This very same "reformed" boozer surrounded himself with the likes of
Dick Cheney, retired from Halliburton, and Rumsfeld to run the country
into the ground and set us on a disastrous course in the Middle East.
They deregulated the financial system and the environment and gave free
rein to Wall Street to reallocate wealth in America from the middle
class to the already super wealthy who never have enough to satiate
their greed (read Michael Lewis' book <MI>The Big Short, Inside
the Doomsday Machine<D> to get the story from a Wall Street
insider).
TOTAL CHAOS
So now we have to work on fixing eight years of total chaos in the
economy, a world in financial crisis and unbearable debts from a war
that should never have been fought. Read <MI>Money<D>
magazine May 2010 interview with Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economics
laureate, who foresaw the collapse of the economy in 2008 and author of
the new book <MI>Free Fall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking
of the World Economy<D>. He states that for a fraction of the
cost of the war, we could have put Social Security on firm financial
ground for the next 100 years.
I disagree with Olin on his diatribes about the Obama administration
working on new controls for the run-amok Wall Street bandits. The
administration is not "adding another layer of restrictions on top of
those already in place," as he states. Wall Street's stock market does
have some restrictions imposed upon it because, in the past, it behaved
as egregiously as the bond market does now. That is what caused the
crisis of the 1930s, and it is what the restrictions imposed on it,
following these excesses, were devised to prevent from happening again.
Did these restrictions make us a socialist nation, as he claims the
proposed restrictions on the bond market - now totally free to run wild -
would do?
NEAR RUIN
The bond market has not been regulated, and it is why it has allowed
greedy, immoral, unscrupulous speculators to bring about the near ruin
of the world's economic system. Read the book by Michael Lewis to learn
from an insider that traders in bonds were out to maximize their own
profits with, knowingly, no compunction whatsoever about what it would
do to anyone else.
So I fail to see how regulating a corrupt, runaway, bond-trading system
would send us headlong into socialism. It has not done so when imposed
on the stock market, and neither has it when other federal regulations
such as the Clean Air Act were enacted to prevent further excesses from
unscrupulous corporations that befouled our air and caused nationwide
pollution that sickened thousands of our citizens.
Would anyone want us to go back to an unregulated stock market and foul
air? Government has a duty to protect its citizens, and when people and
corporations abuse the system and endanger us, the government must, and
does, step in for the good of us all.
MORE INACCURACIES
Let me point out a few more inaccuracies. The Senate has no management
oversight over Freddie and Fannie. Banks are the ones who made the risky
loans because they saw a way to make huge profits at no risk to
themselves since they could pass the risk to someone else, who would
pass it on again and again, until the risk - a true Ponzi scheme -
finally caught up with reality and nearly collapsed the entire world
economy. The banks, and only the banks, are responsible for this
financial disaster; they are the ones who went after the lower income
people because there was no money to be made with the better-off people
who already had mortgages. Blaming this on Congress or the president is
pure poppycock! The Bush administration did not make any attempts at
stopping the issuance of these mortgages; this is another delusion, and
the Congress had no role in this play; it was orchestrated by the banks
from A to Z.
And where does this information that Freddie and Fannie fed gobs of
money to Dodd, Frank and then-senator Obama's campaign funds come from?
They are quasi government agencies and do not funnel money into
political campaigns. Does all this "information" come from the far right
website www.judicialwatch.com? By the way, its website is for sale;
why? A far more accurate and unbiased source of information is on
www.factcheck.org, of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Policy
Center.
WORST EVER DISASTER
And what about the clamor from the Palin far right: "Drill, baby,
drill!"? The Gulf Coast is undergoing the worst ever disaster that may
kill the livelihood of fishermen among many others. The tourist industry
these coastal regions count on may be dead for years, entire ecosystems
destroyed, beaches, wetlands and coastlines fouled. All because of the
fact that big oil (Cheney's buddies and former business) took advantage
of eight years of the Bush administration to get in bed with the
regulators and were not burdened with the controls they should have
been.
It is fine to have different views on any subject. All points of view
are important to listen to. That's what democracy is about. But, to be
respected, opposite points of view must be well researched and founded
on solid ground instead of on half-baked statements and doomsday
forebodings about things that haven't happened and are not about to
happen.
DeMarne lives in Waitsfield and Essex.
