Why All Changes To Dodd-Frank Need Vetoed Outright

Most Republicans smoked dope in high school. Some libertarians did also.  Democrats, maybe, but not so much. Therefore in America at least 47% of the voting public in General Election years, and 51% of the voting public in off-years, is ignorant about American History… The important stuff.

America was founded on freedom, and whenever that fails to work well, our law making bodies add a regulation… Regulations like everything else can be bad or good, but for the most part, the regulations we do have all had to be voted into being by a widely diverse group of people, and therefore there is probably some good reason we have them.

With Dodd-Frank, the reason is obvious.  But Republicans seem to have forgotten both crash deregulation brought on, and their catastrophic loss of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency because of it.

Dodd-Frank simply puts a limit on gambling… No, you can’t bet your domicile at Delaware Park.  No, you can’t sell your car there and bet it on roulette.  No you can’t put your kids into prostitution to feed your gambling habit.

We have to regulate things like that. Otherwise if we don’t and someone does them, they can keep doing them without a law to stop them.

That is why the idiocy of cutting regulations is just that idiocy.. Perhaps I can grant that with Google now, we can search and find perhaps one or two regulations that would benefit society if we removed them.  But they certainly would not be in Dodd Frank.

Those are there to prevent what happened in 2008 from happening again…  That’s impossible you say… It was 80 years between both Great Depressions… That is a lifetime… Nothing happened in between!

Exactly,! Because laws like Dodd-Frank were held in place which limited the amount of our money one could gamble. Two bills repealed that oversight and bam, in 2008 we were in crises.

• In early America there was a major panic or recession every 2 years. 1795 – 1833.
• From then up to the Great Depression, we averaged a major recession or panic every two years. 
• Since the great Depression we have registered recessions on the average one recession every 5 years.

And now, we want to return to the instability of those years prior to the Great Depression of 1932?

The Great Recession was solely the result of an economy built on overextended consumer credit and risky mortgages; the crisis began in March, 2008 as investment bank Bear Stearns became the first of dozens of major American institutions to fail or be bailed out by the Fed. Bear Stearns would soon be joined by AIG, Lehman Brothers, GM, and Countrywide, to name a few.

Some regulation are on the books for a reason… such as regulating derivatives.  While derivatives were regulated, gas stayed at 99 cents a gallon for 8 years… Remember that?  And just as soon as we deregulated Derivatives, it climbed all the way to $4.25 a gallon before the collapsing market dropped the price down to real market, which we shockingly discovered was just $1.70 a gallon.   The Dodd-Frank regulation on derivatives has returned us again to low prices (faster due to help from our Sultanic friends in the Gulf),

And as soon as it gets removed, the hedge funds buy it low…. wait and sell it high…

We played this game before:  the year 2000, the end of Clinton’s term. The spending bill passed in September were held up through December in conference committee by Sen. Phil Gramm.  The Omnibus funding bill that year, had a rider that deregulated all derivatives from government oversight.  Over those 4 months leading up to passage, parts of the government had been officially unfunded.  Government employees wondered if they could even spend for Christmas.  Finally on the very last day of that Congress. by a voice vote only seconds before adjournment, all conference committee (Phil Gramm) changes were approved and the bill got sent to Clinton.

Unfortunately he signed it… and we paid those hedge fund investors a lot more than we should have been paying for our gasoline. Up to $2.50 on every single gallon!  We also sold bad mortgages as derivatives, world-wide… and when those mortgages failed (as we knew they had to), the world economy collapsed.

We should not make the same mistake again. We really cannot afford that same mistake again.  With hindsight, a new democratic Congress would have been sworn, and could rectify that before Clinton left office… But tired and in the last waning days of his presidency, one cannot blame him for not doing so.  Who wants to end with a pie-fight?

And I’m sure it seemed like a good idea … up to 8 years later.  But is was wrong. It was dumb, and we paid dearly for it. How we paid dearly for it…

Veto the changes, and then see if they can find 70 Senators willing to go on public record while all America is watching and screw over the American people.

Removing good regulation will be our downfall.. Don’t let that happen.

It Could Be Worse….

Today it is depicted as sml.  Or fml.  Loosely translated, it means “I’m screwed”….

When I was young, grandparents were very sympathetic.  So we milked them for it.  However to all my problems they had one answer. “Well, it could be worse.”  i always felt that was a cop-out, like “hey, really man?  I come to you for aged wisdom and guidance and all you can tell me is that… hey dude, you know man, it could be worse?”

Funny.

Only now I am fully comprehending what it must have been like living through the Great Depression.  Only now can I fully realize what it was like to lose your house, your farm, and actually have nothing.  Only now can I fully realize the true horror of having evil tear apart your world, and land a sucker punch out of the blue with an unprovoked Pearl Harbor or an invasion through the Ardennes.  Only now, can I appreciate what it truly meant, that zero ships made it up the coast from Florida to New York in quite a few months. Only now can I fully realize what it meant to watch evil take out civilization like shutting off light switches and there was nothing we could do about it except read of the defeats in the newspaper….  Only now, can I fully realize what it meant to put your life and job and family’s future welfare on the gambling table and agree to strike your employer, until he agreed to pay you a little more than the starvation wages you were stuck in…

What my grandparents were telling me was this:  “That’s not really that bad;  try hard and you can dig yourself out of it… “

What was unsaid, probably because they hated bragging, was this……. “We did, and it was much, much worse than what you face today.”

Quit complaining, and do.

Why Are You Still In The Stock Market?

There is only one reason to remain in today’s stock market. That is if you “short” sold everything  to begin next week.  If you haven’t, it might be too late…  if I were the Chinese or other foreign investors, I’d bet short, and start pulling out right now. 

You know that is a safe bet.

What Does One Eat During A Great Depression?

Here is something to ponder… how does one survive during a Great Depression?  Well listen to someone who did…  As you can tell, it was a lot slower time back then….. something I think we can all look forward to….

But below is a recipe which was carried on You Tube, for the dish pasta and peas….

Of course, the pleasure is in the telling….. as those who stick through the end will discover……

And then again, we will be happy just to have work, as this next episode describes… Oh the choice’s we’ll make……