Pangloss

It's starting to look like Republicans have some real ammunition here in terms of responsibility for the AIG bonuses. Secretary Geitner said today that he pushed for the loopholes that allowed compensation bonuses. But the Secretary of the Treasury doesn't write the laws -- Congress does. And Congress was dodging these questions -- which are finally coming from the entire MSM and not just Fox News -- today. Pelosi, Reid, and Dodd were all hammered on this point at press conferences today. I don't let Republicans off the hook -- President Bush signed TARP, after all, and Republicans seemed very much in favor of TARP and the other bank bailouts at the time. But they also complained that they weren't invited in for all the decision-making, and Democrats were in charge of Congress in 2008 as well, so it's starting to look like Congressional Democrats more or less own this bonus fiasco. The AP has an interesting write-up of the political implications for Dodd here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j2D2gxTNCtz_IpnKzTEDIE92sPJwD971EKBO0

http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE52J0S220090320 I think this is an interesting approach. I think his direct appeal to the American people has been largely successful so far, and a marked change versus the traditional presidential approach of working through the mainstream media. It's useful because it really brings out all the subtle nuances of his message -- he can say EXACTLY what he wants to say and not have to worry about how the media filter might change the message. I don't know that this will do a lot of good, but it is interesting and could be just what we need. What do you all think?

Dismissing it as an "oxymoron" doesn't make it any less of an imposition of one group's will upon another without being injured by what they're doing.

Well I don't really have a problem with calling them all "unions" instead of "marriages" as a compromise, but it seems a bit silly. I guess if that's what it takes to remove the objections, then that's the way to go -- people can call it whatever they want on their own. And of course they'll all call it "marriage", and the gay and lesbian community will have gotten what it wants, and the religious right won't have realized that it didn't actually accomplish anything, so everyone goes home happy. Sounds like a plan.

Ah.. so you're saying that we need words or terms that are more specific than "marriage", like "gay marriage", "straight marriage", etc? That's interesting, but how do you do that without applying negative connotations to some of the forms? Also, ultimately this is about benefits (both corporate and governmental). In that sense I'm not sure I see the benefit of splitting it up into multiple forms.

Cool catch, thanks.

The House passed a bill today to try and tax the AIG bonuses. It's actually a broad-based approach aimed at all such offenders: http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSN1929836820090319 The bill goes to the Senate next. I think it will be interesting to see whether this law could be retroactively applied to bonuses that have already been paid out. I could see the argument -- taxes take place after the fact. But people know about taxes beforehand, and can plan accordingly, which is not the case here, so it's retroactive. On the other hand that doesn't necessarily mean the courts would not allow it -- retroactive laws aren't entirely forbidden, if I'm not mistaken. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Ah yes, the modern, socio-political interpretation of the word as subjugated and promulgated by the animal rights movement. As opposed to the original and more traditional definition of the word, focusing more on intelligence. Pardon me, I should have recognized where you were going with that two posts ago. Well hey, I can understand the sentiment. Unfortunately having subjugated that word for political purposes, it can no longer be used as a scientific basis for a rational, objective decision on the subject. So we're back to square one there. But I certainly respect your opinion on it. Mine just differs, I'm afraid.

I'm glad we agree. Now let's move on.

Mice are sentient beings? Are you sure that's what you meant to say?

Unsurprisingly, only covered by Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/18/pelosi-tells-illegal-immigrants-work-site-raids-american/ This is a bunch of rabble-rousing, demagoguery, and it should stop. Illegal is illegal, and there is no difference between explicitly allowing people to enter the country illegally and imprisoning American citizens without due process or spying on their telephone conversations. The law is the law, and the law must be enforced, or it should be changed. Period. What do you all think?

The bailouts and the economic stimulus packages are two different things, and in fact they were addressed via separate bills.

I don't think he's trolling, iNow, I think he's responding politely to our questions. And I think declaring him a troll is just a way to marginalize his opinion. Let's bear in mind that our purpose here is not to make people change their minds through shame and ridicule. (Or to change them at all, actually.)

Rofl, what a nightmare that would be. Think I'll have to conveniently lose my invitation on that one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_flies

I disagree. We had (and still have) the highest standard of living in our history, and more Americans were buying homes than ever before. Your accusation that they were stuck with 30 year mortgages is amusing because before they couldn't GET those mortgages. The American dream was coming true, TBK. We just need to make sure that dream rests on a firm economic footing, that's all. Which means appropriate regulation. Surely you agree with this point? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedThe corruption angle is starting to look legitimate and not just political. Chris Dodd admitted yesterday that he personally inserted key changes into TARP that allowed the executive compensation to take place. Dodd was the largest recipient of AIG election contributions, according to OpenSecrets.org. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-dodd_18mar19,0,1351121.story Democrats are going to look pretty foolish going after these bonuses if they explicitly allowed them in the first place. What the heck kind of country are we running here?

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times gives us a little preview of what's likely to happen when the toxic assets bailout plan is unveiled (possibly next week). http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/18/opinion/edfriedman.php I don't like it, but my gut feeling is that we can't let the banks fail. Letting businesses fail is something we should be doing in general, but if we let the banks fail, with THAT much leverage and impact, we lose the whole shooting match -- we ALL get to stand in the line at the soup kitchen, sooner or later. But I'm trying to keep an open mind about it. The real problem of course is that nobody knows the exact answer to ANY of this shit. Economics is not an exact science, and for every Nobel Prize winner arguing one way there's at least one Nobel Prize winner arguing the opposite. It's ridiculous, but that's the situation we're in. All I can say is it's a damn good thing I don't own a pitchfork.

There is a specific airplane-related agreement dating from 1992, but most of the complaints revolve around the basic rules of the WTO, to which both the EU and the US are members.

You really can't establish fact with Nobel Prize economists, because there's always a Nobel Prize economist out there who thinks differently from your Nobel Prize economist. That's one of the problems with economics -- there is no established factual foundation forming a basis for correct or incorrect economic decisions.

Moved to General with original poster's permission. I thought the general membership might enjoy this fun challenge.

Does that mean I'll be flying bicycles with wings in Kitty Hawk? Rofl. What I meant, of course, was that you could be Redenbacher. As I say you could be right (or wright!), but at the moment I see no evidence that that's the case. The fact that the standard of living was high doesn't automatically mean that it was a house of cards. The fact that it collapsed doesn't mean that it was bound to collapse. That's the Hollywood reasoning I referred to earlier, where effect proves cause. We have to do better than that. And I think you're on the wrong side of the argument given your own predispositions. If what you say is true then we certainly don't need more regulation -- in fact we have to deconstruct the entire economy because it's ALL flawed. As usual I think the truth is somewhere in between. Of course that's my predisposition anyway, to think that way, so maybe I'm biased on the subject.

Er, how would we know why his appointments are being held up? All we know is what we read. It's an interesting question and I've not read a lot about it so far. Perhaps others can pass along articles and we can try and find out together what the holdup is. It does seem odd, because it's not as if they need to have Republicans on board in order to pass these appointments. Is Congress fighting their own president on his appointments? And if so, why would they do that? Or is this just an example of the normal process, exacerbated by the current rapid-fire agenda and the fact that Treasury is at the heart of all of the problems on the agenda?

By ideological error I actually meant in terms of the wisdom of having the federal government bail out AIG. In terms of what you're talking about -- AIG's business model -- you could well be wright, but my gut feeling on it is that this is just another example of lack of the kind of lack of oversight that we're finding existed all over the place. The actual product of that ideology ASIDE from the collapse has been phenomenally beneficial to society -- cheap home ownership, massive retail availability, extreme purchasing power -- we were living HIGH on the hog. And there's no particular reason to think we were exhibiting hubris unless these problems were uncontrollable, and I've seen no evidence to think that. I'm sure Hollywood will soon produce several movies that will inform us that we were playing with a fire that would always have burned us eventually, and we need to crawl back into our gold-standard caves where we belong, but that is not evidence. I need something more scientific than that. What do you think? Am I way off base in my thinking here?

Agreed. We were caught between a rock and a hard place. I know the libertarians are going to be squawking over this, and I guess that's fair, but let's bear in mind that this doesn't change the basic situation that we were faced with a year ago. The problem is one of management of details, or perhaps at the outside a problem of political corruption, not one of basic ideological error.

So... we don't owe it to them to leave them alone, and not eat them or run experiments on them?

Unlike the Justice Department stuff we talked about earlier, I'm in favor of allowing this to continue. (Not that it particularly matters what I think, I suppose, but I just thought I'd go on record.)