Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

It's pretty simple. The venture capitalists all live in Massachusetts and California and to a lesser extent New York.

The economy here is heavily dependent on the Venture investors. If you walk down Mass. Ave. in Cambridge or drive down Route 128 or visit any office park in the state, you will see endless numbers of buildings with names on them filled with people who are there because of venture capital.

So even if they are incredibly chintzy political donors, and the political views of the average venture capitalist tend to be a fairly bizarre macho libertarianism that makes most politicians either smirk or squirm, no one wants to do anything political that kills whatever keeps those geese laying these golden eggs we see all around us.

So, you get the states that ought to lead the charge against carried interest on ideological grounds fighting against it on practical grounds.

And if you chart out who gets those tax breaks and where they live, they'll live here, not in Alabama.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

This is not correct.

The culprit was the steady move from the halfway reasonable greed we used to endure on Wall Street to full-on, grab absolutely everything and fuck everyone else approach that we currently suffer through. The rewriting of a law which removed the ban on outright gambling which enabled assholes to take out insurance on assets they never came close to owning combined with the greed and idiocy of banks who were paying themselves irresponsibly large bonuses on the premiums on those insurance products that they never thought they'd have to pay out and on which they did absolutely zero research was the problem. Combine that with the fact that Republicans have steadily reduced our ability to police anyone on Wall Street by eliminating departments who were already overwhelmed trying to catch the most sophisticated crooks in the world and mix it with banks who were knowingly selling piles of shit that they forced rating agencies to rate as triple A if they wanted to keep their business. Sprinkle in the fact that they created the market for those products and overlooked the massive fraud created by the oversized demand that was going on at every level below (from mortgage brokers to the local banks who bought them) and you have a recipe for the crash.

It wasn't about wage stagnation. I suppose you can add that the shift of the right wing pitch of the American dream from a picket fence and 2.5 white children to "Everyone can be Trump, and when you make it, you won't want to pay taxes" assisted the rich take even more of the pie. Hell, the fact that we let Walmart put every small business out of business and then scream bloody murder when we try to introduce legislation to take care of the people who now have to work and shop there. We all subsidize Walmart's criminally low pay by providing their employees with healthcare, food stamps, and other care. All that may have something to do with wage stagnation, but wage stagnation and personal debt levels did not create the great recession.

You act like we haven't gutted our unions and neglected our minimum wage. Those are the things that lift all boats. You put money in the hands of those who will spend it and will get spent.

This may be true. But if we continue to shit all over our educational system, the people doing the innovating and owning will be in other countries.

Or we can blame them for the elaborate fraud they pulled and actually hold them responsible. Of course it won't mean a thing because the risk-reward analysis for any rational human being in the current bonus culture is a very easy and predictable one.

You are definitely mainly correct on this.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Why won't my people joust at windmills? The other side is jousting at windmills!! WHERE ARE MY FUCKING WINDMILL-JOUSTERS????

You do realize that, in a Republican-controlled House, those bills wouldn't even get out of committee -- don't you?

You apparently do not realize that lining up Democrats to say "Yes, we passed ACA, the biggest expansion of public benefits in decades. But it's shitty and we hate it!!!!" would not be very smart.



Which were the bills on which Republicans needed Democratic votes?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

You don't have to vote for Hillary, just like my moronic cousin doesn't have to vote for anyone other than Trump.

At least he understands what he's doing. And he's a moron.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

What about Coulter? I seem to remember you being one of the right-wingers who rubbed off to thoughts of that shriveled bitch, but this goes back years and I could be thinking of someone else.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Wonk, you are absolutely wrong on this issue.

During Glass-Steagall, there were commercial banks and there were investment banks. Their assets could not be mixed. If Glass-Steagall were in place through the 2000s, every single I-bank would have gone down because they would have been buying and holding the shit products that destroyed the economy. The point that you are missing is that they wouldn't have had any assets to balance their toxic holdings, the government would not have been able to infuse enough money to keep all of them afloat and they all would have gone down, bringing the commercial banks with them as there would be a massive, universal run on all of the banks.

What you're saying above about Glass-Steagall is just misguided.

No argument here.

No. You are not. You are expecting miracles. Whether the Republicans block any and all legislation relating to healthcare through control of Congress or through the filibuster, what you're looking for will. not. happen. You can expect your Democratic politicians to move mountains all you want. But you need to open your eyes to the political realities in this country.

Ah. I see. We should send our representatives to Congress to do pointless, unattainable shit. This is the most ridiculous thing you've said so far.

Maybe that's because Hillary is pragmatic and Bernie, though I love him, is running on a completely unachievable pie-in-the-sky platform.

I will defer to you on this point since it's your area of expertise. But, again, why wouldn't you approach this issue from a "Let's push Hillary on the points we think are important, rather than, I give up. Let Trump burn it to the ground" perspective? You expect all these things from your candidate, but don't think we need to take any responsibility for pushing them once they're in office?

You're really not making a lot of sense on this stuff.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Damn. Did I miss the meeting?

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

But again, they aren't paying taxes, but they are a drain on resources. They eliminate jobs, they don't create them. I suppose the luxury goods market and fine-dining restaurants benefit. But for the rest of the state, they're sucking tit, not filling up the jugs.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

What torture are you talking about?

I really want to ask you a serious question. Let's take a scale from 1 to 100. Do you think that domestic surveillance (which I believe has never been below a 30 on that scale) will not go from what it is now--let's say 40--to 80 or 90 under Cruz or Trump?

Never mind. Don't answer.

What I don't understand about you is that you probably have a list of 100 issues that are important to you, some quite obviously more than others. What you're telling me is that if Democrats, as a party, do not nominate a candidate that holds the same position as you on 90%, but is closer to 82%, you're going to take your ball and go home and let the person who agrees with you on 4% of your issues control this country? Is there any other aspect of your life where this works for you?

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I think when GGG said this -- "If you walk down Mass. Ave. in Cambridge or drive down Route 128 or visit any office park in the state, you will see endless numbers of buildings with names on them filled with people who are there because of venture capital" -- he did not mean the buildings were full of VCs, but that they are full of VC-backed companies.

If VC-backed companies are eliminating jobs, I will have trouble understanding why California is doing so well, and the Bay Area in particular booming, over recent years.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I have never liked Ann Coulter. She has always done the cause of conservatives more harm than good. It is hard for me to even discuss her without using the sorts of words that I try to abstain from using to describe other women.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Under Glass-Steagall, the commercial banks would have been limited in the amount of toxic assets they could hold. They also would have been barred from selling anything but whole loans because they were barred from underwriting securities. The I-banks would have hit the shitter, but the commercial banks would not have.

And I would say fine, vote Hilary and push her for tax reform, but she's backing the kind of tax cuts I oppose. The same ones the Republicans are, just on a slightly smaller scale.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

From where I sit, Hilary and I stand together on about 20% of the issues I hold important. I've also said as we get closer to November, I'll be taking a closer look at where she stands on many of these issues. I may very well conclude she's someone I can vote for. I'm not there now. And quite frankly, I'm pretty fucking sick if getting browbeaten about it by a bunch of my friends, people I try to respect because of their willingness to make allowance for independent thought. Right now, I'm feeling like the fucking yahoos on Facebook are more tolerant of different views and it really fucking skeeves me out.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Incorrect. Yes, commercial banks would have held none of the products (other than the actual mortgages, which were a tiny piece of the problem and which would have been sold to I-banks anyway) that dragged the economy down. It's the next step that you apparently cannot or are refusing to hear.

With no Glass Steagall:
The assets of the mega commercial/I-banks' commercial side provided the stability that allowed the government to force some mergers and infuse some money that kept the financial system from completely collapsing.

With Glass Steagall:
The large I-banks who would have zero access to commercial bank assets would have been completely beyond repair. The government would not have had enough money to prop them up. Every single one of them would have blown up and the result of that explosion would have brought down every single commercial bank. And that's because there would have been no confidence in the financial system anywhere, so it would not have mattered that those commercial banks were not a part of the I-banks.

The fact that commercial banks were allowed to merge with I-banks reduced the damage of the '07 crash in that the commercial bank assets provided them with the stability they needed to limp through the crisis.

Change her mind. You keep talking about all this fighting you want people in office to do. But you're willing to throw your hands up and walk away if your candidate doesn't win?

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Oh stop with the whining. You are saying things that don't make a ton of sense. We are calling you on it in our entirely greedy board-specific annoying way that hasn't changed since we first started posting.

If you tell me you'll revisit her positions come November, that's cool with me. If you decide to stay home after that point, I can't say I'd respect that, but obviously you can do whatever the hell you want. But when Trump or Cruz wins and destroys every single aspect of this country you love and respect, I'd prefer not to read any posts from you about it.

TM