Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

I acknowledge it and stand by it. I admit to a populist anger at paying the salary of people who pretend that they, because of their superior knowledge of the human condition, can fix things. This goes for academics who weasel their way into 'public service' and politicians who also promise to fix things like the economy and create jobs.

If they stay in the private sector and peddle their notions to people who can choose to buy them or not, I have no problem with them. You know, like the idiot students who are paying incredible sums to sit at their feet and are now blaming Wall Street for their student loans. But when taxpayer dollars are supporting their experiments in creating the perfectly regulated world...you bet I have a ton of contempt.

Note to Mr. Carroll
 

Thanks for your time. I realize finding a good place to hold these discussions can be a challenge, but doing them at your office, with other people talking in the background -- putting pages together for the next edition, maybe? -- makes it pretty hard to hear the points you're trying to make.

Maybe you should do the next one from the men's room. ;)

Re: Note to Mr. Carroll
 

...at Grand Central Station.

Ba-dump!

;-)

(it actually gets pretty quiet around 3 am, or at least more quiet than Conn's office).

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

You get so confusing when you're trying to be sarcastic. It just doesn't come naturally, does it?

I don't make the claim that the left hates the rich nor do I make various claims that the left hates the rich. That's something you made up. I hope you don't do that in therapy. It could actually affect people's lives.

Absolutely inscrutable. First of all there are tons and tons of rich people on the left. You don't hate the rich, you just don't think they deserve what they have and want them to give you some of it for your various projects. You know, income redistribution.

I bet this would be really, really good if it had any meaning.

Are you perhaps writing a script for an absurdist play?

BTW, here's what Warren made teaching at Harvard, "Warren is teaching only one class, contract law, twice a week this fall. Records show she was paid $350,000, plus $182,000 in royalties and consulting fees, before she took leave a year ago to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on behalf of the Obama administration."

"And she had been paid $192,722 for serving as chairman of a congressional committee that monitored the 2008 federal bank bailout"

And PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE tell me when I have indicated that I have tender feelings of hedge fund managers. You can't? I didn't think so.

Banal authoritarianism!
 

Weren't you kind of intrigued when the guy in the background said this?

Re: Banal authoritarianism!
 

"David Brooks, Thomas Freidman and the banal authoritarianism..." [of the NYT op-ed columnists, perhaps?]

Mmm, yeah, dunno about Brooks, but if Freidman writes one more apologia for the strongmen in Beijing, I may retch.

Re: Banal authoritarianism!
 

Come on Rob, he's really, really smart and he's just trying to help.

Has it always been this bad? Has the class of intelligentsia always been this blind to their hubris? It's all Charlie Rose's fault for fawning over them all these years. The whole lot of them should be put out to sea.

I feel better, now.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Note the contrast, once again, between reality and the wingnut delusions of badhat -- which are, sadly, typical of the entire conservative movement.

Lawrence Lessig:


On OWS, Lessig says:

From Reclaiming the Republic: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig, in Josh Cohen's Boston Review.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Really? You've never characterized plans to increase some taxes as "eat the rich"? Let alone do it so much that it has the characteristic of a tic?

You often manage to combine a pretty mean-spirited tone with a vacuousness that is stunning in its vulnerability. I wish you well.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Badhat has been mischaracterizing what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is intended to do for a long time. As we see above, badhat routinely describes its purpose as "educating the public."

On one hand this probably isn't exactly a lie, because badhat probably has no idea why the CFPB was actually created. On the other hand, badhat knows she has no idea why the CFPB was created, and yet she goes around characterizing it anyway, despite her towering ignorance.

The actual purpose of the CFPB is to "write and enforce bank rules, conduct bank examinations, monitor and report on markets, as well as collect and track consumer complaints."

Or, from the Bureau's web site:

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Here's the key aspect of the protest to which most people, if they understand what this involves, should relate:

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Which side are you on -- Taxpayer or Politician?:


http://www.c-span.org/Events/Lawmake...e/10737425628/ (Click on the video symbol on the upper right hand corner for Hearing on Anwar. @31:15 for the gist, although the whole of it is instructive)

Quote:

At a Natural Resources Committee hearing Friday on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) mistakenly addressed the professor as “Dr. Rice” while calling his testimony “garbage.” Brinkley interrupted, saying: “It’s Dr. Brinkley, Rice is a university,” and “I know you went to Yuba [Community College in California] and couldn’t graduate —” Then it was Young’s turn to interrupt. “I’ll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair,” he told the witness. “You just be quiet.” Brinkley countered: “You don’t own me. I pay your salary. I work for the private sector and you work for the taxpayer.”

Re: Banal authoritarianism!
 

Glad I could help, though maybe Kez deserves the credit.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Ach, this is what is so false that it grates on me. Elsewhere I discussed this with Don Zeko, where even he, a leftist, assumes that risk needs to be socialized. We argue that consequence needs to work its way through to cleanse the system with the annihilation of bad financial institutions.

These OWS wannabe lumpen proles wouldn't have it any other way. They love the current scheme where they get their easy, cheap credit and live their upper middle class lifestyles while LARPing as Les Miserables cast members on the weekend. They just don't like the idea of their neighbors being wealthier.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Oh, gosh, even knowing as little as I do about all this, I knew someone was going to counter with this argument.

Yes, I know about the right arguing for letting them suffer the consequences. However, I truly question whether that's true in practice (as opposed to in theory, which would indeed be the case for free marketeers) or just a convenient thing to say considering that the current administration chose to bail out the banks.

As I said, little I know about the whole ordeal, however I think that some risk needs to be socialized providing there's a limit to it. And by the same token the profits should also find their way to the same group (we all) that ends up assuming the risk. The problem is the marked asymmetry between who assumes the risk and who gets the profits. In light of the bail out, banks and bankers have made great profits, and that's the point that creates resentment in many people, not just OWS. People are more willing to tighten their belts when they see that everybody is in the same situation but when they see those who created or contributed to the debacle happily collecting their profits while the masses are barely surviving their unemployment and worsening quality of life, their reaction shouldn't be expected to be of passive acceptance.

Your despise for them as shown by your use of language detracts from your argument. You may like or not their message or the way they deliver it, but you're hating their guts.

I personally think they have a valid message, if their delivery of the same may not be most appealing. I'm hoping they'll find a better way.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

The current administration? The stalwarts of the party were able to defeat the bailout under the last administration. I know that it is common currency on the left to believe that we were all enamored with the Bush administration, but that isn't the case, and if you were reading conservative websites at the time, you'd have noticed.

No, I think you believe us. Otherwise, you folks on the left were incredibly disingenuous and dishonest with the American people when you claimed the Tea Party caucus elected in 2010 were insane fanatics. So which would you say it was?

Except that you want to socialize the risk to preserve the current order which you feel benefits you. That is, this whole system built on a great lie needs to be preserved, because you like where you ended up in it.

You already have your socialized profit. The petit bourgeois illusion of the upper middle class professional paid with by credit. What more do you want? To be paid more for this illusion?

Banks and bankers have made "great profits" by facilitating the creation of cheap money. That is how "money is made on money". The question is: where does that cheap money go? It goes to the urban professionals and dilettantes who live in gentrified city blocks and gated suburbs with huge student loans, outrageous mortgages, and a wallet full of credit cards. It is then turned toxic by the gullible elements of the real middle and lower middle class who seek to purchase the same gaudy, cheap illusion with credit.

None of this is possible without this system of cheap money, and the system of cheap money isn't possible without the source of it profiting greatly. Why? Because the risk is obvious. It is only a matter of time before the system collapses, and so it is a game of musical chairs. Get your money in, get it out, before it all falls down. You folks on the left are incapable of believing, it seems, that reality can get in the way of elaborate social engineering, so you feel that the need to "stabilize" this system is essential to continuing it. And it is so obvious to people on the left that technocrats can do anything if they control government, you're off of "fixing the system" and onto "wealth disparity".

It is like people complaining at a dinner party about how unfair it is, the size and opulence of some local magistrate's villa, a week before Vesuvius erupts and makes it all trivia.

I do not believe that we are all undergoing the same "belt tightening". My city is undergoing an economic apocalypse. Where do you live, if you don't mind my asking? What is your "belt tightening"?

I dislike hubris, not people. Everyone on this board should know better than to take the OWS crowd seriously. They are sophomoric--literally. And with their violence, they have cast a dark shadow over left wing politics. Again.

It is time for people to discard the cauls on their faces on these matters. This isn't a football game, where we need to root for our team. This is a world changing event.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

You're right, you're right. It all started with your not-so-beloved Bush. Let me use the proverbial Perry-oops!

I wish you could get out of your head that there is a "you folks on the left" entity that you can communicate with in this forum.

But besides that, oh, I have no doubt in my mind, the Tea Party crowd is as crazy and creepy as it gets. Insane fanatics would do, if that's how you want to qualify them.

I liked it better before the unnecessary wars and the huge deficits started by Bush. I also would like it better if the income/wealth gap wasn't as huge as it is or the unemployment so high, or if there wasn't so much resistance to raise taxes for the rich, or there wasn't so much talk of destroying our only safety nets, social security and Medicare. You know, all those things that the OWSers talk about.

Nice, Sulla. Trying to see if you push some buttons or something? Let me smile back at you. Nice try.

That's the real trickle down, right? What trickles down is credit, debt and the illusion of materialistic capitalism?

Keep at it, Sulla, you may be on your way to discover socialism after all.

More of the wonders of capitalism, as if money was something real.

I think I saw a similar movie.

You mean, how are things here in the suburbs of Wall Street? They are the same as they've always been. That's why we need to increase their taxes, there's money to be spared.

What is a world changing event? OWS? Global financial melt down?

In light of how seriously you think all this is, I'm pretty confident that you would support adding some taxes to the wealthy (who can spare), while making sure that people don't start dying on the streets by providing food, shelter and health care to those in need.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

You don't like being lumped in with the left wing but totally agree with their views on the Tea Party? Let me guess; you consider yourself to be something of a moderate?

Doesn't quite square though. The Tea Party are simultaneously ideological fanatics but also insincere, cynical political operators who don't mean what they say about fiscal restraint and an end to the bailout culture? How did you decide this, divination?

Sorry, its hard to believe that you actually do care about Bush's "huge deficits" when you don't care about the current deficit, and you object to the Republican House's efforts to reduce a paltry $1.2 trillion over ten years.

It doesn't matter if people make more money than you Ocean. And it is a ridiculous myth, the idea that "taxing the rich" at the levels being proposed would make any significant difference in the budget. Like so many things proposed by the left in this day and age, it is an emotional proposal.

Also, I'm sorry that the scheme of bribery has brought us near the edge of ruin, but anyone who tells you that SS and Medicare don't need reform is lying to you, and insulting your intelligence to boot.

It shouldn't offend you at all. It is the truth. The upper middle class live a life based on credit. The rates paid for everything from mortgages to car payments to credit cards to student loans are based on the current scheme on Wall Street. What is unbelievable is that you don't want any of those things to end....you simply don't want the people whom you get it from to make as much money doing it.

It is outrageous.

Eh? It's the system you favor. And it is easily curable by letting the practice of bad business result in failure. Like you said at the outset, you would prefer to socialize the risk.

I'm not interested in socialism. Socialism is organized mediocrity.

Money is something real. It is our cultural value assignment for time and labor. The problem is that the American left, with its rather rudimentary understanding of socialism, has devalued money for the sake of collective consumerism. When you let committed leftist run a capitalist state....they break it.

Yes, we need to raise the taxes on mine and land owners in Nevada, the casino operators and the businessmen of Las Vegas, in order to satisfy your class envy in the suburbs of New York.

OWS is an insignificant blip. What is happening in Europe is the final unraveling of this whole sordid affair.

I reject that framing. People are not dying in the streets from starvation whether we make people in the Upper West side slightly closer to your income bracket or not.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

No, I don't think of myself as a moderate, but mostly liberal with some quasi conservative pockets. No one is 100 % one thing or the other.


No, not simultaneously. Some are ideological fanatics, some cynical political operators, some just people that don't know the extent of what they're getting behind.

We've seen those nice graphs showing how the deficit was created, that it is you who chooses to believe what you want. Reducing the deficit is a good idea. It is the how that we disagree on.

What seems hard for you to understand is that it isn't about me. I don't care whether people make more money than me or not. My concern is about those who are paying the consequences of this financial crisis and risking their survival.

Perhaps there's an emotional component, and perhaps it wouldn't solve all problems, but it would help. Before thinking about cutting other programs that protect the elderly and the disabled, I would prefer to revert to pre-Bush taxes or even increase them a bit.

Needing reform doesn't mean destroying those programs. There's a big difference.

I'm not offended in the least. Living closer to one's means is an idea that I have always liked, and practiced in my own life. But I wouldn't want to make a sudden change and end up hurting a lot of vulnerable people in the transition.

You insist on talking about class envy. I don't think envy has anything to do with the current situation. Why do you insist on framing it in such unrealistic way?

Your guess, your speculation, perhaps your framing of the topic.

Wait and see. Hopefully people will not die from starvation, illnesses or increased crime because some elements of the government will act responsibly in order to prevent it. I don't see corporations or Nevadans coming to the rescue anyhow.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

I wonder how many men think that every time they read a comment by you.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Well the default position of all those supposed modes is what I said. Instead of arguing "they don't really mean it", assume we all do. What is your argument against the position other than it will be unpleasant while it works its way through?

First of all no serious person opposed the campaign in Afghanistan. Secondly, the argument of the left is that Medicare Part D is too cheap, not that it is too expensive. Number three, once war is engaged in Iraq, to argue over the cost is an obscenity. Victory is the only choice when troops are deployed in the field.

Fourthly, Democrats support 3/4ths of the Bush tax cuts.

So where is there actually some kind of singularity of responsibility on the Bush deficit?

Those who are paying the consequences? You mean the people paying higher prices at the grocery store for food? Or the people priced out of buying investment property with their savings because of a FHA policy of artificially floating the housing market?

Because the OWS crowd isn't paying for any consequence. Neither is the gentrified urban left. Neither are the lower class clients of the Democratic party who receive subsidies for the mere act of living. So who pays? I'll give you a hint: they were in the streets in 2009-2010.

Let's put it this way, it would help slightly more than eliminating the foreign aid budget. How seriously do you take that proposal as a means of solving America's problems? So if this is true, why do Democrats and OWS types keep talking about it? Because it is the easy answer that the left likes to hear.

I see. So you favor raising taxes on the middle class and the poor in the middle of a recession in order to "protect the elderly and the disabled". That we can do. But there isn't a dollar of domestic spending which can be cut because every single penny is necessary to 'protect the elderly and disabled'.

No one is talking about "destroying" the programs. That kind of rhetoric just shows that nothing has been learned from Europe.

You just said you are fine with socializing the risk, which suggests you don't want any change. Pain is the price of healing. There is a reason why addicts suffer physical discomfort during withdrawal; the attraction of vice is pleasure. Its absence brings pain to the addict.

I don't think it is unrealistic, that is why. The most far left people generally seem to be members the non-managerial, non-entrepreneurial upper middle class. There has always been an unseemly amount of class envy among this group.

It isn't a guess. I have been predicting the current situation in Europe since 2008. The problem has been obvious. And the consequence of Europe's collapse will reverberate throughout the planet. It will tear down the remnant of this scheme, whether you like it or not.

You have a concept of America that is very dark. There was a beautiful, flourishing society before the far left came to power in this country, you know.

It is neither the duty of the government, corporations, or Nevadans to "rescue" you. The only thing facing imminent doom is the illusion of the petit bourgeois.

Re: Values Added: Winter Is Coming (Michelle Goldberg & Conn Carroll)
 

Okay, Sulla, I'll have to drop our conversation here because my professional responsibilities, as an educated professional member of the left in this part of the country will not allow me to dedicate so much time to it.

I just wanted to say, that the idea of envy is completely off. Maybe some people are envious like that, I don't know, I've never met any. Probably the idea of the left having a saintly concept of itself is closer to reality if you want to criticize something.

And in terms of my personal survival, I've survived much worse times. I have no significant worries. I'll adapt one way or the other. I'm lucky also to be in a profession that's in need everywhere in the world. No kidding.