BasketCase said:
Okay. That entire indented block up there? That whole section is just to prove a point. Here's the Big Secret: you disagree with me on everything in that indented section, don't you?
Actually, I don't disagree with you on everything there.
1. Yes, Clinton signed off on it. I never claimed he didn't. But no liberal would have done that without 20 prior years of conservative pressure to deregulate. It's not as if he came up with the idea out of the blue.
2. My personal opinion, which is certainly not fully-informed on the matter, is that Obama's DOJ has 2 reasons to ignore investigating the banking + mortgage crisis: a) their boss has surrounded himself with bankers, b) there is no political reward for them. I don't think it's because the charges were bogus. Do you read Matt Taibbi? He's been like a pitbull on this, and it seems pretty clear to me that people could be prosecuted if there was political will.
3. Agreed
4. Mostly agree, but would quibble on the details.
5. Disagree
6. Agree. I never claimed that the Democratic party was immune from corporate influence. And I completely agree with you that corporations can sometimes get away with more under Democratic control than Republican. But I maintain that the backbone of the Republican party is an idealogical allegiance to big corporate interests. It's all to easy to find data that shows that corporations give more to republican campaigns than democratic ones. It doesn't mean that they DON'T give to Dems, which is what you seem to have mistakenly taken me to think.
In sum, I agree with you that you and I won't agree on who got us into this mess
But that doesn't mean that it's not in the government's, the economy's, or the citizen's interest to investigate what happened and pursue legal action if it's warranted.
But your stance, unless I'm mistaken, is that there's no point since nobody did anything wrong. How can you be so sure without looking into it??
That's the reason my solution is the proper one: because if you cut the government's revenue stream, the government can't spend us into Icelandville, regardless of which party is in control.
And this is our fundamental disagreement. However I think you could have picked a better example than Iceland. Maybe Greece?
Do you know what happened when the creditors came knocking on the doors of the Althing? Iceland's political establishment told them to GTFO - that Icelanders were not going to bail out the reckless banking sector, making the creditors whole. And if that meant a bad bond rating then so be it.
Iceland's representatives kept the interests of their citizens prioritized above the interests of the corporate sector. Is that really the America you want to see?