82% of Americans: Clamp Down on Wall Street • Financial Experts: Rein In Big Banks to Save Economy • Politicians: Keep Them Lobbying Dollars Coming! → Washingtons Blog
82% of Americans: Clamp Down on Wall Street • Financial Experts: Rein In Big Banks to Save Economy • Politicians: Keep Them Lobbying Dollars Coming! - Washingtons Blog

Thursday, March 11, 2010

82% of Americans: Clamp Down on Wall Street • Financial Experts: Rein In Big Banks to Save Economy • Politicians: Keep Them Lobbying Dollars Coming!

82% of the American public wants tougher regulation of Wall Street.

Most top independent financial experts say that we need to break up the big banks and otherwise rein in the financial giants in order to save the economy.

But Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and Congress like things just the way they are.

Of course they do ... they're bought and paid for:

  • Lobbyists from the financial industry have paid hundreds of millions to Congress and the Obama administration. They have bought virtually all of the key congress members and senators on committees overseeing finances and banking. The Congress people who receive the most money from lobbyists are the most opposed to regulation. See this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
  • Obama received more donations from Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial industry than almost anyone else
  • Summers and the rest of Obama's economic team have made many millions - even in the first few months of being appointed, or right beforehand - from the financial industry
  • The chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University (Donald J. Boudreaux) says that it is inaccurate to call politicians prostitutes. Specifically, he says that they are more correct to call them "pimps", since they are pimping out the American people to the financial giants:

    Real whores, after all, personally supply the services their customers seek. Prostitutes do not steal; their customers pay them voluntarily. And their customers pay only with money belonging to these customers.

    In contrast, members of Congress routinely truck and barter with other people's property...

    Members of Congress are less like whores than they are like pimps for persons unwillingly conscripted to perform unpleasant services.

    ***

    Politicians force taxpayers to pony it up -- just as the services rendered for a pimp's customers are rendered not by that pimp personally, but by the ladies under his charge. The pimp pockets the bulk of each payment; he's pleased with the transaction. His customer gets serviced well in return; he's pleased with the transaction. The only loser is the prostitute forced to share her precious assets with strangers whom she doesn't particularly care for and who care nothing for her.

    Also like the ladies under pimps' power, taxpayers who resist being exploited risk serious consequences to their persons and pocketbooks. Uncle Sam doesn't treat kindly taxpayers who try to avoid the obligations that he assigns to them. Government is a great deal more powerful, and often nastier, than is the typical taxpayer. Practically speaking, the taxpayer has little choice but to perform as government demands.

    So to call politicians "whores" is to unduly insult women who either choose or who are forced into the profession of prostitution. These women aggress against no one; like all other respectable human beings, they do their best to get by as well as they can without violating other people's rights.

    The real villains in the prostitution arena are those pimps who coerce women into satisfying the lusts of strangers. Such pimps pocket most of the gains earned by the toil and risks involuntarily imposed upon the prostitutes they control. No one thinks this arrangement is fair or justified. No one gives pimps the title of "Honorable." Decent people don't care what pimps think or suppose that pimps have any special insights into what is good or bad for the women under their command. Decent people don't pretend that pimps act chiefly for the benefit of their prostitutes. Decent people believe that pimps should be in prison.

    Yet Americans continue to imagine that the typical representative or senator is an upstanding citizen, a human being worthy of being feted and listened to as if he or she possesses some unusually high moral or intellectual stature.

    It's closer to the truth to see politicians as pimps who force ordinary men and women to pony up freedoms and assets for the benefit of clients we call "special-interest groups."

3 comments:

  1. A question for you Aussie School fans. How else but through strict regulation of the banks and the markets can you keep another crisis from happening?? For my money that's the only thing you can do. Derivatives should be banned totally. You want to bet on a stock going up or down play the option market. You can't turn a few trillion dollar real estate market into a 600 trillion dollar problem. (or some value) nobody really knows how big this mess is. Go back to the rules and regs put in after the Great Depression. I know you don't like this idea but I'm open to your side but it has to be something better than get rid of the FED (which I agree with) or Free Market rhetoric . After all Free Market theory is what got us and every other country to that try it to go bust.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Some call it Marxism — I call it Judaism."
    (The American Bulletin, Rabbi S. Wise, May 5, 1935).
    "It is legitimate to adopt a critical attitude toward the relatively large number of Jews who particularly in the first decade after the Bolshevik revolution collaborated with the Soviet Government in the persecution of other peoples."
    Statement of researcher Michael Mills, an official of the government of Australia at Canberra. (Source: Forward, March 10, 2000)
    —Robert Wilton, a long time Russia correspondent for the London Times, said in his book The Last Days of the Romanovs
    "According to the data furnished by the Soviet press, out of 556 important functionaries of the Bolshevik State there were in 1918-1919: 17 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 11 Armenians, 35 Lets, 15 Germans, 1 Hungarian, 10 Georgians, 2 Poles, 2 Finns, 1 Karaim, 457 Jews.
    As the decades past by—after the fateful year 1917—Judaized Khazars kept a firm hand on the helm of the government in the occupied land of Russia. In due time they built a bureaucracy to their heart's desire."
    "The Communist soul is the soul of Judaism. Hence it follows that, just as in the Russian revolution the triumph of Communism was the triumph of Judaism, so also in the triumph of fascism will triumph Judaism."
    (A Program for the Jews and Humanity, Rabbi Harry Waton, p. 143-144).

    The American Hebrew September 10, 1920:
    "The Bolshevist revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal is to create a new order in the world. What was performed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because of Jewish dissatisfaction, and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, become a reality all over the world."
    "We have exterminated the property owners in Russia. We are going to do the same thing in Europe and America."

    (The Jew, December 1925, Zinobit)

    ReplyDelete
  3. We don't need stronger regulation; that's just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

    In 2004 the FBI said there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and they went on to do nothing at all about it. Last I checked fraud was already illegal; there's no way they can go after all the people who left fraudulent income statements on their loan applications it's just too much work; you nail the guys at the top first and then you work your way down.

    What's the government response? They feed the cancer on the body economic with bail-outs; they legalized fraudulent accounting practices by suspending mark-to-market; they're trying to solve too much debt and too much consumption with more debt and more consumption.

    ReplyDelete

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