axelrod608

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

My dream or the current nightmare we're all stuck in - you choose...

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Right on in SF - it really matters not one whit who can make the bigger bribe, er, raise more campaign funds - the individual always loses. Regardless of who raises the bucks, there's always a payback. And pols NEVER forget to reward those who funded their campaigns. So the only logical thing to do is give each one the same amount of money from the public coffers, have a certified independent auditor in charge of approving expenditures and zero money from any other source.

But the huge benefit to the citizens of the US would be , ta dah, NO BUILT-IN ADVATAGE TO THE TWO RULING PARTIES. The greens, the Libertarians and any other party that could get the signatures could get EQUAL funds, equal airtime and equal opportunity.

Our government doesn't work because it is run by two equally UnAmerican parties. They both exist for their own benefit, not the good of the country. Listen to one hour of vapid rhetoric from either party - they couldn't care less about the USA. They either want to run everything their way or not play the game.

It's time our "representatives" started representing US and the USA, not their parties.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

There is only ONE way to fix all this. By that I do not mean clean up the mess - that's going to take decades. But to ensure it never happens again, we need 100% public campaign financing - no outside funding or ads allowed - and an absolute ban on lobbying.

Anything less is just shoveling the crap to the other side of the room. Only when Congress, the administration and the courts see their job as protecting INDIVIDUAL Americans, not companies, will we get a republic that is anything at all like our founding fathers intended.

The mess we're in now is what to expect from government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. And it will persist either until we the people change it or it crumbles under the greedy demands of the corporations sucking the life out of it.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

One of the interesting tidbits not on the Breakfast table this morning is that the nation's financial institutions - yes, the same ones taking massive amounts of cheap, easy credit from the government - have budgeted $71 billion for year-end bonuses THIS year. I wish I were making it up, but I'm not.

I cannot even imagine the cojones it takes for companies that have lost half or more of their value in the past year to even THINK about paying anybody a bonus. These guys have rocks the size of their Ferraris.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Thanks Eddie for the class warfare manifesto. Unfotunately it isn't true, no matter how fervently you believe it.

This financial tsunami was wholly caused by deregulation of financial institutions , an unlimited supply of cheap, easy credit and the absolute greed of a few casino gamblers masquerading as investment bankers. The "sub-prime" mortgage was a symptom caused by the problem, not the problem.

If you were to read 100 articles/books on problem solving, ALL the authors would agree that the one essential step in problem solving is DETERMINING THE PROBLEM. If you don't know exactly what the problem is, a solution is not possible.

So here we are with our government throwing money at this problem even though they haven't begun to figure out what actually caused it. To reinflate the credit bubble with yet more cheap, easy credit will only make the problem worse and longer lasting. What they are doing is adding fuel to the fire, not fixing anything.

This problem was not caused by a few poor people getting bad loans. It was caused by a few greedy, unprincipled fools in Congress and Wall Street trying to ensure more campaign contributions and exorbitant profits.