Fear of what might happen

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-17-2006
Fear of what might happen
101
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 7:49am
All I hear and read from John McCain is how we must fear what will happen if Barack Obama is elected.
The problem is that all the bad things that have happened over the last eight years and continue to happen came under a Republican president. Before Bush took office, 9-11 had not happened. Back then, gasoline cost about $1.50 a gallon. Food prices and everything else was pretty tolerable. But then Bush was elected and ever since that time things have been going down hill in this country.
I do not fear what might be under Obama more than I fear what has been and will be continued if McCain follows Bush into office.
McCain supports all of Bush’s policies. So voting for McCain is like extending Bush’s term for four more years.
I do not think this country can survive four more years of George W. Bush. That thought scares the hell out of me.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 11-11-1999
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 10:27am

What is interesting....


imagine last week if nothing had been done. The most likely scenario is that we would have seen a world wide meltdown of the financial system, with who knows what kind of chaos to follow, worldwide.


Yet this is exactly the goal of the Ron Paul/Bob Barr Libertarian crowd. This is their dream-a US government that has, as it's only responsibility, defending the borders of the country. Markets free to be manipulated by whomever has the most wealth and power. Markets cornered or crashed by whomever has the wherewithal to do so, with the little guy being wiped out in the process. The government having no duty or responsibility to do anything about anything.


Anyone fascinated with Libertarianism-last week provided a brief glimpse of what it holds. While Libertarians

dablacksox


Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.---Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-25-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:00am

However, had there been a truly free market to begin with, the crisis wouldn't have come.


Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac are creations of the government.

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:07am

Sweetie, did it occur to you that the plan for 9/11 was devised under the nose of clinton?

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:14am

Somehow the use of the term "sweetie" invoked, appears

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-25-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:23am
Sort of like when Obama told the newswoman "hang on just a second there sweetie"?
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:54am
LOL - he apologized - I'll be waiting on here for one to the addressed
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-15-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 11:59am
Yep - I've been saying virtually the same thing for years; libertarianism is essentially anarchy, except with a police force and an army to nominally keep control of things. But - as we've seen in plenty of other places around the globe, including right here, 240 years ago - even police and armies aren't enough to contain the sort of discontent and panic which arises when the fundamentals of life are manipulated or threatened in other ways (especially financial ones).





But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence.....truth is considered profane, and only illusion sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
- Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 2nd. ed., 1841


But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence.....truth is considered profane, and only illusion sacred. Sacredness
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-25-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 12:07pm

yes, I've noticed apologies are a rare thing on line...


iVillage Member
Registered: 07-03-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 12:19pm
No, it does not go over well at all. I do not take well to condescention at all. Especially when one wants to blame this all on Clinton. I'm rather done with Republicans, they have nothing to offer me. Sorry, but I'm just really bummed out about the economy, and trying to blame it on the Democrats really gets my ire up, since actually Reagan started this mess we are in now. His trickle down never worked.
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-15-2008
Mon, 09-22-2008 - 12:25pm

That is just so flatly wrong that I'm astonished anyone would even say it with a straight face.

Before the Depression, most of the financial markets WERE substantially unregulated, and it was exactly the sort of predatory excesses that we're seeing again now which led not only to the crash and the depression itself, but also to the after-the-fact realization that the financial markets HAD to be regulated, to prevent the worst excesses of the human impulse toward greed and exploitation of others. Regulations like the Glass-Steagall act were put in place specifically to prevent the kind of abuses which led to the depression - abuses which arose from a much "freer" market than what followed afterwards for many decades, until the Reagan revolution. And it has only been the systematic, sustained dismantling of these very same regulations which allowed first the S&L crisis and now the banking crisis - not to mention charming little side-detours like the Enron-created energy "crisis" of earlier this decade, along the way (I lived in California during that time, ask me; I know). That last one - Enron - is a PERFECT example of what happens when the regulators are thwarted or blinded or neutered by statute, and the "market" is allowed to be "free" - people dying of cold in winter despite a four-times-greater-than-demand capacity for production of energy, due to a manufactured "crisis" and "shortage" in the interest(s) of private profit.

Yet these same people are the ones putting a hold on short-selling stocks (so's not to provoke a collapse, of course - they've just got the PEOPLE'S interest in mind, you see ). This is an absolute mockery and inversion of "free market" capitalism: they allow the "free market" to run rampant over people's retirement savings, their homes, even their very lives - which it gleefully, callously DOES - and then, only when the financial institutions THEMSELVES manage to end up dangling by the neck from a rope of their own making, do they (like John McCain did this past week, after literally DECADES of proclaiming himself "a deregulator") rush towards the TV cameras, talking about "the responsibility of government to ensure stability," blah blah blah. Yet what form does that "responsibility" turn out to TAKE (if they have their way)? Literally, a $700 billion blank check to Hank Paulson, to spend pretty much any way he chooses, with no possibility of oversight of any kind. And just this morning, Republicans and lobbyists from foreign corporations (UBS and Phil Gramm, anyone?) are pushing to have the list of things Paulson can buy EXPANDED to include ANY sort of security.

And around and around we go.






But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence.....truth is considered profane, and only illusion sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
- Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 2nd. ed., 1841


But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence.....truth is considered profane, and only illusion sacred. Sacredness

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