Hear freaking hear Joel Kotkin:
You would think, given the massive dissatisfaction with an economy that guarantees mega-bonuses for the rich and continued high unemployment, that the GOP would smell an opportunity. In my travels around the country -- including in midstream places like suburban Kansas City and Kentucky -- few, including Democrats, express any faith in the president's basic economic strategy.Ask a local mayor or chamber of commerce executive in Kentucky or Kansas City about the stimulus, and at best you get a shrug. Many feel the only people really benefiting from Obamanomics are Wall Street grandees, public employees, subsidized "green" companies and various other professional rent seekers.
It's not surprising, then, that most Americans -- upward of 60 percent -- feel the country is headed in the "wrong direction." Most of these malcontents are not zealots such as those you might find at a tea party. They are more akin to villagers watching in horror as two armies, each fighting in their name, wage war on each other, leaving desolation in their wake.
Yet it's unlikely that the independent-minded will move to the GOP until the party comes up with a credible economic plan that addresses popular concerns. One big problem lies in the very nature of the Republican Party. Since Theodore Roosevelt, the party has devolved into a de facto shill for large corporate interests. One notable exception, to some extent, was Ronald Reagan, whose rise challenged the hegemony of some in the corporate establishment, first in California, when he was governor, and later nationally.
Republicans may now find it convenient to rail against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but it's something many supported under George W. Bush. Even now, most are loath to fight excessive pay and bonuses at places like Goldman Sachs. Instead, it's populists like North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan and Vermont independent Bernie Sanders who seem most outraged by the massive rip-off of taxpayers.
Republicans also do not seem sympathetic to proposals by former Fed chief Paul Volcker and others to break up "too big to fail" banks or reimpose distinctions between investment and mainstream banks. If anything, this illustrates that for all the rhetoric about self-sufficiency and small business, they remain more attuned to Wall Street and K Street than Main Street.
Read the whole thing. I agree too with his conclusion.
In the end, economic populism, not social conservatism, can transform Republicans into something other than a scarecrow party. And they could make this strategy work, if they only had a brain.
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Palin was running for vice president when TARP was debated. She preferred to talk about being a hockey mom rather then say anything that upset Wall Street. Maybe she wasn't asked because the self described pit bull was afraid of talking to reporters.
This is so blatantly dishonest, it's insulting. You know she was VP and the VP is always there to talk about the agenda of the P on the ticket. Palin was never asked, and instead, a lot of cutesy little gotcha games were tried by a press that cared nothing about any relevant issues.
"If you were to ask me what to do with all these... Bust them all up, and liquidate the parts that aren't viable on their own
I, for one, am extremely suspicious of those who think that more "regulation" from the Swamp on the Potomac is any kind of solution,"
You totally contradict yourself in one post.
Please explain. When an institution fails, the process is normally to liquidate it. I was merely advocating doing precisely that, but allowing the divisions or branches or "owned" subsidiaries, etc, to be treated as separate entities for purposes of corporate bankruptcy. In other words, instead of Merril Lynch being pawned off onto Bank of America and building an even larger institution seemingly bound to fail, all the unviable parts of ML would have been liquidated and the parts that were viable be put back in play by investors. There's nothing at all contradictory about this. It certainly is a heck of a lot smarter than the current operations of "build a lot bigger piles of dying institutions from smaller dying institutions".
"All these behemoths are in the death throes"
Are you paying attention to the news? Goldman and Morgan are paying out billions of dollars in bonuses this year.
Ahh, so you believe that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are in great financial health and are rock solid, with no future issues to arise, and that they were all along? If so, who cares about the bonuses? If not, why are they still tottering along?
The fact that you were born into this world imposes a requirement to behave justly. If you don't like it, leave. Or at least secede from society and live as a hermit where your actions will affect only yourself.
So the fact that I breath means that once I struggle and sweat finally launch an enterprise off the ground, and if or when I reach the point where I can use or need the time and talents of others, I am unworthy of living in society if I do not let YOU control the relationship between me and my prospective employee? Not me, not the the employee, not me and the employee... but YOU?
Methinks such mindless arrogance is the precise cause of nearly all our current societal problems.
"This is so blatantly dishonest, it's insulting. You know she was VP and the VP is always there to talk about the agenda of the P on the ticket."
It is not dishonest it is the truth. If she was disgusted with the bailout she could have "gone rogue" like a true "maverick". If she didn't want to say anything to upset the party elites she was dishonest for repeatedly calling herself a maverick. Before or after her VP run has she said anything critical about the money lavished on Wall Street?
"Please explain. When an institution fails, the process is normally to liquidate it. I was merely advocating doing precisely that,"
I agree that is what should have happened but that is not what did happen. Instead two banks used government help to become bigger. They will not break up on their own and will lobby the government in the future for more money if they get in trouble again. The only way to prevent this is to break them up or subject them to the same regulation as commercial banks.
"Ahh, so you believe that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are in great financial health and are rock solid, with no future issues to arise,"
At the moment they are making money. I don't know about the future.
"who cares about the bonuses?"
Most taxpayers don't like to see bankers who screw up and are given government money to be bailed out reward themselves with lavish bonuses that would not have been possible without receiving money from the taxpayers.
For the Anti-Krugman: You write that “We set the rules for the sandbox, detailed and encompassing. This builds a system where the focus of the players is "gaming the rules", since everything allowed is... de facto ‘blessed’ as acceptable. . . .So long as they ‘follow the rules’ they're safe, no matter how irksome or wasteful or bad the decisions made. . . . Responsibility works... All the words in the world on paper do nothing, if the person who can make the decisions isn't responsible.”
This may be what it looks like from the outside, but is not always the case. I think you need to distinguish between different environments and varying regulations. The impact of all regulations is not the same. Don’t take the lessons that apply to apples and try to apply them to oranges. It’s a mistake to over generalize. I have worked in regulated environments where what you assume to be the case simply does not work the way you describe. You have to consider how decision making works in various environments, and support regulation where it encourages better outcomes.
A sense of responsibility and being mindful of regulation are not incompatible concepts, the way they work is not nearly so either/or as you depict it. Indeed, there are circumstances where the more regulatorily and statutorily protected employees are able to nudge decision makers towards ethical behavior where those with little job protection cannot. The ability of the subordinate to speak truth to power (to speak hard truths), to convey to the emperor that he has no clothes and needs to consider other options, to face the ire of the top person but still feel able to give him the bad news he needs to hear sometimes stems from workplace protections which the chief might find irksome. But without them, there are environments where there would be more situations where you would have yes men and bobble heads who support poor decisions, not because they follow the rules or try to game the system, but because they believe it is the only way to keep their jobs. And more bosses who steamroller their subordinates. Read Gordon Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, if you want to see how tragically that played out with LBJ and his senior advisors.
A-K, you insist on making it personal. "I'm an ethical businessman, I act with integrity, and I'm insulted that they have laws and regulations telling me to do what I already do."
I agree with Indy, you are generalizing too much. Note the qualifier: There are some general statements with which I agree. The regulatory environment is a morass.
But here's the other thing: Are you saying (I'm asking, not putting words on you) that since there are examples of bad -- even harmful -- regulatory situations, that all of them must be reined in or cut back? I acknowledge that you are not saying abolish them all, but that's the extreme position. Neither am I -- like Indy, a once and future insider on this process -- saying that all things must have a regulation slapped on them.
When the US population was measured in hundreds of thousands instead of millions, when travel distances were measured in days and weeks instead of hours, commerce and civic morality were personal and local. Those days are long since passed, and it is not only proper to have federal oversight but mandatory, or we'd have an economy consisting of a rich oligarchy and a whole bunch of working peons barely subsisting and getting angrier every year. The industrial revolution created the middle class, and we are the heart of this economy, not the rich investors, not the mega-corporations. You yourself should see that firsthand every day.
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