Well, obviously she’s far from the only one, but Ms. Waters represents the kind of ultra-reactionary pseudo-liberal who, in the guise of helping her own people (bringing dirt cheap loans through Freddie and Fannie), not only wrecks their lives but pulls down everyone else in the process. Her views, if you can call them that, are embarrassingly on display here. (video via Instapundit)
And she will be reelected, no doubt (as will every other clown who created this mess – Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, etc). That is the way of the world. Democracy, as Churchill, E. M. Forster and Plato pointed out, has its limitations. The problem is – elitism may be worse. There are no real elites anyway–maybe there never have been–just a bunch of phonies pretending they are. And that is just part of the problem as we sit here at the brink of what few of us contemplated would occur in our lifetimes – a Depression.
Meanwhile, the leaders of our country run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Nancy Pelosi acts like a partisan lunatic with a cognitive disorder, Barack Obama remains sniffingly above the fray for fear of alienating a single voter… and, sad to say, John McCain hasn’t done much better, though, in retrospect, at least he made a show of doing something by returning to Washington.
Not that any of it matters. Tinseltown has once and for all come to Washington, I regret to say, because William Goldman’s famous words about Hollywood are now equally true for the nation’s capital: “Nobody Knows Anything.”
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21 Comments
1. DB:Time for a real third party movement.
Sep 29, 2008 - 3:34 pm 2. Steve:It is all about power and winning. It is amazing to think these clowns think they will get away with this unscathed. If people lose their savings and wealth, there will be a lot of angry voters who are not interested in spin.
Sep 29, 2008 - 4:04 pm 3. Steve:I agree DB, we need a major swing in political balance. I am loathe to see the crisis used as an excuse by the Dems for advancing a socialist agenda. I am not sure about starting a new party though. That seems a bit weak like being depressed and becoming a vegetarian. I would very much like to see McCain push ahead strongly with his reform agenda. I think a lot of fiscal conservatives (Dem and Rep voters) will rally behind this cause.
Sep 29, 2008 - 4:39 pm 4. Harry:“A depression”??? Roger, what in God’s name has gotten in to you??
Let’s suppose you’re right and America slips into a depression in the classic 1930s sense. Congress could remedy that by sending every household in the U.S. a check for $500,000—-that would certainly end any financial suffering and jump-start the economy, right? And it would be cheaper than the $700+ billion bailout bill rejected today. (Don’t take my word for it; get out a calculator and do the math.)
This was never a “national emergency.” Let’s look at a true national emergency, such as a terrorist nuclear attack on New York or a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in downtown Los Angeles. Do you think Congress would have trouble passing legislation to deal with it? And, if they did fail in an attempt to do so, would they really take a few days off to think about it some more??
If there any severe negative impacts from the defeat of the bailout/ripoff bill, they can be dealt with more effectively, and cheaply, than by bailing out the greedy and stupid.
A lot of scary, apocalyptic language has been used to justify the bailout/ripoff deal, and it seems like you fell for it, Roger.
Sep 29, 2008 - 4:40 pm 5. Minerva:Roger, it is so strange you invoked that line from William Goldman. No one other than Robert Bolt wrote better (screen)plays. The ones from Nicholas and Alexandra have haunted my memory lately. Among them:
Lenin: “You have the right to say that. I have the right to kill you for saying it.”
Sep 29, 2008 - 5:19 pm 6. Mike_K:Don’t take my word for it; get out a calculator and do the math.
Number of households= March 2006 114,384,000 2.57 persons/ household
one billion is a thousand million. five thousand per household is 570 billion.
You’re off by a factor of 100.
Sorry. I would accept either.
Sep 29, 2008 - 6:06 pm 7. heather:it seems that compared to a 7% drop today, back in 1987, it was a 22% drop (Ilya someone, http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_09_28-2008_10_04.shtml#122272506)
And sending piles of money to everyone was an idea held by the Social Credit in Canada, and it didn’t work.
There are some intelligent people that think that if this bailout had occurred, it would have been the first of a bunch (see above link, at the volokh site).
Sep 29, 2008 - 6:09 pm 8. heather:Maxine Waters is my 2nd to last least favorite Congressman; my most hated one is: Nancy Pelosi. Didn’t she look noble this am?
Sep 29, 2008 - 6:21 pm 9. Mike Shuster:I’m no Maxine Waters fan, but I haven’t seen anyone really refute this argument that the CRA doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with the current crisis:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
Plus, the bad loans (no matter where they came from demographically) aren’t the big problem. The big problem is that AIG et al leveraged those loans to an enormous extent, which they did on their own volition and in the absence of regulation preventing it. (And it’s mostly been Republicans that have blocked credit-default swapping oversight).
I’d be more sympathetic to the Republicans who voted against the deal today if they had some other plan other than 1) reducing the capital gains tax, which I think would only provide the tiny-est stimulation bang at a very large cost to the tax base or 2) just letting everything go to hell as a free-market lesson. I’d be more sympathetic to the Democrats who voted against it if, well, Pelosi, et. al. had done their job as party leaders and produced a bill that would reach a wider consensus. And while McCain and Obama have been useless (and, in McCain’s case, possibly counterproductive), I mostly blame Bush and Paulson.
Sep 29, 2008 - 6:39 pm 10. Don Kenner:That America discusses this crisis as if Dodd, Frank, et al were merely bystanders — or worse, champions of justice — only shows what a ridiculous nation we have become.
Face it: the media are picking the president; the crooks who propped up Fannie and Freddie are leading the inquisition; and the response from the McCain camp has been tepid on both counts.
At least he liberals know how to fight. Our side mostly just makes me want to vomit. I’m resigned to president Obama and a deep recession. Oh well, the Chosen One deserves it.
Sep 29, 2008 - 7:01 pm 11. heather:this is a video, Karl Rove talking about the Dems who voted NO this am: friends and allies of Pelosi, ones who owe their committee positions to her; plus allies of Obama: they voted NO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdGpxUEN4RU
and Don Kenner: the Chosen One may deserve his next 4 years in Hell, but the American people do not.
Sep 29, 2008 - 7:28 pm 12. Webrider:And, here’s the video that puts it into perspective, including how the CRA was actually the root cause. Well meaning socialists just tried to make it “better” by introducing laws that hammered responsible banks that actually used sound business practices by suing them for redlining.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU6fuFrdCJY
Sep 29, 2008 - 9:53 pm 13. tess:And she will be reelected, no doubt (as will every other clown who created this mess – Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, etc).
Does the “etc” encompass your Mr. McCain? Was his omission just an oversight?
Sep 29, 2008 - 9:56 pm 14. Tom:If we are busy trying find a scapegoat, how about a non-partisan choice, Benjamin Spock. His books which were the bible of parents raising their children in the 50’s and 60’s advocated a permissive approach to child raising. The result was the baby-boom, generation, the most self indulgent, narcistic and self-centered generation of people we have ever encountered in our history. The political and economic turmoils we are witnessing today is merely a public manifestation of the “spoilt children” syndrome exhibited by people who never had the benefit of responsible upbringing by their parents.
Sep 29, 2008 - 10:06 pm 15. Linda Frank:Tess (of the D’Urbervilles?), I have no idea what Mr. Simon meant by “etc” but I am literate enough to read down a couple of paragraphs to see criticism of McCain. I am also literate enough to know that McCain was pushing for oversight of Fannie and Freddie in 2006 and Dodd and Frank most emphatically were not. If your ideology enables you to override those facts, it’s fine. But realize that is what you are doing.
Sep 29, 2008 - 10:18 pm 16. Gary Rosen:I presume Harry will be voting Republican now since the Republicans opposed the bailout more than the Democrats.
Sep 29, 2008 - 11:46 pm 17. Terrye:I think there is enough blame to go around. However, when one is standing over the bleeding and prone body, one renders…one does not pontificate on the cause of the wounds.
In other words, these guys and gals need to pull their heads out of their asses and do something. This rescue bill was about 700 billion. The market lost 1.1 trillion in an afternoon.
Bush asked for reforms in this sector no fewer than 17 times, and got nothing in return. Maybe he should have pushed harder, but if he had would it have been any more successful than the attempts to reform social security? I think not. People would have {and did} blow him off.
Sep 30, 2008 - 4:06 am 18. Markus:I don’t doubt that many people were wrong about subprime loans in the nineties and early this decade. But it escapes me how right-wingers want to blame Congressional supporters of Fannie Mae, when in fact these people (Frank and Waters especially) were in the minority and had no power to block any legislation until January 2007. Why aren’t people blaming the Republicans who chaired the Financial Services Committee from 1995 to 2007? Why aren’t they blaming the Congressional Leadership from that time, “free-marketers” who ought to have known better? Why is everyone cutting Hastert, DeLay, Mike Oxley slack when running down the list of the guilty?
Sep 30, 2008 - 8:41 am 19. Roger L Simon:Well, sure, Markus, those people were pretty creepy as well, but they are not the ones out front claiming to be “rescuing” the situation now. Dodd and Frank particularly deserve to have their mouths washed out with soap and water for being such monumental hypocrites on this. But that’s democracy, I guess.
Sep 30, 2008 - 10:42 am 20. Markus:The only reasonable argument that I have heard as to why Republicans did nothing about GSE’s even though they had the power to was that they were afraid of the race card. If that’s the way they saw things, I suppose their inaction is understandable, though certainly not a profile in courage.
I’d like to see Pajamas TV interview Frank, give him the O’Reillyesqe slapdown on why he’s all wrong on housing, investment, monetary policy, taxes, Economics 101, etc..
It would be an amusing exchange.
Sep 30, 2008 - 12:47 pm 21. LSD:In some places a billion is a million millions, and a ‘milliard’ is a thousand millions. (Those are the countries where it is best to be a billionaire.)
I am going with the colloquial understanding that our threatened pill was for 700 x one million x one thousand.
-One of those things that nobody knows.
Sep 30, 2008 - 2:35 pm