LockeColeMA wrote:
It's like large groups of angry people rely on short, idealistic (and vague) messages to express the broad variety of their grievances!
Broadly defined bullet points are one thing. The issue is what's behind those points and whether they are realistic, effective, and legal/constitutional. Even from a subjective point of view you can at least respect someone doing that. The points in this case are so naive and foolish as to be laughable.
Quote:
Now that the customary mocking of the Tea Party is done, mind doing a point-by-point of your disagreement with each of those eight? I'm actually curious why you don't like them. I'm assuming you don't, but it's quite possible you just wanted to mock the protesters as I did the Tea Party. Fair enough.
Sure:
1. THIS REINSTATES MANY PROVISIONS OF THE GLASS-STEAGALL ACT. This one's at least potentially doable and subjectively reasonable. The problem is that while many economists do agree that the financial reform of 1999 was largely responsible for the housing bubble and subsequent collapse, it wasn't the repealing of Glass-Steagall that was the culprit. What they're proposing is like someone passing a bill that prevents child molesters from teaching at school *and* requires dumping poison into the water supply, then when people get sick from the poisoned water, insisting on removing the restriction for child molesters to teach at school.
Regardless of what other factors were present in that reform act in 1999 which may need to be changed (and that's an argument all by itself), the part that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act was necessary to allow US banking systems to compete with foreign banks. Reinstating that law would cause massive economic problems. If you want, I'll explain them to you.
2. USE CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY AND OVERSIGHT TO ENSURE APPROPRIATE FEDERAL AGENCIES FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS This one's just ridiculous. If laws were "clearly broken", then there's already recourse to fill charges, sue, etc. This one's based on some people
claiming that the actions of others are illegal and other ignorant people following that up with a call to investigate and charge those evil bankers with crimes. I know that it's become increasingly popular for liberal pundits and their screaming supporters to label anything they dislike as "illegal" (The "illegal war in Iraq anyone?), that doesn't actually make those things violations of the law.
3. CONGRESS ENACT LEGISLATION TO PROTECT OUR DEMOCRACY BY REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF THE CITIZENS UNITED SUPREME COURT DECISION Yeah. That constitution thing doesn't really matter at all. I also love that the point just talks about how bad the ruling was, but not what exactly to do about it. And what would you have to do about it? You'd have to amend the 1st amendment of the constitution to specifically restrict free speech as it pertains to political support. The ramifications of that are dire and long reaching.
Someone just didn't even begin the process of thinking this one through. Actually, a whole lot of people failed at this. Oh. And while they don't use the phrase "Fairness Doctrine", that's also what this one calls for. Also problematic from a 1st amendment perspective.
4. CONGRESS PASS THE BUFFETT RULE ON FAIR TAXATION SO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE & CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOP HOLES AND ENACT A PROHIBITION ON HIDING FUNDS OFF SHORE. This one is self-moronifying (is that a word)? What is the "Buffet Rule" anyway? They're calling for some vague thing that makes rich people "pay their fair share". Let's ignore the fact that if you actually made rich people pay the same percentage of their earnings in taxes as their secretaries, most of them would pay less taxes and not more (Buffet is an extreme exception). There's also the issue that Buffet's taxes are capital gains which he then compared to his secretary's
personal income taxes, yet they complain about GE not paying any
corporate income taxes.
And that's before getting into the fact that the reason GE didn't pay any income taxes in 2010 was because they received massive amounts of tax credits from the Obama administration for all of their "green energy" products (in the very Stimulus Bill which the GOP opposed I might add). I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the same idiots cheering for raising taxes on "the rich" also cheer when Obama tells him he's going to pass a bill to create more "green jobs". F'ing idiots.
5. CONGRESS COMPLETELY REVAMP THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION While I don't disagree that the SEC has some conflict of interest issues, this one's just plain naive. They're calling for increasing funding to hire a large staff of "proven professionals", while criticizing that the current staff are "Wall St. insiders". Um... What criteria do they propose we use to find all these "proven professionals" to work at the SEC? Unless they're arguing for proven professionalism in areas other than the stock market (which is entirely possible I suppose), then how do you get people who haven't worked in Wall Street?
It's like no one even bothered to engage their brains on this. Had this point actually talked about maybe some regulations or practices designed to minimize the potential for corrupt decision making, they'd at least be on the right track. But this just comes off as spend more money on more of the same and hope that things will get better. It's an abrogation of responsibility to take this approach in my opinion and smacks of "I know something is wrong, I don't know what exactly, but someone told me that if we give them a bunch more money it'll be better". That's just a stupid way of doing things.
6. CONGRESS PASS SPECIFIC AND EFFECTIVE LAWS LIMITING THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATING THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION THAT ENDS UP ON THE FLOOR OF CONGRESS. How do you "limit the influence of lobbyists"? Who decides which lobbyists have too much influence? How much influence is too much? Hell. What makes someone a lobbyist? There's just this really apparent lack of clue as to how the 1st amendment applies to political speech present in several of these points. I suspect that there's no detail on this one precisely because it sounds good as a bullet point if you don't think about it too much, but it's impossible to actually write how you'd approach this without getting yourself into massive amounts of incredibly selective trouble, and potentially the creation of government agencies which would effectively control political speech in ways no sane person should desire.
7. CONGRESS PASSING "Revolving Door Legislation" LEGISLATION ELIMINATING THE ABILITY OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS GOING TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS THAT THEY ONCE REGULATED. Trying to eliminate conflicts of interest is a reasonable idea. Passing a law restricting future employment may not be the best way to do it. Oddly, this one is by far the most reasonable of all of the proposals, but it's still problematic and doesn't really eliminate the problem. I'd much prefer that we had greater oversight on conflicts as a whole (which they also propose and is also quite reasonable).
It would be nice if they'd get off the assumption that corporations are the only ones who benefit from this though. I didn't bring this up in the point about the campaign donations, but the same rules that apply to corporations should apply to unions as well (and all organizations, whether profit or non-profit). It's kinda hard to take someone's claims that they want to make things "fair" when they constantly make exceptions for organizations politically aligned with their "side".
8. ELIMINATE "PERSONHOOD" LEGAL STATUS FOR CORPORATIONS. Constitutional issues aside, I'm not sure what they're really going for here. And I'm betting that they don't either. They just assume it's anti-corporation so it must be good. Personhood status does not protect the corporation from being sued for its actions (and they make great big targets btw). It also does not prevent the people making decisions from being subject to criminal charges for their actions.
I suspect many people don't understand that there is no such thing as an "owner" of a corporation (not a traditional corporation for which this legal status applies anyway). I also suspect that many people don't understand that being treated as a person under the law isn't some special benefit. It's a recognition that since a corporation isn't owned by a single person or even a small number of people, it should be treated as a separate entity. Otherwise, every single investor in a corporation could be sued for anything the corporation does. But absent that, the corporation couldn't be sued separately. It's a plus/minus really and not something to get worked up about.
There. That good enough?
Edited, Oct 4th 2011 6:05pm by gbaji