I Hope You're Happy

It would go like this:

Harry Reid: This Bill eliminates Too Big to Fail and Taxpayer Bailouts.

Barack Obama: It sure does, and it’s just what we need, right, Mitch McConnell?

Mitch McConnell: This bill guarantees Taxpayer bailouts.

Harry Reid: Um, no it doesn’t.

Mitch McConnell: What we don’t need to do right now is to overburden the financial industry with regulations.

Harry Reid: But then we’d be open to this happening again. We’d have solved nothing.

Mitch McConnell: Neener Neener.

Harry Reid: Well, let’s just get it out of committee.

Mitch McConnell: That bill was made behind closed doors with no input from Republicans.

Harry Reid: Um, there’s Republicans on that panel, and we took out provisions they didn’t like.

Mitch McConnell:This bill is unpopular.

Harry Reid: The polls say 66% of Americans support tough reforms so that this doesn’t happen again.

Mitch McConnell:The Senate is designed by our forefathers to be a body of great debate.

Harry Reid: Fine, let’s vote on cloture and then debate it on the full floor.

Mitch McConnell: We’ll philibuster.

Harry Reid: We’ll show the public how obstructionist you are.

Mitch McConnell: Uh, Uh…..(runs out of excuses)

Congress is starting to make noises about Chinese currency manipulation, typically five years too late and without much going in the way of a plan. The problem is, nobody wants to start a trade war and possibly jeopardize the flow of cheaply made and unreliable goods into this country, nor anger the government that gives us lots of money to run up those huge deficits Republicans like to make and then deny. Ok, I’m not making friends, so let’s move on.

The issue from our side is Chinese wages are so low, tremendous amounts of our manufacturing has shifted to our communist overseas leaving us with a dearth of jobs and a lust for the cheap stuff. This works out great for China, since they have a pretty massive need for jobs for its population. Thing is, China keeps and official exchange rate, which is the same every day, rain or shine, no matter what the market does, hence the charges of currency manipulation.

Now the problem. The usual means of protesting this is to make sounds about putting in tariffs on the goods to correct the currency imbalance, and if they call us on the bluff, then we actually do it. But this will only escalate the problem, and they will push their interests and well, international tensions are not a good thing right now, given certain global economic meltdowns happening at the moment.

Of course, there are other global problems that could distract us all from these issues, and make the whole thing a muddled mess, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Hey wait a minute…

It seems to me we can work towards a solution to both problems at the same time. You see, a lot of the problems of Afghanistan and Iraq come down to having jobs. In Afghanistan, men will fight for the Taliban for a few days or longer just to feed their families. Farmers grow poppies instead of food because they make more money. In Iraq, there are similar issues, some of the soldiers of the militias we fought after the war were working for money, not ideals. What they want are jobs, American money, better lives.

This is where the issues overlap. Now, I know there are some problems with this plan. Afghanistan is not the technological capital of the world, and many of the people we’re talking about are the least skilled of people in the world. We can start with less complicated products, or find places with sufficient technological resources, like India or Brazil, nations which are our allies. We could send some of our manufacturing to Haiti and Chile, reduce the need for the massive aid being projected for future rebuilding, and at the same time cut down on the carbon emissions of shipping all of this across an ocean.

And there are other issues, the ports of these nations may not be as advanced, but demand is the mother of infrastructure, and infrastructure puts people to work, furthering our goals in these nations even more.

So here’s the idea, instead of getting involved in a trade war in Asia (almost as bad as a land war), we could provide tax breaks or subsidies to companies who will move new manufacturing or existing Chinese manufacturing away from Communist China (this will get the Republicans behind it for sure), and get our consumer greed working for us.

Imagine the fear in China when their growth is threatened, and even better, they may begin to lose jobs.

I overheard a commentator on NPR talking about how some of these economic steps we’re taking in terms of new regulation say we’re headed towards being a more European styled economy, and he then added that this isn’t necessarily good, because it’s more conservative, and not as innovative as ours, to which I say, Is that what you call this? The worst recession in a century and massive deficit spending as stimulus, people going hungry, 10% unemployment, homeless families? A widening gap between rich and poor.

That’s a unique and innovative take on a prosperous economy, buddy. I’ll take the European styled economy, thanks.

So Chris Dodd is only mostly bad

Chris Dodd introduces bill to limit bank overdraft fees and change regulations heavily in consumers favor. Let’s face it, this sounds like a good cause-effect relationship. You can imagine nefarious bankers saying, “First, we create a huge economic crisis, then when people are most prone to stretch their bank book to overdraft, we’ll make millions off of fees.” You’re still a jerk for evading taxes and all that, but you have one redeeming point in the ledger.

Bill Maher, usually a skeptic, called out by Michael Shermer over vaccinations

Bill Maher is suspicious of government sanctioned H1N1 vaccinations. Shermer is calling him out. Let’s see what his reaction is.

Shepard Fairey legal case takes a strange turn

Unfortunately Shepard tainted his own defense by destroying incriminating evidence and misrepresenting himself. What should have been a simple fair use open and shut case that established precedent and forced a big company to accept normal legal use of images, we now have a case that will probably seriously hurt the artist, bit Shepard and the little guy. Also see this

The Secret Service is overwhelmed with threats on the President

Ironically, all those people protesting for smaller government are going to wind up costing the government a fortune.

GOP politician (in a snazzy bowtie) apologizes for ethnic slur

What is it with Republicans that they can’t go a week without a racial or ethnic slur?

GOP survey, find out how they mislead their voter base in a poll to validate their own existence?

Let’s see:

Do you oppose the Obama-Pelosi health care takeover plan that would bring Washington bureaucrats between doctors and patients, ration medical treatment and deny critical care while skyrocketing the national debt?

Should Republicans fight against judicial nominees who bring a personal, left-wing  agenda on social issues to their jobs as judges?

If Barack Obama tries to gut the USA PATRIOT Act and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

Hate to burst your bubble, but Energy Star is bullshit

Apparently, many products are not tested, they run on the honor system, and we all know how honorable our giant companies are.

The net result of the big bailouts of AIG and other “too big to fail” financial institutions is they’ve become larger and more “too big to fail.” The debate as the bailout happened was whether we should allow these companies to fail or should we bail them out. We were assured the institutions were strong enough to survive, that we’d see the money back with interest, that our investments were safe and necessary. A highly publicized stress test helped reassure us this was the case. Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner told is it was necessary.

Now the auditor general of the bailout is telling us we were misled, that these institutions are not sound.
I have a thing against big business at times, and this is one of those times. AIG and the rest of these banks got greedy, and a little too big for their britches. If you want to trace the origin of these troubling times, you can find it in hubris and greed. When hubris and greed take over, people and the rest of the world ceases to be relevant. The result is the disaster we are currently enjoying, these desperate for revenues but won’t tax more except for these little fee increases here and here, highly unemployed, desperate times.

Every time a bank fails, it gets bought out, and another bank becomes larger, at least in terms of its deposits and customer base are concerned. AIG and some of its brethren are fairly unchanged, and the financial derivative products that caused all this mess are now the same products that are being looked upon to bring us out of this mess. Used to be history would run in long, slow cycles, but these cycles have picked up so much, we could practically hook them up to a turbine and call them a green energy source. We’ve completely lost our collective short term memory. We’ve reached the point in the Jumping Jesus Phenomena that the poor guy is on a pogo stick.

There is a phenomena in Hollywood where people who make bad movies get more chances (Joel Schumacher is a good example), and so they fail upwards. Is AIG going to be the same thing, or can we stop it before it makes the financial industry version of “Batman and Robin?”

Might it not have been a more constructive path to split these companies into smaller companies that could compete for available business, hire more people, and each pursue their own fortunes and expansion?

Similar things have happened before, but more often for anti-trust actions. Remember when we split  Ma Bell into the babybells? What if we had made baby AIG’s? We’d have created a lot of that competition we talk about in the Health Care debate. As we did this, the companies would have needed a whole new infrastructure of people, IT departments, HR departments, marketing and printing and advertising, sales forces, too. We’d lick that whole unemployment problem a bit faster.

Of course, if the bailout isn’t enough, there’s still time to do this, or just let them fail. Instead of making too big to fail companies bigger so that we can await the next bailout, why not punish them so they are small enough that they could be allowed to fail on their own merit. I’m just saying.