"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." --Al Capone
Regulation is not capitalism - it is crony capitalism. Many of the companies/banks on this list should have failed. Government gives them the money and the power. The government is to blame, absolutely. Government helps big business, but then the left argues for more government to fix the problem. Brilliant. Business leaders seek success through politics rather than competition, and that destroys true capitalism. That is the problem. But of course the Obama administration's half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra is the good kind of "capitalism". Barf. There is nothing free market capitalism about any of this. Ignorance and lies from the left once again. Crony capitalism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Crony capitalism is a term describing a capitalist economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between business people and government officials. It may be exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, and so forth. Crony capitalism is believed to arise when political cronyism spills over into the business world; self-serving friendships and family ties between businessmen and the government influence the economy and society to the extent that it corrupts public-serving economic and political ideals.
Dude, we get it. You don't like taxes and it's all the big boogey man liberals fault. You're like a broken record. In every thread.
Raymond Flynn to Occupy Boston: ‘Time to pack up... and leave’ A confrontation with a knife-wielding junkie at Occupy Boston and rampant thefts have tensions simmering between the protesters and the homeless, prompting Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s predecessor to say it’s high time for police to clear the tent city. “It’s causing disruptions to public order,” former Mayor Raymond L. Flynn told the Herald. “They should have been given one day — 24 hours and that’s it. They have to be removed.” Asked how he’d handle the encampment — which Menino has been willing to tolerate so far — Flynn said: “I’d walk down there with the police commissioner and I’d say, ‘Look, you’ve done your thing, but please respect the laws of this city. It’s time to pack up, clean up and leave.’” Flynn’s tough talk comes amid the reported rape of a 19-year-old female college student at an Occupy camp in Cleveland and the knife play in Dewey Square in Boston on Sunday. Full story
haha, wow. What other argument are you going to pull out of your hat? The failed CRA argument that the poor induced private market failure? Government failed for 2008 because of malign neglect. The private shadow banking system went NUTS, and destroyed the economy with their flawed economic model of insane leverage ratios, and crappy products. The only argument you have that holds water is that bailouts can be construed as being a risk-increasing factor in that the Treasury Department can be seen as a fundamental backer of this failed system, which is a problem. However, it would not be a problem if we had a stronger government that made clear the penalties for TARP and other assorted bailouts---jail time for executives caught red-handed with moral hazard, regulation of derivative products, and an alignment with banking systems we know work---regulated depository systems, and conservative banks like the Canadian system. Crony capitalism is preventing this from happening. Romney wants to stop all regulations. Wall Street is already pushing back on Dodd-Frank---such that despite all their failings, they want to continue their crap. This will not happen if you have a strong government that does not fall into the crony capitalist position of malign neglect and regulatory capture of the SEC that prevents proper capital guidelines from being implemented. The failure of your position is that you think the government intervening to scrap the crappy shadow banking system is crony capitalism---I am telling you that is completely wrong and that ultimately, people who hold your position will make things worse. Malign neglect a la Greenspan is what led us to this crisis, buoyed by lobbyists who were fighting against regulation in the first place, and now they are trying to get away with their dinosaur of a system again---hoping that there's enough people in your position that think government is "the ultimate evil", such that they can get away with government neglecting their crazy system.
charming. <iframe width="853" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/rDOEnFb526I?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
crony captialism All of a sudden it is being used by the right/libertarianisms. I think Romney used the term-- or was it Cain? I assume Ron Paul mouths it constantly? Limbaugh, too I assume. Ron Paulites, am I correct on this? The talking point has come down the transmission belt from the think tank to the foot soldiers. Crony capitalism is why the last 30 years of the market fundies has led to the present mess. Got to keep the fundies believing despite the evidence. Oh unregulated markets would be so good and the last 30 years are nothing. Deregualtion is never at fault. Libertarianism is never at fault. It is so pure and good and can't be blamed for anything because it has not been completely tried. Doesn't make any difference if policies were put in and advocated by folks claiming to be libertarians, they are not true libertarians which would be so good. If we imagine that there is no government, then business and the market would solve all problems. Any observable problems of deregulation in the actual world are due to the fact that government still exists. Trust us, we know. The same old dodge over and over.
Whole lot of public sh-tting going on at OWS. Angry Manhattan residents lambast Zuccotti Park protesters By JOSH SAUL Last Updated: 10:55 PM, October 20, 2011 Posted: 6:58 PM, October 20, 2011 More Print Infuriated lower Manhattan residents went ballistic on Zuccotti Park protesters at a chaotic Community Board 1 meeting tonight while blasting politicians for allowing the siege to continue without any end in sight. "They are defecating on our doorsteps," fumed Katherine Hughes, a stay at home mom who has the misfortune of living one block from the chaos. "A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids." Fed up homeowners said that they've been subjected to insults and harassment as they trek to their jobs each morning. "The protesters taunt people who are on their way to work," said James Fernandez, 51, whose apartment overlooks the park. Board member Paul Cantor said that residents are fed up with the incessant racket that emanates from the protest at all hours. "It's mostly a noise issue," he said. If people can't sleep and children can't sleep because the protesters are banging drums then that's a problem." "They have to have some parameters," said Tricia Joyce, also a board member. "That doesn't mean the protests have to stop. I'm hoping we can strike a balance on parameters because this could be a long term stay." The line to get into the standing room only meeting spilled out of the board's office and onto the street outside where Zuccotti sympathizers sparred with angry residents. One elderly woman told a protester to stop screaming and was met with an even higher volume. "Get some earplugs!" retorted David Spano. "This is the street. I can say whatever I want! I can't calm down, I've been struggling for 30 years!" The meeting, which kicked off at 6:15 p.m., has already attracted several hundred people. Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/..._lambast_RjpTU0jG2z9yrgf5o4bRcO#ixzz1bNq3swg9
Occupy Baltimore to sex assault victims: We support you in reporting the abuse, but we don’t encourage the involvement of police in our community
I'm shocked and dismayed. Someone needs to put these commoners back in their place! Shouldn't they be in a bar watching state university football teams or that basketball or something? Where is the draft when you need it?
So the critics of OWS resort to talking about poop, which is a shocking turn of argument complexity. I'm going to turn to something a little more meaningful, and I haven't seen it posted yet: The Network of TNCs that run the global economy. (reported in New Scientist Magazine, about a new study by a group of Mathematicians in Zurich, that hotbed of liberal thinking.) It's a nice read, and here are some main points/exerpts: "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. " ... Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance. The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power. The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues. When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. computer imaging of the entangled power network, showing the cross-linking of ownership between the top TNCs in the world. Now, ownership stakes do not necessarily imply control, as the article notes. But you do end up with a system (primarily financial institutions) that grow to have very, very similar common interests. Whether collusion (and market exploitation) follow naturally, even without a concerted effort, is a deeper question. To me, this shows the true global nature of the protests, and why OWS is anything but "unAmerican." To me, we have to fight unstable and unhealthy forms of capitalism, while embracing forms of capitalism that have more built-in stability. Most macro-economics in the article seem to agree that having 150 companies handle 40% of the world's money is not a good recipe, especially when they all own one another, almost exclusively.
I think you missed the best part: John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability. Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates." This was interesting as well: One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Again. How is that a "capitalist" network when a good part of those companies/banks have been bailed out? That is not capitalism. <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gwQ41Yo60og" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
