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Before the US invaded Iraq, when the President was talking about mushroom clouds [0] and the Secretary of State delivered a PowerPoint about bio-weapons to the
by panarky 13y ago
Before the US invaded Iraq, when the President was talking about mushroom clouds [0] and the Secretary of State delivered a PowerPoint about bio-weapons to the United Nations [1], I gave our leaders the benefit of the doubt.
Surely the military, the CIA, the NSA, the NRO, and the President must have secret information they cannot share with the public to justify the horrors of war.
Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to justify a predetermined agenda.
After the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, when the President and the Secretary of the Treasury threatened the end of the world as we know it if the richest corporations aren't given direct cash infusions [2], I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Surely our elected officials would never directly transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest of the rich unless the alternative was truly grave.
Turns out I was wrong. It was a pack of lies, half-truths and poorly-substantiated rumors to transfer wealth from working people to the ownership class on an unprecedented scale.
So when the President stands before us today and speaks for 45 minutes without saying anything of consequence, without providing any evidence that the threat is so dire, so imminent, so cataclysmic that we must relinquish our freedoms to preserve our freedoms, I can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.
No more vague threats. No more fear. No more intimidation. No more secrecy. These are fatal to a political system that relies on an informed citizenry.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9BJ_Kh7mE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9BJ_Kh7mE
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/business/26bailout.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/business/26bailout.html?pa...
- jaibot 13y agoThe financial crisis was probably extremely dire.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoI don't see how it is substantially improved by instituting a tax backed financial insurance policy for gambling losses.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoYou mean the moral ideological alternative would have been better even if it caused the economy to implode? This is why I'll never vote libertarian.
- AutoCorrect 13y agoSo that is the price of your soul? Noted.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoYes, I'm much more for avoiding economic collapse than ideological purity. I like not starving to death, while the tea partying libercrazians would destroy the whole nation just to see out their distorted principles.
- fredgrott 13y agothe punch line is thee was no threat to economic collapse.. The FEd had full powers to ask that any bail out remove current bank leadership from power due to the threat of full Gov receivership of those banks by Fed..we were sold the idea of giving a free get out of jail card to banks based on lies
- mgkimsal 13y agoit was already imploding some. We'll never know how much more worse it could have been, but... Bear Stearns had already closed and the world didn't collapse. If a couple investment banks had closed, would everything have stopped? The big boys would have found a way to keep going pretty quickly. As it stands, the 'fix' still ended up keeping most previously normally available capital for average people on hold for years, grinding many regions to a virtual standstill with respect to housing/travel/construction/etc. So... even with the massive bailout, the majority of average people got hit pretty hard, and many are still recovering as their regions try to fight back from the economic collapse, while we read about bankers bitching that their bonuses were only in the single digit millions for so many years.
- jessaustin 13y agoThat's an opinion you share with all investors who were made whole by the heavy-handed official response to the "crisis". The rest of us, not so much.
- notdrunkatall 13y agoThat's because the rest of you don't understand what an all-out financial collapse would mean for you because as a result of the FED's actions, it didn't happen.
- atmosx 13y agoWhat? What would it mean? Doesn't man nothing. It's just an excuse to hand over millions for free. The basic Liberal theory says that when a big player goes down, it's good for the market, because many smaller players will fill that gap. What is happening the last years throughout US and Europe is that when a bank goes down, the state turns communist and we share the losses. If the bank has huge earning, it's capitalism, so they can keep it because hey they worth it!. Joseph Stiglitz has an entire book on the subject. As Krugman said - and the economist also... go figure! - Obama should have put at least some rules to Wall Street giants when they were on their knees, not after he made them twice as big. Blah, I am not sure if the Congress or Obama CAN actually do anything to regulate WS giants at all.
- coldtea 13y agoYes. Idahoans also didn't understand why they should pay me mucho dinero to continue protecting Idaho from dragons. "But we don't have dragons in Idaho", they'd say. To which of course I replied: "See how effective I have been?". Plus, besides the disregard for the burden-of-proof in your argument, wasn't the economic crisis caused "as a result of the FED's actions" in the first place (deregulation etc)?
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Plus, besides the disregard for the burden-of-proof in your argument, wasn't the economic crisis caused "as a result of the FED's actions" in the first place (deregulation etc)? Deregulation was Congressional action, not action of the Federal Reserve (usually referred to by the shortened form, "the Fed").
- notdrunkatall 13y agoIt's refreshing to find someone who gets it.
- r0h1n 13y agoJoshua Topolsky put it best: > America we are under constant, vague, terrifying attack. There is no end. There will never be an end. http://twitter.com/joshuatopolsky/status/424220069003288577 http://twitter.com/joshuatopolsky/status/424220069003288577
- coldtea 13y ago>So when the President stands before us today and speaks for 45 minutes without saying anything of consequence, without providing any evidence that the threat is so dire, so imminent, so cataclysmic that we must relinquish our freedoms to preserve our freedoms, I can no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. It gets worse: people who do such things, can also manufacture concrete evidence of "dire and imminent" stuff. For example by letting the stock market crumble to some predetermined stop point, when they come with measures to save the day. Or by provoking for some attack and seeing it happen -- which is mostly what was done in Pearl Harbor to convince people to get in WWII (E.g: http://mises.org/daily/6312/FDRs-Pacific-War-Before-Pearl-Harbor http://mises.org/daily/6312/FDRs-Pacific-War-Before-Pearl-Ha... -- Can't vouch for the validity of the linked website in general, just found a quick link to the issue. The facts are available in tons of historical books).