Hillarysworld

Sanders · Diamond

"Pilot Crashes Into Texas Building in Apparent Anti-IRS Suicide" (FOX News 2/18/10) BREAKING NEWS

Sanders · Diamond

Before I switch off for the day, let me just say this.

This is NOT the way to handle angst, no matter how extreme.

I hope people stop and seek help before they reach breaking point.

I see people get into rage in simple settings and wonder how far they go and how they might flip. If you see symptoms of that, let the nearest Human Resource rep or nearest well-wisher know in person or anonymously. It may be the best thing you do for the welfare of that person and a LOT of others.

I think we as a nation need to really cool down a bit.

Time to switch off and take my own suggestion. G'nite.

Destiny · Platinum

Good advice Sanders.

Unfortunately, I think it's only going to get worse. People are really losing their minds.

A couple days ago, a man threw a 3 month old baby girl off a bridge in N.J and a woman (yikes!), killed 3 co-workers in Alabama. I'm sure that a lot more is happening, but we either miss the report or it's a local thing and not national news. I know that the suicide rate is up and domestic and public violence is on the rise.

We need to take all threats seriously and stand up against injustice, so people don't feel hopeless and alone.

Hillarysmygirl16 · Administrator

This is terrible. When things get bad people tend to snap

VotedHillary · Platinum

We are going from a country that is mad to a country gone mad crazy. Turn off the pundits that are fueling this rage for........PROFIT!

They could care less about you or this country.

Sanders · Diamond

I hope people see this for what it is.

He may have been in major despair, but what he did is domestic terrorism.

The government is not the enemy. Most certainly, the nearly 200 people who work in the building, who work for the government, are not the enemies.

These are people with lives - with families to feed. The IRS lives on with or without those people - that is not the way to do justice in life.

The whole thing is terrible and speaks to the state of mind of people. That a person feels the need to take it that far is telling about the person's sick state of mind.

Building 4112 · Moderator

People are getting to the point that they don't care anymore.

Hillarysmygirl16 · Administrator

People are getting frustrated with the government but this man just snapped. Stress will do that. When are people going to realise that sucide is a permenant solution to a temporary problem" this is true.

Alex · Diamond

It's hard to believe the government is not the enemy when you've gone through what we've gone through in the last two years, and by "we" I mean the American voter.

It's also hard to believe the government is not the enemy when you read stuff like this, from The Confluence:

"Tales of the Vampire Squid"

by dakinicat

"Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone spells out why Goldman Sachs is making all that money in a piece called “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle”. [snip] The fix is in and has been in for some time.

"We’ve talked about how by allowing the investment banks to become commercial banks,the FED opened the discount window to institutions that normally cannot borrow money there or for that matter borrow any where that cheaply. Having your marginal cost of capital suddenly go to close to zero lets you invest in a lot of projects whose net present value would not be positive otherwise. Unfortunately, these ‘projects’ weren’t things like inventory loans or loans for new equipment which are items that generally are funded by commercial banks. The proceeds of the Fed loans were used to buy up deep discounted (by the Treasury) financial assets from the remnants of a failing AIG.

"So the scam–as we’ve talked about in several posts–was pretty easy. First, you borrow from the FED at close to zero per cent interest. Then you get inside information on what’s going to be stripped out of AIG by then NY Fed chairman Timothy Geithner (who sees to it that the price is discounted to Filene’s Basement-levels) and you buy. Then, the NY Fed pre announces a program to buy whatever bad investments you may have on your book (including those deeply discounted AIG assets that you just bought at giveaway prices) so that you and your competitors can shift the assets around several times from place to place and run the price up. Just when the price goes up to an unreasonable level, you sell it to the FED. Then you stand in line for your huge bonus check in a few months for being a Master of the Universe when just about any freshman who took an investments course at the local community college could’ve figured out the same thing. La voilà! Fait accompli!

"It would’ve been much cheaper for all of us if they’d have just bought the AIG assets directly but for some reason a bunch of folks in Washington D.C. insisted that the ‘market’ set the price. So, instead of having a phony price set by the FED directly, we had a scammed price set by investment banks. Was all this so Obama could say he’s a good capitalist and not a socialist or was it just away to dance with them that brought you? As we’ve also talked about before, Goldman Sachs and the FIRE lobby invested heavily in the Obama campaign.

"So, if you want it spelled out a little bit more completely–with some much better prose than I can come up with–you can visit the Taibbi article and weep for your hard earned tax dollars. Here’s a great example of that.

[snip]

The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there’s still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street “earns” its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around “earns.” The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these *******s not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?
The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

"So, it explains pretty clearly how Wall Street made that money in a sort’ve pulp fictionish way which hopefully will bring some attention back to culprits like Timothy Geithner who basically was the “loan arranger” of the sting on taxpayers. If that’s what it takes to wake folks up to the scam behind the masters of the universe, then so be it. WAKE THE **** UP FOLKS!"

http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/tales-of-the-vampire-squid/

Sanders · Diamond

That is a very highly personalizing of government action. We can say that the government robbed our future generations, and that would be more accurate.

The government did not step beyond what they are allowed to do under the rules. They followed the rules to form the bills to get the bailout passed.... in however much hurry they did.

The bailout was not the problem; the fact that the government did not put in measures to recover the money fully and also get full rewards of resulting profits into the deficit, and do that accounting opening... that was/is the problem.

We have to watch our language to not push ourselves into a tizzy about the government.

We also MUST step back from angst towards the government from becoming anger towards PEOPLE working for the government.

There is a severe need for the government to clearly convey stimulus and bailout and the government has done a VERY POOR job of conveying the need for both. "Unprecedented" is succinct, but a poor word to explain the NEED and what functions the stimulus and bailout were intended to achieve, how each is different and how they achieved what they were set out to do. By trying to simplify it in terms of jobs, the government did itself major disservice and set itself up to not be able to take credit.

Frankly, stimulus and bailout are not easy to explain. Polarized media and the lack of credibility at the top of the government, inability to communicate clearly in grade school language - all go to complicate the challenge.

Again, there is severe need to cool it and not personalize the issue to the people who work in/for the government. Our ultimate instrument of change is the vote. We need to communicate in the meanwhile so that the representatives know AHEAD of the votes, what is and is not acceptable.. And in communicating that, we need to occasionally step into their shoes to assess the circumstances and the need for specific policies.

-- Edited by Sanders on Friday 19th of February 2010 10:28:43 AM