The Merchant of Venice and the Detroit Three 11-22-08 mpg 11/20/2008 Part 1/2 Peter Schiff On Campbell Brown - video - (YouTube - 5 min 56 sec - November 21, 2008) 11/20/2008 Part 2/2 Peter Schiff On Campbell Brown: - video - (YouTube - 9 min 20 sec - November 21, 2008) One heck of a spirited debate. Peter Schiff (who's predicted most of this fiasco and is featured in Effective Fed Funds Rate 03-24-07) was a little irritating however. His first point was that "government" simply taxes one sector of society to give to another, and therefore does not "create wealth"...very true, but as one of the guests stated government can serve a counter-cyclical function (Keynesianism) in regards to the economic cycle, something which Libertarians abhor for ideological reasons but which they should really abhor for practical reasons. That reason being Keynesianism ONLY works IF government reduces spending during the "good" times. Which judging from history, governments have always been, and will always completely remain, manifestly incapable of doing. His second point in answer to one of the guest's replies was that "government" caused this crisis. That was flat out wrong; it was the financial industry that bribed congress to remove the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, to de-regulate the entire Banking and Brokerage industry, to have the government provide no oversight, to remove government and all of its "burdensome" and “onerous” regulations from the scene. To let the "free market" (no such thing on Wall Street of course) have its way. It was the financial industry which then promptly created all of those worthless pieces of paper known as CDO's, CMO's, SIM's, Derivatives, and other synthetic debt instruments that now amount to well over one quadrillion dollars (one thousand trillion dollars). A feeding frenzy for which they were all highly rewarded. The "government didn't hold a gun to their collective heads and tell them to do it, the government didn't tell them to create and than pass all that bogus script....they did it out of their own lust of greed and avarice. Think of it this way, you go to a game run by some wise guys, one of whom doesn't have a shred of humor and was known to have broken some dead beat's arms, than his legs, and eventually his neck because he couldn't come up with the vig. So you sit down at this guy's table, promptly lose your shirt, and than hand this guy a bunch of IOUs for a million dollars. Think of this not very humorous wise guy as the American people aroused from their collective slumber and currently possessing a really bad attitude. A day later you call him up and say, "what, you actually expected me to pay all those pieces of worthless, bogus, script"....you than proceed to laugh in his face and chortle over what a fool he is, you than tell him you're going to tax his mother along with his kids to pay for it. And you really think the whole thing is funny as you hang up the phone. In other words the whole situation is not going to end very well. Mr. Schiff also stated the "unions" were partly to blame for the auto industry's collapse. Again flat out wrong, Germany does fine with strong unions and besides which, if “capital" can organize, why not "labor"? The unions didn't make the “Titans of Detroit” build gas guzzling monstrosities, or deliberately kill every attempt to build an electric or hybrid car. The unions didn't destroy the financial system preventing the Big Three from getting any more loans. The unions didn't double (or triple) the National debt. The unions didn't start two unnecessary wars. Most importantly, the unions aren't members of PNAC, they didn't plan out a policy which needed a "new Pearl Harbor to catapult" this country onto the road of imperial ambition, or as the PNAC'ers like to call it "full spectrum dominance". No, the people who planned all these events and profited handsomely from them during the last eight years are sitting on the boards of many of America's biggest corporations, including the Big Three auto makers. These people seem to be under the deluded impression that they are protected from all their decisions by corporate liability laws. They seem to believe that this is a win-win situation for them. That they take these enormous financial and geo-political gambles (not for them of course) and if they work out – fine, and if not - they walk away with their ill gotten gains, while, as Mr. Schiff so cavalierly stated, forcing the entire country to accept "pain", to "restructure", to accept diminished wages, benefits, pensions, union participation, to incur massive amounts of homelessness, the loss of Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits and the establishment of perpetual debt slavery. Well that's a nice idea, but how about this one....considering there's been a heck of a lot of retroactive laws passed lately (not to mention gutting the US's constitution, or as one half-wit so immortally stated...."it's just a Goddamn piece of paper!"), how about we pass a law removing all those corporate liability protections going back say...ten years? That sound about right to everyone? Than we as a nation demand that our corporate leaders, whom Mr. Schiff seems to admire so much, simply pay back the missing money. It's their fault, they caused it, so they should just pay every dime of it back, it's that simple. Besides how hard can it be? Right now, guesstimating roughly, that would be about six to eight trillion dollars in federal deficits, plus five trillion dollars worth of commitments for the bail outs (most of which might never be paid back), plus another three to four trillion for their misbegotten wars (assuming they withdraw immediately), plus say fifty trillion to cover all the derivatives (keep in mind, they're about one thousand three hundred trillion right now, much, if not most of them, completely worthless)....totaling that all up we'll say the wealthy one percent of this nation owes their country, and the other ninety nine percent of its citizens, about sixty seven trillion dollars....give or take a few trillion. And if they don't pay it all back, as was so amply and ably demonstrated in William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”, we as a nation will regretfully be forced to take it from their flesh. Consider it as motivation to come up with a better plan. - mpg |