Billmon takes credit for Back to the Future
One $ one vote …
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March 11, 2005
Billmon: 03/11
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Wall Street does what it can, which is to bleed its own customers white (meaning you and me). Though it has to slow down just a little from time to time–and the New Deal would be an instance of this–it promptly recovers it stride, and keeps the average man (such as myself) in a state of endless worry about money matters, something I’ve never learned how to worry about very profitably. So I console myself by taking note of the things that Wall Street can’t do, even when it wants to do them very badly. For example, it hasn’t penetrated China, though China would be an obvious place to go (I rather suspect that China finds its foreign capital in places well populated with Chinese bankers, such as Singapore,). It’s fun to see unbridled greed encounter the limits imposed by its own fear of high-risk investing, and it’s even more fun to watch Wall Street go into a terrible rage when one of its own people figures out how to beat it at its own game (an undeniable, and immortalizing, achievement of Michael MIlken).
Posted by: alabama | Mar 12 2005 0:42 utc | 2
Looking at Billmon’s graph it looks like about $1million = 1 vote on the Senate floor (or even quite a bit less actually).
Regardless, it’s cheap at ten times the price given the billions to be raked in…..
“It shouldn’t surprise you that Republicans receive more than Democrats since the former tend to support business-friendly legislation more than the latter. ” BCS Alliance
This is incorrect. The Republicans support more multi-national friendly legislation. I am a small time capitalist in Canada. Up until now I have stated that the biggest advantage small time business owners in Canada have over the US system is it’s health care. In the US, my health care costs would probably make me destitute. Now there is a second major advantage. Capitalism is supposedly about the ability to take risks. Now it looks like the penalties for taking risks in the US could be quite prohibitive – unless you are wealthy.
The US also has advantages. Size of market is the biggest. (And it’s a big one.) Lower taxes are not an advantage to someone just starting out.
Posted by: edwin | Mar 12 2005 15:38 utc | 4
Edwin’s point is an important one.
Twelve years ago, the Clintons began their push for national health insurance by appealling to compassion for the poor and making the case that national health insurance would actually lower business costs. Small business owners were initially interested in the plan but eventually did not support it. Conventional wisdom has it that big business killed it with a massive PR campaign, but I’ve always believed that the Clinton’s abandoned a potentially winning argument when they failed to mount their own PR campaign for the economic case for national health insurance. Appeals to compassion are fine, but unnecessary; those who are moved by it don’t need the appeals and those who don’t care are unaffected by them. The opposition to it is primarily economic. Yes, we hear the bad-for-your-character arguments, but they are basically invented to augment the economic arguments; demonstrate that national health insurance does help business and the “philosophical” objections will melt away. Unfortunately, proponents of national health insurance never really developed and pushed an economic counter-argument to big business opposition. (Similar rationales could be applied to other social spending that the Norquist crowd wants to eliminate.)
I have several friends who are small business owners. Their relationships with their employees are personal relationships as much as business ones. Unlike large corporations whose decision makers don’t know the people at the front desk or in the mail room, these business people often know the details of their employees lives and care about them as individuals. They would love to see their employees have health insurance; it would help people they care about and their business at the same time.
In addition, the Republican push for tort reform is also an attempt by the large and powerful corporations to maintain their position of dominance. The poster children for the “frivolous lawsuits” claim are the suits judgements won by individuals that have a ludicrous quality to them (i.e., millions awarded to someone who spilled hot coffee on herself). However, most lawsuits – involving the most money – are business to business, such as patent infringements or unfair business practices filed by smaller companies against larger ones. Stopping this is a major goal of tort reform. The money pushing for the “reform” comes from the large companies and the smaller ones don’t have the financial firepower to compete with them.
As edwin’s post suggests, the Republican Party is not the party of business and competitiveness; it is the party of the large and powerful, and money=power. The powerful do not want competition and will destroy it before it becomes a threat, just as large predators eat their young. (National health insurance actually would make it easier for small businesses to start up and help small businesses retain valued employees.) As Jerome and B and others have been pointing out, these powerful interests that have been making our economic policies are trading the nation’s future to maintain their present position of dominance. Their economic rationalizations are fundamentally flawed, but remain largely unchallenged in any public way.
The Republicans can take small business for granted because the Dems give small business no alternative and third parties can’t get real traction in this country. If we are to have any hope of reversing the present tide, we will need a coherent economic rationale to present to the public that challenges the one now proferred by the economic right and is then co-opted by a major party. This may be boring to those of us with a humanist bent, but it is essential.
Of course, we can also wait for circumstances to bring the whole rotten, rickety edifice down – which appears to be the course we are charting.
Didn’t mean to carry on for so long, but thanks to edwin for pointing out the fallacy that the current Republicans are business-friendly.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Mar 12 2005 17:33 utc | 5
As I am a “loser” according to credit card companies, I pay off my monthly balance in full, I am pissed (or maybe happy?) that MBNA is my credit card provider.
Don’t boycott MBNA, just pay off your monthly balance in full.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Mar 13 2005 0:42 utc | 6
I wonder if the Bush push for social security elimination is only a fog campaign to allow other issues to be implemented without the Dems’ and media scrutinity. Bankrupcy, tort reform, the atrocies in the budget do not get the coverage they need. All is filled with his -dead in the water- attempt to kill SoSec.
Could this be the real plan? Will folks wake up 2006 when Bush shows the list of poisiones’ he applied while everybody was looking on SoSec to his sponsers?
i don´t know but sometimes it´s good to be a contrarian.
You’re not wrong, b, but where you’re looking for craft and planning, you’ll probably find nothing more than dream and denial. Bush and his ilk tend to dream of the good old days, c. 1880-1930, when vast fortunes, untouched by taxes, could be made in businesses unchecked by rules and regulations. Underlying it all, of course, is the notion that worth should be measured in wealth, and that getting wealthy is a measure of personal worthiness (a notion ordained, or course, by our reigning Calvinist theology). And while this value-system won’t change anytime soon, at some level Bush and his ilk know perfectly well that the political processes of the last seventy years are not to be seriously undone.
Posted by: alabama | Mar 14 2005 3:43 utc | 8
If, for example, the day of private accounts were ever to arrive, those accounts would be so festooned with rules and regulations that the companies managing them would become branch-banks of the U.S. government–hardly the sort of thing that was happening c. 1880-1930! No, Bush is just a spoiled underachiever trying to win some respect from the billionaires that have terrified his family for over a century now. He spouts their pieties in public, then zones out on ESPN during his down-time. The billionaires who own him are much too smart to endanger the system that makes them as rich as they are–not as rich, perhaps, as a Carnegie or a Mellon, but rich enough to keep the wolf from the door.
Posted by: alabama | Mar 14 2005 3:44 utc | 9
edwin’s thesis is interesting.
I’ve had direct experience in both the American and Canadian systems wrt HealthCare.
I agree with him. The universality of the Canadian system is a big advantage for both employee and employer.
____
alabama–
You think that the Twig has become addicted to the Duece and Celebrity Poker?
@B – “Could this be the real plan?”
Sounds exactly right to me. Media bosses are calling the shots, and very successfully too. I just ran thru an article on the documented brainwashing effects of TV watching. On Rense today if anyone is interested.
You didn’t mention the Gannon fiasco as one of the stories being shrouded by all the SS talk. And several others too of course.
It is only required to keep public discontent below a simmer here until the deal is done. The voting function, mid-terms, etc. obviously don’t matter any more; the winners are pre-selected.
Posted by: rapt | Mar 14 2005 15:31 utc | 12