Month: March 2010
Great
I was just thinking how long it’s been since we outed a Republican closet case!
Ungodly Women
I’d say that like most extremists, the people handing out these pamphlets are likely far too consumed with their own fantasies of what “ungodly women” do with their genitalia.
I mean, it’s a fairly well-known fact that the way rape victims dress has nothing to do with their rape. As I recall, the latest research shows you’re more likely to be targeted if you’re modestly dressed.
But that kind of misses the point, doesn’t it? You’d think religious groups could, you know, just tell men not to rape. If they believe gay men can become straight through prayer and willpower, why do they make this blanket exemption for heterosexual men, blaming women for inciting them to rape instead of telling them to keep their junk in their pants and NOT RAPE PEOPLE?
If I were a young rape victim and someone handed me something like that, I think I’d have to break something – probably their car window.
Punish Them
When even Warren Buffett, who is no Boy Scout himself, is calling them out, you know it’s bad:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Warren Buffett, the world’s most famous investor, launched an attack Saturday on big-bank executives, calling for penalties for those who led their companies to near-ruin.
In his latest letter to shareholders, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. decried the fact that while shareholders suffered during the recent crash, the top people at the banks got off relatively lightly.
“It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country’s largest financial institutions,” wrote Buffett. “Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been ‘bailed-out’ is to make a mockery of the term.
“The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style,” added Buffett.
Finacial ‘Reform’
There goes Krugman, making sense again:
So here’s the situation. We’ve been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we’ve barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can’t find jobs or can’t find full-time work. Yet all momentum for serious banking reform has been lost. The question now seems to be whether we’ll get a watered-down bill or no bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the second option is starting to look preferable.
[,,,] There’s no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward Gramlich — a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to act against predatory lending — summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.”
Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must be, or lobbyists wouldn’t be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency’s creation.
And it’s not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or — as in one compromise that at this point seems unlikely — by a unit within the Treasury Department. But remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under future antiregulation administrations — and believe me, given the power of the financial lobby, there will be such administrations — is if there’s an agency whose whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.
In summary, then, it’s time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic reform that just covers up failure to act.