The Obama administration is not making policy according my every whim even though I voted for him. I find this infuriating and am going to make furious POSTS with arbitrary CAPITALIZATION to emphasize how my ideas would be better than Mr. "President of Harvard Law Review" Obama's.
Economic Advisors:
Fire Larry Summers and Tim Geithner right now. Don't wait. They won't get smarter. They won't change their ideas. Just fire them now. Summers was the Treasury Secretary under the Clinton Administration when Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the destruction of Glass Seagal. The CFMA brought us the Credit Default Swap, which more than any single financial innovation has destroyed western finance. The Credit Default Swap destroyed AIG. The CFMA also allowed for deregulated oil markets, which lead to the commodity overpricing we saw last summer. The destruction of Glass Seagal allowed CitiBank to become CitiGroup. Citigroup has proven itself to be too big to succeed. They played with Credit Default Swaps, and have immolated themselves. Summers advocated both of those legislative acts to Bill Clinton. Summers has not learned his lesson. Summers has not stated he was wrong to advocate such legislative wealth destruction. Summers must be removed.
Geithner. Geithner's entire plan to save the banks, give them more tax payer money to make sure the bond holders don't lose their shorts. This has been tried twice already. It failed both times. The bank losses are around 10-15 trillion. The public treasury just can't bail out that much. Another round of bondholder bailouts won't get us anywhere. The only way the banks can survive is if people start paying their mortgages again. But the people don't have the money. The banks gave loans to people that couldn't pay, then they sold those loans as investments to investment bankers, then the investment bankers sold credit default swaps to banks to get the leverage needed to buy these toxic assets. Unless you give the banks 10-15 trillion, you will not fix the problem. Geithner is wrong on this issue and will serve only to deplete the treasury for the benefit of the bondholders of the banks.
Economic Solutions:
Increase worker bargaining power. The employer free choice act must be passed. By strengthening unions, workers across the country will then be able to bargaing with their employers for higher wages. Until the working man has enough bargaining power to get a decent wage the economy will never recover. The American economy is 70% consumer spending, those consumers must have money before they can spend it. That money comes from wages. And thsoe wages are derived from bargaining power. The Reaganomics solution was simply to give the common man credit and take away the worker's bargaining power. This has lead to our current predicament of gilded age wealth distribution, collapsing demand, and incredible household debt.
Take the banks under government receivership. This has worked with IndyMac, it will work with the other banks. It also worked in Sweden. The bailouts the banks need exceed their market capitalization on their stock. That means it would be cheaper for the government to simply buy all their outstanding shares than to hand them enough money to cover their losses. The banks must be nationalized, and carved up. No longer may banks grow so large that they can bargain with the government. The only reason these banks can demand bailouts is because they are so large that their failure can cripple our economy. The banks must be carved into component companies that are small enough to fail.
Anti-trust laws must be expanded and applied to the financial sector. Never again may a financial sector company grow so large and powerful that it is too big to fail. Once a company is too big to fail, it can go to Washington and extort the congress out of money by threatening its own death. See Behr Stearns, AIG, CitiGroup. This allows the mega banks to pass all their risk onto the public treasury because they can threaten us all with their own failure. Anti-trust laws must be expanded to reach out and carve up such mega banks.
Afghanistan:
Stop all cross border activities in Pakistan. With every 1 Taliban we kill over there, we turn 1000 Pakistani's against their America-enabling government. The numbers just don't add up. We killed about 100 or so high value targets in Pakistan this year, and Pakistan is now on the the verge of civil war again. All our drone strikes couldn't stop the Taliban from seizing the Swat valley and implementing Sharia law. Our mission in Afghanistan should be limited to propping up the Pakistani government. The Taliban have wisely decided to fight the Afghanistan war inside of Pakistan, and it is about time the American government recognize its limited ability to fight in that terrain. The fight against the Pakistani Taliban must be fought by the Pakistanis. Obama should substantially increase the money and arms we give to the Pakistan government, and commit our drone fleet to reconnossaince solely for the benefit of the Pakistani military.
Iraq:
Announce that the war was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. We went to war on stove piped intelligence that fit the policy. Our invasion of Iraq was criminal aggression, but even worse it was criminal aggression based on willfully ignorant intelligence. Our continued presence in Iraq must be limited solely to repairing the damage we have wrought, and no more. Obama must announce as such, and limit our mission to fixing what we broke. If Obama were to renounce all geopolitical motives in remaining in Iraq, Obama could redeem our mission there and give us a path out of that foolish invasion. Iraq will descend in civil war. It took every troop we had to quell the civil war of 2006-2007, and it will come back. Once we leave Iraq will fall into civil war. There must be an armed struggle and a winning side for a new nation to form. For evidence of this see the formation of the USA, Israel, France, Germany, UK. Nations are born of armed struggle amongst the people, and an eventual victor decrees what the law will be. The USA should set a date on which we will leave Iraq, and leave. Look at how Vietnam turned out. They are a modern country now. Their nation was born of armed struggle against a century of colonialism. Yes Cambodia was a bloodbath after we left, but that bloodbath was inevitable after we wrecked that country. And just as in Cambodia, some kind of bloodbath is inevitable in Iraq, and from it a new state will form.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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1 comment:
A good argument, Jason.
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