My bad. If anyone who has been writing the healthcare bill in the House, has dyslexia like me, one of those “stike this and insert that” they did is out to get me.

You can never have to many commas.

Intentional is a “strong word”. Respectfully, Craig if so it would be a unique criminal act.

I’ve considered you just “garden variety”, but with out citation, saying it was intentional, is fertilizer. I am not saying you are incorrect, it just seems that you call human nature intentional.

Bear and Sterns and Chris Dodd is a sad chapter in the book of hypocracy. The 200 million BO got was the sound of the whip cracking on K st.

As for corruption and fraud:

Lately [the free market] has been wrongly accused of doing so many things it just doesn’t do, that are really the fault of crony corporatism and convoluted government policies that brought on the crisis. Too many people equate the free market with big business doing whatever it wants, but that is not the free market. Unconstitutional taxpayer funded bailouts are what allow giant corporations to run roughshod over the economy. The free market is what puts them out of business when they misbehave.

The free market is you and your neighbors working hard to produce what you produce, and exchanging goods and services voluntarily, in mutually agreeable arrangements. The free market is about respecting property rights and contracts. It is not about building up oligarchs and monopolies and confiscatory tax theft — these are creatures of government.

We must watch out when government comes up with interventionist solutions to interventionist problems. The root of our problems lie in interventionism. Trusting the free market is the solution.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=175

Looking at what we have now and blaming the free market is like jumping off a bridge and then blaming the bridge for injuring you.

i am not at all anti-capitalism, but am also not a naive fool who believes that unregulated capitalism is the answer to all of society’s ills. capitalism must be regulated appropriately to prevent social darwinism from turning 95% of the population into serfs. to do that, of course there must be a government which is not a bought and paid for tool of powerful (often “capitalist”) interests.

It’s the exact scenario the IMF and the World Bank have used for decades to destroy the economies of Third World countries, except this time it was used on the US – deliberately.

WHO used it? Foreign countries? Bush/Cheney? Goldman Sachs? The IMF? The World Bank? All of them together? Who? Who? Who? Someone has to know where this run originated. Because what keeps them from doing it again?

While I can agree that the timing of last fall’s financial meltdown is suspect and was orchestrated to help assure the installation of our current POTUS, I have no doubt this latest bubble was going to burst sooner or later. The housing market was irrational and it didn’t take an ivy league education in economics to see it. And millions of people profited from it before it burst — not just the financial sector and some investors. Builders, real estate agents, title companies, many and various contractors, home improvement and department stores, insurance companies, etc., etc, all made money for several years because of the booming housing market. They’re just not as well-situated as influential financiers to have survived the bust. But is this really anything new? What alternative is being suggested here — government control of everything? What will that solve, if government is complicit?

I’m beginning to feel that the only way there’s a fighting chance to combat crony capitalism (and that’s what this article depicts) is to reduce the influence and power of the political class. It would involve radical changes that I can’t honestly foresee though.

As to the rest of your comment: agreed.

George Bush is not a Wall Streeter,, and neither is Cheney.

But Geithner is. Obama’s mother was in international finance. Obama himself was heavily involved in legal issues regarding banks in the 90s.

What was the only faction in Congress to vote against TARP? Conservative GOP in the House.

Was Henry Paulsen a Conservative GOP? No he was not. In fact I heard him be referred to as being a Democrat half the time , though I was never able to find anything official that ever said that.

In fact, Paulsen was so different that lunatic Matt Stoller approved his nomination. From mydd

Henry Paulson: A Betrayal of Bush’s Conservative Base?
by Matt Stoller, Wed May 31, 2006 at 05:54:09 PM EST

Is Henry Paulson going to get the Harriet Miers treatment? Maybe. I’ve already mentioned snarkily that Chuck Schumer loves the guy. The right is sliming Paulson pretty aggressively, with Steven Milloy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute going after him:

The Senate should reject President Bush’s nomination of Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson for Treasury secretary. Under Paulson’s leadership, Goldman Sachs participated in ethically, and perhaps legally, questionable business practices. Paulson also supports the economy-killing Kyoto Protocol and has demonstrated little respect for private property rights.

On the ethical front, Paulson has refused to answer questions about his apparent use of Goldman Sachs’ corporate assets to advance his personal interests. In 2002, Paulson used at least $35 million of shareholder money to help environmental groups stop a “sustainable forestry” project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Environmental groups had delayed the project for years–to the point where financial stress on the project developer became acute and forced the sale of the land. Goldman swept in and bought the land, promptly turning it over to Paulson’s environmental allies.

The environmental groups involved in the transaction included The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the actual recipient of the land donation from Goldman Sachs. At the time of the transaction, Paulson was a member of the board of directors of TNC–after the transaction he was elevated to chairman. Paulson’s son is now listed on tax returns as a “trustee” of WCS’…

On the legal front, the Washington Post reported just last week that Goldman Sachs participated in transactions with scandal-ridden Fannie Mae that “that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, [said federal regulators], was always the same: To shape the company’s books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives…”

It’s not just ethics and his background as a funder of Democrats and liberal groups. They also hate his ideology and his support of environmentalism.

Paulson supports economy-killing global warming regulation. Paulson transplanted TNC’s pro-Kyoto position into Goldman Sachs, an investment bank with no known expertise in climate science. Now Goldman Sachs not only supports greenhouse gas regulation, but has said it will lobby for such policies. No doubt this will be much easier, with Paulson as Treasury secretary.

Private property owners should also be unhappy with Paulson’s nomination. Paulson’s TNC is the world’s richest environmental group with $3 billion in assets and is a major opponent of private property rights.

Paulson is a good choice for this position. A savvy Democratic Party would vote for Paulson’s confirmation but give him a rough go in terms of the Fannie Mae accounting fiasco. Goldman has been in and around many of the larger accounting scandals over the past few years, and a little sunlight wouldn’t hurt. They should also get him on the record about global warming, the financial fallout of Iraq, peak oil, and the financial effects of an invasion of Iran.

There’s no better sign that Bush is weak than the nomination of a liberal Republican like Paulson. This is a big and deep betrayal of his base. Bush is nominating someone who acknowledges the perils of global warming and is a strong environmentalist. Paulson is a good choice for Treasury Secretary, probably the best we’re going to get. The question is will the right allow someone from the reality-based community to take the position?

The people I see at the core of this are Larry Summers, Ruebens, Jamie Gorelick, Rahm, Tim Geithner.Paulsen, the Fed chairs, the GSEs, the ranking Democrat committee membrs.

If you want to see a legacy of incompetence and economic ruin, do a background research on Tim Geithner.. He’s a menace.

George Bush was an ideologically incoherent moderate.

Everyone else in this saga seem to be very driven.

As President of the United States, Bush is directly responsible for allowing himself to be usurped by Henry Paulsen.

Remember that weekend when John McCain suspended his campaign.. I rememer hearing the most bizarre behavior about all these people … Bush was not driving the agenda. Treasury was… and it seemed like Treasury was talking more to the Dems and Obama.

Craig hints at some of the powerful players–e.g., the Goldman Sachs connection. But I want to know if we’d be fighting an organized group conscious of its outlined goals, or if there is just a large group of players with the same philosophy and same hopes for a new world order that will benefit them.

I clearly see the Bush/Cheney group working toward something like what Craig points out. The use of paid mercenaries doing awful and wasteful things in Iraq fits so much into this scheme. I am still shaking my head that this sort of thing passed without a blink of any Comgressman’s (or woman’s) eyes.

I would love a third party to join. I would just hope we had a group of leaders who could really devise a strategy, and really knowing who exactly the oppositions players are is important.

BTW, it seems that some English ‘boffins’ have investigated the matter of tinfoil hats. Apparently they don’t protect you from the aliens’ mind rays – they intensify them…

We need more Hillary and Bill values, compassion, intelligence and service among We the People.