ntmessage's Comments (2740)

“We need to survive as well as our Ag business, including meat. This is non-negotiable. However, fossil fuels are and must be open to serious curtailment. Linking the two is just plain stupid.”

“As much as I hate to say this, Iraq and Afghanistan seem to continue to be more a proxy war against Iran for Israel as bordering countries. There seems to be no other explanation. If the hawks in Israel would honestly work on real peace instead of all of the noisy disingenuous bones thrown about for years now, perhaps there would be some breakthrough. However given the situation with Israel and the Palestinians Iran can manipulate at their hearts content. Spare all of the rhetoric and emotion, unless we want to include the Trillions in treasure and the millions that have died since 1967 by the world on this issue alone. Indeed if you want to understand how the tail can wag the dog in such a manner, just look at Lieberman and what he is able to do to the health care and military debates with just a single vote. Seems like no public option because someone like Lieberman does not want it. The constitution wanted to ensure that the minority has a voice. I do not think they thought one person out of 538 should have this much say, especially when it is so disastrous to the rest of the country and the world.”

“Anyone that has spent more than 10 minutes in a greenhouse understands what is happening to the climate. Yes, we need to regulate carbon because if left unchecked and fueled with more and more water supply from melting glaciers, it is catastrophic. Just because our growing human population also generates carbon, agriculture as well as the fossil fuels industries does not mean we just leave it alone for that reason only. Indeed, we cannot control the population or agriculture as easily as we can control what we burn. Let us start with what we spew into the atmosphere.”

“btw, I reall as many of your posts I can. Just know what the intent of this legislation really is.”

“Phony? No way. A panic is losing confidence in the system. This is what just happened and guess what? Without an independent Fed and those acting for political reasons alone will result in... Tada! More panics than ever before. I read that book, plus many books on the depression and the only conclusion based on emperical fact is you must have an independent Fed to preserve confidence. Both from a human nature and logic perspective.”

“Hello. We can see what is on the Books! They want to audit policy decsions. Different!”

“We hope Obama will hang loose and get it done.”

“The primary flaw of course is making available to more people the most inefficient and expensive health care system by a factor of two that receives only 66% of the outcome value more innovative systems provide elsewhere. The issue is the notion of insurance. With the proposed system, those that need health care will be pushed to Medicare as insurance companies insure those that do not need health care. In addition, a sudden break thru smacks of orchestrated last minute slight of hand. What value to society will private health care providers have anyway if they just collect premiums and never really pay out? Perhaps executive pay and lobbyists will be the only thing that a private insurer requires if a modicum of actual health care is available; just enough to make it look like a real business.

Why we cannot make this about health care; something everyone needs as opposed to insurance something no one needs; especially in its current form, continues to amaze. Congress succeeded in making this about the process and the system instead of health. I do not know what was worse, 1982 when nothing was done and a few companies prospered or now, when a lot was done and a few companies will prosper again. In both cases, it is impossible to see if any improvements will occur at the practicing doctor, nurse or patient level. I suggest zero improvement. We seem to have succeeded in throwing good money after bad. Again.”

“The "audit" is not an audit of the books, which is available to the congress. The intent of this bill is to second-guess independent policy by politicians. That is a disaster. Before the Fed existed panics and real depressions were much more common, because of course you cannot trust politicians to do this job. Never. Ever. In fact when you see how paid off your congress is today, what do you really think will happen without a Fed that can act independently and not show his hand to other country sovereign funds and hedge fund vultures in advance. This would be the biggest joke if it were not so dangerous. And those that blame the Fed have zero evidence that the situation would be better without it. Zero. Nada. Also these are the same politicains that screwed up the economy (not the Fed) because they pass stupid laws and let the system run wild.”

“Got that right.”

“Negative. Human nature and politics created this mess. Not an independent Fed. Seems more like politicians want to shift the blame away from themselves to the Fed after they passed bills legalizing the gambling on wall street and told the SEC to take a vacation.”

“Sadly, those factless, misinformed ideologues that want this bill want to audit the policy and not the transactions, politicizing and eliminating the independence of the Fed sending the country back to the panics and depressions that happened far more frequently before the Fed existed.”

“Quite amusing since the boom bust cycle have zero to do with the Fed and everthing to do with human nature, greed and fear in particular in existance forever.”

“You have it exactly right. Others place blame without evidence. The panics before the Fed even existed proves that.”

“History and fact state otherwise.”

“Not only would we have a full-blown depression, we would also have anarchy throughout the world. This brilliant move by Obama is yielding results sooner than expected given the fiasco over eight years of Bush. The country and Obama need to keep their wits and will about them since the far right is constant in their drum beat of negatively. In fact, they are scared to death that Obama will be successful and see that this will work. Are those people true Americans? Of course not. Some on the left attacking Geithner and Bernanke are doing the country no favors either. Yes, 10% and 17% effective unemployment is bad. But 30% and 50% effective unemployment that existed during the great depression was even worse. To think that we could get out of the Bush years of devolving our country into a third world power without some pain and within 100 days is fallacy and unfair to those trying to fix the complete catastrophic mess. Bush did everything on a credit card so no one felt any pain, a lot like a drug dealer promoting addiction to his customers. Blame bush for this, not those fixing it. You can say Clinton had a hand, but he left a surplus and our real issues are with the debt we took on that left us unprepared to navigate the aftermath of eight years of Bush.”

“Those extremists, ideologists and anarchists are against the Fed as an entity, which is insanity filled with propaganda and conspiracy theorists. How can we let these people dictate to the only independent entity tasked with keeping the economy stable? You can blame the Fed for not doing more in the early days of the Bush administration gone amok, but if the Fed were not, there we would have anarchy right now. Indeed, if the Fed had more powers, they could have resolved the institutions that sparked the panic in an orderly fashion, similarly, to what the FDIC has done with almost 1000 banks since last fall with little impact to the overall system. This so-called auditing of policy is doing the worst thing possible to the economy right when it does not need any more shock to the system. Akin to the patient walking out of the emergency room and then running them over with a truck. There is still no empirical evidence whatsoever supporting this ideology. And that is real danger to our society.”

“What a surprise, except for anyone not paying attention. This bill passed and the stock market went up! Exactly what the right does not want you to know. The reason? Confidence in the system of course. Many on the right and paid for lobbyists know that the system has been rigged against the typical investor and 401k holder for years because these thieves systematically watered down regulations and created so-called new products that function like old products, some outlawed, yet were “exempt” from regulations. These products purposely rig the system. Plus dark pools and off market so called liquidity-enhancing systems make the rigged environment even more opaque. The flash trading represents even more thievery under the guise of innovation. The better the regulations, not necessarily more and the more transparent every transaction is, the better the system will be for everyone. In fact principle based regulations are best so that not product can get around some oversight. That is not capitalism; those are con-game products. Especially those with 401k and pensions – meaning 70% of everyone. Can you imagine if Bush actually got away with privatizing social security into a rigged system? It would make this past meltdown look like a holiday. Good and logical regulations make the system better, not worse. Anyone who says otherwise is on the scam America team that we hear every day shilling for an unfair advantage over the public. There are serious loopholes internationally. No volume moves at International exchange closes.”

“The reason this is so awful, is that many of these Blackwater employees were trained by the CIA, left to work for Blackwater for triple the money. These are probably good soldiers, but they should be in our CIA and/or other military functions. Privatized military functions of all sorts must go. They are too expensive, create marred lines of command and are rife with problematic communication issues that cost lives and create unnecessary incidents all over the world. The war on terror is a euphemism for lets hire Blackwater. The CIA ties Bush 41 and 43 run far, deep and long.”

“They remember the Clinton playbook and it worked. We got Bush in because of the impeachment and spineless Democrats too scared to fight. Now that we see what happened it is really up to the Democrats to make sure it does not happen again.”

“Nice catch. Yes, was in fact using corporate world politics!.”

“Unbelievable. This is exasperating. 50 Senate Votes plus Biden and we are done with Health Care reform. These senators either take on for the team so we can pass a good bill without the handouts, pork and special interest payoffs or they get out of the way.”

“All too often those trying to fix a predecessors disasters expose themselves to the owning the disaster especially by those wishing to rewrite history. The media does this all the time as well as PR people and pundits. It is unproductive, inferior and often just outright lying from those deplorable unconscionable pinheads.

Just as Bush owns the Iraq, the Afghanistan, the economy, the financial, the unemployment and the deficit debacles, Obama owns the solutions and the solutions alone. None of the blame. He also gets as much time to fix these catastrophes as the shoot from the hip previous administration had screwing them all up.”

“The credit rating agencies, especially Moody’s are acting deplorably if not out right illegally. The conflict of interest continues to stink to the high heavens, the agencies that provided the air cover for those selling mortgages rated AAA that were in fact junk. IMO, today there seems to be a borderline extortion scenario playing out. Every time, in the past six months when pressure is being exerted for strong regulation, transparency and conflict of interest rules on these industries, suddenly a rumor about the USA credit rating being at risk seems to come out of nowhere. Imagine a borderline threat to downgrade the USA AAA credit rating by the same agencies that gave AAA credit ratings to mortgages on homes worth $100K with a $200K mortgage and an unemployed homeowner. There is something really wrong here and we need an investigation.”

“The debacle is more complex than simply pinning it all on Bernanke. The post neglects to concur with the fact that Greenspan and Bernanke started raising rates to stave off the bubble as is typical. The real issue laid in the mortgage and debt instruments levered by Fannie, Freddie and AIG (none of whom are banks, btw) going bust when the interest rates were raised and home prices declined only slightly. That meant interest rates needed to go down, not up to save the world from anarchy, a once in a many generation occurrence. The basic miscalculation was on Greenspan’s part, who was phoning it in by then. Bernanke realized what was happening and more importantly, what needed to be done. None of those that claim they saw it coming had any good solutions anyway. Plus the Fed had too little power, not too much! And we want to dilute the power and independent of the Fed? Exactly backwards. Like Greenspan. Indeed, for all of those that want to deny the Fed the independence and credibility so needed for confidence around the world and make it a politically driven exercise that will make the situation worse, they cannot deny that Bernanke is actually a hero. Congress allowed all of those exceptions to the banking laws and regulations and, along with an SEC that was concerned they were being too tough on the financial system perfectly intersected the Bush administration’s motto: never say to no to business. Blame misdirected. Bernanke=Hero.”