Senate Passes ‘Sweeping’ Financial Reform, Sends Bill to Obama’s Mont Blanc
One can only dream of what’s next: “Sweeping” non-discrimination protections, “sweeping” military discrimination reversals, “sweeping” queer-inclusive immigration reform. [AP]
@Bill Perdue: Yes, clearly the best way to decrease unemployment and end this recession is to trash the businesses that create jobs and economic growth.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t TARP a Bush policy?
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@Bill Perdue: So your proposing the best way to solve our economic woes is to switch to communism. What is next on your menu; pharmaceutical companies (hording all the HIV drugs), energy companies (gas prices are to high), agricultural industry (free bread for all). Give me a break.
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@Tessie Tura: Yes and no.
Bush’s Treasury Department came up with the figure of $700,000,000,000.00 out of thin air. Obama gave it his total support and his Treausry Department, people with deep connections to the looters, implemented it.
Obama’s administration sponsored bills to give another few hundred billion under cover of ‘recovery’ and his largest gift was to insurance companies, Big Pharma and HMOs, who’ll collectivey get trillions from Obama’s fake health care scam.
Obama and the Democrats, like Bush and the Republicans are lap dogs of the looter class.
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson09252008.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04102009.html
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Capitalism as it is in the U.S.A. is obviously failing. The current economic situation was caused by a lack of regulation. Government needs to regulate properly and efectively and look after the people.
The Irish economy is a so-called mixed economy. The government has a significant involvement in the economy while much of the economy is in private hands. The Irish Government owns many important bodies including the main electricity provider and the inlt train service provider. Governemnts should owns businesses of doing so has benefiys for the country. In Ireland, because of its small population, without government involvement, a private monopoly would exist as the electricity provider. Currently an independent body sets the prices this body can charge. Another state body is now in competition with the other body, taking its customers. The latter body is free to set it owns prices so that the larger body becomes smaller so that competition can occur. Once the larger body is large enough, it will be free to set its own prices. This is bit one example of how government involvement in the economy is useful.
It must be debated, however, how well a communist system would create wealth. Mixed economie seem to work well while the extremes of entirely free market capitalism and centrally planned economies are worse.
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@Paschal: A lack of regulation did not cause the financial crisis. The cause was a perfect storm of government-sponsored subprime lending, rock bottom interest rates, and the housing bubble bursting. In fact, regulation probably helped cause this crisis because government regulators routinely pressured banks to make loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them
If you guys really want to live in a communist country, I hear North Korea is beautiful this time of year.
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The only sweeping here is an attempt to sweep the anger over Obama’s TARP giveaways under the rug.
The system is not open to reform because when all is said and done it’s a political and economic system owned by the looter classes. The Financial Reform bill has loopholes big enough to drive a depression through.
It’s said that some banks are too big to fail. There is an alternative to giving them more trillions from public funds to waste. We should push to nationalize banks, insurance companies and other major financial institutions without compensation. They’d be much better run under the direction of councils composed of non-managerial workers, unions and consumers.
And we should demand the arrest and prosecution of the looters who wrecked the economy for treason, grand theft and fraud, including officials from the Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, Bush2 and Obama administrations who aided and abetted their treason, grand theft and fraud.