Dad At Work

The fact is that Democrats and Republicans are to blame. It's possible that lending policy crafted by Democrats in the 90s, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac helmed by Democratic supporters, helped create the market of over priced homes and over extended mortgage holders. At the same time, the free-marketeer and Republican mantra of "less regulation" created the market of sub-prime mortgage securities sold and resold for the past 10 to 15 years, shift debt, creating profits from nothing, and lining the pockets of lender CEOs and investment bankers.

If the Republicans knew that the housing market was bad, they should have fixed it when they held the reigns from 2000 to 2006. If the Democrats saw the "Bush fiscal policy" as evil, they should have spend the last two years fixing it rather than biding time until their President got elected.

Representatives of both sides have failed us as much as the CEOs of these companies that sought profit on the unstable foundation of the mortgage and housing industry.

Come November, do us all a favor and throw the bums out. Start with Boehner, Pelosi, Frank, and Bachus.

These stats on Presidential Elections is pretty cool. They look at what is the smallest number of votes in what states to change the outcome of the election. 2000 was 269 votes in Florida to change to Gore victory. And all they would have had to do was ask for a recount of the entire state and the may have won. Instead, the Supreme Court declared voter fraud by their attempt to just recount the votes in a few disputed counties.

Anyway... I hope that this election is not that close and that it doesn't come down to lawyers and how well the conservatives have stocked the Supreme Court. But in my own state of Wisconsin, the Republican Attorney General, who is also co-chair of the state McCain campaign, is suing the state elections commission for supposedly not being rigorous enough in it's verification of voter registrations. He brings this suit less than two months before the election.

The only motivation I can see here is to throw this Obama leaning state into a clusterf*ck situation where our results are disputed. It's a shame really because most of the state uses optical scan voting machines (with a paper-trail!) that have been (finally!) recognized as one of the best methods of electronic voting. We've been using them for at least 10 to 15 years, at least ever since I started voting.

And there have been disputes in voter fraud, especially in Milwaukee, they've had 4 years since the last presidential election and 2 years since the last national election to get it straightened out. To bring this suit now instead of 6 months ago is so obviously a political ploy.

I was tolerant of Van Hollen (even after yelling "that's why you suck!" at his Rep opponent during an interview in his primary, and even though he wasn't my pick) because he had some good opinions on some matters and had some good experience taht made him well qualified. But this latest schtick is ridiculous and I can't wait to vote against him.

Sounds like this kind of thing is going on all over - teams of lawyers being sent around to challenge results in November. And it's both sides doing it.

Shame on all of you in both parties. You have had years to fix polling problems. Don't muck it up now just because you see an advantage to your side. Think of the process and the people and the country for once, not just your party.

Get Your Class War On is an interesting article on campaign strategy in relation to the current financial crisis. Thomas Franks' suggests that the Democrats should highlight the crisis in terms of rich vs. poor (us vs. them) to combat "the public vs. the liberal elite" schtick of the Republican campaign.

Frank says:

On Monday, John McCain blamed the disaster on "greed by some based in Wall Street." It's a personal failing of some evil few, in other words, and presumably capitalism will start working again once we squeeze the self-interest out of it. In the weeks to come, maybe Sen. McCain will also take a bold stand against covetousness and sloth.

But the structural changes of the past 28 years that have made all this possible -- the waves of deregulation, the takeover of government itself by business interests -- these haven't made too much of an impression on him. In March Mr. McCain actually called for more deregulation in response to the crisis

I'm not an economist, nor do I really understand the workings of corporate America. Part of me hates the billionaire leaders of corporations who only seem to increase their haul while we get stiffed. As in the rising profits of oil corporations as our gas prices rise, and the multi-billion dollar salary of the CEO of my health insurance company while they raise our rates to "meet costs".

But in these publicly traded companies, are there not also Board of Directors who are elected by the shareholders? And don't these same BoDs hire the CEOs, create their pay packages and golden parachutes? Where is the ire of these stockholders? Why isn't there sweeping change in the make-up of these boards, as well as in the make-up of the CEOs pay packages.

Seems like part of the same old-boys network at work here - they are all too close to each other. If they take a swipe at someone, it might come around and hit them in their job, too.

Yep. Looks like a class war risin'.

The feds just bailed out AIG, the largest insurer of financial services businesses, after their stock plummeted this month. Part of the reason their stock plummeted, according to the Wikipedia article is because investors evaluated their holdings in light of Lehman brothers' (another recently-failed financial services corporation) holdings, and found them similarly over-valued.

It seems that these huge financial services corporations bet on the high-risk, high-gain low interest mortgage market from the last 10 years, not thinking about what would happen when people couldn't pay once the rates on their adjustable rate mortgages rose after the initial 3, 5, or 7 year term.

The fact that so many of the huge corporate banks and financial services (insurance, savings and loans, brokerage firms, etc) are all tied into these companies is chilling. They are all interconnected and involved in the same shady dealings with the same apparent lack of foresight.

In the past 10 years (maybe longer, but that's as long as I"ve been noticing it), the US Banks, Citibanks, and Chases have been gobbling up their smaller competitors. No one's got a monopoly, but the market is certainly less diverse than it was 10 years ago. The government has antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to protect the public from their evils, but what about the now apparent evils of a simply less-diverse market.

Or would all of these problems still have come crashing down even if the top 5 banking institutions were a more diverse 10 or 15 different ones?

A second point is I wonder if there's an analysis of the salaries of the CEOs of these failing companies, including any severance or retirement packages dealt out in the last 5 to 10 years. It seems these fools who ultimately are responsible for the current instability of their companies (and the economy as a result) deserve a pay cut, if not a forfeiture of their nest eggs in order to pay for the burden the taxpayers are now shouldering.