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Have the voters wise up and then what ? Vote for either Romney or Obama ?

by _k 13y ago

graycat 13y ago
I don't want to oversimplify, but if the voters wise up, then we will get better candidates. Also, supposedly both Clinton and W saw the housing bubble blowing and the threat but believed that politically there was nothing they could have done about it. So, they just hoped for the best -- and wrecked the US and advanced world financial system the worst since the 1930s. With smarter voters, no way could Obama, the CBC, Frank, etc. get Fannie and Freddie to back junk paper that was the real gasoline for the heat for the bubble blowing. E.g., get the 'Frontline' piece with its interview with the COB of Wells Fargo: He was very clear. He saw the bubble blowing, told lots of the right people in various committees in DC, put such a warning in his annual report, and told people that we were not going to like the results. Still, we did nothing. With better informed voters, a president could have put 10 minutes in one of his State of the Union addresses showing the strong parallels -- bubble blowing from over leveraged financial assets where the bubbles pop and wipe out much of the financial system and take much of the economy down with it -- with The Great Depression and stated clearly that the only responsible thing to do was to get a soft landing and save the country. Then have some meetings, say, about the CRA, Fannie, and Freddie, AIG, some of the CDS swap manipulations, the fast and loose work by the bond ratings agencies, the abuses of the variable rate mortgages and no-doc loans, etc. In 1980 I was in Ohio and heard some of the stories about the suffering then in the Rust Belt. Just take a list about every bad thing that could happen to people, families, and communities, and that's what happened. So, got domestic violence, street crime, alcohol abuse, drugs, infant mortality, divorces, heart attacks, suicides, all through the roof. Bad gumment can be really ugly stuff, hurt the middle class a lot and hurt the poor much more. I'm no fan of Obama, and while I see a lot to like in Romney I thought that from his 47% remark on he just blew his campaign. But my reading of Obama is that in part he reads the winds and sometimes goes with them, maybe only temporarily, reluctantly, ineffectually, but is willing to appear to go with the flow. Well, with better informed voters speaking more loudly, I suspect that he can actually pretend to go with the winds and at least mostly get out of the way as Congress does the real work. I believe it's in the hands of the voters and, then, from the media, and now from the Internet.

Have the voters wise up and then what ? Vote for either Romney or Obama ?

by _k 13y ago

Have the voters wise up and then what ? Vote for either Romney or Obama ?

I don't want to oversimplify, but if the voters wise up, then we will get better candidates. Also, supposedly both Clinton and W saw the housing bubble blowing and the threat but believed that politically there was nothing they could have done about it. So, they just hoped for the best -- and wrecked the US and advanced world financial system the worst since the 1930s. With smarter voters, no way could Obama, the CBC, Frank, etc. get Fannie and Freddie to back junk paper that was the real gasoline for the heat for the bubble blowing. E.g., get the 'Frontline' piece with its interview with the COB of Wells Fargo: He was very clear. He saw the bubble blowing, told lots of the right people in various committees in DC, put such a warning in his annual report, and told people that we were not going to like the results. Still, we did nothing. With better informed voters, a president could have put 10 minutes in one of his State of the Union addresses showing the strong parallels -- bubble blowing from over leveraged financial assets where the bubbles pop and wipe out much of the financial system and take much of the economy down with it -- with The Great Depression and stated clearly that the only responsible thing to do was to get a soft landing and save the country. Then have some meetings, say, about the CRA, Fannie, and Freddie, AIG, some of the CDS swap manipulations, the fast and loose work by the bond ratings agencies, the abuses of the variable rate mortgages and no-doc loans, etc. In 1980 I was in Ohio and heard some of the stories about the suffering then in the Rust Belt. Just take a list about every bad thing that could happen to people, families, and communities, and that's what happened. So, got domestic violence, street crime, alcohol abuse, drugs, infant mortality, divorces, heart attacks, suicides, all through the roof. Bad gumment can be really ugly stuff, hurt the middle class a lot and hurt the poor much more. I'm no fan of Obama, and while I see a lot to like in Romney I thought that from his 47% remark on he just blew his campaign. But my reading of Obama is that in part he reads the winds and sometimes goes with them, maybe only temporarily, reluctantly, ineffectually, but is willing to appear to go with the flow. Well, with better informed voters speaking more loudly, I suspect that he can actually pretend to go with the winds and at least mostly get out of the way as Congress does the real work. I believe it's in the hands of the voters and, then, from the media, and now from the Internet.