Forum Post: Our Congress should have us vote on every issue now that we have internet
Posted 12 years ago on Jan. 29, 2012, 11:50 p.m. EST by freewriterguy
(882)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
During the early formation of our congress, there was no internet, so representatives were needed to represent a larger number of people, but now that we have internet, i propose that the government asks the people what should be done about every issue. Truly then would our government be BY THE PEOPLE.
Mob rule is not a good idea. The society would be too susceptible to big swings like a pendulum going back and forth. We need to get our elected representatives in Washington slapped back in line. Money out of politics, harsh sentences for taking bribes, etc....
mob rule is an old cliche argument
what mob rule are we speaking of? (history or event)
Salem which trials ?
Salem witch trials, fall of Rome, crusades, and pretty much any other disaster in human history
lol
Just what we need fans of reality TV making our laws.
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Government by the people is two wolves and a sheep voting over what to have for dinner. We would still have slaves if the internet existed in the 1860s sometimes cooler heads need to overrule angry mobs
[-] 2 points by TechJunkie (2185) from Miami Beach, FL 4 days ago
Yes, the constraints are called "Congress". Even they are not doing a very good job of controlling spending. But without them.. If you require a balanced budget then how could three hundred million people possibly come to an agreement on the budget every year? '
parse the system out to be handled locally by district
the green party tends towards local control
I work. I work overtime. I have a house and I would make the time to vote on every issue if I could vote online. Now we just need an educated populace and free internet available to all citizens. A letter to my representatives is my present form of voting on each issue. Unfortunately corporations and the 1% pay my representatives to represent them, and our system of campaign finance selects the elected officials willing to prostitute themselves to the greatest extent. This is why I support the Zero Contributions Campaign Finance Amendment posted at www.campaignfinanceamendment.org.
money in politics goes far beyond campaign funding
Haliberton was Chainy';s company
and they got the contracts to bomb and rebuild Iraq
Very suspicious indeed, I can't fight all the battles. I am working on the campaign finance front, but I support others on other fronts. www.campaignfinanceamendment.org
i'll keep an eye for fixing the election process
Not a practical idea. Not everyone has the internet. Not everyone is capable of understanding every issue. Those of us that work and don't live in our parents basements don't have the time to vote on every issue.
This is a formula for financial ruin. "Should we fund program X?" "YES!!" "Should we fund program Y?" "YES!!" "Should we fund program Z?" "YES!!" "How about a new entitlement program?" "YES!!"
the populous doesn't know how to handle money
they need "experts" to do that
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Yes, the constraints are called "Congress". Even they are not doing a very good job of controlling spending. But without them.. If you require a balanced budget then how could three hundred million people possibly come to an agreement on the budget every year?
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The first vote should be on banning Occupy protests. My guess is that the motion would win based on the behavior in Oakland over the weekend.
http://ww3.hdnux.com/photos/10/33/17/2208750/17/628x471.jpg
Sometimes getting what you ask for is not in your best interest.
lol
i've thought the same thing; however, i realized that very few people have the requisite knowledge to produce optimal results... in fact, i think it would be an absolute disaster. how much do you know about regulating commodities futures, by way of example? or carbon emissions credits? government is too complex for 99% of people, and that's not meant to be an insult, it's just a fact. shit, i think the dumb asses in there now don't know what they're doing.
well said, however the opening statement of each issue voted up could include the arguments pro and con so that we can decide, after all, we are supposed to govern, if we make a mistake, then we can learn and adjust just as we have been adjusting our constitution all these years.
the issues are not simple, and people wouldn't take the substantial time required to learn them. and frankly, i don't think most could understand them. people goto law school for a long time (and for the most part have high IQs to exceptionally high) in order to grasp such issues, and many folks in congress are attorneys and they often don't get it right (for example the banking crisis would have been warded off if they truly understood the import of the laws that allowed it to happen.
i understood it long before it happened, and I had no edumacation, and i can prove it in writing, such as early withdraws on my bank accounts. I warned family members to do the same, and they didnt and they lost half their life savings. it is because people put their trust in the wrong things. they seek for riches and recognition of men, instead of wisdom.
You may have understood it but the majority of the other people did not understand it. Even Bill Clinton, a smart President (in my perhaps prejudiced opinion), did NOT get the significance of his not vetoing in 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that largely nullified Glass-Steagall. And he even had a very intelligent wife by his side who might have alerted him! Direct democracy is problematic and that over the internet is even worse. Have you thought of the hacking that had been done and will be done? I monitored the world on a rather regular basis and it is NOT easy. I doubt that the majority of our people in the U.S. has the time or intellectual capacity to monitor and delve into the intricacies of our political system. Also our laws sometimes have very subtle clauses inserted into them by congressional staffers at the behest of lobbyists that have far-reaching or targeted-for-specific beneficiary consequences. Even our attorney-heavy Congress frequently lets these clauses slip through intentionally or unintentionally. I would rather have a system set up to record all of the proceedings in our political system that journalists, academics, and historians can research with utter confidence in the veracity of the information. Knowing that virtually everything will be recorded for posterity can serve as a deterrent of hanky-pankies. Our Founding Fathers probably knew this because they did NOT go for direct democracy. They chose a republic with representative "democracy" instead. I believe that their motivations are still valid. The people must be the Supreme Rulers but we must have safeguards for supreme rights against the mob that the people can turn into at times. Perhaps they saw the going-ons of the French Revolution when they decided not to go with direct democracy. They instead chose the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of association to guard against potential madness from direct democracy.
it's basic economics that credit expansions are unsustainable beyond a certain level and lead to great contractions. this happened preceding the great depression. we saw the same but kept dancing until the music stopped.
There is really NO limit to credit expansions except trust but that can undergo rapid collapse at electronic and photonic speeds, outstripping even the most powerful central banks in the world's abilities to stabilize. Of course, if you take a good look at how there is so much credit, the central banks are the ones who created the credit. What follies!
true as long as income increases are limitless, credit can expand limitlessly; but i know of nobody, nor any government that can have limitless income expansion. meanwhile they incur fixed costs like taxes and living expenses (that are both expanding) so they are being squeezed. meanwhile real incomes have been stagnant on a real adjusted basis since 1980. what people did was borrow against ever increasing percentages of income, leaving them with less to spend elsewhere (that's the expansion) and now a very many people are tapped out.
In principle, money freely flowing around can allow both income and credit to expand concurrently tracking each other but we have bottlenecks at our banks some of which are scared stiff of becoming insolvent. What you said above reminds me of people being like the hamsters that run on their little wheels faster and faster until they fall off. Inflation makes us all feel a little richer until we realize that we are all on the hamster wheels. Of course, the politicians and central banks love to cater to our desires so they give us persistent "benign" inflation which is actually shoving everyone who holds money a bit under so everyone can have some room to climb up. Inflation also makes comparisons of costs of things difficult to do or explain. It makes the elites so much more superior to the common folks who are happy about the larger numbers. Yes, it takes some brain power to figure out why one does not seem to live any better on a bigger paycheck. As long as there are some people who do not know, the trick will work. We probably have to use it again for getting out of our binds again this time. Inflation is a rather painless way to raise taxes without raising taxes - rather like a narcotic drug.
you're right, it's politically expedient to tax via inflation. however, inflation leaves most worse off, as would raising taxes. people 2003-2007 leveraged a MEDIAN of 52% of their income if they bought a house, and it was climbing from 30% (where it had been for 5 decades) to that pinnacle before then, according to friends in mortgage origination. they're basically at the brink of insolvency and are initiating cutbacks that hurt other businesses where they'd spend that money. raise their fixed costs via inflation and they won't know it's a tax, and you might effectively push them over the cliff, or they live far worse off. it's a race to the bottom in world currencies. and all these ridiculous imbalances caused by stupid central bankers (particularly greenspan) bode poorly for the future. at least greenspan admitted in front of congress that he was wrong... well--sort of,,, he talked about incorrect modelling and so on,,, but to me by 2006 i saw this monster fueled by unsustainable debt coming to eat the economy (and am well known among my circle for espousing that view, and in writing), and it's just had it's first app, if you ask me, and now ready to gorge. inflation, much lower living standards, maybe push poverty to 60-70% of US citizens (currently around 50%). it's just nuts. it's a shame we can't get good people in government because they really facilitated this.
The form of our federal government being a republic of representative "democracy" may have contributed to the financial catastrophe. As the old saying goes, you can lead them to the water but you cannot make them drink. Things will only change if people "wake up" mentally and "focus their eyes like laser beams" on our political and economic going-ons.
yes, the sham democracy that has been manipulated needs to be replaced by plato's philosopher king. many have said democracy is the penultimate form of government, destined to collapse, to give way to the best governance form.
From where will the philosopher king come? Do we need to create him through intentional and elaborate education or we can just pick him "off-the-shelf"? If he is available "off-the-shelf," how can we identify him? What criteria should we use for selecting him?
fair questions to which I have not the answers. Just saying that this one seems to be clearly failing and that other forms of government are worthy of consideration.
This discussion of the philosopher king reminds me of the play "Waiting for Godot." Perhaps we will only break out from our absurd conditions when we finally realize that time, money, religions, political institutions, economic systems, etc. are all just human inventions that are subject to revisions. Of course, the revisions need to be appropriate for human needs, both present and future.
well when you consider our current state, that our electable positions are swooped up by the elite 1% like mitt romney or life time politicians who never worked in the private sector, I have to ask the question: How could it get any worse? because none of those people represent me from the 99%. I do everything they say to do, and I still get turned down from financing in my business, even when I have record contract awards on the table, instead I walk away from them and lay off all my employees while they continue the rhetoric, "we need to create jobs in this country". Its so shameful they are their to represent me when I actually am creating jobs.
The mindset of the bankers after the financial crisis of 2007 that was held off till late 2008 by federal reserve and treasury actions and finally crashed can ONLY be described as SHELL-SHOCKED. The fix by the government after the crash allowed them to have free money from the government while collecting interests on that money from the government. The federal reserve did that to encourage them to retain that money as reserve to help them weather the coming financial storm. The federal reserve also helped the European banking system because Europe trusted the U.S. and they bought significant amount of our toxic assets. The European governments also pitched in. The banks have perfect excuse NOT to loan any money out. The ones who know best how badly they fouled up our swimming pool with their poop are the ones who climbed out and stayed out with government financial encouragement. There are still huge amount of these toxic assets being worked through and banks are still reluctant to lend. Then there are the Dodd-Frank financial regulations coming down the pipeline to close the barn door after all the horses have bolted away. They added more uncertainties for the banks. By the way, the elites could NOT defeat the passage of Dodd-Frank in the aftermath of the financial disaster but they DID manage to defer most of its actual details and implementations to much later dates. This allowed their lobbyists to work their nefarious magic while people withdrew their attention because the Dodd-Frank was passed. In reality, the battle to regulate the financial markets had just begun. Did you see how Congress delayed the confirmation of the head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau called for by Dodd-Frank? Only very recently did Obama wake up to that and use recess appointment to head up the bureau. You see, the U.S. is a house divided against itself so Abraham Lincoln's saying may come true eventually.
As for funding sources, have you considered government sources instead of the banks such as the Small Business Administration, etc.? The politicians KNOW that they need to create jobs in this year of election so make sure that the people whom you are dealing with in the government KNOW that you will be helping their top bosses to retain their jobs. The other thing is to ask a community bank or credit union instead. They were not heavily into this global toxic asset dispersement and they are less shell-shocked. The too-big-to-fail banks are still concerned about what their balance sheets REALLY look like because by NOT recognizing the problems head-on they also veil their own eyes. They REALLY need to keep two sets of books but never let one set leak out into the public domain.
yes, small business administration funding is a myth, u see they issue a guarantee to banks that the government will ensure 80% of the loan, but heres the catch in order to obtain a sba loan, it has to be 100% collateralized. And I never bought a home (until after the collapse) i was putting everything into my business. Too bad I couldnt get anyone else to. But this year i plan on going bankrupt and walking away, even though I had record contract awards on the table whose profits would have wiped away all my debt. (My little contribution to the pending collapse).
Its funny that u mentioned the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. they recently received a hundred million dollar fine from wells fargo for defrauding 10,000 people, which I was one of, which destroyed my credit. Guess how much of that money I have received? Not a inkling. This is why Im not in favor of taxing the rich, because the government consumes it, they do not help the people, they just repeat empty promises of other government reps. I do believe Ron Paul would help the people, but I dont believe Mitt Romney will.
Have you thought of asking those people from whom you had your contract awards? They have a vested interest in the success of the contracts. There are also Department of Commerce, Export-Import Bank, etc. for you to look into. Another thought is: can you split the contracts into smaller slices and stagger them so that you can do a small job, make some profit, reinvest into doing a bigger one, make some profit, and so on? Another funding source is your friends and relatives. These days much of their savings are probably getting close to zero interest so they should be rather willing to lend. Be extremely careful though if you go this route because if relationship may be a major reason why you get the loan and yet you value the relationship, you may not want to pawn it for money (to put it bluntly). Family relationships and friends are very valuable in life even unto death! Please keep that in mind.
As for the recovered money from Wells Fargo, you can contact your Congressional representatives or Senators to see what they can help you with. You will probably have better luck with the ones nearing re-election time and there are close races. You can also contact the White House directly because it is a very legitimate question where all of the various recovered money went. The government should put the money where its mouth is!
yes family is what keeps me in business, why one year i had paid the duns and bradstreet to "verify" my small business so that I could get more contracts awarded. Not long after and due to my successful marketing strategy I started getting bombarded with companies seeking my product on a grand scale, (not due to duns however, they arent involved in marketing). Any ways, Duns and bradstreet called me back and said I was getting a rather large hit on companies seeking my creditials, (now keep in mind that my business was carrying about 80k of debt and was really looking to head into the profit margin after being in business for 6 years) Some of the contracts I bid were between 100k and 200k just what my small business needed. But when duns and bradstreet reported to these big businesses, they told them that my total credit available was 16k, needless to say, this shot my small business in the foot, as IM sure they thought I wouldnt be able to finance their purchase orders if awarded even though those companies were buying from me, I wasnt buying anything, why would I need 100k of credit. Fact is I was financing my business thru mommy and daddy loans cause banks and sba didnt give a shit about my business, and I asked why d&b couldnt list them on my credit report and they said, well they arent a credited investor. I had spent alot of money on yellow page large advertising this is what generated the big money calls, but I didnt land even one of the big contracts.
Qwest DEX yellow pages is a 7 billion dollar corporation and when I finally was awarded a contract in 2008, it took 4 months to finish the job, and I wasnt able to pay Qwest back by the sept. due date for my advertising that year, I could have gotten caught up next year cause i did have the money in oct. when i finally got paid but, now get this: even though I had already paid Qwest DEX Yellow Pages $60,000 in advertising in all the previous years, they deleted my small business from their book, this was in 2008 - 2009 the year of the collapse. If the world knew this was how corporations treated small business I wonder if it would outrage them. They didnt even have the courtesy to list my name and number as a single line entry, and to this day my business is no longer listed in the yellow pages. I knew then that the system was broken, and since then it has been coming to light to the rest of the world. It seems bankers only want to loan money to people who dont need it. (banks only wanted to give money to my mommy for the house i bought last year, even though they are almost dead, and im actually out working and created two jobs)
Have you tried meeting people at trade shows or direct mailing people of upstream and downstream businesses that you identify on the internet or from the yellow pages? Have you considered doing a related but less capital intensive business instead?
Yes, Dunce and Badstreet (pun intended) can be detrimental to main street businesses.
thats an interesting idea, i wonder if they would leave enough profit on the table, as i usually just break even each year, because i donate half my profit to charity called (employees).
I am up for the challenge however and will continue to try and succeed, for I believe that success is something that comes from within the soul of man and is not based upon profit alone. I believe what is happening is that my eyes are being opened, to how truly closed our country is to the development to small business, perhaps preparing me to become a well qualified advocate to help straighten out what is really wrong with this country. I wasnt really fond of obama bailing out rich bankers, who in turn traded our money in foreign equity swaps which today is supposed to announce whether the top 5 banks are insolvent or not, however, he (obama) did hit home with his proposal to streamline the business development branch of our government with a new website called www.businessusa.gov. None of the other candidates have even addressed such specifics yet, and like a bait and switch salesman's pitch I do not believe that generalized promises will ever bring positive results.
However much I hated the financial bailouts, I felt strongly that the initial QE was justified. We were staring at a financial abyss when there was a run on the money market funds in which businesses parked their payroll money. Which business would have been able to function if it did not pay its employees? Bailing out GM was another correct move. I am not sure about Chrysler because it was mostly just bailing out a hedge fund (and an extremely greedy but huge one with BIG POLITICAL CONNECTIONS). QE2 reignited commodity inflation and has repercussions around the world such as the Arab Spring revolutions. I guess we have to "make lemonade" when we have been handed a lemon by the federal reserve with these revolutions.
Also even if you did not make any profit, you still gave jobs to your employees so it serves the common good. As you may know, money is not everything so smell the roses even though they are in your employees' yards. There is something to be said about the family happiness that a job in a family can engender.
yes, but what of the principle of equality, why is one business worthy of bailout and not another? I actually had work on the table during the collapse, and the funding dryed up, resulting in two people losing their jobs. Let me reiturate that , I actually had alot of contracts on the table, resulting in job creation, and I never tried to screw the american people by creating and selling illegal 2nd mortgages on americans homes in the form of cdos or equity swaps i was creating jobs, and i didnt get any funding. I see in my city school districts (at least 3 of them I drove by who are building million dollar buildings currently even hundreds of million of dollars at where my daughter goes to school, and while I was standing in line at costco, i heard a lady behind me talking about a grant she got. I turned and asked her, "you got a grant for your business" she said, no it was for their school district. I got so upset, I told her, I asked her how giving more money to governmetn was going to help people. she said they could hire more people, or better teachers or something. I was outraged while im struggling to try and finance the two new jobs I had created this year, in my business.
The whole fiasco is patently unfair but the important question is why the people were not watching and preventing the financial disaster. I believe that many people could not and would not delve into so many news articles to monitor what was going on. Hence, I am doubtful about direct democracy. If you can show me how things have improved regarding the level of political and economic awareness of the populace since 2007-2008 when the extended economic collapse was occurring, I may change my mind but it is in my belief something like that will take years, if not decades, or eternity to change. Yes, I still very much like that to change, perhaps through our school systems' educating our younger generations but that will take time.
I determined from what you had posted that the source of the "tsunami" that "drowned" your business had originated from the credit crunch in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse. That should be charged to the account of the greedy bankers, some homeowners, government regulators, Congressional representatives and senators, former Presidents, mortgage companies, rating agencies, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc. It is not due to the school districts building the new buildings. It is arguable about where the "stimulus" money should have gone but small business was apparently low on the priority list of our federal government.
I do not mean to be cynical or facetious but the truth is that the banks that got bailed out were big enough to have counter-party risks that may have congealed into systemic risk (read it as Global Depression). Hank Paulson "tried" to impose "market discipline" and let Lehman Brothers go under and you know what that had led to, right? Lehman Brothers was the SMALLEST investment bank at the time and Hank Paulson was an extremely free-market-oriented guy (he had headed Goldman-Sachs before he became the Secretary of Treasury under Bush Jr.). I think he simply got overly frustrated and perhaps overwhelmed at the time when Lehman collapsed. There was an EVEN bigger fish to fry around that time - AIG and it was TRULY GLOBAL in scope. Without shoring up AIG, global economy would have gotten a real heart attack because AIG was insuring much of the toxic assets worldwide. Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke had been two little kids sticking their fingers in the holes of the embankment through which the North Sea water was coming in for around one and half years. Can you imagine standing there cold and wet and damn it, new holes were springing up left and right and you wish that you have turned into an octopus? Hank Paulson did not have to take the job (he was all set financially) but here was how the government-to-Wall-Street connection dragged him in - a sorry guy. Ben Bernanke was manufacturing "facilities" left and right and he WAS extremely creative but he was blindsided by his "market discipline" mantra. Even octopodes would have reached the limits of the number of their appendages. Yes, I, having observed all of these, did not anticipate how BAD things would have gotten but like you I took "precautions" so I was not hurt badly (yes, conservatism helped). It is most unfortunate that the lingering effects are still with us. Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke were nearly begging Congress to act to save the U.S. and world economy. To their credit, they realized that they had come to the edge of the cliff for Capitalism. Hence, crony capitalism reigns.
There are philosophical differences between parties as to how best to create jobs. Our "stimulus" packages were not creating many new jobs. They were more saving old jobs or cushioning the loss of jobs. You can be angry about them but there is a Biblical saying that God rains on the good and the evil ones regardless. We just have to accept that to minimize economic damages we had to bail out, fatten up, stuff money into the pockets of perhaps the wrong or even evil people. It would have been better if the "stimulus" packages were targeted more towards the creation of new jobs rather than mostly just saving the old jobs in state governments but they were called "shovel-ready." I understood that to mean that I was ready to accept a shovelful of money from the government but hey, when was life fair?
Watching this horror movie unfolding made me realize how rotten things had gotten in our political/economic system. It was profoundly disturbing and it just rubbed me the wrong way but I understand why so many people missed the whole thing (they were too busy working and not looking at the big picture) until they were hit by the 2-by-4. I want to make people wiser so they could watch our business and political system better to avoid going through anything like this again.
How many people can identify the three branches of government? How many people can list the line of succession? How many people can even find Washington DC on a map? Sorry to say this, but the majority of people out there are in no position to make a decision on spending of TARP money, voting of funds for terrorist fighting in the Sudan or even picking a day to celebrate Clinton's birthday.
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and the issues need to be broken down to one allocation and law at a time
unlike the package laws these days
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Smart thinking but goverment prefer crooks
Yes, I agree that is a great idea that I also had thought of at on time. This process would have the added benefit (obviously) of keeping people involved ,and making it less possible that we will ever fall asleep again while our politicians take us down a road of ruin. There would have to be some constraints, conditions, and parameters, I think.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/direct-democracy-candidate/
These people have devised a new internet called the V2 - http://osixs.org/V2_Menu_V2.aspx - that you can do exactly what you suggest. They also have a plan to initiate this process -
http://osixs.org/Rev2_menu_commonsense.aspx
FIGHT THE CAUSE - NOT THE SYMPTOM Cheers!
I think the current internet works fine
if every one voted publicly, the vote can be publicly verified
Hell, in Florida the democrat voters in several counties were TOO stupid to punch a hole in the ballots. They announced they voted for the wrong person because they were confused on punching ONE hole or the OTHER hole. While millions of others in those counties were able to correctly do it, these dumb liberals were too stupid and announced how stupid they were. Then we find out the democrats in control of the ballot machines failed to clean those machines for severl years when the instructions clearly said after each election. Democrats are too stupid to vote. I bet they can find their porn ok.
The govt of the USA is representative republic, not a democracy.
Then why do we even need a government? Do away with all government?
Let`s not go there
Government is needed to do things that individuals cannot do, do effectively, efficiently, or economically.
Doing away with government is a very BAD idea for the people because we can see what places with weak or nearly-non-existent governments like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan do to the living standards of their people. Minimizing government may be a desirable end to strive for (such as by reducing the size of banks so that they can go bankrupt without much consequence and without government bailouts and reducing financial regulations afterwards) but no government is unacceptable.
Yes. And the government is also needed at times to take decisions that may not be popular with the majority but has to be taken nonetheless.
Not every citizen is expected to understand all the intricacies of each and every issue, not even if you provide them with all information. One needs to have a certain level of intellect/training in the first place to be able to actually evaluate all that information. Which is also why we have a judiciary to take decisions on the matters of law instead of letting citizens deliver their own brand of justice, popular or otherwise.
The regular citizen has other full time jobs to do than to evaluate info and take decisions. That's why it is the full time job of the elected representative to take those decisions.
Reducing the size of banks can be just as bad an idea as letting them be 'too big to fail'. An elementary understand of statistics should tell you why.
when they too big., monopoly take over
Not if there are many banks. And there are
They will buy them too
Reducing the size of banks may encounter resistance due to the Mutually Assured Destruction stance of the humongous banks and some are shored up by national governments. What I want is a global reduction in financial arms so we can get out of our straitjackets. EU is trying to shore up their already huge banks to protect them from sovereign defaults. Huge banks have economy of scale and are more profitable to the CEOs and shareholders but they are the real reasons why we are even talking about sovereign (i.e., nation state) defaults and contagions.
What we need is to clear out the toxins in the global financial system with central-bank-backstopped controlled bankruptcies of the huge banks.
We went through the 90's Resolution Trust Corporation's unwinding of the Savings and Loan debacle that had started in the 70's and early 80's. Things were dragged out inordinately because no one wanted to face the bad consequences but eventually the U.S. mustered the courage not to simply merge credit unions backing (NCUA) with savings-and-loans' and banks' backings (FSLIC and FDIC) to keep papering over the dry rot and that cleared up the system. Japan had been doing this sort of papering over since shortly after 1989. Look at where they have gotten their economy in the last two decades. It was a slow-motion train wreck still going on. Observe the symptom of the frequent turn-overs of their prime ministers and ruling coalition. It showed that they have a highly hierarchical society that cannot recognize its problems publicly and just kept on doing very long-term "stimulus" programs. Does the U.S. want to end up like that, with 200% debt-to-GDP ratio? Well, with the spendthrift people that we have in the U.S., the financial collapse would have come much earlier than 200%.
Pray tell me how banks are the reason for Greece constantly over spending for nearly a decade? Dude, I know it's fashionable among your ilk to blame banks for everything from the World war 2 to your girl friend dumping you. But please use those rhetoric in front of OWS not me.
It is NOT a secret that Greece was overspending. Any fiscal conservative would have observed the lifestyles and profligacy that existed. It is the same old thing as what had happened here in the U.S. with the so-called subprime mortgage crisis (in fact, it was NOT strictly subprime nor was it strictly mortgage - the elites invented the vocabulary to confuse our language [so we blame the hapless or ignorant ones or speculators] just as the trick used at the Tower of Babel but the real culprit was wanton multi-level securitization and pushing the salad with the E. Coli-infested tomato out to the world salad bar for investors [poop is made into tasty morsels for all unsuspecting ones]). Many people were in on the gravy train (borrowing rates at euro-area interest rates). Let me tell you in almost all financial crises SOMEONE always knew. People just did not pay attention to the canaries in the coal mines.
If the banks had enforced their strict lending standards even to sovereign nations, they would not have gotten themselves into such hot waters. They were correct though in their judgments that the ECB, IMF, Merkozy, euro-area leaders, even China, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, etc. would all ride to the rescue. In the U.S. if you remember Goldman-Sachs in late 2007, it got burned to the tune of billion(s) of dollars but I tell you Goldman-Sachs did have some of the best financial brains and turn around to buy insurance from AIG. That is why we had to bail out AIG but Goldman-Sachs was so afraid of their going under, they even got Warren Buffett's billions of dollars to shore them up at 10% interest rate and preferred equity. Goldman-Sachs was correct in their judgment and Warren Buffet was correct, too.
Really no one but Greece is largely responsible for their own overspending. However, prudent banks should not have functioned as their "drug" pusher. I would say the same thing about the U.S., too. We are going into a slow-motion train wreck as we speak just as Greece did for a decade. IMF and Germany, the most economically powerful country in the euro-area were playing their game of forcing austerity measures on Greece at the same time trying to preserve the integrity of the euro-area. Germany as an export powerhouse gains tremendously from the single-currency area of the euro so Germany had to save it sooner or later. All I can say is Chancellor Angela Merkel played her part well as "Mutti" but the gyrations made the global financial markets dizzy for about two years by now. The final act of the euro drama is not over yet. Stay tuned. A sequel will be unveiled, starring the U.S. I guarantee you unless we change course this sequel will be both spectacular and appalling at the same time. What would happen if the 800-pound gorilla of the economic world keels over at the Empire State Building?
Another thing that popped into my mind is why Obama appointed the Bowles-Simpson commission and simply ignored their recommendations/suggestions? I think that he initially wanted to really tackle the very hard problem that had to be solved for the long-term health of the U.S. since the Congress had plainly refused to create its own deficit-reduction commission. However, Obama decided eventually that it was the most American thing to say simply, "It's too hard!" (that we hear so often from our K-12 students about doing mathematics) so Obama chose to become a demagogue instead. Not causing pain is a path to reelection but as long as the people are not pushing for deficit reduction, it is not "MY" problem.
Okay. I have to agree with you on this. Banks should not have lent to Greece or Spain, the fiscal mismanagement should have been obvious to anyone. And yet they did lend. May be because they were very stupid or very smart. And for once I see some well reasoned, fact based, arguments. You quite obviously are not the average Occutard (no offense to you. But yes offense to Occutards).
How about the banks being both very stupid AND very smart at the same time? A little bit the same as our very intelligent but perhaps evil Goldman-Sachs. It is why I am still tuned in to the EU. How will this drama end? Will there really be sovereign-nation contagion?
Well in banking you make assumptions. The assumption here was that there won't be a default. Of course the fact that average profits, even with a default, would still be positive for many banks. Right now, I believe (my assumption) we will not have any default and the Euro survives
Good. I hope so. Europe is in many ways our brothers and sisters on the other side of the pond, culturally and otherwise. It is a shame if the euro-area breaks up. European economic union can be good for preventing the factious nations from going to war. The euro also makes trading in the euro-area easy. For all the buzz that Europe generates, many European countries are relatively small in comparison with some U.S. states economically so it helps on the world stage that EU speaks with one united voice. We in the U.S. tend to stand on the same side as the EU on human rights issues, for example.
The problem with Euro that still remains is that the ECB or the EU has no control over member nation fiscal policies.
I thought that they got something worked out for closer fiscal integration at the potential detriment of the U.K. I wonder about the status of that deal. Well, Europe got so many last-minute and weekend specials that I admit that I have lost track of them but I hope to catch up on that. What have you read or heard recently in the news about their new plans?
About the EU's new plans. Well the Greek debt deal should have worked out by now and everything else that is there in the media (and some other things that are not there yet ;-) )
Okay, thanks.
One thing the big banks (including Goldman Sachs) did in Greece more than ten years ago in collusion with Greek politicians was hide their debt. This was a secret deal that the average Greek didn't know anything about. So many of their problems could have been dealt with back then, instead they got worse.
The GS deal was perfectly legal within the EU framework. And the government knew full well what they were doing. The still had enough time and opportunity to cut spending and get their act together. They didn't
I knew that the deal was legal and the government should have put austerity measures in then. It's just the fact that this deal was kept secret from the Greek people is what bothers me. Had the people knew, maybe things would have turned out differently. Although the crisis would have been bad then, it is horrendous now.
The people know the mess they now are into and yet many are not ready for the austerity measures.
And add to that.....tax evasion is a national past-time.
Um. Yeah. And just exactly what kind of oversight do you propose so that "the people" can be sure that this internet system is fair, honest, accurate, and completely NOT manipulated in any way?
well they can monitor who logs on to the internet with IP addresses, people can vote with their social security numbers, and passcodes, and perhaps send photo id copies of their licenses. Fact is if someone trying to log on and vote on an issue that a fraudulent person has already hacked, they can report it and an investigation can ensue. Hell, let the congressmen do this job, as we wouldnt need them for much anymore anyways. All computers have to register to access the internet anyways, so its not going to be too difficult.
we can't even get agreement to have proof of ID for traffic stops.
Every time this comes up I wind up saying the same thing; the Internet is not magic, nor is the information passed across it secure assuming someone wants to crack it enough. There is no such thing currently in existence as an uncrackable cyptographic algorithm; all there are are algorithms that take an absurdly long time to brute force (until someone figures out a shortcut). 1024-bit RSA just fell to three kids at the University of Michigan who used slightly damaged hardware to assemble the key piece by piece using consumer-available Pentium chips and 100 or so hours of computing time. Do we really want to trust the sum total of our policy to a system that's that vulnerable?
http://occupywallst.org/forum/direct-democracy-candidate/
Tell me how would you hack that platform?
No oversight needed ether. People would oversight themselves.
hang anyone that abuses it. like our votes arent manipulated already. remember when bush ran for president, and the only state that contested the votes happened to be governed by his brother? that was an outright conflict of interest, i knew then we should have made it illegal for more than one family to be involved in government at any one time. It's like there isn't enough other familes to represent us, we need to make it a family run business? Sheesh, I knew something was wrong then.
Take the manipulation that can and does exist within smaller, closed "voting" systems and multiply it by a BILLION when introduced into a worldwide unclosed system. Impossible to control.
banks do it, ive logged onto my online bank account for 10 years now and never gotten hacked. multi layer passcode protection can be improved upon as needed.
Wow. Just....wow.....
I would vote for a huge tax on each email sent. I think I will propose that and get all my rich friends to vote on it. Once it passes, thanks to the internet, we can have a $100/month tax on emails. Vote YES on internet email tax.