Letters to the Editor
Ballsee
Published Letters: 293 Editor's Choice: 21
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Dean Baker
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]in The Conservative Nanny State, 2006, explained that it's a fraud that conservatives are supporters of "free markets" but are in fact the purveyors of government regulations that favor the rich. They're opposed to government regulation that favor the working class. He also points out why it is that progressives get it wrong when they flail around against markets because they've accepted the fraud that conservatives support free markets.
http://www.conservativenannystate.org/
"The key flaw in the stance that most progressives have taken on economic issues is that they have accepted a framing whereby conservatives are assumed to support market outcomes, while progressives want to rely on the government. This framing leads progressives to futilely lash out against markets, rather than examining the factors that lead to undesirable market outcomes. The market is just a tool, and in fact a very useful one. It makes no more sense to lash out against markets than to lash out against the wheel." (Excerpted from Preface)
“Dean Baker is one of the most insightful and original economists in Washington. With this book, he exposes the prevailing myth of modern conservatives. They are not for limited government, as they claim. Rather, they are for a government that helps their own. Baker says it is time to balance the books. Government is by all the people, for all the people. It's that simple.”
– Jeff Madrick, author of Why Economies Grow: The Forces That Shape Prosperity and How We Can Get Them Working Again
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@kimbah
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's jarring to hear the ravings of people who have some of the dots but have connected them so badly that the picture they draw resembles more the infantile scribblings of two year olds than anything in reality. A little education is a dangerous thing.
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The Conservative Nanny State
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The book is a free PDF download.
“Baker knows what the phrase "free market" really means, and in his new book, The Conservative Nanny State (which you can purchase in paperback or download as an e-book free of charge), he lays waste to the notion that American conservatives embrace anything resembling a truly free market. In fact, they're perverse Marxists, using heavy-handed government intervention to redistribute wealth upward.”
-- Joshua Holland, AlterNet
“Dean Baker has done us all a great service by exposing the counterfeit language pundits and politicians use to hide who really gets what in our economy. The biggest welfare chiselers, it turns out, are the corporate rich. This excellent book convincingly shows that the fundamental issue about government is not its size, but whose side it is on.”
-- Jeff Faux, Economic Policy Institute
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@Jim
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Please don't join the ranks of the many who are lamenting that the taxpayer is writing a check to the bad guys so they can get away with their crimes. Do your homework; it's not like that.
Yes it is Jim, it is like that. In fact, you're late. It's already the case that these guys have gotten away with their crimes. These criminals are already long gone.
"During the last five years of his tenure as CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld's total take was $354 million. John Thain, the current chairman of Merrill Lynch, taken over this week by Bank of America, has been on the job for just nine months. He pocketed a $15 million signing bonus. His predecessor, Stan O'Neal, retired with a package valued at $161 million, after the company reported an $8 billion loss in a single quarter. And remember Bear Stearns's Chairman James Cayne? After the company collapsed earlier this year and was up for sale at bargain basement prices, he sold his stake for more than $60 million.
Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - aka the gods who failed - are fighting to keep severance packages of close to $24 million combined - on top of the millions in salary each earned last year while slaughtering the golden calf. As it is written in the Gospel According to Me, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. " Bill Moyers and Michale Winsap
Are you going to ask these people for that money back?
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Reality Check
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]American conservatives are not opposed to government intervention and regulation. They are only opposed to government intervention and regulation that doesn't serve their interests.
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Pigs
[Read the article: The corporate financiers are wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Last week and now this coming week, Paulson, Bernecke, Bush and the U.S. Congress by way of the taxpayers bails out and shores up troubled and failing financial institutions as the conservative apologists start their lying machinery up to confound and confuse the public with assurances that we're buying "assets" and that we'll eventually get our money back once the dust settles and the banks are back in business.
The trouble is even the money managers and financial wizards of Wall Street dimly understand and aren't always certain what's wrapped up in the "assets" we're buying. We're buying them up without knowing exactly what we're actually buying. A pig in poke most likely.