Are you saying that the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall Act didn't cause this economic melt-down? Are you saying John McCain didn't follow Gramm down this road.

He certainly has called himself a master deregulator and he cannot fix what he helped bring on. You can't just say I am for regulation but been against it for the 26 years you've been in office. If people believe that... well there is a sucker born every minute isn't there.

Oh and to your Bill Clinton missive, true enough he did sign it, but Barack Obama did not sign it, nor would he have ever supported such deregulation. We are not talking about President William Jefferson Clinton here, we are talking about John McGramm. And was it the Republican Party that controlled the senate in 1999 or was it the democrats? Oh right it was Republicans, their leader at the time Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich until he was driven out. So this continues to be a Republican problem and if you caused it and admit you know nothing about the economy, you can't fix it.

No matter how mad I get you keep me laughing!

Thanks again!!!!

Suddenly Rush Limbaugh cares about taking people out of context, suddenly he worries about thugs, and he is so worried about racism... things couldn't be better!

Hahahaha.... What a great ad!

Deregulation and it's effects: Part I:

Until 1978, the U.S. government, through the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), regulated many areas of commercial aviation such as fares, routes, and schedules. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, however, removed many of these controls, thus changing the face of civil aviation in the United States. After deregulation, unfettered free competition ushered in a new era in passenger air travel.

The CAB had three main functions: to award routes to airlines, to limit the entry of air carriers into new markets, and to regulate fares for passengers.

The Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 put in place a regulatory organization, known after 1940 as the Civil Aeronautics Board, that was authorized to not only supervise the air transport industry, but also to promote and develop it. The goals of the CAB were to provide the American public with the safest, most efficient, least expensive, and widest ranging air service possible. The CAB accomplished these objectives by regulating such aspects of the commercial aviation sector as entry into and exit from individual markets (by dictating the route patterns between cities and the frequency of flights), fares for passengers and cargo, safety, financing, subsidies to carriers flying on less profitable routes, mergers and acquisitions, inter-carrier agreements, and the quality of service.

Proponents of regulation claimed that the CAB used its power appropriately to mandate carriers to fly routes of high traffic volume (and therefore high profit) as well as those with low traffic (small towns in America) and profit. Without regulation, advocates argued, the airlines would concentrate on flying high volume and high profit routes, depriving out-of-the-way communities of air transport altogether (this has happened). Moreover, concentration of airlines on lucrative routes could easily create a business climate of cutthroat competition!! In the process, the carriers would undercut the economic stability of the industry and possibly cut corners on safety and maintenance of aircraft in an effort to reduce costs to compete more effectively with the other carriers!! It was the fear of cutthroat competition that had motivated Depression-era members of Congress to vote for the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938. Regulation also ensured that no one company could dominate the market in a particular region and thus be in a position to set high fares because of the lack of competition. Federal regulation was one way of assuring that the industry operated efficiently and with the greatest good for the greatest number of Americans, although perhaps at the price of subverting the free market. We no longer regulate airlines and they still require us to bail them out, and our government does it.... yet all the fear of the original designer of the regulatory act have come true. But people who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

THE BASICS -- For nearly half a century Washington state has enjoyed some of the lowest electrical rates in the country. Those days may now be over, thanks to national and regional efforts to "deregulate" the electric utility industry.

Those pushing laissez-faire deregulation claimed it would lower costs and improve service simply through the magic of free-market competition. But their experiments in states like California have yielded disastrous results, creating an energy crisis that spread throughout the West in 2000 and created dramatic spikes in cost and lapses in availability. (Deregulation proponents are blaming the price caps and other regulations retained in an effort to protect consumers for the crisis.)

Consider this: Deregulation opponents have long argued that large industrial customers with lucrative accounts would successfully demand lower costs, but individual households would lack this bargaining power and utilities will have little incentive to devote resources to maintaining or improving service to outlying rural areas where there are few customers.

Indeed in 1996, Boeing, Intel, Georgia-Pacific and other industrial users got approval from regulators to break away from Puget Sound Energy’s fixed prices and buy electricity at market prices. Sure enough, it was a great deal... until Winter 1999 hit $800 a year later. (thanks to Enron and those crazy republican deregulators in DC.

So the question remains, can stable deregulation be accomplished that ensures we all benefit, and that we avoid the cost spikes and availability lapses that have plagued businesses and households in 2000? So far the answer appears to be no.

Bank deregulation: Hmm really don't need to say much about it, except pretty soon there will be one bank in America that has merged with everything else, need not say anymore than that. Sure as shit didn't bring costs down or treat investors with respect to not loose their money and invest it poorly... etc and so on...