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Yes We Can

2009-04-04 15:21:37.779767+00 by Dan Lyke 15 comments

Twit of the moment, in response to Barack Obama's statements to the bankers:

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Igor wrote:

Yes we can

[ related topics: Current Events ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-04 18:56:47.025041+00 by: meuon

First warm fuzzy I've heard in a while. Forget pitchforks, although that is a great reference, in reality, fear the .50 cal BMG from a mile away, or a subsonic .22 from 3 feet.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-04 20:06:58.143906+00 by: andylyke

Dan: Is Obama's interposing himself between the bankers and the pitchforks the action that upsets you about him?

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-04 21:45:33.919659+00 by: ziffle

Dan I have to say, maybe like Andy, I do not understand what you are saying here.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-04 22:07:35.758321+00 by: dexev

I'm having trouble reconciling that with things like this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/.../2009/04/03/AR2009040303910.html

Obama may be full of tough-talk populism, but so far his policies have been more of the same.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-04 22:51:47.909261+00 by: TheSHAD0W

And in related news...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123879833094588163.html

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 02:26:48.842729+00 by: Dan Lyke

Dad and ziffle, yep: I see a tremendous amount of sheltering the looters and fraudsters from any real consequence, and an amazing willingness to give huge amounts of money to the same people who got us into this mess, and I think it's all going to make the resulting depression that much worse.

I guess I'm okay with that, I'm doing my best to inflation-proof my personal finances, but I think it's going to be long and ugly, and I believe the Obama policies are driving us heavily in that direction.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 02:37:47.064362+00 by: Medley

Right. I suppose it's good that he recognizes this, but my question is: *why* is his Administration standing there?

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 03:05:43.55611+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Because if those companies went down there would be (or the administration believes there would be) chaos; and chaos is bad for bribes business.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 05:18:55.063947+00 by: spc476

"I want to own nothing, but control everthing."

Is that John D. Rockefeller, or Barack Obama?

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 11:55:47.103081+00 by: meuon

Medley has a great point. According to Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg, a little chaos is good for business. The strong survive, the week evolve or die. Very Darwinian. Instead, we are doing the Christian thing, saving the weak, propping them up, to the detriment of all. I'll contend if they had let AIG fail, (and a few others). it would have been a bloodbath, and everyone else would have gotten their houses in order quickly and quietly.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 15:17:58.844458+00 by: andylyke

I have to confess that the thought of the chaos that would follow AIG's collapse is scary to me, but anything that could lead to some upper limit on the size of an enterprise, and so open up the possibilities of the free market to all, I would welcome. I fear that Obama is afraid of the prospect of tackling big business (read big bribes, aka the congress-industrial-financial complex), but the answer to the problem of enterprises being "too big to fail" is implicit in that very phrase.

whatever your stance on gun control, OPPOSE PITCHFORK CONTROL!!!

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 15:51:34.645444+00 by: ziffle [edit history]

" I see a tremendous amount of sheltering the looters and fraudsters from any real consequence"

ok, but this all started with the government; they are the ones that removed gold backing and printed all the money; they are the ones that took Freddie And Fannie to Liar Loans and the like. And they alone have the really big ponzi schemes

A free market is self regulating. There can be no 'too big'.

And Dan, sorry to dissappoint you in your attempt to short circuit things, but in the long run, the Moral Is the Practical and reality can only be forced aside for so long. I would say beng seriously upside down in a house is a strong hedge against inflation :)

Ziffle

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-05 22:25:38.841684+00 by: Dan Lyke

Ziffle, I'm not convinced simply because these sorts of shenanigans have been occurring throughout recorded history, including those periods when currency was gold based. Err... that is to say that I'm not contradicting your assertion that governments are looters, just that in the history of banking, banks have never made a return for their customers: Considered over the long-term (ie: a century or so), they consistently overextend, go bust and get bailed out by governments. No matter what the currency is based on.

And, yes, we're not upside down (surprisingly, our neighborhood appears to be holding value, and I'm really glad we didn't buy on the east side, but that was inherent in looking for real value anyway), but we're taking several opportunities to borrow more on fixed interest: I'm willing to take the pessimists side of that bet.

Dad, I don't know if AIG's collapse would be worse than the results of this spending spree; I think the results of the current government free-for-all is that everyone's going to hunker down and save, making this whole debacle worse.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-06 10:21:24.752748+00 by: jeff [edit history]

Dan--I agree that hunkering down and "saving" will likely lead to this debacle getting worse (at least in the short-term). But that will serve to help bring pricing (and the real value of goods and services) back to reality.

The common thread being brought into question throughout all of this is the use of leverage, the time value of money and, in its basic form: usury. "Saving" runs counter to all of those concepts.

Unbridled capitalism (which promotes ever increasing production and consumption) will eventually ground to a halt on a planet with finite resources. An effective homeostatic entropic economic system is needed sometime within this century, or nature and the simple laws of physics will force a less desirable consequence on all of us (greedy bankers included).

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-06 14:05:12.590229+00 by: Dan Lyke

Just to snark a little bit... so, yeah, it would have been awful if AIG had been allowed to fail, we might be looking at skyrocketing unemployment, a Federal deficit approaching two trillion dollars in a single year, and... uh. No. Wait. My bad.

If, rather than going out of the way to help smart people defraud the American taxpayer (via this MeFi entry) we made that sector as unprofitable as it actually is without government intervention and redirected those energies towards productive endeavor, engineering, R&D, stuff like that.

Instead, Obama is welcoming the looters into the fold.

And, while I'm snarking: when I suggested that Obama could be another Reagan, I was talking about his ability to lead and inspire, not his ability to spend the country into bankruptcy while giving away the treasury to special interests.

I guess this is what I mean about Obama making it okay to hate Democrats again, with the amount of cronyistic theft at the highest levels going on right now it's possible to fondly look back at the Dubya years, at least the pointless devastation he wrought was in a far-off land. And Geithner makes me long for Paulson.

Clearly I was optimistic and wrong to separate those abilities.