Freedumb, Freedumb, Read All About It! "A Free Trade, Free Market, Free Corporate, Unregulated Economy run like Al Capone's Casino Joint, and Policed by Al Capone". Is this the best University MBA/PHD Masters and Government Regulators can provide?
PEOPLES LIVES DEPEND UPON THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. The economic system is not singularly a 
tool for profit, and the hell with Life. "We now have to pay for the greed and recklessness of those who should have known better.” It is time, Mr. Schumer said, for the American economy to be revived as the “engine of prosperity,” rather than as a “casino” for high-rollers in the realm of finance.
tool for profit, and the hell with Life. "We now have to pay for the greed and recklessness of those who should have known better.” It is time, Mr. Schumer said, for the American economy to be revived as the “engine of prosperity,” rather than as a “casino” for high-rollers in the realm of finance. How, in a world of exploding human population, with unparalleled needs, wants and desires, can the economy keep falling, with more and more working people around the world, poorer, lacking basic needs and going hungry... this can only be termed Freakohnomics: The new 21st Century Supply & Demand Economics - absolute greed, absolute power brings on absolute madness - Turns into Freakohnomics gone berserk. Or mafia economics by deliberate Design - the greater the need, the higher the price for all commodities required to sustain Life. The Outcome, economic strangulation and workaholic enslavement of a people was not designed by the lord thy God, nor (for the non-believer) is it a Natural or Nature's Law, nor a Scientific Law
What factors changed Market Supply & Demand Fundamentals to Freakohnomics gone berserk? From cheaper goods and services available to all through continual advances in science, technology and mass production, to 'Whatever The Market Will Bear' depending on how great the need for sustaining Life?
The answers lie in Power, Greed, and Stagnant Energy Science
The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.
The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil
Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when lacking a Bill of Rights for Human Life
Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted
realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.
October 5, 2008
Power Plays
How Free Should a Free Market Be?
How much can we gamble on other people's lives?
By ALEX BERENSON
Is this the end of hypercapitalism?
For nearly a generation, the United States has driven growth by deregulating markets, lowering tax rates and promoting trade. Across wide swaths of the economy — from airlines to banks to energy to telecommunications — Washington stood aside, believing less regulation would produce broad prosperity, even at the cost of greater income inequality.
Now, with Washington setting aside $700 billion to bail out financial companies, the economy weakening daily and the Democrats likely to enlarge their majorities in Congress, it may seem that the United States is shifting away from faith in markets and distrust of government.
In Europe, some political leaders, including conservatives like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, have declared the death of laissez-faire economics. “A certain idea of globalization is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that imposed its logic on the whole economy,” Mr. Sarkozy said last month. “The idea that the markets are always right was a crazy idea.”
What about America? In one sense, the present crisis would seem likely to continue the retreat from the free-market ideas associated with Ronald Reagan and President Bush suggested by the passage of the Medicare drug benefit plan in 2003 and the failure of Mr. Bush’s proposal to privatize Social Security in 2005, the centerpiece of his vision of an “ownership society.” Then, in 2006, Democrats took Congress for the first time in 12 years.
Whoever becomes president in January, lawmakers will be under pressure to strengthen financial regulation and give more resources to agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, which have appeared overwhelmed in recent years. Some critics of the bailout legislation complain, for instance, that at the same time that it empowers the Treasury Department to buy hundreds of billions in troubled debt from financial firms, it fails to fortify oversight of the nation’s financial system.
But Americans are fundamentally suspicious of government in a way that Europeans are not, a cultural and political difference that stretches back centuries. Anyone expecting a major expansion of Washington’s powers after November — whether under a Barack Obama or John McCain administration — may be disappointed.
Americans are certainly weary of Mr. Bush, whose approval rating fell to 22 percent in the most recent poll by CBS News, the lowest rating for any president since Harry S. Truman in 1952. But this poll, and others, also show that whatever their anger at Mr. Bush and Wall Street, Americans are not necessarily ready to embrace liberal ideals such as stronger unions, significantly higher and more progressive taxes, and new trade barriers.
A deep, long-lasting recession could change that dynamic, just as the inflation and severe recessions of the 1970s fueled the last major ideological shift in American politics with the election in 1980 of Mr. Reagan, a fervent apostle of lower taxes, free markets and deregulation.
But for now, the United States economy is far stronger than it was in the 1970s. The credit crunch, swooning stock market and rising unemployment are frightening, but economists are still predicting a relatively mild recession. The unemployment rate, for example, has risen from 4.4 percent in March 2007 to 6.1 percent at the end of September, but it is far below the post-World War II peak of 10.8 percent in November 1982. And while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of big stocks has fallen by nearly 30 percent since its peak in 2007, it had dropped nearly 50 percent between 2000 and 2002.
The relatively mild recessions of 1990 and 2001 did not shake Americans’ faith in free-market principles, said Robert D. Reischauer, president of the non-partisan Urban Institute. Mr. Reischauer directed the Congressional Budget Office between 1989 and 1994, when Democrats controlled Congress. Similarly, this recession will probably not produce a major shift, unless it turns out to be much longer and more severe than economists expect, Mr. Reischauer said.
“We’re basically a conservative country,” he said. “And one would expect that to be the case when one has as much stuff as we have to conserve.”
Doug Schoen, a Democratic strategist and pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton for six years, said that should Mr. Obama win next month, he should not mistake his election for a mandate for sharply higher taxes on the wealthy or major government expansion. “The polling I’ve done shows that people are anti-Republican, not pro-left, not pro-redistribution,” he said. “They’re ever more skeptical of Washington.”
For example, in the poll by CBS News released earlier this week, 44 percent of Americans said businesses now faced “too much” or “the right amount” of regulation, compared to 43 percent who said they faced too little. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll in September, 42 percent said Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, should be made permanent, while 36 percent said they should be allowed to expire over the next several years.
Most strikingly, 34 percent described themselves as conservative, compared to only 20 percent as liberal. Those figures have hardly changed since September 2000, when 32 percent described themselves as conservative and 20 percent as liberal.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, said the financial crisis has benefited Mr. Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates. But Mr. Gingrich added that if Mr. Obama is elected and presses too hard for liberal policies, Democrats may be repudiated by voters in 2010, just as they were in 1994, two years after Mr. Clinton was elected president and offered proposals for national health insurance and higher energy taxes that failed in Congress.
“You have to convince a country that watched Katrina, that watched Baghdad, that watched Fannie and Freddie, now the answer’s going to be to pile more junk on top of the junk we already have,” Mr. Gingrich said of new government programs.
Some Democrats think that Americans are ready for at least a moderate turn to a more activist government.
Lawrence Summers, who was secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, said that even before the financial crisis, Americans were concerned about income inequality and the cost of health care, and increasingly aware that those problems cannot be addressed by market solutions alone. Indeed, in a poll in August by the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Americans said they favored government-guaranteed health insurance, even at the cost of higher taxes, while only 34 percent opposed it.
“There has been a substantial change in the intellectual climate,” he said. “It’s a change that antedates the financial crisis, and I think it will only be reinforced by the financial crisis.”
Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management who was an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, said lawmakers are likely to impose stricter regulatory oversight on several industries — especially financial companies and markets. Having established itself, at great expense, as the financier of last resort, the government will no longer blithely accept banks’ assurances that they are safe, Mr. Garten said. Instead, Congress will give the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve new powers to oversee financial institutions, Mr. Garten said.
“The government’s going to be inside them,” he said. Mr. Garten also said he expected the F.D.A and Consumer Product Safety Commission to receive increased funding and stronger oversight powers. “The whole issue of food and product safety — it’s a total mess,” he said. “We are headed for an extensive regulatory re-think.”
David Ruder, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and now a professor emeritus at the Northwestern University School of Law, said he also thought that much stricter financial regulation was necessary, both in the United States and internationally. “The events, even as they’re unfolding today, are revealing the need for much closer cooperation among financial regulators,” he said.
But, in a sign of the opposition that Democrats will face as they try to strengthen regulation, Mr. Ruder said that he did not think regulatory reform would be easy to implement, even in the financial sector. Even after receiving massive government aid this year, banks may fight stronger government oversight next year, he said.
The banking and finance industries are major political donors and powerful lobbying forces in Washington. Lawmakers who voted for the bailout received substantially more in contributions over their careers from the finance, insurance and real estate industries than those who voted against it, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks political contributions.
“I’m scared about the next year but I’m very optimistic we’ll come out of this in good shape,” he said. “We very well may come out of this horrible situation with a better version of American capitalism — it’ll be a little tamer; it’ll be a little more regulated.”
“But this country is built on an appetite for risk,” he added. “We don’t want to be France.”
By ALEX BERENSON
Is this the end of hypercapitalism?
For nearly a generation, the United States has driven growth by deregulating markets, lowering tax rates and promoting trade. Across wide swaths of the economy — from airlines to banks to energy to telecommunications — Washington stood aside, believing less regulation would produce broad prosperity, even at the cost of greater income inequality.
Now, with Washington setting aside $700 billion to bail out financial companies, the economy weakening daily and the Democrats likely to enlarge their majorities in Congress, it may seem that the United States is shifting away from faith in markets and distrust of government.
In Europe, some political leaders, including conservatives like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, have declared the death of laissez-faire economics. “A certain idea of globalization is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that imposed its logic on the whole economy,” Mr. Sarkozy said last month. “The idea that the markets are always right was a crazy idea.”
What about America? In one sense, the present crisis would seem likely to continue the retreat from the free-market ideas associated with Ronald Reagan and President Bush suggested by the passage of the Medicare drug benefit plan in 2003 and the failure of Mr. Bush’s proposal to privatize Social Security in 2005, the centerpiece of his vision of an “ownership society.” Then, in 2006, Democrats took Congress for the first time in 12 years.
Whoever becomes president in January, lawmakers will be under pressure to strengthen financial regulation and give more resources to agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, which have appeared overwhelmed in recent years. Some critics of the bailout legislation complain, for instance, that at the same time that it empowers the Treasury Department to buy hundreds of billions in troubled debt from financial firms, it fails to fortify oversight of the nation’s financial system.
But Americans are fundamentally suspicious of government in a way that Europeans are not, a cultural and political difference that stretches back centuries. Anyone expecting a major expansion of Washington’s powers after November — whether under a Barack Obama or John McCain administration — may be disappointed.
Americans are certainly weary of Mr. Bush, whose approval rating fell to 22 percent in the most recent poll by CBS News, the lowest rating for any president since Harry S. Truman in 1952. But this poll, and others, also show that whatever their anger at Mr. Bush and Wall Street, Americans are not necessarily ready to embrace liberal ideals such as stronger unions, significantly higher and more progressive taxes, and new trade barriers.
A deep, long-lasting recession could change that dynamic, just as the inflation and severe recessions of the 1970s fueled the last major ideological shift in American politics with the election in 1980 of Mr. Reagan, a fervent apostle of lower taxes, free markets and deregulation.
But for now, the United States economy is far stronger than it was in the 1970s. The credit crunch, swooning stock market and rising unemployment are frightening, but economists are still predicting a relatively mild recession. The unemployment rate, for example, has risen from 4.4 percent in March 2007 to 6.1 percent at the end of September, but it is far below the post-World War II peak of 10.8 percent in November 1982. And while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of big stocks has fallen by nearly 30 percent since its peak in 2007, it had dropped nearly 50 percent between 2000 and 2002.
The relatively mild recessions of 1990 and 2001 did not shake Americans’ faith in free-market principles, said Robert D. Reischauer, president of the non-partisan Urban Institute. Mr. Reischauer directed the Congressional Budget Office between 1989 and 1994, when Democrats controlled Congress. Similarly, this recession will probably not produce a major shift, unless it turns out to be much longer and more severe than economists expect, Mr. Reischauer said.
“We’re basically a conservative country,” he said. “And one would expect that to be the case when one has as much stuff as we have to conserve.”
Doug Schoen, a Democratic strategist and pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton for six years, said that should Mr. Obama win next month, he should not mistake his election for a mandate for sharply higher taxes on the wealthy or major government expansion. “The polling I’ve done shows that people are anti-Republican, not pro-left, not pro-redistribution,” he said. “They’re ever more skeptical of Washington.”
For example, in the poll by CBS News released earlier this week, 44 percent of Americans said businesses now faced “too much” or “the right amount” of regulation, compared to 43 percent who said they faced too little. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll in September, 42 percent said Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, should be made permanent, while 36 percent said they should be allowed to expire over the next several years.
Most strikingly, 34 percent described themselves as conservative, compared to only 20 percent as liberal. Those figures have hardly changed since September 2000, when 32 percent described themselves as conservative and 20 percent as liberal.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, said the financial crisis has benefited Mr. Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates. But Mr. Gingrich added that if Mr. Obama is elected and presses too hard for liberal policies, Democrats may be repudiated by voters in 2010, just as they were in 1994, two years after Mr. Clinton was elected president and offered proposals for national health insurance and higher energy taxes that failed in Congress.
“You have to convince a country that watched Katrina, that watched Baghdad, that watched Fannie and Freddie, now the answer’s going to be to pile more junk on top of the junk we already have,” Mr. Gingrich said of new government programs.
Some Democrats think that Americans are ready for at least a moderate turn to a more activist government.
Lawrence Summers, who was secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, said that even before the financial crisis, Americans were concerned about income inequality and the cost of health care, and increasingly aware that those problems cannot be addressed by market solutions alone. Indeed, in a poll in August by the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Americans said they favored government-guaranteed health insurance, even at the cost of higher taxes, while only 34 percent opposed it.
“There has been a substantial change in the intellectual climate,” he said. “It’s a change that antedates the financial crisis, and I think it will only be reinforced by the financial crisis.”
Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management who was an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, said lawmakers are likely to impose stricter regulatory oversight on several industries — especially financial companies and markets. Having established itself, at great expense, as the financier of last resort, the government will no longer blithely accept banks’ assurances that they are safe, Mr. Garten said. Instead, Congress will give the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve new powers to oversee financial institutions, Mr. Garten said.
“The government’s going to be inside them,” he said. Mr. Garten also said he expected the F.D.A and Consumer Product Safety Commission to receive increased funding and stronger oversight powers. “The whole issue of food and product safety — it’s a total mess,” he said. “We are headed for an extensive regulatory re-think.”
David Ruder, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and now a professor emeritus at the Northwestern University School of Law, said he also thought that much stricter financial regulation was necessary, both in the United States and internationally. “The events, even as they’re unfolding today, are revealing the need for much closer cooperation among financial regulators,” he said.
But, in a sign of the opposition that Democrats will face as they try to strengthen regulation, Mr. Ruder said that he did not think regulatory reform would be easy to implement, even in the financial sector. Even after receiving massive government aid this year, banks may fight stronger government oversight next year, he said.
The banking and finance industries are major political donors and powerful lobbying forces in Washington. Lawmakers who voted for the bailout received substantially more in contributions over their careers from the finance, insurance and real estate industries than those who voted against it, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks political contributions.
“I’m scared about the next year but I’m very optimistic we’ll come out of this in good shape,” he said. “We very well may come out of this horrible situation with a better version of American capitalism — it’ll be a little tamer; it’ll be a little more regulated.”
“But this country is built on an appetite for risk,” he added. “We don’t want to be France.”
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