Capitalism threatens to throw us back to the Dark Ages

I would agree with you regarding the Clinton administration's complete failure to regulate derivatives via the Commodities and Future Exchange Commission...and generally blame that on the Clinton's, Rubin, Summers and Greenspan (The Clinton's closeness to Wall Street is, IMO, largely what brought on the Sanders movement in the Democratic Party and a factor in her failure to win the Presidency). Not aware that the Bush administration did much to change the situation, but would be interested in reading any interpretation that presents evidence of such. Would not be surprised regarding Dodd's action, but would need to go back and research his "filibuster."

 

This crisis will be a test of the conservative movement. If we fail ... it doesn't bear thinking about.

For a long time, many conservatives read their Milton Friedman -- and maybe their Adam Smith -- and observed the repeated failure of genuine socialism (which is the whole economy in the hands of the state, central planning, no real market) -- and gained a deep, and true, understanding of one central fact:

The most efficient way to allocate resources, and to grow wealth, is to have at the center of your economy, the free market.

Anyone who doesn't understand this can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. And ... most so-called 'socialists' agree!!!! The Nordic countries are capitalist!!!!! They have an extensive welfare state -- based on the wealth that their capitalist class generates. As soon as Nixon recognized Red China, the wise Orientals, with a higher mean IQ than us, ditched genuine socialism, and they haven't looked back. Vietnamese, same-same. Poor old North Koreans and Cubans.

These are not stupid people -- when Sweden saw, in the 1980's, that they had gone too far with the welfare thing, they dialed it back. You can do that if you have a democracy. In countries like Cuba or China, it all depends on the whim of the top guy.

[Okay, they're not stupid, but their kindness has made them act stupidly in one very important respect: mass Third-World immigration. But that's another story.]

So ... yes, yes, yes: the market economy. And the market society: you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize, so don't subsidize irresponsible selfish behavior.

And .. most rank and file conservatives agree, if not our lobbyist-surrounded representative in Washington -- that 'welfare' is not something that applies just to the poor. Big corporations, who can afford to hire persuasive lobbyists and who have bribes, sorry, I mean campaign finance funds to give out, are absolutely shameless about demanding welfare. We know that.

Anyway ... Trump took the Republican tops by surprise. They, and the Republican Donor Class didn't see him coming. He said unorthodox things -- free trade, a freemarket fundamental -- was questioned. Maybe American jobs, and social cohesion, was more important than adhering to Econ 101 arguments about comparative advantage. The comfortable New Cold War stance of the Washington foreign policy consensus was upset: maybe the Russians weren't such bogeymen after all and why should we be the unpaid nightwatchmen for those fat rich Europeans, some of whom used to be pretty good at war. (No names, it's not polite. They speak a language whose name is similar to 'Dutch' but it's not the Dutch.)

Now Trump is no thinker -- understatement of the year -- and has deep character flaws: egoistic, impulsive, ignorant of things he should know about. So in office he's shifted this way and that -- bringing in ultra-hawk John Bolton, who would invade Iran if he could -- and then throwing him out.

Trump made promising statements about infra-structure spending -- but doesn't seem to have followed through on them. (We ought to be planning a massive national fallout shelter building program, for instance: read through the last few issues of Foreign Affairs -- where our heavy thinkers discuss the world -- and you get a distinct Summer-of-1914 feeling. You can make a good argument that there is a distinct possibility that Iodine-131 is going to be on the menu at some point in our future. We ought to plan ahead for these things, no? ... or ... well... hey, no big world disaster could happen nowadays, you silly old conservative pessimist you .. stop being an alarmist ... everything is going to be fine if we can just do in that horrid Donald Trump ... the rest of the world is run by responsible sensible people...

Conservatives need to do some deep thinking now about what to do politically. I believe we must get into the Republican Party if we're not there now, push aside the people who want to return to the pre-Trump era, and transform the Party into one that has a chance of winning the majority of ordinary Americans. Trump will not be around forever. He might be gone in less than ten months. It's okay, while he's here, to grit our teeth and keep repeating, "You go to war with the army you've got," but we've got to have a much better army.

So .. go to Amazon, buy Professor F.H. Buckley's The Republican Workers Party -- Why Trump's Victory Drove Everyone Crazy and Why It Was the Best Thing that Could Have Happened to America -- just fifteen bucks or so, and let's discuss his ideas, here or somewhere where the pesky liberals won't keep butting it. (Buckley was one of Trump's speechwriters and served on the transition team. Read his book!!!)

 

The following are some of my notes taken from published resources. You might want to check resources directly. Clinton and other Democrats were the main culprits, but they were supported, aided and abetted by many Republicans.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) exempted derivatives from all oversight and regulation.

Two of those growing instruments were financial derivatives and credit-default swaps. As these new financial instruments emerged a debate began over whether or not to regulate them.

The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) Brooksley Born issued a first call for her regulatory commission to have power to oversee financial derivatives. While previous legislative attempts had been made earlier, Born’s efforts were the most direct and threatening to the financial industry. During an April 1998 meeting of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (and later Secretary Larry Summers), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Arthur Levitt opposed Born’s efforts and attempted to derail her.

Born lost her battle and, in May 1999, asked to be replaced as CFTC chairman. The new chairman, William Rainer [not Raines of Fannie Mae]. Later that year, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets released a report calling for “no regulations” of derivatives and swaps and began crafting a program to make that possible. Meanwhile in Congress [Republicans had a slim majority in both the House and Senate], lawmakers were still up-in-arms over Born’s attempts to regulate the financial derivatives market and began working to pass their own set of deregulatory language.

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During a lame-duck December session, while the media was focused on the recounts and court cases, Gramm and Ewing sought to strike a compromise on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The day after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gov. Bush, December 14, Ewing introduced a new version of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. On December 15, with little warning or fanfare—aside from the overshadowed discussions on the floors of Congress—the new, compromise version was included as a rider to the Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY 2001, an 11,000 page omnibus appropriations conference report.

As of June 30, 2008, the global derivatives market had exploded to $530 trillion, while credit default swaps had grown from mere insignificance to $55 billion............... By the end of June of 2000, outstanding derivative contracts — again, possible debts — were worth a total of $94 trillion, while the GDP of the world was $31.6 trillion. And for some reason, even though derivatives were worth nearly three times the size of the world’s economy in 2000, Bill Clinton decided to not regulate them in any way, shape, or form.

McCain spoke forcefully on May 25, 2006, on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005

“I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

It never made it out of committee. Chris Dodd, then the ranking member of the Banking Committee and now its chair, was in the middle of receiving preferential loan treatment from Countrywide Mortgage, one of the companies gaming the system in the credit crisis. Meanwhile, Barack Obama took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the lobbyists McCain mentions in this speech, making him the #2 recipient of Fannie/Freddie money. [It was Dodd who led the filibuster effort.]

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July 29, 2005 report:

The Senate Banking Committee approved a bill yesterday that would tighten oversight of the mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shrink their assets.

The measure, sponsored by the committee's chairman, Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, was approved in an 11-9 vote along party lines. The measure would compel the companies to sell portfolio assets unrelated to their mortgage bond business.

What this means is that all nine Democrats on the committee voted against the bill basically making it impossible for Republicans to defeat a filibuster when it came to the Senate floor.

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If the Times was going to address political contributions, shouldn't it have also informed readers about donations by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to active members of Congress since 1989? Take a look at the top three recipients:

Dodd, Christopher $165,400
Obama, Barack $126,349
Kerry, John $111,000

It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggy’s lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks. Senator Barack Obama, number two on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the senate.​

 

All I will say is that Capitalism is the only thing that got us out of the dark age.

 

You hope.

 

Who's fault is it?

 

We need to package up this sort of information, in the context of presenting a comprehensive conservative approach to banking/financial regulation, and then proceed to try to educate the base. (The fifty million people who voted for Trump.) I'm not completely stupid, but life is short and I, and many others I suspect, just don't have time to get into the details -- we're lucky if we can distinguish the debt from the deficit.

 

Everyone with a brain knows this.

You know what's ironic? The modern day young Lefty is ignorant, probably barely knows who Karl Marx was, and if he did would condemn him as a racist/sexist etc ... but ... it was Marx who praised capitalism for doing just that -- dragging us out of backwardness. He even had kind words to say for the French and British imperialists, bringing capitalist modernity, albeit with the bayonet and hangman's rope, to the backward masses of the Third World.

If anyone's interested in the truth of this, just read The Communist Manifesto -- an astounding predictor of globalization, written 170 years ago.
You can get it here: Marxists.org -- along with many other interesting books by Marxists of all flavors. For serious conservatives who have begun to feel the tremors that the social tectonic plates are making -- presaging big events to come -- Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, available free from the same source -- will make very instructive reading. It's very well written and translated, as well.

 

So very true. As they say the devil is in the details, but the details are never described and hardly ever understood by the people. Hell, Pelosi made the House approve Obamacare without the representatives even getting a copy of the bill, let alone reading it. And this is all too common.

 

We should move to a different system.
I got this really cool idea for one.
We can give everything free (medical, college, houses, abortions) and charge everyone 90% taxes on their income.
Oh and that wont' only apply to citizens. Anyone can come here and get in on the unlimited money, even former ISIS members.
Anything that money doesn't cover, no problem, we plant some money trees.
Only problem is, i can't think of a good name for this system of government. Any ideas?

 

I am familiar with the Born story and generally agree with your comments regarding the CFTC. And, to go back a few steps, I am sure you also know that Phil Gramm's spouse, Wendy Gramm, served as head of the CFTC, and deregulated the Commission as much as her powers allowed, before moving on to serve on the board of ENRON. And, I assume, you also know that it was Gramm, as head of the Senate Banking Committee, who insisted on withdrawing many of the regulatory features of the Ewing's House bill, passing it in some sort of "Midnight Vote" in the Senate, prior to resigning his Senatorial seat prior to the end of his term. [He then went to work as Vice Chairman of Investment Banking for the North American branch of a Swiss bank.] Gramm, while still retaining that position, then became McCain's chief economic adviser for McCain's Presidential campaign, serving as such until McCain was forced to fire him in response to a public interview by Gramm, in which Gramm criticized the American public for being wimps and denying the fact that the country was in recession.

In regard to the GSE's...both parties have played fast and loose. However, it's been a long standing Republican position (partially fulfilled) that they should be cut-loose from their "quasi-government status" regarding guarantees and totally privatized. As conservative economist Johan Norberg pointed out in his 2009 CATO Institute book, "Financial Fiasco," this largely resulted in the GSE's being faced with conflicting pressures. On one hand, they were under political pressures to increase their portfolios of subprime mortgages (for political social purposes), while also being pressured for the profits they offered, in their competition with the commercial lenders (which due to "securitization" included much of Wall Street). While Norberg lies much of the GSE problems at the feet of Democrats such as HUD Secretaries Cisneros and Cuomo, he also notes: "Even though the Bush administration had criticized Fannie and Freddie for their reckless risk taking, it inexplicably helped drive them further down that road by decreeing in October 2004, at the height of the lending craze, a drastic INCREASE in their targets for the number of mortgages to low-income earners." [Page 41, "Financial Fiasco," CATO Institute Press, 2009.]

IMO, the explanation for this "inexplicable act" was the Bush Program of "Compassionate Conservatism," and his call, in various speeches, for MORE low-income housing. In turn, such a policy was also consistent with a need to provide investment opportunities to validate his tax cuts and the "trickle down" economics of Reagan. [Note: In a "national economy" trickle-down theory may have some merit...but Reagan was like the Generals who prepare for the next war based on their experience in the last one and missed the shift from a dominant national economy to a global one.]

IOW, in my opinion, money and special interests have corrupted both major parties, which now are losing all of their options. Between the Fed and the Congress, we have just increased our debt by roughly $6 trillion dollars, without any plan of how that will eventually be paid off (I am assuming that the latest Trump budget proposal was PRIOR to the actions in regard to the virus). IOW, we are and will be pushed toward socialism as a means of survival...like it or not.

 

I'm a Republican, I'm not rich, and it's my own fault.

What is it about being responsible that you hate?

 

For one thing, not being rich is probably NOT totally your own fault. Life is pretty haphazard and random, even with the best of intentions and planning. IOW, probability and luck play an indeterminate part of it. Being responsible toward others within our species, is not necessarily a bad thing. An understanding of co-dependence was undoubtedly a major factor in human progress...first to families, then to tribes, then to communities, etc., etc.
But, of course, as the "Court Jester," your fate is probably in the hands of the King.

 

Absolutely. It is the one thing we are all totally equal in. Bill Gates has no more than I and I no less than him.

Oh here we go, the Deep State diddit, I was wondering when this would be along

Look, these epidemics are not uncommon, they pop up all over from time to time, and our branch of the CDC goes in and helps other nation's doctors either/or cure and contain them We never hear of them, they're laboratory curiosities.

Or they WERE until BONESPURS DISBANDED THAT PART OF THE CDC THAT DEALT WITH PANDEMICS IN 2017 excuse the shouting but Trumpers just don't seem to be listening on this

And yes, the doctors were still on staff but they were working on biological weapons, not pandemics

And yes again, the Chinese were not at all helpful with this, (at first, they seem to be controlling it now) but we KNEW they couldn't control their diseases and we had been helping them for years

We shouldn't be having this conversation and this disease would have never gotten out of China if Trump hadn't done this part of his "America First" bushwa. There's no grand conspiracy, it's as plain as the nose on your face, TRUMP did this, ALL this death, ALL this destruction it's TRUMP'S ****** ****ING FAULT

TDS that may be, but it's also TRUE.

 

The conservative movement is --let's face it -- crap at doing education. It relies on Eternal Truths, which are fine. And getting agitated about the latest Leftwing descent into Insanity, of which there is never a shortage of examples. But we don't do education into complex issues. Because why? Because all the education apparatus is in the hands of the other side, with a few exceptions.

So we have got to get to work. We've got some great economists. They need to take their Econ 101 lecture notes, and re-fashion them so that the conservative truck driver can understand the basics. I know that Prager U and Hillsdale and certain other groups do something like this .. ..the material is probably already there on YouTube (which is how it has to be disseminated, the art of reading more than three sentences in a row being restricted now to old Reactionaries.)

 

What we have to do is to craft a program that frankly acknowledges the usefulness of the state, and its coercive powers, and its power to redistribute income, directly or indirectly -- but also shows how, in prudent hands, this can be a good thing. For a long time, the base of the Right ... or rather the kind of politically-aware conservative who reads books and posts his opinions in forums like this, which is .. what? a hundred thousand people, out of fifty million Trump voters... anyway, this base have avowed a belief in Friedmanite economics, if not Randism, while their elected leaders did something else.

I'm personally interested in FH Buckley's book The Republican Workers Party, and will keep droning on about it, hoping to get thoughtful conservatives to read and think about its proposals and then, ideally, start trying to move in that direction. It's far from ideal, that book, in many ways, but at least it opens the discussion.

 

You need to upgrade your principles to fit today's reality. Small business people (including truck drivers) well understand Econ 101 and micro-economics. The problem, IMO, lies in fitting those basic principles into the macro-economics of Wall Street, which usually comes with Econ 102.

 

We have this - it's called the US Constitution.
It gives the federal government all the power it needs to do all the things it should do.

 

I'll take a look at it...probably somewhere in my library. I've always thought of "conservatism" as a cautious, but rational, approach to progress...not a return to the past. Globalization and automation present significant challenges to the value of human labor and consequently "capitalist principles," which are acceptable to the majority, because they yield a pay-out. This was why "trickle-down" worked (to at least an acceptable degree, while simultaneously leading increasingly to a concentration of incomes) within the context of a national economy and national borders. The reality of the 21st century is different than the reality of the 20th century. Similar principles, IMO, have to be adjusted to fit the new circumstances. I've read that today, in Communist China, there are more billionaires than in the U.S.A. Curious.
IMO, old and antiquated industries placed their bets on new markets rather than admit obsolesce. Numerous developing nations (particularly China) took advantage of Western industries seeking market expansion over innovation. The "why" of that gets complicated. Successful companies tend to want to stay with the past practices by which they achieved their success...as I mentioned in another post, similar to generals preparing for the last war. In the case of economics, I see a few entrepreneurs, or those who able to predict the future, as a far better bet than those rooted in past performances within the context of past realties. But, that's sort of "the child's play" of the basic problem, which will rapidly become species survival.

 

Assuming that those in charge of the federal government know what to do. At the moment, that's TBD.

 

well I am a Democrat and in the top 5% and I know perfectly well it wasn’t only my doing. Had great parents, a top notch public school. Had parents who could pay my college. After that yes it was my doing after that including adding in a few lucky breaks but if I had been born to a single mother with no skills in an area with crap public schools the outcome would probably have been much different.

And yes the greatest predictor of the class you end up in is the class you were born into.

 

Well look at our crappy public school system and you tell me! That said I do know a President who lied about who would benefit from his massive tax cut for the rich.

 

Wasn't it Capitalism thought brought and continues to bring the common man out of the dark ages???

 

What should Trump have done differently?

I emphasize done, because so far, the answers I get to that question are that folks don't like his rhetoric on the issue. I wanna know what policies you think should have been different.

As to the CDC, it has primarily been a political organization for decades. Their revolving door policy with the pharmaceutical corporations has wholely compromised their effectiveness at promoting social health and safety.

 

Schools are crappy because parenting, mass culture, and the inability to split schools up based on ability. We try to split them up by having special ed and AP classes, but having those students intermingle is a detriment to the talented kids. Most kids shouldn't even go to high school. They should receive vocational training instead.