home
home
home
home
home
home
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 20:51:32 -0800
Subject: Fw: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: t&m@dslextreme.com; iak@earthlink.net; spk@hotmail.com; xme@hotmail.com --- On Sun, 1/4/09, nimble<xnimble@att.net> wrote: From: nimble <xnimble@att.net> Subject: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: letters@latimes.com Cc: xnimble@yahoo.com, editor@garmentandcitizen.com, xnimble@msn.com Date: Sunday, January 4, 2009, 2:58 PM Jack B. Nimble xnimble@att.net 626-665-0000 2024 Laspanada St. L.A. CA 91026 re: 1/4/09 L.A. Times "Meltdowns, So What Else Is New"- John Lauritz Larson http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-larson4-2009jan04,0,7143608.story Try this for a new party line for those who think the nation could stand to move to the left: Look at what the nasty conservatives did to us! They took away all the regulations that were saving us from the crooks. We all KNOW that this is a crook-generated (translate: speculators) financial crisis and what we simply need to do is put the regulations back in place and this will all go away. To a small businessman like me this smells suspiciously like the "apparatchik under every desk" model tried for seventy years (long, long ago) by the Soviet Union (in a galaxy far, far away). Since this type of thinking causes me to hyperventilate I must... MUST!... cast about for other answers and so I submit this party line for those who prefer to be socialist-contrary: We deregulated on the UP side whilst failing to deregulate on the DOWN side. "Too big to fail" and "We must never allow another Great Depression"-- combined with other policies which amounted to financing everyone's feel-good altruism by printing up money and throwing it at social goals (while all the time ensuring that you get a little extra too)-- amounted to making it government policy to breed ever-stupider investors whose can't-lose position became "follow the rise" instead of "I'm actually risking my fortune on this so I'd better eat, sleep and breathe the fundamentals of whatever industry I'm betting on". It ends up effectively being an unholy alliance of government with whoever wants to make easy money, but the catch is that everyone is all-in for the expansion of bubbles instead of thinking about making winning bets on what is the will of the people regarding the allocation of resources. Government workers are not, in my opinion, MOTIVATED enough to correctly call the moves in this game, always choosing 'cover my own a__ first' as times get worse and worse and the gulags (OK, now I'M speculating) fill up with the best and brightest thinkers. Give me a nasty speculator to be the economic brains of this nation, as long as A) he is betting with genuine risk against other nasty speculators, B) the government has had the guts to clear monopolies off the never-level playing field and C) the government... wait... NOTHING ELSE. What is the next thing up from Trillion? Quadrillion, I think. We'd better learn the word now because we'll need it for the future fight against the NEXT Next Great Depression, along with terms such as Troika and Police State. |
From: xme <xme@hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: "Nimble - Jack" <nimble@yahoo.com> Date: Sunday, January 4, 2009, 9:50 PM The Times doesn't publish letters that long! If were to go with what you wrote, they would chop it down to no more than maybe three paragraphs - and you would not like it at all. Anyway, at least you made yourself clear this time -- congratulations. But you still fail to realize what you are promoting: 50-75% unemployment that will make the Great Depression look like a party. That's what they're talking about when they talk about too big to fail -- too big to let that many people end up out of work (and not just the company employees, but all the many, many other companies that will lose because of links to that company, just as all the auto parts makers who have not done any bad business will go under if the GM company they sell to goes under). Save the company in order to save the jobs. You keep talking that they are saving the speculators. No, not at all. They are letting the stock become worth ZERO even as they save the company from bankruptcy - thus, the speculators are losing everything, but the jobs are being saved, and whatever that company produces or does continues to be available. |
From: nimble@yahoo.com Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: xme@hotmail.com didn't you feel anything about the DIRECTION of the nation? you talk like complete acceptance and nowhere to go but bigger intervention in the future, nationalize and central plan more and more: THAT WAS THE CENTRAL CORE OF MY letter and you just breezed by. Plus, the ratings agencies and big financial corps that allowed the hokey mortgages and crazy derivatives weren't speculators? What were they... momentum investors? nimble |
From: me <xme@hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: "Nimble - Jack" <nimble@yahoo.com> Date: Tuesday, January 6, 2009, 7:30 AM No, I didn't breeze over it. You don't seem to understand that there will be no nation going forward if you allow the economy to so totally collapse. And if you do nothing, as you suggest, the economy will so completely collapse that the Great Depression will look like a cakewalk. |
From: nimble@yahoo.com Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: xme@hotmail.com are we so low in percentage of entrepreneurial spirits in this country that we are totally dependent on corporations, gummint, shrinks and ambulance chasers? should we go ever farther in that direction? how long can we suspend our eternal vigilance before it becomes "1984"? bJorden |
From: me <xme@hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: "Nimble - Jack" <nimble@yahoo.com> Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 6:41 PM Yes, in fact, we are very thoroughly dependent on corporations - we have let them control far too much -- become too big to fail becuase they control too much. Thus, as we are, they can completely and utterly bring down the country, as is happening with this economic collapse. This collapse definitely has the very real possibility of being as bad as the Great Depression, and being even far worse than that. Thus, government is acting in the only responsible manner, unlike the irresponsible manner in which Prez. Hoover failed to act, and thus brought about a deeper and longer depression. We already know what his inaction produced -- but you keep advocating inaction anyway. That is a tried and failed approach -- you seem to be one of the only ones who failed to learn that lesson in the past 80 years. It is fantasyland to think a bunch of little entrepreneurs will swoop in tomorrow and hire 100 million people in good paying jobs that produce all the goods and services we have now and need and want -- hire them all overnight as that is how fast the jobs are being lost. If those entrepreneurs were going to do that, where have they been for all these years that they have not done it? The only thing that got us out of the Great Depression was the massive spending (meaning jobs) that came with WW II. And that is why they are saying a MASSIVE spending plan is needed now, not something too small, as had been done prior to WW II by Roosevelt and the alphabet soup job programs. Something huge enough to shock the system back is needed, not a mere safety net. And meanwhile don't lose what we already have, and thus merely hold the line with that huge spending. Keep what we haven't already lost and add more to it. That is, save the jobs we have rather than let the companies go under and disappear. And create a ton of new jobs -- as in Barack's plan for a public works program, not just a tax cut handout. If you want to fire the bastards who are running those failing corporations, fine. But don't kill of the jobs that are at the heart of what you need. |
From: nimble@yahoo.com Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: xme@hotmail.com I thought it would be more like 100 million entrepreneurs swooping in tomorrow and hiring a bunch of little people in good paying jobs that produce all the goods and services we have now and need and want. But no: we've had government policies for almost 80 years that could have been written for the express purpose of breeding just such a group of whiney dependents as we now are saddled with, This is the ULTIMATE too big to fail, and now what do we do. The way out is not to have bred such a flock of millstones in the first place. You could make Marx-Engels- Leninism work if you had a decent enough bunch of people to work with, you could make any system work with such a group. The question that needs to be answered is "What is the system that tends to increase the proportion of such citizens?" Maybe we are too moribund already and the only thing to do is kiss our ass goodbye (I hear Sarcozy and Blair and the German guy are agitating for a world financial system managed by the U.N.), or maybe there WILL be some kind of upheaval (did I say I thought Barack would be much likelier to preside over WWIII than Senator John?) which we still might come out of as a bastion of freedom. Maybe it's just like a little food poisoning, you know, where you throw up and then feel better... bJorden P.S. There seems to be a little blindness in your MOST WONDROUS certainty that it was Hoover, and not the spew of panicky and possibly ill-advised socialist makework legislation forced through by crocodile-mouthed hummingbird-assed panic mongering do-gooders in the period following. P.P.S Money can represent value or it can be fake. If there were a power on earth that could say shock the system with MASSIVE SPENDING and have that mean a massive surge of value, then that would be something to consider. But what's being done is actually a dog and pony show that they hope against hope that everyone will buy into, each with his own little bit of actual value, and so make it come true. But the biggest players in this skin game are the TooBigToFailBoys and are they really on board and do they go ooh and ahh as the printing presses gear up from billions to trillions to quadrillions. |
From: me <xme@hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: "Nimble - Jack" <nimble@yahoo.com> Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 8:06 PM You're blinded to the fact fact you are advocating chaos and anarchy and the dissolution of order. NOTHING in the history of mankind has ever worked without regulation. There is no "free" market competition without regulation to establish the competition. Regulation is merely a matter of setting the ground rules of the game. |
pfui! nothing starts from the top down. the main thing is, as Larry Ellison said, "What do we tell our kids?" there's always some charlatan coming around saying he either started everything or is a direct philosophical descendant of whoever did. no one has codified the teleology of the human race and no one ever will: titans of finance will battle and thus "regulate" each other, and the myopic petty dictators who self-reinforce themselves that someone, somewhere in their group knows everything that needs to be done to achieve nirvana, will only produce zilch, their total product being friction, smoke, and the redistribution of honest people's creativity and productivity according to the latest half-baked psychosocial dabblers' fad! nimble |
wrote: From: me <xme@hotmail.com>> Subject: Re: Larson op-ed 1/4/09 To: nimble@yahoo.com Date: Saturday, January 10, 2009, 7:26 AM Everything starts from the top down. Since when do the employees hire the boss? Without regulation, you would not have the titans battle each other into effective regulation. Yu would have a monopoly called the Mafia -- at best. Of course, even the Mafia regulates! You would just rather have the criminals control and regulate everything instead of the good people -- because that is the ONLY thing that can come of your approach. |
January 11, 2009 9:50 PM From: "Nimble - Jack" <nimble@yahoo. com>Add sender to Contacts To: "me" <xme@hotmail.com> no whassamattah me! whassamattah you! nimble |