouses? To say "I hate people getting away with crimes and that's why I'm pinning large numbers of police at a protest?"
Very nice article.
They are trying to draw attention to the issue. Is it the most appropriate and best way? Perhaps not, but it a loud and vocal way to do it, to make sure that opinion is heard at least.But what's the point of protesting at the bankers? So that they can enjoy the show from their penthouses? To say "I hate people getting away with crimes and that's why I'm pinning large numbers of police at a protest?"
Days since the Apocalypse began
"We are living in space-age times but there's too many of us thinking with stone-age minds" | How to spot a Humanist
"Men of Quality do not fear Equality." | "Belief doesn't change facts. Facts, if you are reasonable, should change your beliefs."
Basically, as long as they go through the motions enough to make the protesters feel good about themselves.
Is there a way to prevent financial criseses? You can regulate against some things but the financial system is always changing. You could fix it in place but change is a good thing on the whole. People's attitudes towards risk and uncertainty and their grasp of what is going on in the economy is not going to change much.
What's needed is exactly the opposite of a vague protest. It's not enough to pass a law with more "restrictions" or "oversight", attempts at those laws can easily fail. The larger the issue and the more difficult legislating a solution, the more need for care instead of kindergarten chanting...and if legislating isn't the solution, then what should be done has to be figured out and related in a clear way (and, I might add, in a way that doesn't politicize the solution--if you want the attitude of the country to change don't do hippie protest things).
If anything gets done it will be people writing articles:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
and other people critiquing them, and coming to understand and spread actual knowledge, not from the mystical power of twitter and facebook:
Not every one needs to have a leader with clear demands. That’s the old way of launching revolutions. This revolution is run by the Internet generation, with egalitarian ways of looking at things, and an inclusive process of getting everyone involved. That’s the magic of it."
They should pick one goal and just parrot it all day long till the quality has to do something to shut them up.
They slew him with poison afaid to meet him with the steel
a gallant son of eireann was Owen Roe o'Neill.
Internet is a bad place for info Gaelic Cowboy
The best way to protest wall street it to put paper currency in your butt, then deposit it into the banks.
Baby Quit Your Cryin' Put Your Clown Britches On!!!
Look I think finance is overpaid, but there is actually a very strong contributor to this increase.
Cities speed up as population increases in a non-linear manner, crime, patents, talk, walk all increase faster as the population increases.
Some in a non-linear manner for instance you get along the lines of double the amount of people and you get 15% more crime per capita.
So do pay rates... increase the number of people and so does the income... just compare country towns to small cities to large ones.
One of the confounding things is finance sectors attract the best/worst and concentrate them in one city generally per country (London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney). Essentially that group of workers has a population based on the country's total population not just the local city... and at a non-linear increase rate too.
So you need to compare this to the general population increase of the US and apply a non-linear pay increase.
that graph is literally the most worthless piece of drivel ive ever seen
also these people are protesting the evil 1% and how they have all the wealth. They just look like ignorant buffons.
also i live in the city and some of the kids at my school are there (shocker). The ultimate irony is their parents are likely part of that evil 1%
Well it's not *that* bad but teasing out a single occupation and comparing it to a group of occupations is an attempt at manipulation.
Another shock value graph.![]()
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
Ik hou van ferme grieten en dikke pintenOriginally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Down with dried flowers!
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Kanye showed up in all his bling, the credibility of the protestors has just skyrocketed. I expect Paris Hilton next.
Baby Quit Your Cryin' Put Your Clown Britches On!!!
Doubtless some of them are exactly that stupid. However, I don't think their little movement would gain any traction at all if it were merely "eat the rich." See earlier in the thread, comments by me about "legitimate complaints" and a very well-written article reposted by Sasaki Kojiro. As unlikeable as the protesters may be, they're not reacting to a vacuum.
-edit-
A more broad-reaching series of charts can be found here.
Also, further smackdown of the idea that the Federales were the primary movers/causal agents of the mortgage meltdown can be found here and (in less detailed form) here.
The GSEs did generate large losses, but their bad investments in housing loans followed rather than led the crisis; most of those investments involved purchases or guarantees made well after the subprime and housing bubbles had been expanded by private loans and were almost about to burst.
Even then, the GSEs’ overall purchases and guarantees were much less risky than Wall Street’s: their default rates were one fourth to one fifth those of Wall Street and other private financial firms, a fact not made clear by the authors. A further review of other literature shows that Clinton’s goals to increase “affordable lending” had little to do with the risks the GSEs took. The FCIC, for example, argued that in several years these goals were largely met by the GSEs’ standard loans with traditional down payments. [...]
As noted, the GSEs bought very few subprimes in the 1990s. But it might especially surprise the inexpert reader to know that the GSEs did not own almost half of the “toxic mortgages” written by private companies, a remarkable exaggeration on the part of the authors. As usual, no source for the estimate is given, but it is likely based on the analysis of Pinto, who was a former Fannie official and is a colleague of Wallison’s at the American Enterprise Institute. To make the claim, Pinto radically redefined what qualified a mortgage to be subprime or an Alt-A, for which mortgage-holders were often not required to document their income, rejecting the conventional and widely accepted definitions. In his analysis, almost any mortgage held by Fannie and Freddie with modest above-average risk was categorized, to use Morgenson and Rosner’s term, as “toxic.”
If so, one would presume the delinquency rates suffered by the GSEs during the crisis would have been very high. But David Min, an analyst with the Center for American Progress, shows that the after-crisis delinquency rates on the large additional portion of GSE mortgages that Pinto claimed were high risk, and that was termed “toxic” by Morgenson and Rosner, was roughly 10 percent, far lower than the 25 to 30 percent default rate of true subprimes. In fact, the rate of delinquencies for all GSE securities in 2004 was 4.3 percent, compared to a delinquency rate in private industry of 15.1 percent of mortgages. In 2005, the GSE rate was 7.8 percent compared to 28.7 percent, and in 2006 and 2007, the rates reached 13.2 and 14.9 percent in the GSEs and 45.1 and 42.3 percent in the private market.
Last edited by Lemur; 10-14-2011 at 16:03.
Just for humor: First you say it's not about "eat the rich" then you link to an article showing exactly that.
The start of the article isn't very promising. Being "unable to focus their complaints" reminds me of when Democrats talk about focusing, or effectively communicating their "message." As if they somehow worded their thoughts better people would agree with them. DC buzzwords.
Those are nice, and exhaustive graphs, but all their only purpose is to point fingers at corporations when the real problems consist of things like uncertainty and poor political leadership. "The new normal" isn't. This is more like "what's old is new again."
Does the article even take Europe's problems into account? Not Europe as a whole but the ongoing financial instability caused by certain countries.
So, to sum up: There are a lot of factors influencing our current problems. What you are seeing, and what people are reacting to, are the symptoms, which are easy to see and point a finger at. They're missing the point and that's why I don't respect them.
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
Ik hou van ferme grieten en dikke pintenOriginally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Down with dried flowers!
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
You know what REALLY makes me mad?
This:
THAT'S what we should protest!
Last edited by Beskar; 10-15-2011 at 22:59. Reason: Edited picture
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
Ik hou van ferme grieten en dikke pintenOriginally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Down with dried flowers!
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
So instead of reforming the government that paid bailouts, you think it'd be easier to reform.... human nature?
Edit: Also, don't kid yourself. Fannie and Freddie were very much in the thick of the mortgage crisis.
Their buying mortgage backed securities funneled more money back to the investment banks which allowed them to make even more loans.Originally Posted by Lemur's article
Last edited by Xiahou; 10-15-2011 at 01:58.
"Don't believe everything you read online."
-Abraham Lincoln
Why yes, that's exactly what I wrote, both in sense and literal meaning. From the beginning of this thread I've been arguing that we should all have our brains replaced with either robot or baboon brains. You, on the other hand, have clearly been in favor of trying to turn the human race into dolphins. Sure I read that somewhere.
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