The Passage of Times

The more with which time passes, the more one sees how some things always stay the same.

This is something unrealized by youth… I certainly couldn’t see it, though many elderly tried to project their insight into me.. I simply lacked enough background to understand.

But seeing the return of things you fought to vanquish and were once successful, as well as expanding ones knowledge-base across many cultures, times, and distances, one tends to see a larger pattern in effect that probably is conducive to our survival…

Here is how it relates to conservatives and liberals, democracy and our ultimate survival…. .

No matter who you are, when you are, or where you are, if you are comfortable in your position, you tend to lean towards conservatism… Why wouldn’t you?  It’s what enabled you to get and keep what you have… On the other hand, when you have nothing but dreams listed as your assets, you’ll insist on change, or newness, or something better than what you have.. Why shouldn’t you?  Who would want to stay in the same decrepit conditions one finds themselves when they don’t have to?

And so democracy is simply a mechanism that allows for the ebb and flow of fortunes to change policy so parity is maintained for the most part…

When a majority of people are doing better than those who are not, then keeping what is working now is best for that society as a whole.  On the other hand if it it not working, then changing ones course is better for that society.  That makes so much sense, does it not?

So being a liberal in a time of economic well being is, how should we say politely, being “very forward thinking”?… Likewise being a conservative in a time of turmoil, could be rather dangerous, being so outnumbered so… you better hope you are “well liked”….

It is rare that events outside the human experience impact us on a large scale. Most of what affects us drastically (wars, Depressions, power grabs) usually comes from mankind’s own doing:… acts where we consciously chose to go a certain route, and more or less, damned all the torpedoes that got in the way.

Today we are in a bru-ha-ha of our own making…. Most of it directly came from our choosing to go towards giving the top 1% all of our money and keeping less for ourselves… It was a conscious decision on our parts.  We elected enough Republicans to allow them to do what they told us they would do.  It was no secret. We made a bad decision.

The experiment failed.  They kept all the money and none trickled down, at least here within our borders… Our wealth actually built up China, which is great for them, but that hasn’t helped us much.

When one finds out one is losing something important, one hangs onto it harder… Which means someone has to try harder to take it away, right?… This gives insight into the harshness and lack of decorum in politics today… The ugliness we see today in Conservatives, and the hard clenching tenacity we see in Liberals, we’ve seen before in this country.  We had it in the 1820’s between the old guard wealth of the Eastern Seaboard, and the wide individualistic wealth newly available across our national heartland.  We saw it in the 1850’s as slavery hit the hot button and both sides became bitterly entrenched as support for slavery evaporated into a cauldron of gunpowder.  It only took one spark.  We saw it in the 1890’s as the capitalists grabbed up more and more companies, crushed workers rights, and the workers in cities became less and less empowered. Finally Republican Progressivism broke out of the chokehold. Then WWI flipped the scales back to big business and an investment boom followed by a Great Depression again created the necessary environment for another total sweep of old for new.  That “new” lasted 60 years until it succumbed to having been so successful so that so many numbers who had previously benefited from liberal policies switched allegiances to keep their assets to themselves… And that leads to today, where our individualistic efforts to improve ourselves simply were not enough to balance ourselves comfortably against wealth and power and we are again looking at more government interaction…

So rawness and candor have always been part of politics.  Always will be. Some things never change. (Some of us love it, btw.)

So what is happening today is that the post Republican Depression economy has made mockery out of those “traditional” Republican values and the only thing they have to hold on to power right now, is their appeal to the prejudiced.  Against this direct solicitation, Progressives continue to offer a new vision of hope to millennials, or the return to the old vision of what actually worked well for 60 years to those still alive who actually lived it.

The conservatives count the votes and know their time is numbered.  Population trends have pointed this out for many years. Which readily explains why they focus on ways and methods to limit large numbers of those voting, and have vacated all plans to appeal to new members… No surprise here.

In this election conservative policy has been reduced to stem complete annihilation of their party… For whereas they have failed over the past 16 years, Progressives have succeed across that same time. By going hog-wild on bigotry, they are using the only tactic with which they know how to keep some members in their party from flipping…

Bigotry is a “thing” unfortunately… And right now…. it is the only “thing” Republicans have to garner one single vote this November…  Unless of course, it is ….. “wild hair”…

 

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.