Saturday, April 15, 2017

Crazy Overload




I haven't posted in quite a few days as of late.  It seems you can't go an hour without some crazy thing happening around us.  The Russia-Trump campaign thing.  The MOAB.  That "Crazy Fat Kid" (gotta love McCain!).  Ben Carson getting stuck in a public housing elevator.  Anti-government ideologues destroying the EPA, the DOE, the USDE, the FCC...  It's just been incessant.  Where does one even begin?

Well, for starters, when the President said he was going to "Make America Great Again," for the people he's put in charge of our federal agencies, it seems like a return to the "Good Old Days" as described in the Weird Al tune, "torturing rats with a hacksaw and pulling the wings off of flies."

Candice Jackson, now acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, is the latest exemplar here.  This is woman who believes she suffered discrimination for being white (though shows no evidence of suffering anything), has neither a civil rights nor education background, and is apparently no fan of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or public, compulsory education, or Title IX (though unlike Betsy DeVos, she actually may know something about it).

Ajit Pai, the Chair of the FCC, is meanwhile trying to destroy Net Neutrality.  Trump voters are not going to like where this goes.  The "Good Old Days" in this case would be like the early 90's, when downloading a single picture was an opportunity to do the dishes and laundry, and maybe trim the hedges.

And then there's Richard Cordray, who now runs the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, who together with the House Financial Services Committee Chair, Jeb Hensarling, (R-His Satanic Majesty's Toilet), are working to...

"...(weaken) the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by stripping the agency of its independence and severely limiting its ability to go after corporations."

"...convert the CFPB into an executive agency with a director who can be removed by the president at will."

"...scale back the agency's enforcement powers and prevent the agency from publishing its consumer complaint database..."

With so much happening all at the same time, it's hard to see the action in the windy forest.  But our education, information, and the safety of your finances are all at high risk right now.  This is not going to "Make America Great Again, " unless by "Great" you mean "Like Putin's Russia, but with Worse Education."  

Please, whatever your political persuasion, whatever your religion, philosophy, ideology, or any other disposition, please, please study up on these issues and let your congress critters know that making America like Russia is NOT what what any of us had in mind!

JMJ

19 comments:

  1. ... please study up on these issues and let your Congress critters know that making America like Russia is NOT what any one of us had in mind.

    Good luck with that Jersey.

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    1. The American right as it exists today has morphed into a political ideology as dangerous as the one you refer to.

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  2. You must hate people who don't work for the Gubmint, Jersey! Giving the President the power to replace a member of the Buraecracy? Sacriledge!

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    1. Yeah. That must be it. I just hate people who don't work for the government. What a stunningly deep appraisal.

      JMJ

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  3. Lets grant independence w/0 oversight to ALL Gubmint agencies. I always wanted to live in "Brazil...."

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  4. ...Mrs Buttle, here's a receipt for your husband...

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  5. A government "financial protection bureau" makes me long for the days of paying "protection" to the local mafia boss.

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    1. Move to somewhere in South America. Oh, that's right, you did mention Brazil.

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    2. Every day I now look forward to the next erratic, illogical, and provocative utterances or bizarre move POTUS 45 makes. He rarely disappoints.

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    4. Thersites, you are the only pro-Great Recession person I've ever come across.

      JMJ

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    5. Pro-recession is filling the FHA pool with subprimes. Thank you Democrats!

      http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/21/real_estate/subprime-mortgages/index.html

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    6. LOL! I worked in that business, Thersites. The gov't certainly wasn't forcing anyone to write bad paper. Freddie Mac only had a 6% share of the collapsed second-tiers in 2006, the biggest of the boom years. If anything, they were being avoided so the culprits could get their fees. And just so you remember, most all this happened under the auspices of a GOP administration - and after the repeal of Glass-Steagall (a mostly Republican effort wit the help of that "liberal" Bill Clinton) and that God-awful bankruptcy "reform" passed during the Bush years.

      But these boom/bust cycles now happening regularly in practically every sector, and the lack of any safe place for ordinary people to safely grow their meager fortunes, these are the products of the Milton Friedman economics we've had since the 70's, and I see nothing good that has come from that - just booms and busts, stagnant real national growth, ridiculous wealth stratification, no respect for real work and a free ride for the idle rich, lowered upward mobility, and on and on.

      Modern American Conservatism has been an abject failure and needs to be thrown in the dustbin of historically bad ideas.

      JMJ

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    7. The gov't certainly wasn't forcing anyone to write bad paper.

      You've got a pretty bad memory. Jesse Jackson was organizing marches against bank "redlining" and Barack Obama was suing banks in court and winning over the lack of "bad paper." You either made bad loans, or got sued for "discrimination". And of course, the idiots at HUD were setting higher and higher "targets" for housing loans to people with terrible credit.

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    8. Modern liberalism jumped the shark when it bought into the "identity politics" rubric.

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    9. Idenity politics is not, and never has been, a partisan affair. But partisans will always claim it's only the other side that engages in said practice.

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    10. FJ, what the hell are you talking about? NO ONE FORCED ANYONE TO WRITE BAD PAPER. IT IS A MYTH FOR LOW-INFORMATION SLOBS. YOU ARE NOT A LOW-INFORMATION SLOB. READ SOMETHING OTHER THAN RIGHT WING SHIT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS. Please!

      JMJ

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  6. Conservatism lost its way. Sometime after DDE.

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